Type on Screen is an essential design tool for anyone seeking clear and focused guidance about typography for the digital age. Type on Screen is the definitive guide to using classic typographic concepts of form and structure to make dynamic compositions for screen-based applications. The long-awaited follow-up to our all-time bestseller thinking with type is here. A critical guide for designers, writers, developers, and students by Ellen Lupton. Buy Type on Screen from Amazon.Type on Screen. See the Type on Screen website for more info. It’s available in paperback with an ebook and PDF coming soon. Type on Screen was authored by graduate students and faculty of MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) and edited by Ellen Lupton. For those of us who have lived through the evolution of the craft, Type On Screen is an epic hair-metal ballad - a celebration of living squarely in the age of enlightenment of on-screen typography. Reading about type in this context is inspiring. There is an enlightening chapter on generative design with type and code which left me thinking about the future possibilities of type. This book will teach you all manner of topics including type selection, web fonts, interface design, responsive design, and SVGs. It sits alongside Lupton’s previous book “ Thinking with Type ” but over broadband and on a Retina display. It shows us just how far we’ve come since fat-bitting. We took pride in pixel craft.įast forward to the present and Ellen Lupton’s latest book “ Type on Screen ” is a fascinating typographic inventory of the present. “I could be at the bar, but no… I have to fat-bit this shitty logo.”īut the clients loved the attention to detail. We were masons, chipping and shifting single pixels - fixing what the screen did to otherwise well intentioned letterforms. Endless hours were spent on what my colleagues and I affectionately called “fat-bitting.” It was an activity hardly worth the effort.

Designers traded in low-res compromise, bending to the will of fours, the tyranny of the pixel.

Those were the dark ages of on-screen typography. By the 1990s, CD-ROMs and the Internet turned computer screens into the final display substrate.

Type on screen ellen lupton