Tag Archives: typography

Which Font do you Fancy? Hosting Design Museum’s #FontSunday

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Type Tasting turns three years old on Valentine’s Day, having started with an evening of ‘Typographic Swearing ‘n’ Cussing‘ back in 2013. To celebrate this I’m the guest host for the Design Museum‘s #FontSunday with a Type Dating Game inspired theme of ‘Fanciable Fonts’. Get ready to Tweet/Instagram your photos of the typefaces you would date (or ditch) from 12 noon on Sunday 14th February to @DesignMuseum with #FontSunday.

Remember, no premature tweeting, the font flirting starts at 12 noon on Sunday!

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Do you like your typefaces naughty or nice?

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Sunday Brunch

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I was delighted to be invited on to Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch yesterday (Sunday 7th February) to talk about my new book Why Fonts Matter and play some classic Type Tasting games. It was a fast-paced and fun 9 minutes. The aim had been to show that typography can be fun and accessible; that it doesn’t always have to be an intellectual discussion, and from the feedback on Twitter we achieved this. I demonstrated how type tells us how expensive or calorific a product might be. I talked about Simon choosing a typeface for his restaurant menus to convey that the chef is skilful (and discovered that he has an aversion to italics). We had a quick look at the Type Dating Game, before Tim and Simon both chose a typeface card and read out their own personality analysis. We ended with font sniffing: pairing the smells to the shapes of typefaces, and I explained why most people give very similar answers.

Click here to play the Font Fortune personality analysis game yourself.

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The Type Tasting props posing nicely with the Channel 4 logo in the background.

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It’s Nice That ‘Why Fonts Matter, and how they impact your mood’

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Typography might just help you date, solve obesity and impact your mood; so we’ve learnt from type fanatic Sarah Hyndman. We’ve previously dubbed her “the one woman tour-de-force behind the Type Tasting enterprise”, which looks at the power typography has over our lives and senses. She’s now published a new book on the subject, Why Fonts Matter, and has kindly offered us an extract looking at the effects of typography on our emotions.

“Physically, we use our voice, facial expressions. gestures and posture to convey a wide range of emotional cues from the subtle to the dramatic. Typefaces and the way they are used provide a similarly extensive emotional range typographically.”

Read the full article.

AIGA: The World’s Most Expensive-looking Font Might Surprise You

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The World’s Most Expensive-looking Font Might Surprise You
By Madeleine Morley for AIGA

When you hear the word “luxury,” it’s easy to conjure up the colors gold, silver, and velvety purple; yet when it comes to typography, what we associate with wealth is less clear-cut. For the ancient Greeks, rare and precious purple ink came from sea snails found deep in the ocean, a dye so difficult to obtain it was reserved for kings. We don’t mine the sea for letters of the alphabet though, so what’s the typeface equivalent of purple ink, the fanciest looking font?

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Final Weekend

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FINAL WEEKEND
It’s the final weekend to purchase a copy of the first edition of The Type Taster: Why Fonts Influence You
Books purchased this weekend will all be signed and have free UK postage
This first, limited edition of the book is only available until the end of Sunday 25th October 2015.

From 28th January 2016 The Type Taster will be published as Why Fonts Matter under the Virgin Books imprint of Penguin Random House.

Click here to pre-order Why Fonts Matter

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Talking fonts live on BBC Radio 4

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Yesterday I was invited to be one of the guests on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live to talk about how we respond to typefaces. I took along some of the games that had gone down so well at the Pop-up Type Tasting at the V&A for the London Design Festival the previous weekend. Above is actor Sophie Thompson playing the ‘Feel Me’ game matching what she can feel to one of the fonts shown, if you came along to the event last weekend you know exactly which font she’s feeling from the expression on her face!

It was such an interesting programme to be on. Sophie is delightful and a pleasure to listen to, and I was excited to meet Peter Bleksley who is one of the hunters on ‘Hunted’ with the most amazing voice. It seems that we would all love the challenge of being on the next series and going on the run in an attempt to evade capture for 28 days. Third guest Trevor Lyttleton founded a charity which works with the elderly and we had a great chat afterwards about the power of typefaces on packaging to trigger nostalgia and bring back memories.

Scroll down for links to listen to the show.

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