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Wordle is a simple and fun tool to generate typographic word clouds. It may only seem like a time-waster at first, but if you take a look at the gallery you can find some very clever word combinations and descriptions that are great examples of typographic solutions to design problems. The above word cloud includes all the major words from my last few posts, but there are more in the gallery that go as far as to include entire novels.

While I prefer not to use TrueType fonts, building your own over at FontStruct can be extremely fun. The tool lets you build fonts using geometrical shapes arranged in a grid pattern, save them as high-quality TrueType fonts, which in turn you can use in any Mac or Windows application.

If you’re feeling short on inspiration, you can browse the user gallery and download a wide variety of fonts. Digital fonts certainly have their limitations, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be creative and useful.

Two of my favorite things in life, The Big Lebowski and motion graphics, have been combined in this translation of a popular scene from the film using only animated typography as its visual. It is a great example of how effective type can be in video when used with familiar visual traits. I especially like the animation of the word “lanes” and “click”. Animator and designer Koos Dekker was certainly successful in re-creating visual dialogue without using any images from the film. This video was created in Adobe After Effects.

Typographic art seems to be constantly evolving; It’s genetic matter made up of new styles as well as old, with the established as its skeleton. With the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1456, traditional letter forms gave way to new cuts of type faces which were previously unheard of. Letterpress allowed the use of a combination of size, space and type face that opened the minds of printers and designers to all new possibilities. Contemporary graphic designers can sometimes neglect the history and the styles that were born of letterpress with the emergence of digital typography in the design world. The styles, techniques and rules that have stood the test of time are what graphic designers need to absorb, rather than replace with the generic simply because its easier.

The above design by Il’ia Zdanevich, for his and Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist announcement, Soirée du Coeur à Barbe, is an example of a typographical design previously unseen and made possible by letterpress. It’s use of contrast in type font, type size and white space, as well as its asymmetrical layout, was considered avant-garde at the time. These are now core design principals whose maker is often under-appreciated by the modern designer. Read the rest of this entry »