IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2011 - 54

rEsourCEs

MAGAZInES
Design Bureau Alarm Press $24.00, bi-monthly This Chicago-based design magazine feels substantial. It’s packed with profiles of designers and studios, gorgeous project features, and articles on global design, new products, and books—many you might not be that familiar with. The magazine’s focus is to gather a “like-minded community of design enthusiasts across the world with one common idea: discovering great design and the people who make it happen.” “People” is the operating word here. Like a talented party host, the magazine gathers an intriguing group of mostly smaller, boutique firms, and gets them to share the stories behind their designs. There’s plenty of interiors and architecture, but it also expands its dialogue to include other design disciplines. Esopus Magazine The Esopus Foundation Ltd. $14.00, bi-annual Twice a year a wonder of contemporary publishing occurs with each issue of Esopus Magazine. It’s a stunning visual treat with contributions from a cross-section of creative disciplines, including artists’ projects, critical writing, fiction, poetry, visual essays, interviews, and, in each issue, an audio CD. Projects featured are by both established and emerging artists and have taken the form of removable posters, booklets, foldouts, and hand-assembled sculptures, often utilizing complex printing processes, unique paper stocks, and specially formulated inks. Funded by the nonprofit Esopus Foundation, there’s no advertising. www.esopusmag.com tells you where you can purchase this treasure worldwide.

BooKS
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts By Simon Garfield gotham Books (September 2011) 356 pages, $27.50 Even if you are not a fontophile, you’ll be thoroughly smitten with garfield’s history of fonts and the characters who invented them. Tracing typography back 560 years, garfield provides fascinating and amusing anecdotes about the Darwinesque struggles of fonts, illuminating why good type never dies. We learn some cardinal rules for typefaces, such as what makes one readable and eye-catching might not ensure that it’s legible, or that a beautiful font might lack the discipline required for it to endure. but sometimes it’s personal drama that kills typefaces, such as with Doves, which lies elusively out of reach at the bottom of the Thames. Ever attentive to entertaining his reader, garfield also provides “Fontbreaks,” brief excursions into a particular font’s provenance printed in the typeface under discussion. Chapters are brief comestible nuggets. There’s one on the Interrobang and why it never really caught on but the ‘at’ (@) sign did. Don’t miss the chapter that’s a lovingly intimate portrait of the ampersand. ultimately, with its melding of history, cultural observation, and design acuity, one comes away enlightened about the power of fonts to communicate beyond the words they represent, conveying gender, nationalities, and helping to elect presidents. be warned: This book may heighten your awareness of fonts in the world around you to the extent that you too will become just garfield’s type.

perspective

http://www.esopusmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2011