Visual Designer
Golly gosh, folks, this Sunday, March 8 is International Women’s Day! Isn’t it neat that they let us ladies have a whole day to ourselves? And a whole month to ourselves too? One out of twelve is just nifty! In any case, I thought I’d celebrate the day’s novel status with some typography for this, my cute li’l typography blog, and look for women-oriented fonts.
Skip to here for the #resistance.
Here’s the very first thing I got when I googled “female” and “font” on March 8 last year:
Oxymora is a typeface that evokes the twisting, non-Euclidian geometry of MC Escher’s artwork
Impossible, twisting geometric artwork abounds across the internet (see The Verge‘s logo for one prominent example). So it seems high time that someone made a similarly reality-defying font. “Oxymora” is it, transforming the familiar forms of English letters into bizarre, spatially confused 3D blocks that make your brain hurt. It was created by Barcelona-based illustrator and designer Birgit Palma, who says she was inspired by the work of brain-teasing artist MC Escher. As she tells us:
Not to be confused with my post Found Font Friday 1, the tale of a bitter turn-of-the-20th-century rivalry which led to economically valuable—and artistically priceless—metal type being flung into London’s River Thames, to be recovered only after a lapse of a hundred years.
This post deals with matters cheerier, cheekier, and altogether less grim.
From foundfont.com: FOUNDFONT™ is dedicated to typographic archaeology as well as the use of found typography within design. We create complete type sets based on found examples. Follow us on twitter at @foundfont. Email us at info@foundfont.com
Forensics professionals pay a great deal of attention about what fonts to use in courtroom exhibits concerning or reproducing digital evidence. To quote a paper by Fred Cohen & Associates of the California Sciences Institute [abstract below] “fonts for forensics are less about the beauty of the presentation and more about the tradeoff between readability and being definitive about what is present.” Specifically, from a presentation by Cohen at SADFE, the Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensic Engineering in 2010:
Today we salute fonts that fake text itself. Microdot replaces every character with the placeholder rectangle from regular fonts, and Blokk replaces characters with horizontal lines. Type in either font gives the effect of a block of copy (or headline) without distracting the viewer with content. Both are great for making wireframes or mockups.
Not to be confused with my posts Fake Font Friday 1, Fake Font Friday 2 and Fake Font Friday 4.
A look at most popular fonts used in the logos of famous brands & companies.
Browse and find fonts used in (or similar to) the logos of food and beverage companies and brands.
Part three of five articles concerned with spotting fake Louis Vuitton merchandise. This cool font-related piece is about the font and spacing of the characters in the signature heat-stamped label. Mostly the signals of an authentic label are subtleties of spacing, alignment, and character shape. Font geeks, pull up a chair!
[Heat (hot) stamp] : Authentic Louis Vuitton fonts generally conform to a relatively constrained font that is heat (or hot) stamped into their label. These identifiable characteristics can be broken down and isolated by letter (or letter sequence relationships).
Did you know that Grand Theft Auto and The Price is Right use the same typeface? Totally awesome. It’s Pricedown Black (see below) from font house Typodermic. I discovered this using WhatTheFont, a great online tool that helps you find out what typeface a particular type sample uses. You upload an image, ascertain which characters it displays, and the WhatTheFont bot gives you its best guesses. Alternately, “let cloak-draped font enthusiasts lend a hand in the WhatTheFont Forum.” WTF has enlightened me many times.
Not to be confused with my posts Fake Font Friday 1, Fake Font Friday 3 and Fake Font Friday 4.
