Six Mooc with Jean François Porchez about typographic design in French
The Mooc Digital Media Paris was created by the City of Paris school, EPSAA. This is a serie of online videos through their transversalities address many issues around the digital world. Dominique Moulon came to Typofonderie in February 2016 to meet Jean François Porchez and talk about typography and design. The six videos are online, enjoy.
Nationality and Type design
Nationality does not apply easily to type and culture, as Yvonne Schwemer Scheddin has said: ‘The concept of “nation” is political, whereas script is connected directly to language and its geographic linguistic areas.’ A couple of centuries ago, languages, scripts and the typefaces which represented them were intrinsically related to each other. Earlier Roman capitals became the typographic system dedicated to monumental inscriptions during the Roman Empire, and later the Carolingian minuscule was adopted as the official script for all of the Charlemagne Empire…
History of typographic writing: the 19th century French style
Published by Atelier Perrousseaux, this voluminous opus History of typographic writing: the 19th century French style, of nearly 400 pages is once again an erudite body of work with a great wealth of information. It covers not only what is most famous & important in French typography in the 19th Century, like the Didot family characters (which take central stage in the book) but also aspects which are sometimes rather under-valued: for example, the influence of English typography on the French type designers of the time, the importance of the rebirth of the Elzévirs (old face) or the invention of fancy characters.
Year book of type, a typographic compendium
Year Book Of Type is a book collecting the best of digital typographic production in the past 2 or 3 years: Typefaces of both students and well-known designers are shown evenly. Each font its double page, one page with some informations about the author and other existing glyphs, and the other page with a specimen created by the designer himself.
In use: Done not done meet Parisine Plus
Among the many applications and TodoList web services, Done not Done is a rather atypical case since it allows the user to focus not on what he “should”, but rather on what he “wants” to do. Here, your desires are classified into three categories: watching, reading, listening. We are far from a stressful TodoList, the “Done not done” look and feel is fun and it is noticeable immediately.
The rich diversity of Deberny et Peignot’s specimens
What is fabulous with old typefaces specimens, is that the source seems inexhaustible. It brings us wonderful surprises around everytime. During the weekend organized by the Rencontres internationales de Lure, the Flea market Typo 2013, we acquired a few things, including these series of mini-specimens created at Deberny and Peignot…
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!
Amplify the content
The question of harmony between the form, the layout, and the content of a book is one of the most recurrent and fundamental questions in graphic design. This problem is the same than is character design. Have the support of the information to be invisible to convey it better, like a crystal glass, or can it have a personality that serves the content? In our recent readings three books arised that illustrate this question quite well. They beneficiate all three of a very polished but original layout work that allows not just to transmit the content but to amplify it.
Time to read
2012 has truly been a year full of work at Typofonderie. Enjoying the begining of a new year, the readings late for some months have been made with pleasure. Among them some books rise by the qualities of their contents or layouts.
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.