If there’s one thing we’re always happy to see, it’s a crop of fresh slab serifs. This week we have a few of them to share, starting with one that we somehow missed back in December. Brix Slab is a meticulous and extensive new family from HvD Fonts. Designers Hannes von Döhren and Livius Dietzel have produced 24 styles of finessed, readable text faces covering six weights in both regular and condensed widths. Five variations of numerals, true small caps, a tasteful selection of alternates, stylistic arrows, and broad language support are all part of the package.

Whereas Brix Slab has a draughtsman-like quality in its unbudging serifs and notches, Jeremy Mickel’s Shift has display (type)written all over it. Playing on its name, Shift progresses through a range of changing, expressive qualities. The flared and tapered terminals, exaggerated serifs, and curvaceous italics set off a progression of typographic personalities as the weights transition from the lighter, typewriter-ish faces to the beefier, Egyptian-fueled styles of the bold and black.

Andreas Stötzner describes his addictively cross-genre Rosenbaum as “an eclectic merger of didone stroke pattern and contrast, uncial letterforms, and blackletter appearance.” That’s a lot of reference material to stuff into a single design, but it’s pulled off masterfully. The two styles combine into a contemporarily calligraphic, poetically organic, and “tarted up” display face that includes decorated capitals, an assortment of ornamental add-ons, and historical forms.

The first of two new faces from the good folks at Canada Type is Wonder Brush, a compact display script straight from the sign painter’s shop. Loosely based on Friedrich Poppl’s Poppl Stretto from the late 60s, this maleable script has been designed to “take intense abuse and still look natural.” Stretch it, slant it, set it in all caps … it doesn’t care … and yet somehow still looks decent. We’re not sure that we’d subject any font to that level of mistreatment, but you might want to give it a kick.

Huzzah! Another slab! Canada Type’s second release is the heavy duty Spade. The hard and soft variations of this masculine Egyptian are built from the baseline up to add heft to those headlines. It’s tightly spaced and packed with a bucketload of biform and stylistic alternates.

Anuthin Wongsunkakon, Pongtorn Hiranpruek, and their Bangkok-based Cadson Demak design agency have been creating custom typefaces for nearly a decade. A couple of years ago, they split off their type development into its own “boutique” foundry, the unsurprisingly named Cadson Demak Distribution. The latest fruit of their labor is New Son Gothic, a sparse and mechanical seven weight sans.

Had we waited on sharing that new type until after the big — no, massive — news from this week, we’d probably lose you. There’s only so much one can process at a time, right? Just promise to come back here for the news after this first, epic, item. We might have to wait days, but rest assured we’re not going anywhere.

Because we’re equally transfixed with “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2011,” by Stephen Coles and friends. After a two-year hiatus from sharing some favorite typefaces from the previous year, Typographica more than makes up for this absence by covering, in loving detail, fifty (that’s right, 50) incredible typefaces from the past year. Overloaded yet? We recommend taking it in small chunks and giving yourself frequent breaks. It lasts longer that way. If you’re looking for a place to start, Jason Santa Maria shares five of his favorites. Well done, everyone!

Are you still with us? Well, you’re in luck, because we can suck a bunch of your time away with the rest of this week’s news. Maybe freshen up a bit first by reading some narratives in Emoji. Once you’ve worked out the kinks, let’s loop through a bunch of great stuff:

• Ralph Herrmann has updated his catalog of rare type specimens at the Open Library. He also has an interesting infographic on the development of major outline font formats.
• Typecast is still in beta and rolling out a metric ton of new features. You might just want to sign up.
• I love playing with line-height. And now you can learn more than you’d ever want to know about this CSS property, through a three-part series from MyFonts: “We need to talk about line-height,” “The problem with line-height,” and “Line height options in the kitbuilder.”
• While we’re on a webfont kick, Monotype and Google are collaborating to reduce webfont file sizes.
• Jon Hicks has more to say about icon fonts.
• Typekit now has curated webfont lists that might help you find the face that launched a thousand ships.
• There’s not a Doctor Faustus among them, but these are still some impressive playbills.
• Tim Brown is collecting a reference of “core concepts” related to responsive typography.
• Jan Middendorp interviews Daniel Hernández in the latest issue of Creative Characters.
• Last week we reported on Matthew Butterick’s calling out Brad Bird for his use of Verdana. But! It didn’t end there.
• Adobe is sponsoring OpenType development workshops in India this March.
• Meanwhile, March 14-15 marks “Variations of a typographer,” a conference in Birmingham, UK.
• If you’re in Seattle a month earlier, Jean François Porchez is speaking on February 15.
• March 2-4 kicks off TDC Non-Latin Weekends — beginning with Cyrillic.
• Paul Shaw reviews Stephen Banham’s Characters.
• Sean McCabe would like to help you learn more about lettering.
• This handy stencil can make more than every letter in the alphabet.
• Please welcome Novo Typo, a new foundry based in Amsterdam.
• Process Type Foundry is collecting type designers’ work spaces on Pinterest.
• It’s getting close to annual report season. Here’s “Not Quite an Annual Report” from FontFont.
• Michael Rosen has a lot to say about the apostrophe.
• Anna Raff made an ampersand bird.
• Finish this feast of type and type-related news with a few gelatin letters. Tasty!

That’s it for this week, with hopefully few syntax errors. With any luck we’ll be far enough through that amazing mass of goodness at Typographica to bring you the news again next week. [Wait, what? — Ed.] No, really: see you next week!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing us sound and fury, signifying something, i.e., this week’s new type!

The latest release from OurType is a reinterpretation of a little known “Balken-antiqua” by the name of Wellington. Maurice Göldner’s Stan takes the Brüder Butter foundry’s stark — yet sophisticated — early 20th century slab through a seven weight OpenType update. Highly readable, display-savvy, and including charming details like the “mailbox flag” ear on the lowercase ‘g’ and a ‘Blond’ weight sitting between light and normal. Also available is Stan Plus which provides slightly extended ascenders and descenders.

Rhythmic. Invigorating. Angular. Expressive. Humanist. Glyphic. All of these words can be used to describe Winco — a bouncy, flared stroke sans from ReType’s Ramiro Espinoza. This five weight family offers a useful range of colour and sports some rather intensely calligraphic forms — especially the italics. Espinoza studied the work of book cover designers and the “German and Czech traditions of expressive printing types” prior to beginning work on Winco. Ultimately, he designed the typeface from the ground up, nodding to the past while creating something fresh and energetic.

Set a couple more places at the table. TypeTogether’s popular Abril has added a pair of family members … and more substance. Abril Display Black is the heaviest (and frankly, most fanciful) addition to the didone-style headliner. It has plenty of contrast and curvaceousness where it counts … and that just happens to be everywhere.

Industrial architecture and the gritty bones of the Rust Belt have inspired designers and artists for ages. This includes Chris Lozos, who feels that stencil type “is almost a signature for the city.” Dez Yinz’nat Stencil is an emboldened condensed sans channelling some true Pittsburgher vernacular. Even the name is a combination of colloquialisms that defy explanation outside the region. Ya-hunh.

While we’re on the subject of regional flavour influencing type, Diego Sanz Salas has pulled from several sources in the newest face from Cocijotype. Taking visual cues from Peruvian sign painting and its name from South American music styles, Chicha is an undulating and vibrantly calligraphic script. Several hundred alternates, swashes, and ligatures are included — along with ‘Suave’ and ‘Dura’ styles for additional layering and shading options.

Before we move completely away from our new type segment: Remember Pictos? Now you can customize and use it as a webfont — and have it served without your needing to put the whole infrastructure together on your own. This is no small undertaking. We might usually think of this kind of service in the same way Jackson Cavanaugh does, but the reality is probably more like what Typotheque diagrams here.

Speaking of webfonts … Matthew Butterick explains “Why Google Web Fonts aren’t really open source” and questions Brad Bird’s use of Verdana. Meanwhile, the Legal Writing Institute awarded Mr. Butterick the 2012 Golden Pen Award for his excellent Typography for Lawyers. Quite the week! — and well-earned.

