Coming soon!

Cassius is getting ready to rumble! 
Stay tuned: sneak previews, full trailers and pdfs are on their way. As well as some fun/entertaining/tragic/exiting/missing/incredible/true story telling items!
Some bits and pieces are already available on Flickr here or here.
[ Éventuelle traduction automatique dans les commentaires les mecs ! ]

Tales of a Time Traveller

Now we know. We know where Jonathan Hoefler’s outrageous talent come from: he is in possession of the mythical time machine, constantly travelling with his type DoLorean, collecting the most valuable type treasures from all times and all spaces. The evidences can’t lie, we spotted him on a picture published in the 1957 issue of Caractère Noël.

Caractère Noël — 1957 issue.

Indeed during his last visit Gerard Unger shown a couple issues of the French type and graphic annual Caractère Noël, the gorgeous ‘that’s what we can do’ publication’ published every year by the Compagnie Française d’Édition during the late 50’s and 60’s.

Caractère Noël — 1957 issue.

Caractère Noël — 1957 issue.

Caractère Noël — 1957 issue.

Gerard pointed a very interesting comparison with Caractère Noël older brother and model, the famous –not less gorgeous– English Penrose Annual, maybe (?) not as flamboyant but probably more constructed, deep and ambitious.
Two equally infinite sources of fascination anyway.

Penrose Annual volume 58 — 1965 issue.

Penrose Annual volume 58 — 1965 issue.

Penrose Annual volume 59 — 1966 issue.

Michael Twyman on Non-Latin Books

I now need a little help from my thesaurus to keep on saying how Mychael Twyman’s sessions are great. And that week –28 January– it was slpendiferous, as usual.
Note that you have an opportunity to see the almost complete crew of the MA Typeface design students on the picture, we just missed Yvonne. And guess what? We had two guests! Seb et popsy étaient dans la place. Clin d’œil les mec.

Greek Week!

Here it was, inevitable, fascinating, gorgeous, famous: the week long Greek workshop!

Gerry started with a quick but deep and dense overview of the history of Greek typography by showing us some amazing pieces of printed matters from his collection, from 16th century (and earlier) to present days

Garamond’s Grecs du Roi, printed by Henri Estienne in 1591
in Dionis Cassii Romanarum Historiarum.
Didot’s Greek in Hymne d’Aristote à la vertue, 1832.
We also reviewed digital typefaces and explored some former students workfiles. Then came the writing and sketching time, and we quickly ended with some draft digital versions we could talk about.

First printout on day 3. A lot of thing to do and more to come, I promise (maybe).
What a fantastic week! Our understanding of Greek, Greek type, and Greek history got of course a lot greater. So did our understanding of type design and typography themselves. I now fully realise the importance of seeing things rather than pictures of things. We all got a pretty strong demonstration that type has to be taught and seen in its context, in relation with its history and the history of languages and culture. The whole approach of multi-script type family as system of relationships get now even more exiting and challenging, opening new routes for the Latin design itself. Yoohoo.
Read more on your usual story dealer.

Michael Twyman on Pop Up Books

The ‘Monday’ saga goes on and on. On the 21 January, Michael Twyman shown us his pop up books collection. Again amazing stuff and gorgeous lecture, unfortunately Dan and I were not good enough to save the poor lady above. Condolences.

Spéciale dédicace Valentine, you are not alone.
Picture by Michi

Things We Don’t Have In France: Burger King

As a lot of people requested it, here is the shameful truth: there is no Burger King in France.
National tragedy.

Non-Latin Session: Day 2

Devanagari lettering (picture by Paul Hunt).
After the theoretical session on Tuesday we started practising North Indian scripts today. Some lettering exercises, with various tools, let us identify the different signs, getting a writing comprehension of the shapes and a better understanding of the letter combination systems.
Fiona shared her amazing experience with us, kindly criticising our sketches with precious and accurate advices.
Enjoy a more enjoyable overview –free beer included– on Dan’s blog!

It’s Devanagari, Paul is happy.

«The Three Is The One Which Looks Like a Two!»

Today was the first day of the Non-Latin workshop about North Indian scripts. Fiona Ross gave us an efficient overview of each major writing systems used in North Indian –including Devanagari, Bengali & Gujarati– always linked to past and current technological limitation and a vast amount of local documents.

The goal of the week is to demonstrate to us a way to approach Non-Latin typeface design, confidence and questioning documentation seems to be key issues according to Fiona. By the way, it appeared the the ratio of available good typefaces per Indian reader is kind of low… unlike the number of photocopied sheets we got to cover the subject.

Michael Twyman on 17th French Manuscripts

As usual Michael Twyman gave us an amazingly well documented talk about French manuscripts yesterday, looking for a way to qualify average 17th century French writing.
Some very intersting statements were made about document safety and some amazingly skilled kids were been jealous of…

17th century fun.

Gerry’s Collective Crit Session On Early Typeface Designs

No Black Friday in the department!

Michael Twyman on Monograms

Unfortunately, Michael Twyman was not abble to give us one of his weekly lovely show & tell sessions today. Here is a cellphone picture of the last week one, about cyphers and monograms.
Guest starring fellow MAs Andrew (researcher) & Paul (type designer). A lot more on Michi's Flickr.

First Unger Week

«always go to extrem!»
(it’s easy to make some step backs)
Last week Gerard Unger was visiting the department for the first time. He came with a new Unger Method: a dense 4 days work session, experimenting with the design of a very condensed typeface.

First sketches, never condensed enough.

I explored five direction by sketching, reducing, reducing again, reducing more, composing words and going back to sketch. Then the experiment keeps going on FontLab with digitalised forms and printouts.

Picture by Dan ‘TypeOff’ Reynolds.
The use of computer allowed us to to explore the automatic extansion of typeforms as a design process. We all made some really surprising and exiting statements about the realtion of body size, x-height, wideness and optical sizes. The following pictures show some tex set with exactly same body and x-height !


Thanks to Gerard I learned a lot, both from my own design and those of my classmates!
Dan Reynolds and Paul Hunt made some more detailled ‘english native speaking’ reports on their own blog.