1They exist everywhere. Plagued with holes, awry baselines, and font weights that flagrantly stick out. Tag clouds1 are the breeding grounds for uneven color. The newfound attention given to typography on the web addresses generic formats adapted from print, such as headlines and pull quotes. Since tag clouds were invented by the internet, there’s no original model to adapt. What designers and developers resort to are the possibilities of CSS. For years we’ve cherished the great strides the web has made for typography, but silently accept the clumsy aesthetics of its limitations. Doing so has produced messy, uncontrolled tag clouds. Continue…
An Ideal Tag Cloud
My first font.
1 With not many “serifless romans” to choose from save Doyald Young’s Young Finesse and Palatino Sans by legendaries Hermann Zapf and Akira Kobayashi, I decided that my first true typeface design will be the suave sans you see to the right.1 It’s far from finished, but I think it’s well along enough to post. The intentions are for it to be mainly a display face, but not so fancy that it won’t be usable at text size.
Besides the serifless roman influence, I admit there’s a bit of that square sans trend sneaking into the curves of the lowercase b shapes and some of the capitals. The face’s primary features are 1. rounded endcaps on the strokes, 2. a large x-height, 3. slight flourishes on the terminals, and 4. squareness. The flourishy curves and squareness sound like they contradict, but that’s the challenge I’ve set out to solve. Continue…
The New MyFonts Logo
I love brush lettering whether it’s calligraphic or spontaneous, like the old Interview Magazine masthead. Being a practician and fan of of optical illusion, hidden symbolism, and ambiguity in design, I usually scan peculiar logos for hidden meanings. When a script logo is done right, it’s enough for me to admire the craft involved in the lettering — I normally don’t look for any hidden gems. Big mistake. The new MyFonts logo has great lettering plus some. I won’t ruin the surprise for anyone, but just think about it and look closely. What would be a perfectly iconic statement on the craft of typography, to remind us that letters are created by humans, tweaked, nudged, and redrawn obsessively, until it feels right? Put that statement about typography into a hand-crafted typographic logo for a company selling typography, and we have a winner. Gotta dig that ambiguity. It’s one of the most awesome pieces of type as illustration I’ve ever seen.
Making of a Masthead.
Welcome to Notes on Type. I didn’t spend much on the name since I was so psyched to design the masthead. When the sketching process started, I set a few parameters for myself. Since the subject matter of these notes is typography, the masthead has to use letters. Duh. The second is that it has to be unique. I mean really unique. I wouldn’t be happy taking a sweet typeface and setting it huge and beautiful. Sure, (only) other designers appreciate that, but shouldn’t we expect more from each other? The third parameter was that it had to have wordplay. That’s easy. I can take the literal route and show the “notes on type” by having my blog notes, lay on the typed masthead, hiding it in a self-referencing way. Can’t get enough of that ambiguity!
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