Typography Tuesday

ANNA SIMONS and WILLY WIEGAND

Here are some calligraphic initials by the German calligrapher and type designer Anna Simons (1871–1951), paired with a proprietary typeface designed by German type designer and fine press publisher Willy Wiegand (1884-1961) for his Bremer Presse. From 1918 to 1934, Simons designed over 1400 initials and titles the press. Weigand himself designed the typeface used for the press, known today as Bremer Antiqua, designed in 1911. The typeface was cut by Louis Hoell and cast at the Bauer type foundry, and is based on the fonts of incunabula printers Adolf Rusch and Johann and Wendelin de Spira.

The examples shown here are from an Italian edition of Dante's La Divina Commedia printed in Munich at the Bremer Presse in 1921. Every initial designed for this book by Simons is unique, as can be seen here in the examples of A, P, and Q. Our copy is a gift from our late friend Jerry Buff (1931-2025).

View more posts on the designs of Anna Simons.

Typography Tuesday

Clay Type Design

Here are some examples of letter faces made from clay and plasticine from our copy of The Making of Artistic Typefaces by 50 international designers published in 2016 by SendPoints Publishing in Hong Kong.

LudoSans is a handcrafted sans serif typeface by artist David Luepschen and designer Janina Sitzmann using Plasticine, wax, pigments, and a knife. Their purpose was to animate the typeface using a Strata-Cut method, a form of stop motion animation invented during the 1920s and 1930s by German animator Oskar Fischinger. You can view their animation here.

The San Diego Latino Film Festival Poster was created in clay by Mexican designer Rodrigo Zarain Rojas for the contest at the Media Arts Center of San Diego. He used white clay to model the icons and fonts, arranged them on a wooden surface, photographed the layout and imported it to Photoshop, and used a Wacom tablet to create the colors.

Using clay and sculpting tools, Barcelona-based designers Alex Palazzi, Eudald Carré, and Mio Ouchi created the Arial Family as an experimental series that investigates a relationship between typography and the human body. Changes in the font ‘weight’ are imagined as physical sizes of the human body, spelled out using an Arial font. Black, bold, regular and light variations are visualized with a realistic texture that mimics the skin, with wrinkles, folds, moles and bones intricately spelling out the typeface name.

Polish designer Justyna Rzepa created Zupa using Plasticine modeled into vegetables. The project was for a poster to encourage making and eating soups. Saturated colors were intended to bring to mind the deliciousness of fresh vegetables.

Awesome is also by Alex Palazzi. Letters were carved from a clay base, placed on a stand of thin dowels, then refined and smoothed, and finally covered in dripping slime.

View more designs from The Making of Artistic Typefaces.

Typography Tuesday

Will Bradley (1868-1962) was an American letterpress printer and book and type designer. He helped revitalize commercial design and is well-noted for his typeface designs, especially his Bradley Ornaments that he designed toward the end of his life. Shown here are drawings for some of his designs, assembled with a biographical text by Pasadena writer and printing enthusiast Jane Apostol (1922-2016) and printed as a commemorative pamphlet in 1976 by Vance Gerry (1929-2005) at his The Weather Bird Press in Pasadena in an edition of 200 copies.

View other posts on Will Bradley.

Typography Tuesday

PLANTS & FLOWERS

This week we bring you a few experimental fonts made with flowers and plants from The Making of Artistic Typefaces by 50 international designers published in 2016 by SendPoints Publishing in Hong Kong. Shown here:

Blossom Type: handcrafted with natural flowers with Photoshp for color correction by designers Nikita Shchykin and Alice Mourou of Oddity Studio based in Hong Kong.

Wanto 3 Aroma Living: letterform overlaid with a flower arrangement from Victor Design Corp.

Garden, Flowers, and Ice: as the name implies, this font, designed by Manuel Persa of Voluminica based in Asturias, Spain, is made using wild flowers placed in letter-shaped silicone molds, filled with water and frozen, and then removed from the mold.

Good Vibes: typographical wooden frame filled with living moss, designed by Camilo Rojas of CR-eate based in Miami.

Good Enough: original clay pottery with small plants as an illustration in the Dutch Volkskrat Magazine from the design studio Autobahn based n Haarlem and Rotterdam.

View more designs from The Making of Artistic Typefaces.

Typography Tuesday

Portuguese designer Ivan Alves created the Wild Potato font for Nor267 design studio in Porto, Portugal. Although used to working digitally, the designers for this project got off their computer screens and approached their work in a different way, creating a typeface made from handcrafted potato stamps. After three days of cutting, drying, painting, stamping, and drying again, the alphabet was finally completed. Then all the letters were scanned and turned into the digital font known today as Wild Potato.

These images are from The Making of Artistic Typefaces by 50 international designers published in 2016 by SendPoints Publishing in Hong Kong.

View more designs from The Making of Artistic Typefaces.

Typography Tuesday

QUILLING

Today we bring you some typographic designs based in the practice of quilling, the practice of using rolled paper strips to create forms. Shown here are designs by Lori Lennon, Ceres Lau, and Noelia Lozano. These images are from a compilation of typographic designs, The Making of Artistic Typefaces by international designers published in 2016 by SendPoints Publishing in Hong Kong.

Typography Tuesday

Today we present a few pages from the 1968 edition of Hermann Zapf’s classic typographic design publication Manuale Typographicum, handset and printed in an edition of 1000 copies signed and numbered by Zapf at Officin Ludwig Oehms in Frankfurt am Main for Zapf’s own Z-Presse. The first edition appeared in 1954 in an oblong quarto. The book displays “100 typographical arrangements with considerations about types, typography and the art of printing selected from past and present, printed in eighteen languages.” Zapf writes:

Perhaps this book can help to bring the complexities of type and typography within the grasp of those plain readers who today tend to consider type a commonplace unworthy of further regard. Very few take thought of the development of the alphabet, to which every generation, as in architecture and fine art, has added its own contribution. But we best honor the achievements of the past when, inspired by their tutelage, we design for our own contemporary printing, alphabets suited to the industrial design of our century.

Our copy is another generous gift from Jerry Buff. Click on the images for more details.