From SNDS Magazine 3|2008 www.snds.org
”Font: The Sourcebook is a resource no designer, typographer, artist or aesthete will want to be without.” Publishing company Black Dog Publishing is very self confident when promoting its new book, published this summer. And Font: The Sourcebook is a great book – but only most of the way.
__The elegant minimalistic cover is a contrast to the traditional way the book is designed on the inside. Except for bold opening spreads for each chapter, the book’s two-column grid, in combination with a lot of small illustrations, makes the flow rather monotonous. Only in a few passages, like in the Ed Fella chapter, are the illustrations given air to breathe and a chance to speak for themselves. The body text is set so small that it looks like it has been scaled down from a larger size.
__The content, however, is mainly great. Font: The Sourcebook is divided into two parts. The first section gives a thorough history of the public word, back to its roots in Egyptian hieroglyphs, describing the mechanics of early printing up until the digital methods now in use. This is the best – and largest – part of the book.
__The essays are both personal and written with deep insight by some of the world’s leading typographers, graphic designers and critics, such as Penguin’s David Pearson, Chairman of the Type Directors Club Alex W White, Will Hill, Pentagram’s Domenic Lippa, Ed Fella, Peter Bi’lak, and more.
__The second part of Font: The Sourcebook profiles 50 fonts in use today, with a short history of their origin, their inspiration and the designer who brought them to life. Each typeface entry is illustrated with examples of the font in use.
__Except for a few modern additions like Tobias Frere-Jones’ Gotham family, the fonts shown in this section are the well-known classics from the 19th and 20th century (like Avant Garde, Helvetica, Univers, Gill, News Gothic, etc.), the history of which can be found in almost every book about type history. This font resource section could have been left out to give room for more essays and analytic articles like the ones in section one. That would have made this book really special – a true resource.
Lars Pryds
Nadine Monem (editor): Font: The Sourcebook
Black Dog Publishing, London UK, 200821 x 17 cm , 320 pages, Paperback, 500 b/w and colour illustrations
ISBN: 978 1 906155 41 4
Price: GBP 24.95 / USD 45.00
blackdogonline.com/all-books/font.html
Other great books about type design
Henrik Birkvig: Birkvigs Typografiske Mosaik
Grafisk Litteratur, København, 200721 x 29,7 cm, 136 pages, Paperback
ISBN: 978-87-91171-34-5
Price: DKK 300 + shipping
www.grafisk-litteratur.dk
Neil Macmillan: An A–Z of type designers
Yale University Press, USA, 200628 x 22 cm, 200 pages, Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-300-11151-7
Price: USD 35.00
www.yalebooks.com
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