Typography Books

Hello, I am Erik: Erik Spiekermann: Typographer, Designer, Entrepreneur.

Erik Spiekermann is one of the best-known typographers and graphic designers in the world. As a teacher and critic who is loved and feared in equal measure, his influence on contemporary graphic design is unparalleled. Spiekermann also represents German typeface and corporate design like no other. 

Hello, I am Erik is the first-ever visual biography of Erik Spiekermann’s work. The book documents his projects, traces milestones in his life, and offers his personal perspectives on design. Essays by notable designers and authors provide a framework and further context for this vivid presentation of his body of work.

With his design of guidance systems for the Berliner Vekehrsbetriebe (Berlin’s transportation authority) and Düsseldorf Airport as well as his typeface design for Deutsche Bahn (Germany’s national rail system), Spiekermann made sure that not only Germans could better find their way around. With his corporate identities for brands such as Audi, Volkswagen, and Bosch, he also helped establish a sensibility for corporate design in Germany. Yet Spiekermann has also always worked internationally. He is, to name but one example, responsible for the redesign of the magazine the Economist. 

The founder of MetaDesign, FontShop, and EdenSpiekermann has been a successful entrepreneur and impulse generator for decades. When Erik Spiekermann founded FontShop International with his wife Joan and Neville Brody, he helped establish the internet as a source for buying fonts. His typefaces FF Meta and ITC Officina have been bestsellers for years and are already considered modern classics by typographers worldwide. Spiekermann now likes to comment on current developments in the world of design via Twitter, where he has more than 250,000 followers. In 2011, he received the German Design Award for lifetime achievement.

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The Big Book of Font Combinations 

With so many amazing typefaces out there it is easy to lose hours exploring and pairing fonts to get the perfect design. The Big Book of Font Combinations changes all that.

This amazing resource streamlines your research by putting a working historical record of the most incredibly influential typefaces in graphic design history in your hands. This endlessly inspiring and time saving guide has been compiled by expert font lovers to help professional designers, students and hobbyists dig deep and discover great looking combinations of typefaces and fonts for any design projects.

Use the font combination examples from the BBOFC in your next project, or use them as a jumping off place to think about fonts in a new way. However you use it, this essential guide is bound to become your constant companion on your design journey.

This electronic version of the BBOFC is a 100% vector PDF. Searchable, indexed, and completely clickable and is perfect for an eReader. Filled with 370 packed pages of font combination ideas this essential eBook is normally $25, but this Mighty Deal makes the BBOFC available for only $13 - 48% off the regular price.

Simply put. It's font-tastic!

Gothic and Old English Alphabets: 100 Complete Fonts (Lettering, Calligraphy, Typography).

Gothic — or black-letter script — was a principal model for printer's types when printing was first invented. This impressive collection features 100 complete and royalty-free alphabets of Old English and Gothic typefaces: Blackstone, Dolbey, Germania, Caxton Initials, Munich Fraktur, and 95 more — with many lowercases, numerals, and punctuation marks.

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The Essentials of Lettering: A Manual for Students and Designers by Thomas Ewing French.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

An Essay On Typography by Eric Gill.

An Essay on Typography was first published in 1931, instantly recognized as a classic, and has long been unavailable. It represents Gill at his best opinionated, fustian, and consistently humane. It is his only major work on typography and remains indispensable for anyone interested in the art of letter forms and the presentation of graphic information. This manifesto, however, is not only about letters their form, fit, and function but also about man's role in an industrial society. As Gill wrote later, it was his chief object "to describe two worlds that of industrialism and that of the human workman & to define their limits." His thinking about type is still provocative. Here are the seeds of modern advertising unjustified lines, tight word and letter spacing, ample leading. Here, too, is vintage Gill, as polemical as he is practical, as much concerned about the soul of man as the work of man; as much obsessed by the ends as by the means.

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Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield.

Just My Type is a book of stories about fonts. It examines how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. It explains why we are still influenced by type choices made more than 500 years ago, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. It profiles the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, as well as people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook. The book is about that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about. And beyond all this, the book reveals what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world – and what your choice of font says about you.

Today we can imagine no simpler everyday artistic freedom than the pull-down font menu. Here is the spill of history, the echo of Johann Gutenberg with every key tap. Here are names we recognize: Helvetica, Times New Roman, Palatino and Gill Sans. Here are the names from folios and flaking manuscripts: Bembo, Baskerville and Caslon. Here are possibilities for flair: Bodoni, Didot and Book Antiqua. And here are the risks of ridicule: Brush Script, Herculanum, Braggadocio and Comic Sans. Twenty years ago we hardly knew them, but now we all have favourites. Computers have rendered us all gods of type, a privilege we could never have anticipated in the age of the typewriter.

