Process

In the realm of the command line, where black and white and monospaced fonts reign, the software company Charm is breathing new life into the terminal. Their mission is to make the command line glamorous and if their website is any testament to what they can bring to your CLI, they are succeeding.

Christian Rocha is the designer behind Charm’s website and uses Anchor as the primary display face. It is whimsical without being silly, and plump enough to support subtle gradients laid on top. Anchor also makes a home for those hypnotic animations of … glowing? chroming? disco? Whatever it is, it’s fantastic.

Forever Friends is a volunteer-run organization in Australia that rescues, rehabilitates and rehomes animals in need. Susu Studio completely re-imagined their identity and choose Anchor as the organization’s primary typeface. Photography by Sebastian Avila.

In the spring of 2012, eight students at North Carolina State University’s College of Design participated in a new course to curate, edit, design and publish The Student Publication, a journal that reports on important issues in the field of design. While they had the support of Dean Marvin Malecha, FAIA and were guided by the expertise of Assistant Professor Tania Allen, the students (Michael Carbaugh, Dwight Davis, Eric Flood, Anna Gonzales, Craig Maxwell, Rebekah Zabarsky, and Leigh Anne Zeitouni) managed every aspect of the project including selecting and inviting contributors, authoring content, designing the publication and managing its promotion. The result, Volume 35: Transformation: New perspectives on design methods and processes, was printed and released this fall.

Volume 35 of The Student Publication was designed by Michael Carbaugh, North Carolina State University Master of Graphic Design ’12.

Assistant Professor Allen was asked how building a course around the well-established publication enhanced the students’ learning experience. She explained that a dedicated course provided time and space for students to sit, think and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a potential topic and whether it merited an entire issue.

‘The Student Publication provides a forum for students to develop a comfort with writing and articulating an idea that might be more theoretical in nature,’ said Allen. ‘I have been trying to develop projects that give structure to creating an argument, introduce students to prominent (or not so prominent) thinkers and writers in the field and experiment with the writing process itself.’

Anchor and Elena are used exclusively throughout the publication.

While the Publication Course was new in 2012, The Student Publication has a sixty-year history. The College of Design published the first volume in 1951. Its purpose then was to act as a collection of voices, focusing on timely and important issues in the design field. Past contributors have included Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller. Then in 2006, a group of faculty and students in the College, including Denise Gonzales Crisp, Tony Brock and Bob Burns, proposed creating the Publication Course to formalize the project’s learning objectives and student experience. Allen’s Spring 2012 class was inspired by that initial proposal.

Allen commended her students for their ability to create a framework on which future classes can build on and expand. ‘The students really rose to the challenge. They developed a fundamental appreciation for this publication as part of a larger system that not only will, but must, evolve and change in future semesters.’

In addition to providing a more holistic view of editing, designing and publishing a journal, the Publication Course has expanded students’ understanding of writing’s role in design both as content creation and critical practice. Rather than marginalizing writing at the edges of the design process – either as project brief at the start or explanation at the end – Allen wanted students to experience integrating writing into the whole process: to practice writing as a method to talk about how ideas develop through various stages and to enhance those ideas through the course of a project. To further clarify the connection between design and writing, Allen built visualization and making components into the students’ writing assignments. For example, they developed concept maps to find connections among contributed content and designed interactive pieces about the publication’s topic.

A detail – Elena up close.

For Volume 35, the students approached Nicole Dotin for an interview following the public lecture she gave at NC State the previous fall. Nicole presented on type design practice and the development of her typeface Elena (used throughout the publication for text alongside Anchor for headlines). The interview appears among contributions from educators, theorists and practitioners from various design disciplines: Eve Edelstein, Deb Littlejohn, Juhani Pallasmaa, Fernando Magallanes, Casey Reas, Matt Tomasulo and Erin White. Each of the eight contributors offers his or her perspective on how design methods and processes transform and adapt to new cultural and technological contexts. The student editors wrote that they hope The Student Publication creates a dialogue about how the field currently approaches design as well as how it might evolve in the future.

‘Today, I would argue that the incredible shifts in the field have precipitated an increasing need for us as designers to reflect not just on what we are creating, but how and why we are creating and what it is adding to material culture at large,’ Allen advocated. ‘The Student Publication is an opportunity to do that.’

This fall, a new set of students began working on Volume 36: Form + Fiction to be published spring of 2013. Find out more about The Student Publication.

— Guest blogger Erin Hauber is a graphic designer, educator and Master in Graphic Design degree candidate at North Carolina State University.

If you happened by the FontFeed recently, you’ll find an interview with Process Type Foundry partners Eric Olson and Nicole Dotin by Yves Peters. Go ahead, read the words. Sometimes, though, we just want to ogle the pictures. Here are photos from the interview along with extended annotations, outtakes and some extras.

Eric and Nicole standing in the doorway of the Process Type Foundry studio.

At some point, our photo shoot started to sour after taking shot after shot. There was nothing left to do but lighten the mood. Obviously, Eric grabbed a house number designed by Erik Spiekermann and placed it where it belonged.


This is Charlie, the silent third partner of Process, in the studio along with Bob Dylan, an old Mac Cube, our record player and various drawings by 3-year-olds.

After posing for his photo, Charlie popped by Nicole’s desk to see what she was working on and offer insight. Or, he might have been looking for a treat.

