#8 faces

8 Faces: Collected — Last chance to pre-order

At long last, we're about to send 8 Faces: Collected — our 540-page hardcover book — off to print, and we're very happy to announce that pre-orders are now open once again! You can pre-order your copy today and it will be shipped in early May.

Xu Bing: The fusion of English and Chinese

First, we recently announced that Type Designer, Toshi Omagari, is our new interviewees for the forthcoming book, 8 Faces Collected. 

Toshi discusses his work on playful designs, such as Sir Quentin Blake’s handwriting typeface and the variable width typeface, Cowhand, through to his groundbreaking Tibetan designs for the monolithic Noto Sans for Google.

During the interview Toshi introduced me to the work of artist, Xu Bing, and described how it had sparked an idea for a typeface.

Xu Bing developed his unique square word calligraphy, that fuses written English words with the square format of Chinese characters. Although the arrangement of the letters within the English words are altered to form the square shapes they remain legible. Each then takes on the form of an ideogram and symbolises a thought within a word. 

The above reads: Square word Xu Bing

It becomes easy to read once you become attuned to the structure of the words. For example the top image on this post reads: “Art for the people Xu Bing”

The one beneath it reads:

Jack and Jill Went up the hill To fetch a pail of water Jack fell down And broke his crown And Jill came tumbling after Nursery Rhymes Five Xu Bing

Can you decipher these?

8 Faces: Collected

We’re re-designing and re-editing all 8 issues of typography magazine 8 Faces — and adding new content — to make a huge, hardback book.

We need your support to make it. We’ve decided to crowdfund the book’s production on Kickstarter.

Publishing a print magazine about typography and lettering might’ve seemed a risky endeavour in an internet-centric world, but it was a hit. Issue #1 sold out in a couple of hours and between July 2010 and May 2014 every issue followed suit. (Even we only have one copy of #3!)

Over the course of 8 Faces’ life, we interviewed 64 graphic designers, web designers, illustrators, and artists, and set some beautiful type specimens for their eight favourite typefaces.

Since the publishing the final issue we’ve had requests for back issues on all our social media channels, by email, and from friends and colleagues in the industry. For this reason — and because we want o go back and re-design and re-edit the content to turn it into the best that it can be — we’ve decide to create a book.

Brand new content

This isn’t simply a repackaging of our old issues. Since the magazine finished, our blog has been going from strength to strength and now attracts over 220,000 followers on Tumblr. It’s seen as one of the leading typography destinations on the web and we have a wealth of great online content that we want to put in the book.

We’re going further than that, though. We’ll be conducting a number of new interviews exclusively for the book and we’ll be including a handy reference of every typeface chosen by our interviewees. There will also be space dedicated to reprinting the artwork prints we produced over the magazine’s lifetime.

All of this will be presented in one big, beautiful, hardback book. And when we say ‘big’, it’ll be over 500 pages! It’s going to be a beast. Oh, and Erik Spiekermann has agreed to write our foreword.

This book is going to be costly to produce and we have a lot of work ahead of us, but we can do it with your support — no matter how small.

The Type Worship blog was created by Jamie Clarke in 2011. It started as a personal research aid, a place to collect inspirational type and lettering together with notes and commentary. The blog grew rapidly and gained support from Tumblr. Type Worship is now one of the largest type and lettering blogs, with a following of over 230,000 type enthusiasts.

Over the years we’ve interviewed many designers, featured educational and research articles and even commissioned a typographic Advent calendar. A selection of this content can be found in our Top Posts section.

“Need to go back to 8Faces more: blog.8faces.com great blog about type & typography.” Erik Spiekermann

Affiliations and Editorial Policy

The opinions expressed are those of the editor and images shown are the property of their copyright holders. We write about whatever we find interesting or relevant, regardless of industry connections or sponsorship status.

Type Worship is the official blog of 8 Faces magazine. The blog joined forces with Elliot Jay Stocks’ well respected bi-annual in 2012. The magazine ran to eight editions and a book which will collected together all of the great content and interviews from the past four years.

Available at last, the final issue of 8 Faces magazine.

The penultimate issue of 8 Faces will be available this Friday

That’s right, type lovers: There are only two more issues to go and the  seventh and penultimate issue of our highly collectable magazine will be available to order from 8faces.com this Friday at 4pm BST.

