St. Patrick’s leprechaun, shamrock, green beer typeface

green beer insular typeface

Every year we trundle out the “Gaelic fonts,” for St. Patrick’s Day. Insular (Irish) scripts, or uncials started out as a Byzantine script which enjoyed widespread use, but they are now often associated with the Book of Kells and are viewed as Celtic, or perhaps even less accurately as Gaelic. Uncials are a script form which was developed from Roman cursive during the early Byzantine era (third century) along with the new, smooth media of parchment and vellum. Ascenders and descenders were developed in uncials, contributing to the later development of upper and lower case in early printed Gothic typefaces. read more…

Favicons: tiny branding

favicons in use

A favicon (or “favorite icon”) was the 16 pixel square image that precedes the website title in browser window tabs (see illustration). Favicons are now used for tile and touch icons, read more…

One plus one makes three

two color matchbooks

Old fashioned two and three color printing often overprinted spot colors (colors generated by a single press run) to create a third color. Both of these Hungarian matchbooks are two-color press runs of the same red and turquoise green. The print on the left makes use of a third, “black” color by running the red on top of the green (overprinting). read more…

Lovely, short letterpress documentary

Firefly Press, Sommerville, Massachusetts

“If I were to be sat down at a computer and told, ‘here, you can do whatever you want,’ I wouldn’t know what to do. There would be too many choices,” says John Kristensen, of Firefly Press in this gorgeous short film. Take a moment to enjoy the rich artistry and craftsmanship in the everyday work of the Firelfy Press in Sommerville Massachusetts.

Raster (or Bitmap) vs Vector images

bitmap-raster-image

Raster (or bitmap) images are fixed-resolution, made of a grid of pixels. Enlarged they will be blurry and pixelated, with a jagged edge.
Common raster file formats are jpg, gif, tiff, bmp and png. read more…