2025/FW in review: books, articles, and other news

Jan 2, 2026

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Chipping away at the 2025 backlog, one post at a time.

Publications:

Published by Niggli, The quick classification guide for typography is the printed companion to the typ/o project led by Eva Kubinyi at FH Aachen. The authors present a selection of more than one hundred relevant typefaces, supplemented by historical background, user-relevant information and explanations of their special formal characteristics to make it easier to recognize the underlying formal principles. Also available in German.

Alphabetical playground by Nigel Cottier, with a foreword by Hamish Muir: beginning as a series of ongoing variable type experiments, unused project concepts and playful takes on existing letterform typologies, the book is an attempt to consolidate these varying ideas into a playful collection of Alphabets, a showcase of how far we can push the medium of type design and structure. The project is a follow-up to Letterform Variations (Slanted, 2021).

Edited by Elliot Jay Stocks and expected in March 2026 on Quarto’s Rockport imprint, Fine specimens collects together some of the best examples of contemporary type design from around the world, showcasing the promotional graphics created by type foundries to promote their fonts. The book, featuring essays by John Boardley, Ellen Lupton, Erik Spiekermann, Laura Meseguer, Min-Young Kim, and Veronika Burian, is available for pre-orders.

From Lazy Dog and CAST, Alfabeti modernisti italiani (EN/IT) collects over one hundred specimens, systematically organized into categories and subcategories: functional, cyclopean, triennial, synthetic, modulated, decorative, and modular. The book provides a historical contextualization of their origins, offering a clear mapping of typefaces produced in Italy between the 1920s and 1940s. Luca Lattuga’s research, realized in this volume, serves as an essential tool for studying a little-known phenomenon, shedding new light on a coherent and recurring style largely overlooked by traditional typographic historiography, emerging from small workshops and minor foundries, the so-called ‘basso’.

The volume is complemented by Alfabeti modernisti type specimens, a documentation of CAST’s eponymous collection of historical revivals based on the same material. Ricardo Olocco, Valentina Casali, and Giulio Galli presented the project in a Letterform Archive lecture in March 2025.

Coming later this month from Letterform Archive, Lettres décoratives: a century of French sign painters’ alphabets includes more than 150 plates from grand lithographic albums printed at the height of the sign painter’s craft. Originally made to demonstrate styles and inspire artists to decorate cities with increasingly colorful, adventurous, and refined forms, these portfolios preserve a rich visual history of urban alphabets. With an introduction by Morgane Côme.

Also upcoming from the Archive, Hotel retro: vintage luggage labels from Tokyo to Buenos Aires features hundreds of vibrant steamer trunk labels from the Golden Age of Travel, faithfully reproduced as 330 charming full-color stickers.

Speaking of urban signmaking, India street lettering by Pooja Saxena is the printed evolution of the author’s decade-in-the-making eponymous online archive. Take a short walk in any Indian neighbourhood and you’ll find signboards in a profusion of languages, styles, materials, and colours. So far, this living typographic archive has existed on the fringes of mainstream design discourse. India Street Lettering brings it to the fore, celebrating the artistic expression, linguistic diversity, and historical intrigue found in the vibrant letterforms around the country. The result of a successful Kickstarter run, the book is now available for pre-ordering from the publisher. More on the project in BLAG magazine, Indian sign painting, a typeface designer’s take on the craft.

Also the result of successful crowdfunding, Rian Hughes: Typeractive marks thirty years of Device Fonts and collects the foundry’s output in one sumptuous, 600-page hardback, showcasing complete glyphs sets, specially-designed type specimens, notes on process and background research, and hundreds of examples of type in use. Copies can still be ordered through the project’s Kickstarter page.

Six centuries of type & printing by Glenn Fleishman, originally letterpressed in 2019 and sold out by 2024, is back in revised print and ebook editions. This short book tells the story of the evolution of type and printing. It starts in Asia, before Johann Gutenberg, then takes you generation by generation through increasing sophistication in metal and relief printing and type manufacture.

Covering similar ground from an academic standpoint, Type. Buchdruck in Europa und Asien (DE) by Cornelia Schneider and Volker Benad-Wagenhoff offers a well-founded yet vivid look at the development of printing in two cultural spheres that operated independently of each other for a long time, and yet reveal striking parallels. With detailed technological knowledge, historical drawings, and cultural-historical perspectives, the work demonstrates that the invention of printing was not a solitary achievement, but rather a culturally diverse response to the challenges of knowledge, power, and media [intro translated from German]. The book is published jointly by the Gutenberg Foundation and the Gutenberg International Society in Mainz.

