Awesome Typography

This incredible book is a 1,264-page tribute to one of the first and most important digital type foundries. Edited by Rudy VanderLans, it compiles nearly 40 years of inventive type specimens, design insights, and print ephemera from the trailblazing Emigre font studio. An essential addition to an design lover’s collection.

Designers Graham Plumb and Stephen Braitsch collaborated on this amazing mechanical display that uses a series of 180 magnets to write text in a pool of ferrofluid. They built 10 custom machines which are programmed to raise and lower magnets, creating the segmented letters in the oily fluid.

Husband and wife design team Gareth Smith & Jenny Lee’s typographic short film plays a clever visual trick, simulating the physics of what might happen if all of the letters on advertising signage started to break loose from their appropriate locations, and came to rest in totally haphazard ways.

Director Dimitri Basil’s music video for the Joywave track Obsession is both a tribute to and a loving parody of vintage movie title sequences, featuring an array of convincing, but fake opening credits for spaghetti westerns, exploitation flicks, B-movies, and much more. Quentin Tarantino would be proud.

Graphic and motion designer Vinicius Araujo envisioned iconic industrial designs from electronics brands as Helvetica letter forms corresponding to their brand names. We’d love to see actual products designed this way. Check out the full alphabet in his Behance portfolio.

Designed by Paul Renner in 1927, Futura became the first widely used sans serif font and remains a popular choice because of its efficient and clean design. Vox put on its Wes Anderson hat to sum up the font’s history.

It’s the world’s most derided and improperly used typeface, but there’s no denying that Comic Sans is iconic. Great Big Story introduces us to Vincent Connare, the typographer who came up with the casual font while working at Microsoft, and explains its genesis.

Vox looks at the history and evolution of comic book lettering. The most well known style – all caps, italicized, and with consistent thickness – was developed to make text easier to read on cheap paper. But there are dozens of comic book fonts and lettering styles.

Creative studio Nelson Cash made a web app that lets you make your own text in the style of Stranger Things’ title design. You can download the image, tweet it, or post it on Facebook.

Stranger Things’ title sequence is a perfect complement to the show’s ’80s aesthetic. Vox spoke with the folks who made the sequence, Imaginary Forces – who also made the openers for Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Jessica Jones, etc. – about their project.

Dan Perri has created titles and title sequences for Star Wars IV, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York and more. He spoke with the Oscars about his career, his tools and his penchant for adapting rather than stamping his own style to the movie he’s working on.

Vox once again asking the right questions. The infamous Wingdings was never meant to be used as a substitute for letters. Like its predecessor, its characters are meant to be used to decorate a page. Some symbols also stand in for words, i.e. as emoticons.

Dangerdust is the moniker of two (partially) anonymous Columbus College of Art & Design students. Every week, they make impressive typographic chalk art of a memorable quote and leave it on campus. Learn more about them here.

(NSFW: Language) The music video for Aerosol Can features an ill typographic time-lapse, achieved with the help of graffiti and tattoo artist Mike Giant and creative studio Abel14. The song is from Major Lazer’s latest EP Apocalypse Soon.

A stop-motion animation about the origin and the pivotal developments in the field of typography. Ben Barrett-Forrest does a great job of explaining the differences and the rationale behind different typefaces.

Wonderful posters with imagery made using food and ingredients. Visual communication design student Nina Harcus made them for a story/recipe book about a chef who falls in love with typography.