posted Wednesday, February 1, 2012
FF Nexus Web and revised Open Type
In October 2011 the FF Nexus family was made available as Webfont. Webfonts are compatible with Typekit, a service that has a partnership with FontShop. Essentially Typekit is an easy way to use high-quality Open Type fonts (like the Nexus family) on the web.
For this occasion FF Nexus has been revised, mainly for the italic swashes in the Stylistic Sets. The overview above illustrates what the different Stylistic Sets will do (there are two different Swash capitals and there is a short and a long lowercase end character). There is now also a special Stylistic Set for the Jan van Krimpen comma (SS09).
A nice example of FF Nexus Swashes can be found here: Das Magazin L ...Leben.Liebe.Laster
posted Monday, June 1, 2011
Design for Music
Hans
Lijklema, my dutch colleague and friend in Warsaw,
has again compiled, written and designed a great book on graphic design. This
time it is the second book in the series ‘Pictographic Index’
(published by The Pepin Press in Amsterdam). He is also responsible for
the highly successful series ‘Free Font Index’, of which the second volume was published in 2010.
Lijklema did not forget to include a few designs for classical music, one of them being my work for the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the oldest European contemporary classical music festival. I was the festival’s graphic designer for 11 years, up until 2010.
‘Pictographic Index 2: Design
for Music’, 320 pp, softcover, CD, ISBN 9789057681578
Edited and designed by Hans Lijklema, Written and compiled by Karolina & Hans Lijklema.
‘Pictographic Index 2’ – The Pepin Press
posted Monday, June 1, 2011
Lettermix / Which character do you see?
.From 25th untill 28th of May 2011 the Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Toruń, Poland, for the second time organized PLASTER – International Festival of Typography and Poster Design. It was a four-day event with lectures, 3 workshops, and exhibitions of Ed Fella, Władysław Pluta and myself.
Have a look at some pictures of the exhibition here.
posted Thursday, March 31, 2011
FF Scala acquired by MoA (Seoul)
In
October 2010 the MoA (Museum of Art Seoul National University) in Korea
acquired FF Scala for its permanent collection, the ‘Design and Crafts’
collection. It was the first time the museum made an aquisition of a
typeface.
Shortly after my lecture in Seoul last October (read this post) I officially handed over FF Scala to Haeng-Ji Kim, the curator of the museum (see left image). The exhibition ‘MoA Invites 2011’ (see the poster on the right) took place from 19 January 2011 untill 2 February 2011, showing all new aquisitions of last year, including FF Scala. One of the nice things is that the museum actually uses FF Scala in its printed matter: the english text in the catalogue is set in it.
See some pictures of the beautiful catalogue here.
posted Monday, January 10, 2011
My steel pen collection
In 1980 Fred Smeijers and I started our studies Graphic Design at the at the School of Fine Arts in Arnhem. During the writing lessons we used broad nibbed pens, but our typography teacher – the late Alexander Verberne (1924-2009) – also showed us sharp pointed steel dip pens. Most of these pens had been manufactured since about 1800 in Birmingham (then the world centre for steel pens) by John Mitchell, A. Sommerville & Cº and Perry & Cº. In Germany manufacturers like Heintze & Blanckertz, F.Soennecken and Brause & Cº dominated the market of ‘Stahlfedern’. In Holland there was Gebr.Rikkers who had their pens manufactured in Birmingham (“where steel is king”).
Fred and I used the pointed pens for transitional lettering à la George Bickham (the universal penman), and especially Fred was quite skillful in this. But in the 1980s these pointed steel pens – or ‘Schelvispennen’ as we call them in Dutch – were hard to find because most of them were not manufactured anymore. We went to about every office supply shop we came across, also in London and in Berlin. It almost became an obsession but in the end we had collected hundreds of steel pens in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
Some pens can still be bought, but I thought it would be nice to share some pictures of the most interesting pens I have. I took the opportunity to change the header of this type blog, using an index nib, the funniest steel pen I posses.
Have a look at more pictures of pens and boxes here.
posted Thursday, December 23, 2010
Interview in ‘8 faces’ #2
Last week I received my copy of the second issue of 8 faces, the new succesful magazine of Elliot Jay Stocks. When he interviewed me for this issue one of the things I said was that “I am still always excited by books — real books, not iPads. The iPad is nice, but I like the three- dimensional thing that a book is. To me, a book is like a sculpture: you can hold in your hands.”
Exactely that is what 8 faces is: a real magazine, printed on heavy paper and smelling of intoxicating ink. You don't have to start it up, you just take it in your hands and immediately you can flip through the pages. No need to recharge it after reading the great content. Just put it aside, touch it once in a while, show it to other people or put it vertically on the bookshelf.
“If you could use just eight typefaces for the rest of your life, which would you choose?”. That‘s the core questions posed to eight leading designers from the fields of web design, print design, illustration, and of type design. From the eight typefaces I choose, six of them are hot metal typefaces, just because I think its quality is still superior to its digital counterparts. But I also just love the imprint of metal typefaces on paper, it ads yet another dimension to a book.
