Ralf Herrmann: Wayfinding & Typography |

2011/06/14

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

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. [...]

2011/06/09

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Typographic Week 23—Vintage, Poems & Paintings

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. [...]

2011/05/27

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Typographic Week 21

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 [...]

2011/05/17

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Traffic Sign Typefaces: East Germany

In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) the road traffic regulations were revised in the 1970s. The GDR had signed the treaty of the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals (1969) and in the years 1974 till 1978 the official norm for the design and content of road signs was changed significantly. The new, quite remarkable layout also [...]

2011/04/25

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The Onion Layer Model of Legibility

“Legiblity … a word that can lead into an ocean of misunderstanding and argument” R. Hague, 1936 (via Dear Reader) With this posting I am starting a series of articles that explore the meaning and myths of legibility and readability. In this first article I am gonna start with the definition of terms and the [...]

2011/04/13

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Wayfinding symbols with OpenType magic

The beta testers of our Wayfinding Sans typeface kept asking us about support for signage pictograms. So we finally gave in. Here is a quick video preview of where we are today. Wayfinding Sans Symbols (Preview) from Ralf Herrmann on Vimeo. I would be happy receive feedback about it. A general symbol set can never [...]

2011/04/10

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Wayfinding in different frames of reference

“Orientation in space (and time) is the framework of cognition […] we take delight in physically distinctive, recognizable locales, and attach our feelings and meaning to them. They make us feel at home, grounded.” Kevin Lynch The word orientation is derived from Latin oriens, meaning East. It stems from the mediaeval practice of drawing maps with [...]