Thursday, 4:13pm
28 June 2012

New recipes for old-fashioned eye candy [extract]

New Vintage Type: Classic Fonts for the Digital Age

By Steven Heller and Gail Anderson<br>Design by Gail Anderson and Jessica Disbrow<br>Thames &amp; Hudson, &pound;24.95<br>Watson-Guptil, $39.95<br>

‘Vintage type from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is designer porn,’ says the entertaining introduction to this survey of contemporary use of ‘vintage’ type and lettering styles. It is not often that one sees a meditation on porn preceding Phil Baines’ work for Penguin. But here it seems to work . . .

What is useful about New Vintage Type is that it shows evidence of how graphic designers interpret historical material, rather than just providing them with more fodder for pastiche . . .