Bigelow & Holmes Blog

The NY Times Magazine Relaunch The New York Times magazine launched a re-design on February 22, 2015. Editor Jake Silverstein discussed the new design in the NY Times on February 18, “Behind the Relaunch of The New York Times Magazine.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/behind-the-relaunch-of-the-new-york-times-magazine-by-jake-silverstein.html The article mentions new fonts and shows four of them in 2-letter (‘Gg’) samples, asserting, “Not a single letter in this relaunch issue has ever seen the light of day.” Three of the fonts illustrated are primarily display faces: they are used in headlines, subheads, pull-quotes, call-outs, or other short pieces of text, and are set at distinctively bigger...

["Philosophies of Form in Seriffed Typefaces of Adrian Frutiger" originally appeared in Fine Print: The Review For The Arts of The Book, October 1988. I still admire the seriffed types and still feel they are under-appreciated, so I'm posting the essay here for readers who may have missed the first go-round.] by Charles Bigelow IN COMPARISON to modern fine arts, typeface design seems at first glance to be lacking in self-expression. The canons of acceptable alphabet shape and proportion have been so established through centuries of precedence that deviations from the norm can vitiate the utility of a typeface. Hence, the...

I am posting this on April 2 so it doesn’t get dismissed as an April Fool joke. A private e-mail list has been discussing whether training in calligraphy and lettering is necessary in modern design education. To paraphrase the eminent antiquarian, Kasper Gutman, that is a question, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment. Because I am merely former professor of digital typography at Stanford and former Melbert B. Cary Jr. professor of Graphic Arts at RIT, a school that was formerly respected for excellence in typographic education, I felt that I needed to ask more eminent authorities for...

Readers have said they enjoyed the B&H interview with Dr. Püterschein and have asked to read more of his writings. Dr. Püterschein was highly esteemed in his time, but few of his publications have survived, presumably because the fashionable punditry of one era seems embarrassingly outmoded to members of the next generation who know they really do know everything.       Fortunately, we are able to republish here one of Dr. Püterschein’s classic essays, “A Note on the Designer”, which graced Linotype’s 1939 introductory specimen book of Caledonia, an admirable typeface by William Dwiggins, the influential American type designer, lettering...

For many typographers, the best thing about U.S. Income Tax day is that John Dreyfus was born on April 15, 97 years ago, in 1918. When this day rolls around again every year, we are happy to remember him.      John Dreyfus was a notable book designer, typographic adviser, printing historian, and editor, who performed many other deeds benefitting typography and type design, too numerous to list here. His numerous writings constitute a revealing panorama of 20th century typography and typographers, many of whom he knew personally, including Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde, and Jan van Krimpen.      He...