Jean François Porchez speaking at Otis College
Jean François Porchez will be joining Pinar and Viola, Broken Headlines, Morag Myerscough + Luke Morgan, Raw Color, Team Thursday and Alex Quinto for a symposium with visiting international artists held at Otis College. Jean François will present recent projects made at ZeCraft along the result of the Otis type design workshop.
Ben Barrett-Forrest about his animated history of typography
Ben Barrett-Forrest, from Forrest Media presents a stop-motion version of the history of the history of typography. Since Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of printing using movable type, he goes on to track the different types that have emerged and diverged since Nicolas Jenson’s invention of roman typeface. We asked him a few questions…
A epigraphic journey the side of good and evil
The graphic designer and author, Philippe Buschinger was invited to present his new book during a lecture on February 2013. It was at the Centre Pompidou during the Book Machine project, an event of the fourth edition of the New festival 2013 Centre Pompidou and during which he shared his enthusiasm for the Blackletter, from its use to the reasons of its very frequent use in the contemporary urban landscape!
Handmade signs in Soweto
In September 2012, I was invited to Johannesburg and had a great chance to discover a beautiful country, South Africa. Indeed as typeface designer, one of the first things I look into a new place is the typography, specially signs in the streets.
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.
On type classifications
Classifications of Typefaces is an endless activity. Many books cover the subject, and try to adapt, optimise the system. There is no perfect system, I still use The Vox ATypI system mainly as terminology to describe typefaces. Maximilien Vox, founder of the Rencontres Internationale de Lure, its author said repeatedly that his system should work by combining the names of categories
1995: FF Angie specimen
In 1995, a small A4 specimen about FF Angie was designed.
Type History 2
Featured here is the second part of a small history of type. This history, normally told from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, is from a French perspective, allowing the reader to form one’s own opinion. Part One, covering the origins to the twentieth century is also available.
Type History 1
Featured here is the first part of a small history of type. This history, normally told from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, is from a French perspective, allowing the reader to form one’s own opinion. Part Two, covering the twentieth century and recent history, is also available.
Ambroise in details
The typeface Ambroise is a contemporary interpretation of various typefaces belonging to Didot’s late style, conceived circa 1830, including the original forms of g, y, &; and to a lesser extent, k. These characters are found in Vibert’s typefaces. Vibert was one of the appointed punchcutters of the Didot dynasty. Punch cutting at the time was a hard and long task.