Month: December 2010

Just My Type

Just my Type by Simon GarfieldIn a comment to a recent post I made, my friend Kate says check out the book Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. I looked it up, and was amused by the product description on Amazon:

What’s your type? Suddenly everyone’s obsessed with fonts. Whether you’re enraged by Ikea’s Verdanagate, want to know what the Beach Boys have in common with easy Jet or why it’s okay to like Comic Sans, “Just My Type” will have the answer. Learn why using upper case got a New Zealand health worker sacked. Refer to Prince in the Tafkap years as a Dingbat (that works on many levels). Spot where movies get their time periods wrong and don’t be duped by fake posters on eBay. Simon Garfield meets the people behind the typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts — like men — are from Mars and some are from Venus. From type on the high street and album covers, to the print in our homes and offices, Garfield is the font of all types of knowledge.

Birthdays

janeausten.pngI usual ask people who buy my books and such where they found my shop. Since I started selling my Jane Austen coasters, several buyers have reported they were using them for their annual Jane Austen birthday party. Her birthday is today, Dec 16th (and the doodle on today’s UK version of Google commemorates Austen — that’s the picture to the left. I guess here in America we’re not literary enough?) I have several friends who have gone to England in mid-January to celebrate the birthday of Scottish poety Robert Burns and the Baker Street Irregulars celebrate Sherlock Holmes (fictitious) birthday every January as well. I think I’ll give a toast to Ms. Austen at supper tonight — do you have a favorite author or character that you celebrate?

Map & Text Collages

matthew cusick map collage detail matthew cusick word collage

Matthew Cusick does collages with maps and texts. Above on the left is a detail of Red and Blue and on the right is a detail from Ether (which uses Bible and history book pages). He also alters book pages — see the collection called Defacements where, using pages from olld schoolbooks, he alters them “through a process of scraping and sanding to isolate the illustrations and remove all but a few words of text. The page numbers are also left intact so that the works can be reassembled into a unique codex.” About this work he says:

Defacements are obsessively crafted amalgamations of word and image in the tradition of altered books and concrete poetry. The re-contextualization of image, word, and number creates a new storyline that is often in the spirit of a prankster student who has marked up a textbook with irreverent and provocative commentary.

Retrofonts

Retrofonts by Gregor StawinskiGregor Stawinski’s book Retrofonts is a chronicle of more than 360 fonts designs from last 150 years, with an accompanying CD containing 222 copyright-free fonts. He’s categorized the fonts into nine chronological sections, ranging from “Art Nouveau and Japonism” to “Postmodern and Punk.” It was reviewed in the NY Times Book Review the other day. The reviewer, Steven Heller, says “This is not the first book to collect passé typefaces. Nor is it the first to uncritically celebrate the good, the bad and the ugly. But it is one of the most attractive and inclusive works of its kind, revealing how, as the preface states, ‘fonts encode the zeitgeist’.” You can see samples of the fonts in the book here.