The Entire 1980s in Three Minutes

Totally loving today: This video for Justice’s DVNO, designed by Machine Molle . It just gets better and better; wait for the very end. The very end. Totally loving today: This video for Justice’s DVNO, designed by Machine Molle. It just... 

Continue reading »

H&FJ Crime-Fighting Division

It was not a dark, stormy night at the H&FJ offices, and she was not a dame in a red dress who spelled trouble with a capital T. It was last Friday afternoon, and the caller was Bill Bastone, founder and editor of The Smoking Gun, with a question... 

Continue reading »

Big brass matrices again: the Enschedé ‘Chalcographia’ type

In the post of March 2007 it was suggested that existing brass matrices for big types could not have been struck with steel punches in so hard a hard metal as brass, but were probably reproductions cast in brass of strikes that had been made in lead... 

Continue reading »

Selectric Days

My reputation compels me to deny that I ever spent adolescent weekends hanging out at Tannen’s Magic Shop or The Compleat Strategist, and I certainly never wasted sunny afternoons playing with the Ohio Scientific computer downstairs at Polk’s... 

Continue reading »

St. Patrick’s Type

Three of my favorite things are big type , chromatic type , and type specimen books , and St. Patrick’s Day offers the perfect occasion to bring all three interests to the table, literally. Parked here at our conference table is the 1904 type specimen... 

Continue reading »

Digital Analog

Writing about the glories of the nixie tube last December, I wondered aloud whether there’s anyone alive who has any affection for the ubiquitous LED display . Today I have my answer. At RISD, BFA candidate Alvin Aronson has made the witty and... 

Continue reading »

A Font Tip for Leopard Users

One of the unsung features of Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”) is Quick Look , a useful tool in the Finder that allows you to preview collections of files at a glance. It’s commonly used for images, but Quick Look turns out to be immensely... 

Continue reading »

Pilcrow & Capitulum

My last post made passing mention of the pleasures of designing the paragraph mark, prompting one reader to rightly ask, “how much fun can it really be to draw a backwards P?” No more fun than it is to draw the rest of that font you’re... 

Continue reading »

The Sulzbacher Eszett

The designers at H&FJ are often asked if there are particular letters that we especially enjoy drawing. Office doodles testify to the popularity of the letter R , perhaps because it synopsizes the rest of the alphabet in one convenient package (it’s... 

Continue reading »