Art from Turmoil: Stock Promotions Blitz Metaculture  

The stock catalog, a tool that was once used for research, has become a funky book that you look through for ideas and inspiration.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2002). Design>Graphic Design>Publishing

Big Thing  

OpenType is an awesome font format. Based on Unicode, and created by Microsoft and Adobe, it will inevitably become a universal standard—sooner or later.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2002). Design>Typography>Standards

The Bottom Line  

It's not been easy for art directors and graphic designers to maintain a career amidst rapidly changing technology and design trends.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2001). Careers>TC>Typography>Graphic Design

Chalk and Cheese  

Two new typefaces came into being for very different reasons, in very different ways, and with a completely different appearance.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2001). Design>Typography

Cruising for Fonts  

From boutiques to department stores, where to shop for type on the Internet.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2002). Design>Typography>Online

Deeper into the Paradigm  

The screen may be flat, but the illusion of depth grows stronger. With Apple’s new operating system, OS X, the evolutionary trend of the user interface becomes clear. Starting as flat, monochromatic symbols, the Mac’s icons have become progressively more naturalistic, and the suggestion of depth created by layers of overlapping windows has been enhanced, first by the Classic bas-relief shading on the window frames, and now, with Aqua, the OS X interface, by the addition of feathered drop shadows cast by the windows.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2002). Design>User Interface>Operating Systems>Macintosh

Diggin’ It?!  

The buried treasures of typography: comprising the Style Guide of the Type Club of Toronto, with illustrations, and an Expert Font Guide.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2001). Design>Typography>Style Guides

The Face of Uniformity  

Helvetica is back, bigtime. On the street, it’s in campaigns for companies as different as IBM and The Gap. At the online font retailers, it tops the sales charts. In the metaculture, Getty Images uses it to express control of the visual world. It’s quite shocking to look at the font sales charts, and realize that the serif genre has dropped off the map. But you know this already, because whenever you try a serif font in a layout it doesn’t look right — too oldfashioned. But perhaps that’s the wrong term, because the sans faces ruling the roost today are anything but contemporary, mostly dating from the mid-20th century, many from a lot earlier.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2003). Design>Typography>Fonts

For the Masses  

Throughout the 20th Century—the age of mass media—traditional serifed typefaces dominated the advertisements and editorial pages of mass circulation magazines.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2001). Design>Typography>History

Graphic Propaganda: Cultural Expressions in Time of War  

The media is a battlefield where moral systems collide. Ownership tilts it. TV channels and newspapers in the U.S. promote their business interests by supporting a probig business government and its war. Even The New York Times, which opposed invading Iraq without UN consent, did so in a way unlikely to rock the boat—and clearly in direct contrast to the intention of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Mirror's front page, designed to generate newsbox sales by aggressively engaging the man in the street, is as pointed and artistically crafted as an editorial cartoon.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2003). Design>Graphic Design>Typography

Hip 2B Square  

If the fonts you’re using aren’t Post-humanist, they’re out of date.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2000). Design>Typography

Neo-Modernism  

Neo-modernism is the tool that Carmen Dunjko (shift) and David Pratt (The Globe and Mail) are using to project the message. It’s a step beyond the old bare-bones functionality.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2000). Design>Typography>Journalism

Redesign--What Redesign?

In a culture where nothing changes, even a small change is momentous, and that’s what just happened at the Wall Street Journal. Renovation may better describe the subtle changes in the Wall Street Journal’s first makeover since the Second World War.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2002). Design>Typography>Journalism

Seeing the Light  

A digital camera and a cell phone. Small, hefty boxes crammed with circuitry. For both, the typeface is a light sans serif. But beyond this similarity the creative directors—Sam Sitt for Sony; and Jane Hope for Clearnet—pursue different paths to extreme typographic conclusions.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2001). Design>Typography

Text Talk: Online Forums Emerge as Beacons of Typography  

How does one stay up-to-date on typography? It would be nice if there were a regular trade magazine covering type business and technology, reviewing new typefaces, type books, font management tools, and software applications, with features on type issues, typographers and design projects (for instance, publication redesigns). But there isn’t, and it ain’t gonna happen—the marketing dollars that could support such a venture are too few and far between.

Shinn, Nick. ShinnType (2003). Design>Typography>Journalism