Pinboard (coldbrain)

Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo

coldbrain — 2026-01-01T11:41:27+00:00

A brief typographic history of the influential Japanese comic.

Here’s a Thought: What if Letterforms Had More Serifs? – Eye on Design

coldbrain — 2023-04-12T19:01:10+00:00

On the one hand, it’s almost like asking: why can’t people have an extra set of arms at waist level? On the other, the question challenges a venerable assumption about letterform design and leads to some fascinating explorations.

How to bring a language to the future

coldbrain — 2023-04-03T20:55:48+00:00

Typefaces Inspired by the Bauhaus

coldbrain — 2022-05-06T19:17:35+00:00

A Star Is Born | Claire Cock-Starkey

coldbrain — 2022-04-04T20:44:24+00:00

The history of the asterisk.

Acrylic Afternoons on Twitter - a thread about Pulp’s typography

coldbrain — 2021-09-02T18:18:35+00:00

Asterisk

coldbrain — 2021-05-14T21:13:07+00:00

Miscellany № 90: 🌀🪐☆✻, or, the grawlix

coldbrain — 2021-05-04T12:49:21+00:00

The Signs that Make a City

coldbrain — 2021-04-25T21:01:43+00:00

The signs on the street are a measure of how much authorities care about their citizens – and from stylish fonts to neon lights, Britain has a lot to learn from European cities which have used signage to enliven the urban landscape.

Inside The Design: The Case For Better Watch Typography

coldbrain — 2021-03-27T23:25:56+00:00

Watchmakers are master craftspeople. Why do so few invest in lettering?

Leon Sans

coldbrain — 2019-09-06T12:55:40+00:00

Leon Sans is a geometric sans-serif typeface made with code in 2019 by Jongmin Kim.

Fontjoy - Generate font pairings in one click

coldbrain — 2019-08-28T15:17:04+00:00

A neural net approach to finding and using interesting font combinations.

WALL·E

coldbrain — 2018-12-04T15:18:32+00:00

An interpunct is, of course, a vertically centered dot originally used to separate words in Latin and ancient Greek. (Spaces weren’t invented until several centuries later.) The interpunct is still in use today—it’s the official decimal point in British currency (£9·99), and is used to represent the dot product of two vectors in mathematics (x · y). Most relevantly, it’s used in Japanese to separate titles, names, and positions, as in “課長補佐 · 鈴木” (Assistant Section Head · Suzuki). It is therefore entirely appropriate as the separator in WALL·E, which is short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter · Earth Class.

The World’s Scariest Fonts – Magenta

coldbrain — 2018-11-24T10:30:58+00:00

Seriousness. Humor. Quirkiness. Friendliness. Godliness. Sophistication. Immaturity. Typefaces are called upon by designers to instill all sorts of characteristics in text. But what about horror? Can…

Ode to the Dinkus

coldbrain — 2018-06-11T15:53:39+00:00

All I think about 24-7 is the dinkus, a line of three asterisks (* * *) used as a section break in a text.

Johnston 100: A New Typeface for the Underground

coldbrain — 2016-06-15T17:35:14+00:00

Practical Outlier | Grafik

coldbrain — 2016-06-02T09:49:30+00:00

Toshi Omagri looks at the letter ‘c’ from Futura - designed in 1927 by Paul Renner to perfectly accommodate the various idiosyncrasies of his mother tongue.

Kerning, And Other Aspects Of Typography, Explained

coldbrain — 2015-04-27T17:41:28+00:00

Butterick’s Practical Typography

coldbrain — 2013-08-20T12:16:32+00:00

10 Great Google Font Combinations You Can Copy | Design Shack

coldbrain — 2013-01-28T12:10:51+00:00

Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

coldbrain — 2012-12-19T15:43:27+00:00

WhatFont Tool - The easiest way to inspect fonts in webpages « Chengyin Liu

coldbrain — 2012-11-28T09:48:19+00:00

Five simple steps to better typography | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

coldbrain — 2012-10-23T12:06:52+00:00

The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face | NeuroTribes

coldbrain — 2012-06-14T21:18:37+00:00

Graphemica - For people who ♥ letters, numbers, punctuation,

coldbrain — 2012-03-31T13:57:07+00:00

Klim / Retail / Metric & Calibre Design Information

coldbrain — 2012-02-06T15:01:13+00:00

Home | Design in the browser with web fonts and real content — Typecast

coldbrain — 2012-01-25T12:07:27+00:00

The web’s most beautiful typefaces: Try typefaces from the web’s best known web font services. Design with real content: Kiss goodbye to Lorum Ipsum. Get real web content in place, fast. Create HTML & CSS in the browser: Quickly get to a working, standards-compliant prototype.