And now for the rest of the news:

• I missed the TDC’s “Judges Night 2012.” If you did, too, or you just want to relive it, the video is on Vimeo. How about that!
• Taro Yumiba interviews Kunihiko Okano for I Love Typography.
• James Lileks profiles Chank Diesel for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
• Meanwhile, Yves Peters interviews Łukasz Dziedzic on the FontFeed.
• Dave Foster describes and documents his experiences during the first fours months of the KABK’s type and media course.
• Early- and mid-century ATF paraphernalia are making the rounds. There’s a 1912 specimen book on the Internet Archive. And Mark Simonson writes about their alphabet boxes.
• The 17th edition of the Speedball Text Book is on Flickr.
• Speaking of Mr. Simonson, his “Bookmania”: is featured on the German FontShop Blog.
• The final edit of Linotype: The Film is complete. Check out the screenings page to see when it might come to your area.
• Fontfabric is offering free social media icons.
• Paul Shaw will be editing the second issue of Codex.
• YouWorkForThem Shares its top 10 fonts of 2011.
• Support Valuco on Kickstarter, a project to develop a beveled typeface that only requires two colors to achieve that effect.
• Also on Kickstarter is the intriguing Vernacular Typography project.
• Swarm is a “parametric” typeface that might hypnotize your morning away.
• House Industries opens an exhibit on Photo-Lettering at the Chapman University Guggenheim Gallery on February 6. The show runs until March 9. Stephen Heller has a few things to say about it, too.
• On January 26, Ilene Strizver will demystify OpenType in a webinar.
• Head to New York on February 16 to hear Abbot Miller’s “My Beautiful Dark Typeset Fantasy.”
• Stephen Heller shares a tree of type.
• Let’s wrap up this week’s links with some great experimental typographic poetry.

See you next week.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing us this week’s new type!

We begin with news from the wide world of webfonts. First, welcome Mr. & Mrs. Eaves — and the rest of Emigre Font Library! Emigre is offering self-hosted licenses for “five-year renewable” and “one-time perpetual” terms. In other exciting news, Microsoft has announced that the latest beta release of Internet Explorer 10 supports OpenType features, joining Firefox on the edge of web typography. Christopher Clark and Nick Sherman have put together a lovely showcase of OpenType on the web. And the Fontdeck blog shares how to do some of these things yourself.

But you’re not here just to read about web-related type news. How about we move on to big things of a whole other sort: this week’s new type!

The clean, humanistic Mantika Sans came about after Jürgen Weltin revisited an older, unreleased serif design and used it as an inspirational starting point. The roman and bold weights are defined through their compact ascenders and descenders, bevelled stroke endings, slight variations in the verticals, and attention to detail in the differentiation of similar glyphs. Although clearly an easy-reading text face, Mantika Sans maintains some calligraphic qualities which are similar to — but certainly less deliberate than — its more cursively Informal cousin.

Often vernacular, always impressive. Paul Barnes has been playing with the concept of “reducing historical models to their basic skeletal forms” since 2000. Finally available as a complete family, the reductionist Marian consists of nine serif faces, delicate matching italics, and a single blackletter style — trimmed down to their fundamentals and reinvented as sinewy hairlines. For the full experience, we suggest that you dip your toes into the exhaustingly thorough PDFs showing the family specimen and OpenType features.

Ryan Martinson’s Anodyne is not just another weathered and worn wood type replicant. Sure, we’ve all seen the chewed-up, caps-only condensed sans with the grotesque pedigree … but there’s more to this face than meets the eye. Four sets of distressed characters per style, special “double-letter ligatures” to eliminate repeating textures, and independent shadow variations add to this face’s flexible and rustic realism.

Maga is a fresh, five weight serif family from Dino dos Santos’ eponymous DSTYpe foundry. Initially designed for use in a Portuguese newspaper supplement, it shares some of the underlying structure found in Quaestor Sans — one of Dino’s first typefaces — but takes things much further. Solid uprights and wedge-shaped serifs are married with large counters and a compact stance — com muito estilo.

From fresh type, to some fresh news:

• The Design Museum has announced the nominees for Design of the Year, which include Dalton Maag’s type design work for Nokia and House Industries’ Photo-Lettering.
• Typetoken features some animated typefaces.
• Larry Buchanan interviews Mandy Brown about “design, news and, ahem, reading.”
• Stephen Wildish has created some neat film-inspired alphabets.
• Ivo Gabrowitsch has been busy — identifying the best typefaces of 2011 and explaining “why native app fonts still suck.”
• Check out these animated books.
• FontShop has introduced FF Skill Sets, the new “font collection CD” (sans the CD).
• John Berry reminds us to pay attention to writing and printing surfaces.
• Stephen Coles shares some bathroom notice poetry.
• Classily rock out to the unholy union of Swiss modernism and punk, from Mike Joyce.
• Nikola Tesla’s letterhead is awesome.
• See what’s up with work on the typeface Marais.
• Buy typefaces from a brick-and-mortar store.
• Richard Turgeon shares why type matters for your brand.
• William Addison Dwiggins wrote to Rudolph Ruzicka, and you can read it on the Internet Archive.
• Get your fill of free fonts, courtesy Smashing Magazine.
• Typography, Referenced sounds pretty thorough.

Get your calendars ready, here are a few upcoming exhibitions, deadlines, and events:

• TSI: Type Scene Investigation, with Thomas Phinney at the Type Directors Club in New York, January 19;
• La typo dans tous ses états (Typography in all its forms), January 31 – March 16, in Paris;
• Rotation, Reflection, Repetition, Repetition, January 4–29, at the Mota Italic Gallery Gallery in Berlin Berlin (echo echo);
• 50% off You Work for Them font purchases until February 1; and
• Submissions for the Mota Italic Gallery’s upcoming New Vintage Digital Vernacular Letters exhibition, due January 25.

That’s it for this week. Now: get out! and enjoy your weekend.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for escorting this week’s new type!

To kick off, we’re catching up on a few of last month’s late arrivals, starting with Kunihiko Okano’s Quintet. Photo-Lettering’s custom cut of Okano’s calligraphic script features three variations of the “double-stroke in a single-stroke” style, originally designed as part of his KABK Type]Media studies. Three different flavours of the face can be layered and combined using Photo-Lettering’s letterer setterer in variety of ways, providing a fair amount of depth and contrast. Apparently, we’ll just have to wait patiently for full OpenType version of Quintet Script to be released, along with the serif and italic styles. Here’s hoping.

Tomi Haaparanta and his Suomi Type Foundry managed to sneak out the tidy, two weight Tow just before the holidays. This simple headliner sports slabby, notched serifs and subtle diagonal contrast. There’s a nice selection of ligatures, some tasteful fleurons, and a few quirky character traits (like the stub-nosed lowercase a and the lollipop-headed binocular g) which offer some interesting balance to the script-like italics.

Inspired by the clean geometry of Aldo Novarese’s Eurostile, Frio takes a more elliptical approach to the monoline sans. With a slight curvaceousness, the five weights and three widths of Kristians Šics’ design have thrown off much of the stiffness associated with other grid-based, linear typefaces.

Berlin’s Büro Dunst have expanded their impressive humanist grotesque family with the release of Novel Sans Condensed Pro. This horizontally economical six weight addition fits in nicely amidst its award winning sans, serif, and surprisingly balanced monospaced brethren. And oh! You have to appreciate that sexy, sinewy italic lowercase y.

Jeremy Dooley’s increasingly voluminous Aviano series of display faces surfaces once again. Aviano Contrast continues the extended stance, pared-down lines, and deco-esque flair of its predecessors — but with higher contrast — arguably structured like a serifless didone. As if there weren’t enough choices throughout the Aviano clan as is, each weight in this new family includes a boggling twelve sets of stylistic alternates.

