Editor’s Note: Over the years, Steven Heller has written thousands of installments of his blog, The Daily Heller. With Vintage Heller, we’re exploring entries from the archives. This post first appeared in 2014. To celebrate turkey day, let’s look at some other, non-edible fowl. These birds of a letter, representing indigenous oiseaux of France, introduced children to their ABCs but also to the aviary of la belle France. Printed on porous newsprint, these Epinal illustrations

We all wear some great designs that people rarely see (except in the jeans department). I’m talking about clothing labels, those embroidered pieces of fabric that are endowed often with beautiful lettering and graphic devices. Label-making is a big business (and it was, even when it comes to vintage clothing labels) within a big business, so never take it for granted. The vintage clothing labels here are from Spain c. 1930s (hopefully before the murderous civil war). They wer

Yesterday afternoon, we sat down to write our weekly Type Tuesday post, about Buenos Aires type collective Sudtipos’ Confitería—and as we were doing it, they released their Dilemma typeface. Trying to figure out which to feature was a good dilemma to have. Ultimately, we decided to run with both. First up: Confitería, designed by Julieta Ulanovsky, in collaboration with Sol Matas. As Ulanovsky says, “Confitería is the Spanish word for a shop where sweets and chocolates are ma

Sure, we’ve all been locked in and masked up … but that doesn’t mean we should sleep on these eight great new typefaces released in April and May. Every Tuesday we spotlight a new release. Stay tuned to PRINT for the latest. Degular Last year, James Edmondson of OH no Type Company asked his Twitter followers: What’s the best—and worst—thing about OH no? One answer to the latter haunted him for months: “It would be great to be able to use an Ohno font more than once.” With Edm

Introducing a new “occasional” Daily Heller series devoted to type, lettering and imagery in the public domain—found or orphaned graphic material that has no particular provenance, lives homeless on the street yet has a certain je ne sais quoi that suggests skill, craft and intelligence were responsible for its being. The first is “clink!” a sign for, well, you name it: a soft drink, perhaps; or a hip new bar; or something even more arcane, like an inmate’s lounge in a minimu

This post is brought to you by our partners at CanvasDiscount.com Typographic and lettering-based prints have a timeless appeal. Whether they feature an inspiring quote or lyrics from your favorite song, an elegant word-art print will complement almost any interior design scheme. The photo printing experts at CanvasDiscount.com are here to explain what makes typographic and lettering prints so reliably popular. A Great Fit for Any Interior Space The appeal of this style of pr

Laura Mesegeur’s latest typeface celebrates the creative women of the world. The family of four dubbed Sisters began as a custom lettering project for an art exhibition identity, and grew from there. Mesegeur started with the stencil-based Sisters One … … Added contrast to create Sisters Two … … Equalized the weights of Sisters Two to create Sisters Three … … And threw some deco flair into Sisters Two to create Sisters Four. As Type-Ø-Tones, which Meseguer co-founded, writes,

The Portugal-based foundry DSType has been around since 1994, and yesterday its designers released their unique take on a geometric face: Mesclo. We were quickly seduced by the outline, interline, sideline, borderline and endpoint styles, but stuck around for its personality-laden regular weights that can be deployed across a variety of applications. “With monolinear appearance, humanistic elements and subtle hints of Art Deco, Mesclo is a timeless typeface with dramatic obli

If you’re a designer, you’ve no doubt seen countless pangrams—even if you’ve never actually heard the term before. A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, and an essential tool for type designers and purveyors. Rather than simply offering up yet another Quick Brown Fox jumping over a Lazy Dog, Monotype, in partnership with ANR BBDO, has begun turning pangrams into PSAs with their Tiny Reminders series. In response to the UN’s call for messages that ins

Monte Stella is a type rooted in time and place: Milan, 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Dalton Maag Creative Director Riccardo De Franceschi drew inspiration for the face—named after the Italian city’s hill built from World War II debris and signifying renaissance—from Milan’s shop signage and print ephemera. As Dalton Maag writes, “Monte Stella’s letters are constructed and modular, with the purposeful naivete and imperfect feel of vernacular lettering. Narrow proportions give an econ