Figuring Out Numerals – The Sequel | The FontFeed

coldbrain — 2012-01-24T20:08:06+00:00

Figuring Out Numerals | The FontFeed

coldbrain — 2012-01-24T20:07:25+00:00

The League of Moveable Type

coldbrain — 2012-01-23T13:36:47+00:00

Google Web Fonts

coldbrain — 2012-01-23T13:28:20+00:00

Fontdeck web fonts: Real fonts for your website

coldbrain — 2012-01-23T13:03:58+00:00

Font Squirrel | Create Your Own @font-face Kits

coldbrain — 2012-01-23T13:00:41+00:00

Bulletproof @font-face syntax « Paul Irish

coldbrain — 2012-01-23T12:55:29+00:00

Let me introduce you to the best way to do your @font-face definitions:

Slide Design for Developers

coldbrain — 2011-11-05T08:37:19+00:00

My slides are not designed for people who didn’t see the talk in person. They’re designed to support my words, not some online audience. What’s more, many commented that they found the design of the slides to be noteworthy. I’m expressly not a designer.

Information Architects – The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard

coldbrain — 2011-10-07T10:44:17+00:00

The basic rule is: 10 to 15 words per line. For liquid layouts, at 100% font size, 50% column width (in relation to window size) is a good benchmark for most screen resolutions.

Typography of Apple Inc. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

coldbrain — 2011-09-16T10:37:51+00:00

Typography of Apple Inc. refers to Apple Inc.’s use of typefaces in marketing, operating systems, and industrial design. Apple has used three corporate fonts throughout its history: Motter Tektura, Apple Garamond and Adobe Myriad.

H&FJ News | Hoefler & Frere-Jones

coldbrain — 2011-09-06T08:37:17+00:00

Until its OED entry is solemnized, we’ll have to settle for this definition on Wiktionary: “grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.” I don’t think I’ll ever look at a character set quite the same way again.

The History Page: Exactly your type - WWW.THEDAILY.COM

coldbrain — 2011-08-17T17:16:54+00:00

It’s in State Department memos, vintage pages of Woman’s Home Companion and your inbox: Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface in the world — and one of the most controversial. For more than half a century, it was attributed to a titan in the field of typography, Stanley Morison. But in the late 1980s, a Canadian printer discovered that Morison might have plagiarized the classic font.

How To Type Symbols, Accents, and Special Characters

coldbrain — 2011-08-16T12:34:42+00:00

How to type symbols, accents, special characters, and weird punctuation

Mind Your En And Em Dashes: Typographic Etiquette - Smashing Magazine

coldbrain — 2011-08-16T12:34:13+00:00

An understanding of typographic etiquette separates the master designers from the novices. A well-trained designer can tell within moments of viewing a design whether its creator knows how to work with typography. Typographic details aren’t just inside jokes among designers. They have been built up from thousands of years of written language, and applying them holds in place long-established principles that enable typography to communicate with efficiency and beauty. Handling these typographic details on the Web brings new challenges and restrictions that need to be considered. Below are a few rules of thumb that will have you using typography more lucidly than ever before.

Typography Insight: iPad App Teaches Fonts Like Never Before - Rebecca Greenfield - Life - The Atlantic

coldbrain — 2011-06-13T14:47:26+00:00

Learning the subtleties of Helvetica and Garamond used to be a pain—but a sleek new app has made the process easier

“What Font Should I Use?”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces - Smashing Magazine

coldbrain — 2011-05-22T15:54:07+00:00

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

A List Apart: Articles: More Meaningful Typography

coldbrain — 2011-05-03T13:10:47+00:00

Wrapping Long URLs and Text Content with CSS • Perishable Press

coldbrain — 2011-04-20T13:53:31+00:00

To wrap long URLs, strings of text, and other content, just apply this carefully crafted chunk of CSS code to any block-level element (e.g., perfect for

 tags)

helveticons

coldbrain — 2011-04-19T15:30:28+00:00

Royalty-free vector icons, glyphs and symbols based on the Helvetica Bold typeface

TK TYPE > Chartwell

coldbrain — 2011-03-08T09:16:32+00:00

Chartwell is a family that explores the use of OpenType to interpret and visualize data. The font format is highly portable and can be used in any application that supports standard ligatures. The data also remains editable allowing for easy updates.

Comic Sans Criminal - There's help available for people like you!

coldbrain — 2011-02-19T14:55:32+00:00

Steve Heller hunts down a Nazi graphics standards manual : Observatory: Design Observer

coldbrain — 2011-02-08T10:47:45+00:00

Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.

Typograph – Scale

coldbrain — 2011-02-01T21:18:23+00:00

This page falls somewhere between a tool and an essay. It sets out to explore how the intertwined typographic concepts of scale and rhythm can be encouraged to shake a leg on web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you can play upon it.

Cooper Black - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

coldbrain — 2011-01-22T16:40:07+00:00

Cooper Black is a heavily weighted, old style serif typeface designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper in 1921 and released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry in 1922. The typeface is drawn as an extra bold weight of Cooper Old Style.