Matthew Carter’s dignified Postoni face has graced the headlines of The Washington Post since the late 1990s. Expanded and finessed by Font Bureau’s Richard Lipton, Jill Pichotta, and Dyana Weissman ten years later, it is finally available in commercial form as the renamed Stilson.

“I absolutely love using a pointed brush for lettering.” So says Laura Worthington — and it shows. Her latest script packs a lot of liveliness into each curve and transition — from upswept hairline to voluptuous downstroke. Rosarian features two weights of strong, modulated forms that can be set either as connected or unconnected text. There’s a plethora of swashes, alternates, and complementary ornaments to boot.

Based in Copenhagen and Tokyo, the Kontrapunkt design agency often creates unique fonts specifically for visual identity and other client projects. Wanting to share some of that typographic love, they have graciously posted two sets of namesake display faces based on that work. Kontrapunkt is a three style hybrid sans with a square, modern stance and angular joinery. Kontapunkt Bob is a simple, two weight geometric slab. Both families are free, in exchange for a short tweet or kindly post.

Last of all, Alejandro Paul has finished putting a fresh coat of “Pro” paint onto another five faces from the eponymous Charles Bluemlein Script Collection. Included in this update are the sultry Dr Sugiyama, energetic Mr Dehaviland, forward thinking Mrs St-Delafieldh, Herr Von Mueller’s staccato tone, and the pleasantly plump Mrs Sheppards.

And now, with steely resolve, we bring you a double serving of newsy things:

• Process Type Foundry remembers 2011 and previews 2012.
• Ben Proudfoot has created a touching short film about Aardvark Letterpress and McManus & Morgan Paper.
• Jackson Cavanaugh discusses his creating Harriet with Jennifer Wehunt for Chicago magazine.
• Hooray, Mark Simonson is blogging again!
• It’s winter. Here’s some ice typography on Lake Ontario.
• Pilcrow It!
• J. M. Mosley writes about “Type held in the hand.”
• Head to the Hamilton to learn the basics of letterpress printing with wood type on January 17.
• Communication Art’s Typography Annual 2 is out! Read Yves Peters’ take.
• Gail Anderson interviews Joe Newton, celebrates his work at Veer, and laments the company’s change in direction.
• Vesper is the latest typeface of the month for PAGE magazine.
• Did you know that writing is the greatest invention? Now you do.
• Once more into the Roboto breach, this time with Glenn Fleishman.
• Be sure to ponder Mike Monteiro’s “10 New Year’s resolutions for designers.”
• Jan Middendorp profiles Melle Diete for MyFonts’ Creative Characters. The text is available in German as well as in English.
• Speaking of MyFonts, here’s the list of their most popular fonts in 2011.
• FontShop shares its collection of the best typefaces of 2011.
• LetterCult wants your help in finding the best custom letters of 2011. The deadline for submissions is February 1.
• Maybe some of Dana Tanamachi’s custom chalk lettering will make the cut!
• Read (is that the right word?) “The Beast,,” by Laura Marling.
• Tim Brown uncovers a neat mutant title sequence.
• Set aside a few hours, and listen to Mevin Bragg’s fascinating series for the BBC, “The Written World.”
• You’ll need a bit more time to make it through Steve Kroeter’s list of notable design books from the past year.
• David Dunlap reviews “Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale,” an exhibition that runs through February 4 at the Grolier Club in Manhattan.
• Unicorns appear to be all the rage. Arthur Reinders Folmer has even made a Magical Unicorn Typeface, available from dafont.com.
• Nick Montfort reviews It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers.
• Jean François Porchez wishes you a happy 2012 and shares a bit about the future for his Typofonderie.
• Hear Andy Ihnatko and Dan Benjamin discuss Comicraft fonts, webfonts, and typefaces in web design.
• See what’s coming in RoboFont 1.2.
• FontBook 2.0 is available on Apple’s iTunes App Store.
• Too late for Christmas, but early for Valentine’s Day, there a couple neat items available at the Lost Type Co-Op Store.
• Or you can get ready for the day after my son’s birthday with some lurvely big letters.
• Are you in academia? FontLab has some discounts for you.
• An oldie but a goodie, Nathan Ford discusses paragraphs on the web.
• Another lipsum generator? This universe isn’t too small for Sagan Ipsum.

That’s it for this week, but hardly for this year. There’ll be plenty of news to be had (though hopefully not this much each week). See you next time!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for hopping in his time machine and joining us in 2012! For sharing this week’s new type with us, too. What.

We’re taking the week off. Thanks for reading, everyone, and have a happy New Year!

Psst! — if you’re looking for something to read, you might be interested in past editions. There’s plenty of still-fresh stuff in there. See you next week!

No question about it, ’tis the season of giving. And to prove that point, here are three very generous foundries giving away tasty samples of their typographic wares.

TypeTogether’s Veronika Burian and José Scaglione have boxed up a single weight serif companion to their popular Bree family. Bree Serif exudes the same versatile charm of the original upright italic sans. We can’t wait to see this teaser typeface developed into a full range of styles in the new year. (Hint, hint.)

It may be named Briarwood, but Chank Diesel’s latest freebie is decidedly less bramble and branch—and more cardboard and craft. Constructed as part of an experimental “fontmaking” workshop at the Minnesota State University Moorhead, each character was built from paper and then photographed, outlined, and stuffed into a typeface. By layering the uppercase “shapes” and lowercase “shadows”, an intriguing duotone dimensionality can be produced. To see where the typeface started, check out Chank’s photos of the original alphabet objects on Flickr.

The final gift of the week comes from from Typedepot’s Alexander Nedelev and Veronika Slavova.  Corki is simple, display slab in four styles—including rounded and Tuscan-inspired bifurcated variations. A selection of manicules and arrows are tossed in with (very) basic Latin and Cyrillic uppercase character sets.

Barely a month after releasing the voluminous Air, Neil Summerour has inflated his sans superfamily with Air Soft. The design takes a “subtle and very intentional” approach to softening the forms throughout each face. As Neil puts it: “I wanted to show that you could put a radius on a corner without rounding it to oblivion.” He’s also hidden something extra special amidst the nine weights, three widths, 81 fonts, and tens of thousands of glyphs—a magical, Unicode easter egg.

James Montalbano’s take on the vertical script was originally conceived and delivered as a single face for Vanity Fair over twelve years ago. Based on the lettering found on a French automotive poster from the 1920s, Insouciant has been expanded, preened, and subjected to a thorough rejig to “sort out the problem of the connection logic” without resorting to multiple, esoteric ligatures. Ten weights from extra thin through heavy provide a nice range of feminine, but not girly display type.

“I started out to do an OpenType upgrade to Panoptica, but got distracted.” That’s how Nick Shinn’s Parity came about. This two weight, oldstyle biform was specifically designed and optimized for a single task—setting unicase text in a most classy manner.

Taking cues from the early 20th century work of Dutch designer Dirk Hart, PintassilgoPrints’ energetic, hand-lettered Melkslijter is an face with split Art Deco personality. The regular weight is thin, monolinear, and feminine. The black weight is complementary, but graphically testosteronic—counters and curves abstracted through obfuscation. Both weights feature decoratively organic swashes, stylistic alternates and terminal forms, plus an array of wiry ornaments.

Freshly harvested from the Fontfarm is Gedau Gothic. An interpretation of the structure and appearance of the Americanized gothic sans from the likes of Morris Fuller Benton or Jackson Burke, it sports tighter counters, space-saving metrics, and squarer “newschool” details.

It looks like Alejandro Paul managed to squeeze out one final update to his Bluemlein scripts before the end of the year. The delicate hand of Miss Fajardose Pro is even more refined with an impressive number of alternates, including stylistically appropriate swashes and suitably restrained filigree.

