Speak Up
Design Dialog (Visitar)
Parting Thoughts
Some of our contributors and friends offer some final words on Speak Up. These were requested not just to make us feel good but to be able to share what Speak Up may have meant to others. We will also take this opportunity to express our gratitude for all (+)
New: Word It
Word It has been a fixture of Speak Up since April of 2003, a visual respite from the generous amount of text that typically adorns this web site. Since then, more than 1,250 people have generated more than 4,400 Word Its, and it remains one of Speak Up's (+)
The Proof isn't in the Pudding, it's in the Proofs
This past Monday, we had the pleasure of seeing Graphic Design, Referenced printed in full color and as spreads for the first time — try ponying up the cash to print 200 tabloid sheets, yikes — with the arrival of the printer's proofs. At this point we di (+)
Typo Terror
It is always strange when my dreams and work life get tangled in the dark. No amount of coffee can make vector-dreaming go away, nor can it make the fears of wrapping up a project diminish. Yet, upon finishing the largest (self-imposed) assignment of my l (+)
An Homage to Shigeo Fukuda
Guest Editorial by KT MeaneyWe define reality through sensory experience. Some experiences challenge our notion of what is real, so we call them illusions. I could argue that illusion is reality and reality is illusion, but I won’t. Instead, I offer this: (+)
Bookmarks: Netherlands
Sorry it took me more than two months since the last bundle of bookmarks (Spain), but to make up for it here is a round-up from one of the most avant-garde design countries of them all, the Netherlands. Known (and envied) for the acceptance and relevance (+)
Interview with Font Bureau’s Dyana Weissman
Guest Editorial by Christian PalinoWith the increasing number of typefaces entering the market these days, more and more type designers are finally getting some of the recognition they deserve. In light of this, I thought it would be interesting to reach (+)
Fraktur Mon Amour
Let me start by declaring that I am an ardent fan of black letter. I understand its connotations and associations to a certain fascist regime. I understand its importance as the type choice for a certain book printed with movable type many centuries ago. (+)
Bookmarks: France
Over the course of 2008 I have been almost obsessively bookmarking designer or design firm web sites like I hadn't bookmarked since 1999. Largely to scour the internets for fresh work to show in our upcoming book, Graphic Design Referenced. My bookmark fo (+)
An Eye for an Eye: A Visual Remembrance of Lou Dorfsman, 1918 – 2008
Last Wednesday, October 22, Lou Dorfsman passed away. For forty-five years he worked at CBS, shaping everything in his and its path. Both Michael Bierut and Steve Heller have captured his life in words. What follows is a little bit of his life in images. (+)
The Stenberg Brothers in 200 Words
After the Russian revolution in 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, cinema played an important role in the dissemination of propaganda for the Bolsheviks, thrusting a large number of Russian movies produced during the 1920s and early 1 (+)
Typographic Nostalgia: Bell Centennial
In 1982 the Center for Design and Typography at The Cooper Union (which I believe was the precursor to the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography that was established in 1985) published its first Type & Technology Monograph on the development (+)
Inside the Graphic Design Archives at RIT
One of the most gratifying perks of working on Graphic Design Referenced — aside from the unbelievably intense pressure of writing 400 pages and making sure we don't tell any lies — has been the opportunity to interact with many of the design artifacts we (+)
Parallel Strokes
Guest review by Ricardo CordobaJohn Downer once compared the work of professional sign painters and type designers, concluding that "exploring the two subjects simultaneously shows that at any given time, each discipline somehow influences the other." He (+)
Dear Lulu, The New Standards
It's funny how things change. Five years ago I wouldn't have given second thought to producing print material with digital printing. No, only offset printing. The thought of a brochure, annual report or catalog printed as if it had come out of Kinko's — e (+)
ADAA: The Top Print Communication Projects
Back in May, with the first near-90-degree day of the year and sequestered in a huge loft without air conditioning on the west end of midtown Manhattan for close to ten hours, I was one of the judges of the Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ADAA), celebrat (+)
Agenda: Offer a Membership to Zapf Dingbats?
