Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 7, 2007

Every design studio has at least one of Edward Tufte’s books. They’re traditionally distributed during the sacred initiation ceremony through which one becomes a Graphic Designer: a cloaked celebrant makes the sign of command-option-escape and anoints the novice with toner, the congregation recites the paternoster from Paul Rand’s Design, Form, and Chaos, and the now-ordained Designer is presented with the Holy Relics that will form the heart of his or her own workplace: a mang

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Illustration Art

AUGUST 4, 2007

James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) drew the same way that he lived: brash and arrogant. Flagg's confidence was understandable. He worked at a time when illustrators were national celebrities. His famous poster, Uncle Sam Wants You , made him a household name. The press sought him out for his strong opinions. He consorted with hollywood stars, judged beauty contests, seduced young and impressionable models, frolicked at bohemian parties, and traveled back and forth to Europe with the beautiful pe

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 26, 2007

I’ll admit it: snow-covered typography is a guilty pleasure, and one I get to enjoy throughout the year. Summertime icicle fonts are never hard to find, once soft-serve ice cream trucks establish strategic flanking positions on either side of our office. And in the winter, their appearance on the sides of HVAC trucks heralds the return of seasonal boiler problems, a cherished part of the winter experience in New York.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

SEPTEMBER 4, 2007

The New Font Pages. We’ve completely reconceived the way our fonts are shown online. Hardcore type fanatics might enjoy reading our expanded font family descriptions, and those hoping to make the most of their fonts can explore the font feature pages that illustrate what’s inside each package from H&Co. But the rest of us can sit back and enjoy the show, because today’s typography.com debuts a collection of “visual tours” that demonstrate what’s inside eve

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Speaker: Amber Asay, Creative Director and Founder of award-winning design studio Nice People

Understanding what trends are happening and how they’re impacting the competitive landscape is crucial to providing top dollar design strategy to your clients. With so many trends coming and going, it can be overwhelming to determine which ones you should capitalize on and which ones might not be worth the trouble. In this exclusive webinar with Amber Asay, we’ll explore graphic design trends that need to die, trends that are starting to pick up and why, trends that have come and gone, and how t

Graphic Design

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 30, 2007

The snow-themed alphabets below all belong to the world of lettering rather than typography, but typefounders have made their share of snow-covered fonts as well. Some of these go back quite a bit further than I imagined, as I learned this afternoon: at lunch, Tobias mentioned offhandedly that he remembered being surprised to see a snow-covered typeface in a specimen book from Weimar Germany. “I don’t remember which book it was,” he added, a sure-fire way of triggering a typogr

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 16, 2007

A visit to Shorpy inevitably lasts the rest of the day. This tremendous archive of hundred-year-old photos has much to recommend it to anyone interested in period typography: the optimistic lettering of the New Deal is well represented, and there’s an excellent cross-section of sidewalk Americana as well; entertainingly, the whole collection is leavened by an undercurrent of quiet menace that I find delightfully surreal.

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Entertainment Gallery Print Typography 40

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 10, 2007

I’ve yet to meet a designer that didn’t have a thing for cartography. In any medium (to this day, maps are printed, engraved, drawn and painted) cartographers have to be excellent and inventive typographers, and mapmaking has given typography some of its most interesting styles. Some of the more exotic letters we’ve drawn certainly owe something to mapmaking, in this case the engraved maps of the very fertile Age of Enlightenment.

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Gallery Print Typography Artist 40

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 5, 2007

A few weeks ago, I posted some scans of nineteenth-century wood types by William Page, from the rare specimen book Wm. H. Page & Co. Wood Type of 1872. The designers at the Cary Graphic Arts Press (Rochester Institute of Technology) apparently share my love of Page's colorful woodtypes, for their lovely Wood Type Notecards reproduce some pages from the exceedingly rare Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, &c. of 1874.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 20, 2007

Christmas is about more than just eggnog and carols and sitting by the tree. It’s about having to explain to your family yet again what exactly it is that you do for a living, and suffering through comparisons with your cousin who’s “also into computers.” If there’s anything that mom and dad truly need this holiday season, it’s to be tied to the andirons and belabored about the head with a copy of Jan Tschichold’s collected essays in the original German

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 2, 2007

Passing fancies in lettering often vanish without a trace, and no style has died a harder death than Art Nouveau. Even in its heyday, the style’s contributions to typography were slight: there were never many Art Nouveau typefaces, and the few eccentrics that have survived may owe something to a resurgence in the sixties, when their smoky and vegetal forms found favor among the psychedelic set.