Let’s wash those delectables down with some news:

• Matthew Butterick eloquently explains the value of investing in type.
• Richard Rutter boldly kerns on the web.
• Nick Cox introduces us to Gesta.
• Yves Peters came a cross a lovely clip of Dan Madsen’s sign painting.
• Meet kizuna, the kanji character of 2011.
• Rick Poynor has come across typographic fragments in Saul Leiter’s photography.
• On the evening of January 12 is The Judges Night: TDC Typeface Design Competition 2012. “If you need to know anything else you probably shouldn’t be there.”
• That same night, but at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, hear Chank Diesel and Craig Eliason present “CrossTalk: What Fonts Say.”
• Andrew Haslam explains how letters for large signs are made.
• Meet Myriad again for the first time.
• Are you using Identifont on sans-serif faces? You are not alone.
• If you prefer serifs, here’s a bit about FF Tundra on Typography Served.
• Are you an “extreme” typesetter? Think again.
• There are more Typekit webfont views than Flintstone Kids.
• The Typecast beta has received a significant upgrade.
• TypeTogether has a preview of Tablet Gothic up on Flickr.
• Why, hello, Bodoni girl.
• ’Tis the season for careful apostrophe use.
• Adobe’s type team wishes you a Happy holidays.
• So does Monotype.

And so do we. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for the Yule Log decorated with new type!

As we alluded to last week, Alejandro Paul has indeed completed updates to the first pair of faces from his voluminous Charles Bluemlein Script Collection. The defiant brush of Mr Dafoe and the delicate flourishes of Monsieur La Doulaise have both gone “pro”—featuring dozens of new alternates (and a light housecleaning all around.) Given Alejandro’s habitual awesomeness, can expect the remaining thirty Bluemlein scripts to experience the same buff and polish in the very near future.

Belgian designer Dries Wiewauters is known for considering and adapting the historical and material contexts of type. The most recent example of this exploration is PDU — a rigid, modular design derived from Joseph A. David’s 19th century, stencil-based lettering system — better known as “Plaque Découpée Universelle”. The structured, alphanumeric weights include solid and Morse code-esque outline cuts. Two styles of corresponding pattern fonts are also available, along with a snappy looking limited edition, laser-cut physical stencil.

The good folks at the Lost Type Co-op recently sprung another couple of pared down display faces on us. Ben Dalrymple’s Arvil is a softened, compressed sans with subtle vertical contrast and a monolinear nod to classic, squarish “gaspipes” like Agency Gothic and friends.

Also fresh from the Co-op is Bender, a bold geometric “throwback” by Jim Dore. With a quirky mix of curves and diagonal crossbars, the solid and inline styles evoke industrial equipment, factory signage, and some nifty vernacular charm.

After three years of work, the talented Nina Stössinger has released her very first commercial typeface. FF Ernestine combines warmth, earnestness, stability, and a certain underlying femininity. The four weights of this monoline slab show their distinctive personalities in the airy, modestly extended Romans and the slightly slanted italics. Additional traits include some smart contextual alternates, a smattering of playful ball terminals, and the delightfully appropriate Armenian glyphs contributed by Hrant Papazian. While the accompanying microsite offers significant background on the typeface, check out this “first sketches” thread on Typophile—it really shows how the typeface began as just a twinkle in Nina’s eye.

And now, the news:

• Ivo Gabrowitsch and Christoph Koelberlin interview Verena Gerlach for I Love Typography.
• Interested in letterpress? Cole Henley shares how you can get into it.
• Did you know that letterpress loves lasers?
• Meet Justin Knopp of Typoretum.
• Paul Shaw and Indra Kupferschmid share some information about the origins of the ‘Helvetica’ name.
• Jon Hicks introduces another way to use type for icons on the web.
• Check out Typekit Tweaker, a handy plugin for adjusting Typekit previews.
• Just what the world needs: another typeface history infographic.
• Thermo Fisher Scientific is closing its factory in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Does anyone know how this affects the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum?
• RoboFont 1.1 is out.
• And Apple’s iBooks app has been updated to include some different typefaces. Yves Peters and John Berry share their thoughts on the update.
• The prolific Mr. Peters also has another great installment of his ScreenFonts series for your enjoyment.
• It seems too angular, but meet the Helvetica bike anyway.
• Jason Santa Maria has some great photos of M & H Type, “oldest and largest letterpress type foundry” in the United States.
• Head to Japan between now and January 17, 2012, to check out some alphabetic equestrianism from House Industries.
• More chocolate letters. Mmm!

Thus ends what we hope is a delectable confection for your Saturday. See you next week!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing us a flurry of new type.

Before we drop into the new stuff, let’s cover off a few brief typeface updates. To start, Pilar Cano has added book weights to her gracefully textured and fluid text family Edita. Alex Scholing’s simple, soft, and subdued CoreHumanistSans was a single freebie when we introduced it two months ago. He’s since revisited his “neutral international” by adding light and bold weights — and a proper price tag. Hubert Jocham has also given his “strange baby” sans an update. The eleven weight NewJunePro family now comes equipped with small caps, additonal figural styles, and fresh complement of diacriticals.

The Ukraine-based AndrijType foundry’s latest is an uncomplicated, headline-focused, multilingual slab. Bandera Pro shares similar proportions and weights with its sans cousin Osnova Pro — an implied superfamily in the making. Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic language support are built in, along with a smattering of stylistic alternates, ornaments, and historical forms.

Bracketed beauty. Four years in the making, Delve Withrington’s Helfa provides a highly readable range of weights, featuring ample x-height and true italics. Subtle tapers, cups, and curves throughout each face show just how much individuality has been drawn into each character. See for yourself — Delve has generously made the regular and italic weights available — absolutely free.

Word on the street tells us that Social Gothic — Canada Type’s revamp of Thomas Hollingworth’s 60s-era Informal Gothic — is their best selling font. While we don’t have any numbers to back that up, consumer demand has apparently elicited the release Social Stencil — a sliced variation of the uncomplicated, unicase sans.

OurType has released Meret, a precise seven weight text family by Nils “Undogmatic” Thomsen. Designed while attending the KABK Type]Media course, this contemporary serif is balanced and meticulously detailed — right down to the six varieties of serifless numerals. Unsurprisingly, Meret was also an award winner at this years Letter.2 competition and can be seen at large in the recent redesign of Fast Company magazine by Florian Bachleda and Christian Schwartz.

Dave Rowland takes his Schizotype brush on the road with Streetscript. This upright display script definitely has oomph where it counts. Keep you eyes peeled for some snappy swash and ligature action, alternates galore, and stylish automagical underlining courtesy of some smart contextual substitution.

Taking inspiration from the decorative and linear nature of South American graffiti styles, Pandilla is the end result of years worth of sketching and lettering by Bogotá based Cristian Vargas and his Typozon studio. An urbanized visual language has been merged with slick, modular shapes to create a unique, multiple weight display face.

And now, the rest of the news!

• There are some beautiful letters in Calligraphy Tagliente.
• Owen Gregory discusses music, harmony, and proportion in web design.
• Paul shaw takes “A Closer Look at Type@Cooper.”
• Funkyum interviews Delve Withrington.
• Chris Coyier shows why icon fonts are awesome.
• Phil Baines guides us through “Public Lettering in Central London.”
• Check out some lovely vernacular typography in Rome.
• These neon signs from Poland are quite nice, as well.
• What if Fedra Serif was designed before Fedra Sans?
• Mike Sall explains how Typekit uses data.
• Grain Edit profiles the work of Tony Dispigna.
• PostDesk interviews Vincent Connare about the future of typography and (you guessed it) what he thinks about Comic Sans.
• If the previously-mentioned typeface causes you to react poorly, don’t follow this link.
• Interviews galore, this week. Here’s one with Ken Barber.
• View slides from David Březina’s talk, “On Typeface Design.”
• Tim Brown has shared some resources from his recent AIGA/Adobe web talk.
• How about a chromatic typewriter?
• Alan Ariail wants to know what this is.
• Typefaces from Rosetta have been added to Identifont.
• Help beta-test typefaces.
• A warm welcome to the newly-independent Samarskaya.
• Go wild with OpenType.
• Hello, Milwaukee! TypeCon2012’s call for papers is now open.

