Old style figures blend invisibly into text. Old style text figures (or lower case, non-lining numerals) have become popular in graphic design in recent years. Typesetters use old style figures mainly in book publishing and magazines because they are lower case and...
Bulmer MT Regular with a Goudy Oldstyle Italic ampersand The italic versions of ampersands are typically less restrained than their roman counterparts. As Robert Bringhurst wrote, “Since the ampersand is more often used in display work than in ordinary text…there is...
We recently purchased this 11 x 17″ sale flyer. Typographic ephemera typically consists of beautiful broadsides from foundries, advertising a new typeface on high-quality paper, but this is a notice of a sale of “secondhand job type” printed on low-quality...
Our type anatomy chart, which was inspired by a similar diagram in U&lc magazine in the early 1980s. Access a high resolution pdf here. Besides typographic parts, we’ve included some diacritical marks, punctuation and common sorts.
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...
Single primes are used to mark feet, and double primes for inches. They are no substitute for apostrophes and quotation marks—a mistake made even in (shudder) company logos. The apostrophe, or single closed quote, is used for contractions or possessives. It’s also...
