Don’t forget, tomorrow night is the opening of the Eames Century Modern show at the Eames Office. 7pm to 11pm. Free and open to all, live music from The Mattson 2, screen printing on site with David Dodde and Fresh Pressed, and meet and greet with the Eames family, House Industries designers and Erik van Blokland.
Opening Reception: March 11, 2010, 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Where: The Eames Office, 850 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, CA
Free and open to the public
Exhibition Runs from March 12 through April 1, 2010
Please join us as we introduce the illustrative beauty and cumulative functionality of Eames Century Modern with a three-dimensional tactile typographic experience at the Eames Office Gallery in Santa Monica. A cornucopia of free-standing dimensional letterforms and hand-printed installations celebrate the intricate curves and stunning stroke contrast that are the building blocks of this new font collection.
A quick video out-take from printing at Lead Graffiti last week. Nothing makes the case for keeping good old machinery around than printing on a Universal III (first made in 1959 for pulling reproduction proofs of metal type for offset printing in the days before photo type) with brand new digital type on photopolymer plates.
Much has been made this summer over fonts on the web. Web developers, web users, type foundries and browser makers have been debating the need and future of expanded options for typefaces on the web. From that discussion, our friends Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland along with Jonathan Kew of the Mozilla Corporation collaborated on a font format for the Web that satisfies the needs and concerns of browser makers, web designers, and type foundries. That formant, WOFF, offers compression to speed page load times, freedom from thorny legacy issues, and inclusiveness (font outlines can be Postscript or TrueType).
WOFF has the support of a wide spectrum of the type community; from peers such as Emigre, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Commercial Type, etc and larger foundries such as Linotype and Monotype. Today it has also gained the support of Mozilla in their release of Firefox 3.6 (Mozilla has a full list of designers and foundries that support WOFF on that page). We hope and expect that WOFF will quickly gain support in other major browsers as we support, endorse and expect to license our library for use on the Web in the WOFF format in the future.
In the meantime, issues of emdedding fonts on the web remain murky. If you want to license one of our typefaces for the web, we ask that you contact us to work out the licensing and technical issues involved. We also hope that you’ll help to encourage other browser makers to support WOFF so that we can exit this period of murkiness as quickly as possible.
“the ritual of spreading out the catch of the week, getting out the cutting mat and some fresh blades, pouring a glass of red, knifing these little bad boys up, drinking even more red, continuing through the evening and squaring up each and every little piece of cardboard – man, to say it all was cathartic would be an understatement atmo.”
—Richard Sachs
Richard Sachs is someone you meet and know that you’ll never meet anyone quite like him again. Master bicycle frame builder (his wait list is closed and if you’re lucky enough to be on it, it’s seven years long), cyclocross racer & team manager (producing one of America’s great cyclocross hopes, Jonathan Page), documentary film subject, and, apparently, printing ephemera collector.
We’re no strangers to the lure of what Richard calls “printer tabs”, but might also be called color bars. In designing the packaging for Burbank Tal mimicked the often out of register color bars on cereal boxes (driving our printer a bit crazy). So it was wonderful today to come across Richard’s collection of them on Flickr. Many thanks to Richard for letting us share his photo.
It’s no secret that Rich and I, as the two members of the House Industries Factory Racing team, are avid cyclists. So it should come as no surprise that while we obsessed over the results of today’s time trial —chapeau Contador, that was an amazing ride— we noted that Lance Armstrong’s new RadioShack team is using Chalet Paris 1970 for their new site. While it remains to be seen who’s going to make up the team (Hincapie? Levi? Bruyneel?), we’ll be excitied to see if they continue using Chalet.
Last week’s, but important news, was Julius Shulman passing away on Wednesday. We had the pleasure of working with Julius when digging up reference for the Neutraface collection; his insight and wit will be missed. To hear how Shulman worked, give NPR’s piece a listen.
Now that the upcoming PLINC site is getting some press, I realized that we didn’t highlight an important part of the House Industries site redesign. If you’ve ever wondered which OpenType features a font has or what those features do, click on the “More Options” part of the type tester for each font. You’ll get to play will all those cultural sets in Studio Lettering or see Ed Interlock in action. See something you like? You can email it to that client holding your project’s purse strings to persuade them to open said strings. Liked what you set before? Just click on it in the history window to go back. Ever wondered what all those figure styles look like in Neutraface Slab Text? Go nuts.
All this made possible by Lettersetter and the coding skill of Brook Elgie.
In other Neutra news this week, the Los Angeles Public Library has a new exhibit of Richard’s drawings running through September 6th. The New York Times gives it a good review, so if you find yourself in LA this summer, check it out.
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