Designed and published by Ryan and Tina Essmaker, The Great Discontent features various weights of Stratum 1 alongside body text set in FontFont’s Meta Serif. More importantly, it features interviews with the makers of today.

“Do you guys know that thing that Ira Glass talks about? Where you start out and you know your taste is really good, but your ability needs to catch up to that taste?” An interview with Olga Bell on The Great Discontent.


Bryant and yellow belong together. This bag was one part of a larger rebrand of Raffles, a design school based in Sydney, Australia. Find more of the identity using Bryant on the Naughtyfish website, the firm that handled the redesign.


A test print for Elena Italic. Most of Nicole’s test prints are marked up in colored pen. Red, pink, blue and green are favorite colors for making messy, almost indecipherable notes for later decryption and then correction. The arm of the k needs … finesse.

Elena found its way into Instapaper, a popular app by Marco Arment for collecting and saving content to read later. If you happen to click on the link above for Marco, notice his personal site is set in Elena too (at the time of posting).


It’s no secret we love seeing our fonts in use and used well. It is a secret however, that we hope to one day see every font in our library used in a single magazine. As far as we know, Seattle Met is the front-runner in our imagined competition. Capucine, Anchor, Bryant, Bryant Compressed and Colfax have all graced the magazine since design director André Mora took the helm. Only 13 more fonts to go, Mr. Mora.

During the summer of 2010, we jumped into the seemingly rarefied world of print and made a limited-edition poster celebrating Anchor (long since sold out). Designed by Abi Chase, it was a three-color screenprint featuring an unusually pastel palette when compared to our typical propensity towards CMYK.


And last but not least, a random bonus. >Wants for Sale was started in July of 2007 by Christine and Justin Gignac. A couple of months later, they took the same basic concept and started Needs for Sale. The concept? The couple paints pictures of needs, anything from basic necessities like food or shelter to research for curing diseases. The paintings are offered for purchase and 100% of the sale is donated to a charity whose mission it is to meet that need.

Anchor is used for all headlines and titling.

A nice way to end, right?

It’s 2012 already but before we say goodbye to 2011 entirely, there were tidbits from the last 365 we don’t want to forget. And while we’re at it, we’ve included a preview of typefaces slated for release in the New Year.

Seravek in iBooks
The 1.5 update to Apple’s iBooks app included several new typefaces, our Seravek among them. Of the seven type choices within the app, Seravek is the only sans serif.

Read more about the new fonts in iBooks:
Apple Updates iBooks App with Nighttime Reading Theme, New Fonts, More on MacRumors
Version 1.5 Improves Typography in iBooks on iPad and iPhone on the FontFeed
FontSwap in iBooks on BoingBoing

Anchor at the Walker Art Center
Like MoMA’s acquisition of several typefaces last year, the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production currently on view at the Walker Art Center highlights typefaces as significant cultural artifacts in their own right. Anchor was featured among a number of other typefaces as further evidence of the emerging role of designers as producers.

Five Long Years
After five years of tweaking, polishing and refining, we finally pressed the launch button on Nicole’s typeface Elena. Up next for Nicole? A display font loosely inspired by the rhythms of the brush marker.

1% for the Planet
As members of 1% for the Planet, we donate one percent of our yearly sales to non-profit organizations working to improve the environment. This year we lent our support primarily to local organizations like the Will Steger Foundation, the Midtown Greenway Coalition, Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness and the Sibley Bike Depot. Our one non-local exception was the Washington-based Sea Shepherd.

One year on: Webfonts and Capucine
October 6 of 2010 marked the launch of our webfonts program making 2011 our first full year with webfonts on offer. And the report so far? Roughly 38% of fonts purchased on our site were either webfonts or webfont/desktop combinations.

Alice’s typeface Capucine also celebrated its first year post-release. We were delighted to see it featured in the inaugural issue of Codex. Of course, seeing it used for what Alice originally intended – as a typeface for magazine listings – in the November issue of Seattle Met also made our list of wonderful things.

Henry B. Weimelt
We were surprised to learn this year that Eric’s great grandfather, Henry B. Weimelt, was a passionate letter maker when not working his shift at the local Post Office. For years, relatives told tales of his after-hours letter work but it wasn’t until this year that his collection of hundreds – if not thousands – of handcrafted letters were uncovered and gifted to Eric. After sorting through the collection though, Henry’s intentions remain a mystery. What were the letters used for? Why did he make them? We’ve posted one half of one small box on our Flickr account.

On Deck for 2012
And last but not least, a good deal of 2011 was spent focusing on releases for 2012. In the New Year Eric will release his 12-font family Chrono followed by the boisterous display companion to Klavika, Klavika Display.

2012 also marks our ten-year anniversary. Thank you for ten wonderful years (officially in June) and here’s to ten more. All our best in this new year!

Seattle Met, a magazine covering the local scene in Seattle, WA, has been using Anchor and Bryant Compressed since May, when designer André Mora came on board. But it was for the summery July issue, with its focus on farms, foraging and other foodie adventures that Mora paired Anchor with the agile Capucine, named after the French word for the Nasturtium flower.

As the newest addition to our family of typefaces, it’s great to see Capucine being put to use here in a way that showcases its flexibility, from display headlines to captions.