The Periodic Table of Typefaces

A month or two ago, a coworker sent me a link to a designer Camdon Wilde's Periodic Table of Typefaces. It was a little project he just did on the side and posted on the Behance Network to get some feedback. Well his feedback was overwhelming.

Unfortunately, the original image was small and there was no link or capability to purchase a larger print or file. I emailed the design, apparently along with many other designers, and he has now posted a large jpg, a link to Squidspot where you can order a poster of it. In true collaborative style, Wilde has also made the working file available for others to refine and tweak if you email him.

All I can say is I love it! I absolutely love it. :)

Type Is Art

I have a designer's love affair with typography. I find fonts beautiful. Well, maybe nor comic sans, but in general. The thing is, type is really just specific shapes that we recognize and you can form those beautiful shapes into art that has nothing to do with words. Take, for example, the mixed media work from one of my favorite college professors. (She taught a class called Reconstruction, Recognition and the Found.) Her work uses letterforms to create something new.

There's an interesting site called Type Is Art that let's you play around with the 20 different identifiable pieces of letters and use them to create art. Here are two little pieces I put together. Visit typeisart.com to see more work or to create your own!

Ten Rules Every Designer Should Live By

This is from an article in Businessweek called the 10 Commandements of Web Design. I whole heartedly agree with them and think every designer should abide by them. Most web designers I know should pay special attention to #6... Some of these commandments also translate to, and should be adhered to in print design as well. They are as follows:

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.
8. Thou shalt be social.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king.

FontStruct: Make Your Own Fonts Online

There's a new website out called FontStruct that allows you create your own font online for free. The font creation abilities are limited, but it's an interesting extension of Web 2.0 into the design world. After you design your font, you can keep it private or choose to share it with a Creative Commons license. According an article in Slate, this site is popular with all kinds of font enthusiasts, not just designers.

My personal opinion is FontStruct is it's pretty fun to play around with, but incapable of creating any fonts that I might actually use. You are limited to pretty blocky, tech-y and ultimately gimmicky designs due to how the program is set up and the shapes available to build with. I was really excited about the site at first, but as I tried to design a font, I just got frustrated and annoyed that I was unable to make any of the designs that I wanted to. Call me a font snob, but I really hate gimmicky fonts and was overall, unimpressed by the gallery of fonts generated by users. The Slate article suggested that this site is so overwhelmingly popular it's been crashing. That scares me a bit. There are already many horrendous fonts out there, do we really need more? I think I'd be on board with this site if it had more capabilities to produce a wider range of designs because right now they're all too obviously made by building block shapes.

The Slate article quotes a user stating, "all of us are going to be little Adrian Frutiger[s]!" Sorry, but this program is nowhere near capable of producing a font like Univers. Not even close...