Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

LetterCult offers up an exhaustive 15-page post detailing the best custom lettering of 2009. It’s the first part in a series of posts that will narrow down the list to a top ten, an interview with their person of the year, and finally, something they’re calling AlphaBattle, which looks interesting.

Designer People – Ed Fella from Bijan Berahimi on Vimeo.

Here is an entertaining Australian documentary featuring legendary designer Ed Fella.

(via VLU)

Artist Scott Teplin has created this superb series of 26 letterpress dream-houses, each designed from the letters of the alphabet: Alphabet City. The prints are $80 each, and the entire set is available in a bound volume for $2000.

The Art of Hand Lettering blog showcases some of the custom lettering work of Alan Ariail.

Nobrow is fast becoming my favourite small press outfit. They keep putting out fantastic small runs of illustrated books and comics, all of them beautifully printed.

The latest is an English translation of French comicker Blexbolex’s graphic novella Abecederia. The book is a horrific scifi thriller masked as an alphabet book; each page features an illustration based on the shapes of the letters of the alphabet, all printed in a minimal 3 colours, and the combinations they make. Visit Nobrow to order the book.

Designer and illustrator Ty Wilkins (founder of Type Theory) has a small (but hopefully growing) collection of animal illustrations made up of a nice mix of vector shapes and hand-painted textures.

A convincing argument that the Trajan font has somehow come to dominate movie posters of the world.

Also see: Helvetica is the movie font.

Will of A Journey Round My Skull shares with us twenty-five book covers and posters from the out-of-print bookBlickfang: Bucheinbände und Schutzumschläge Berliner Verlage 1919 – 1933.

The book features a thousand images, so these 25 are but a small taste. I’m dying to see what other treasures are in its out-of-print pages. Will also astutely points out that Blickfang is German for eye catcher.

reator Jessica Hische (previously) has launched this brilliant blog: Daily Drop Cap. Jessica will stretch her typographic muscles each day to deliver an original decorative initial cap. And what’s more, she offers the HTML code needed to use the drop caps in your own blog posts.

This post started out being about this article that says cursive writing is an endangered species on accounta those dang-blasted computers the kids are all using these days (*shakes fist*), but when looking for an image to include I stumbled on Adam R. Garcia’s Flickr stream, and now this is all about him and how awesome his work is. He’s not only a skilled letter artist, but a talented designer and illustrator too. Check out more of his beautiful work on his site, The Pressure.

Here’s a brief quote from the article I mentioned above:

The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.

Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.

And if you’re into font-porn like me, don’t forget to peruse the lettering tag here on Drawn to see the beautiful work some artists have done with cursive lettering and art. It’s totally safe for work.

Edit from John: The typography tag yields some great links, too!