Have you ever cooked a meal at home and been delighted to find the perfect ingredient to complement your recipe? Maybe you forgot you had cilantro, crushed peanuts, or lemon juice, and it’s just the thing you needed to elevate your dish.
Long gone are the days of zipping up folders of font files and sharing them across your organization, or even messier, embedding fonts in documents in the cloud in hopes that the design remains intact. We recently announced an expanded set of licensing rights which allows all employees within an organization to access Commercial Production Fonts in their desktop environments.
This week we’re welcoming Andrew Krivine, author and punk rock collector, alongside Michael Worthington, faculty at CalArts and co-founder of Counterspace. The creative duo is here to tell the tale of how they co-created the largest exhibition of punk and new wave graphics ever shown on the West Coast.
Over the past four years, we’ve been lucky to forge a reciprocal partnership with the Limerick School of Art & Design / TUS in Ireland. Both Creative Type Directors Tom Foley and Emilios Theofanous have now participated in workshops and modules at the leading fine art, design and creative media school. This year’s students were asked to write a message platform for one typeface and build a marketing plan and design assets to promote it in digital or print media.
When you’re a designer, it’s thrilling to create a new brand or update an existing one. You get to be creative! Strategic! You get a chance to make your mark!
In addition to deciding on a color palette and imagery style, you get to choose foundational typefaces for your brand. But font selection should not be based on looks alone.
Today’s designers are faced with a multitude of new challenges when it comes to designing for a digital world. Customers expect constant communication, have short attention spans, and expect brands to keep up with emerging technology. Learn about the branding challenges to advance your digital strategy and forge ahead.
You’re at your desk reviewing your emails, and getting ready to kickstart a new design project tomorrow. You’ve read over the project brief, and you have a team call coming up to go over the project guidelines. It’s an exciting challenge, but you’re not sure where to begin.
Today we’re welcoming Annie Atkins, a creative in the film industry (just like our last guest, Holly Fraser). She’s known for her graphic props and set pieces for Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs. Tune-in to learn about the magic of film.
In episode four we talked with Tré Seals, founder of Vocal Type, about his efforts to break down stereotypes in design and how a middle-school side gig, born out of a brush with serious childhood medical issues, helped him become the artist he is today.
Find design inspiration in an age of information overload.
We are thrilled to have Aaron Draplin on the podcast this week and to dig into the “heavy stuff” with him – existential musings on life and building a career, the importance of hanging on to your inner kid, and the “weird little spot” he’s in as he approaches 50 turns around the sun.
Today’s brands must keep up with a fast-paced digital world and navigate a “new normal” that’s still emerging from the worst of the pandemic. The last few years shifted everyone’s digital expectations, how brands operate, and in some cases, impacted their business models. Moreover, issues like biodiversity, sustainability, diversity and equity, and brand activism are all booming. So how does this all impact brand building? These macro shifts are greatly influencing how companies position themselves, the services they offer, and how they communicate with their customers.
From alternates to X-height, this list of typography terms and definitions covers just about everything you’d want to know about fonts and typography.
Font superfamilies are vast collections of type that can meet a multitude of needs without compromising on consistency. But what defines a superfamily, exactly?
A letter is more than the sum of its parts, but sometimes it helps to know what those parts are called. And it may not surprise you to learn that in a field as meticulous as typography, every little piece of a letter has a name.
When it comes to commonly known type categories, you might be able to think of sans, serif, script and maybe slab. Four categories would be simple and easy, but it would also make design boring. Thankfully there are many more categories and subcategories to explore.
Elliot Jay Stocks, designer and musician, joined us on the podcast this week to speak about passion projects. Known for his typography work, Elliot is a freelance designer and was previously Creative Director at Adobe Typekit. Today, he’s working with Google on Google Fonts Knowledge.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to strange abstract symbols, marks simplified down from more complex expressions, shapes that look like they might be alphabetical. As a type designer, my day to day is a bubble of black-and-white shapes, lines, stems, curves and bowls, white space and the all-round balance of form.
Embarking on the design and build of your first ever “typeable” typeface is an exciting prospect: the result of learning new working methods and exploring what makes your own type design personal to you.
Following on from our research into how fonts are used in the beauty and automotive industries, in part three we take a look at ten luxury fashion brands. What is the most fashionable font style? How do these brands use typefaces to stand out from competitors and are there opportunities which are being missed?
The section sign, also called a silcrow, is a typographic mark used to reference a particular section of a document. Its shape derives from a double ‘s’, which in Latin stands for signum sectionis (meaning ‘section symbol’).
In part two of our research into the luxury sector and how font styles are used, we look at automotive brands. Still thought of as a masculine dominated industry we were interested to see if there were any similarities with our last study which was focused on the beauty sector.
There are certain font characteristics which have traditionally been thought of as representative of luxury like serifs and high contrast strokes. We wanted to do some research into the top luxury brands across beauty, fashion, automotive and travel to see which typefaces these brands are using and how. First up the beauty sector – do all beauty brands really use Optima? We looked at ten of the top brands and revealed a few surprises.
As type designers we can get immersed in an insular typographical bubble at times. It’s easy to forget that our language, the lingo, words and terms that we use to discuss, critique and refine our designs is under the constant pressure of discourse and scrutiny within, often redefining itself.