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Advertiser: Issuu

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Publishing

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 1, 2007

ASME has announced its winners for Best Cover of 2007 , and we’re thrilled to see that of the six covers that feature typography, five are clients of H&Co. You’ll see Chronicle on the cover of O, and our forthcoming Sentinel font on the cover of Texas Monthly. But especially gratifying is the 2007 award for Best Fashion Cover, which went to Harper’s Bazaar: it was Bazaar who commissioned our HTF Didot typeface in 1992, and fifteen years later, they’re still winning aw

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Typography Magazine Fonts Fashion 40

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

OCTOBER 29, 2007

Our erstwhile language researcher and font developer Luke Joyner (not pictured) files this dispatch from the campus of the University of Chicago: A recent late-show at U. Chicago’s Doc Films was Plan 10 from Outer Space, a stinker of a B-movie that’s somehow unrelated to Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood’s better-known cult classic.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

OCTOBER 18, 2007

Thankfully this was published after my cab ride back from the airport, after AIGA Denver: “Whatever design changes befall the yellow taxi, in my mind they’ll forever have checker striping, double headlights, and a rate card posted on the front doors that’s quirkily lettered and reckoned in fractions of a mile. (But then, I also believe that ‘The Train to the Plane’ is still in operation, because its noisome jingle has never stopped playing in my head.)” “

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

OCTOBER 10, 2007

A quick invitation for everyone who’s coming to Denver this weekend for Next: the AIGA Design Conference : Jonathan Hoefler will be speaking on Friday at 2:15, discussing how recent changes in the profession have brought about what might be the end of historical typography, and what this means for designers going forward. (He’ll also be offering a rare sneak preview of some projects that will debut in 2008.

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Graphic

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

OCTOBER 1, 2007

John Kwo posted this Flickr set with some beautifully crisp photos from the type tour. Don’t miss some of the great inscriptional lettering to be found on lower Manhattan’s municipal buildings, including these spirited NH and TT ligatures. Over at Villatype , Joe Shouldice has assembled some instructive comments to accompany his photos. Points for relating why signpainters’ dropshadows point left instead of right, and defining the term “gaspipe lettering.” More good

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

This weekend, 107 news outlets around the world picked up this AP story about the custom typeface we designed for one of our favorite organizations, The Nature Conservancy. “What it looked like,” writes journalist Erin McClam, “was not so much an alphabet but a masquerade ball for 26 capital letters that had arrived early, stayed late and gotten into the good liquor.” The font, which we’ve been calling “Oakleaf,” is a cousin of our Requiem typeface.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

SEPTEMBER 14, 2007

Except in the most conservative of settings, there’s nothing unusual about freely mixing serifs and sans serifs in text. This technique might still be unexpected in a novel, or in the main text of a newspaper, but otherwise it’s a familiar device that designers have employed for decades. This image could be a piece of printed ephemera from the thirties — a legal notice on a train ticket, perhaps, or a gummed label from an appliance box.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 31, 2007

Sure, Kim Hastreiter knows her typography, but how did she manage to so accurately foresee a top-secret font release not scheduled for another hundred years? —JH.

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Illustration Art

JUNE 2, 2007

It is difficult to paint realistic, detailed pictures. However, artists don't really begin to earn their money until they start deciding which details to leave out. This brilliant portrait by Chris Payne is a good case in point. The face and hands are tightly rendered, even down to individual hairs. Yet, other parts of the picture are highly simplified and flat.

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Illustration Art

MARCH 10, 2007

My eye is always drawn to those little places in a picture where the artist takes the liberty to play with abstract design. Sometimes you'll find artists indulging themselves when they depict folds , or water. Often you find them sneaking it in when they portray hair. In this Joe De Mers picture (which I borrowed from Leif Peng's excellent Today's Inspiration blog) contrast De Mers' tight, disciplined treatment of the face and hands with his wild treatment of the hair.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

OCTOBER 22, 2007

“Grecians” are slab serif typefaces in which curves are replaced by bevelled corners. The fashion for octagonal letters took off in the 1840s (the style may have begun with an American wood type, produced by Johnson & Smith in 1841), and by the end of the decade there were all manner of Grecians on the market: narrow ones, squat ones, light ones, ones with contrasting thicks and thins, and ones without.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 11, 2007

It’s hard to begrudge the polish and flexibility of a good pixel, but I’ll always have a soft spot for the earlier technologies. Mechanical and electronic displays with fixed images were somehow knowable in a way that screens are not, lending a palpable something to the things they inhabited. Has train travel been the same since the disappearance of the thip-thip-thipping flap display ?

