This week in type: All Bat-Helvetica breaks out over emoji dumplings (and: Spiekermann)

joeclark

Let’s start with a bang: The justfont “Working Group is chartered to define the ‘font’ top-level media type, as per RFC6838 [§]4.2.7.”

ATypI 2015 São Paulo recap: Part 1 ¶ Part 2. One does rather wonder how the interpreters kept up.

“Interestingly, there’s no Kickstarter campaign to reissue this particular standards manual, perhaps because it wasn’t created by a famed Italian modernist designer and is typeset in the most basic manner possible.” Here the Transit Maps Tumblère is talking about the Boston MBTA identity guidelines, links to PDFs of which are helpfully given without having to ante up a hundred bucks.

“The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process” variously “of creating a Chinese font” or getting a dumpling emoji into Unicode. As the latter is premised upon cultural inclusion and sexism, we’ll never hear the end of it.

“Why Are the Terms of Service Agreements We Never Read in All Caps?” And Why Do Online Clickbait Sites Use Only The Upstyle For Headlines Despite The Fact The Times And The Journal Are Almost Alone In Doing That In The Real World?

Richard Ishida pickers: Runic and Old Norse; Old English. Still dearly missed is his utility whereby you paste in any string and it lists every Unicode character in that string.

Hi! Yes, the Canada 150 logo(type) boondoggle continues to worsen, notwithstanding what Ray Larabie tells us in a different drawer. Ray predicted the press and designers won’t care; in fact this thing gots legs.

1. Adrian Jean, Twitter: “$400k on waterproof Canada 150 flags… with design from a logo contest and a free font. 3 for 3 on the ‘brutal’ score”
2. “All Helvetica breaks loose in typography squabble” is the print headline but not the online one, Neither Of Which Is In Upstyle. (“DESIGNERS TO FREE FONT: DROP DEAD”)
3. “Government planning to flood country with millions of Canada 150 flags”
4. Canada Gizmodoed

“Releasing Your First Typeface: An Interview with Font Bureau’s Victoria Rushton.”

Typeface reality check–cum–intervention: “You Are Not a Sassy Black Woman.”

“Everything I Know About Typography” has quite a few errors and overgeneralizations, of which everyone will have a different set.

“I am not 100% certain, but as far as I can tell, Vietnamese is probably the only Eastern language that is not written in ideographs,” says Donny Trương, rather quite neglecting Burmese, Hmong, Indonesian, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Malaysian, Mongolian, Nepali, Thai, Tibetan, and Uyghur. Still, Danny’s Vietnamese Typography site looks great on an iPhone while mine do not.

“Louisville.”

Evert Bloemsma lives through Cobalte.

The Spiekermann Economy.

Rewardingly thorough Tumblère de l’instant: Bat-Labels.

This Week in Type clearly has nothing to do with This Month in Typography because weeks and months are as unrelated as type and typography are.

Miles Newlyn

big bang!