Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Have a Seat

ABChairs is a series of 26 lacquered MDF alphabetic chairs designed by Roeland Otten in the Netherlands. Next he should do an italic set of this face for the American market and call it the Lazy-boy edition.

The Land of Lost Letters

Misbegotten signage as seen in the cultural corridor of Las Vegas, Nevada. I've never actually visited, but this neon boneyard is now on my destination travel vacation list—like a trip to dreamland. This land of lost letters officially known as the Neon Museum, is a sanctioned public non-profit preserve and home to spent slab serifs and burned out blackletter House of Lord's Steak House signs. Just try and find another mobil park sign with true small caps like the Tropicana Mobil Park sign. And a swash neon R? Won't happen! I sense an upcoming roadtrip to this burned out neon letterland. If you go, be sure to book a reservation in advance and bring sunscreen!
:: As seen on the Idsgn Flickr site.

Mmmmmmm

Book origami by Isaac Salazar. See more of his books at his Flickr photostream and Etsy.

Stereo

Really great logo on an Echo Stereo 1112A, a combination radio record player. Made by Tesla, Czechoslovakia in the early 60s. As seen in an exhibit at the Technical Museum in Brno, Czech Republic by photographer|designer, Goran Patlejch from Prague. He claims it was more prominent than the manufacturer's own signature.

Type Inside Shapes

First image above: Cover design for 1954 British Arts Council publication.
Second image: Romanian matchbox label, undated, but would guess late '50s.
:: Via Jane McDevitt's photostream.





















:: Matchbook cover for Huddle Restaurant from Jericl Cat's photostream.






















Langston Hughs' First Book of Jazz from 1955. This is actually the third book in a series of five books that Langston Hughes (1902-1967) wrote for the Franklin Watts First Books series. This was designed by Cliff Roberts (1929-1999) who was a cartoonist and animator. His cartoons appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy. He worked as an animator on Sesame Street, and wrote and drew the short-lived Sesame Street newspaper comic strip. Ariel Winter has lots more to say about Langston's book series on his wonderful blogsite We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie. And read more about the brilliant artwork of Cliff Roberts there too.
:: From Ariel Winter's photostream.

Ghost Letters

Designer Roland Hörmann shares some wonderful examples of ghost typography from his walks through Vienna where he lives. He kindly shares desktop wallpaper downloads of the collection from his blog link on his website just so the letters can have an afterlife.

un mystère petite machine

Le Typewriter from Kyle Reiter on Vimeo.

A little typewriter noir!

xType Culture Show

The rules of engagement for my experimental typography class were an "about face" from classwork of the previous quarter teaching the fine typography skills required of book design. Here are just a few of the 37 great examples currently on exhibit in our school's art gallery through end of April.

From the top: Emi Buckmaster: Ephemeral (Suminagashi) | Shinya Iwaki: Cityscape (Handmade letterforms of architecture) | Sean Fischer: Dance Team (video of dancing girls, a pirate and a cat) | Adam Curtis: InterAction (Flash animation and lots of coffee) | Atticus Waller: Dreamgasm (Handmade letterforms) | Reis O'Brien: Toypography (cheap plastic toys) | Jordan Dailey: Micron Font (100s of Micron pens) | Mike Holm: ABC Gum (26 pieces of gum) | Anna Goldstein: Typuccino (26 lattes) | Jen Pearce: Rind (Oranges).

Type Class Warfare

An international type conference gathers to consider the inclusion of Zapf Dingbats when the crooked, villainous, Ransom decides to hold Courier, and his daughter, Curls MT, hostage. Suspense mounts. Can't all types just get along?