Edited by NYC-based designer Anežka Minaříková and published by Inventory Press, Clara Istlerová, a life among letters is the first publication in the United States to delve into the design landscape of the former Czechoslovakia through the lens of Czech designer Clara Istlerová (born 1944). Minaříková presented the project at the Herb Lubalin lecture series in July 2025.

From Triest Verlag, the upcoming two-volume The roots and impact of Jan Tschichold’s “Die neue Typographie” / The sources and characters of Jan Tschichold’s “Die neue Typographie”, edited by Davide Fornari, Chiara Barbieri, Jonas Berthod, and Matthieu Cortat-Roller, crystalizes into book form the Sources of Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography research project conducted at ECAL in Lausanne between 2019 and 2022. Design scholars have explored the international impact of TNT by looking at issues of mediation and dissemination, as well as by addressing the ways in which Tschichold’s ideas were incorporated into everyday practice. While TNT has been acclaimed as the curtain raiser of modern graphic design, the sources cited by Tschichold in it have been understudied also because of their difficult identification.

Also from Triest, Das Medium Bilderbuch (DE) by Hans ten Doornkaat is an upcoming publication dedicated to the picture book phenomenon. However, it does not focus on specific books or content, but rather takes a look at the medium itself: from the technical and formal requirements of printing to the format, paper and binding and ultimately, to special versions of the medium picture book such as pop-up books or hidden-picture books.

Tratex, a road sign alphabet in the making by Rikard Heberling and Jonas Williamsson traces the development of Tratex prior to its digital release and situates it within the broader technological and social transformations of twentieth-century Sweden – a society increasingly organized around the car. It also examines the criticism Tratex has faced over the years, along with the alternative alphabets proposed to replace it. The book is published by Lineto, whose Munken Sans (2020), commissioned by Artic Paper for the identity of its Munken product line, takes inspiration from Tratex. An abridged essay is available online.

From Pyramyd, La création typographique. Concevoir des polices de caractères (FR) by Matthieu Salvaggio is a revised edition of Blaze Type’s type design guide, How to design fonts? (2023). The foundry’s blog provides more details on the new edition.

Edited by Matter Of, New new typography seeks to unsettle established paradigms by opening typography to an expanded, more inclusive vocabulary. ‘New New’ means not innovation and progress, but rather a reorientation, a new relational standpoint between past and present, to bring forward practices that have been neglected, marginalized, or excluded.

The first TDC annual designed and published by Slanted: The world’s best typography. Typography 46 documents the winning entries in the Type Directors Club 71 competition.

First published with Onomatopee in 2021, How many female type designers do you know? I know many and talked to some!, a pioneering appraisal of female typographers, with historical research and interviews with contemporary practitioners edited by Yulia Popova, returns to print in the Set Margins' catalogue. Interviewees include Gayaneh Bagdasaryan, Veronika Burian, Maria Doreuli, Louise Fili, Martina Flor, Loraine Furter, Jenna Gesse, Golnar Kat Rahmani, Indra Kupferschmid, Briar Levit, Zuzana Licko, Ana Regidor, Fiona Ross, and Carol Wahler.

Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type features over 55 articles, essays, and interviews exploring intersections between culture, language, business practices, technology, and type. It also includes interviews with Alphabettes members, visual histories, and reflections on past and ongoing initiatives. More than an anthology, the book is conceived as a type specimen, showcasing over 120 typefaces designed by women and non-binary individuals. The book, planned for March 2026, can be pre-ordered from the publisher.

Ten Thousand Angels Press is a publishing imprint founded in 2025 by John Morgan, primarily to publish the second edition of his project Usylessly, which explores the non-literary aspects of the 1922 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Art Data distributes the updated Usylessly, as well as Baskerville’s teardrop explodes: a selection of books as muses, a project comprising 31 books that have touched Morgan and his work as a book designer, completed shortly before his death. The publisher also announced another upcoming project: a “long-researched study of the Gallimard Blanche series of books”.

French studio Recto Verso have been crowdfunding the production of typographic swatch books organized by country of origin. Their latest nouancier, dedicated to typefaces by German foundries, had a successful Kickstarter run in 2025. The whole set of four — covering Germany, France, Switzerland, and the UK — is available from the studio’s shop.