Doyen of type design: The most-read man in the world | The Economist

coldbrain — 2011-01-15T15:53:30+00:00

MATTHEW CARTER, a type designer and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, was recently approached in the street near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A woman greeted him by name. "Have we met?" Mr Carter asked. No, she said, her daughter had pointed him out when they were driving down the street a few days before. "Is your daughter a graphic designer?" he inquired. "She's in sixth grade," came the reply.

iOS Fonts

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T18:22:32+00:00

There’s more than one way for developers to access fonts. This list is based on cycling through UIFont. However, there are a few more fonts available via Core Text. I’m debating on a design for displaying Core Text fonts in a meaningful way.

FAQ Pronunciation | Typophile

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T11:35:12+00:00

Following is a list of names and their correct pronunciations (using English orthography).

Inconsolata

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T10:41:06+00:00

Inconsolata is my first serious original font release. It is a monospace font, designed for code listings and the like, in print. There are a great many "programmer fonts," designed primarily for use on the screen, but in most cases do not have the attention to detail for high resolution rendering.

True to type: why letters are a labour of love | Art and design | The Observer

coldbrain — 2010-12-30T10:02:56+00:00

From easyJet to Facebook, road signs to clothing labels, we are surrounded by a world of type. But what messages do its different kinds convey? In this extract from his new book, Just My Type, Simon Garfield looks at the history of typefaces, the obsessive care taken over their design – and the role they play in shaping our lives.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts: Amazon.co.uk: Simon Garfield: Books

coldbrain — 2010-12-04T16:35:02+00:00

Frank Chimero

coldbrain — 2010-12-04T16:11:36+00:00

Typography belongs to the people. Typography does not belong to graphic designers. Visual communication, like verbal communication belongs to all. Just as we are all free to speak, we should all be allowed to communicate graphically. Trained designers are not the only ones who have earned the right to do so. Designers who stand in opposition to such “untrained” communication stand in the way of democracy and the right to speak our minds.

How to Understand Typography Like a Professional Designer - How-To Geek

coldbrain — 2010-12-04T15:37:35+00:00

Typography is so overwhelmingly ever-present we hardly notice it there anymore. As elemental as it is to our culture, it’s actually bizarre to think it has a history at all. This article will serve as a condensed education on the basics of typography, including typographic terms, proper usage of fonts, unusual characters, and history.

How many grammatical errors can you spot here? | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

coldbrain — 2010-11-25T16:26:24+00:00

Dribbble - Vintage by Dan Cederholm

coldbrain — 2010-11-24T16:17:32+00:00

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 11px Verdana will never go out of fashion: http://drbl.in/mf

Vintage Threads | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

coldbrain — 2010-11-21T12:38:13+00:00

Small treasures. Most of these are wooden spools. My favourite is the small spool of "service khaki", it's only an inch high.

FF Enzo Web | Typekit

coldbrain — 2010-11-16T08:59:37+00:00

Enzo is a vigorous sans serif consisting of five weights, ranging from Thin to Black. Designed by Tobias Kvant, it was inspired by type from the past as well as from the present, giving it quite a unique look. Its short ascenders and descenders makes it a good headline face, ideal for magazines, posters and such, but it will work fine for body text as well.

Best Practices of Combining Typefaces - Smashing Magazine

coldbrain — 2010-11-11T11:52:33+00:00

Creating great typeface combinations is an art, not a science. Indeed, the beauty of typography has no borders. While there are no absolute rules to follow, it is crucial that you understand and apply some best practices when combining fonts in a design. When used with diligence and attention, these principles will always yield suitable results. Today we will take a close look at some the best practices for combining typefaces — as well as some blunders to avoid.

A List Apart: Articles: The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)

coldbrain — 2010-10-23T14:13:23+00:00

The dawn of the web has frequently been compared to the invention of the printing press. But the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since Gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type. The printing press gave us type that was clearer and easier to read than that produced from a typewriter, because the typesetter had additional tools at his disposal—and knew how to use them. The web has cost us some of those tools.

CopyPasteCharacter.com

coldbrain — 2010-09-14T07:42:35+00:00

Copy and paste special characters.

Tungsten | Hoefler

coldbrain — 2010-09-10T10:06:59+00:00

Combines with Gotham Rounded

iPad Fonts Petition – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

coldbrain — 2010-08-17T17:57:31+00:00

Please either add the ability to retain fonts (and all their settings) when importing Keynote, Pages, and Numbers documents from computer to iPad, or else please create a simple font management tool for the iPad that allows us to import a reasonable subset of our fonts to the device.

Helvetica (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

coldbrain — 2010-08-15T14:43:48+00:00

Gary Hustwit's Helvetica was fascinating. Lots of strong opinions for and against a 50-y-o typeface. http://bit.ly/27hKTm

Arno Pro-Regular « MyFonts

coldbrain — 2010-08-01T14:11:38+00:00