FreeTypography.com is an online magazine about great typography works, fonts, inspirations, portfolios and of course freebies.
We all LOVE to work with typography to create lovely designs, posters and layouts. FreeTypography.com want to show the BEST things in the web.
As of today we’re pleased to announce Typeplate, a free-range and open-source typographic starter kit that will hopefully help you build beautiful, text-rich websites. The word on the street is that the Web Is 95% Typography, so as we hurtle towards the future, we think there’s still a lot we can learn from five centuries of history. Typeplate is the result of this exploration of our typographic heritage.
Coming out of the grunge, graffiti and David Carson era through the ’90s, there has been a major resurgence of interest in typography. We have seen a number of designers and artists make their careers out of designing type or custom lettering, and it has become common to list typography among our skills and disciplines.
Unfortunately, as with any popularity surge, there have come with it a lot of misunderstandings of some of the terms and concepts that we use. This article will help you gain a clearer understanding of what typography is and isn’t, and why.
One rather common example of this is the myriad of blog posts and showcases claiming to display “hand-lettered typography” — I’ve even heard university professors say it. Though the phrase seems to make sense, it’s actually a contradiction in terms — hand-lettering is not typography at all! Before you throw your pens and brushes at me in protest, please let me explain!
Even though lettering and typography share many of the same concepts, and a good eye and understanding of one will enable you in the other as well, they are completely different disciplines. Let’s begin by defining how we understand each term.
Typography is essentially the study of how letterforms interact on a surface, directly relating to how the type will be set when it eventually goes to press. One definition is stated as “the style, arrangement or appearance of typeset matter,” and is a product of the movable type printing system that much of the world has used for centuries. It is related to typesetting and can include type design. In our current digitally-driven design world, this means working with fonts on a daily basis for most of us.
Typography is actually a subset of lettering, because it is the study of letters applied to typefaces. Many designers have also taken up letterpress printing as a hobby or side interest, which also utilizes aspects of typography or typesetting, depending on the project.
The other day someone sent me a link to a website with the preposterous title of “The 100 Best Typefaces of All Time”. Topping the chart was Helvetica, and that stirred my ire. I dismissed the list because it was based on marketing figures from one source, FontShop, coupled with the opinions of half a dozen Berlin-based typographers, but I was still incensed.
When it comes to, say, boxers, you can handicap the various athletes in the ring and predict that Muhammad Ali would beat Jack Johnson or Jim Corbett and that, therefore, he is number one, but a lot of other factors come to bear on your decision: sentimentality, the fact that Ali is acknowledged (by people like me, with no real knowledge of the sport) to be “The Greatest”; he has name recognition, and so on. But how do you evaluate a typeface? Is it just based on its widespread use? Or its suitability to the subject at hand? Ease of reading? Familiarity?
Standard’s forms were designed to perform well at reduced sizes. It has large counterspaces and clean contours, principles of type design that help make legible letters. This set focuses on core shapes and removes unnecessary embellishments that cause crowding and blurry forms. Proportions were guided by 16-, 24-, and 32-px grids.
A symbol font that behaves like it should. Standard’s characters are monospaced so that you don’t have to fuss with horizontal alignment. Glyphs are centered so you have more control when setting your icons. Clean shapes reduce the number of Bézier points used per symbol and keep the overall filesize down.
Nothing like the perfect font. Many brands, movies and entertainment properties utilize custom typography, but the web has gone to great lengths to capture the art of these letters. The results are impressive, and often free for non-commercial use.
A time-full tribute to a timeless typeface.
Sponsored by mypsdtohtml.com. Your PSD TO HTML.
Comic Sans: childish, unsophisticated and overuse in offices, schools, public places. Some have even campaigned to rid the web of it forever!
But despite the haters, French designers Thomas Blanc and Florian Amoneau have sought to spark a movement. Their new Tumblr, entitled the Comic Sans Project, tries to re-imagine the much-maligned font by posing a simple aesthetic question: What if the world’s most recognizable logos used Comic Sans?
Via Mashable
