Font Poetry: Starting a meme May 21, 2009
Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Blogging, Etcetera, FFFFOUND!, Pretty!, Typography, Words.Tags: Alice in Wonderland, Amalia, Basho, FFFFOUND!, Gotham Narrow, Haiku, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, James Joyce, Nikola Djurek, Poetry, Typeface, Typography
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Confession: I have fallen head over heels in love with the delicate, poignant, meaningless poetry of typeface samples.
Amalia
Designer: Nikola Djurek.
Print Foundry: OurType.
Found: via FFFFOUND!, via AisleOne
Mainly this calls for no effort from me, and is therefore a greedy, parasitic indulgence on my part. But sometimes the prettiest words need to undergo a bit of picking and choosing to turn them from Joyce into something bite-sized, like Bashō. Case in point: this sample grid for Gotham Narrow from Hoefler & Frere-Jones could be a ballad of epic proportions…
…but I like it better paraphrased into this charming little verse:
Hawkweed Foster House,
Collective Gingerbread;
Copperware Gothic Revival,
Gourmand Gristmilling,
Corinthian Order.
Gotham Narrow (abridged)
Designer: Frere-Jones (from the original Gotham, circa 1930s)
Print Foundry: Hoefler & Frere-Jones
Found: via Seannamon
Now, as far as filler text and typeface samples go, typographic poetry runs rings around the quick brown fox, and has far more individual character than the oft-repeated, famously nonsensical lorem ipsum.
It did get me wondering, though: Who chooses the content of these beautiful little odes? Is it a matter of science and reason, or just a happy mish-mash of randomly chosen words? Can someone from the world of typography please put an end to my ignorance?
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