The secret of creativity

Source

Origins of popular typefaces

Download the overview as a PDF here (and ignore the terribly written article, wrong typeface names, Times New Roman classified as a Sans Serif, come on) 

Prestiggio and Mingray from Rekord

Mingray is a stylish monospaced font in three weights

Prestiggio is an elegant display font with many alternate characters and ligatures

KernType, kerning game

Pretty cool game, needs more words and fonts though :)

Reuters

Fontdropper

Some of you may know WebInk, the web fonts service from Extensis, the guys behind Suitcase Font Manager. They offer a pretty cool widget called FontDropper 1000, used for live preview of the fonts on any web page, really any web page, no matter if you have administrative access to it or not.

Using it is very simple, all you do is just drag the bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar, and then drag the fonts out of the preview panel on the text: look how I redesigned the sidebar. Of course the fonts selection is somehow limited to the WebInk library, but the most useful feature (for typophiles) is that the tool also tells you what webfont is being used at the moment (the little rectangle with Benton RE is the font used at ATypI site). It definitely recognizes fonts that are not in the library as well (tested on a site with custom font). Very handy, not having to look into the CSS and all.

Wolda contest winners

The winning entry is pretty cool, but overall I'm a bit disappointed with the level of the short-listed works. My two favourites among them:

Smidgen from House Industries

Nice revival, and it comes with drop shadow style

Brocade

Irma Text

I've always liked Typotheque Irma, the tight spacing, rigid but somehow warm geometric shapes, fun ligatures. But I've also asked myself, y u no lowercase? Now there is the Text version with lowercase and even new Rounded styles. I must say, I didn't expect the Text styles to go in this direction, reminds me of De Groot's Taz a bit (which is not a bad thing at all).

Photolettering catalog

Beautifully done, very fun. The photos don't do it justice, the thin paper is amazing!

Calligraphy on Glass

Calligraphy on Glass from Jonathan Hamilton on Vimeo.

How ligatures are made

by David Schwen who happens to make much more cool stuff

Sexy alphabet

click to enlarge

by the wonderful Malika Favre

Nice cards

All these and more at 55his.com

Marlene Stencil

Nicola Djurek has extended his wonderful Marlene with Stencil styles, which offer 4 alternate swashes per glyph. He's crazy.

Capitolium, Coranto and Pollen

Finally, the magnificent Gerard Unger typefaces can be bought at typetogether or MyFonts. Developed especially as newspaper headlines faces or signage type, they are both very space-saving and have excellent display qualities at the same time. Now if he only would release Gulliver as well ;)

Pollen is a very nice, playful, soft serif by the Brazilian designer Eduardo Berliner

Kieler Woche posters

Kieler Woche is a sailing cup in Germany, and the best thing about it, they ask renowned designers to create new identity every year. Some of the highlights from over 60 years of nice poster design can be found on the homepage (Click Übersicht der eingerichten Entwürfe to see the runner-ups, well worth it)

And here's an overview of winning designs

Of course there's a book on Amazon about it too, only 5 copies left, so hurry up











^ My favourite posters

Times New Rope & Swing City

by Sveinn Davíðsson

Once upon a time

By Carlos Naude

Touchfont

Sexy stuff by i_sunny_smile, m and z are my favourites