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 ! ]

The Great Robbery

Yes, back in March Foxhill got some unwilling visitors. Damned. 
But don’t worry, unlike this blog, we’ve got over it!
And, well, procrastination have to plead guilty in the lack-of-update case too.

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.

♥

things We Don’t Have In France: Feathered Students

I just realised that the ‘Things We Don’t Have In France’ series might be read as cynical way to mock United Kingdom or express a more than very doubtful French primacy. It is absolutely not. No irony there, England rocks (so does France, once in a while, and a truckload lot of other countries anyway).
Here is the evidence: we have wonderful swans swimming over the lake in the campus. And as the year goes on we are getting really good friends. We’ll soon chat with them as we daily cross the bridge to get some Student Union Magic Sandwich Deals.

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