Typography

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

"Can you make the type bigger?"

Judging by the design blogs, the chatter at conferences and award ceremonies, and the rhetoric in the magazines, graphic design is a profession where insecurity and doubt are rife. Whenever graphic designers get together, the talk …

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Guardian’s New European Look

The Guardian's choice of the "Berliner" format, half-way between broadsheet and tabloid, is an inspired alternative. The paper is the first British title to adopt this European page size. Elegant, well-proportioned pages make its tabloid …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Marian Bantjes, Alexander Gelman + Michael Surtees

An interview with Marian Bantjes, Alexander Gelman and Michael Surtees of DesignNotes.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Our Bodies, Our Fonts

Family Tree ©2000 Zhang HuanBody markings — piercings, tattoos and so forth — have recently evolved into a kind of marginalized form of graphic expression, yet one that sheds an unusual light on some of the more mainstream …

Michael Bierut|Essays

I Hate ITC Garamond

ITC Garamond, a popular typeface designed in 1975, is quite simply ugly, and I hate it.

William Drenttel|Essays

Font Forensics, Or Whether George W. Bush Is Hiding Something

Imagine a leading newspaper summarizing its main story in these terms: "It was the typefaces that consumed much of the news media." Meanwhile, Dan Rather, the anchor of CBS News, had to mount an aggressive defense "to protect the …

William Drenttel|Essays

Penmanship: The Voice of A Future Designer

Reading handwriting is an old art: graphology is one of the more articulated forms of divination, and handwriting analysis has long had the trappings of a science with its history and court experts.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Bodoni Conspiracy

Eerie parallels between the cover designs of the reports of the 9/11 Commission and the Monicagate investigator Kenneth Starr suggest a conspiracy that can be traced back to sixteenth-century type designer Giambattista Bodoni.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ask Not What Your Typeface Can Do For You: Ask What You Can Do For Your Typeface

Photo: James Estrin / The New York TimesAn article in today's New York Times celebrates the suitably-named Gotham for its presence, etched into a 20-ton slab of Adirondack granite, in the Freedom Tower cornerstone. The choice of a …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Stanley Kubrick and the Future of Graphic Design

Stanley Kubrick's attention to the nuances of graphic design, typography, and branding went far beyond his well-documented obsession with Futura Extra Bold. 2001: A Space Odyssey in particular projects a perfectly designed vision of the …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Typographic Oddity No. 2: Spaceship Gothic

An upcoming auction of space memorabilia at Swann Galleries features a number of unusual specimens of paper ephemera which have miraculously survived the last half-century of American (and Soviet) space exploration. Who designed them? …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Blanket Statements

Psalm 23 Quilt, Lena MooreAn exhibit currently on view in New York at the American Folk Art Museum explores the visual texture of language through a selection of approximately twenty quilts made by women over the last 150 years. Here, …