Sans Comic Sans

On top of the list of the most hated fonts would have to be comic sans. Although Comic Sans is constantly put down upon it has enough merit for its name to be bestowed upon one of the printers in the general lab, so even if you did not want to speak of comic sans...it is probably mentioned every day at Tyler because of that.

Here, a man named Mykl Roventine passionately presents his distaste for comic sans:

This video gives you the background of comic sans and why not to use it. I think it is important to understand what is bad about typography in order to know all the good stuff too.

There is even a website devoted to banning comic sans, where I also found a lovely game of shooting the type culprit (which is pretty entertaining). So if you ever need to take a break from all the graphic design babble, just take it out on comic sans, will ya?

P.S. Comic sans did not go down without a fight.

Why God Hates Ham

So this post is a typographic video of moving type, and clever little manipulations, based on the audio recorded of famous secular writer Christopher Hitchens, who is actually reading a passage from one of his latest books, "God Is Not Great". The whole skit is based on Hitchens' explanation on the historical aspects of how religions came to hate ham.

Throughout the skit there are little type treatments that switches lettering, uses images in place of words in specific instances, and treats keywords in different ways to convey a point. I believe the actual creator of the video is the user who uploaded it, bergcrantz. Most of the type, with a few exceptions, is Helvetica. The only downside is that it is a long video, and if you're not interested, may get boring, but the type is interesting, and the little treatments one can catch makes it worth it.

To see the video, you might want to click here.

Thanks guys, hope you enjoy, Victoria.

House vid and photolettering

I got the chance to visit House Industries this past winter break after corresponding with Ken Barber, lead type designer and Tyler alumn, for my Magazine project which I did on his work.Needless to say the visit was awesome! here is a link to a video they recently posted showing their previous work if you are not familiar with House Ind.

A huge inspiration for Ken and the the guys at House was an old book called Photo lettering. Photo Lettering Inc (PLINC) was a photo lettering business that was responsible for designing thousands of fonts in its time. It was ultimately beaten out by the computer and thus a majority of their fonts were forgotten. House is currently building a website based on that business in which you set out the type online and only pay a small fee for just those words like you would have done during the hay-day of photo lettering. Be on the look out for it soon because I was told they were putting on the finishing touches.

P.S. here is a funny video with the man who founded PLINC

Type from Pages

So I have always found it to be beautiful when great typography can be taken out of its element of printed media, and can be presented in extraordinary ways. Isaac Salazar has created this great series of folded pages in books to create some marvelous examples of 3 dimensional type. Enjoy!

Should I work for free?

Probably not. Check out the new chart created by Tyler alum, Jessica Hische. The CSS version can translate into any language. Amazing.

What type are you?

A great application to identify your "type" from Pentagram.

So True

Seeing this poster made me think "ah that is so true". It is amazing how, after learning about type, you begin to notice bad typography everywhere you go. It really is everywhere, billboards, logos, letters, packaging, posters, you name it. It's hard to go anywhere without wanting to fix everyone's type!