In times of a Font Aid appeal, The Society of Typographic Aficionados organizes charitable designers to contribute to a themed font. Previous Font Aids have included typefaces comprised entirely of ampersands and another consisting of only fleurons. The latest Font Aid, called Made For Japan, is a face consisting of glyphs representing their designers interpretations of Japan.

Flush Left has submitted 2 glyphs, 1 of which i have included the sketches for below. The initial sketches were completed on the iPad, using an application called Penultimate – very natty tool for making visual notes, sketches etc. The glyphs were then created in Illustrator and are currently under consideration for inclusion. As soon as I hear back about them, I will post them here. In the meantime, you will need to be happy with the Penultimate iPad sketches of Glyph 1 below.

I would urge anyone with the talent to do so, to enter your glyph ideas into this worthy cause. I have had a sneak peak and there are some really good things coming along! Further details of submission can be found on the SOTA website. Be warned though, the deadline for submissions is Friday 25th March, so you will need to get your design skates on!

You can also follow SOTA on Twitter (@typesociety).

The Flush Left glyphs can now be seen here.

It probably doesn’t need pointing out, but these prints will obviously be quite a focal talking point, wherever they are hung. FL will keep you updated as any news and progress become available, so keep your eyes peeled.

Harald is currently taking orders for prints of his Typographic Wall Calendar via his site HaraldGeisler.com

The resulting entire years worth of layout will be photographed and then be purchasable as B0 wall sized prints!

It’s a completely unique project, and both an expensive and huge undertaking for Harald, whom I must say is very humble and understated.

He has chosen the Kickstart project to help attract backers and financiers for the project, so please click along to the project page for Harald’s typographic calendar where you can see just how he will go about the project. You can also back the project here financially, which would be fantastic if you are able to! To read more about Harald’s working approach to the project, read Mike McGregor’s Q&A with him. Below is the fantastic result of 2010′s version, and you’ve guessed it… it was made from 2 thousand and 10 keys!

Aside from taking on these large scale projects, Harald runs his own typographic studio in Frankfurt am Main and has produced some pretty stunning typefaces which can be seen at haraldgeisler.com and purchased via myfonts.com.

Download Gridface Facist here. The zip file contains 2 weights (Gridface Facist and Gridface Facist Stroker), plus a large format A3 specimen sheets with size / leading recommendations for each.

I don’t ask for payment, or even a credit on your work, but it would show outstanding designers respect, if you decide Gridface Facist is the right font for your job, if you could contact me and show me examples of how you have used it. You can contact me here – and I’m pretty hot on replying!

GridFace Facist Font by Flush Left is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The list is endless to be fair, there are commonly accepted names and terminologies, and there are those that have been invented and over time, have become commonplace. For the purpose of the reference part of the site, we shall leave the naming thing at the 2 posts.

It’s for my favourite grid structure, the 3×5 grid, and is fitted to an A4 page. It has a 15mm border side and top, 20mm bottom, with 4mm gutters. Enjoy.
Download it here

Grid Templates by Flush Left is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

This post was inspired heavily by Jim Williams, design lecturer at Staffodshire Uni, thankyou Jim.

The first post of the year will start a series of posts, which can be added to and used as a source of typographic reference. Before I start though, I make no apologies for potential incorrect apostrophe placement! So, without further ado, welcome to…

Typography Reference 101: 1. The Basics

1. Differentiate your levels of read with the key elements:
   Size
   Weight
   Colour
   Position
   There is no need to introduce more fonts than is necessary, learn to put yourself in control of the type, not the other way around.
2. In a piece of design (editorial excluded) try to limit the amount of different font families to 2 ideally, but if it’s essential 3 families can be used at a push.
3. Set leading for bulk text at 3 points above your character size. Because fonts are designed differently (12 pt Meta may be a different physical height to 12 pt Perpetua), this may prove visually uncomfortable. If this is the case, use your designer powers to increase the leading by eye / hand manually.
4. Personal rule of thumb: when using sans serif fonts do not italicize words – it looks tasteless when set in sans serif.
5. When setting the weight of a font, use the family’s font weight not the character palette where possible. Character palettes are for lazy designers and they never represent the way the font should appear naturally in its’ proper weight. ie. use Arial Bold, not Arial with bold selected in the character palette.

But what fun would it be if I was not to make you wander half way around the web to find it?

Click here to see the full typeface on my design portfolio site

Recently undertaken for a national savoury snack distributor, based on Minion Regular