Can there be such a thing as a hit in typography? A blockbuster? The surge in the popularity of Rockwell must have come from somewhere. The Times Magazine’s use of the face goes back at least to 2001, though it has been used more prominently since 2004. One might think that Apple’s decision to bundle Rockwell with the release of its Tiger operating system in 2005 is also part of what sparked the resurgence. But could Apple’s position as weathervane of the creative world be that pervasive? The evidence is only anecdotal. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you’ve been avoiding television, newspapers, and all other forms of mass media for the past few months, you’ve probably seen Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s ‘Change We Can Believe In’ and ‘Stand for Change’ banners. The typophiles among you have realized that the ‘change’ font Obama’s campaign uses is Gotham, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, originally as a commission for GQ Magazine. Read the rest of this entry »

It took three years and three designers to develop FF Meta® Serif. All through the ’90s, Erik Spiekermann made several attempts at designing a counterpart for his groundbreaking FF Meta®. Fans of Meta frequently asked him which serif face would best complement it. He recommended Swift, Minion, FF Clifford, and others, until he realized that he should just buckle down and draw his own serif Meta. True to his principle of collaboration, Spiekermann enlisted the help of accomplished type designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby. Read the rest of this entry »

Once there was a typeface called Helvetica. It was extremely popular. Later came a software company called Microsoft. They “borrowed” Helvetica for their operating system and called it Arial. This inferior typeface is now on millions of desktops all over the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes all designers HATE Times New Roman, but let’s face it- on the web we are very limited on what fonts we can safely use. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am getting a little board of seeing Georgia as the only serif font on the web. However there is hope. Yes times new roman is ugly, it is overused, and often by amateurs. However we can in fact use it to our advantage with the power of CSS and typography. Read the rest of this entry »

When Linotype acquired the Helvetica family it was in disarray - two different names for the same version, variations in design features. To make order out of it all they redrew the entire Helvetica family and dubbed it Neue Helvetica (New Helvetica). They also added a numbering system to help identify all the many styles and weights. Read the rest of this entry »

Better known today for being Apple’s main font on their website, iPod and more, Myriad is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach (born 1956) and Carol Twombly (born 1959) in the period 1990–92 for Adobe Systems. Myriad is a multiple masters face that works with an intelligent software “engine” to allow the user to generate variations in width and weight by accessing a broad range of stroke widths arranged on individual character rasters. Read the rest of this entry »