Hour Glass Creation

Carl Shank • October 18, 2023

Hour Glass Creation. Have you ever found something that challenged your creativity and skill? In typography such things exist all the time. In leafing through old ad booklets for the now defunct Adobe Minion Multiple Master Font (See Blogs on "More About Fonts" and "The Journey of Digital Type"), I found a challenging hour glass design with type expertly set within the hour glass to look like time slowly draining from top to bottom. That inspired me to see if I could do something similar with Adobe InDesign, which I love to use for all sorts of projects.


The challenge was to create an interior using only type that seems to be trickling down, as time is seen slowly moving down the hour glass. Since I am a Christian typographer, author and pastor, this was also an opportunity to pull from the Bible's perspective of time slowly drawing to a conclusion from the book of Revelation in the Bible. I chose Revelation 20 as the text to use inside the hour glass. I am certain that more professional illustrators and type setters can do a better job. But this is what I created using the tools and training in InDesign over the years.


Enjoy — and dive into your next type challenge!

Successful Layout & Design

AI & Typography: A Christian-Theistic Look

By Carl Shank • December 10, 2025
AI & Typography: A Christian-Theistic Present Look Monotype Corporation recently released their 2025 Report concerning Artificial Intelligence and Typography called Re-Vision (See https://bit.ly/4aEUePf ). This eReport looks at the various typographical, social and cultural issues surrounding AI and how it affects and impacts the craft and science of typography. A selected summary of the Report is available below.

Variable Fonts: An Introduction

By Carl Shank • December 9, 2025
Variable Fonts: An Introduction History & Use “Variable fonts are a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts.” (John Hudson) The technology behind variable fonts has been around for a while. Starting in the 1990s, interpolation and extrapolation have been used to create different masters, and weights in typefaces. For example, by designing a regular and bold weight a semibold could be interpolated from the two masters.
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