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Typography
Review and Rate the all-new Font Combinations App in the iTunes App Store
Spread the love! If you like the all-new Font Combinations 2.0 app, and we hope you do, please stop by the iTunes App Store and give it a review and some star ratings for us! We need your font-loving help!
Mistral: Font choice of the gods
What better topic for Mistral to be an appropriate font choice for, than a spoofy Italian movie about Hercules fighting against assorted masters of Karate, circa 1973? Perfect!
All-new Font Combinations App 2.0 released to iTunes App Store
Just a quick note to everyone know the all-new Font Combinations 2.0 App has been released and is available on iTunes! Please take a look at the new interface design and list of features! If you bought version 1.0, your free update is on the way! Let us know how you like it! And don’t [...]
Font Combinations 2.0 Preview & Screenshots
The Font Combinations app 2.0 is on the way for iPhone and iPod Touch with iOS 4.2 and later! It’s a complete rewrite from the ground up with a slew of new features, a whole new UI, and best of all, all-new Retina Display graphics.
Random Font Combination Generator
Here is a little foretaste of some upcoming functionality in our new Font Combinations app. Click “Randomize Me” to generate a random typeface pairing from about 50 of the top typefaces of all time. There are nearly 2000 combinations at your fingertips below. After you’ve had some fun, please click on the link to the [...]
The 100 Best Fonts (in a Huge Sortable Table)
An Inspiring Collection of Fonts FontShop sold a typeface collection called “100 Best Fonts” for a limited time in Germany a little while back. The website for this special promotion generously listed the names of all 100 best typefaces for graphic design with background information in German. When the typeface collection was no longer available, [...]
Fonts that work with Gill Sans
What fonts go with Gill Sans and match up nicely? The truth is that there are probably thousands of fonts that would pair with Gill Sans just fine. The trouble is finding them and making something work really well. To find something that works and still have time left for designing, you are going to [...]
Typographic Portrait: Morris Fuller Benton typeset in Souvenir
So I’m working on this big new post (check back soon) and I notice two curly quotes that for some reason struck me like they looked like that old-time barbershop down-the-middle hairstyle from the turn of the 20th century. I had typed the characters in the order they appeared on the keyboard (I had been [...]
Smashing eBook #6: Typography
Smashing Magazine’s eBook #6: Typography has just been released. I contributed an article, “Best Practices of Combining Typefaces“. Please drop by the Smashing Magazine store and pick up a copy for your iPad, iPhone, or your favorite eBook reader.
Free PSD from Smashing Magazine article “Combining Typefaces”
I had a few requests for the PSD from which all the graphics were created for the article “Best Practices of Combining Typefaces“. Here it is for anyone interested in how the graphics were made, whether you liked the psuedo-CSS3 embossing or my choice of colors or not .
Cover art for “Font Combinations” book shows samples of all the typefaces used
If you been following the blog here at bonfx.com you have undoubtedly been made aware of my new book in the works. How do you promote a book? Well, if you have followed any news about the iBookstore for iPad, or the Nook or Kindle, you know that the old school Publisher/Author model is over [...]
What typefaces are going in the Big Book of Font Combinations and why?
Here is a sneak peak at what fonts are going in the Big Book of Font Combinations this Fall. I haven’t posted for while as I’ve been neck-deep in InDesign and typefaces and creating useful and / or instructive pairs from them.
Typography Primer: all you need to know in one PDF
I came across this excellent PDF from Adobe that succinctly covers all the basic terms about typography. Download without delay and refresh your memory. It’s beautifully designed and easy to read with wonderful graphics.
Alt Key Combinations with PDF cheat sheet
There are a handful of keyboard shortcuts for special characters I routinely need but can never quite remember when I’m working on a PC. Because I split time between Mac and PC, I tend to confuse “alt” and “option” key shortcuts. I put together this cheat sheet of the characters I need the most, plus [...]
16 Top Useful iPhone Apps for Graphic Designers
When you are in transit, at a meeting, or at lunch, having your iPhone with you affords you a chance to get some graphic design work done when away from your computer. These 16 useful apps for graphic designers will help you learn, organize, brainstorm, or research different aspects of your design work. As a [...]
