Type Slugs 2006-03-24: Font Magazine

This edition: A look into FontShop.com’s Font Magazine, Issue 004

Well, we knew this…Font Issue 004 Front cover

This last week at Designorati:Typography Main Mission we were thrilled to at last get our copy of FontShop.com’s Font Magazine, issue 004. With an attention-getting cover we figured we were looking at something if not slightly iconoclastic, at least insipriational and challenging. Leafing through it, we found we were right, so, we’re going to devote this edition of Type Slugs to a look at its design and features.

Obvious Truth of the Cover

The cover is, visually, like chipotle peppers (the excitment part, not the chili oil part). On a field of bright orange the declaration “TYPE ROCKS”, as assertion to which we all can agree. The back, however, reminds us that “TYPE SUCKS…if you can’t read”, a message call citing the UNESCO statistic that there are nearly one billion non-literate adults in the world.

But we’d do well to remember this. Font 004 Back cover.

The inside of the cover holds a reare treat: a dialog between the three designers of the cover, Akeim Hemlung, Bas Jacobs, and Sami Kortemäki, they who are the distributed font studio Underware, that occurred when they were in the act of designing the cover to this issue. Through email and iChat they discuss messsage, ideas, and we get a look at some of the design stops along the way. Along with being astoundingly creative, we get a look into the minds of three individuals with evident passion for what it is they are doing and their energy fairly leaps from the page as an inspiration.

I Can See Your Underware

The noted Underware digital typefoundry is, in fact, one of the features of this issue. The article itself bears mentioning in its layout and format: interspersed with samples of Underware’s work, sketches of their Auto 3 Italic font in the process of design (which we find particularly inspiring) and photos of the crew, the article itself is laid out into parts one and two; one follows the black type of part one through the article to the end of the pages, inverts the magazine, and follows the white type of part two back through to the beginning. Subheads and titles to this article are in fonts from Underware, and the simple act of reading the article is fun…the insight into the workings of the trio (based in The Hague, Amsterdam, and Finland) is a bonus.

While one really ought to go to the Underware website (http://www.underware.nl) and check out their entire range, the feeling of an Underware style–energy and solid design driven by passion–begins to emerge from looking at their work. We find that, in a way, we wish we were them.

We’re One of You…and You’re One Of Us, We Think

A particularly compelling feature uses type, line, and masses of limited color to define and try to give a feeling of not only what connects us but what separates us. Called “Us vs. Them”, it traces, over three spreads, the nature, rise, maturation, and fall of commmunity, and by featuring many parts of that community, makes the point that we humans tend not only to define ourselves by who we are a part of but also by who we are not a part of.

A part of “Us Vs Them”, in Font 004, by Marian Bantjes (click for a closer view)

As the author and artist, Speak Up member Marian Bantjes, says in the introduction, “That which unites must also separate. It is often by defining them that we define ourselves.”

We still feel that designers are a tribe, and apparently, we aren’t the only ones. This is play with type and with shapes that will absorb and make one think.

Other Notables

Above all, Font is also a way for Fontshop to show off what they got, to induce you to, at the very least, look at what they have to show you, and in this it also succeeds. Pages 18 and 19 exhibit the new FontFonts, releases 35 and 36, and the two succeeding pages announce the fifteenth anniversary of the FontFont library with a raucous collage. FontFonts claims more than 3,500 fonts and celebrates thier anniversary with a travelling exhibition, “FiFFteen”, which began in London in November 2004, and announces that Jan Middenthorp will be publishing a book in 2007 about the FontFont universe. There are also lovely “Featured Distractions” and Lucasfonts, Process Type, and Mark Simonson Studio offerings simply too numerous to list here.

John Berry also chimes in with a delightful article on name tags and thier communicative power and potiential.

All in all we’re still having fun with this issue. It’s insprational and a delight to read. Fontshop’s Font Magazine is free for the subscription, and can be subscribed to at Fontshop’s page here (this is the web-version of issue 004, the subscribing link is at the bottom). We highly approve of this publication, and enthusiastically suggest that you subscribe to it.