Dana Tanamachi’s paperweights for West ElmI have a lettering crush on Dana Tanamachi. Have you seen her work in the February issue of Oprah’s magazine? I purchased the issue (first time, ever!) to read on my epic journey to Salt Lake City for the Alt Summit. {rediscovered via Papertastebuds} Click here to purchase the paperweights from West Elm.
I am happy to welcome Melbourne designer Jennifer Wu to our list of subscribers. I saw that she tweeted about her purchase and I followed over to her portfolio to find many great things. The exploration above is in response to the slogan “Less is a bore.”
I’ve said it before and I shall say it again: UPPERCASE subscribers are a talented bunch! (You can subscribe right here, please and thank you.)
Foundation Rwanda’s latest fundraising initiative, “Color Rwanda with Hope,” comes with a typographic twist. The nonprofit organization, founded in 2008 by photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik and former creative director Jules Shell, tapped members of creative agency LBi Syrup to design an original typeface for the multi-media campaign. Rather than whip up something in the studio, where they work on projects for artistically inclined brands such as Bottega Veneta and Puma, the LBi Syrup group traveled to Rwanda and used the artwork and writing of the children they met there as inspirational font fodder. The resulting typeface, “Color Rwanda,” appears on various campaign materials, including the limited-edition coloring books that are at the heart of the fundraiser. LBi Syrup also created a short film (below) for the campaign. All proceeds from the Color Rwanda with Hope effort will help to fund Foundation Rwanda’s work to provide secondary education for the 20,000 ostracized children born of rape during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
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From Luca Barcellona’s Flickr
Milan-based calligrapher Luca Barcellona.
How one designer represents the antiquity of type in the digital age
Austrian designer Andreas Scheiger celebrates the “craft of etching, engraving and letter design” with a nod to both science and the graphic design of the Victorian era. Scheiger believes that letters are “full of life” and, in an effort to explore “the means of communication by dissecting and rearranging its basic elements,” he delves into the heart of typography with his sculptural letter series, The Evolution of Type, inspired by Frederic W. Goudy’s tome, The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering (1918). Says Scheiger, “Goudy analyzes the denomination of letters as we know them today. For him, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous achievement because with it, written communication is independent from pictograms like hieroglyphs.”
Turning typography into a metaphor for evolution, Scheiger depicts the immortal nature of the written word with his latest contribution to the Evolution of Type series, Exhibit 16/1-9. Reminiscent of fossilized specimens suspended in amber, Scheiger takes an anthropological look at the future of the craft. Casting solitary letters made of balsa wood into polyester glass resin, the designer spells out a cautionary tale that echoes the way of the extinct trilobite fossil group. Scheiger reflects, “With digital print processing, letterpress letters indeed become something like ancient species.”
The seemingly petrified letter blocks follow in Scheiger’s alphabet, which also includes sculpted letters splayed in sections to reveal a realistic array of muscles and marrow. Using a combination of wood and carved chicken bones mixed with polymer clay, Scheiger’s Evolution of Type exhibits visually conjure up an anatomical riff on the children’s alphabet—S is for Spine, T is for Tendon and so on.
For Scheiger, “letters are organisms and typefaces are the species, all classified similar to biological taxonomy. Each letter displays the anatomical features and evolutionary characteristics shared by so many living creatures,” an idea harkening back to Goudy’s inspiration, which focuses on the notion that “a letter should possess an esthetic quality that is organic, an essential of the form itself and not the result of mere additions to its fundamental form nor to meaningless variations of it.” As a result, Scheiger becomes somewhat of a “font surgeon” of design-focused, dissected specimens.
Items from The Evolution of Type series along with Scheiger’s graphic prints are available for purchase in his shop.
Stimulation is always in store with the Guggenheim’s annual Hilla Rebay lecture, an endowed program named for the Strasbourg-born baroness and artist who made her mark as Solomon Guggenheim’s art advisor and curator. The twenty-fourth annual lecture is set for the evening of January 11 (admission is free, but get there early to stake out a seat) and has a distinct design angle, as Tom McDonough, associate professor and chair of art history at Binghamton University, will discuss the prominent role of typography in contemporary art. “The Artist as Typographer” will highlight the work of artists such as Dexter Sinister (the design and publishing collaborative’s 2010 unpronounceable glyph, “A skeleton, a script, or a good idea in advance of its realization,” is pictured at right) Shannon Ebner, and Janice Kerbel. Learn more here.
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Dezeen Screen: this video by Gavin Lucas in collaboration with Order involves a visit to Mr Smith’s Letterpress Workshop in Kennington, London where Smith explains how he likes to design, set and print using traditional wood and metal type to create contemporary typographic prints. Watch the movie »
Un hommage aux excellentes vidéos Live The Language de Gustav Johansson, avec cette réalisation et collaboration de Xuan Pham et Roman Koscianski autour des richesses de la ville de Montréal. Des plans et un travail sur la typographie, sur la musique de Magnus Lidehall.
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There’s been something of a buying spree within the business of type lately, with last month’s announcement that Adobe had purchased Typekit, and now the news from late last week that Monotype, which owns the rights to such typeface designs as Helvetic and ITC Franklin Gothic (among thousands upon thousands of others), is preparing to acquire Bitstream‘s font business. For an all-cash payout of $50 million, the purchase will give Monotype access to Bistream’s “89,000 fonts from nearly 900 foundries,” will make them the new owners of the popular What’s The Font” site, and will also bring over approximately 55 employees from Bitstream’s current roster (Bistream itself will continue as a company, just no longer working with type). Given the bulking up on type companies by both Monotype and Adobe, this recent purchase wasn’t exactly met with universal applause. Type designer Erik Spiekermann, never one to hold back on voicing his opinion, tweeted a number of responses to the sale, including that his company FontShop is now “the only major survivor outside the font monopoly” and asked, “Will Monotype Imaging be renamed Monopoly Imaging after buying Bitstream?”
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