Hungarian typographer and graphic designer Aron Jansco used to doodle during class. “My schools weren’t too strict,” he says, so he had a lot of time for drawing graffiti and letterforms. Graffiti still remains a big part of his design style, though you wouldn’t know it to look at Ogaki, his very first type face, now available from Gestalten. But if you look through Jansco’s body of work, Ogaki is the natural result of years of blending graffiti, Japanese calligraphy and modern design. But it really started with the letter G.
“The double-story lowercase g to be exact. Most designers say it’s good to start with something like h and o, because you can generate a couple of letters from these shapes. But I like g because it gives a lot more freedom than other letters. The hook at the bottom is the best part for me, but I like that little ear too.”
Designer Jelte van Abbema was a winner at the Dutch Design Awards and the accompanying €10,000 Rado Prize in part due to his piece “Symbiosis,” a font created with e.coli bacteria. One could say this could be a nasty computer virus!
Van Abbema created the font by stamping bacteria into paper, and then placing the paper in a jury-rigged incubator, which provided the right humdity and warmth for the organisms. As they multiplied and died, the resulting fonts changed color and shape. As van Abbema says, bacteria “transforms the image to something new,” creating something that is literally alive, changing every minute without ever being tended.
Similar to the previously mentioned trend of creatives designing imaginative typefaces, artist Tom Gauld illustrated this whimsical onomatopoeic alphabet. I highly recommend reading his version of the alphabet out loud in public. Go! You can see more of the artist’s works here.
I’ve noticed a trend lately of creatives, designers, and photographers creating imaginative typeface using unique and often surprising objects ranging from beards to food. Oddee compiled twelve of them for your wonderment.
This one’s for the typography nerds: In a follow-up to last year’s excellent short “Font Conference,” the loopy gang at College Humor gives us “Font Fight!,” a violence-filled showdown between two typeface gangs–one led by Helvetica, the other by Helvetica’s “shameless impostor,” Arial. The ending features a surprise cameo by perhaps the most evil font of all.
You may take them for granted, but a quality typeface is almost like a functional work of art – and yes, they’re still generally craftted by hand. I suppose April isn’t too late to discuss last year, so without further ado: Typographica lists their favorite typefaces of 2008.
Sensationalism aside, it’s significant that the ever-increasing quality in type design these days — dubbed by some as the new “golden age” of type — has caused this year’s list to supersede previous lists in many ways.
Gary Hustwit’s first film, the smart 2007 documentary HELVETICA explored the 50-year history of that iconic typeface and the countless ways it’s shaped Western visual culture. To the joy of design nerds everywhere, Hustwit’s second film, OBJECTIFIED, is starting to make the rounds of film festivals, and it will be released later this year.
OBJECTIFIED shares a number of themes with HELVETICA, and judging from the trailer, the two films also share a distinctive directorial approach, something we could perhaps label with the adjective “Hustwitian”: footage of beautiful design accompanied by hypnotic, repetitive major-key instrumentals and the voiceovers of smart interviewees–in OBJECTIFIED, everyone from Jonathan Ive of Apple to Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art.
Here’s the trailer:
On the OBJECTIFIED site, the film is described as “a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.”
