Two little tweets in an ocean of tweets. What harm can they do, especially when their message feels overwhelmingly positive?
Last week, Indian Type Foundry (ITF) sent out the following tweet in reaction to this showcase of type designers who also happen to be women:
Who said there’s no gender equality in type? Out of 30, 14 of our designers are female. @AdobeCreate @shiva__n pic.twitter.com/9NMqGkc7q4
— Indian Type Foundry (@itfoundry) May 4, 2016
Typeface designers frequently seem to assume the more OT features their fonts have the better. Typeface users, on the other side, don’t always share this delight. They are often stressed by the complexity, don’t get any sense out of them or just ignore the features. Since I am both a designer and a user of typefaces I tend to sway from one position to the other.
In my work, where I am involved with script typeface design, OpenType features and coding play a very big role. I would say that a natural looking contemporary script typeface is not imaginable without an extended OT feature code.
Every letter in the alphabet has its own history. They change with time, and it is part of the type designer’s job to give shape to those changes. We set out to celebrate a letter that most designers would agree to be one of the most challenging forms to design in the Latin alphabet, the lowercase s.
The origins of this letter led us to the Phoenicians (1500–300 B.C.), who used three different forms: shin, shade and samekh. The shapes of the letters were simplified drawings of their names, for instance shin means teeth. This letterform is the predecessor of the Greek sigma, which evolved into the Etruscan S, and later on into the Latin form.
Inscriptions of Phoenician shin, Greek sigma, Archaic Etruscan s, and Latin uppercase s
As a type designer, every so often, one is confronted with the question “Do we need more typefaces?”. As somebody who makes a living out of creating typefaces, the obvious answer is yes; however, here are other less subjective reasons in favour of new type designs.
Have you ever been called a type snob? Font nerd? Typomaniac?
If you use, make or draw type / letters, it’s your job to care. I’m personally guilty of using this kind of language. However, when we act like our work is somehow above the mental capacity of typographic plebeians, are we giving ourselves a bad rap?
Who’s worse: wine people or font people?
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) June 5, 2015
(original tweet appears to have been deleted)
A couple of years ago, one of my graphic design students handed in a project that used the typeface Gotham. As soon as she handed it to me, I looked at her skeptically.
“You have a license for Gotham?” I asked, knowing that the least expensive license runs close to $200—which is not typically the kind of cash students in New York City, or even in the United States, tend to have to spend on school projects.
“Yes!” she declared triumphantly. She, like all my students, knew that I do not accept projects using pirated fonts; it’s stated clearly in my syllabus, and I assertively read this aloud on Day 1 each semester. She continued, “Professor ___ gave us all a CD of it!”
Book review in three words or less*:
“Stereotypes lamely perpetuated”
“Missed opportunity”
“Better explain differently” …
See also: http://www.alphabettes.org/type-and-gender-stereotypes/
Type for the temptress. 🙄
Car. Auto. Duh.
Type for the family man
No ultimate guide
* A category-idea by Amy Papaelias
The typographic twitterverse is aflutter today. The subject? Project Faces, an iPad app by Adobe that allows users to customize the skeleton of a typeface and watch it magically change from flat to fabulous in a matter of seconds. Well, not exactly. At least, that’s not the consensus on Twitter. The application itself, demoed at Adobe Max last week, is perhaps less interesting than the ensuing discussions. Here are a few collected tweets worth sharing. Continue reading
Here’s the deal with describing type or lettering as feminine or masculine:
This is my simple request. If you already have an inkling about why this might be an issue and think it’s a reasonable request you can handle, awesome, no homework for you today. But if not, take my hand.
Over the long Labor Day weekend, I had a lovely evening meeting several ladies in type. In some respects, it was one of those moments where you suddenly realize that you’re not quite alone in the world anymore as both a woman and creative individual. Sadly, it’s not often that you meet so many women in the creative field in one place. That being said, there should definitely be more opportunities to make it so.
In my early days after graduating college, I remember how shocked I was upon jumping into the corporate world of Typography and Design. Contrary to the gender-neutral classroom environment, the studios, agencies, and companies I worked for were overwhelmingly male-oriented. Could it be that women didn’t want to work at these places for specific reasons that I wasn’t seeing? If not, where did all these educated women go after they earned their diplomas?