Resources
A collection of resources related to this website that you may find useful and interesting.
Google Fonts
A good selection of fonts, all under a friendly license. Noto is the font used on the site to render the glyphs, because of its broad Unicode support. The other resources they provide are good too.
- Most families are under the SIL Open Font License and the rest under other open licenses, so self-hosting and commercial use are both fine.
- Noto is the family this site renders its glyphs with, named for its goal of leaving "no tofu": the blank box a font shows when it has no glyph for a character. It aims to cover every script Unicode encodes.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is an incredible resource for finding books that have been printed. Every book is published as plain text in UTF-8.
- Tens of thousands of public domain books, transcribed and proofread by volunteers since 1971, free to read and to redistribute.
- Texts released before 2004 survive in ASCII and ISO-8859, a record of the punctuation compromises that predate routine Unicode.
archives.design
A nice curated set of resources found on archive.org, specific to typography. Archive.org is a huge resource and this collection is a great starting point by itself, or to see just how useful the Internet Archive can be.
- Compiled and curated by Valery Marier as a personal project.
- Categories include type specimens, design annuals, branding and identity manuals, posters, editorial design, and ephemera.
Internet Archive
A bigger reference that someone may want to explore to get inspiration and simply encounter the physical representation of text as it is typeset. It is probably the most useful when you have something specific in mind, such as this illustrated copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- A nonprofit digital library, designated a California state library since 2007.
- Full-text search runs across the scanned books, so a phrase can be traced through the printed editions that carried it.
- Open Library is where to go with a specific title in mind. It catalogs editions and links through to the scans you can read in full or borrow.
Letterform Archive
https://letterformarchive.org/
My experience with Letterform Archive is minimal, but so far I have enjoyed browsing their content and watching some of the lectures they have posted.
- A nonprofit archive in San Francisco for lettering, type design, and graphic design history.
- The Letterform Lectures run about ten times a year, are free to attend live, and are posted afterwards as recordings.