October 15th, 2009 — Design

H&FJ Type Booklet

Spen­ding some time with a few of my favo­rite Hoe­fler & Frere-Jones fonts, I enjo­yed crea­ting this “abbre­via­ted type cata­lo­gue.” Ins­pi­red by the fan­tas­tic sam­ples H&FJ publish with their font relea­ses, this brochure-style piece show­ca­ses 5 of my favo­rite H&FJ faces: Archer, Didot, Hoe­fler Text, Zig­gu­rat, and Gotham.

type treat­ment

The Story

What a fun day. From deci­ding I wan­ted to do this, the first sketches in the note­book, and crea­ting a faux logo for H&FJ — to selec­ting the type faces, gathe­ring con­tent, layout, prin­ting, bin­ding, pho­to­graphing and wri­ting up a blog post about it all in one day. We had to get a little crea­tive toward the end there as Kin­kos had for some rea­son clo­sed early and I could not find a sui­ta­ble sta­pler for the bind — I ended up sta­pling all of the pages to the wall, extrac­ting it and then for­cing the sta­ples down with my thumbs. Skills, I know. All in all, a blast. Also, in the pho­tos below, can you spot my woo­den amper­sand that makes a brief cameo?

The Pho­tos

The Pro­duct

The cover fea­tu­res an ori­gi­nal type treat­ment of the foun­dries name that I crea­ted spe­cially for this pro­ject. Each face fea­tu­red within recei­ves a 2 page spread. The copy on the left read is sup­plied by the desig­ners them­sel­ves (cour­tesy of com­mand c+v.) On the right each face is shown in the ligh­test and hea­viest weight, except Zig­gu­rat , of course, which has a sin­gle weight: black. The moc­kups that H&FJ pro­vide as visual candy are accom­pa­nied by a mini spe­ci­men and a list of the weights avai­la­ble in that par­ti­cu­lar face. Each spread recei­ves a new color palette, I tried to relate the tone of the colors to the emo­tio­nal feed­back I get from the faces them­sel­ves. For exam­ple, Archer is set against a calm blue while Gotham is set against an indus­trial and stark grey.

And the conclusion

I really had a good time, and I am well plea­sed with the result. Let me know what you think in the com­ments below. What are your favo­rite type­fa­ces? What, in your opi­nion, makes a strong type sample?