Godfather of Helvetica, Mike Parker Dies at 84

When we hear Helvetica, the normal person might associate it with the standard Grotesque font that is packaged with every Windows or Mac OS (among hundreds of applications). When a typographer hears Helvetica, they think of one of, if not the most technically sound type system designed in the past century.

Originally designed in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, dubbed “Neue Haas Grotesk” was a colab between geniuses Max Miedinger with Eduard HoffmannParker and his team took Haas‘s original drawings and began reworking them to work on Linotype‘s machines. The modified design eventually became known as Helvetica.

Under his leadership, more than 1,000 typefaces, including Helvetica, were added to the company’s library, which became an industry standard and helped guide the type landscape from hot metal, to photocomposition, and finally to digital printing.

“It is not a letter that’s bent to shape; it’s a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space, it’s — oh, it’s brilliant when it’s done well.”
—Mike Parker

Sources: CNN, FastCo

Diablo III Fan Art Contest

Whenever they have a design contest on deviantart.com, you know you are going to see some sick stuff. And with the Diablo III Fan Art Contest, I’m postitive that we’re going to see creatively creepy stuff, especially for a 2 night trip to Blizzard HQ in Irvine, CA to meet the artists and developers of Diablo III! and $5,000 cash, not to mention a bunch of other stuff. So if you think you have what it takes to compete with the big dog illustrators, enter here.

Good Practice: Regular Backups!

So, if you didn’t notice, good; but our site was down for a couple days. We lost a bunch of portfolio and blog posts which really sucks. This is a reminder to myself and all of the other people that forget to do regular backups of their websites when the work is really busy. Back it up, especially if you work with a database driven website, something can easily go wrong which is irreparable. No worries, we’ll have all the portfolio back up soon and better blog posts!

Lettering vs Calligraphy

Just ran across this site and thought it was awesome. Lettering vs Calligraphy is an ongoing project by Giuseppe Salerno and Martina Flor consisting of a visual dialogue between a letterer and a calligrapher, where they draw/write a letter responding to a keyword given by a moderator. The adventure aims to explore the capabilities of the two technical approaches. They deliver one letter every day and all of it takes place online where visitors are invited to vote for their favorite.

Read more

New Microsoft Website

I was scavenging the web yesterday for new info/tools for responsive web design and came across this awesome article on Paravel’s website digging deep into their redesign of the new responsive design for Microsoft‘s homepage. If you haven’t seen this or the article by Nishant Kothary it’s definitely worth a read.

Read more

Sutturah Typeface

The Sutturah typeface, was among the Typographica’s Best of 2012, it was awarded in the prestigious TDC2 2012 competition, and won the second prize in the Display typeface category at Granshan 2012 competition, with the first prize not awarded (WTF!) and Retiro designed by Jean Francois Porchez placing third.

Read more