Sunday's New York Times carries a short piece by Steven Heller on digital type design [requires free registration].

While not nearly as rare or pricey as Big Red, this book is -- in my opinion at least -- one of the best-designed and most-complete specimen books ever produced. Copies in decent shape routinely go for as little as $35, and the excellent quality of printing and paper -- far superior to the ATF books I own -- and the tremendous quality/quantity of sample settings throughout is more than worth a much higher price. In fact, I can -- without hesitation -- promise that anyone interested in type will be more than happy with this book. My two copies of the Manual ($75 near-fine copy, $15 battered reading copy) are some of the best book purchases I've made in the past 5 years.

Copies in a wide range of condition can be found through various Alibris vendors, and, hopefully, your local fine press dealer(s).

A few pages: cover / title / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

Oh, Stephen. You can't mention education and not talk about Ilene Strizver. Come October you (this is the collective you) could be attending the Typography Master Classes through the Type Director's Club, where you can spend some quality time with one of the industry's most energetic personalities.

And while we're on the subject of books, take a look at Type Rules!, a more contemporary manual compared to Craig's Designing with Type. In addition to a brief history of the alphabet, it also gets deeper into the technology designers use today.

See also: Typography In Education Panel at TypeCon2003

The craft of typography thirsts for education information. So it's exciting to see the omniubiquitous Steven Heller has weighed in with a book titled The Education of a Typographer, joining his others of similar name (The Education of an Illustrator, Graphic Designer, and Design Entrepreneur). I haven't read it yet -- I'll leave the reviews to the more literate JLT -- but the list of contributors is fairly impressive. A glaring omission is Underware, whose workshops break new ground in teaching methods and online presentation. It's a shame their thoughts aren't part of what should still be a very revealing book.

I'm pretty honored (and humbled) when I see our journal listed as a resource on the websites of collegiate graphic design courses. John Chastain's online syllabus and reference for his Typography course at the Herron School of Art is one of the best I've seen. A nice glossary (work in progress) and very thorough list of references (both online and off) is included.

One of those references is Designing with Type, a growing resource for typography students and educators maintained by James Craig, author of the book with the same name.

For the "Four on the Floor" feature in their current Sex issue, Print magazine asked a group of studios to

... explore their fantasies and create design-and-sex eye candies for readers' esthetic pleasure.

The results include Trollbäck & Co.'s mock-fetish Helvetica Lovers Anonymous and excellent entries by Modern Dog, karlssonwilker inc. and Jennifer Lew (last three entries not available online, unfortunately).

Make Ready is a new site "for letterpress printers [et al], a journal featuring news and observations on letterpress, book arts, design, and typography -- slightly carmelized [sic], with a healthy dollop of ephemera."

Tony Rimmer of Halftone writes to us about a new ongoing project, "Can You Type?" - a sort of typographic portrait gallery. "With a canvas 240 pixels wide, and 400 pixels high, create a typographic representation of yourself."

My favorite so far is Anthony Sheret's Lunch.

Those few of you who are lucky enough to work for employers who pay hourly overtime will no longer be paid at a higher rate for those additional hours.

Rule 6: Employees whose job requires imagination, invention, originality, or artistic or creative endeavors are not eligible for overtime.

I don't usually post much political content here, nor do I encourage it, but this seems to be bad news for many folks working in the graphic arts (especially the huge volume of low-paid typesetters, commercial layout artists, production people and photo retouchers who, for many of us working as ADs and graphic designers, remain often and unfortunately off our radar), and -- as far as I can tell -- removes one of the largest incentives for job creation.

It looks like the inevitable has transpired. Typographica's previous, long-standing domain, (confiscated by the Canadian authorities a few weeks ago), was just released to a new registrant. It's comforting to know CIRA's rigorous enforcement of the Canadian Presence Requirement has worked as intended and typographi.ca is now populated with quality content that is beneficial specifically to Canada and its residents, replacing the useless international typography drivel that used to live there.

Still, the drivel lives on. Look for us to once again occupy and befoul a new permanent domain very soon. In the meantime, keep dialing typographi.com and keep calling us Typographica. The address may change but the name remains the same. Thanks for your patience.

Uh, maybe I’m missing something, but what exactly makes a Linotype release an "Original"? It's clear Univers is, but can someone explain me what Scriptuale represents?

It's strange: Herbert Post or Post Antiqua are not mentioned anywhere (am I right?) and how can we say a design so related to an existing typeface is a Linotype "Original"?

I hope this is not what it appears to be...

