#44 — Dashes for Lashes 🍁

It was Stanley’s favourite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers, too. Clean and elegant… I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs.

John Baskerville in the 1750s, the character set is sharply defined with wide, regular proportions, open counter forms and a graceful curvature.
However, Baskerville’s type was not regarded as readable, let alone trustworthy, when it was first used in 1757, one of his British competitors accusing its designer of “blinding all the readers in the nation; for the strokes of your letters, being too thin and narrow, hurt the eye.”

The work of a master craftsman, Johnson’s Railway Type demonstrates the beauty and power of typography as a communication tool. A combination of letters with the proportions of classical Roman inscriptional capitals and radical new forms, it embodies an understanding of the history of letterform in every detail, reconciling humanistic and geometric attributes in ways that are without precedent.

The Alphabet, first published in a fashion magazine in 2001, is not a typeface in a conventional sense. Cut into photographs of fashion models, Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag of M/M Paris created a rudimentary all-capitals alphabet that loosely followed the contours and tonal structures of the images.

Dyslexia is a reading disorder with a lot of different reality for our users. Problems may vary from difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly and easily, reading aloud or understanding what other people read.It can be important to understand that dyslexia is not a visual or hearing problem but a learning disability affecting 3 to 7% of the world population.

Punctuation, largely invisible and insignificant for normal people, as it should be, is a highly personal matter for writers. Periods, commas, colons, semi-colons: in their use or non-use and in their order and placement, can represent elaboration, conjecture, doubt, finality. And in aggregate, over the course of a text, the rhythms of punctuation advance an author’s worldview and personality as surely as any plot or theme. Patterns of punctuation usage are the writerly equivalent of an athlete’s go-to moves, or a singer’s peculiar timbre and range—those little dots and squiggles, in a sense, encode your voice. 

“The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark. Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons—in each case to slightly different effect.” It is the doppelgänger of the punctuation world, a talented mimic impersonating other punctuation, but not exactly, leaving space to shade meaning. 

But what if we told you that the the secret to understanding how to use type is something that type designers have learned from making it?

Do we need to modify the Stem 1’s top to deal with the Joint and Stem? What about playing with the angle of the shoulder, based on the weight? How does each of these variations affect your overall perception of the type, and of whatever you’re designing, for how you intend to use it?
Holy crap, we’re suddenly considering how the atomic elements of a font can affect our end goals for the whole design — the options are suddenly endless, and suddenly available to us.