Typeface: Knockout

This morning's post by the always-fertile Grain Edit reminds me that I’ve wanted to write something in appreciation of Mark Weaver. As with so many things I like, Weaver’s work is difficult to classify: design? illustration? art? The term “collage” might do as a formal description, but it’s a shabby word to describe Weaver’s mysterious inventions, which so successfully bypass both the senses and the intellect and go straight to the mid-brain. His tableaux that simultaneously evoke grange exhibits, Japanese consumer goods, early David Bowie, and recent Wes Anderson — without ever quoting any of them literally — are worth experiencing up close; spend some time with his Make Something Cool Every Day series, and I think you’ll leave intriguied, delighted, and inspired. —JH

Photo: Nick Sherman. Typeface: Gotham Black

An enchanting bit of Gotham seen en route to ATypI Mexico: timbered lettering, on the storefront for Guru, a gallery and design emporium in Cuauhtémoc owned by graphic designer Quique Ollervides. Thanks for sharing this, Nick! —JH

Typeface: Ziggurat

When Abi Huynh sent me this image, I thought at first that it was a website graphic in the prevailing style: a digital rendering of high-gloss black acrylic, against a reflective white surface, in that "web 2.0" style that will not go away. But no! It’s an actual artifact, and a lovely one at that. Dominic Hofstede and Wendy Ellerton designed this limited edition stencil, a lovely laser-cut thingum at A5 size, produced as a promotional gift for the Australian studio Hofstede Design. Front and center here is our Ziggurat typeface, the lone representative of roman capitals to join a great typographic crew: among others, the design features one of the world’s best ampersands (from Caslon), along with sundry other punctuation (you know I love paragraph marks and daggers), and a Fraktur capital S. —JH

Typeface: Whitney Semibold

I have a friend, an editor at a renowned university press, who is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the English language. He is my go-to man for typo-lexico-philological questions, like whether there’s an English word that contains the adjacent letters h and x (there is); he’s the sort of gent to casually drop the words "usufructuary" and "megaboss" in the same sentence. It was therefore with great temerity that I once challenged him to a game of Scrabble, which to my surprise and relief he declined. ”I hope you understand,” he said, “I can’t. What would happen if I lost?”

This allegory was far from my mind when I agreed to captain Team C at “The Type is Right,” the AIGA/NY’s first-ever typographic game show. Join me and H&FJers Andy Clymer and Sara Soskolne, along with nine other nerds and nerdesses, as we go for the gold tonight in Brooklyn. The contestants’ range of interests and inclinations suggests a fun evening, probably one rife with withering embarrassments that you won’t want to miss. So come and join us this evening at Galapagos in DUMBO, and see which lucky typographer gets the chance to go all Kanye on the actual winner. —JH

The Type is Right
Monday, November 9, 2009, 6:30–8:30pm

Galapagos Art Space
16 Main Street
DUMBO, Brooklyn

Update: H&FJ clinches the vaunted title! Assisted in no small part by our fourth contestant, selected from the audience by random draw: typomaniac Ina Saltz. (Which is a little like learning that "one of the dads," who has volunteered to fill in at a Little League game, turns out to be Barry Bonds.) Thanks to the AIGA/NY, emcee Ellen Lupton, host Matteo Bologna, puzzlemaster Paul Shaw, and all the other participants for making it a fun evening. And please never remind us that we mistook a line of Zuzana Licko’s Filosofia (1996) for a line of Giambattista Bodoni’s Manuale Tipografico (1788). Our only explanation is that the venue boasts very bright spotlights, and an enviable collection of pale ales.