Yet when we choose Calibri over Century, or the designer of an advertisement picks Centaur rather than American Gothic, what lies behind our choice and what impression do we hope to create? When we choose a typeface, what are we really saying? Who makes these fonts and how do they work? And just why do we need so many? What are we to do with Alligators, Accolade, Amigo, Alpha Charlie, Acid Queen, Arbuckle, Art Gallery, Ashley Crawford, Arnold Bocklin, Auriol Vignette Sylvie, Andreena, Amorpheus, Angry, and Anytime Now? Banjoman, Bannikova, Baylac, Binner, Bingo, Blacklight, Blippo, Bebedot Blonde, Beach House or Bubble Bath? (And how lovely does Bubble Bath sound, with its thin floating linked circles ready to pop and dampen the page?) There are more than 100,000 fonts in the world. But why can’t we keep to a half-dozen or so familiar faces? Or perhaps we should just stick to the classic Garamond, named after the type designer Claude Garamond, active in Paris in the first half of the sixteenth century, whose highly legible Roman type blew away the heavy fustiness of his German predecessors, and later, adapted by William Caslon in England, would provide the letters for the American Declaration of Independence.

Typefaces are now 560 years old. So when a Brit called Matthew Carter constructed the now-ubiquitous Verdana on his computer in the 1990s, what could he possibly be doing to an A and a B that had never been done before? And how did a friend of his make the typeface Gotham, which eased Barack Obama into the Presidency? And what exactly makes a font presidential or American, or British, French German, Swiss or Jewish? These are arcane mysteries and it is the job of the book to get to the heart of them. But it begins with a cautionary tale, a story of what happens when a typeface gets out of control.

Just My Type from Pentagram on Vimeo.

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USA: http://amzn.to/Lkl6GK UK: http://amzn.to/1dz5BX7

Last Minute Gift for the Typophile Geek: 9 Typography books.

This humble blog began some months ago, until this date we have posted 9 wonderful books about lettering, typography and calligraphy. In case you forget the gift for your graphic designer geeky friend here is a recap of all the books featured here, a perfect gift for the typophile or the amateur designer avid of know more about this beautiful discipline (click on the name of every one to see more details):

The Geometry of Type by Stephen Coles.

Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton.

New Ornamental Type: Decorative Lettering in the Digital Age.

Little Book Of Lettering by Emily Gregory.

Helvetica and the New York City Subways System: The True (Maybe) Story.

Type Matters! by Jim Williams.

Hand to Type: Scripts, Hand-Lettering and Calligraphy by R. Klanten.

Calligraffiti: The Graphic Art of Neils Shoe Meulman

Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age

In case you want a light review of this books you can visit typographybooks.tumblr.com and see more details.

Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design's Golden Age

“No one person ever invented an alphabet,” wrote Type-maven Tommy Thompson. Script typefaces were no exception. During the letterpress era they were in such great demand that many people “invented” them, and many others copied them. In some commercial printing shops, composing cases filled with scripts were stacked floor to ceiling to the exclusion of other type. Printers routinely amassed multiple styles of the heavy metal type fonts, each possessing a distinct twist, flourish or quirk, used to inject the hint of personality or dash of character to quotidian printed pieces. Fonts had names like Wedding Plate Script, Cursive Script, Engravers Script, Bank Script, Master Script, French Script, Stationers Semiscript and Myrtle Script — Myrtle? — there were countless others. They surfaced in Europe and America. And the exact same types in France, for example, could be found in Italian foundries with different names. Scripts signaled propriety, suggested authority yet also exuded status and a bourgeois aesthetic. The wealthy classes couldn’t get enough fashionable scripts in their diet. Likewise, the nouveau riche embraced them too — maybe it helped them to appear even more wealthy. 

Seen in everything from wedding invitations and birth announcements to IOUs, menus, and diplomas, script typefaces impart elegance and sophistication to a broad variety of texts. Scripts never go out of style, and the hundreds of inventive examples here are sure to inspire today’s designers. Derived from handwriting, these are typefaces that are stylized to suggest, imply, or symbolize certain traits linked to writing. Their fundamental characteristic is that all the letters, more or less, touch those before and after. Drawn from the Golden Age of scripts, from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this is the first compilation of popular, rare, and forgotten scripts from the United States, Germany, France, England, and Italy. Featuring examples from a vast spectrum of sources—advertisements, street signs, type-specimen books, and personal letters—this book is a delightful and invaluable trove of longoverlooked material. 275 illustrations, 254 in color

Calligraffiti: The Graphic Art of Neils Shoe Meulman

Calligraffiti - The Graphic Art of Niels “SHOE” Meulman’ is an impressive publication that presents a large selection of typographic works by Niels Shoe Meulman arranged in a uniquely simplistic manner; every spread presents two interacting visuals on its opposing pages. This repeating duality makes this book much more than just a collection of the artist’s best work; it unveils the basis of all graphic art.

