Just a little peek inside of my kitchen today for Make-it Monday. Our all white kitchen needed a little livening up when we moved in, so I pained the top 2.5 feet of the wall in black chalkboard paint, and then started a "recipe mural" in white chalk. I'm only 1/3 done and looking forward to getting the rest of the recipe up there - maybe in the style of my new favorite font? What do you think?
Today for Make-It Monday, I wanted to share my experiences in making your own font! For our new Bold & Beautiful line, we had to create a couple of our own fonts since some of the metal type we purchased does not have a corresponding computer font. So, to do this, we foil stamped each of our letters and then scanned them into the computer and fiddled with them as best possible in Illustrator to make them look pretty (and by pretty, I mean straight lines and the same height). This was a tedious task and the letters aren't perfect, but it will allow us to proof your orders in our foil stamp fonts to be sure you like the look before we print! Then we places all of the little letters and glyphs in the template from yourfonts.com and then clicked create font and they did the rest! It was $9.95 for their services (well worth it, if you ask me!)
Here is our first go:
And this is our new monogram font:
and my favorite (and reminiscent of my wedding reception venue):
You can make your own font here! Let us know how it goes!
Ikea's August announcement that it would change their signature typeface from Futura to Verdana caused an uproar in the design world.
Although the reasons for this uproar are many, perhaps what angers designers most is that Ikea's decision violates its own design aesthetic. In a way, Futura is the typographic equivalent of Ikea's furniture: spare yet functional, based on simple geometry. By rejecting a typeface which has stood the test of time (and print volume - Ikea's catalog is the third most popular publication of all time, after the Bible and the Harry Potter series) in favor of a typeface designed specifically for the computer screen, Ikea sends a different message from the one they have left unchanged for over 50 years. This medium change, mostly due to the fact that Verdana is distributed free of charge by Microsoft, could be described cynically as the triumph of a difficult market over good design.
We happen to think that the differences aren't as noticeable for the main pages which mostly feature images, but that the pages with larger amounts of body copy are dramatically cheapened; you can see the difference between the past and present designs at www.idsgn.org. An excellent article by Edward Rothstein in The New York Times further outlines the controversy.