I have mixed opinions of this. Even if it is a blindingly obvious thing to use a planet to make the zero, it is NASA and if anyone can use a planet in a logo they surely can, and I think it’s quite nice with the 5. I just wish they’d left it at that, but no. They had to go and stick a big fat lens flare on it. It’s not even a real one even though one thing NASA has, is access to plenty of lens flares. Oh, and I hate the vignetting.

Jeremy Pettis has produced a wonderful series of typographic illustrations, representing 26 animals - one for each letter of the alphabet. For each, custom lettering is designed to convey the appearance or behavioural characteristics of the animal. They’re all very clever, and some require a bit of contemplation to ‘get it’. My favourite is the (perhaps) rather obvious, but beautiful Zebra one, though the Kangaroo one has an ‘ar’ ligature that’s just perfect:

He’s put the background sketches and roughs on Flickr, which is a great use of the site and for once, a use of the site that I actually can get behind. Flickr’s soviet, rigid, artless presentation is actually ideal as a kind of digital scrapbook for roughs.

I’ve had this link stored for a little while now, waiting for me to explore further and write about it. I was initially taken by the use of arabic script to form directional signs (at right) and downloaded the beautifully designed and illustrated thesis by Luigi Farrauto. It’s well worth a look, even if you don’t read Italian. There’s a Q&A in English too:

Which are the main differences between the typography of arabic countries using arabic script and the one of non arabic country using arabic script?
I find that there is more typographic freedom within the Arab world that outside of it. There is a perception, or maybe that’s just how I see it, that Westerners are more focused on fully calligraphic styles for Arabic typefaces, and so they are unaware that we need other typefaces to suit our daily life. Calligraphic styles are great but you can’t set a dictionary in 5 pts size with that.

That’s what I noticed about the sign in the first place - clean, sans-serif (as it were) arabic type. OK, anyone who watched a news broadcast in 2003 would most likely have seen motorway signs written in arabic, but the films crews were hardly focusing on the finer details of the typography.

Lam-Alef ligatures

How has been faced the problem of vertical ligatures in typography?
Opentype provides us with GSUB (glyph substitution) lookups that can exchange a string of characters by a pre-designed ligature. That means that there is a large number of ligatures to be designed, and I’m not a fan of that. In my Naskh style typeface, I kept only horizontal stacking and so I have no ligatures except the Lam-Alef. I find that simpler to read and clearer.

This is also interesting. There are fonts that have been designed with loads of ligatures, but I guess sometimes, less is more.

This is interesting, the Bunch design agency got a whole bunch (geddit?) of designers and illustrators they admired to ‘respond’ to their identity. As a result they got a whole load of variations on their logo which they’re now using as part of their identity. Very clever indeed, as commissioning all that work conventionally would be very expensive indeed.

A few of the results are shown on the CR blog page, but I picked my two favourites here. The blackletter style one is very interesting, as the negative spaces aren’t simply a reversed image of the implied continuation of the stroke, but an additional shape on the outer edge of that stroke. Very nice.

I came across a site this morning offering a 9Mb RAR file offering fonts for free download. It’s quite a list:

Agency Bold, Alternate Gothic No. Two, Arial Rounded Bold and Bell Gothic Black, Avenir (Book, Medium, Heavy), Avernus, Base 9 Regular SC, Catull (the Google font), Digital Sans Medium, FF Cocon Bold, FF DIN Medium, FF Dot Matrix Two Regular, FF Meta Bold and Book, Frankfurter Medium or Bryant Bold Alt, Frutiger Black, Frutiger Bold, Handel Gothic Bold, Helvetica (complete set), Hoefler Text, Interstate Black, Interstate Regular, ITC Bauhaus Medium, ITC Officina Bold, ITC Ronda, Klavika, Lisboa Sans, Myriad Pro (complete set), Neo Sans Medium, Pixel Fonts, Proxima Nova, Syntax Bold, Trade Gothic Bold, VAG Round (Round, Rounded BT, Rounded Lt-Normal, VAGRundschriftD)

From the language used on the site, I’m not sure that the person involved actually knows that fonts are licensed software products, that you have to pay for with actual money:

By the way i would like to share 9mb file contained with web 2.0 font type files archived in *.rar format in order to fulfill some of my loyal reader request.

Whether he does or not, ignorance is no defence, so I did my civic duty and shopped him to ITC, FontFont and Linotype. I’ll be interested to see what happens (if anything). The thing I notice on the three companies’ sites is that there is only a general contact email, but nothing specifically to report piracy of their products. Very strange. David suggested a good way to encourage reporting of piracy would be to give the first person to report an instance of theft a bounty of those fonts being used illegally.

UPDATE: The author of the site removed the link. I got replies from Linotype and FontFont too.

I was just reading “Why Bembo Sucks” over on I Love Typography, and I was led to wondering why Opentype doesn’t allow for alternate glyphs based on size, at least, that’s how I understand this. After all, as Kris Sowersby points out, fonts were cut for a specific size, with variations in the glyph forms created as a result of aesthetics and practicality. Looking at the Opentype font I have with the most optical weights (Arno Pro) and what options Photoshop offers for Opentype, there isn’t anything in the OT menu or the application itself to set the optical weight based on size.

So why not? Of course, if it does and I’m misreading the spec, do let me know. Mind, I’ll then have to ask why no-one is doing it yet.

And, for comparison, Arno Pro Caption (left) and Arno Pro Display (centre) scaled to the same point size and overlaid on each other (right). Wouldn’t it be nice if the software could switch between the weights automatically?

Digging around in my files this afternoon, I found this PDF. I’ve had it since early June 2007 after being sent it by David, who noted that they’d developed a branding remarkably similar to the far more important Ministry of Type, something I still find amusing. Hey, I was here first - just. The combination of white, black and chartreuse must be quite the current fashion for ministries - though I notice that the website carries the oh-so-accessible-but-dull Standard Public Sector branding. Shame that, as the branding of the PDF is rather pleasant.

I was trying to identify the typefaces used. It’s unlikely to be a custom job since the time between the announcement of the MoJ and the publication of this document was only a couple of months. I doubt they’d have been able to create a whole new typeface in that time. Also, the branding was included in the costs of “capital, hardware, accessibility, branding, templates, desktop” - £700,000 in all, and after the costs of IT that doesn’t leave much. So yes, I think it’s a modified version of Bliss - the y is not quite exactly the same, so perhaps some tweaking was done (if I’m right). As for the serif, that’s Perpetua. Quite a nice combination really.

The logo and some sample pages: