Type News: Kerning Man
What’s with all the neon lights? This week we’re reporting from TypeCon2011: Surge, in the famous French Quarter of New Orleans.
There’s already been a flurry of activity around TypeCon. Yves Peters offers a great introduction to the week’s events, and Si Daniels once again is providing lighthearted and timely coverage on the official TypeCon site. The Flickr group is already quite active as well, so you can see what other attendees have seen — or see what you’re missing if you’re not here.
Last night Ed Benguiat delivered a hilarious and witty keynote presentation. Ed guided the attendees through various type-related artifacts found in his home and through his many years of significant contributions to branding and to the world of type. He lamented the decline of cursive and script instruction in US schools and, to the delight of the crowd, he emphatically declared, “Type should be beautiful. Screw readable!” Ed’s talk was a perfect fit for an event in New Orleans.
Odds are good that we’ll have plenty more TypeCon coverage next week. For now, let’s move on to the rest of this week’s news.
- The work from this year’s Type]Media class is online, and beautifully presented. (Web standards types: the typefaces are presented using SVG!)
- Neil Summerour has created a beautiful print to benefit SOGO Japan. It’s available as a limited edition of 100 from the fine folks at Ligature, Loop & Stem.
- Over at Typetoken, Greg Coley interviews the folks behind Colophon Foundry.
- Speaking of Typetoken, if you’re looking for a new iPhone lock screen image?, they have you covered.
- Elliot Jay Stocks guides us through the wide world of CSS
font-weightin the age of webfonts. - At Converge SE, Trent Walton talked about web typography. Now you can check out his slides.
- FontFont has launched FF Subsetter to optimize your FontFont webfonts. (The site requires Flash for uploading, unfortunately.)
- Researchers at the University of Exeter have developed a 3D chocolate printer. We think there will be a flourishing of chocolate letters, and perhaps exclusively-chocolate typefaces.
- A new edition of FontBook is coming soon. Find out how it’s coming along by signing up for email updates at fontbook.com (or keep religiously reading the Type News, of course).
- Jeff Rogers has some beautiful hand-lettered and typographic images on Flickr.
- Do you love letterpress but don’t have access to the equipment you need? If you have an iPad, you can simulate the experience using the just-released LetterMPress.
Next week we return with a boffo fiftieth edition of the Type News. Until then, laissez les bon temps rouler!
Wait, where’s the new type? Thanks to an exuberant Canada Day and the run-up to TypeCon, our resident Canadian, Grant Hutchinson, has been a little on the busy side. So this week’s abundance of new type will appear in tandem with next week’s new type. Give Grant something to do, type designers — and release your new typefaces next week!
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