Before getting to where the Typography Team's™ cartography project has ended up, it might be a good idea to put these maps in context and point out how we got started down this particular(ly strange) path in the first place. It begins, as so many things do, with a slip. It was...
Typographic Prosopopoeia Lesson Plan
Among the many other fantastic lesson plans outlined by our DWRL colleagues for the recent Digital Pedagogy Open House, the Typography Team™ offered the following exercise as one way to integrate a rhetoric of fonts into a writing classroom. In your typical freshman comp class, instructors often observe that a student tends to give more thought to...
For the Love of the Ampersand
[x_section style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 45px 0px 45px 0px; "][x_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="true" bg_color="" style="margin: 0px auto 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_column bg_color="" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_image type="none" src="http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-27-at-4.21.30-PM.png" alt="Anatomy of an Ampersand, a Vitruvian sketch of an ampersand" link="true" href="#https://www.flickr.com/photos/snapfus/9541189831/" title="A Vitruvian...
X Marks the Spot
[x_section style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 45px 0px 0 0px; "][x_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="true" bg_color="" style="margin: 0px auto 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_column bg_color="" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_text]"Where is your group?" Considering our project's cartographical component, it's a particularly apt question to wonder where...
Two Types of Type: Part II
Previously in this space, I used the work of the late Adrian Frutiger to illustrate a particular way of thinking about typography. According to that view, a typeface is best when it goes unnoticed. Font is meant to invisibly transmit an writer's point, without the letterforms interfering with either the author's intent or...
Two Types of Type: Part I
A few weeks ago, on September 10th, Adrian Frutiger passed away in his native Switzerland at the age of 87. If you don't recognize his name, that's just as well: Frutiger was among the foremost typographers in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, and a strong proponent of the...