In February of 1989, I had the pleasure of meeting Josef Müller-Brockmann. I was a young, wide-eyed student of 21 years studying at Arizona State University. With great fortune, a professor of mine had heard that Müller-Brockmann was going to be in the country and asked him to add a stop in Tempe, Arizona. The program director for the design department at ASU at the time was the famous Rob Roy Kel

by Taro Yumiba 2010年の九月から約一年間、オランダ、ハーグにある王立芸術アカデミー、通称KABKのTypemediaコースに留学されたタイプデザイナーの岡野邦彦さんに卒業制作で取り組まれた書体Quintetを中心にインタビューさせて頂いた。 どのようにしてタイポグラフィとタイプデザインに興味持ったのですか？ 大学ではグラフィックデザインを専攻していました。ポスター制作などの課題が出た時に、使う文字を調べるために書体のカタログを見たりしてたのですが、なかなかイメージにぴったりと合うものがありませんでした。だったら自分で好みの書体を作ってしまおうと思ったのが始まりでした。 また運のいいことに、当時まだ高価だったMacintoshとFontographer3.1が大学の研究室にあったんです。Macintoshがまだそれほど普及していない頃で、誰も使い方がよく分からなかったのです

By Taro Yumiba How and when did you become interested in typography & type design? At university I majored in graphic design. I used to leaf through typeface catalogs in search of letters to use in my poster design assignments. However, I could never find any typefaces that matched perfectly what I had in mind, so I began making my own. I was lucky enough to have access to a Macintosh and Fontogra

Part 2: Readability, affability, authority [read part one] When their words are put into print, writers want the text to be inviting and welcoming, so that readers will read what they have written. And they also want the text to have an aura of credibility, so it will be taken seriously and maybe even accepted. When I read Einstein’s Autobiography many years ago, as both a writer and a lover of ty

by Jeremy Mickel I remember clearly the day I was waiting for the 6 train at 33rd Street and Park Avenue in New York. I had taken pictures of type on the street for some time, but there was something here that caught my eye. There was a plastic sign on a door with letters and numbers routed out of plastic, and I noticed a couple of characters in particular: the way the 8 curved back into itself, t

Where does our alphabet come from? We see it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, and in printed and digital books and magazines; in fact, you’re looking at it now — the Latin or Roman alphabet, the world’s most prolific, most widespread abc. Typography is a relatively recent invention, but to unearth the origins of alphabets, we’ll need to travel much further back in time, to an era contemp

Part 1: The snare of authenticity How much should a revival of a typeface look like the original? Well, just as with performing an old song—an analogy Matthew Carter has made—there is something you have to like in the original in order want to revive it. And you can’t depart from the original too much, or you lose the charm of the old song that appealed to you in the first place. But if it is too

The Week in Type I had intended to publish my review of Theo‘s The Typographic Desk Reference today. I’ll publish that next week. And, I missed out on April Fool‘s. I had so many ideas, from the new and free Adobe fonts with embedded ad glyphs (the humour’s in the execution!) to the … well, I’ll save that for next year. In the meantime, here’s plenty to keep you busy. Everything from new typefaces

By Benjamin Brundell The letterpress printing process is one of the oldest ways of getting the printed word on to a page. It relies on a physical representation of each letter being inked and then pressed against the paper—and this is why it’s both interesting and expensive. Thinking a little further about it for each page the printer needs a piece of metal to represent every single character; a w

roman, italic, rotalic August marks iLT’s first birthday, and I’d like to ask you all for suggestions on how we might celebrate. I have begun organising some prizes, so if you can think of a competition or whatever, then let me know in the comments below. Don’t be shy. I’ve recently begun heading this post with a lovely photo of found type. Let’s stick with that. Here’s one from Simon Pascal Klein

Seconds Out, Round One Every typeface, like every one of us, has its distinguishing features. You might be forgiven for thinking that some fonts are clones, or identical twins. However, closer inspection reveals subtle differences and nuances that simply escape casual perusal. Something that can really help heighten our sensitivity to those differences is getting out our magnifying glasses and rea