What a trippy collection.
Those Olivetti Chinese crop-circle thingies are amazing.

But to me this (~55% down the page - yes, I measured) takes the cake:



Really, what the hell could those bitmap patterns mean?! The only stuff I can think of that can explain it is prescient (assuming it was done a while ago).

hhp

Pretty sure that's Crouwel. He did a bunch of experiments with grid-based type in the 60s (I'm sure you know the New Alphabet -- the Foundry have a nice digital version).

That one, though, really is as you say: trippy.

R

A shame about the compression.
Try this: Put on your earphones, crank it up, grab that scroller thing, unfocus you eyes and start scrolling, the first millisecond or two you'll be superinspired, then your mind just blows.
great collection of stuff!

Hi. As it was stated, it

BTW, it

> why

"Fodor", of course! :-)

Yes... There is a Hungarian actress, Eva Fodor, now in her
eighties, that came to Rio as a young woman and quickly
realized that she

I'm interested in getting a sample of the type used by Olivetti typewriters in the late 50's. I'm writing a story about a friend who owned one. I had a Smith Corona at the time and I always thought hers was so cool, so moderne. Any ideas?

Hrant,

Not quite the same, but Pulsar G Class from T-26 has a similar feel to the Olivetti font.

You can get a sense of Wim Crouwel here in this book:

http://youworkforthem.com/product.php?sku=P0068

They actually show you some of the pages inside the book. Having the book in hand is better of course - but here is a taste. Wim is wonderful.

There's some hilarious stuff in Piet Schreuders' book
"Lay In - Lay Out" (which should be mandatory literature
for graphic design students BTW) about Crouwel's grid-
based experiments. He has a fair stab at the New Alphabet,
or 7/3/11/3/7 as it was originally called: (my translation)

"This text set in Crouwel's 7/3/11/3/7, a typeface originally
conceived to be read by optical text recognition, was
submitted to such an OCR program in 1996, which resulted
in the following:
Urn df ~ trut I ren Lno ~ L tc~r~L~n RAC) J ~ Er U ~ ~rtrn]
dr. ~ trrnL: UCnrc~cEr~ ~rtr Lu~drn Irl~Jr ULB Lol ~r rlrr L
~IXt~L L~ LLr~rn d~ NV dLnrm~ ~rCrLut nap h n q n L rrqF
(and so and so on I'm getting a headache - ed.)
How intriguing it might be, the general sense of this text still
is not very clear to me."

BTW, the

I have heard that The Foundry didn't talk with the living designers
of some of the faces they revived for that series - the Ballmer
font in particular. Can someone confirm or deny?

My source says the URW Ballmer is legit, however.