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Facade relief brick typography in Mitte, Berlin

Facade 3D relief brick lettering at Sophienstraße, Berlin
Type set in stone at Sophienstraße, Berlin. The relief brings continues variations in light and shadow and so a continues changing piece of lettering.

If you make it to Sophienstraße, be sure to make a pit stop at bakery Die Bäckerei & Konditorei Balzer.

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Back slanted type, always good.

Affiche of The Barnum & Bailey greatest show on earth — The great Coney Island water carnaval.
Poster (1898) measures about 99 x 73 cm. and is on show at the Brooklyn Museum, until March 13 2016.

Not sure who’s stealing the show, but we’re biased anyway as we’re a sucker for back slanted type. Spotted this poster at the great Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, New York. On show until mid March 2016.

The poster is printed by The Strobridge Lithographing Company, in service 1878-1939. There’re are lots of others samples visible online. Some are available offline too, but prices vary. A few years ago some are also bundled into a book.

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Specific Font Serving

For Google Web Fonts we’ve been thinking if we could tackle certain problems related to online typography. As a result, we developed the concept ‘specific font serving’. This makes web fonts completely responsive to medium and design – solving multiple issues at once. Amongst other features and in no particular order, it could speed up downloads, reduce bandwidth, deal with optical sizes and eliminate the variety of how thin or thick a single font looks from screen to screen.

We’re delighted to see that Google’s type team immediately updated their font library after our consult. At their conference ‘Google I/O 2011’, the team presented that some of the suggestions we made had implemented already.

Details at the project page.

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Actium on skin

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=eGB0ox6HJp8

A short docu we shot at an Amsterdam based tattoo shop. The legendary Henk Schiffmacher adds another glyph at Dan Rhatigan’s arm. This time a character from our typeface Actium, the double u inked in its black italic font.

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To cheat or not to cheat

Subject: Re: Questions for use Actium
From: Dodo
Date: 12/13/10 6:09 PM
To: gerben@typemafia.com

Unfortunately, you’re right. Last week we decided which fonts to pick and even though I plead for your typeface, it wasn’t picked.

My professor said that your typeface is too similar to the “scalasyntax-world” and quotes it too much (also Kievit, The Sans). Besides that, she doesn’t think that it will work fine in charts and lists, which the university calendar mainly is. Kind of sad, because I think with all the OpenType functions it could have looked very appealing.

It’s like with a girl I met once. After weeks of hanging out together, we realised that we were into each other. But she wanted to stick with her boyfriend at that time, so I will now forever wonder if it would have worked out between us. In this scenario I’m the university calendar, your font is the girl and her boyfriend is my professor.

Anyway, like the girl I will always love your font and hopefully will buy it someday. Maybe there will be a good use for other projects the next semesters.

Best,
Dodo