Typography and type design

Matthew Butterick, author of Practical Typography, gives a talk titled Typography for Docs at the Write the Docs conference. He introduces the basics of good typography for people who write and publish documents.

A short animated film by Ben Barrett-Forrest that runs through the history of typography. It is a quick visual overview aimed at a general audience.

A Vox video on why Helvetica and fonts like it show up on so many logos, signs and interfaces. It traces how the typeface came to dominate and what that says about design.

Richard Rutter, co-founder of a design agency and a web font service, gives a 48-minute talk at CSS Day 2018 on web typography. It offers practical rules, such as using the default paragraph size and adjusting type size to reading distance, and a section on setting tables so they can be read.

Marcin Wichary of Figma gives a Config 2020 talk that starts from the simple Cmd+B keyboard shortcut and follows where it leads, through the typography and software behind making text bold. It is a playful, detailed dive into type, keyboards and interface details.

Marcin Wichary, Director of Design at Figma, gives a Config 2024 talk defending the old pixel. It is a design-history look at pixels and pixel fonts on screens.

Posy surveys segmented displays, from the familiar seven-segment digits to displays with more segments, and looks at the shapes designers chose for numbers and letters on them. The video is a calm, detailed look at an everyday kind of lettering.

Kris Sowersby of Klim Type Foundry speaks at Typographics 2017 in a talk titled Untitled. He gives an insider's view of designing and releasing a modern commercial typeface.

A San Francisco Public Library talk with the Letterform Archive on the story of LoveFrom Serif, a typeface by the LoveFrom design studio that is inspired by Baskerville. It tells how the typeface came about.

Typographer Erik Spiekermann talks in German about iOS 7, with English captions available. He gives a type designer's view of its design, including the thin, ultra light type.

Tantacrul of MuseScore tells how he designed a new free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. He explains why a notation font is hard to make and gives a short history of the Score program.

Donald Knuth reminisces at the San Francisco Public Library about thirty-two years of Metafont, his system for describing typefaces with programs. He talks about what he remembers and what the project taught him.

Tom Mullaney, a historian at Stanford, gives a Letterform Archive lecture on the history of the Chinese typewriter. He explains how a script with thousands of characters was made to work on a machine and what that meant for later input methods.

David Kadavy's short presentation on why designers and others hate Comic Sans. He looks at the typeface's origins, including how it came from an era of low-resolution, unsmoothed screens where it read well.

A Saturday Night Live sketch in which a man (Ryan Gosling) is haunted by the Papyrus typeface used in the Avatar logo. It plays the font's overuse and the designer's guilt for laughs.

A Saturday Night Live sketch, the sequel to the 2017 original, about the Papyrus typeface and the fixation it provokes. It is comedy rather than instruction, and works only if you already know what Papyrus stands for.

Neutra Face is a parody of Lady Gaga's Poker Face recast as an ode to the Neutra typeface. It is a comic music video made by and for type-minded people.

A kinetic typography animation set to Stephen Fry speaking about language. He argues that English has always changed, that pedantry about grammar misses the point, and that people should use language freely and with delight. It runs about six minutes.

A kinetic typography music video by Jarrett Heather, set to Jonathan Coulton's song "Shop Vac" and animated with tools like After Effects. The lyrics become the visuals, with the text itself acting out the song as a mock commercial.

Tom Murphy VII (suckerpinch) presents his SIGBOVIK 2021 research on inventing new letterforms past upper and lowercase, using machine learning to generate 'uppestcase' and 'lowestcase' letters. It is a comic but surprisingly thorough exploration of how letters can be represented and extrapolated.