Typography posts

The side project series is a series of posts in which we’ll be taking a look at the best of designers’ side projects. To get things started, this week we’re going to be looking at Type Fight, a side project by designers Drew Roper, Ryan Paule and Bryan Butler.

Type Fight plays host to weekly “fights” in which two designers are asked to create a typographic treatment of the same character and then have their final designs voted on to determine whose is best. So far, Type Fight has hosted 61...

The most frustrating aspect of web design for designers trained for print, is the persistent lack of typographic control.

Careful typographic choices are the hallmark of quality work and the lack of that quality online never ceases to be jarring for those of us that know what we’re looking for.

Fortunately, the level of control that we have is increasing all the time and support for more advanced typographic rendering is also increasing. Whilst it’s certainly not possible to deliver the kind...

Lovers of abstract art are undoubtedly familiar with the superlative Wassily Kandinsky — the Russian-born painter, printmaker, and theorist who was recognized as having painted the first purely abstract compositions in modern art history. As a tribute to the pioneering expressionist, Turkish graphic designer Sinan Buyukbas has created a series of stunning 3D typographic art — aptly titled “Kandinsky Type” — to reflect Wassily Kandinsky’s groundbreaking style.

Using bold, striking hues and funky shapes to craft the letters, Buyukbas states he approached each character as a blank canvas, channeling the creative mojo of Kandinsky with both color and form. In fact, one look at the painter’s work known as “Composition X” (1939) makes it easy to see where Buyukbas got his inspiration.

Free-spirited,...

It’s rare that you find a typeface with both legibility and character; the latter often obscures the former.

So you’d be wise to take advantage of our sister site MightyDeal.com’s current offer on the beautiful Solomon font family.

The family includes 2 different styles in 6 weights, 12 fonts in total. The first style is a utilitarian san-serif, easy to use for body text and is somewhat reminiscent of...

A few weeks ago, we posted a nifty quiz to test your prowess at differentiating between Helvetica and Arial. If that typography challenge succeeded in whetting your whistle for font games, a new app design is ready to take you to the next level of typographic deduction.

Designed by Copenhagen-based designer Andreas Hansen, Font Nerd is currently only a concept of an app, designed to help users gamify their font experience.

Quizzes — in the form of entertaining sentences displayed in different fonts  — prompt players to guess the correct typeface; if you’re stumped, there’s the option to view the whole...

Talent, discipline, and creativity just might constitute a triple threat in the world of design; and if it does, 21-year-old Peter Tarka easily meets the definition.

Each month, the ambitious Poland-based creative produces a collection of mesmerizing 3D typographic art. Currently a graphic designer and illustrator with Grate Studio in Wroclaw, Tarka’s digital artwork has been featured on Behance, PSDTuts, and Abduzeedo,...

It’s long been thought that Arial is to Helvetica what the ugly step sister is to Cinderella. Helvetica was designed in Germany in the 1950s to compete with Akzidenz Grotesk; Arial was designed in America in the early 1980s, believed by many to be a move by Microsoft to supply a Helvetica-like font as part of its TrueType specification without acknowledging or paying royalties to Helvetica.

Be that as it may, to the untrained eye, the differences between the two fonts are negligible — largely due to the near identical widths. But to the savvy eye of the designer, there are dozens of subtle differences that leap off the page. For example,...

Since the very earliest illuminated manuscripts, dating back to the 5th century AD, we’ve associated flora with enlarged type. Perhaps it’s something to do with the way plants repeat the same shapes, echoed by type. Or perhaps it’s simply that we can bend an organic shape to our design without compromising its integrity.

Whatever the reason, botanic forms play a...

With increasing diversity in monitor sizes, it’s not practical to design single blocks of text that take up the entire width of the screen. The traditional solution is to split text into columns manually, which is very time intensive; or to split text dynamically with JavaScript, which doesn’t function universally. Besides, this is a presentation issue, we should be able to style it with CSS without the use of grid systems or floats shouldn’t we?

CSS3 actually does provide a way for you to style your text into various columns, it even gives the ability to set a gutter — the space...

First it was the Capulets versus the Montagues; then it was Coke versus Pepsi; and the latest epic battle? Serif versus sans-serif, of course.

Lucky for us, the crew at UrbanFonts has produced a nifty infographic to help clarify the age-old rivalry between serif and sans. Brief, yet information-packed, it covers everything from DPI to classification, and expertly explains why serif is better for print and sans serif is best suited for web.

This clever infographic — that smartly draws upon...

When I was in middle school, I took a sign language class. At the time, it struck me as interesting that some words and letters looked exactly like the thing being described, while others seemingly had no relation.

That’s why I’m intrigued by what New York designer Tien-Min Liao has undertaken as a typographic challenge. Her self-initiated experiment explores the relationships between uppercase letters and lowercase letters, using only some ink and her hands.

To further challenge herself, Tien-Min made the transformation between upper and lowercase symbols a test in and of itself. After drawing shapes on one or both of her hands, the artist manipulated her gestures until an upper-case letter was...