By my best estimation, at least 1,800 new commercial typefaces were released in 2006 alone. This count does not include freebies, custom and proprietary commissions, or even individual weights. It is a rough tally of the number of new font families released by the major resellers and exclusive foundries last year. If we take this fresh meat and trim the inevitable 90% that is unusable fat, we are still left with hundreds of quality new typefaces, most of which will never get ink from a design magazine or a blurb on a blog. Read the rest of this entry »

From the company that popularized Arial, here are three examples of bad typography in Microsoft Word. Bad typesetting in Word finds its way into resumes, business plans, research papers, government documents, even published books. These small inconsistencies and imperfections may be un-noticible in small doses, but paragraph-after-paragraph they stack up - resulting in ugly, visually-incohesive documents. Word isn’t for professional typography work, but that’s no excuse for these typography sins. 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 »

We’re seeing change in font use and designs in Web 2.0, but these changes aren’t just aesthetic but functional too. So I thought I’d share some insights we’ve had while discussing these trends. Eventhough I’ve narrowed it down to font usage, the trends I see in this artcile obviously apply to all design elements. Read the rest of this entry »

We have become an increasingly visual society in the years since the advent of television in the 1950s. If other web advertisers are emphasizing imagery, you can either choose to follow the prevailing attitude, or you can buck that trend - and possibly become more visible - by telling your story using only type and space, space and type. No imagery at all. The key is to impose the space on the type to make itself visible in the foreground. 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 »