Unit Editions, an independent publishing collaboration between Tony Brook (Spin) and Adrian Shaughnessy, have released two new videos showcasing spreads from Type Plus and Type Only. Featuring a range of contemporary typographic work by a host of international designers. If you don’t get a chance to flick through them yourself this is a nice little sneak peak into their contents.

Both are available from Unit Editions here:
uniteditions.com

And you can watch all of their videos on Vimeo here:
vimeo.com/uniteditions

Very thorough type specimen from Grilli Type (see full PDF here ) to show off their updated version of GT Walsheim, now with Cyrillic support and renamed GT Walsheim Pro. I particularly like the tittle (or dot) on the lowercase i, j and accents in the lighter weights.

They describe it as:
“Inspired by the lettering of Swiss poster designer legend Otto Baumberger from the 1930s, GT Walsheim is a friendly but precise typeface. Unlike other geometric sans-serifs, it sports warm curves and wears a broad smile.”

Design:
Latin by Noël Leu (Grilli Type)
Cyrillic by Noël Leu with Mirco Schiavone

Take a look here –
grillitype.com/typefaces/gt-walsheim

Nice promo for Font Font’s new Open Type features by Stark Films. Based on the pangram ‘The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog the film playfully highlights each of the new features introduced by Font Font through various contrasting mediums.

For more information on the new features introduced you can take a look here –

fontfont.com/ot-feature-sample/

Directors: Rob Blake and Zu Kalinowska
Producer: Brian Papish

Described by Fontbook as –

“If typography were a religion, this would be the Bible. FontBook is the world’s most comprehensive typographic reference tool, containing 110 type foundries and featuring over 620,000 typeface specimens.”

A bold statement, but one their iPad app doesn’t fall short on. Its a great (and lovely looking) app that delivers on design, usability and content. If you’re just looking for inspiration you can browse by style, alphabetically, foundry, year and more. Meaning however vague an idea you may have of the font you’re looking for you’ve got plenty of angles to approach from to narrow it down. The most useful tool I’ve found, however, is the ‘Compare’ function. Perfect for when you (or a client) can’t decide between a selection of fonts. You can test them out using different copy, and glide between them to make your decision. Much easier than running up a comparison sheet in Illustrator, and a bit more fun too…

You can read more reviews, and download the app from the iTunes store here

As I missed this exhibition (by nearly a year…) it’s nice that they took the time to film themselves flicking through the work shown. I think it’ll be a while before I come across a showcase of such intricate print work, and it’s especially nice to see some of it being constructed & deconstructed. So here you have it, a permanent digital version you can peruse whenever you have a spare 30mins, lovely!

Combining the latest in 3-dimensional prototyping technology with sublime typographic art, johnson banks have created Arkitypo: 26 letters, or 26 typographic sculptures, each exploring the character and history of an individual font.

The Arkitypo project developed as a collaboration with digital media and design college Ravensbourne, and acts as a showcase for the college’s prototyping skills and technology. The result is sheer visual delirium, from the “fractalised” Akzidenz Grotesk via the lace-like pipework of Johnston to the Vorticist collision of Zig Zag. Arkitypo took over six months to complete, and was the product of considerable research and practical experiment. And when examined in complete rotation, the results are all the more surprising and inspiring.

You can read more about this project on the johnson banks website here

Selfridges new store wide initiative is an homage to Words! With the likes of Faber Publishing and The Idler Academy providing talks and poetry readings, as well as handwriting analysis (which I’m especially interested in, as mines terrible) it looks like they’ve got it pretty well covered. As always though, what I’m most interested in is the window displays, this time provided by the clever people at It’s Nice That. I have to say that I’m not as keen on the supporting windows, but I think the main display is a really nice idea. Shown above, it brings a playfulness to what could otherwise be seen as quite a boring subject by many. It’s Nice That explain it like this:

“For the showpiece corner window of Oxford Street and Orchard Street, we have collaborated with interactive designer Stewdio to create ‘The Word-A-Coaster’ a playful fortune telling machine. The 14 foot high hand-built wooden rollercoaster (constructed by model makers Atom) is surrounded by a sea of 30,000 brightly coloured balls filled with 30,000 unique fortunes that can be picked up in store for free.

Inside the balls, shoppers will find a small card emblazoned with a uniquely numbered adjective, generated by a clever computer programme that leaves each individual with their own personal, playful prediction for 2012.”

For a full itinerary of talks and events take a look on the Selfridges site here