Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
by Ellen Lupton.

This is a really great book for folks wanting to get into typography. It not only teaches the basic principles (what’s an x-height? what’s a descender?), it also gives a good bit of the history and theory. I really dug it, and for $14, I’m thinking about adding it to my library.

Links:

• On-line companion to Thinking With Type
• Ellen Lupton’s Website
• Ellen Lupton, “Reading Isotype“

An 80-minute film all about typography that interviews lots of great designers…what’s not to like?

After reading in the New Yorker about the great type designer Matthew Carter, and then stumbling across James Kochalka’s personal font, I decided to make a font of my own. It’s a real pain in the ass to letter comics, and I’m always wanting to make revisions after I’ve inked, so if I had my own font, I could simply make the speech bubbles and type the text in after I’ve scanned, finished the layout, etc. Supposedly, you should be able to draw your letters in a vector-based program, then copy them to a font creation program, and voila you’ve got a font. No problemo…if you’ve got the cash for the program. Right now, I’m looking around for a bootleg copy of Fontographer, the program used by the pros (list $300). In the meantime, I’m learnin’ about serifs and glyphs and all other kinds of crap about typography. Here’s a great list of links about font creation, and there’s also this cool Typography wiki at Typophile.com