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Travel Marketing Marketing Digital 40

Speaker: Eden Spivak, Design Expert and Editor at Wix & Nir Horesh, Accessibility Lead and Senior Product Manager at Wix

When we design products or websites for people like ourselves, there are many others who are, as a result, left out. From visually impaired users who rely on assistive technology, to people with a temporary injury such as a broken arm, tech users are forever diverse and beautifully unique. The products we design can, and should, reflect the extremely wide range of human experiences and needs.

Web Design

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 7, 2007

If there’s one thing that says Gotham Fabulous, it’s rhodium-plated silver with a hit of CZ. Sara found these Initial Pendant Necklaces online, each offering 0.2 carats of genuine cubic zirconium in a tarnish-free setting. A full alphabet’s available, though sadly no ampersand, otherwise the whole H&Co posse would be rolling in style.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 6, 2007

Much nattering takes place on this blog about the distinction between lettering (letterforms rendered for a particular situation) and fonts (sets of type designed for reproduction.) Edible lettering is an ancient tradition , but edible fonts may be something new: our designer Sara Soskolne discovered this marvelous set of Movable Type in Chocolate , created by Sandra Kübler and Christine Voshage.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 4, 2007

Since the countdown to the holidays has begun in earnest, we thought we’d dedicate the rest of the week to recommending typographic-themed holiday gifts for the designers in your life. Our own Ksenya Samarskaya liked these Alphabet Mugs from Fishs Eddy. The monograms draw from different decorative traditions: the A and C are from decorated American wood types (and you know we love those ), the T from signwriting, and the K and Y from nineteenth-century lettering manuals.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

DECEMBER 2, 2007

I started a typeface called Feldspar some years ago, which I’ve yet to complete. After eight years, most such projects would have lost their inertia, but this one’s moving steadily along, driven by a single, fervid dream: I am determined to one day see it in the hands of Dan and Mike at Aesthetic Apparatus. Aesthetic Apparatus is one of those studios we love to see using our fonts.

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Speaker: Michele Berdinis

This session will answer business law questions that people are asking most during the pandemic. If my business can’t pay its bills, can my creditors come after my personal assets? Do I have to pay the rent on my co-working space or office? Can my clients cancel signed contracts? Can I cancel contracts for things I no longer need because my business has slowed down?

Client

Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 29, 2007

Over at Saks Fifth Avenue , they’ve decked out their signature Gotham Medium in snowy finery for winter. The snowflake treatment is a nice counterpoint to the icicled Gotham below , conveying luxe rather than hypothermia; in any case, it’s the second seasonally-themed Gotham I’ve encountered this week. Any others? —JH.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 28, 2007

An office full of type designers is already a dangerous a breeding ground for the highly contagious chronic arrowmania , but H&Co alumnus Kevin Dresser has taken things to the next level with the DresserJohnson Arrow Ring. A chic adaptation of one of the duo’s great icons (their logo for Brooklyn Bunny is a cheerful highlight in modern logodom) the Arrow Ring makes possible marvelous moments of unwitting self-annotation such as this.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 12, 2007

Robots have long been useful in completing challenging or hazardous tasks: dismantling explosives, assembling automobiles, winning chess tournaments, etc. Robotlab in Karlsruhe, Germany, is training them for another purpose: calligraphy. Above, an articulated limb renders the Luther Bible in a primitive but serviceable version of the schwabacher script.

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Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

NOVEMBER 6, 2007

Thanks to a few well-traveled blogs, this clip has been getting some traffic lately: it’s a segment about typeface design that ran on CBS Sunday Morning last summer, featuring us. Correspondent Russ Mitchell spent some time at our offices, and speaking with Steve Heller, to introduce non-designers to the strange world of font design. Now that the clip is easily freeze-framed, a few designers have written to ask about the fonts themselves.

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Speaker: Sean Adams, ArtCenter College of Design

Thomas Edison once said “Vision without execution is hallucination.” This statement applies not just to invention, but to graphic design. One of the greatest strengths of graphic designers is the ability to first develop a concept and then execute it to make it real. From visualization and ideation all the way through to actuation and execution, each step of this process takes skill and expertise.

Graphic Design