My copy of Elliot Jay Stocks’ new magazine, 8 Faces, just arrived in the post this morning. I was lucky enough to snag a copy during the short period before it sold out. Given the nature of the online typography community, I had a feeling the limited print run would be snapped up in short order. There is still a pdf available for purchase if you’re interested. The magazine is devoted to typography, asking eight leading designers which typefaces they would use if they were limited to just eight for the rest of their lifetime. It features interviews with Erik Spiekermann, Jessica Hische, Ian Coyle, Jason Santa Maria, Jos Buivenga, Jon Tan and Bruce Willen & Nolen Strals. I’ve had the pdf sitting around for a couple weeks, but have avoided reading it, because I wanted to see the magazine in print first. Can’t say that I’m disappointed for waiting, there’s been a lot of care and effort put into it. Elliot has written an article about his experiences with getting it published. The magazine is gorgeous and I’m looking forward to sitting down and reading the entire thing.

Photo of the first issue of Elliot Jay Stocks' typography magazine 8 Faces to accompany this post.

Derek Punsalan examines the interface choices available in a selection of washing machines, or as he puts it,

A video about the design ethos of Dieter Rams.

From an interview with designer Barbara Alves about teaching in Mozambique. For example, students in the graphic design course asked me to give them lessons in color, insisting they knew nothing about it. This really surprised me. My immediate answer was, “But you should teach me! You’re surrounded by color and use it in such powerful ways in every aspect of daily life. I admire you for it!” Their response was to laugh and say, “But Teacher! That’s not design! We need to use design colors.” From talking to my students and people in the cultural sector, I got the impression that design was this distant, quite artificial, field they had to adapt to.

An interesting set of advertising posters from the 1950s recently uncovered at the Notting Hill Gate tube station in London. The passageway had been sealed off when the lifts were replaced with escalators.

This recent image of typesetters, from Shorpy, reminded me of a photo that I took at the National Print Museum in Dublin awhile back. It was of a boy’s indenture agreement to serve as an apprentice compositor in a Letterpress shop. Highlights of seven years service include: no fornicating, gambling or frequenting of ale-houses. I’ve transcribed the document and made the text available.

A photo that I took at the National Print Museum in Dublin a few years back. It's an apprenticeship agreement for a compositor. Highlights from the seven year indenture: no fornicating, gambling or frequenting ale-houses. It puts some of the hardships of being a junior designer into perspective. For a text transcription, please visit this post.

Behind the redesign of the New York Times Magazine. Great visual and typographic treatment

Simple browser based to do list. To play with later.

Mistakes in typography grate the purists from the NYT. “I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy,” said Michael Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group in New York. “My font nerdiness makes me have bad reactions to things that spoil otherwise pleasant moments.” I’m not at the anaphylactic stage of typographic allergy yet — more the sniffly, dry and itchy eyes sort of thing.

Letters from the Hellbox is an irregular column from Martin McClellan on typographers.