One of those old images I’ve had around for a while found here (I think). I saved it because of the interesting script lettering (extracted on the right). It’s bloody hard to read (even if you can read German) and yet it’s really attractive. Maybe for a native Swiss German speaker it’s easier to read?

UPDATE: Steffen wrote to tell me that this is Sütterlin script, and sent the Wikipedia entry on it. Thank you! From Wikipedia:

Sütterlinschrift (Sütterlin script), or Sütterlin for short, is the last widely used form of the old German blackletter handwriting ("Spitzschrift"). In Germany, the old German cursive script developed in the 16th century is also sometimes called Fraktur. ... The beautiful version that Sütterlin developed was taught in German schools from 1935 to 1941.

The full image below (top left) and a few others I rather like from the set.

It’s a bit tempting to create a category called “Stuff you didn’t know needed a name” for this. You know those bits that hold the counters in on type stencils? They’re called Pylons now, apparently.

Actually, I’m surprised they don’t already have a name.

(via Design Observer)

Bit late with this one, “9 cool animations with typography” (actually 12 now). Found via Swissmiss.

I love “The Lion’s Roar” especially the bit in the still I’ve grabbed here (on the left):

(via Chris Glass)

Have a look at these great typographic maps of city neighbourhoods from ORK. There’s only Chicago and Brooklyn at the time of writing, but coming soon are Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston. I can’t wait for the Manhattan one.

They remind me a little of this typographic map of London, though I’d be interested to see London represented in the same style as the ORK ones. Well, that and other cities of the world too.

(via swissmiss)

[UPDATE: The Manhattan one is now available]

So, as posted elsewhere, the Android platform now has its own set of fonts, created by Ascender Corp. They look pretty good from what I can tell from the PDF sampler, though only time will tell how they’ll be used. I’ve written before on the subject of mobile typography, and it’s clear that the problems with it are rarely down to the actual font - Nokia Sans is, after all, a rather pleasant face. What I’m really interested in is if the Open Handset Alliance will create a strict set of UI guidelines, with a grid, and whether any of the manufacturers will adhere to them.

So here’s the sampler from the PDF, without the hideous distracting colours (the fact that they were displayed thus doesn’t bode well to my mind):

Now this is what I call a character set. Swissmiss pointed me at this incredible new typeface by Alejandro Paul, on Veer. I have a strong urge to buy it just to play at typing things and seeing the ligatures appear. I mean, some of these ligatures are whole words!

Discovered over on Fubiz, this beautiful animation from zero to ten using imagery from the arts of bonsai and ikebana. This really is a beautiful short film, and it reminded me of something I’d seen before, so a little bit of checking through my saved files and links I realise I saw some of the preparatory work on artless. In fact, I wrote about it here. The artwork is by Shun Kawakami, Illustration, Suibokuga, Drawing by Tadashi Ura and the photography (?) by Taisuke Koyama

The first picture here is from artless, the remainder are stills from the animation.