“When we asked you, our readers, to tell us whom you would like us to interview for Creative Characters, one name that kept coming up was Christian Schwartz’s. Although he’s not even 30, Christian Schwartz is among the most prolific type designers in the USA, having published fonts with about half a dozen foundries. He has also created successful corporate type systems, such as the superfamily made for the German railways, for which he and Erik Spiekerman received the Federal German Design Prize 2007. And that’s not his only award this year…”

“These pages are provided as an outline for [Marietta College’s] GRPH: 210 Typography. At right you will find links to the material covered each week throughout the course, as well as links to each weeks assignments, distributed via Adobe PDF files.” (Scroll down for a broad overview of typographic history and usage…)

“‘So, what do you see?’ Martin Pietrucha I asked, turning around in the driver’s seat of his mint green Ford Taurus. It was a cold day in January, and we were parked in the middle of a mock highway set on the campus of Pennsylvania State University in State College. Pietrucha is a jovial, 51-year-old professor of highway engineering. His tone was buoyant as he nodded toward the edge of the oval stretch of road where two green-and-white signs leaned against a concrete barrier.

What I saw, Pietrucha knew, was what we all may see soon enough as we rush along America’s 46,871 miles of Interstate highways. What I saw was Clearview, the typeface that is poised to replace Highway Gothic, the standard that has been used on signs across the country for more than a half-century. Looking at a sign in Clearview after reading one in Highway Gothic is like putting on a new pair of reading glasses: there’s a sudden lightness, a noticeable crispness to the letters.”

“There has been a lot said recently about Vertical Rhythm. Richard Rutter began the work on 24ways last year with the piece ‘Compose to a Vertical Rhythm’. This was built upon by Wilson Minor on A List Apart recently with his article on Baseline Grids. All sound typographic advice… At @media this year, I presented ‘Five Simple Steps to Better Typography’. Step two in my presentation was was Vertical Rhythm where I reiterated some of the excellent points Richard made in his article and also the presentation we both gave in at SXSW in March. I also added something of my own: Incremental leading, or Incremental line-height.”

This is a list of international corporations and the fonts used in their identity and branding systems. (Thanks kottke.org!)

“For Massimo, this was an ideological choice, an ethical imperative. ‘In the new computer age,’ he once wrote, ‘the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.’ For me, it became a time-saving device. Why spend hours choosing between Bembo, Sabon and Garamond No. 3 every time you needed a Venetian Roman? For most people — my mom, for instance — these were distinctions without differences.”

“It’s one thing to try to stop the rampant font piracy. It’s another thing entirely to not let me embed your typeface in the most popular digital format in existence.”

“The history of screen fonts is also the history of electronic authoring, design and publishing on computers. For over 30 years, from early electronic publishing, to the Internet of publishing today, screen fonts have proved of growing concern to users and publishers. What’s good? Or more appropriately: What are good options that should be available to users? Or to ‘Our’ users?” (Thanks Ben!)

Slides and notes from the much talked about SxSW presentation by Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton.

“Helvetica is a classic. Helvetica is played out. Each of these statements is true to an extent. The world’s most recognizable typeface will soon star in a new film that documents both its omnipresence and its timelessness. There are many reasons why Helvetica is so widespread. The most obvious being that a few weights have been bundled with the Mac OS for years. It is arguably the most respectable of the ‘default’ fonts. But it’s also used because it’s a safe, neutral choice.”

“Why does it matter which form of encoding we choose? What happens if we choose the ‘wrong’ one? The choice of character encoding affects the range of literal characters we can use in a web page. Regular Latin letters are rarely a problem, but some languages need more letters than others, and some languages need various diacritical marks above or below the letters. Then, of course, some languages don’t use Latin letters at all. If we want proper — as in typographically correct — punctuation and special symbols, the choice of encoding also becomes more critical.”

“Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica will begin screening at film festivals worldwide starting in March, followed by cinema screenings across the US and Europe, and the DVD release.”

“I’m trying to compile a list of the 20 most important type designers of all time. Which one would they be? I know this is personal, so I just wrote down what came to my mind, odered by living and dead. I know this is by no means complete or correct yet.”

“Acquired: at the Museum Bellerive in Zurich recently, the catalogue for Typotecture: Typography as Architectural Imagery, an exhibition at the Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich, 2000. Great collection of posters, wide-ranging in provenance and subject matter but all concerning typography ‘being able to subject itself to gravity and acquire a physical presence, to expand into a space and come closer to architectural form’. Includes an essay by curator Andres Janser. Features work by Max Huber, Michael Bierut, Ivan Chermayeff, Mihaly Biro, Claude Luyet, Tomoko Miho, Mirko Ilic, and many others.”

“Just for fun, I’ve decided to share my first published writing on the subject of typography. It appeared in the April 19, 1977, issue of Metropolis, the Weekly Newspaper of Minneapolis. Metropolis unfortunately folded about six months later, but it was an incredible place to work. I may write more about it sometime.”