I Love Typography

7 stories

I Love TypographySteven Heller’s Font of the Month: Dez Bollardian Read the book, Typographic Firsts At long last, I’ve found a newly conceived typeface that allows me to be accessible and expressive all within the same family.

10.20

I Love TypographyFont Faces: Stefan Hattenbach Read the book, Typographic Firsts Stefan Hattenbach was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1961. Although he’s moved around a lot, with longer stays in Budapest (1993–94) and San Francisco (2005–06), he’s…

10.14

I Love TypographySteven Heller’s Font of the Month: Ege Basalt Read the book, Typographic Firsts I’ve forever fancied fat faces. And not just for the alliteration. And I’ve found the perfect weight in a comparatively new design with vintage flavor: the revival…

09.09

I Love Typography

I Love TypographyStructure in Type Design Read the book, Typographic Firsts The legendary type designer Adrian Frutiger once described an epiphany he had: “When I put my pen to a blank sheet, black isn’t added, but rather the white sheet is…

08.14

I Love Typography

I Love TypographySteven Heller’s Font of the Month: Zinkraft Read the book, Typographic Firsts Massimo Vignelli was canonically adamant that a contemporary designer only requires a handful of typefaces and should “trash the rest.” He was talking about five to…

08.07

I Love Typography

I Love TypographySteven Heller’s Font of the Month: Loopy Read the book, Typographic Firsts I once taught a research/writing class called “No Google” that lasted until it dawned on me that “Google” was indeed the research tool for the 21st century.

07.03

I Love TypographySteven Heller’s Font of the Month: Brutal Types Read the book, Typographic Firsts “Brutal” is such a nasty, albeit seductive, word. A quick visit to my desktop Oxford dictionary confirms that the adjective “brutal” is, etymologically speaking…

06.01

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo