Typography Magazines, Journals and Hubs. Part 1

If you’re into typography, you know there’s more to life than just staring at types in the street, on walls and websites. You also subscribe to typography magazines that feed your addiction, right? On which you spend a certain amount of money or time, or both. We’re talking about those publications that focus on typography before anything else.
Today we give a helping hand to those beginners who are still looking for typography magazines out there to keep them updated with the most important news in the business, new exciting designers and not to be missed events.
We picked a few of them today, but we’ll be back with more next week. There is no particular order. How could it be, de gustibus non disputandum est, right?

Limited Editions

Some of the best print magazines on typography are limited edition, resembling a luxurious extension to an online shop or publication.

Codex-cover

Codex, the ‘journal of letterforms’, is a limited edition print magazine, or a hybrid of magazine and journal, as they say. It’s one of the best-selling print magazine out there for graphic designers, teachers, students, and everyone who has any interest in fonts, graphic design, lettering, and typography. Scholarly at times, but not dry in tone. Serious, but not stuffy. We also agree that this is a beautiful product, like in ‘pleasing to the eye’. Recently they added a new option: you can now subscribe, thus saving money and ensuring you’ll never miss out on an issue. You can also read past issues for less, in PDF.

Font is FontShop’s acclaimed annual print publication of typography and design. Being annual, it might actually be quite good to know that this San Francisco based magazine has a very popular newsletter too. The subscribers are treated to new and free fonts, typographic tips and trends, and important FontShop developments. Issue 007 was published in 2008 and is entitled ‘Rule Makers/Rule Breakers’. It features a selection of art and design projects generated within arbitrary sets of parameters, plus a showcase for the FontShop type library. You can see this particular 40-page issue online too.

Back to Uni

Since the universities are providers of fresh new original material, you should definitely consider some of their publications. Here you have two of them:

typohub

Typography papers is an irregular collection of good things edited and produced at the Department of Typography, University of Reading. This book-length work publishes extended articles on its subject, exploring topics to the length to which they want to go. Being an academic publication, its scope is broad and international, its treatment – serious, but also lively. You can find details about contents and browse through its pages before buying it.

The Typographic Hub is part of the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design at Birmingham City University. The Hub works to promote the history, theory and practice of typographic design. It is a busy centre for the study of printing and typographic history, theory and practice.  You’ll come across articles on all aspects of the history, theory and practice of typography, printing and the allied trades. The Hub is more like a magic door to a lot of resources: articles, books, podcasts and much more. It might even talk you into studying typography.

close
Login into your account