Fonts Books

• Gotham Books

Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product that we buy. But where do fonts come from and why do we need so many? Who is behind the businesslike subtlety of Times New Roman, the cool detachment of Arial, or the maddening lightness of Comic Sans (and the movement to ban it)? Simon Garfield embarks on a mission to answer these questions and more, and reveal what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world.

Typefaces are now 560 years old, but we barely knew their names until about twenty years ago, when the pull-down font menus on our first computers made us all the gods of type. Beginning in the early days of Gutenberg and ending with the most adventurous digital fonts, Garfield unravels our age old obsession with the way our words look. Just My Type investigates a range of modern mysteries, including how Helvetica took over the world, what inspires the seemingly ubiquitous use of Trajan on bad movie posters, and what makes a font look presidential, male or female, American, British, German, or Jewish. From the typeface of Beatlemania to the graphic vision of the Obama campaign, fonts can signal a musical revolution or the rise of an American president. This book is a must-read for the design conscious that will forever change the way you look at the printed word.

Add a touch of panache and style to a wide variety of graphic projects with the decorative letters in this unusual and practical collection. Typographer Dan X. Solo has compiled 100 different swash letter fonts — typefaces characterized by ornate letters with long tails and flourishes. Included here are: Cantini Casual; Cranston; El Greco; Goudy Cursive; Italian Slab Fancy; Mardi Gras Regular; Raffia Initials; Rousseau Fancy; Allegro Swash; Artcraft; and dozens more.
All fonts include uppercase alphabets; most also contain lowercase letters and numerals. Inexpensive and royalty-free, these alphabets are ideal for use in display ads, on posters, signs, menus — almost any printed communications.

“Each contributor has a distinct skill that refutes the mainstream view of graffiti artists as mere vandals.” ―New York Times

Classic graffiti lettering and experimental typographical forms lie at the heart of street culture and have long inspired designers in many different fields. But graffiti
artists, who tend to paint the same letters of their tag again and again, rarely design complete alphabets.

Claudia Walde spent over two years collecting alphabets by 154 artists from thirty countries to show the many different styles and approaches to lettering within the graffiti and street art cultures. All of the artists have roots in graffiti. Some are world renowned such as 123 Klan (Canada), Faith47 (South Africa), and Hera (Germany); others are lesser known or only now starting to emerge.

Each artist received the same instructions: design all twenty- six letters of the Latin alphabet within the limits of a single page of the book. How they approached this task and selected the media with which to express their ideas was entirely up to them, and the results encompass not just street art but sketches, sculpture, digital art, and photography.