If you appreciate new typography and follow the release of new typefaces, want to read interesting articles about design, and have a penchant for new musical talent then the online magazine Jazz is for you.

The articles are presented in English, but are also available in Spanish and the current issue is the third in the series. Brought to you by Argentinan graphic and type designer, Ramiro Espinoza and with articles by Marcelo Soler, Marta Zatoni and Jaap Roos, I guarantee you will enjoy every page of this smart, well designed and well written site.

This looks like it was a fantastic conference. If you are interested in typography, book design, type design, etc -- then this was the place to be.

Although proceedings from the conference don't appear to be online, brief synopses of the speaker presentations are available as are PDF versions of the conference newsletter.

This is definitely one to watch for next year.

The folks over at Typophile have a project going that taps into the collective visualization ideas of it's visitors. They are building letters of the alphabet pixel by pixel, based on the whims of the visitor. Each visitor is asked to designate the color (black or white - letter or background) of a pixel that makes up the letter. Very interesting. The viewer can also view an animation of all the choices made for that letter to day - watch as the letter comes together and morphs from a serif font to a sans serif font and back again. Pretty cool to playaround with.

Tribute site for Saul Bass is done in Flash and features Prints -- movie posters and graphic design work, Stills —still clips from movie opening sequences, and Movies — quicktime clips of opening sequences from several Hitchcock movies, Vertigo, Psycho and North by Northwest, several Otto Preminger movies, Anatomy of a Murder, The Man with the Golden Arm and Exodus and several Scorsese movies, Cape Fear and Casino.

Compare the work and style of the sequences between the Hitchcock work and the more recent Cape Fear.

Bass was a genius. “Symbolize and summarize” were the words he lived by according to the author of this site, Brendan Dawes, and that is overtly evident in all his work.

There is also a funky timeline of Bass's work covering the 1950's to the 1990's and a biography of his life and work. He died in 1996.

Microsoft has a typography blog chalk full of interesting links.
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Also of note: Andy Crewdson, of Lines and Splines has launched a new typography focussed site called New Series. The first issue features an indepth interview with writer Robin Kinross and a review of the reprint of Harry Carter’s A view of early typography: up to about 1600. Both strong pieces. I am looking forward to more from Andy.

In case you haven't seen this yet - this takeoff of Behind the Music - Behind the Typeface - Cooper Black - is brilliant.

Funny, informative and an interesting way to present the background and lineage of a typeface.

This has got to be one of the most interesting and novel typgraphic experiences I have seen in a long time. Type as central character, set, actors, and location all rolled into one. You get sucked into the story and forget it is all type. Very cool!

A collection of interesting book reviews about typography, design and type related books is over at Typotheque.com. There are reviews by Steven Heller, Andrew Blauvelt among others.

The reviews section is only one of three worth perusing. Interviews and Essays also are full of interesting and rich information by such authors as Steven Heller, Jessica Helfand, Robin Kinross and others. One of the most interesting interviews is Steven Heller interviewing Don Norman - the interview was done shortly after the 2000 election and a lot of the conversation revolves around the butterfly ballot. But it is interesting nonetheless to see these two (Heller and Norman) viewpoints about design.

Typotheque is a type foundry and site run by Peter Bilak based in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Great article appearing in the latest issue of Print Magazine about Typography Blogs. The article discusses Lines and Splines (a fave) and Textism (another frequently visited site) and how the online type blogs are tearing down the snobbish walls erected around formal typgraphic discussion.

I found the article, by Joe Clark (of NuBlog fame), online for your reading pleasure.

I applaud Print for publishing the essay, as it is one of the first articles I have seen in the slew of offline magazines that I still read, that references the topical blog.

In the same issue of Print, Rick Poynor laments the lack of "real" criticism in design. This refers to true criticism about designed works rather than the critical writing or theoretical writing about the topic of design in general. If he looked around online at the plethora of blogs that talk about design, he would find a lot of designers, albeit online, web, IA, ID, experience types, writing critically about the work of others. Criticising the experience, the design, the choices the designers made.

In the meantime we are inundated with sites, books, annuals, features in magazines, that fawn over the work of a designer with little to no critical analysis or discussion of their work. Until the sides are balanced or some of the online writers make the leap into the "printed word", there will seem to be little in the way of critical writing by designers. These designers are generally unknown in the circle of "design writers" so to Poynor they probably don't exist - but they are here and vocal and writing and "seeing" the work of others.

This site is a flash version of the book Bembo's Zoo and is delightful. A-Z animals are created using characters from the name of the animal and is done from the alphabet in the type font Bembo.