Archive for category: Typography

How many ways can you torture a schwa?    (2006.08.31)

God, I hate trendy “pop-culture aficionados” who think the word refers to aliens.

John Hudson has a paper (PDF) on designing his font Sylfaen in which he lists what he thinks is the complete Cyrillic character set. Ever seen a capital schwa with dieresis?

Me neither. By the way, that’s 96 letters. Care for a game of Scrabble?

(Meanwhile, teddybearish Tom Phinney did a lousy job explaining which Cyrillic characters Adobe will include in future fonts, going so far as to type their raw character codes, not the characters, into his blog entry.)

Words/Lettering in/on/& Buildings/Architecture    (2006.08.25)

I am methodically reading every remotely plausible book on graphic design and typography that can be borrowed from the Toronto Public Library, the world’s largest such system, with 99 branches. (If you recently went looking for the only circulating copies of Eye, I’m the one who snagged them.) I am, further, ordering everything under the sun from other libraries via interlibrary loan, which fails about four-fifths of the time but is still worth a go.

Recently, I read the three classic treatises on words/lettering in/on/& buildings/architecture (for their titles are merely permutations of those words and you could generate your own): (more…)

’Tis an error i’faith    (2006.08.21)

What is with CBC captioners’ fondness for ‘single quotes’?

Apparently complete but embarrassingly short list of known homosexualist bloggeurs with graphic-design and/or typographic skills    (2006.08.06)

Total: 3

Research advice for our dear British friends    (2006.07.27)

In which I petition Ofcom for new research on fonts for captioning. Junk science has got to stop someday

Invert tattoo trifecta    (2006.07.17)

Cursive, blackletter caps, and Chinese

‘Ckear Print’    (2006.07.07)

The CNIB (sorry, “cnib”) muffs it yet again, this time with published guidelines on making print accessible

The Solid Bore of Language    (2006.05.09)

What few choice parts there are in a pamphlet masquerading as a book entitled The Solid Form of Language by Bringhurst

Jagged Arial for the visually impaired    (2006.04.02)

How is it even possible to produce type this bad on monitors this expensive?