typography redux

I am re-posting this post from myspace blog thingy.
It's, like, what I aim to do with this blog-thing.

Anyway last week I found myself attending a typography seminar with the great English type designer, Jeremy Tankard. If you aren't familiar with him check him out at, www.typography.net
He does some really great stuff, he seems to be on the leading edge of British typography, he has a good sense of history, but isn't afraid to break with old traditions.
The seminar was crazy because half of the class were students, a quarter of the class of the class was Anna and I, and the last quarter were really serious type designers, who made some really great work. One guy flew from London, to Vienna to attend the seminar. I felt like a clown, or at least a philistine, with my Hot Snakes font, and my silly animal icon font, but it was really cool, nontheless. So I happened to stumple upon a really great thing.
The big discovery was the FONTLAB program, which, besides being much easier than Fontographer, is a great drawing program. And I am considering using it to do illustrations, instead of Adobe Illustrator. It's really that good.

Then, later that night, we saw the amazing swiss designer, Urs Lehni, who has done some amazing stuff. The funny thing is that Anna and I thought he was the mastermind behind "OUR MAGAZINE" but he was also the designer who made the stuff for the ShauspielHaus in Zurich. (The Shauspielhaus in Zurich, had made some really cool catalogs and programs, that we had long admired. Very cool formats, done on a low budget.)
"Our Magazine" is a great topical magazine that examines some pretty banal topics, and gives them new light. The first issue was about Dogs, the second was Landscapes. But they manage to find some pretty offbeat stuff, and make you reexamine the subject. And it's done in an interesting way, that makes it much more than a piece of eye-candy. Afterwards, I talked to Urs about Wesley Willis, who was well known in indie rock circles, but relatively unknown here in Europe. Wesley Willis' brilliant Chicago landscapes are one of the features in the latest issue of "Our Magazine." check it out:
http://www.our-magazine.ch/