Tausend und ein Anfangsbuchstaben – One Thousand and One Initial Letters – is a rare book designed and illuminated by Owen Jones in 1864, eight years after Jones published his influential design sourcebook The Grammar of Ornament. While the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Library’s copy is in German, the book was also published in English...

TYPEFACE is an application that creates a custom font using facial recognition via your computer's Webcam. The sophisticated software even allows you to make silly faces at the camera and watch as the typeface adjusts in real time. The project was created using Processing, the open-source programming language. A font created with the TYPEFACE application...

On Friday, Cooper-Hewitt opens “Recent Acquisitions: Digital Typography,” a new installation of five recently acquired graphic works that explore post-modernist trends in typography. On view will be examples of lively and expressive type fonts developed by designers as a counterpoint to modernism’s rigid and impersonal sans serif type. Below, curator Gail Davidson explains the typographical...

Here’s another blog that just became a book: Michael Bierut’s new collection of essays, Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, published by Princeton Architectural Press. Sixty-eight of those essays first appeared on Design Observer, the blog that Bierut edits with Wiliam Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, and contributors. Bierut has started a conversation at Design Observer about why...