Here are some things to put a dent in your budget:

• You love type, right? Of course you do! Then how about a me-gift!
• It sounds like the third edition of Practical Font Design would make a nice gift.
• You could also order some nifty stuff from Linotype: The Film.
• Typoretum has some lovely letterpress Christmas cards.
• Creative Times has some nice gift ideas, too.
• One if these 2012 calendars could serve as a neat stocking-stuffer.

Finally:

• Mmm — chocolate.
• Mmm — beer.

See you next week!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson, purveyor of fine type specimens.

Before diving into the new type, let’s cover off a couple updates to existing faces.

The dashing Alejandro Paul and his Sudtipos foundry have just added a baker’s dozen to the Google Webfonts quiver. Along with basic Latin editions of Angel Koziupa collaborations such as Aladin and Aguafina Script, they’ve also included nine faces from the impressive Charles Bluemlein Script Collection. Word on the street is that updated pro versions of these “signature” scripts are also in the works.

A week after the initial release of Laura Worthington’s Shelby, we were informed that her 80lb Lab puppy (and typographic namesake) “… swiped a piece of pie and a turkey leg off of the counter while no one was looking” during last week’s Thanksgiving festivities. Shelby (the dog) was so bold — and subsequently emboldened — by his escapades, Laura decided to follow up with a new, bold weight of Shelby (the typeface.)

Felix Braden’s Floodfonts points us towards Polaris—an unusual slab with squarish forms and tapered serifs. In case you need more convincing to give this retro-flavoured display face the green light, it comes equipped with extensive language support and a non-existant price tag.

Debelly is an oddly attractive fatface sans from Dusan Jelesijevic and Serbia’s Tour de Force. Squat lowercase, ample letterspacing, beefy contrast, and a few unexpected curves give this single weight face some quirky, throwback charm.

Also new to the Tour de Force catalogue is Epitet. This quiet, six weight geometric sans sports an unusually small x-height. Compact and lean, it has several distinctive traits—in particular, a spunky binocular ‘g’.

Along with the basic Latin version of Bubblegum Sans that recently popped up as an open source webfont, Sudtipos released Bubblegum Sans Pro. It’s a bouncy “brushalicious” sans from the typographic tag team of Koziupa and Paul, featuring expanded language support, a handful of tasty alternates, and plenty of 1930s-era lettering style.

Righteous, brother. This freebie was inspired by the art deco posters of Hungarian artist Robert Berény, but channels some serious 70s album cover art. With solid geometric forms and spiky “rock horn” spurs, this headliner delivers.

Melle Diete’s Gingar steps across the page anything but gingerly. From the finessed ultra light through beefy extra black, this latest family from Volcano Type oozes slabby, playful warmth throughout its massive range of 30 styles.

Fluid, yet strong — with an organic, modulated structure like that of “… a flying bird.” Such is Bruno Mello’s calligraphic Caturrita — a four weight serif family, versatile enough for both text and titling. It’s also the first typeface released by Armasen, a fresh-faced collective of students and type designers based in Brazil.

Portugal’s DSType has pushed out an impressive number of significant typefaces this past year. The latest is no exception. Dino dos Santos presents Acto, a humanist sans in eleven weights. Although there’s very little background information on Acto, suffice it to say it’s an extremely clean and efficient series of faces—covering a lot of ground from hairline to ultra black.

New York based Pagan & Sharp have finally released an expanded version of Malleable Grotesque. This rounded, industrial — but nuanced — condensed sans has been kicking around the interwebs as a simple roman and oblique pair for the past couple of years. It now incorporates seven weights, a complete set of obliques, plus a striking bilinear “wire” style.

From wires to the web:

• Movember is gone, but we’re into Decembeard, so the Hairy Lipsum generator might still come in handy.
• December also means the return of Fontdeck’s Adfont Calendar.
• Letters from Sweden has a sweet new site design that, thanks to the clever use of webfonts, functions as a living type specimen.
• Christian Vasile offers a “short course” on how to improve your website’s typography.
• Typekit has shared its users’ favorite webfonts.
• Despite the unfortunately-placed ad, these web typography experiments are still worth a look.
• For more webfont trickery, check out Drew McLellan’s “Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range,” which kicks off this year’s 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends.
• Fonts in Use covers the use of webfonts on the new Boston Globe website.
• No custom webfonts? No problem! You can still create a CSS font stack.

But enough about webfonts, let’s see what else is going on in the world of type:

• Dina Silanteva has crafted some beautiful typographic music
• Yanone is working on a new type design tool.
• Almost four years after coining the word keming, David Friedman revisits the term.
• Heydon Pickering discusses “The Perfect Paragraph.”
• The Eye blog covers Edward McKnight Kauffer’s titles for Hitchcock’s The Lodger.
• YouWorkForThem has updated its font license to account for mobile apps and eBooks.
• There’s a new beta release of TypeTool 3.1 for Mac OS X.
• If you were wishing your grandmother had advice about life online, it might look something like this.
• Yo, Freckles! is a “collaborative typography project,” and you can participate in it.
• See almost 45 years of font format history, thanks to Pedro Amado. (See also the full-resolution timeline.)
• Yves Peters remembers Hans Reichel.
• Meet TypeBrowser, from YouWorkForThem.

There’s plenty for your calendars this month and into next year:

• Join Sumner Stone this Monday (December 5) at the Cooper Union for “Type, Technology, & Trade: Adobe’s Early Years.”
• Are you an AIGA member? Join Tim Brown on December 7 for Typography for the Web.
• December 8 is the TDC Holiday Party. Remember to wear your bells.
• On December 15, Ilene Strizver can help you solve Troubling Typesetting Mysteries.
• AIGA Philadelphia is hosting Penned: A Hands-on Lettering Workshop with Ken Barber, January 28, 2012.
• Registration is open for TYPO San Francisco 2012.

Finally, here are a few gift-related items that seem to crop up around this time:

• The 2011 edition of .net magazine’s web designer’s gift guide contains a few nice type-related gifts, as well.
• Or perhaps you’re looking for a good book. Maria Popova has some recommendations.
• You have until December 8 to get your hands on this Compugraphic Typesetter.
• And you might have even less time to obtain a print copy of 8 Faces #4.

Whew! Next time we’ll bring snowshoes—or pretend we’re in the southern hemisphere.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for digging out this week’s new type.

Christoph “Typefacts” Koeberlin kicks things off with Libero—his free, numerals-only face that’s perfectly suited for Fußball jerseys (or whatever those other sports are wearing these days).

Still hot on the Nebiolo trail, Canada Type resurrects yet another classic. This time around they’ve tackled Paganini, Alessandro Butti’s 1928 Italianate display face. Old style text forms meet ornamented titling type—including a “super-seductive” engraved style.

What would happen if a gothic fraktur hooked up with some sexy, ultra black display type? You might just end up with a jovially plump, brush-ish script like Sutturah. This surprising departure from Rosetta is pleasantly packed full of delicious alternates and swashes.

The Lost Type Co-op is pleased to proffer James Edmondson’s third contribution to their communal foundry. Lavanderia is based on the hand-lettered Laundromat windows spotted in and around San Francisco’s Mission District. With a trio of weights, this delicately condensed script features hundreds of ligatures and an impressive number of OpenType features. Frankly, it’s an unexpectedly high quality package for what’s essentially a “name your own price” typeface. Mr Edmondson also takes us on a tour of Lavanderia’s roots and his creative process.

We simply can’t classify Wolfgang Homola’s Soleil as just another clean, static sans. Asymmetrical counters, a robust x-height, and subtle optical adjustments amidst the geometry provide a certain freshness and fluidity throughout the six weights.

Starting with a Speedball nib, Laura Worthington fashioned Shelby—a natural, monoline script with just a hint of modulation. The semi-connected forms and a bouncy, natural lilt are friendly and approachable. Toss in some OpenType sass and a handful of handcrafted ornaments, and dear Ms Worthington has another unassuming hit on her hands.