The print finish on Calligraffiti’s cover is particularly eye-catching. A strong white masthead made with custom lettering by Niels Meulman is pressed into thick, black stock. The white type is then finished with a cello glaze to maximise its shine and contrast. There’s no paragraph on the back cover explaining who Meulman is or what the book might include. Instead, you will find 12 of Meulman’s most interesting logotypes. This decision is somewhat unconventional, as it leaves the content of the book fairly unknown to the average reader. However, it lets the work do the talking and invites those who are curious to open the book for more.

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Hand to Type: Scripts, Hand-Lettering and Calligraphy by R. Klanten.

Hand to Type is a stunning compilation of hand-made and digital scripts that showcases the beauty of handwritten letterforms. The book features work by some of today’s most successful and original calligraphers and lettering artists. In addition to fonts and lettering using the Latin alphabet, it introduces artists who explore Cyrillic, Arabic, and Greek scripts.

The book’s rich visual examples are complemented by in-depth interviews with outstanding calligraphers and type designers conducted by editor Jan Middendorp. Hand to Type also offers a revealing glimpse into processes by which hand-made letters may be turned into digital files. Prominent guest authors introduce the workings of scripts with which many readers may be less familiar—from Arabic and Indian writing systems to the amazing scripts found in pre-war German schoolbooks and on Amsterdam pub windows.

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Type Matters! by Jim Williams.

Once upon a time, only typesetters needed to know about kerning, leading, ligatures, and hanging punctuation. Today, however, most of us work on computers, with access to hundreds of fonts, and we'd all like our letters, reports and other documents to look as good - and as readable - as possible. But what does all the confusing terminology about ink traps, letter spacing, and visual centring mean, and what are the rules for good typography? Type Matters! is a book of tips for everyday use, for all users of typography, from students and professionals to anyone who does any layout design on a computer. The book is arranged into three chapters: an introduction to the basics of typography; headline and display type; and setting text. Within each chapter there are sections devoted to particular principles or problems, such as selecting the right typeface, leading, and the treatment of numbers. Examples throughout show precisely what makes good typography and, crucially, what doesn't. Authoritatively written and designed by a practitioner and teacher of typography, Type Matters! has a beautifully clear layout that reinforces the principles discussed throughout.

Type Matters is unpretentious, unassuming, and reductive. Explanations rely heavily on elegant typographic diagrams that dominate most pages. Quotes from older typesetting manuals provide the text for the diagrams, set in a variety of classic types. Combined with the black and red printing and cream paper the book takes on the feel of a vintage type specimen. Readers are expected to study the diagrams, and some concepts, like x-height, are only introduced via a diagram. Once the book has been read it will make a great reference tool for students and designers alike, especially those less inclined to read lengthier, more comprehensive texts.

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USA: http://amzn.to/14RJ9lI UK: http://amzn.to/1embX8Y

Helvetica and the New York City Subways System: The True (Maybe) Story.

For years, the signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of lettering styles, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. The original mosaics (dating from as early as 1904), displaying a variety of serif and sans serif letters and decorative elements, were supplemented by signs in terracotta and cut stone. Over the years, enamel signs identifying stations and warning riders not to spit, smoke, or cross the tracks were added to the mix. Efforts to untangle this visual mess began in the mid-1960s, when the city transit authority hired the design firm Unimark International to create a clear and consistent sign system. We can see the results today in the white-on-black signs throughout the subway system, displaying station names, directions, and instructions in crisp Helvetica. This book tells the story of how typographic order triumphed over chaos. The process didn't go smoothly or quickly. At one point New York Times architecture writer Paul Goldberger declared that the signs were so confusing one almost wished that they weren't there at all. Legend has it that Helvetica came in and vanquished the competition. Paul Shaw shows that it didn't happen that way--that, in fact, for various reasons (expense, the limitations of the transit authority sign shop), the typeface overhaul of the 1960s began not with Helvetica but with its forebear, Standard (AKA Akzidenz Grotesk). It wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that Helvetica became ubiquitous. Shaw describes the slow typographic changeover (supplementing his text with more than 250 images--photographs, sketches, type samples, and documents). He places this signage evolution in the context of the history of the New York City subway system, of 1960s transportation signage, of Unimark International, and of Helvetica itself.

