I happened to be looking at Reuben Miller’s blog today and stopped when I saw got to the item “Introducing Illustrator 88” in which he embedded link to a YouTube video showing a portion of the VHS tape that shipped with the Illustrator 88. I have that tape and also the one that came with Illustrator 1.0. (And the disks, and the packaging. I know. It’s a disease.) I’d been toying with the idea of digitizing these videos and posting them online, but someone saved me the trouble….

I started watching the critically-acclaimed series Mad Men on DVD over the summer, and I am enjoying it a lot. I was a little kid in the early 1960s, and watching it is like stepping back in time. People really did used to smoke and drink like that. Of course, the show is set in the early 1960s, so I had to write a “Typecasting” piece about it.

Ginger is the most recent Filmotype font I’ve digitized. (See also Zanzibar and Glenlake.) It’s the first in a range of Filmotype “G” series fonts—condensed sans serifs whose names all start with “G”—that have many Futura-like features that are unusual for the style. I was interested in this range of typefaces even before I knew about Filmotype….

While I was off doing type things at TypeCon in Buffalo this last July, my partner was off seeing the city. She got a picture of this breathtakingly beautiful old sign. Wow.

Almost forget to mention: I did an interview with LetterCult, the new website devoted to the art and culture of making letters. It just went up today. Link.

All this for a few blocks of text. In this case, for a client’s stationery. It’s from about 1986 or so. I was already starting to use PageMaker for some jobs, but high resolution output was not available quite yet in Minneapolis, and 300 dpi LaserWriter output would not do for a job like this….

Click at your risk: Typographunnies.

My friend David Steinlicht recently posted a time-lapse movie showing the day-to-day progress of his award-winning entry to the seed art competition at the 2008 Minnesota State Fair. It depicts a scene from the video game Grand Theft Auto (of which he is an avid player) with a can of Festal sweet corn. In seeds. Not your typical seed art subject, but David is not your typical seed artist.