America's big green highway signs are about to become more legible. Type designer James Montalbano announces that after years of development, the US Federal Government has finally given official interim approval for his Clearview to be used on all Federal roads. The ClearviewHwy site covers some of the extensive research Montalbano has presented at various type conferences. It's pretty fascinating stuff.

The following have already adopted Clearview:

• Texas (statewide)
• Pennsylvania
• British Columbia
• Toronto (older version)
• Yukon
• other Canadian municipalities

It could take years before it appears elsewhere, as individual states must decide whether or not to make the switch. They are not required to do so.

Old vs. New:

See also: Text to be Read at 60 MPH

Bembo? Minion? Garamond?
Ahhhhhhhhhh, what's the difference, anyway?

Alexander Girard alphabet pillows.

UPDATE -- There are sale pillows for $40 each. I got white on natural and it looks beautiful in my living room. More tan than the greyish shown on the site.

Thanks Christian.

Making snowmen and the occasional angel can be great fun, but have you ever made a snow letter? Test your typographic skills in a different medium at the largest winter festival Western Canada has to offer, Le Festival du Voyageur, featuring the Snow Type competition. Winning entries will receive airfare and accommodations for the five day event, taking place February 9-12, 2005 in Saint-Boniface, Canada.

Simply prepare a sketch or photograph a maquette of your ideas for a letter sculpture or an inscriptional block which can be worked in three days out of a twelve by twelve foot by ten foot high block of snow.

Post, fax or email your submission no later than November 5, 2004. (Hurry!)
Submit your entries to:

Snow Type
Festival du Voyaguer
768 Tache
Saint-Boniface
Canada, R2H 2C4
fax: 204 233 7576
email: nbernardin@festivalvoyageur.mb.ca

Erik van Blokland's KABK class invited living lettering legend John Downer to demonstrate how to use Speedball pens to achieve the look of that bygone era when advertisements and posters were lettered by hand.

Downer, while Speedily rendering a perfect 's':

It takes years of practice.

A flabbergasted student:

That's very comforting.

See also: Cartoon Title Cards : Hand Lettering Basics : Various images of Downer in action: 1 / 2 / 3

Your signature is needed to help save the Imprimerie Nationale, one of the greatest repositories of typographic material in the world. (If you have ever used a Garamond revival, or a Didot, or a Fournier, you are perhaps indebted to the Imprimerie.) Their collection, which spans four centuries, is scheduled to be dissolved in the next twelve months.

The petition, in seventeen languages, is here. Please step up!

Veer called our attention to a couple of excellent typography resources this week: Apple Fonts at the comprehensive Wikipedia, and Microsoft's disagreeably facetious type glossary.

Thanks to Karen Huang's Snog Blog too.

In case you haven't already heard, FontFont and FUSE are turning 15. That's quite the milestone for an institution of digital typography, an industry that isn't much older. FontShop has been organizing a big fat exhibition to celebrate the anniversary. The traveling show is curated by FontShop founder Erik Spiekermann, with Dutch writer-designer Jan Middendorp, author of Dutch Type. It will feature dozens of the best examples of FontFonts in use.

There is still time to submit your own work for possible inclusion in the show. Anything that makes use of typefaces or pictograms from the FontFont library or the FUSE collection will be considered -- books, magazines, posters, and newspapers, as well as examples of packaging, signage, gadgets. Send an email with previews (keep images under 1MB, please) of your work to FontShop and they'll tell you if there's a place for it in the exhibition. Questions can also be directed to that address.

Marc Moulin, living legend of the Belgian music scene, has just released his latest album Entertainment. The videoclip for the first single Silver (Who stole the groove?), directed by Didier Malchaire, gives a whole new meaning to the concept "body type". In the accompanying Electronic Press Kit, the artist explains his love for type, calligraphy, and language, while the Making Of video lets us peek into the process of ... well, making the video.

Democrat designer Scott Dadich contributes a piece to the Times lambasting Kerry's visual campaign. He calls it inconsistent, wimpy, and a weak echo of Bush's. He's right. When the logo was unveiled back in July I hoped to high heaven it was merely a quick whip-up to announce Edwards joining the ticket and would soon be replaced by something real. Georgia is an excellent font for screen (you're reading it right now), but on a bumper sticker, it fails.

