Ahhhhhh…! That wonderful aha moment when we see the spark in our students’ eyes—when they realize that typography reaches far beyond the font list under the type menu on the computer. The tricky part is getting to that aha moment!
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Articles by John Boardley
Shameless
Neil Summerour’s latest release sat in a ‘drawer’ for two years gathering dust. Fortunately for us, he discovered it, dusted it off, and released it as a scratchy, dynamic, and elegant script font. Shameless is available in two flavors, Standard & Deluxe, with the latter comprising more characters. Shameless is […]
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Making waves with Magasin
I’ve always been fascinated by typefaces based on fluid handwriting, and as an amateur calligrapher of copperplate, I decided to design a display font based on this experience.
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Socialist TV Typeface Videtur Finally Freed
In the 1980s, the German Democratic Republic’s state television broadcasting service commissioned Axel Bertram to develop a custom typeface. The result was “Videtur,” a remarkably independent serif design that was intended to define the on-screen graphics of East German television for years to come. But by the beginning of the […]
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A compulsive tribute to Giambattista Bodoni
In 2013 to mark the bicentenary of Bodoni’s death, designers Riccardo Olocco and Jonathan Pierini will publish the Parmigiano Typographic System which has the ambition of being the most extended family of fonts ever to have been inspired by the great punchcutter and printer who spent most of his life in Parma. Compulsive […]
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Crafting Type
I don’t know what it is about type design recently. I could swear that five years ago there wasn’t even half as much interest as there is today! But somehow, it has become hip and interesting to a lot more people than before. Perhaps this reflects the growing democratization of […]
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Lettering versus Calligraphy
Despite the frequently ill-defined line between Lettering and Calligraphy, they have always been separate disciplines. Lettering vs Calligraphy, a new project from Berliners Martina Flor and Giuseppe Salerno, seeks to bring together both the craft of drawing letters and the art of writing, but at the same time emphasize and […]
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A firm turn toward the objective: Josef Müller-Brockmann 1948–1981
In February of 1989, I had the pleasure of meeting Josef Müller-Brockmann. I was a young, wide-eyed student of 21 years studying at Arizona State University. With great fortune, a professor of mine had heard that Müller-Brockmann was going to be in the country and asked him to add a […]
Read MoreCodex Editorial Board
Beginning with Codex 3, we are pleased to announce that the journal will have an editorial board comprised of eminent figures in the fields of graphic design and typography, type design, type and printing history, and typographic education. The members, whose biographies are listed below, represent a cross-section of the […]
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TDC type-design competition 2012
The Type Directors Club in New York City has been holding an annual competition for the best in typography (that is, the use of type in graphic design) since the 1950s. In 1997, James Montalbano and Paul Shaw founded TDC2, a second competition that dealt specifically with the design of […]
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