Universal Grotesk I remember looking at this book cover every evening before falling asleep. I was perhaps 13 or 14, and I didn’t really know who Franz Kafka was, but this book with the weird ‘f’ on the spine caught my attention.
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Articles by John Boardley
Designing Vinter
The process of drawing Vinter fonts began almost six years ago. The initial spark originated from one of the many magazines I regularly purchase for inspiration in my work as a graphic designer. Its headlines were set in an extremely thin sans serif, employing the thick–thin contrast commonly found in […]
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Pure Gold
Both the Roman, Pliny (c. 61–113) and the Greek historian, Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), mention gilding; the latter writing that the Egyptians gilded wood and metal. It has been used in decorating ceramics, in art, and at least from the fifth century in the production of illuminated manuscripts, reaching its […]
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The First Illustrated Books
The early history of illustrated printed books is also the history of woodcut. Woodcut illustrations long predate the mid-fifteenth-century introduction of movable type to Germany. They were used extensively in the printing of textiles many hundreds of years before in Europe and the Far East. Designs were cut in relief […]
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The First Printed Children’s Books
Anyone who has children understands that books are a crucial part of their development. Parents also know that children’s books are likely to have relatively short shelf lives; torn pages, chewed corners, and crazed crayoning conspire toward the book’s inevitable annihilation. Fifteenth-century children were no different, and so it is […]
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Printing the Stars
For tens of thousands of years, humans have looked up at the night sky in awe, intrigued by the motion, manner, and nature of the stars. And with our propensity for pattern recognition and our proclivity for causal inference, or attributing meaning or significance to coincidence, we joined the dots, […]
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Font Marathon
Last November, I decided on a whim to spend a whole weekend dedicated to designing a full, new, Arabic typeface. All I knew was that I wanted to design a fat, display, Naskh typeface. Because of the speed required, I relied almost entirely on intuition and produced something I wouldn’t […]
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What are Optotypes? Eye Charts in Focus
My graphic design students love to design posters using the classic eye chart composition, and they frequently ask “What typeface should I use for this?” Not having a definitive answer has always been frustrating, so I decided to investigate to find out what typeface is used on eye charts.
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Unusual fifteenth-century fonts: part 2
Nowadays, with tens of thousands of fonts available, we are accustomed to a great variety of letterforms. But, of the approximately 1,000 cataloged fifteenth-century roman fonts, very few stand out as unusual. Most share the same fundamental attributes. Almost all roman typefaces of the period are, what we now call […]
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ILT 2015
Way back in 2007, while living in rural Japan, I created ILT. I remember its birth with supreme clarity. It began simply as a way to share what I found typographically interesting, and I never foresaw its popularity. Almost eight years on, more than 500 posts, eight moves, and four […]
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