typography
typography on Spoot baby... spooooooot!: a running collection of 3 stories we have gathered and hand-picked because they are worth your time. Every post here touches on typography in some way — the news, the analysis, the deep dives, and the occasional surprise find. # Spoot. New stories are added to this page as we find them, so check back if you want to keep up with what is happening around typography, or subscribe to the RSS feed to get them as soon as they are published. Browse the collection below, or head back to the homepage to see everything Spoot baby... spooooooot! is covering right now.
Godard, Typographer.
Godard didn't just point cameras; he set type. Paule Palacios-Dalens' 2019 piece, *Jean-Luc Godard, the Typographer with a Movie Camera*, catches him red-handed in the act of composition, treating intertitles like jump cuts and credits like character studies. The man understood that a frame is just a page with better lighting. Layout design, and particularly the collision of letterforms with celluloid, becomes the real protagonist here, a hidden grammar beneath the jump cuts. It's the kind of obsessive, etymological rabbit hole we live for, the footnote that swallows the text whole. For those of you who think language is just vocabulary, our piece "Still You, Just With More Vocabulary" circles a similar obsession, but Godard proves the medium is the message, and the message is often just a beautifully kerned secret. Stay spooty.
Tuscan Letters.
Tuscan letters have hollow feet and harlequin hats, and if that doesn't make you want to read closer, check your pulse. Tere Schultz is back with the second part of her typographic divertimento, chasing her own fixation down a rabbit hole that's part lapidary prank, part ornamental obsession. These letters are delicate, then extravagant, sometimes both in the same serif. I love that she treats them as a joke with a straight face. It's the kind of deep-cut nerdery that rewards the reader who already circled back. And if you're wondering why language itself keeps shifting shape under pressure, her earlier piece on multilingual personalities, "Still You, Just With More Vocabulary," pairs perfectly with this. Stay spooty, friends. The margins are where the mischief lives.
PrintingFilms.
There's a specific joy in watching a pressman's hands move, the way they know the weight of a plate before it ever meets the ink. That's the feeling I chased in the 1980s, proofreading in a printing and design department, dodging the spray of solvent and the tall tales. PrintingFilms.com gets that. It's a rabbit hole for anyone who's ever mourned the death of a good halftone or wondered what a proof actually proved. The site is a footnote that became the main text. It's sharp, narrow, and surfaces fast. For those of us who still circle back to the clatter of the old machines, it's a welcome burrow. Stay spooty.