Today kicks off #TypeCrime month! We’re challenging you to find type crimes and expose them to the world. Expose the injustice towards the readers everywhere!
Stand up for legibility, use your powers against visual abominations and fight design laziness. Want to join us? Take a photo and post them to the internets!
Heroically call out these infractions with the hashtags #TypeCrime and #TypeEd on your photos on your Twitter and/or Instagram accounts. Throughout the month, we’ll search and repost visual offenders. If we see you’ve shared a supervillian** you’ll win a typographic gift!* Original photos or screenshots only, please don't steal from the web. Let us know where you found it, or geotag the location.
* Gifts will be awarded once a week.
** Apologies in advance if any type crimes spotted are yours.
“My favorite typefaces switch over time. Right now, I find myself turning to Univers (Adrian Frutiger, 1957) pretty regularly. With such a large family (21 faces), it can serve so many purposes. And I love that it's available in condensed and extended too. Clean and readable, it's a good workhorse.”
— John Clifford, Owner at Think Studio
“There is something immediately comfortable about the typeface. Yet the more time you spend with it, the more of the details you appreciate — while never becoming precious. The letterforms themselves adhere to a tight grid but this structure allows for a flexibility in the ways it can be used to express different ideas.” — Tim Guy, Creative Director at Google
On Friday, we wished Frederic Goudy a happy birthday with this tweet.
“A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” — Frederic Goudy Happy birthday to Frederic Goudy!
— TypeEd (@TypeEd) March 8, 2014
“I just received my wish list gift, Marian Bantjes new book. ”— Sean Adams, Co-President at AIGA and Partner at AdamsMorioka
Matthew Butterick is a writer, typographer, and lawyer in Los Angeles. He is the author of Typography for Lawyers and Butterick's Practical Typography. His most recent type designs are Equity and Concourse. Matthew gave us some insight into his typography mission and his newest efforts.
“My go-to is probably Helvetica, for simplicity’s sake.”—Sara Schmidt, Global Retail Design, Nike
“Lately of I've been switching all my Microsoft apps to Courier—if you can believe it. I think I've reached that point in my life that I'm sick of thinking about which font to use. Otherwise, I'm a Gotham guy.”—Steven Ryan, Partner at VSA Partners
“My favorite typeface for everyday use is Palatino. I fell in love with it when I was a student at Chouinard Art Institute and we have been happily married for 50 years. Palatino has a charm and sensitivity that makes me excited every time I use it, or see it. I love that typeface.” —Archie Boston, AIGA Fellow
“Trade Gothic. At least that’s what comes to mind, not overthinking it… because of its nice clean feel and it doesn’t feel cold.” —Karin Fong, Creative Director at Imaginary Forces
More than once, I‘ve heard this question from young designers, “why should one know typography? So-and-so just did their own thing and now they have 50K followers on Instagram.”