Fool, you can’t tell Arial from Helvetica!

The ulti­mate graphic designer smack-down. Admit­tedly not as much sting as a well timed mother joke, but it can set an SVA, Par­sons or Pratt grad back on their heels a bit.

Take the quiz and impress your friends with your new found skills. Walk down the street con­fi­dently point­ing to store win­dows and pass­ing deliv­ery trucks, suck­ing your teeth and mut­ter­ing – urgh, dreaded Arial! Or find your­self say­ing things like – Hel­vetica would make a nice girls name wouldn’t it…

If you’ve seen Hel­vetica the movie this should be pretty easy. Take the quiz and let me know how you did. I scored 18 out of 20, and I’m not a good test person.

Ironic Sans has taken 20 Hel­vetica logos and redrew them using Arial.

“It seems to be the con­sen­sus that Arial is a sub­stan­dard alter­na­tive to Hel­vetica. What if the logos we’re used to see­ing in Hel­vetica were redone in Arial? Would you even notice if the next time you saw the Amer­i­can Air­lines logo it was redone in Arial?

If you know what to look for it prob­a­bly jumped right out at you. If not, you may see that they’re dif­fer­ent but still not know which is which.

Take the quiz here!

Orig­i­nal post: Ironic Sans: Quiz: So you think you can tell Arial from Hel­vetica?.

Typeface designers wrestle with the world of pixels

A New York Times reporter sits down with typog­ra­phy gurus, Jonathan Hoe­fler and Tobias Frere-Jones to dis­cuss some of the chal­lenges fac­ing graphic and web design­ers. Incon­sis­tent ren­der­ing of type­faces due to dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems, web browsers and dif­fer­ent user set­tings. View the Times arti­cle.

Three tips I have: 1– Reset your browser zoom set­ting, this at least ren­ders the same sized type that the designer intended. 2– Upgrade to Fire­fox or Safari, any browser but Explorer. 3– Check to see that your mon­i­tor is set to it’s high­est res­o­lu­tion set­ting. I’m always amazed to see how many peo­ple never bother to check this setting.

Design — Type­face Design­ers Wres­tle With the World of Pix­els — NYTimes​.com.

New York designer gets new identity

Logo and iden­tity for Ali­son Rose New York

New York inte­rior designer Ali­son Rose asked Robert Merola to cre­ate a new logo design and cor­po­rate iden­tity for her design busi­ness. In addi­tion to busi­ness papers a bridal pack­age was cre­ated. A sim­ple black square defines the logo­type and a cus­tomized Hel­vetica Neue in var­i­ous weights com­pletes the under­stated iden­tity. Visit the web­site.

Typography old school video

The basic prin­ci­ples of typog­ra­phy have not changed much in four-hundred years says David Dab­ner in new short.

In this beau­ti­ful 5 minute film by Omair Bar­lat­ulla, David Dab­ner demon­strates how an old tool can still teach us a lot about typog­ra­phy and design in a com­puter dom­i­nated craft.

In this inter­view, Dab­ner, a typog­ra­pher who teaches type and design at the Lon­don Col­lege of Print­ing, uses the time con­sum­ing art of Let­ter­press, to slow down the design process, giv­ing stu­dents more time to think about typography.

Dab­ner offers some valu­able advise to young design­ers many who have never expe­ri­enced the tac­tile plea­sure of hand draw or hand set type.

A must see for any­one who remem­bers the plea­sure of an indus­try where beau­ti­ful typog­ra­phy required an invest­ment of time, mus­cle, plan­ning and thought.

View Typog­ra­phy School