Font Combinations App just released to iTunes Store
We are excited to have our first app be published in the iTunes Store. It’s a simple app called Font Combinations that lets you see how different header and body fonts relate to each other with a simple swipe. So many fonts, so little time!
How to try fonts online
Many people don’t know how great the font tryout tools are over at MyFonts.com. Here is a quick tutorial to show you just how easy it is to take a typeface or font for a spin, changing it’s size, kerning, and even sampling its extras like ligatures and fractions. It takes about 1 minute to [...]
Smilevetica – the younger, happier little brother of Helvetica
What would Helvetica look like if it wasn’t so perfectly stoic, so absolutely neutral? Perhaps it would look like “Smilevetica“, if it took a positive outlook on life. Helvetica, Helvetica, why so serious all the time? Have a chat with Smilevetica and brighten up!
23 Really Bad Font Choices
Font choices can make or break a message. In the 23 examples we created below, we broke the message on purpose to highlight how on a conscious or subconscious level, poor typeface choices negatively affect the message in the copy.
100 Funny Typos from my Graphic Design Blog Stats
Part of the fun of running a graphic design blog is getting to see how people find the site through Google. I recently took a look at my analytics, and found some crazy typos and hilarious search strings! While most of my traffic comes from other designers through Twitter and other graphic design related sites, [...]
Top 10 Fonts for Graphic Designers with PDF Chart
Last month I posted an article called 19 top fonts in 19 top combinations which caught the attention of Jacob Cass and Smashing Magazine and quite a few other readers as a result of all the traffic that came in from Twitter. I also got a lot of correspondence over the article with a large [...]
6 Tips for PDF Brochure Design on the Web
A quick way to give customers fast complete access to a printable version of your business or products is to get a PDF version of your brochure on your website. Smart move! But you don’t want to put just any PDF brochure design on the web. If you want to communicate your services or products [...]
28 Top Typography Blogs Ranked by Top Graphic Design Blogs
Grab your beveled pica ruler, Letraset rub downs, and your favorite browser. We did some fresh research to discover what the best typography blogs are, according to the top graphic design blogs. We went through our own lists (see Related Posts below) of top graphic design blogs, some other lists, and tallied up all of [...]
19 top fonts in 19 top combinations
I recently compiled a list of the 19 most popular fonts according to usage by graphic designers from all over the web. I could have had 100, but I got it down to under 50, and from there whittled it down to just the 19 best fonts. Why 19? Because at exactly 20, the “long [...]
Dear Ikea: Verdana is not a top font and now I can’t go in your store
Ikea, as many of you know, changed their typeface for all catalog, in-store, and online presence to Verdana. Yes, Verdana. The outrage by graphic designers and others with an intuitive design sense let out an immediate cry of digust. An online petition was started. I just got around to signing it. It’s up to about [...]
19 top fonts most preferred by graphic designers from around the web
Out of the huge number of fonts used by graphic designers, there really is quite a small pool of fonts consistently chosen over and over again by graphic designers as their “most used”. I took some time to search out as many “top fonts for graphic designers” search results (plus variations) that I had time [...]
Top 10 fonts for graphic designers from 6 top blogs combined
We did the homework so you can pass the test! We spent a bunch of hours weeding through the menagerie of great and not so great blogs and websites to see if we could come up with a nice cross section of agreed-upon, best font recommendations from sources the collective brain of the web has [...]
Top 10 fonts for graphic designers
There are approximately 73 billion typefaces out there in the wild the last time I counted. 99.5% of them are either copies of classic fonts, totally useless in regards to real typography, or copies of classic fonts rendered totally useless for real typography because of poor construction of the font files like missing characters and [...]
Process color and small type on print jobs
Ever had a print job come back only to see blurry small type but nice and crisp images? When you are designing for 4-color process (CMYK), you have to obey a few rules or you’ll end up with poor results off the press. One mistake that very common to new designers is the flippant applying [...]
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