Elegant, clean, refined. Vanitas has it covered—with the contrast and chiseled detailing of a didone, the structure of a titling sans, and nary a hairline serif in sight. This four style fashion plate from Reserves is couture, without being cloying.

By his own admission, Dan Sayer is “not a type designer” — however, he is an experimentalist. It was this noodling around and his inherent fascination with typography that lead him to create Avería — The Average Font. By visually interpolating over 700 typefaces that were installed on his laptop, Dan squeezed out a series of multi-style families that are “just your average fonts” — literally and stylistically. Even though the process behind its development is far more interesting than its contrived aesthetic, Sayer recently updated his original project with sans and serif subfamilies.

Scrumptious! For dessert, how about a fat slice of this week’s news:

• Did you miss this year’s Wayzgoose in Two Rivers, Wisconsin? Felt & Wire has a great recap with plenty of pictures.
• Jeffrey Veen shares the origins of Typekit.
• You may have heard that there’s a new movie starring the Muppets. In honor of that event, David Vordtriede has created his own Muppabet.
• Watch Jonathan Hoefler discuss “Type at the Crossroads.”
• Joe Clark provides guidance for journalists using Unicode.
• Sam Berlow’s tumblelog Staked&Justified is a delight on the eyes. The archive is especially nice.
• FontShop San Francisco shared some type-related things people are thankful for this year.
• Typeradio has received a lovely facelift.
• The latest issue of “Creative Characters” features the work of PintassilgoPrints.
• Congratulations to the the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading for winning the Queen’s Anniversary Prize.
• Starting December 1, submit your writing for Typodarium 2013.
• 2012 is going to be the year of wood type (at least at the Genesee Center for the Arts).

It’s almost December. Apparently people like to buy things around this time of year; here are a few type-related things that might make it onto your list:

• Studio Neat has released two add-ons for its Glif tripod mount and stand for the iPhone 4 (and 4S): the Serif and the Ligature.
• Send someone a typewritten letter without typing it yourself.
• Where are you going on the typeface express? Find out with your very own typeface bus destination roll.
• Celebrate a not-quite-white Christmas with “EEEEEE”, a limited-edition print by Cyrus Highsmith.
• On Wednesday, November 30, at 4:00 p.m. (GMT), the fourth issue of 8 Faces will be available for order.

Finally, we are saddened by the unexpected death of Hans Reichel. He’ll be missed.

And that brings us to the end of ths week’s Type News. Don’t be a stranger!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for carving this week’s new type.

Heed the call of Stephen Coles when he says … “You can burn all your Bookmans.” After four years in the glyph factory, Mark Simonson has released Bookmania — his personal take on the American Type Founder’s classic Bookman Oldstyle headliner. This is a Bookman’s Bookman, featuring five weights from light through black, each with matching italics and small caps. Hundreds of swashed characters, optional ligatures, stylistic alternates, lining and old style figures (both proportional and tabular), and plenty of other OpenType features fill out the wish list. As Mark states … “It’s the revival I always wished someone would do.” Well done, indeed.

There’s something in the Air. Could it be the nine weights, three widths, 81 fonts, and 76,707 glyphs found in Neil Summerour’s fresh sans superfamily? Absolutely. Created to unify the flavours of both English and German grotesques, this exhaustive collection of faces balances function, legibility, and personality.

Marseille-based Johan Mossé gives blackletter type an kick in the eszett with Guillemet, a streamlined gothic for Berlin’s Gestalten studio. Echoing the calligraphic contrast and aesthetic weight of a textura, the compact forms of Guillemet have been smoothed, shaped, and simplified for approachability.

Peter Biľak’s latest for Typotheque is an exuberant geometric gem by the name of Julien. This unicase display family is constructed with turn-of-the-century Avant Garde sensibilities and architecturally-inspired forms. With over a thousand glyphs in each of the six styles and a dose of Tal Leming’s OpenType “pseudo-randomisation” magic, Julien is made for mixing and matching. Take a few minutes to enjoy the short video specimen and Peter’s “the making of” post as well.

According to designers Chester Jenkins and Jeremy Mickel, Aero was “… drawn from memories of Antique Olive.” Specifically, they were inspired by the heavy “Nord” weight of Roger Excoffon’s seminal sans. Pushing those classic shapes in a contemporary direction, they ended up with a nine weight range that includes some truly flavourful italics.

Lighthearted, with a definite flourish. That’s a pretty good description of this friendly, connected script from Rena and Ryan Martinson’s Yellow Design Studio. The monoline and gently modulated bold weights of Melany Lane have a natural, ink on paper quality. The package comes complete with a surprising number of contextual alternates, swashy options, unconnected forms, calligraphic ornaments, as well as a set of matching background patterns.

Dharma Type’s Tsunekawa Ryoichi and Wordshape’s Ian Lynam have just finished collaborating on Onick — a dense, geometric display face with a curious lineage. Extrapolated from a ’70s-era Onitsuka Tiger ski boot logo, Onick’s heavy set characters and thinly-sliced counters are a fresh — and appropriate — nod to the past. For additional background on the history and process of creating this free font, refer to Mr Lynam’s Catalog Heritage: A Typeface Is Born.

While we’re revisiting the seventies, let’s poke around FontShop’s replacement for that cranky, old pi font we all love to hate. Erler Dingbats provides a consistent, Unicode-savvy set of updated icons and symbols designed by Johannes Erler and Henning Skibbe. And it’s free. So go forth and spread the good word (and some better looking glyphs.)

Finishing up our freebie trifecta is Tyler Finck’s signpainterly face for The League of Moveable Type. Knewave comes solid and outline in a quick brushlike style — feeling a bit like Balloon’s ornery, open source cousin.

And now, the news:

• The Ampersand Conference is back, by popular demand!
• This Hebrew Typography site is as lovely as it is informative.
• Everything gets a trailer these days. Not to be left out is You Are not so Smart.
• Gustavo Ferreira argues for the primacy of the pixel in screen-font design.
• Josh Korwin writes about the influence of the Ludlow Typograph in the second quarter of the 20th Century.
• Ki Mae Heussner interviews Susan Kare about icons, design, and a bunch of other things in Adweek.
• The (Flash-required) Conqueror Typographic Games sound interesting.
• Keming plus a bad viewing angle aren’t exactly a winning combination for the new Jeff Bezos biography.
• Readability has reintroduced itself as a platform.
• Steven Zimmerman isn’t happy about the use of Helvetica in mass-transit systems.
• Learn your ABCs with Huddlestone’s Alphabet Flash Cards app for iOS devices.
• Apparently Keynote and ITC Lubalin Graph don’t get along.
• There’s a bunch of lovely stuff in the American Type Founders pool on Flickr.
• FontStruct has an impressive poster of FontStructed letters available for order.
• Say “Hasta la vista, baby,” to boredom with these lovely Arnold one-liners.
• Typekit has added a favorites feature.
• Congratulations to the winners of the 2011 Web Font Awards.
• Finally, it’s always nice to see a new issue of “The Week in Type.”

That’s for this week’s Type News. Next week: a very special issue, wherein I confront my tryptophan habit.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for tracking down some amazing type!

You can never have enough … swash or casual attitude for that matter. Photo-Lettering’s West Italiano delivers plenty of both. This rakishly good-looking italic has been lavishly ligature’d and blessed with a terminal case of ballsiness by creator Dave West.

Why settle for a single headline revival when you can have a couple more? Filmotype presents a pair of freshly scrubbed 1950s faces for your typesetting pleasure. Filmotype Gem is a beefy, all-caps Grotesque remastered by the deft hand of Mark Simonson. The revamped version includes an expanded character set, automatic fractions, ordinals, and an assortment of alternates.

The rejuvenated Filmotype Reef is James Lambert’s digitization of one of the company’s original wide-style serifs. Maintaining a calligraphic nod to its sign-painterly roots, Reef has been likewise buffed, polished, and tuned.

Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re arguably the most popular (and ubiquitous) typefaces on the web. The brains and brawn behind Font Bureau, Carter & Cone, and Monotype Imaging combined forces to expand the humble Georgia and Verdana into full-blown, multi-weight collections—each with buckets of OpenType niceties tossed in. Both Georgia Pro and Verdana Pro are impressively complete and flexible families for both print and the web. Don’t believe us? See the faces in action on the stunning “specimen” site designed by Christopher Clark and Nick Sherman.

Matthew Butterick has been proclaiming the need for better legal typography for years. Finally putting his Béziers where his brief is, he’s released Equity—a text family inspired by legal typography and the real world requirements of judicial scribes everywhere. Modeled on Monotype’s Ehrhardt, it features an economical pitch, truthful small caps, and a pair of “weight grades” optimized for suboptimal output devices.

As long as we’re being inspired … Henrik Kubel’s Antwerp for London’s A2 foundry is a typeface influenced by 16th century Plantin. Drenched in history, but with a modernized chassis. This five weight family is warm, welcoming, and inherently schooled in the classic European typographic aesthetic.

We bet you never knew you needed “on the fly serial weight dispersal” in a typeface, did you? Typonine has revved up their charmingly geometric Delvard sans with some weight-shifting, OpenType chutzpah. Delvard Gradient provides four varieties of densitometric magic … as … you … type!

And now for the rest of this week’s news:

• Zounds! Monotype is acquiring Bitstream’s font business.
• The League of Moveable Type has gotten a refresh.
• Delve Withrington has some provocative thoughts on the promise and perils of microfunding and new font development.
• Ilene Strizver shares her thoughts on the font and type games that have been cropping up of late.
• James Mosley reintroduces us to the Elzevir letter.
• Yves Peters returns with a welcome new episode of “My Type of Music.”
• Now available online is Paola Antonelli’s “States of Design 06: In your face,” first published in Domus 951.
• David Lemon looks back at (and forward to) 25 years of working with type at Adobe.
• Speaking of Adobe, Extensis’ webfont plugin for Photoshop now includes type from Google’s webfont service.
• Let’s have a little more from Monotype, this time in image form.
• Shapecatcher helps you find Unicode characters. (But its delicate sensibilities don’t recognize U+1F4A9 … yet.)
• See Akko, Neue Haas Grotesk, and Rotis II in the second annual Mill Co. exhibition.
• Next Thursday (November 17), head to the Type Directors Club for Mario Hugo’s “Shapes and Changes.”
• If you’re making letters out of leg hair … um … yeah.
• Less fleeting and far more worthwhile and enjoyable is the new Comedy Carpet in Blackpool, 160,000 granite letters set in concrete.

And that brings us to the end of this week’s news. Where will we be next week? Right here! Same type-time, same type-channel.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for figuring out where this week’s new type is.

Design by committee is not always a bad thing. The first typeface by Proyecto Demo is a good example. This collaborative project began several years ago and features a veritable who’s who of Chilean and Argentine type designers, including: Alejandro Paul, Alejandro Lo Celso, Eduardo Manso, Eduardo Tunni, Jose Scaglione, Pablo Cosgaya, Francisco Galvez, Rodrigo Ramirez, Tono Rojas, Kote Soto, Luciano Vergara, and Felipe Caceres. Clara is the end result—a sophisticated, unconnected display script packed full of alternates, ligatures, display caps, fancy fractions, and other OpenType wonderfulness. This open source typeface project was originally coordinated by Cristian Gonzalez Saiz, Daniel Berczeller, and Andreu Balius.

Another free face that caught our attention is Eduardo Tunni’s Mate. This highly readable, three-style text family features sharp, angular details and slightly calligraphic colour. All we need is for Eduardo to add some weight in the emboldened department.

Another type from the chisel, anyone? This week’s majestic majuscule comes courtesy of Photo-Lettering—those headmasters of the headline. Copeland Trillium is a multi-part play on the Romanesque titling face. Incise, tone, and shade to your Trajanic heart’s content.

Now this is something that was well worth the wait. Process Type Foundry has released Nicole Dotin’s Elena as their very first text family. It radiates “warmth with a crisp, tailored tone” through subtle brush-like terminals, strong horizontals, and restrained forms.

“A new release from Michael Doret is like a new flavor of ice cream.” We couldn’t possibly agree more with Mr. Coles. A streamlined, top-heavy display face with a dual personality, Dynascript shifts from hooked-up forms to non-connecting italics—with a flick of the stylistic switch.

Paula Nazal Selaive’s delightfully wispy Dulce is one of a pair of fresh display faces from Latinotype. Don’t let the slightly swollen terminals throw you for a loop—Dulce is sweet, swashy, and oozing with ligature-rific allure.

Also from the Chilean foundry comes Mija, Miguel Hernández’s “vernacular” grotesk. This four-style sans is inspired by the handpainted signs of South America and their beautiful imperfections. The voluptuous curves and ink-trappy details are perfect for headlines, but work surprisingly well in text settings.

The mind-bogglingly prolific Ray Larabie created his infamous Blue Highway font over fifteen years ago. A popular freebie — but plagued with technical problems — it was discontinued and replaced with the more aesthetically robust (and commercial) Expressway family several years later. But go figure … Ray has reintroduced the venerable roadside sans as Blue Highway 5.0—replete with all the “clunkiness” and “goofy charm” of the original.

We love the way Alex Varanese describes Antechamber. From its “unremarkable condensed sans” foundation to the “exaggerated ink traps of dubious functional value” and “haphazardly designed” clogged-counter alternates. Even though the designer downplays the aesthetics, this is still a rather attractive display face. And don’t you dare miss this free font strut its stuff in its very own promotional video.

And now, let’s peel out and race through this week’s news …

• beginning with The Ministry of Type on “The Typography of Speed.”
• On our way, let’s take in some sights, including TYPO       London 2011.
• Tiffany Wardle reintroduces us to Robert Slimbach’s lovely Caflisch Script.
• Do you use news headlines to preview fonts at MyFonts? Here are some amusing and horrifying results.
• Richard Rutter explains “The Trouble with Font Classificiations.”
• Jessica Karle Heltzel discusses the uncanny valley as it relates to type design.
• Help FontShop identify the best new fonts of 2011.
• Speaking of FontShop, the San Francisco office is hiring.
• Kristy Stewart reviews Richard Lipton’s Canto.
• Fred Smeijers introduces the work of Matthew Carter.
• Adobe is updating how it identifies font versions.
• Paul Shaw reviews the Kerning Game.
• Google has released the sfntly font programming language as open source.
• Tim Brown has tracked down an interesting discussion on Unicode, webfonts, and icons, among other things.
• Meanwhile, Tim Ahrens continues his series on optimizing fonts for the web, this time on Unicode values and glyph sets.
• The new DSType website is lovely.
• CopyPasteCharacter is getting an upgrade.
• Fontsmith is ten!
• There’s some very special type coming from China’s Founder Electronics.
• SOTA’s Font Aid V: Made For Japan charity typeface is now available through MyFonts and Veer.
• The “giving season,” or whatever we’re calling it now, is almost upon us. Consider a Hamilton gift certificate, a pair of scare quote mittens, or this lovely wood ampersand.
• There’s also About More Alphabets, a new book about Herman Zapf’s type designs from after 1970.
• Learn a little more about Rosetta Type Foundry (also available in Czech).
• Learn about “Post Typography’s Greatest Misses”: Wednesday, November 9, in Boston, and Tuesday, November 15, in Newark, Delaware.
• Also mark your calendars for a hand-lettering workshop with Ken Barber, hosted by the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington, on Saturday, November 19.
• Finally: since 2005, Patric King has been entertaining and informing us through his “Obsessions” column for Print Magazine, and now he’s decided that it’s time to be done. What a run!

Thanks for riding along with us this week. See you next Saturday!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for picking a grand route through this week’s new type.

