Type Specimen Inspiration

Type Specimen Research

Palatino is an old-style serif typeface that was created by German designer Hermann Zapf and released by the Mergenthaler Linotype Foundry in 1950. Zapf named his design after the 16th century Italian calligrapher Giambattista Palatino who was considered a master of his craft. The Palatino typeface was based on popular fonts found during the Italian Renaissance which had a humanist quality to them. One of Zapf’s goals when designing Palatino was to create a font with large proportions that would make it easy to read on the poor-quality paper found in Germany at the time.

Cover 02 Ideas

While I was looking through the 1968 covers from TM I was especially inspired by issues 2 and 8/9. They seemed to work with layering, transparency, and texture which are elements that I want to explore when creating cover 02. My plan is to print out several letterforms to experiment with and to then scan them back into the computer where I will alter them further. I had the idea of using paint and/or crumpling paper to create an interesting texture. I’ve also thought about layering tracing paper to create a similar transparent effect shown in issue 2 of TM.