Paula Scher adds to the article an amusing supplementary graphic.

With a huge proportion of graphic designers leaning left, there's no excuse for the Kerry campaign to present such a weak image.

Thanks to reader Ian Blair for the tip.

Last week, 340 typographers, type lovers, and lovers of type lovers met in Prague for the annual ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) conference. Most of the week's events were held in the Archa Theater, in the center of the city. Prague's transformations over the past 15 years, as well as Central & Eastern European type design, served as the theme and inspiration for the conference, entitled Crossroads of Civilizations.

Apart from the conference hotel -- the Park Hotel (a communist-era behemoth not centrally located but centrally expensive) -- and the Friday night "Kerning Party" thrown by the otherwise fabulous VŠUP (pronounced fee-shoop) students, the entire conference was a fantastic event, filled by a three-track schedule of broad-topic lectures and opportunities to meet all of the other delegates.

The conference began a day early, with the two-day Type Tech Forum, lead by Thomas Phinney and FontLab. FontLab unveiled a new logo, and Microsoft unveiled new OpenType support for their upcoming OS, as well as cool ClearType freebie booklets. The Conference was closed five days later with the election of a new slate of board members, as well as John Hudson's elevation to Vice President and Jean François Porchez election as ATypI President.

Rick Poynor's keynote speech sparked more controversy than the rest of the conference put together -- and at least 45 minutes of questions. Many in the audience interpreted his speech as being condescending to Eastern European designers, encouraging them not to sell out to western commercialism, but conceding that if they don't, they will be destined for poverty.

Probably drawing the smallest crowd, and the least amount of controversy, was a small lunch discussion led by P22's Carima El-Behairy entitled "The Value of a Font." She intended to talk about circumstances in which fonts add value to products -- i.e., when a typeface becomes the bulk of a product being sold, such as a stamp set made from a font and sold by a third party. Most of the few attendees at the session wanted to talk about something else, perhaps real piracy or OpenType pricing ranges.

My favorite talk was the Education panel discussion, where Gerry Leonidas made all of the young designers worry, by remarking that only about five new jobs in type design are available every year (I'm not sure if that is an understatement or an overstatement). Later, a member of the audience asked an off-topic question that was nonetheless amusing: Why haven't type design programs changed their names to font design programs, since most people just call typefaces fonts nowadays anyway?

Next year's ATypI conference is already less than a year away, and will be held in Helsinki from September 15---18, 2005. But you needn't wait until then to get in on ATypI discussion; a few, longer recaps of the conference have already been posted online, including one by Luc Devroye, and another by myself at TypeOff. Jean François Porchez has also posted some photos on his blog. Conferences never seem to end on their closing date anymore, do they?

Literally “beautiful letters” in French, the term belles lettres aptly describes works of graphic design in which typography plays an aesthetic role, elevating print communication to the realm of art. This exhibition explores contemporary type treatment, looking at how designers employ contrast, scale, layering, and formal manipulation to reiterate and transform content. Drawn entirely from the SFMOMA collection, Belles Lettres presents posters, magazines, brochures, and books by boundary-breaking designers such as Michael Bierut, Jennifer Morla, and Martin Venezky.

Belles Lettres will run from Saturday, October 30, 2004 to Sunday, April 17, 2005 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

text filched from the SFMOMA site

A. M. Cassandre is best known for his posters, but he's also the designer of several typefaces including Peignot, the eccentric that's seen rabid abuse in the last quarter-century due to its broad availability as a digital font. Cassandre's first face was Bifur, designed in two parts — two colors for each glyph. Elsner & Flake once digitized Bifur as Cassandre Initials (now unavailable), but as a single font it didn't capture the two-tone spirit of the original.

Today, the International House of Fonts (IHOF) fills that void with the release of their own P22 Bifur. Rich Kegler's creation includes six fonts with layerable sets of wide lines, fine lines, and solid overlays. He took it a step further and added a lowercase that complements Cassandre's initials surprisingly well.

IHOF (supposedly the daughter of P22, but I'm having trouble distinguishing the two labels lately) also announced another multilayered revival: Durer Caps, again an alphabet that was previously only available via less serious renditions (Duerer Latin, Codex, Hands On Albrecht).

See also: Anisette : Applied Geometry of Albrecht Dürer : De Symmetria