I stumbled on this interesting piece of typography the other day while cruising around through Behance Network. This collective of found objects make up the typeface entitled, ELEKTROTRASH, was created by California-based graphic designer, Alex Varanese. In no way is this anything you’d consider a traditional typeface, but its a very clever manipulation of ordinary objects used to communicate an idea. The examples included are a display some really nice ways in which he’s put these together into compositions. How will this typeface affect the way you view your everyday surroundings?

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Typeface: Alex Varanese

A game based on typography you say? Where do I sign up!? Think you know your Arial from your Helvetica, your sans from your sans serifs? Then step up to the plate. With three levels of game play from the ease-yourself-in, ‘Somewhat Difficult’ through to the incredibly challenging ‘Exceedingly Difficult’, there’s lots of fun to be had for novices and typographic experts alike. I’m not sure how many of you saw my post with the original Font Game, but this new version puts this font-filled action in the palm of your hands via the new iPod application! Check out the beautifully designed Font Game by John Boardley, Justin Stahl and Kari Kari Pätilä.

Go ahead, press your luck! See if you can beat me.

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Application: Font Game

Okay, so I was searching around this morning through some of my regular websites and came across a very interesting article that got me really thinking about typography on the web. A common problem I have is writing CSS and designing the type as I’d like it to be presented on the screen to the viewer. So you can imagine how insane of a task it might be for type designer who is actually crafting the fonts. There is a big difference between designing typefaces for print and the web; pixels behave differently than blobs of ink on paper. Typefaces for the Web need different qualities. “The bigger problem is all of the technology that delivers the font to the viewer. The website is delivered by one cluster of hardware to another, often with a different operating system, different browser and, in some cases, different pieces of software. That’s a very long chain. The number of variations is almost bottomless, and the results are unreliable at best.”

Imagine that you are a super-successful movie director, who’s been given hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of whiz-bang technology to make a cinematic epic. Sounds good? Not once you are told that people will have to watch it on fuzzy old black and white television sets.

The new publishing world of pixels presents striking complications to displaying fonts on the Web, according to a recent New York Times article. Browsers grow; eyes get strained; fonts become unclear and unappealing. As the Web world has evolved, typographers have worked to develop new tricks to fashion fonts for computer screens while preserving the craft’s rich history and nuance. For instance, if typographers “make enclosed spaces, like those in an ‘a’ and ‘e,’ bigger than they need to be in print.”

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Reference: All Top
Article: New York Times
Photo Credit: Fotolia