Little Book Of Lettering by Emily Gregory.

Typography is always one of the designer's first considerations when it comes to making a statement, and in recent years the world of lettering and type has exploded in an unprecedented wave of creative discovery. Contemporary artists, typesetters, and designers of all kinds are exploring new horizons in illustrated and hand-drawn lettering, digitally rendered lettering, and 3D lettering. This collection—large in scope but petite in size—surveys the recent lettering renaissance, showcasing a diverse range of talent in gorgeous, eye-catching examples and profiling today's innovators. In a stunning little package that expertly combines a handmade feel with a modern aesthetic, this is the ultimate inspirational collection of contemporary lettering for design buffs and type enthusiasts alike.

New Ornamental Type: Decorative Lettering in the Digital Age.

New Ornamental Type presents a dazzling collection of animated text and typography across a broad spectrum of styles and effects. It is a rich resource of images, ideas and inspiration and an essential reference for typography students and professionals.

Expressive lettering and illustrated words: here is a kaleidoscope of highly animated text and type from a broad spectrum of styles and effects. Psychedelia, Hip-Hop, Gothic, flowers, smoke, hair, electricity, and monuments are just a few of the creative allusions for the dramatic and intricate examples inspired by nature, history, and just about anything that is visually provocative. Beginning with an historical overview of ornamental type and how it has evolved through the major creative periods from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, the book includes hundreds of contemporary examples from around the world, organized into three sections: History Lesson, Au Naturel, and Eclectic. Each includes a brief essay introducing the background, influences, and outstanding aspects of the graphic work so beautifully displayed. New Ornamental Type is an essential reference for practitioners and students, and for anyone who appreciates the sheer delight of type as illustration. 272 color and 88 black-and-white illustrations.

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Thinking With Type By Ellen Lupton.

What kind of typeface should I use? How big do I set it? How should those letters, words and paragraphs be aligned, spaced, ordered and shaped? Thinking With Type answers these questions and more, providing clear guidelines for Designers, Writers, Editors and Students on how best to arrange their written content.

Type is the foundation of print and web design. Everything you need to know about thinking with type, you will find here. This richly detailed update to the classic text belongs on the shelf of every designer, writer, editor, publisher, and client.”  -Jefferey Zeldman-

Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication, from the printed page to the computer screen. This revised edition includes forty-eight pages of new content, including the latest information on style sheets for print and the web, the use of ornaments and captions, lining and non-lining numerals, the use of small caps and enlarged capitals, as well as information on captions, font licensing, mixing typefaces, and hand lettering. Throughout the book, visual examples show how to be inventive within systems of typographic form--what the rules are and how to break them. Thinking with Type is a type book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, and anyone else who works with words.

An official web site is set up as a classroom companion to Thinking With Type. Lupton has provided a syllabus, sample chapters, exercises and handouts for download in high-res PDF format. If you’re still not convinced about the quality of this title yet, I would suggest you head over to the site to download the sample pages and judge for yourself.

Compared to the more common encyclopaedic approach to design theory books, Thinking With Type is easy to understand, engaging and fun to read. The tone of this book is what really makes it special and is why I can’t recommend it enough.

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The Geometry of Type by Stephen Coles.

"The Geometry of Type" explores 100 traditional and modern typefaces in loving detail, with a full spread devoted to each entry. Characters from each typeface are enlarged and annotated to reveal key features, anatomical details, and the finer, often-overlooked elements of type design, which shows how these attributes affect mood and readability. Sidebar information lists the designer and foundry, the year of release and the different weights and styles available, while feature boxes explain the origins and best uses for each typeface, such as whether it is suitable for running text or as a display font for headlines. To help the reader spot each typeface in the wider world, the full character set is shown, and the best letters for identification are highlighted. This beautiful and highly practical work of reference for font spotters, designers and users is a close-up celebration of typefaces and great type design.

There are many things I like about Stephen Coles’ recent book; the bright, clean design and the accessible structure allowing you to dip in and out; but most of all, it’s the lack of fluff or filler. The content has been carefully honed to focus on the important details, which is in fact what the book is all about: the details of each typeface.

In highlighting and comparing the features that give each typeface its character, anyone exploring this subject can begin to make informed choices between similar typeface options.

The pithy descriptions describe each typeface’s origin and advise what makes each appropriate for certain scenarios and where it might fail. These are occasionally laced with a subtle humour that keeps the tone of the book warm.

The great balance of written and visual explanation means the book works well as a quick reference but has a seductive way of drawing you in to read more and examine further.

Book Review by typeworship

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