Update to Free Skillshare Courses: Typography That Works

Not too long ago, I wrote a short post about some free Skillshare courses on typography, presented by Ellen Lupton. What I didn’t write was that for one of those classes, Typography That Works: Typographic Composition and Fonts, I did some of the projects.

Screenshot from skillshare
Typography That Works: Typographic Composition and Fonts

The assignment for this short workshop is to create a few business cards. The first card uses different layout techniques to add hierarchy, interest, and symmetry or asymmetry. The second card is a literary style business card, which looks like a paragraph of text. The third is using one word to create custom letterforms to create a business card.

The first two projects should probably be done in InDesign. The last in Illustrator or some other vector program.

I haven’t yet gotten to the third card project, but here are my first two business cards.

These cards are based on a typography and graphic design project for a business called “Madison To Go”. The business theme is “fresh”. In a previous menu project (see below), I used the font Brandon Grotesque as the body font, but the literary style card with Arno Pro looks really good. I’d have to recreate the menu with Arno Pro to see if it conveyed the same feeling.

Menu for Madison To Go

Design Courses with Ellen Lupton on Skillshare

Ellen Lupton is a curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She is also the author of Thinking with Type, which is widely used in graphic design.

After recently browsing around on Skillshare, I discovered a few of her courses. Many are free and only around 30 min long. Here’s a short list. I haven’t taken them all, but I hope to review them sometime soon.

Typography That Works: Typographic Composition and Fonts

Screenshot from skillshare

 

 

 

Demystifying Beauty: Inspiration for Design

scrreenshot

 

 

 

 

Graphic Design Basics

Screen shot of video on scale

 

 

 

How Posters Work

Title slide for skillshare

 

 

 

 

I’m not a big fan of the Skillshare interface — for one thing, the videos autoplay when you load the page. But, these are pretty short videos, about 30 minutes, so don’t let autoplay scare you. Plus, they’re all free.

Fire-Writing: Tolkien-Ready Fonts

A quick search for fonts that look similar to fire-writing, the handwritten font J. R. R. Tolkien invented in 1953.

I recently attended the Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth exhibit at the Morgan Library, and I wondered if anyone had created a true Tolkin-esque font. I did a search for fonts that look similar to fire-writing, the handwritten font J.R.R Tolkien invented in 1953. You can see an example on the exhibition web page. My findings are below.

There are plenty of runic or “elvish” fonts, but I was only looking for Tolkien-esque fonts that resembled fire-writing.

dafont.com

Nancy Lorenz is clearly a fan of Tolkien and The Hobbit!

Google Fonts

Velvetine.fr

Typography Book Projects: Psychogeographical Mapping, Cooking & Typography

Outlining some ideas for my typography class at Parson’s, for our book making projects.

For class, we will be creating 2 projects, which will turn into books. One is a psychogeographical map and the other is a little cooking memoir. I need to come up with idea for each.

The cooking book is to teach us about book binding and selecting type options for recipes, which can have many options. We need to pick a somewhat personal story/recipe. I think I will write about both my hatred of pot pies, as well as my love of Gordon Ramsay’s shepherd’s pie recipe, which I first made during Hurricane Sandy. This was also the week I adopted my cats, only kittens at the time, only 8-10 weeks old. At the time, the subways had been shut down, so I couldn’t go anywhere for a week. Luckily, because I was living so far north in Manhattan, there was no flooding and basically we didn’t lose any power. (In the East Village, it was another story.) I think there’s enough there to write a good story.

For the Psychogeographical Mapping…I’m drawing a blank. Some ideas:

  • dog runs
  • pet stores
  • Japanese grocery stores
  • Walking down the street listening to Rhapsody In Blue and taking note of what’s around me. (If you haven’t done this, while taking a walk in NYC, you’re really missing out.)
  • Mapping the Central Park Conservatory Garden, a good place to read. Maybe the benches.

Maybe some better ideas:

  • Map movie theaters in NYC that aren’t chains, up to 96th St. Meaning no Regal, AMC, or Imax theaters. City Cinemas is OK.
  • Map Goodwill Donation stores. I do go to Goodwill and the Salvation Army a lot.

I’m leaning towards the theater idea. Now to do some write-ups.

More Letters for A-Z Book

More letters for my A-Z project, from my Typography course at Parsons.

Before I forget, here are some new letters I’ve taken photos of.

A continuation from: http://alliwalk.com/blog/2019/02/progress-on-found-alphabet-miniature-accordion-book-typography-i/