But even without using metal type, 8 faces is a lovely magazine. You will also find interviews with Ale Paul, Stephen Coles, Tim Brown, Nick Sherman, Rich Rutter, Veronika Burian, and José Scaglione.
Read all about the magazine here.
posted Wednesday, November 17, 2010
A week of type design in Korea
.
From
17 to 25 October 2010 I was invited to Seoul for a series of
workshops/lectures on typeface design. Highlight of the week was the Type & Design Forum 2010
which took place at the Museum of Art (MoA) of the Seoul National
University. My work as type designer was the
main focus of the event.
Many renowned graphic designers and typographers like Karel Martens, Neville Brody and Armand Mevis had been invited in previous years, but it was the first time a typeface designer was invited.
It was my first visit to Asia and it made a big impression on me. continue reading >>
posted Monday, November 8, 2010
‘158 Answers’
About 9 months ago I was asked by Tânia Raposo – then student at the Type & Media postgraduate course of the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (KABK) – to give an interview.
It was part of a larger project in which 11 students were asked by their teacher Peter Biľak to conduct an interview with a respected professional whose work was relevant for their personal work, but who is not a teacher at the KABK. The list of the interviewees is quite divers, and the students used all sorts of methods to conduct the interviews: face to face, voice over ip, online chat and email conversation.
Ken Barber by Fritz Grögel, Peter Bruhn by Nils Thomsen, Christopher Burke by Brigitte Schuster, John Downer by Frank Grießhammer, René Knip by Jon Glarbo, Radana Lencová by Slávka Pauliková, Martin Majoor by Tânia Raposo, Jan Middendorp by Yohanna Mỹ Nguyễn, Alejandro Paul by Martina Flor, Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès by Kristyan Sarkis, František Štorm by Irina Smirnova.
All
interviews were brought together in a small book of 112 pages. And
although ‘158 Answers’ was produced by the students themselves (using a
1200 dpi laserprinter), in all its aspects it has become a nice little
book: the choice and diversity of the interviewees, the size, the
weight, the paper, the binding with an open spine. The text was set in Brioni designed by Nikola Djurek, himself a postgraduate student at Type & Media in 2005.
There
is only one minor point of critic: there are only 50 copies... A book
like this deserves to be published in a limited edition, maybe through
Peter Biľak own small publishing house Typotheque.
> More images of ‘158 Answers’ on the website of Tânia Raposo.
> Visit also the website with type designs by all 11 Type & Media graduates of 2010.
Update 1. 10-11-2010: Peter Biľak has confirmed he will indeed publish ‘158 Answers’.
Update 2. 10-10-2011: In 2011 ‘158 Answers’ has been published by Typotheque.
posted Tuesday, September 21, 2010
ATypI Dublin: four personal highlights
ATypI 2010 – ‘The Word’ – took place from 9 to 12 September 2010 in
Dublin, at the historic venue of Dublin Castle. It was my first visit
to Ireland and the days I spent at the conference were both
interesting and fun. There are four personal highlights I would like to share here.
1. Our lecture about ‘The Questa Project’
The main reason for going to the ATypI conference was to lecture
together with Jos Buivenga about our typeface in progress ‘Questa’. We showed
the way we work together, developing the serif text version first and using that as
a basis for the sans version. We are about to start working on the
display version, which will also be based on the text version. This was our
second mutual lecture about The Questa Project (the first lecture was held in our home town Arnhem), and we got some nice reactions:
“@martinmajoor has possibly the best theory on how to turn a serif face into a sans. And the end result looks fabulous.” (Yves Peters on Twitter)
Another event I was involved in was the panel discussion Managing multiplicity - The Pitfalls and Pleasures of Collaborative Typeface Design.
The panel members were (from left to right) Hrant Papazian (chair),
André Baldinger, Erik Spiekermann, myself, David Berlow and Nina
Stössinger. For some
type designers collaborating means working together with technical
people and clients, whereas I think the real challenges of
collaborating are on an artistic level. Usually I don't collaborate in
type design, but in the case of Questa Jos and I found a true artistic
collaboration.
3. Robert Bringhurst
During this ATypI conference I finally got to meet Robert Bringhurst in person. His book ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’
is among my favorite books on typography (and not only because FF Scala
Sans is used for the captions throughout the book). In another book ‘Carving the elements: A Companion to the Fragments of Parmenides’
(pictured above) Robert Bringhurst uses my FF Seria and FF Seria Sans
in a way I had in mind when I designed it back in 2000. Therefore I
consider him not only a great writer,
but also a great typographer.
4. The ATypI program booklet
Last but not least: I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that this years ATypI program booklet was completely set in FF Scala. The design was done by Clare Bell and Brenda Dermody, cleverly using fluoriscentic red for the captions. I haven’t been to a lot of ATypI conferences, but I presume it is the first time the ATypI program booklet is set in FF Scala. For me it is great to see this, more than 20 years after Scala’s first appearance.
posted Monday, September 20, 2010
FF Scala family now available as webfonts
.
