Ace Jet 170

1 for sorrow, 2 for joy...

Just don't mention C_ _ _ _ _ S_ _ _

acf acf

...or so, it appears, Mr Tankard would say. Rummaging around for the Architype stuff I found JT stuff. 

Lots of it.

      

Sack Face

 

Not seeing much of Freda Sack last week got me thinking about The Foundry and, digging through some old cigar boxes, I managed to find this, one of the first promo leaflets for their brilliant revivals of groundbreaking type design projects carried out in the early part of the 20th Century by the leading lights of the day, including my all-time hero, I-wouldn't-be-doing-this-stuff-today-without-him, Tschichold.

At the time, the Fuse/Emigre glory days, the release of these for Mac was dead exciting. Can't find samples for all three Architype sets but do have them somewhere.

 

OneTypeBook

 

Thanks must go to the guys at We Made This for the tip-off. As St Bride Conference attendees they got a copy of Jeremy's lovely 2004 TypeBookOne for free. I've just bought mine and it's well worth the micro price tag.

As well as samples of Mr Tankard's superb typefaces, it includes a text by Catherine Dixon on "the emergence and use of the type specimen" and a short text by the man himself on the OpenType format.

According to his "occassional newsletter" Footnotes, stocks are running low but you can order a copy using this form. It also reports that TypeBookTwo will be going to press soon.

 

 

Extra Vista

A surprise type specimen in the post is a lovely thing isn't it? This one's for Xavier Dupré's new additions to his 2004 designed Vista family. Lovely.

Type Museum

Paul at This is Real Art very kindly sent me this set of postcards he designed for the Type Museum as a thank you for a favour I did. It has to be said, a favour sooooo small it hardly deserved the name. I'm not being ungracious though, these are brilliant and received with great thanks.

They're still available from Paul.

The Pilcrow

And Jonathan Hoefler explains this (which, incidentally, I have tattooed on my upper arm...it's a long story of vodka breakfasts, foolishness and the love of a good woman, unsuitable for these pages).

Oldstyle/Lining/Tabular figures explained

Uppy and downy figures on The Font Feed.

Typographica's favourite fonts of 2007

Typographica’s fourth annual review showcases the best in new typeface design. Twenty four of the world’s brightest type and graphic designers selected their favorite releases of the year...

Read all about it.

Kitching and the truth of actual size

Not surprisingly, managing two data projectors through one PC interface doesn't come naturally to Alan Kitching. But although he struggled throughout his talk to master the new fangles contraption, he remained unfazed.

In a down-to-earth, northern accent, that made me think of him (oddly I know) as some kind of typographic John Shuttleworth (with apologies to less local readers for that reference), Kitching began by explaining how he started out: First, in a composing room, he talked about the influence the work of Tschichold and Max Bill had had on him. Then how he found himself working with the legendary Anthony Froshaug, one of my personal heroes Derek Birdsall, Fletcher and Colin Forbes. He talked about his vagabond existance in the sixties and how it took him years to break away from his early influences.

He told us how he likes to, whenever possible, work at actual size becuase of it's "truth" and how he has the largest wood type collection in Europe; how Fletcher showed him how to compose work in a way that Froshaug could never do; how there are times when you just have to get out your tennant saw and slice off a bit of your wood type to fix the kerning; how to make your ink glow on black art paper by underpinning it with perfectly registered opaque white first and how some of his stuff takes 3 months to print.

Brilliant.