The lettering work of Thomas Lincoln has often shown his fascination with Roman majuscules. His newest design for Canada Type is Roma, a “proper Trajan sans” based on those historic carved capitals. Mind you, this is not simply a streamlined, sans-ified Roman. Roma consists of four weights, each with a finessed lowercase, small caps, and oldstyle figures. Six additional styles of capitals provide stackable options for shading and chromatic settings.

Please sir, may I have some more? More majuscules, that is. The mighty Richard Lipton’s latest take on the inscriptional style comes in the form of the calligraphic Canto. This family covers plenty of expressive ground — two weights, a uniquely fine-tuned lowercase, and multiple styles that progress from brush to pen to formal Roman.

Felix Braden’s Capri is a contemporary, “constructed sans” with a slight tip of the geometric topper to the clean lines of Futura and Avant Garde. Observe the use of basic forms throughout the four weight family — circles, squares, triangles — particularly in the rather staccato forms of the italic.

Condensed. Monospaced. Free. Prague-based graphic designer Filip Matejicek’s Donator is all that … and more. The “more” includes a lightweight grid, quirky connecting strokes, small caps, case-sensitive forms, and a unique set of swashy stylistic alternates. As the name implies … if you like it, donate a little bit to Filip.

Jeremy Dooley has expanded his Sommet superfamily yet again, this time with a slightly softened slab. The appropriately named Sommet Slab Rounded sports ample counters, “obliqued” serifs, and a handy selection of titling alternates across six weights and matching italics.

The streamlinish Atomic Age from James Grieshaber takes inspiration from mid-century automotive chromeography. Clean geometry and a rigid, upright stance form the bones of this unconnected throwback script. It’s also free … yet another open source face from the Google Web Fonts directory.

Hamburg-based Rekord has recently tossed out a pair of new releases. Mingray Mono is a stylish, three weight family equipped with a lot of features not necessarily associated with a fairly functional monospace. Keep an eye out for oldstyle figures, small caps, fractions, ligatures, plus a variety of pictograms and arrows.

Rekord’s second typeface is a high contrast sans by the name of Prestiggio. With plentiful alternates and unconventional ligatures, this elegant display face oozes more than its share of deco-esque charm.

From the bountiful pen of Laura Worthington comes Nelson—a rustic, weathered titling serif. It features a trio of “rugged” styles, each festooned with four sizes of capitals, alternates, swashes, and other decorative accoutrements.

We don’t have anything edible in the news this week, but we also won’t make you smell our feet

No werewolves were seen at TYPO London, but reports on that event are starting to sneak in. The TYPO London blog has an excellent set of resources in its retrospective. Joe Allam recaps Saturday’s happenings. If that weren’t enough, Will White has collected a ton of links. Next year, TYPO branches out to San Francisco.

And now let’s bob for the rest of this week’s news:

• Let your type nerd flag fly—and hit the rails.
• Punctuation? It’s tricky!
• Last week, we kerned. This week, Mark MacKay asks us to shape type.
• Typotheque’s 2012 pocket calendar is out, and considering the quality, it’s €15 cheap!
• Ian Hex explores what one should look for in a UI typeface.
• Mandy Brown interviews Christopher Slye.
• The latest Creative Characters features Jeremy Dooley and his work.
• August Heffner helps us come to terms with type from the 1990s.
• Google’s webfont service has launched three Kickstarter campaigns to create some new webfonts. I hope they’re less horrifying than these scary fonts for Halloween.
• Type is (re)animated in the living type specimens from PersonaType.
• Simon Garfield boldly makes the case that the London 2012 Olympics font is ugly.
• TypeTogether has shared some lovely photos from Jose Scaglione’s “Four Hand Type Design,” in the latest issue of Diseña.
• Finally almost ready for prime-time is Made for Japan, the Font Aid V typeface.
• Happy (belated) 70th birthday to Jim Parkinson!
• Ready, typeset go!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing us this week’s new type and brains.

Preto Sans is the first completed family in Jan Filipek’s planned Preto type system. While the sans will form the “skeleton” for the other styles, it still displays a number of distinctive qualities. Tapered stroke endings, unexpected angles, plus a selection of tasteful alternates. The ampersands are particularly fun.

There a didone hiding under there somewhere. Brazilian graphic designer Eduilson Wessler Coan’s Encorpada takes inspiration from classic, contrasty slabs and then flaunts its very generous, feminine form. The abnormally deep ink traps and uniformly curvaceous endings pack a lot of detail into this already personable display face.

No one would blame Dino dos Santos or Pedro Leal if they bragged a bit about Braga, their exuberantly layered font family. Taking its name from the city known as the “baroque capital of Portugal”, this textural typographic toy features nearly two dozen decorative variations that can be clamped onto the base weight. Mix and match swashes, patterns, floral motifs, and more.

Colour me chromatic. DeLittle Chromatic, that is. Wood Type Revival’s latest release breathes new life into a century old British display face. The modulated capitals and swooping strokes liven up this otherwise rigid sans. Distressed and smoothified styles with outline and inlay variations are included.

It’s been a while since we’ve perused what’s happening over in the Google Web Fonts directory. Recently, there’s been a pile of extensions and updates to existing fonts, but a pair of newbies caught our attention. John Vargas Beltrán says that his Salsa was inspired by “old album covers from the 1970s”—but there’s definitely something else mixed in. This is a fluid, calligraphic display face that maintains a softness without resorting to disco-era puffiness.

Also intriguing us this week is Sancreek by the seemingly bottomless Vernon Adams. Designed primarily as a contemporary woodtypesque display face, this condensed bifurcate successfully bridges the old school with the new tools.

Hitting the new type circuit this week, too: Roboto, set to be the system face for Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich.” Stephen Coles called it a “four-headed Frankenfont,” a melange of Helvetica, Myriad, Univers, FF DIN, and Ronnia. Michael Degusta also noticed Roboto’s similarity to Helvetica. And John Gruber responds to claims that this is just Apple fans looking down on Android. There is plenty more to read, I’m sure, but there’s a start.

Let’s head away from future Android text to the much wider and more delightful realm of webfonts. Typekit has given its font browser a very welcome overhaul. Even more amazing: fonts.com has finally gotten around to providing operating system and browser previews for its webfont service. Finally, head over Co.Design, where John Pavlus interviews Mandy Brown about Typekit, “cloud” computing, and (of course!) Typekit’s recent acquisition by Adobe.

The big thing this weekend is TYPO London. Here’s Yves Peters’ account of day one. Eva-Lotta Lamm has some sketch notes. And follow along yourself with the video feed.

And now for the rest of the week’s news:

• Let’s begin by pointing you to an incredible collection of pixels in the wild, curated by Nina Stössinger.
• Head to Tokyo for an upcoming House Industries exhibition, on October 27.
• Decisions, decisions. Also on October 27: make your way to New York for a holiday postcard letterpress workshop.
• Charles Kostelnick’s 1990 article “The Rhetoric of Text Design in Professional Communication” has surfaced on the internet as a PDF.
• In more recent publication news, Type News favorite Shady Characters has received a book deal! We can’t wait.
• The Letter.2 competition winners were announced this week. There’s some beautiful stuff in there.
• Can you create an image out of a word by using only elements from the word itself?
• Here’s some type made using magnets and iron filings.
• Nick Sherman compares the update process for different font editors.
• Stephen Coles explores how a typeface is like a chair.
• The Eye blog shares Matthew Carter’s masthead for Private Eye magazine.
• Learn about our friend Verlag.
• The Ministry of Type is back from a brief hiatus—and brought us this awesome music typewriter.
• Speaking of music and typewriters, check out the history of the typewriter, recited by Michael Winslow
• HAPPY CAPS LOCK DAY.
• Who knew, Ryan Gosling is a typographer. Steamy!

Finally, we’re officially moving the Type News to Saturdays. To the weekend!

Dōmo arigatō, Grant Hutchinson, for bringing us this week’s new type.