Just learned from PRINT Magazine that iLife and iWork have an OpenType palette. Though it seems you can’t access all open type features (e.g. stylistic alternatives), you can still get to ligatures, small caps and old style & lining figures.
To access the Typography palette: from the Fonts palette, click the gear icon in the lower-left and select Typography.
Oh, and don’t forget the Glyphs palette in Illustrator & InDesign
Enjoy
Reading stories to my kids this morning, I was impressed by the hand-drawn type on the cover of The Little Engine That Could and found it interesting that you can still see the rules the artist drew to guide his baseline and x-height. It’s interesting how typography has been both blessed and injured by advancements in technology. Even the best designers among us get lazy and let the computer do too much. Here’s a casual reminder for you this morning to not forget that it’s just a tool and that it’s still up to you to make sure that your type is set perfectly. An example of this is the introductory line in the book that our team is currently reading. I was shocked to see that the last word was hyphenated. It looked horrible. It’s sad that the publisher let that go to print.
I’d like to discuss this book for our next team off-site.
“Graphic design is an organic process that uses type and image to create a visual solution for a communication problem. Much like leaves make up the shape of a tree, a graphic design solution is made up of many elements working together to create the whole. Research and knowledge are at the root of design. Formats and grids offer structure—the branches. But it is the smallest elements of design—the letterforms—which bring a design to life.”Thoughts on Leaves & Letters, a leaflet from Vangool Design & Typography
“There are two types of people in the world:Grubing Fireball, on the new iPhone-ready Flickr.
those who can’t tell the difference between
Arial and Helvetica, and those who despise Arial.”
“There’s a very thin lineGraphic designer David Carson,
between simple and clean and powerful
and simple and clean and boring.”
former art director of Transworld Skateboarding and Raygun magazines,
and former professional surfer, in this clip from Helvetica.
“Your Journey Made Simple” by Shaz Madani
A response designed to promote the M25 motorway. On one side the poster gives exact directions that would have to be taken in order to travel from one side of London to the other illustrating the complexity and confusion involved in taking alternative routes through the center of the city. The reverse side reads: “wipe away the confusion take the M25″.
Nice use of contrast and a good understanding of type and form.
Simple still looks good.
“In typography neither the old style nor the new style matters; quality does.”Jan Tschichold, On Typography (1957) — Jason Santa Maria provides a nice little piece about Tschichold’s change of heart, from his youthful days of san-serif only typographic rebellion in Nazi Germany to his latter years of classical inspiration as the head designer for Penguin Press. Tschichold’s writing and design work is something that every designer should be familiar with.
Use the best available ampersand. Nice charts over at SimpleBits on the different fonts & ampersands available by default on Mac, XP and Vista.
The Girl Effect. Do not skip the video. I love the typography on the site and the logo/nav on the top left.
Typographers and their handwriting. Draw your own conclusions.
Beautiful P22 Operina Pro. 1284 glyphs! Go to page 3 of the glyphs and scroll to the bottom. Mmmm.
Robert J. Blolesta’s Value Pac.
Alphabet made of raw hamburger. Each character hand-shaped, packaged, and photographed individually.
The Beard font via core77
For me, this site presents the best of both worlds…Hot cars and cool typography. It’s heaven on the intertubes.
Speaking of typography, a brief history of the pilcrow, or paragraph mark as we refer to it today. “It’s tempting to recognize the symbol as a ‘P for paragraph,’ though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for ‘chapter.’”
No images, pure typography… the result? Seed Conference site. As Jon Hicks put it, “A truly inspirational site, showing how Times New Roman can look great in the hands of someone that knows what they’re doing.”
“The designer, Rian Hughes, was researching old wood type, but instead found the lettering at the beginning and end of each reel of microfiche far more appealing. Based on the intro and outro messages, Dukane (named after a Microfiche reader) has the battered and scratched quality of mistreated film stock.”