A lot of design books have hit the shelves in the last month, but of all those I've read, only a few in particular really resonated with me. Most of what has appeared recently has really been pretty mediocre. Here are a few highlights from the shrinking field of stuff worth reading:

Stephen Hogbin's Appearance and Reality: A Visual Handbook for Artists, Designers, and Makers, originally published in 2000 and recently reprinted, is one of those manuals where a visual artist or designer has tried to organize a consistent system for applying creative ideas to the generation of product. Unlike so many similar attempts, Hogbin's system — grouped around the four key disciplines of art, craft/technology, science and design — is flexible enough not to see the disciplines or the creative process as a zero-sum equation. It's a broad approach that focuses on illustrating how both fine artists and commercial designers can create work with integrity and social conscience, and succeeds on a number of levels.

David Jury's Letterpress: The Allure of the Handmade is a big and beautiful book from the editor of TypoGraphic, the ISTD's journal. Jury offers insight into the continued (and in some places growing) popularity of letterpress techniques, and investigates how they have been adapted to work in tandem with digital typesetting. Mostly, though, the book is great for its wonderful pictures of great work from around the world, and is a must-read for anyone even slightly interested in contemporary letterpress work.

Excerpts from a Plazm press release:

In 2002, Nike commissioned Plazm to design an entire alphabet called Victory, a comprehensive and proprietary typographic family to be used exclusively in its own communications, collateral and advertising.

Victory recollects attributes of Avenir, Geometric 706 and Futura, whose origins in the industrial era pervade their flawless geometry. The addition of certain curvaceous details, such as seen in the lower case l and y, suggest a preoccupation with things organic, and echo this generation's obsession with the body, a perfect evocation of the Nike ethos. "The Nike brand was built around the concept of performance. To inject the concept of victory is a logical next step," says Pete McCracken, project lead on the development of Victory, and director of Plazm Fonts.

Particular attention was also paid to the uppercase U, featuring the addition of the terminal, and the uppercase N and K. These letterforms were important not only because of the name of the company, but because they offered an opportunity to customize letterforms that are normally unnoticed.

(P.S.: sorry if this is old news, it was news to me)

In recent weeks I've had the pleasure of working with the talented and friendly people of FontShop (resume includes FontFont, along with 50 other handpicked foundries, and the ultimate FontBook) and Punchcut (resume includes Typophile — enough said). Our most recent effort is the release of several free fonts, including Olympukes [PDF Character Set] from Virus. As is often the case with Jonathan Barnbrook's stuff, it's blatantly cheeky, and very entertaining. On that note, here's a illustrated history of Olympic pictograms.

The FS/PC/SC threesome is hard at work on another, broader project of which I am very fond. When it's finally chugging along at full throttle, you'll be the first to know.

Ralph Levien describes ATF's automated optical scaling technique and offers high-resolution scans of ATF catalogs. One of my favorite pages: the proclamatory To The Progressive Printer which states:

This Specimen Book contains no item which has outlived its usefulness and profitableness … Not the least service the American Type Founders Company has rendered to the printers is that of discarding hundreds of series of type faces which do not conform to the present higher standard of typographic taste which has been created and fostered by the "Originator of Type Fashions."

One wonders what the type world would be like if today's foundries followed that policy. No more ITC Eras, perhaps?

Thank you Allesandro.

At the AIGA Design Forum, Cyrus Highsmith writes a little about Font Bureau founder David Berlow and his advice for type designers.

Speaking of bad type: at Shopsin's, you have the choice of breakfast, lunch or dinner. But by reading the menu, you've already made the choice to go blind [PDF link].

Almost exactly a year since their last redesign, Thirstype relaunches again. This time with a simpler, cleaner look and a type tester that puts all other online samplers to shame. mudTyper displays your custom text, with kerning, as you type. No buttons to push, no new pages to load. Very slick. Unfortunately, it looks like it's not yet ready for the Lux and Underware subsites.

Also new is chester's GalaxiePolaris, a modern take on the old school grotesque. It borrows from Helv and AkzGrot and even Univers, but the italics are mostly unprecedented.

Sprawl is based on urban planning maps and the density of population in Belgium. The basic shape of the letters is the same so that when you type they can lock into each other.

— Brecht Cuppens, designer

In celebration of the ‘Bad Type Conference’, The Friends of St Bride Printing Library are inviting all typo-voyeurs to submit photographs of very bad type they have discovered.

Bad type may be been found in any environment—shop fascias, on the side of buses, in the rear windows of cars, on TV, or in magazines, newspapers or books; and produced by any process—printed, engraved, painted or airbrushed.

All submissions will be exhibited at the Bad Type Conference and judged by a specially chosen panel of experts who will assess the entries on grounds of content and composition, and not the quality of the photography. The winners will be awarded one of a number of glittering prizes.

You could gain even more fame when the BBC includes this 'Bad Type' competition in their upcoming documentary on typography!

Photographs of bad type can be sent as medium resolution digital images to: conference@stbride.org. Please mark your email ‘Bad Type Competition’ and include your name, address and the place where the photograph was taken. The official closing date is 1 October 2004 but if you want it on the BBC program, get it in by 15 August!