Stencilled music books in France: techniques, inventories, ateliers, 1669–1841 is the theme of the 10th issue of Typography papers. The articles in this volume of Typography papers document stencilled music books made in France and those stencillers and stencilmakers involved directly or indirectly in their production. The books and individuals are located, in time, between the second half of seventeenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, mostly in Paris and the surrounding region. It was here, during this period, that such work became inventive, sophisticated, and often highly refined. All articles are available as PDF downloads, along with the contents of all the other issues except #8 (which still pops up occasionally at affordable prices on online marketplaces).

Published by Brill since 1971, Quærendo is a leading peer-reviewed journal on the history of books and manuscripts in Europe. A few of the journal’s articles, such as Mathieu Lommen’s Theosophy and lettering and Standards for lettering, are available as open-access PDF downloads.

Cyrillic printing in Romanian lands, from 16 to 19 century is Anna Vasina’s dissertation for the degree of MA Communication Design / Typeface Design at the University of Reading, UK: This dissertation examines the development of Cyrillic printing in the Romanian lands, focusing on the most culturally significant and widely circulated books within a defined period from the beginning of printing to the era of cultural transition and modernity. The narrative of Slavonism in Romanian culture is characterised by its ambiguous nature, presenting a compelling subject for investigation.

Back issues of The American Typecasting Fellowship newsletter are available online (via Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh).

Beyond Bézier is a research project conducted between 2023 and 2025 at ECAL in Lausanne and HEIA-FR in Fribourg. In the age of early digital type, several methods were explored to draw letterforms. One of them, the Bézier spline, an algorithm that generates curves with a small quantity of data, has the crucial advantage of sparing computer memory and processing resources. As a result, drawing type with Bézier curves became the industry standard, and remains so today. This project aims to question and reevaluate this standard, to move beyond established trends, and to develop innovative, liberating ideas by exploring alternative methods of drawing curves and letterforms. Essays by Matthieu Cortat-Roller, Alice Savoie, Kai Bernau, Radim Peško, Micha Wasem, and Florence Yerly are supplemented by an Appendix featuring artifacts from the research process, such as the Stroke Scribbler RoboFont extension.

(Another ongoing research project to keep an eye on: WYSIWYG, an investigation in the uptake of graphic design software in Switzerland and France, 1980–today conducted at HEAD in Geneva, aims at documenting, from a historical and theoretical perspective, the digital turn of graphic design practice. How and when did the computer become the main working device for graphic designers? And what are the long-term unexpected effects of these technologies on the practice of graphic design today?)

Nicholas Rougeux prepared a digital edition of Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Printing types: their history, forms & use (1922, 1937). While facsimiles are valuable, they can’t compare to the original material from which they were generated. This project is a reproduction of Updike’s original work enhanced by the inclusion of scans of the original materials in place of the facsimiles. Thanks to publicly available digital collections, original scans of nearly every facsimile have been carefully sought out and included to allow readers to explore the many traits Updike described in their original form. The process notes are as informative as always, and there’s a poster specimen of types from the book.

Articles:

In 2021, Monotype bought Hoefler & Co, and with it several families that I designed. As these families are now further removed from their origin, I want to ensure that their stories are accurately recorded. I invited Doug Wilson to write these stories, to help tease out the threads of each typeface’s history. After eight days of interviews, he patiently arranged my overlapping thoughts into linear accounts of eight families, says Tobias Frere-Jones of the Design Accounts series. In the latest installment, Doug looks at how Gotham was designed.

Robin Kinross dissects the design of Fitzcarraldo Editions: Over many years there have been intermittent attempts by the larger, mainstream British publishers to emulate the French seriousness of content and design, but they have been feeble and short-lived. Sometimes the imitation has amounted to not publishing first in hardback, and publishing only in paperback with ‘French flaps’ on the covers. As if conscious of this history of failure and of the obstacles presented by an obdurate, sometimes philistine UK literary and bookselling culture, Fitzcarraldo’s founder Jacques Testard took the name of his firm from Werner Herzog’s film about the task of transporting a steamship over a mountain in Peru.

Each summer, Typotheque takes time to recharge. Before our break, we share seven books from our studio shelves that continue to inspire our work, says Peter Biľak.

