In their paper titled The Aesthetics of Reading, Kevin Larson and Rosalind Picard present their findings on the effects of typography on reader mood and cognitive performance. They conducted two studies, each involving 20 people. The participants were divided into two groups of 10 and were given 20 minutes to read a specially typeset issue of The New Yorker on a tablet device. One of the groups got a badly typeset version (using Courier, with spaced out words), the other a properly typeset one.

Interesting findings. Bottom line: typography matters.

Fathom created an experimental project using found fonts from PDF documents:

An edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein laid out using characters and glyphs from PDF documents obtained through internet searches. The incomplete fonts found in the PDFs were reassembled into the text of Frankenstein based on their frequency of use. The most common characters are employed at the beginning of the book, and the text devolves into less common, more grotesque shapes and forms toward the end.

(via Carolina de Bartolo)

By Yeohyun Ahn and Viviana Cordova. Type + Code, explores the aesthetic of experimental code driven typography, with an emphasis on the programming language Processing which was created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

Don’t know Processing language? Well it’s awesome. It’s my next language to learn after I become fluent with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python.

(via graphicporn)

My new favorite website about type. It best to hear it straight from them:

There are many great type foundries around the world. It has been really difficult to keep up with the activities of every single one of them… so why not collect their information and make an online compendium? This is how we started this project.

Make sure to check them regularly. So many beautiful type!

Jim Williams is a senior lecturer at Staffordshire University, where he compiled an excellent series of student handouts about typography. In 2010 the handouts were featured on Creative Review’s blog which generated interest from publishers. The handouts have now been published in book form as Type Matters.

Because type and typography always mattered, dang it.