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A better place to talk about typography.

Happy type holidays!

It's supposed that this blog is about typography, maybe this post is a little out of the topic.
When I knew that the python language existed I began to look for some information about it & found Drawbot an application, developed by Just van Rossum, to begin to learn how to program in python. Looking up for more information I found some excercises from the students fo Type&Media in The Hague and some of them were patterns, sadly that website no longer exists, but I have some examples of the works.




Well well, but what does a picture of fireworks mean in this blog? When I saw the exercises with Drawbot I inmediatly remembered fireworks because in my city this is a job made by craftsmen & I'm used to see this kind of patterns. I plan to develop in python something like this.
By the way...
Happy holidays!

5 pts

5 pts has arrived, I bought it for the editorial design, look at those margins, they have good space, haven't they?



The cover is very interesting.




Type basics are good too:

Designing type is like driving a car. If you drive a car, you always take the curve in a natural way. If you draw a curve of a character on paper, this is exactly the same. The curve starts smoothly, never out of a sudden. While driving a car, you don't start turning the wheel when you are already in the beggining of the curve. A while before you arrive in the curve you anticipate by leading your car gently in the right direction. Think about driving a car when you are sketching type on a paper.

The stroke, theory of writing

For a Mexican like me, it has been quite difficult to get involved in the type world, specially because I come from one of the most marginalized counties from my country. That's why for me is a kind of achievement to have this book in my hands, finally I'm reading this interesting work by Gerrit Noordzij. Set in Ruse from TEFF.
I like the beggining very much:

A letter is two shapes, one light, one dark.

Mujer

I did this lettering for a poster about women rights in Jalapa de Díaz, Oaxaca. I took as a reference Burgues Script but I wanted something unique. So I decided to play with curves and obtained this.

Linotype Ginkgo

This is Linotype Gingko, I saw it two weeks ago in the Linotype newsletter & I liked it so much. It has some kind of purity, a generous aperture and a dutch taste, very nice letterforms by Alex Rütten, I feel some self-assure in this typeface, I really liked it, it reminds me Dolly, by Underware.

A brand For Urban & Architectonic Design

Some days ago I decided to design a brand for my workgroup, they are mostly interested in architecture and enginering (I am the exception because I'm a graphic designer), the group's name is Diseño Urbano & Arquitectónico, I had been thinking about this brand for two months, so when I started to sketch the letters it was quite natural to approach to the result.

I tried to make reference to buildings and accurate traces and I drew the letters inside a square net, the letters were supposed to be monolinear, but when I saw the result, some parts looked thiner than others, then I remembered something a teacher said to me:

If you want it monolinear, you have to do it non monolinear.

I adjusted the thickness and after that I selected Bell Gothic Std for the text below, but I had to make some changes in the I, the Q and the Ñ. This is the result.

Type Design Competition 2009

For those type lovers & designers who are obsessed with letterforms,the TDC of New York has published the Call for entries for the TDC2 2009, you have until december 19th to send your work. It would be a proud to see more latinoamerican works there, I have seen the work of many good typedesigners from Chili, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico.
One of the judges will be Gabriel Martínez Meave, illustrator, calligrapher & typedesigner from Mexico; another interesting judge will be Jonathan Hoefler, from Hoefler & Frere Jones.
I encourage you to participate & I hope to see many interesting works of the selection. You can download the entry form here.