Ralf Herrmann:
Wayfinding & Typography

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) [...]

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 [...]

Type Specimen is a free iPad app to visually browse the fonts of the Czech Suitcase Type Foundry. It can be used to select fonts for projects - be it magazine design, corporate identity design, web applications, or book typesetting. Type Specimen allows you to categorize individual fonts, make comparisons, or see details of specific glyphs.

Four fonts—found on a map of America, created by the spanish cartographer Diego Gutiérrez and the dutch engraver Hieronymus Cock anno 1562.

OpenType is the standard font format of these days. But even 14 years after its introduction, many users don’t really know what the term OpenType implies and how it differs from other font formats. Since I use the domain opentype.info for my weblog, I thought it is time to shed some light on this confusing subject [...]

The typeface Guia by Tânia Raposo has been her final project at the type]media Master in The Hague. “Guia” is the Portuguese word for “Guide”. In this guest article on opentype.info, Tânia explains the development of her typeface.

“The year was 1887. Dierk Einhard Haäfe Master Typographer and Johan VanEngelbert Haph Suspected Wizard were inventing a typography machine to compete with Mergenthaler’s newly unveiled Linotype. With Haäfe’s typography experience and Haph’s scientific and technical know-how, they were sure to revolutionize the design industry. Misjudging the combined radioactive effects of (then unknown) plutonium and [...]