A rare, one-sentence "look at this" link on Speak Up: College Humor Original Videos presents a great short on typography, with special appearances by Futura, Courier, Times New Roman, Comic Sans and, the typeface in question, Zapf Dingbats. Hilarious. Tha (+)
Highlights from TypeCon 2008
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending TypeCon in Buffalo. While the festivities, lectures and workshops had been going strong since last Monday, I only made it to two full days of lectures. As usual, TypeCon presents a collection of topics tha (+)
Comic Sans: One Good Application
Hatred for Comic Sans has come to be a design cliché, everyone hates it, even if they are not sure what makes it such an infuriating typeface. While its design is less eminent than that of, say Gotham or Bembo just to pick two examples out of a hundred, i (+)
Inside the Herb Lubalin Study Center
Yesterday, while the humidity in New York grew to more than an inch thick, Bryony and I had the pleasure of spending the day inside the Herb Lubalin Study Center (HLSC) in famed Cooper Union. Founded in 1985 — and first curated by Ellen Lupton until 1992, (+)
Otl Aicher: An Expanded, Abridged Story
By now some of you are aware of the stress-inducing book we are working on, Graphic Design Referenced. This week I had the pleasure of writing the entry of German designer Otl Aicher. Unfortunately I got carried away and wrote much more than the word coun (+)
The Video Flipthrough is the New Finger Hold
One of the ever pressing matters for graphic designers is how to display our work, especially work that is best experienced by interacting with it or seeing it at 100% size and reality. With online and PDF portfolios becoming the norm, it is increasingly (+)
Modern Dog: 20 Yearsof Poster Art
At some point during the late 1990s I saw Modern Dog’s poster work for the first time, and it then became a consistent recurrence to see it again and again in design annuals, year after year. What impressed me the most wasn’t the actual work but the indo (+)
New Book Recommendations
I've been pretty irregular about updating our book recommendations, so herewith dear readers are a ton of new additions and, yes, some books might already be a few months old, so we are trying to catch up. The full list can always be accessed here. Graph (+)
Of Fonts and Students
In their latest Communiqué, AIGA announced the introduction of the Adobe Font Folio Education Essentials (AFFEE), a package of 25 type families for use by teachers and students and made available at an affordable rate of $149.00 — the retail price for Ad (+)
Newsworthy is Communityworthy
Guest Editorial by Renata GrawIn September of 2007 most of the graphic designers from our MFA program at the University of Illinois at Chicago enrolled in a seminar class called "Drive-by: On Site-specific Art and Urban Screens," led by professor and art (+)
An Interview with id29's Doug Bartow
Like many, Doug Bartow stumbled upon graphic design and typography almost accidentally. But before that could happen he had the good fortune of flunking out of engineering school to get started down the right path. Recently, his id29 studio released a pu (+)
The Wall that Lou Dorfsman Built
by Jim SchachterleLately, I have given myself over to a particular type of thought; my mind wanders the fields of the iconic, thinking about the ingredients of legend, those qualities that separate the wheat from the chaff for all time. Icons, I have com (+)
Sagmeister’s Show Stinks
Updated 2/23/08Literally. It does. Walking into Deitch Projects, just off the tourist-induced ruckus that Soho has become, it smells like a banana milkshake-scented steam room. It’s suffocating. But that should be no surprise when 7,200 bananas flank the (+)
Flexible Consistency, Consistent Flexibility
Guest Editorial by Jon HewittIn late 2006 I went to see Alan Fletcher's retrospective at the Design Museum in London. It's the only exhibition, before or since, where I've read every word on every caption for every piece of work. It was a masterclass in (+)
Open Letter to Adobe
Dear Adobe,I have been using your software products since 1995, starting with Illustrator 5.5, Photoshop 3.0 and even Pagemaker and have embraced every upgrade since — well, except for Illustrator 9.0, which both you and I know was utterly useless. I hav (+)
Small Design Ephemera: The Alternative Portfolio
For as long as I can remember I have always wanted to do a printed portfolio that went beyond showing appropriately-framed pictures of my work in decently-laid out pages with titles and descriptions of each aforementioned picture. Instead, I imagined a p (+)
Booksourcing: Posters
As some of you might know, Bryony and I are working on a rather complicated book with the nice folks at Rockport titled, at the moment, Graphic Design, Referenced. We have tried to come up with an elevator pitch for it: It’s a 400-page book that contains (+)
You've Got Letter
Every December we go back to Mexico for the Holidays and spend time with our families. And every December, invariably, my 91-year-old grandmother asks me to write her a letter "every now and then". I always say yes but, eight years later, I have only sen (+)
The New(er) Typography: Counterless, Bold and mostly Geometric
During 2007 the feed subscriptions in my trusty RSS reader grew from a modest dozen to six or seven dozen, allowing me to keep tabs on an increasingly addictive number of blogs throughout the world: Design You Trust™ in Russia, NiceFuckingGraphics in Mex (+)
"What is a Typeface?" Alex
[Answer: This is the correct way of calling a Font]This past Wednesday, November 7th, 2007, the show Jeopardy presented its 5,328th show, the quarterfinal of the Tournament of Champions. In the Double Jeopardy! Round, the three contestants were faced wit (+)
- contacto