This inter­ac­tive Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Time­line of Typog­ra­phy is a con­cise overview of the per­ti­nent moments in typog­ra­phy in the past century.

In a pre­vi­ous Type Basics we exam­ined the dif­fer­ence between a type­face and a font. Both terms refer to a single man­i­fes­ta­tion of type. In this episode we will look at how indi­vid­ual typefaces/fonts relate to each other.

This tuto­r­ial shows how to create del­i­cate shadow lines and shaded engraved type.

Character size, mea­sure, type­face … these are all gen­er­ally accepted as being fac­tors that influ­ence leg­i­bil­ity. Yet the study “The uncrowded window of object recog­ni­tion” by New York Uni­ver­sity neuro-​scientists Denis G. Pelli & Katharine A. Till­man pub­lished in sci­en­tific jour­nal Nature Neu­ro­science advances the thesis that char­ac­ter spac­ing is the defin­ing factor for legibility.

Is all caps set­ting really so poorly read­able that one can’t use it in head­lines of let’s say max­i­mum three lines, or is the unfavourable effect negligible?

As we’re col­lab­o­rat­ing with mul­ti­ple authors on the Font­Feed, we com­piled a list of guide­lines for our­selves and guest con­trib­u­tors. One of our con­cerns is that we should attempt to “speak the same lan­guage” when using typo­graphic and related terms. Because these terms evolved over a con­sid­er­able period of time and saw sev­eral tran­si­tions in […]

Some of you dig­i­tal age kids ;) may not rec­og­nize what the images in our intro­duc­tory post are, so maybe there’s some ’splain­ing to do. The top image are wood type let­ters; the bottom one shows metal type. They are used in let­ter­press, a dwin­dling print­ing tech­nique that nev­er­the­less still counts many fer­vent admirers.

“Let­ter­press puts […]

We love Open­Type. It’s not just the latest font tech­nol­ogy, but also the most advanced, poised to replace the old True­Type and Post­Script for­mats. This font format brings many more pos­si­bil­i­ties for typog­ra­phers and graphic designers.