Albert Boton’s colorful world of black and white
Presenting 50 years of type design was not an easy task. Albert Boton’s career was indeed long and very prolific. He was born in 1932 in Paris. His father was a carpenter so he grew up in the smell of glue and wood chips. Nothing predisposed him to become a type designer and yet that’s when he joined his father’s workshop that he discover type design.
Young Type Lovers: What to do?
Its interesting to see a group of students producing a video about font piracy in design schools. Conducting interviews of various people from students — who actually use illegal fonts — to typeface designers, teachers and so on. Its a good topic about something that many people doing everyday (& not only students), without speaking and saying anything about it. Based on what I have understand from this nice video, is that learning more about the value of typefaces will help a lot. A step to the right direction.
The systematic mind of Stéphane Elbaz
Stéphane Elbaz is graphic and type designer. In 2009 he was awarded the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club of New York for his type family Geneo recently published by Typofonderie. He is the first typeface designer outside the foundry to be published by Typofonderie. It seems to be interesting and necessary to interview him.
Inside Paragraphs: type setting explained
Cyrus Highsmith, type designer working for the Font Bureau, just published Inside Paragraphs: typographic fundamentals, a book about fine type setting. Thinking the reader is not an idiot, Cyrus Highsmith doesn’t just tell how to do things, but explains why it has to be like that. A must-have for all the graphic-designers.
Typocamp 2012: re-enchant reality
Typocamp is the result of a joint initiative of the Foundry (Digital Agency of Île-de-France), Silicon Xperience and Graffr, within the Futur en Seine festival. It is a type manifestation of a new kind posing as challenge of creating and staging typography in 48 hours in the fields of print, web and animation. We have also noted the presence as a type design team from the Velvetyne type foundry. The first edition took place on 22, 23 and 24 June at the Cantine.
Meet The Shelf Journal
The moment a magazine is created is always an important event, specially when this one is French and is broadcasting abroad. The Shelf Journal has been created by Colin Caradec and Morgane Rébulard, both less than 25 years old and graduated from École Estienne.
Visit of the ESAD in Amiens
I am currently doing an internship at Typofonderie, you may have already seen the article I wrote: Escape to the KABK describing the open doors of this school. Well, once again, I took a new short break in February 2012 to discover a type design course. I went to the ESAD in Amiens, the city of beets, brick walls and cold.
Roger Excoffon,
The confident and keen gaze of Roger Excoffon spoke volumes; his place in French typographic and graphic design history spans generations, some rejecting his work, while others, often more recent, venerating his vision and the visual force of his work. In my beginnings, as a student at the end of the 1980s, Mistral, Banco and Choc were lumped among the tacky fonts that should only have been used for parodying the shop window of a provincial butcher, baker or hair salon. At least that was the view of graphic designers, design instructors, journalists, etc. of the time. To recap the well-worn banter of that era’s agencies and studios: Excoffon’s typefaces were not modern.
Trip to the KABK
I am currently doing an internship at Typofonderie and passionate about drawing letters. I inquired about the courses dedicated to typography and a school caught my eye: the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten or shorter, the KABK located in The Hague Netherlands. I heard of the 28 January 2012 open day and decided to go, armed with my little Renault Clio, my camera and my curiosity for everything related to the design of letters.
Le jour où j’ai décidé de ne plus utiliser le Din
Là où je pensais que les caractères de type Fraktur avaient subsistés, là où je pensais, comme dans Astérix, que les Allemands parlaient et écrivaient en gothique, non, du Din, partout, du Din.