Superb design and a bespoke typeface for a new guide to analogue photography

The book, claims publisher Ars-Imago Editions, is the first “to reestablish the principles of film photography for a new generation.

Bellamy launched ilottvintage.com in 2010 as a resource for anyone wanting to know more about rangefinder cameras and film photography. Then in 2015, inspired by vintage manuals from the 1960s he expanded the Glossary from the website into a physical book and printed a short run of 35 copies. “It was a personal project that let me combine passions for print design and photography,” he says. “Luca Bendandi at Vetro Editions in Berlin saw this and thought such a short run of beautifully designed book was ‘madness’ and got in touch, and we set about publishing it with proper distribution.

“Having already done all the photography and illustrations the final touch was the custom typeface 35-FTR, now available at myfonts , I had initially set the book in a version of Futura because it had the perfect look as it was used for the majority of the ads and manuals of the period, but I had had to make the point size fairly small to get the information in to the 192pp count. The tall ascenders and descenders of Futura make it difficult to tighten up leading, and also make the x-height relatively small. I set about making a font that had the style of Futura but could be set tightly more like Helvetica to be able to increase the point size without increasing the page count.”