TEXTile

Opening this weekend at the Type Director's Club in NYC is a lecture by British photographer, Adrian Wilson who will be speaking about his amazing collection of wood and copper stamps used to imprint merchant's trademarks on English textiles during the Victorian era. These elaborate stamps often featured stunning ornamental lettering and devices which represent a very highly sophisticated style of branding. I find them remarkable inspiration and hope we get to see them all published in a book someday. The coloful printed fabric labels in Wilson's collection, reminiscent of our orange crate labels, are pretty darn fine too!

Pattern Thinking

This is what happens when you set Novia with negative leading. Thank you Cyrus Highsmith!

Can't Believe the Type

As a class exercise this past week, students were asked to design a familiar image using just the letters of either their first or last name. For this "typographical analogy" exercise, students were allowed to repeat those letters of their name and rotate, reverse and even consider the negative shapes and spaces they might create. I threw in the option of allowing just one punctuation glyph (in the same manner as Vanna White might throw in a vowel), and expected them all to complete their artwork within just 30 minutes. They were to look at the shapes and forms of letters and let them suggest an image rather than predetermining something to illustrate. Here are just a few of the delightful results among many. From the top: Ryan Ogborn (Angry Cow with Gun); Tracy Curly, (Sheep); Erin Kendig (Walking Bird with Tailfeathers); Kaitlyn Goodeve (Man Smoking Pipe); Ariana Sigglin (Scorpion); and Chieu Van (Peacock). Typeriffic!

Ornamental Robot

Sweet! A typographical robot created by British letterpress printer, Mike Edwards for a booklet entitled "Daft Robots".

The Many Faces of T

The T Magazine, a supplement to The New York Times Magazine dedicated to design, celebrates their fifth year of publication with a retrospective online gallery highlighting some of the best cover designs. Artists and designers are given little guidance or direction with their interpretation of the fraktur T, and it is amazing to review all the distinctive styles that result here. And read the backstory of artist Marc Andre Robinson's, castoff chair construction of the letter T, and watch a time lapse video of the making of it here.

How to Decorate a Letter

Class is back in session and we are ready to play – and experiment with letters, words and all things typographical. Jessica Hische offers up this morphology on how to decorate a letter, using the basic skeletal structure of the letter A as a great example.

Communal Font Design

THE ABC 2009 // KLUB7 from KID CASH // KLUB7 on Vimeo.

A great introduction to urban experimental typography by the German artist collective, Klub7.