Collectors Weekly asks “Is an 1874 Type Catalog the World’s Most Beautiful Book?” The answer is no. But it is a visual feast nonetheless.
Source: To Hell With Helvetica: Is an 1874 Type Catalog the World’s Most Beautiful Book? | Collectors Weekly
Hat-tip to MrMild !
Nile Peterson has put together an astonishingly beautiful collection of typography samples and covers of typography specimen books. How did I come across this? I was searching for the Franklin Photolettering Film Alphabet Compendium.
Our bud Larry Yudelson sent us a link to this neat article by Raphael Freeman, showing how he uses a variety of custom scripts to compose complex book pages in Hebrew.
I’ve sent a note to Raphael asking what page layout program he’s using. I’ll reveal all when he gets back to me.
via Book designer meets programmer | Raphael Freeman | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel.
For those who have been designing web sites for centuries, the recent acceptance of web fonts and the possibilities of HTML typography requires some readjustment. We had our hopes for typography dashed around 1998, when the first type embedding specs were proposed and then not accepted in a cross-browser way; we were afraid to get too invested in the new trends. But cross-browser web fonts are real, and more sophisticated forms of typography are coming down the road, through a combination of fancy JavaScript plugins and some nascent new web standards. All of which is to say, it’s time to start looking at examples of best practices, such as those offered in the following link: http://desgr.com/web-typography-multiple-fonts-in-web-design/
I remember . . .
Headliners — one of the most beautiful type catalogs I ever saw. The fonts were all drawn exclusively for them and the settings in their catalog were exquisite. The Headliners fonts now belong to Joe Treacy’s Treacyfaces. I like some of Joe’s original faces (e.g., TFForever) but his website is unappealing.
Photolettering — I think they must have had the largest collection of custom headline fonts in the world. Some were quite astonishing, though my clients could never afford their prices. Their fonts have been acquired by House Industries, whose beautiful website you really must visit.
Alphabet Innovations and TypeSpectra were two lines of original fonts drawn and licensed by Phil Martin. A few of Phil’s fonts can be purchased through MyFonts.
MKP – Marvin Kommel Productions — Marvin had a typography shop with such a huge line of 2″ film fonts for headline setting that other shops would send jobs to him when they didn’t own the required font.
Franklin Photolettering — ordinary headline photo typesetting, but they had an unusually large range of fonts with funky swashes. (I had thought that their 2″ film fonts were purchased from the usual reputable and disreputable sources, but some searching on the Web suggests that they had several original faces of their own.)