Cool Hunting Video Presents: Pixação

Thanks to Joker for the tip!

Make fonts from your own lettering

Interesting free online tool lets you make fonts from your own hand-drawn alphabets.

Thanks to Nowon for the tip

16th century alphabet drawings

Shoe

Shoe's new Calligraffiti expo at Rush Hour Records in Amsterdam

The artist known as Shoe, aka Niels Meulman (1967, Amsterdam) is the inventor of Calligraffti - calligraphy and graffiti merged into one art form. Shoe began tagging when he was 13 years old and now he's a locally and internationally renowned artist, designer, art director and owner of Unruly, a brand of designer silk scarves.

AN EXHIBITION OF TITLES - BY NIELS SHOE MEULMAN
RUSH HOUR - SPUISTRAAT 98 AMSTERDAM
19 DECEMBER - 18 JANUARY 2009
OPENING THURSDAY 18 DECEMBER - 18:00

[Shoe is one of the most respected style masters in the world. Don't miss this chance to see his work in person!

Speaking of Shoe's silk scarves ... Santa, please.]

Bando on Flickr

Bando has long been considered one of the most influential style masters since Dondi. He wrote in NYC, Paris, and London in the 1980s with CTK and the Chrome Angels.

Thanks to Rough for the heads up.

FontStruct

Create, share, hide, modify, and download TrueType fonts -- using this Web-based lettering tool.

Hieroglyphic Collages - Steven Travis

May 27 - June 21, 2008

Amos Eno Gallery
530 W 25th St. 6th floor
NY NY 10001
212 226-5342

Steven is not a writer but he works with lettering and calligraphy in interesting ways.

Parallel Strokes - New book by Ian Lynam

"Parallel Strokes is a collection of interviews with twenty-plus contemporary typeface designers, graffiti writers, and lettering artists around the world. The book is introduced with a comprehensive essay charting the history of graffiti, its relation to type design, and how the two practices relate in the wider context of lettering.

Interviews within include conversations with pan-European type design collective Underware, Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi, American graffiti writer and fine artist Barry McGee/Twist, German graffiti writers Daim and Seak, American lettering artist, graphic designer and design educator Ed Fella, among others. Parallel Strokes is an enquiry into the history, context, and development of lettering today, both culturally approved and illicit.

Softcover, 244 pages, printed in glorious Canada First 100 orders ship with a limited edition 17 in. x 20 in. two-color Parallel Strokes poster
us $25 + Free shipping worldwide.

[Check the link for sample pages and a full list of interviewees.]

Usugrow and Chaz

Usugrow's blog has some nice action shots of him and Chaz performing live in Japan recently.

Retna, Dame, and Werc

Sacred text

Style animation, political satire

This is supposedly by IGT/Phase2. Nice styles in any case.

Calligraphy of Mouneer Al-Shaarani

Arabic calligraphy, as fine as I've ever seen. His sense of balance is impressive. Most of these look like they would work as mobiles.

Bombing Modernism: Graffiti and its relationship to the (built) environment

Shoe interview

Shoe.CIA is a legendary stylemaster from Amsterdam. And he's having a show there this month.

September 13 - 16, 2007
BG
Oosterdokskade 3-5
Amsterdam

Press preview opening September 12 10:00-12:00
Opening party September 13 18:00-01:00

Mr Wiggles on the Art of Lettering

Tutorials, alphabets and more.

How to type all those special characters on a Mac

Accents, symbols, everything. Download the PDF file(s) and you'll always have it on your Mac when you need it, for email, word processing, general lettering and typesetting work.

I used to use PopChar for this but it's US$30 now and I don't need special characters that often these days. PopChar is very fast though, so if you want to use lots of special characters it might pay for itself in time savings.

For making special characters in HTML you'll need an entity list instead.

NeatFonts

Huge collection (7 pages of fonts with names that start with "A" for example, 8 pages of "B" etc., and catagories too). Lots of interesting display typefaces. Free. Ready to install TTFs.

Smash137

Smash137 from Switzerland has shared his sketch pile with the world on his website.

Iranian Typography

Another great PingMag feature of interest.

Marian Bantjes, Designer

Check out her lettering styles for Wired magazine.

Haze: Mad Skills 1

Haze has a blog! He's doing a series called Mad Skills. #1 features Shoe, one of the true style kings of Europe, from Amsterdam.

Thanks to Jon Creech for the heads up.

Type for You - typography blog

Letters and lettering design

Zoomorphic Calligraphy

Letter animals.

BBS Lettering Style

Back in the day when the network meant dialup BBS boxes, the hackers were the guys who knew the ins and outs and who had all the cool lettering. You can have a lot of fun with this kinda thing in email still, but use monospace fonts, like courier and monaco.

See also the demoscene for the animated lettering and multimedia hacker crews.

Typographica's Favorite Fonts of 2005 (part 1)

Interesting blog, really nice fonts. The main page tells of FontLab Studio for Mac in case you're interested in being a fontographer.

Get a load of Josh Darden's "freight" typeface, which comes in 60 font styles.