eliason's blog
Quite crazy: I've just dashed off exactly 1K web pangrams!
As many of you know I have been publishing original pangrams every weekday for some time now. This actually started 2 April 2008, which means today marked my 1,000th pangram!
The pangram in the thread title and 999 others can be found at The Daily Pangram.
Minnesota-area typophiles - type conversation at the MIA Thursday
Type designer Chank Diesel and yours truly will be taking part in the "Cross Talk" event held at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this Thursday (Jan. 12, 2012) at 6pm.
Here's a link to the MIA event page with more information.
And here's the cool poster for the event designed by Anne Ulku. Tickets are available online, or at the event.
Chank will be talking about his own work and I will be quickly surveying the sources of inspiration for type design over the centuries. Then most of the time is devoted to an unscripted conversation and q-and-a about type following our presentations.
Presidential pangrams
Happy President's Day!
My "Daily Pangram" blog is featuring a pangram about a different U.S. President every day of this month. Some of my favorites so far:
The end of ampersandampersand
Farewell to 300&65 Ampersands, a great Tumblr project that is closing up shop.
Minnesota typophiles: Will Hill lecture
Looks like the College of Design at the U of M is putting on a lecture by Will Hill, called "The Word as Image: Experimental Typographies and Visual Poetics," on Monday 11/8.
More info at:
https://events.umn.edu/The-Word-as-Image-Experimental-Typographies-and-V...
Pangrams about type designers
In recognition of the start of TypeCon, my Daily Pangram tumblog is publishing pangrams about type designers all week.
Daily Pangram hits 600
Today the Daily Pangram celebrated another milestone: 600 original pangrams have now appeared on the blog, one for each of the last 600 weekdays going back to April 2008.
I'm marking the occasion by making the pangrams for this week assemble into a pangram-only short story (okay, very short story). You can follow it at http://dailypangram.tumblr.com/
A pangrammatic trivia question on type designers
Quiz: X enjoyed talking about movie typeface errors. Who is X?
Spanking and drinking rules in the old printer's shop
The amusing rules written up by Moxon are covered in the entry on "Customs, Ancient" in The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, starting p. 126.
Apparently if you showed up drunk, or took somebody else's composing stick, you will be "laid on your Belly athwart the correcting-stone" and held down to receive "Eleven blows on your Buttocks"
Justification for perfectionist type designers
from Fournier's Manuel Typographique (1760s)
The punchcutter should neglect no means of imparting to his work the greatest perfection. Before entering upon it he should consider deeply of everything that may help to give it the greatest possible beauty. Unlike many trades, in which indifferent productions find a use proportionate to their worth, printing must have the best: not even the second best will serve; for it costs as much to cast and print ill-cut letters as to cast and print the very best; therefore if the punchcutter lack the necessary skill, the founder and the printer who reproduce his work, the one on metal and the other on paper, neither being in the least able to alter it, will only be giving permanent proof of his ignorance and dishonouring printing.
The extinct typesetter
Typesetter is among the obsolete "jobs of yesteryear" (along with iceman, lantern lighter, etc.) in this NPR feature:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060&sc=fb&cc=fp
iPad and book design
Following up on Typophile discussion about the iPad, there is some interesting commentary on book design and the potential of the iPad here:
http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/
Austin-area typophiles invited
I will be giving a talk —
"Classifying Printing Types: Maximilien Vox and the Power of Suggestion" —
at the Design department of the University of Texas
Wednesday Feb 24 at 6:00pm.
A Christian poem that ends a printing history/specimen book printed by James Watson of Edinburgh (1713)
A
Contemplation
upon
the Mystery of MAN's Regeneration,
In Allusion to the Mystery of
PRINTING.
We could use Ben Franklin on the crit forum
Here's a letter Benjamin Franklin sent to Giambattista Bodoni.
Pangram for Dr. King
M. L. King Jr. expressed belief in equality with amazing conviction.
Graffiti layers
5 years of graffiti exploded into three dimensions: http://vimeo.com/6704105
Typefoundry on Gill's R
Fascinating blog republishing of James Mosley's 1990 article on an Italian source for Eric Gill's characteristic form of R is here.
