The Chinese invented printing, but their writing system required a large number of typefaces, which made for very high up-front capital cost...
Thinking with Type
The essential and bestselling guide to typography from beloved design educator Ellen Lupton—revised and expanded to include new and additional voices, examples, and principles, and a wider array of typefaces. "Thinking with Type is to typography what Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is to physics."—I Love TypographyThe bestselling Thinking with Type in a revised and expanded third edition: This is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication. Covering the essentials of typography, this book explores everything from typefaces and type families to kerning and tracking to grids and layout principles.Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped. Historical and contemporary examples of graphic design show how to learn the rules and how to break them. Critical essays, eye-opening diagrams, helpful exercises, and dozens of examples and illustrations show readers how to be inventive within systems that inform and communicate.Featuring 32 pages of new content, the third edition is revised and refined from cover to cover: More fonts: old fonts, new fonts, weird fonts, libre fonts, Google fonts, Adobe fonts, fonts from independent foundries, and fonts and lettering by women and BIPOC designersIntroductions to diverse writing systems, contributed by expert typographers from around the worldDemonstrations of basic design principles, such as visual balance, Gestalt grouping, and responsive layoutCurrent approaches to typeface design, including variable fonts and optical sizes; tips for readability, legibility, and accessibility; and stunning reproductions from the Letterform Archive Thinking with Type is the typography book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, anyone who works with words on page or screen, and enthusiasts of type and lettering. Readers will also love Ellen Lupton's book Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, and educator. She has written numerous books about graphic design, including Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. She teaches in the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA), where she proudly serves as the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair. She is Curator Emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, where her exhibitions included Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision. Lupton loves reading, writing, teaching, and learning new things about design.
The typographic scale
The typographic scale has been used for centuries to choose harmonious font sizes. It has been likened to a harmonious musical scale. But there are *flaws* in those historical values.
Writing books isn't a good idea
Could the creator economy provide a better one?
MD Thermochrome by Mass-Driver - Future Fonts
Our written world is made from little dots: little dots of ink from a printer; phosphors or pixels on a screen; blackened thermal paper on a sales receipt. MD Thermochrome is a typeface designed around little dots. It’s not a faithful mimicry of any single printing technique, but an allusion to several — the coarse grid of dot-matrix printers, the visible scanlines of CRT terminal fonts, the varying dot size of over- and under-inked documents from any number of technologies. Built on a consistent (but not quite square) grid, Thermochrome features five discrete italic angles (Upright, Italic, Inclined, Retalic, Reclined), eight weights, and over 100 icons and symbols.
The Geometry of Type
The Geometry of Type explores 100 traditional and modern typefaces in detail, with a full spread devoted to each entry. Characters from each typeface are enlarged and annotated to reveal key features, anatomical details, and the finer, often-overlooked elements of type design, which shows how these attributes affect mood and readability. Sidebar information lists the designer and foundry, the year of release and the different weights and styles available, while feature boxes explain the origins and best uses for each typeface, such as whether it is suitable for running text or as a display font for headlines. To help the reader spot each typeface in the wider world, the full character set is shown, and the best letters for identification are highlighted.
Lost in Translation? A Designer’s Guide to Japanese Type – PRINT Magazine
J Type 101 takes type lovers inside the fascinating mechanics of Japanese typography, revealing the rules, rhythms, and cultural context behind the characters.
Fonts In Use
A searchable archive of typographic design, indexed by typeface, format, and topic.
Immutable Skills
How knowledge redevelops at higher levels of abstraction, and why its still dependent on properties of the printing press
Fraunces by Undercase Type
Fraunces is a display, 'Old Style' soft-serif typeface inspired by the mannerisms of early 20th century typefaces such as Windsor, Souvenir, and the Cooper Series.
Esoteric Fonts
Arbitrary code can run inside a font, what was a power given to compute the complex layout of characters, can be repurposed for esoteric and even practical purposes. This collection reflects the esoteric fonts people have created and the ways to make them.
Bastardica
coralscript
propublica/weepeople
StateFace
Hexagone · eieio.games
Decoy Font: A TTF font that hides what you type