Meet Stapel—a sharp new contemporary trio of subfamilies with seven weights each … and a nice array of possible applications. Designed by Alexander Lubovenko and released by Paratype, from headlines to text, these specimens show that Stapel would indeed be equally at home on a market report as it would a film title card. Images: Paratype #Stapel #typedesign #TypeTuesday #typography

Print has been acquired by an independent group of collaborators—Deb Aldrich, Laura Des Enfants, Jessica Deseo, Andrew Gibbs, Steven Heller and Debbie Millman—and soon enough, we’ll be back in full force with an all-new look, all-new content and a fresh outlook for the future! In the meantime, we’re looking back at some of our favorite pieces from PRINT magazine, such as this one by Nadja Sayej. Berlin-based gallery dealer Johann König makes a living selling art he can barely

For anyone who laments that type design today is boring … we submit to you Gimme v. 0.1, a delightful in-progress release from Typearture (aka Arthur Reinders Folmer). It began, appropriately, with a Battleship battle against Folmer’s nephew—“I was hit with a realization: Hey, you could make type with these things! Of course I promptly lost as well”—and grew from there. The face has two families of two styles, and a bonus variable color font, and can be purchased at Future Fo

If you’re going to be in quarantine, you may as well have a healthy supply of Quarantype on hand. When the team at Florence, Italy–based Zetafonts found themselves isolated at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, they channeled their anxiety into designing letters—and then decided to spread some good karma by releasing the sum toll of their efforts online for free. Developed in a mere three weeks (!), the team is now offering 10 free typefaces for download. “Although playful an

Illustration: Peader Thomas When the time comes for soon-to-be parents to name their newborns, there are plenty of books and websites to help find a fashionable or distinctive moniker. A typeface is a type designer’s baby yet there is zilch on what to name it after all those months or years of labor. If such a guidebook were available, it might offer the same wisdom as this paraphrase from the precis to a popular infant-naming resource: There’s a lot of pressure in choosing a

Today’s Type Tuesday treat comes from P22, the Rochester, NY–based independent design group that’s been crafting type from historical inspiration since 1994. The “four-member” font family Bangersfield was designed by Robby Woodard, who also desgined P22’s Nudgewink. From the foundry: “With line treatments clearly inspired by cased meat products, these fonts function as a healthier alternative to Comic Sans. The casual handlettering works well for lighthearted design and comic

Back in 1991, PRINT’s former sister publication HOW asked 11 prominent designers the following: If you had to live with one, and only one, typeface for the rest of your life, which one would it be? As the magazine noted at the time, “Their responses reflect a variety of typeface preferences, and also reveal how much they differ in their approach when faced with a hypothetical design scenario.” Paula Scher, Louise Fili, Milton Glaser and eight others weigh in below. “Simonzini

Ever wondered what your face would look like as a typeface? … Neither have we. But thanks to Overtone and Set Snail’s passion project Your Typeface, now all of our faces can be typefaces—and it’s actually a pretty cool tool. Your Typeface merges variable font tech with face recognition (the Beyond Reality Face SDK framework, specifically) to give life to eight master typefaces that are transformed on three axes. In other words: Make expressions on your webcam while using the

Print has been acquired by an independent group of collaborators, and soon enough, we’ll be back in full force with an all-new look, all-new content and a fresh outlook for the future. In the meantime, we’re looking back at some of our most popular pieces, such as this one by Rebecca Bedrossian. Typography by Louise Fili, using the Montecatini face In 2000, a conference at the St. Bride Library in London featured only female speakers. It was organized by Dr. Shelley Gruendler

Lick ’em, moisten ’em, adhere ’em. Type is our lingua franca. How we consume type—words, headlines, sentences, in signs, on the page and on the screen—happens in many ways. As a young type user, in addition to hot, cold and digital type, I employed press-down, stencil and adhesive lettering. The latter were not necessarily the finest cuts or drawings but they provided a dynamic way to use letters. Below are some typical examples. Sticky stuck. PRINT is back. And soon, we’ll b