The weeks leading up to a speaking event my nerves will inevitably begin to shake; I bite my lip uncontrollably, my mood swings from ecstatic to horrified and back again, whilst sleep becomes entirely out of the question. Soothing these nerves just before I step onto the stage and find these strangers staring back...

Whirls of color and texture flipped by, one after another, up on the projector in front of us. Pitch-perfect typographic settings and illustrative allusions were printed onto these book covers, each striking the balance between describing the story of their contents whilst experimenting and bringing something new to...

Last week I wrote about an interesting method for setting type by using a brand new feature in Sass 3.3 called maps. This essentially lets you store lots of data in nested lists which can then be accessed via a mixin or a function. In that post on the Erskine blog I ultimately argued for font-size and line-height...

Typographica has once again published a collection of reviews about last year’s type releases and so I’ll be spending the next couple of days carefully bookmarking and reading each of them in turn. This is one of my favourite annual traditions now – creeping through the spiral of links, stories and subsquent threads...

Last weekend I finally picked up Inside Paragraphs, a book by the illustrator and type designer Cyrus Highsmith. Essentially the book is a primer into the typesetter’s world, with the succinct writing being wonderfully complemented by the format of the book and the charming illustrative style. This combination makes...

Written by the prolific Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night examines the history, culture and religious circumstances surrounding the establishment of libraries, both public and private. Throughout what seems like a rather short book in hindsight, the author lovingly takes note of the various ways in which to...

Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form of Language: Hebrew script, to many, is a badge of Jewishness, Arabic script a badge of the Islamic faith, Devangari script a badge of Hindu pride, Cyrillic script a badge of Slavic solidarity or Soviet nostalgia, and Sinhalese and Tamil scripts the symbols of two Sri Lankan...

In Six Memos for the Next Millennium Italo Calvino outlines all of the attributes and properties of great writing that he believed ought to thrive into the distant future of literature. One extract which I particularly adore is from the topic of quickness where the author quotes Carlo Levi: If a straight line is the...

Trying to keep the number of book recommendations to a minimum is difficult when I keep stumbling over novels by Ellen Ullman (here’s my micro-review of her first book, Close to the Machine). This time though it’s The Bug, a story about programming, information theory and obsession. The protaganist, Ethan Levin,...

In moving to the next generation of consoles I’ve found that it’s somehow managed to fill me with a deep and bitter sadness. This is mostly thanks to the ‘Library’ menu which is hidden amongst the rest of the interface of the Playstation 4, yet it’s not the questionable typography or arrangement of its icon that...

I can’t stop thinking about this story from the latest issue of Codex magazine where an upcoming designer visits Herb Lubalin’s studio and began to wonder at all the facets and inner-workings of this celebrated graphic design agency in New York. The designer then asks Lubalin how he managed to work in an office...

This time last year I was a pup. I had never used Sass before, I didn’t know what a shell was, and the DOM was a ghostly, nightmarish thing that infiltrated my dreams. Time has zipped by since I joined Erskine a year ago today and I’m now looking back at how I’ve spent my days so far. What have I learned? What can I...