Ralf Herrmann: Wayfinding & Typography » Typography

More amazing Type Specimen and Printing Books/Brochures

Ralf Herrmann — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:21:48 +0000

Just some days ago, I updated my article Rare Type Specimens at the Open Library. In a comment, a user suggested another great resource: The Silver Buckle Press Collection. Silver Buckle Press is a working museum of letterpress printing dedicated to preserving the craft of fine printing through educational programming, publications, exhibitions and tours. The [...]

Info graphic: Development of the Major Outline Font Formats

Ralf Herrmann — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:03:00 +0000

For years I try to explain to people, what OpenType really means and in which way it differs from TrueType and in which way it doesn’t. And I explain to people that it is safe to use a Windows TrueType font on the Mac in the year 2012 … (See my older article OpenType myths [...]

Tricycle Calligraphy

Ralf Herrmann — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:52:51 +0000

Media Artist Nicholas Hanna built a tricycle that can also paint Chinese characters on the ground as it moves. Water Calligraphy has a long history in China, normally characterized by older Chinese men painting characters on the ground of parks with long brushes and water. But Nicholas’ version is a wee bit more complicated … [...]

Cities and their typographic associations

Ralf Herrmann — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:37:21 +0000

In this series of videos for the EF International Language Centers the director Gustav Johansson captures the stories of three different students who travel abroad to study a new language. Everywhere they go they communicate in the local language and pick up new vocabulary, illustrated with gorgeous artifact-style typography by Albin Holmqvist. The first four “Live the language” films shot [...]

Hooptie Script—Two Typefaces inspired by the Motor City

Ralf Herrmann — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:54:45 +0000

Detroit—a city of extremes. A third of the city lies derelict, and many buildings have been or are about to be torn down. But at the beginning of the 20th century Detroit was one of the boomtowns of North America, representing the birthplace and the center of the American car industry. The city’s wealth was reflected in [...]

Dusty signs

Ralf Herrmann — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:09:06 +0000

Traditional hand-lettering by Dan Madsen. → more from him at dustysigns.com

Capital Sharp S explained to Typographers (screencast)

Ralf Herrmann — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:33:07 +0000

In my talk together with Nadine Roßa at the ATypI conference 2011 in Reykjavík I explained why Germany and Austria need a capital Eszett character today. For those who couldn’t be there, I made a screencast of my talk, which can be seen and commented here. Keep in mind, that this talk was made for [...]

Empirical study about the legibility of typefaces used on signs in public space

Ralf Herrmann — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:51:46 +0000

At the University of Applied Sciences Berlin an empirical study was conducted by Sven Neumann to test the legibility of nine typefaces, including my own Wayfinding Sans typeface. The use of type in this study was based on the recommendations of the German legibility norm DIN 1450. This ensured that the study reflected a real-world [...]

How to draw a Capital Sharp S

Ralf Herrmann — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:12:45 +0000

In a previous article I already explained the need for an uppercase counterpart for the German lowercase letter ß. At AtypI 2011 I talked about this topic again. Here you can watch a screencast of my presentation: Unfortunately I didn’t had time to discuss the possible shapes of this character in this talk. So I [...]

What makes letters legible?

Ralf Herrmann — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:22:01 +0000

In the last articles of this series we have established the relevant terms of legibility and learned what we know about the reading of words in the latin script. Now we move on to the legibility of letters itself. What makes the letter of one typeface more legible than the one from another typeface? Is [...]

Walbaum Type Specimen in high resolution

Ralf Herrmann — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:25:30 +0000

The type designer Justus Erich Walbaum was born in 1768 and started his career in a spice shop. His skill of making baking pans lead him to engrave steel plates for printing music books and later he started to cut letters. Around 1800 he designed the serif typeface Walbaum Antiqua and the corresponding italics (Walbaum Kursiv) [...]

A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script

Ralf Herrmann — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:13:23 +0000

Rajesh Rao is fascinated by “the mother of all crossword puzzles”: How to decipher the 4000 year old Indus script. At TED 2011 he tells how he is enlisting modern computational techniques to read the Indus language, the key piece to understanding this ancient civilization. Video does’t show up? Watch it at TED.

How do we read words and how should we set them?

Ralf Herrmann — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:07:50 +0000

In the last article of this series we have established the relevant terms around legibility. Now we move on to the process of reading itself. As you probably know, our eyes don’t move continuously along a line of text. Instead we perform so-called saccades, fast eye movements from one word or phrase to the next. [...]

Typographic Week 23—Vintage, Poems & Paintings

Ralf Herrmann — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:07:43 +0000

Poem Script from Sudtipos Poem Script by Ale Paul is a mixed collection of interpretations conjuring a late nineteenth century American pen script style. Though not an actual Italian letterform, this style was called “Italian Alphabet” stemming from an old penman’s term for an alphabet where the stress or shades are opposite their normal placement. [...]

Typographic Week 21

Ralf Herrmann — Fri, 27 May 2011 13:37:42 +0000

Letters in Stone Maud Bekaert from Brugge, Belgium carves letters in stone. There are beautiful carvings available at http://www.letterwebshop.com. Apart from the shop items, name plates, tombstones, inauguration stones, house numbers, wedding and birth stones, or any other application of letter carving can be commissioned. Font Editor Glyphs Glyphs is a new font editor developed [...]