A smart-but-not-dense guide to creating and bending letters to one’s will
No component of graphic design has attracted as much interest or inspired as much innovation in recent years as lettering and type. These foundations of design, once the exclusive domain of professional typographers, have become an essential starting point for anyone looking for a fresh way to communicate. While there exist many maxims and practical guidelines for executing specific design styles and processes, what makes lettering and type endlessly fascinating is the flexibility to interpret and sometimes even break these rules.
Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces
Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals
(with a forward by Ellen Lupton)
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
Lettering & Type is a smart-but-not-dense guide to creating and bending letters to one’s will. More than just another pretty survey, it is a powerful how-to book full of relevant theory, history, explanatory diagrams, and exercises. While other type design books often get hung up on the technical and technological issues of type design and lettering, Lettering & Type features the context and creativity that shape letters and make them interesting.
Authors Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals of design studio Post Typography examine classic design examples as well as exciting contemporary lettering of all stripes—from editorial illustration to concert posters to radical conceptual alphabets. Lettering & Type is ideal for anyone looking to move beyond existing typography and fonts to create, explore, and use original or customized letterforms. This latest addition to Princeton Architectural Press’s best-selling Design Briefs series features a foreword by Ellen Lupton and hundreds of images and examples of work by designers, artists, and illustrators, including Marian Bantjes, Matthew Carter, Emigre, Ed Fella, Sibylle Hagmann, House Industries, Margaret Kilgallen, Christoph Niemann, Steve Powers (ESPO), Stefan Sagmeister, Christian Schwartz, Alex Trochut, Underware, James Victore, and many more. Throughout the book interviews with type designers, artists, and graphic designers provide real-world perspective from contemporary practitioners.
“A smart, sexy, readable guide to type design and lettering. This is no ordinary type book. It’s a blast of brain candy that will make your serifs stand on end.”
Ellen Lupton