Since the end of June, FF Scala and FF Scala Sans are available as Webfonts. Scala Webfonts are compatible with Typekit, a service that has a partnership with FontShop. Essentially Typekit is an easy way to use high-quality Open Type fonts (like the Scala family) on the web.
I am very proud that the website of I Love Typography
was one of the first to use the Scala webfonts. In my view this site,
hosted by John Boardley, is todays best website on typography, and I
think the way Scala looks on the web is truly amazing (see image below,
or better visit the real site). The technical staff at FontShop sure
did a great job on hinting the Scala webfonts. I hope to change my own
website soon, and I am sure you can guess which fonts I am going to use.
posted Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Interview in ‘Free Font Index 2’
Hans Lijklema is a Dutchman living in Poland, just like me. We regularly meet
in the Warsaw coffee shops (not comparable with the Dutch ones) to have a ‘lekker bakkie’ (Dutch for a good cup of
coffee).
Hans, who is the author of ‘Free Font Index 1’ and ‘Pictographic Index 1’ (both published by The Pepin Press in Amsterdam), has just compiled the second volume of ‘Free Font Index’. It is a type specimen that contains over 500 fonts by different type foundries.
A good part of ‘Free Font Index 2’ (about 50 pages) consists of texts, images and interviews about free fonts, thus making this book much more than a simple collection of free fonts. There are interviews with Donald Beekman (DBXL), Jakob Fisher, Ray Larabie and Svetoslav Simov. Jos Buivenga (exljbris) talks about ‘Serendipity in type design’ and Max Kisman wrote a tutorial on how to design and produce your own font.
Ellen Lupton is also present in the book. Hans Lijklema arranged an interview/discussion about free fonts between Ellen Lupton, Caroline Hadilaksono/Micah Rich (The League of Moveable Type) and myself (see the spread on the image above).‘Free Font Index 2’ – The Pepin Press
posted Wednesday, May 26, 2010
PGR. Graphic Design in Poland
It
is my conviction that you cannot be a good type designer if you are not
a book typographer.
Since 1999 I am the graphic designer for the Warsaw Autumn Festival in Poland, one of the oldest European music festival that is fully dedicated to contemporary classical music. I designed the inside typography of the programme books which was then a perfect opportunity to use and to test my newly designed Seria and Seria Sans.
I also designed colourfull covers for the books. The whole graphic design for the festival is purely typographic, maybe a reaction to the typical illustrative, handlettered Polish posters.
Jacek Mrowczyk and Michał Warda (from the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts) have published the book ‘PGR. Projektowanie graficzne w Polsce’ (PGR. Graphic Design in Poland). They present the most interesting examples of Polish graphic design of the last decade, and I am proud they also included the book covers I designed for the Warsaw Autumn Festival. The book is in Polish only.
posted Wednesday, May 12, 2010
TypoBerlin, here we come!
On Friday, May 21, Sébastien Morlighem and I will present the book we wrote about José Mendoza y
Almeida (see the post below), during TypoBerlin 2010.
José Mendoza y Almeida – the »Godfather« of French Type Design.
TypeBerlin 2010. Friday, May 21, 13:00, TypoStage
posted Friday, April 30, 2010
José Mendoza y Almeida (the book)
José Mendoza y
Almeida (now
83 years old) designed typefaces like Pascal, Photina and ITC Mendoza.
He is considered the “godfather” of french type design and he is still
active today since he began working with Roger Excoffon at the Fonderie
Olive in 1954.
The first ever dedicated book to his work was published last March in Paris by french publisher YpsilonÉditeur, as part of the Bibliothèque typographique collection. It features several essays by Martin Majoor and Sébastien Morlighem, with an introduction by Jan Middendorp. Many unpublished documents are reproduced in the book.
YpsilonÉditeur | View some images of the book
posted Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Scala microsite
In
2009 FontShop announced a series of detailed microsites dedicated to
the most important FontFont originals: FF DIN, FF Meta Serif, FF
Trixie, FF Dingbats and FF Scala in all their full-featured glory.
Go to the Scala microsite here.
posted Tuesday, December 1, 2009
FF Scala Slab (in progress)
At
the moment I am working on FF Scala Slab, a logical next member of the
Scala family. I am planning to release it in the second half of 2010,
in the planned versions: light, regular, bold and black.
posted Friday, September 4, 2009
Working on Questa
The Questa project is a type project of Jos Buivenga and Martin Majoor.
It
all began in April 2009 after we had met at the 33pt. Symposium in
Dortmund, both giving a lecture. We knew each other from the Academy of
Fine Arts in Arnhem, but we had not seen each other for about 25 years.
We renewed our contact and after a few meetings we decided that we
wanted to do a type design project together.
Questa in progress, a squarish Didot-like font that Jos originally had planned in one display style only, was a perfect basis to apply upon Martin’s typedesign philosophy about the form principle of serif and sans, as advanced in an article for Eye Magazine about the origin of the sans serif and Helvetica’s plagiarism.
More on the official site of The Questa Project.
