I’m getting fed up of Flickr. Does no-one write about the things they’ve seen anymore? Do they not care about how their images are presented? There are no narratives on Flickr, it’s a bucket full of photos with comments scrawled on them, using tags as a substitute for context and a sovietised interface as a feeble analogue for the blank gallery wall. I read on Kottke of the Tobias Frere-Jones Typographic Tour of Manhattan, with links to photos as ‘set 1’, ‘set 2’ etc. With a groan in my heart I clicked in full anticipation of yet another soulless grid of brutally-cropped thumbnails, and lo! there they were. Browsing this site is like Corbis Images in the early 2000s - the photos are subservient to a forbidding interface built to remind you that this isn’t a site to celebrate photography, but to make it conform to a catalogue. But what’s this? ‘Set 4’ is not Flickr! It’s an actual blog, with words and everything! No vile blue-with-pink vowel-less logos here! OK, it’s plain old Blogger, but it’s a sign of how things are going with presenting photos of things that even Blogger can seem exotic and challenging!

Anyway, if you’re not yet so damn jaded with Flickr, you can have a look at sets 1 through 3, though I recommend set 4, which was posted on Villatype by Joe Shouldice.

This image is from the Villatype set.

Yes, I know that many people don’t have the time, patience, resources and skills to set up their own photoblog, but there are plenty of blogging services out there, including some designed for photoblogs specifically! Break out from the Flickr mindset, please.

Another Flickr set! I might have to create a whole category for Stuff That Exists On Flickr at this rate.

This is a collection of scans of The Art of Letter Arrangement by Sallie B. Tannahill posted by Jason on Graphicology

...Of the film. Another Flickr collection, this time of the ends of films. Found via swissmiss.

This Flickr set has some great images of the 1923 ATF Specimen Book. Later in the set are some wonderful images from other sources, including the one at right which is great - can’t beat blackletter and, er, pinkletter. I’m liking the monograms too, which you can see on the original set here.

The car everyone would love to own!

Well, based on this fabulous brochure, who could blame them? Found on the Old Car Manual Project, another of those collections-of-things sites that you bookmark because you know you’re going to find them useful someday. This site is a great resource for 20th Century typography, illustration and layout, not to mention car design.

I recently came across the excellent site, Liam’s Pictures from Old Books, and while browsing came across scans from Letters & Lettering: A Treatise With 200 Examples.

When I had first decided I wanted to design typefaces I looked around for books on the subject, and yet could never find any book that worked as a primer, a beginner’s how-to manual*. If I’d have come across Letters & Lettering back then I’d have found a very good book from which to learn about constructing letterforms. The examples you can see here (and lots more on the page on Liam’s site) are lovely and clear and show the construction of, say, Trajan-esque forms. There are other examples in the book, blackletter and modern type forms, but it’s the large outlines that interest me here. This site will definitely go in the bookmarks.

* I did eventually find Leslie Cabarga’s Logo, Font and Lettering Bible

Something I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. This site is a veritable treasure trove of calligraphic inspiration. Three examples of my favourites below. Visit the site for much more.