On the Fontstand blog, Dan Reynolds examines the historical sources for Pascal Zoghbi’s 29LT Idris (2024), a typeface inspired H. Berthold AG’s Arabisch halbfett Nr. 49, drawn by Salim al Habschi. I have great hopes that Pascal’s typeface will not only find great use itself but also serve as a model for other designers, illustrating how archival materials like those available for Berthold’s Arabisch halbfett Nr. 49 can be interpreted as source material for new typefaces today and tomorrow. Dozens of folders from Berthold’s type-cutting department were digitized in 2024 and published online in 2025. Few type designers have seen those materials since the early 1990s. Who knows what other designers in the 2020s might draw from them? 29LT Idris is an excellent example of their potential.

For the same blog series, Katerina Grushka reviews David Jonathan Ross’s Club Lithographer (2020).

For the ECAL Typefaces blog, Switzerland-based designer Nell May in conversation with New Zealand physicist Crispin W. Gardiner, who also happens to be their dad: A thing I have always felt is that support for the concepts of maths, mathematical thinking and mathematical typesetting in virtually all places is woefully inadequate. A journal like the NZ Listener can discuss Shakespeare in some depth, but be unable to typeset some of the simplest equations, such as would be taught in high school at the same time as Shakespeare. — A quantum physicist’s views on type.

Dan Reynolds on The Akzidenz-Grotesk you’ve never seen: In the 1920s, a unique variant of the Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface was created for Germany’s emerging system of industrial standards. Few people have ever seen it.

In a revised version of his talk at Automatic Type Design 3, David Březina asks: What is a (universal) script grammar?. The assemblage of topics discussed attempts to map the relationship among the font technologies (such as font formats and font editors), the manual and educational origins of writing (in the sense of mark making), and human perception (namely character recognition). Would it be theoretically possible to derive basic morphological principles of scripts based on the human condition? And if so, why would we want to do that?

Okay Type’s favorite typefaces of 2025: Did I make this up or did designers used to write blog posts with end of the year lists about their favorite font releases? Maybe they still do and it’s all hidden in the rotting guts of the social media walled gardens. Anyway, in a renewed effort to manifest a better, more personal internet I decided to write about mine.

Nick Sherman explains why Fonts in Use is not active on Instagram: We’ve abandoned problematic platforms, embraced ethical alternatives, and survived to talk about it.

The evolution and adaptation of the Arabic script by Amir Mahdi Moslehi examines the origins and the development of various calligraphic styles, with a focus on how regional influences have shaped these forms.

The Letterform Archive showcases Sylvie Vodáková’s book covers for Květy Poezie.

Erik van Blokland recounts a forgery case involving alleged correspondence between two departments of the KGB, incongruously typewritten in FF Trixie (1991).

For the 13th issue of Flat File, a semi-regular publication that practices the ‘close-reading’ of graphic design by the Herb Lubalin Study Center, Jess Kuronen looks at the work of Roy Lagrone for Avon: Roy LaGrone used the back cover to exercise creative freedom during his time as an art director at pulp publisher Avon Books. His job was to oversee the design of books, jackets, interior illustrations, and layouts. Since the back was the same size as the front and faced less contentious approvals, it was the ideal experimental laboratory.

Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller reports that for its 7th edition, Meggs’ history of graphic design co-editors Sandra Maxa and Mark Sanders “sought parallel, converging, and divergent designers and works that bolster the spine of graphic design history presented over the previous editions”, in an effort to reform the textbook’s perceived white, Eurocentric narrative.

As Proxima Nova turns 20, Mark Simonson reflects on a quarter-century of type design in Mark Simonson Studio at 25.

An in-depth interview by François Chevret with Alice Savoie, Une femme de caractères (FR), touches on the lack of visibility of women within typography and type design, and the efforts to reveal their contributions in projects such as Women in Type and Alphabettes.

A chat with Elizabeth Goodspeed, Casual Archivist by Jessamyn West for the Flick Foundation blog: The internet gives this illusion of permanence, when in reality it’s more like a series of short overlapping windows. So I worry about loss, but also about flattening. When images get detached from their original context, they start functioning as purely aesthetic material—or worse, as false history. That risk feels especially relevant in the age of AI, when the difference between real and fabricated often comes down to what context survives.

Type is magic, an interview with Anne-Dauphine Borione, whose fantasy-inspired typeface Dargon won her the Gerard Unger Scholarship in 2024, on the TypeTogether blog.

From Google Arts & Culture, 800 years of English handwriting from the collections of the Derbyshire Record Office.

