Writings
Writings comprises commissioned articles (including those for other websites) and books.
16 May 2013
Bibliologia 7 (2012) is finally out—and so is my article “New Types for New Books Revisited”. The article is a survey of the typefaces used by several American and British book designers, ranging in age and in temperament. It is a tribute to the late Will Powers (1943–2009) and his essay New Types for New Books: What We Have, What We Need (2006) which argued that we should use only typefaces designed for digital production and not settle for digital upgrades …
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25 February 2013
Helvetica and the New York City Subway System came up short at the Art Book Prize ceremony this evening at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. The winner was Architecture in Uniform: Design and Building for the Second World War by Jean-Louis Cohen (Paris: Editions Hazan, distributed by Yale University Press, 2011).
9 February 2013
Thirty years ago Gunnlaugur SE Briem—Icelandic calligrapher, handwriting reformer, type designer and digital maven—edited a Special Calligraphy Issue of Visible Language (17.1). He has now followed it with The Briem Report: Letterforms 2012, which can be freely downloaded (as either a low- or high-resolution PDF). As before, he has gathered a wide-ranging set of contributions from colleagues throughout the overlapping worlds of calligraphy, handwriting, type design, typography and graphic design, that cover such topics as handwriting therapy for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity …
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3 February 2013
For nearly a year my life has been bound up with that of Czech calligrapher and type designer Oldrich Menhart. In August 2011 I was approached by John Boardley, the mysterious genius behind I Love Typography, to be the editor of Codex, his new magazine, but it was not until January 2012 that the position was made official. At the time there was no sign of Menhart. It was sometime in March that I concocted the idea to take a …
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11 November 2012
The Art Book Prize in London has narrowed its field of finalists to two books: Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux and Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story by myself (both published by MIT Press). The winner will be announced by The Authors’ Club on Thursday, November 22nd at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. I doubt I will be there, but if any British friends have a chance to stop in at the gallery at 16 Wharf Road, …
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25 October 2012
Last year I wrote a short essay entitled “Rules for Researching” for Gunnlaugur SE Briem to include in The Briem Report: Letterforms 2012. It will soon be available for free download at his website operina.com. Meanwhile, it has been published earlier this month in Whatever Next: A Discourse on Typography, a book jointly sponsored by This Is Art and the Camberwell Press, both located in London. The essay is a quick guide to doing research for those not trained academically …
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11 June 2012
My advance review of Inside Paragraphs, type designer Cyrus Highsmith’s new book on the fundamentals of typography, can be read at Imprint. Here are previews of several other pages from the book: “How Type Works”, “Glyph Space” and “Hierarchy of Space”.
Inside Paragraphs, pp. 14–15 “How Type Works”
Inside Paragraphs, p. 22 “Glyph Space”
Inside Paragraphs, p. 76 “Hierarchy of Space”
A reminder: Inside Paragraphs is not a complete guide to typography and the history of type. It is a beginning …
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25 January 2012
Typographica recently announced their list of the best typefaces of 2011. Stephen Coles invited me to be one of the critics and—from the list of typefaces he offered me—I chose Cala by Dieter Hofrichter to discuss. There were a number of typefaces on the list that appealed to me, including several by Hofrichter. In the end I selected Cala because 1. it was a Venetian Oldstyle face, an historically important category of type that has been on the wane since …
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21 December 2011
Season’s Greetings from Paul Shaw at Blue Pencil, Legacy of Letters and Paul Shaw / Letter Design. This card, set in Alejandro Paul’s Poem Script, is an outgrowth of The Roots of Type: Scripts, a book on digital script typefaces and their background that Abby Goldstein and I have been working on for several years. We expect it to be ready in 2012. Stay tuned for updates on its progress.
Joyous New Year
17 December 2011
The current issue of Visible Language (45.3, pp. 261–263) contains a review of Helvetica and the New York City Subway System by the editor Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl. It is very laudatory and concludes on this positive note, “The book design facilitates taking different paths through the material, the visual examples tell their own story. Look carefully at the dates, when something was created and whether it lasted. The running narrative is staightforward, while the footnotes go into historical detail and the …
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9 December 2011
Not only has Helvetica and the New York City Subway System been selected for the AIGA 50 Books competition but is has been declared one of the Best Books of 2011 by the writers and editors of Slate. It is one of only 17 books chosen and shares that honor with such lumimaries as Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Tina Fey (author of Bossypants). It is number seven in the queue, but since the books are not ranked that …
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23 November 2011
Although it has been talked about since late September I just got my complimentary copy of Typography Sketch Books by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011) today. So I apologize for being behind the curve. My six pages show sketches, proofs and notes for my Origins, Kolo and Donatello typefaces. (The former was a custom typeface for Origins, the cosmetics firm, and is not available for general sale.) The book is not limited to sketches …
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