This issue features interviews with design and typography legends:

Michael Bierut, Tomas Brousil, Georg Salden, Hannes Von Döhren, Phil Baines, Ken Barber, and Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko of Emigre.

We’ve also got essays from Christopher Murphy and Typekit’s Bram Stein, and a foreword written by Adrian Shaughnessy.

Typographer’s top typefaces

If you could use just eight typefaces, which would you choose? In each issue 8 Faces magazine asks this question to eight leading designers from the fields of lettering, typography, and of course type design itself.

So far we interviewed 48 world-renowned designers including Erik Spiekermann, Jessica Hische, Yves Peters and Ale Paul, plus owners of type foundries such as H&FJ, Font Smith and Process Type. Between all of them 336 typefaces have been chosen so far.

With well over 100,000 possibly options there is some surprising consensus on their favourite fonts. Here’s the list so far, together with the number of times each typeface was chosen:

Georgia (9) Matthew Carter, 1993. Designed for screen display for Microsoft and still features on millions of websites. Jason Santa Maria: “A gorgeous technical achievement”.

Gotham (7) Tobias Frere-Jones, 2000. Famously used for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. H&FJ: “Each character just feels ‘normal’ and ‘right’.”

Caslon (Adobe Caslon) (5) (William Caslon I, 1722) Carol Twombly, 1990. Gave rise to a printer’s saying “When in doubt, use Caslon” Also a favourite of Benjamin Franklin.

FF Scala (5) Martin Majoor, 1990. FontShop International’s “first serious text face”. John Boardley: “Scala and Scala San are just about perfect”.

Akzidenz Grotesk (4) Berthold Type Foundry, 1896. The first widely used sans serif typeface. Nina Stössinger: “It’s spark of charm and character are still most welcome today.”

Alternate Gothic (4) Morris Fuller Benton, 1903. Currently used on YouTube’s homepage logo. Mark Simonson “Very well designed and drawn. It’s a standard that I strive for in my own work”

Fedra Sans (4) Peter Bilak, 2001. With a very large x-height this typeface was designed to work equally well on paper and screen.

FF Meta Serif (4) Erik Spiekermann, Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby 2007. The serif companion to Spiekermann’s influential sans serif, FF Meta. Also designed to work well with FF Unit and FF Unit Slab.

Metro (4) William Addison Dwiggins, 1930. Designed out of a dissatisfaction with the san serifs of the time like Futura.

Caecilia (3) Peter Matthias Noordzij, 1990. A humanist rather than geometric sans serif aiding its legibility.

Chaparral (3), Carol Twombly, 2000. A “hybrid slab-serif” text face that mixes the legibility of 19th Century designs with 16th century panache.

ITC Franklin Gothic (3) Morris Fuller Benton, 1902. Designed for the American Type Founders Company named after Benjamin Franklin.

Gill Sans (3) Eric Gill, 1926. A quintessential British design though it’s eccentricities make it notoriously tricky to use well. A mix of humanist and geometric shapes.

Helvetica (3) Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann 1957. Helvetica needs no introduction as the planet’s most famous typeface—it even inspired a very good film.

Hoefler Text (3) Jonathan Hoefler,1991. Designed for Apple to demonstrate advanced type technologies it reintroduced type design traditions once central to fine printing like ligature sets, engraved capitals, Ornaments and Arabesques.

ITC Officina (3) Erik Spiekermann, 1990. A paired family of serif and sans serif faces, originally designed as a typeface for business correspondence but found a much wider trendier audience.

Sentinel (3) Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones, 2009. “For everyone who’s ever wished Clarendons had italics”. Three of our interviewees so far had. A slab serif suitable for both text and display.

Trade Gothic (3) Jackson Burke, 1948/1960. Michael Bierut described it as “the ultimate ‘I don’t give a damn’ typeface. No style, no nuance, just blunt, in-your-face, straightforward attitude.”

8 Faces teams up with Typekit

8 Faces founder Elliot Jay Stocks spends his days as the Creative Director of web font provider Adobe Typekit, who are teaming up with the magazine to offer a free copy of 8 Faces #6 to all new (or upgrading) Performance or Business plan customers.