Resources, archives, and tools:

Typefoundry Directory was revised, expanded in scope, and re-engineered this year. Matthew Smith outlines the updates in v3, among which is the ability for foundries to sponsor custom nameplates. Having faced similar challenges with demarcation, I also appreciate the thorough documentation of the methodology Matthew employs when having to shoehorn nuanced, human realities into tabulated facts.

TimeLure, une chronologie des Rencontres de Lure documents seventy years of meetings in the alpine village of Lurs, kicked off in 1952 by Maximilien Vox and friends.

The KABK TypeMedia class of 2023–2024 student showcase is now online.

Communication Arts have announced the winners of their 2026 competition for the Typography discipline.

Fontbob by Carl Enlund is a web-based font editor that works on desktop and mobile devices. The app is free for public fonts, and a paid version priced at $7/month enables users to keep their creations private.

three-text by Jeremy Tribby is a high-fidelity 3D mesh font geometry and text layout engine for the web that packs several interesting algorithms under the hood: three-text relies on HarfBuzz for text shaping, Knuth-Plass line breaking, Liang hyphenation, libtess.js for removing overlaps and triangulation, curve polygonization from Maxim Shemanarev’s Anti-Grain Geometry, and Visvalingam-Whyatt line simplification. There’s a live demo available.

Type-X, a Google Chrome extension that makes it easy and efficient to test local fonts on any website, has been renovated through the efforts of Simon Cozens and Roel Nieskens.

Also from Roel Nieskens, FontJit is a small library for controlling webfonts: load fonts when they enter the viewport, or when they almost enter the viewport, or immediately.

fPDK by Connor Davenport is an open-source development kit that uses DrawBot to automate the production of font proofing PDFs, as exemplified here.

From HAL Typefaces in collaboration with Christoph Seibel, TypePad is a free tool which offers a more playful, intuitive and accessible way to work with variable fonts in InDesign with an interface inspired by interface is inspired by drum machines and MIDI controllers.

Anchor Dropper by Ryan Bugden is a RoboFont extension that automates the placement of achors for accents in Latin chacters. More details in Ryan’s video presentation.

The World Wide Web Consortium has published a candidate recommendation draft, and is inviting implementations for Incremental Font Transfer. The spec presents outlines a mechanism for the efficient use of large, multi-script fonts on the web that addresses the shortcomings of unicode-range-based subsetting.

Adobe After Effects has recently gained the ability to animate variable fonts.

Videos:

James Mosley’s History of Letterforms: James Mosley’s lectures on the history of letterforms were delivered in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication over many years. They represent the sequence of lectures given by Prof. Mosley to students over the course of one academic year. In 2020–21, they were recorded as still images with voice-over. Following Prof. Mosley’s death in August 2025, the Department is pleased to make the recordings generally available in agreement with the Mosley estate.

Essential RoboFont with Colin Ford: RoboFont is our font editor of choice here at OH no Type Co, and for many professional type foundries around the world. Getting to know it would be a good foundation for all of our OH no Type School design courses. All you need to get started is a Mac, and a free trial download of RoboFont!

Talks from Typographics 2025 have been published on the conference website.

A couple of lectures related to the Small Performances research project (2024, ongoing): Caroline Archer-Parré talked about The making of Baskerville’s typeface at the Herb Lubalin Lecture Series, while Riccardo Olocco & Michele Patanè presented Investigating John Baskerville’s type design at Ensad in Nancy.

Also from the Herb Lubalin Lecture Series:

From St Bride Foundation:

From the Letterform Archive Lecture Series:

The story of Skin & Bones, a talk by Mark Simonson on the revival of the 1972 typeface designed by Douglas F. Jones, presented at Type Tuesday in Minneapolis.

Filiation: nurturing a pedagogy of type design in France, a talk by Alice Savoie and Thomas Huot-Marchand presented at ATypI 2023 in Paris. Taking the year 1982 as a starting point, this talk will revisit the historical events that led to the construction of a pedagogy of typeface design in France over the last four decades. The presentation will be an opportunity to pay tribute to some of the key contributors of that period, and connect the dots between some of the topics addressed by other speakers during this ATypI conference.

Multilingual and multiscript book design, a talk by John D. Berry from the Face/Interface 2025 conference at Stanford University.

On the Jectives YouTube channel, Curtis Simpson is streaming Typography News each week.

Farewells:

Finally, Ramiro Espinoza’s recent tribute to Piet Jacobs (1944–2024), Farewell to a printer.

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