New Type

Two and a half years ago, TypeTogether deliberately teased us by giving away a single weight taste of a serif’d Bree. Designers José Scaglione and Veronika Burian have finally finished polishing up Bree Serif — a fleshed-out slab to complement their sleek sans family. The six weight range shares the same lively, upright forms and slightly condensed stance as the serif-less version. The only thing missing is a set of matching italics. (Hint, hint.) Let’s assume those are already in the works … and we’ll promise to wait patiently.

The concept behind Nikola Kostić’s Bicyclette was to create a balance between curves and angles, gentleness and solidity, elegance and substance. The family contains six weights of moderately extended geometric sans with squat lowercase characters, whose stubbiness is exaggerated by elongated ascenders and descenders. Details have been sanded down just a hair, softening the typeface without obscuring the structural fundamentals (or requiring a name change to “Bicyclette Rounded”).

The first of a pair of releases from Serbia’s Tour de Force is Dušan Jelesijević’s Lasta. This quaint titling face mixes low-contrast engravers-style Romans with a set of “poetic” italics. A diminutive x-height, sharp wedged serifs, and an oddball lowercase rhythm provide a lot of personality in the details.

Also from Tour de Force comes a contrasty hybrid sans by the name of Publio. Jelesijević created minimalist upright and italic styles on a geometric framework, featuring an oblong shapes, triangular “semi-serifs”, and generous counters.

Building on the structural qualities first seen in his Remo Stencil, Thomas Thiemich has recently finished up a seriously complete set of sans for OurType. Combining aspects of the grotesque, humanist, and geometric schools, Thiemich’s Remo provides ten weights worth of uniformly warm and inviting type. It’s stuffed with OpenType niceties, including a generous selection of alternates, as well as a “plus” variation that implements longer ascenders across the board.

Fascinated by the limitations of the pixel, Nicolas Eigenheer explored how rendering curves on the screen could affect typographic forms. The result is Px Grotesk — a hybrid grotesque-style sans that “embeds screen parameters into a classic linear drawing.” The three primary weights — from light to bold — embody the simplifications required in grid-based constructions, especially noticeable in the vertical curves. A deliberate (and obvious) “pixel” cut is supplied as well.

News

And now, a deliberate curve right into the news:

• Thanks to Dubi Kaufmann’s efforts, we can confirm that birds love type as much as we do.
• Check out this stitched type. (Or is it lettering?)
• Do you write about type and typography? Consider writing for the Typophile blog.
• Joel Brown profiles The Museum of Printing in North Andover, Massachusetts.
• Add two shirts to the covet list: “Lock-Up” and “Hamilton’s 1892 Specimen,” from — you guessed it! — the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
• While we’re on the topic of the Hamilton, check out these photos of unpacking the press room from the big move.
• Mark Barratt reports on the fifth International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication, which recently took place in Cyprus.
• Richard Turgeon explains WebINK’s type classification system.
• Typekit clarified their stance on privacy.
• The folks at Typecast interviewed Edenspiekermann on type, branding, and responsive design, among other topics.
• Those same fine people also interviewed Gareth Hague.
• Ralf Herrmann recommends some type- and lettering-lovers to follow on Instagram.
• Jack John Brown reviews the FontBook app for iOS.
• Stephen Coles answers the question, “Why do many font foundries not provide app / web fonts?”
• Follow (“your”? “a”?) dream & be the next software engineer for Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
• Did you know that Edward Johnston was born in Uruguay? Now you do.
• Monotype has released FontExplorer X Pro 4.0. Yay, software updates!

Apple announced iOS 7 last week; here are a couple type-related highlights:

• Khoi Vinh notices that Apple put Helvetica Neue on a diet.
• John D. Berry calls said light weights nigh-unreadable.

Events

We’re probably missing events — let us know of others in the comments! — but here are a couple TypeCon-related announcements:

• On August 21, Alejandro Paul will give a special presentation.
• The workshop schedule just went live.

Quit following me

Or not, whatever floats your boat. Next week: the paraneue continues!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for rounding up this week’s new type, if only because of the surveillance cameras I’ve installed around his home.

New Type

Ján Filípek’s Preto Serif is a natural accompaniment to his existing Preto Sans family. Designed from the outset to be part of a sizeable type system (including an upcoming semi-serif version), this face contains uniquely spiked serifs, angular stroke transitions, persnickety optical adjustments, and language specific ligatures and alternates.

Fresh from the Exljbris foundry is Jos Buivenga’s Tenso, a five weight sans with more than just a few “hints of grotesque”. Pinched and angled stroke endings and a lightly condensed stance are matched with an aggressively sloped, yet uncompromisingly sexy, set of italics.

We’re always pleased to find a new face hanging out at the Lost Type Co-op and this past week was no exception. Klinic Slab is another multi-weight workhorse by co-operative regular Joe Prince. The clean (and nearly monoline) four weight family features a large assortment of ligatures, unpretentious small caps, ball-terminalia amidst the numerics, and some delightful italic detailing.

Just over two years ago, Paul Barnes released Dala Floda — an elegant (and arguably innovative) display stencil. Now with Dala Moa, he gives us more than just a sans companion to the serif’d original. Yes, they share the same underlying structural elements and take visual cues from both Renaissance forms and eroded stonecut lettering. However, this new sister family “diverges into the upright humanist tradition” with its less-intense italic styles and a larger, eight weight range.

Voluptuous and delicate do not have to be mutually exclusive traits. Case in point is Salomé — where hairline and curvaceous strokes mix and mingle, swell and confine, contrast and couple. This titillating titling face comes fully fleshed in stencil, display, and “Decó” variations — with plenty of hot, ligatured action to spare.

In creating Bulo Rounded, designer Jordi Embodas (with the help of Noe Blanco), set out to provide a softer, warmer version of Bulo for Barcelona’s Tipografies foundry. Specifically, they delivered “a real rounded” face — not just softening the ends of the monolinear strokes, but also smoothing out every nook, cranny, counter, and notch throughout this five weight condensed sans.

The latest collaborative effort between the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and Buffalo’s P22 is mostly straight, definitely square, and “curious angled”. HWT Geometric revives six styles of late 19th century charm from the archives. Typeco’s James Grieshaber digitized and expanded the original set of cuts to include a regular weight of the condensed width, plus a pair of even heavier “Shopworn” styles.

News

This week might look light on links, but rest assured: there’s plenty of there there.

• Carol Fillip and Lorrie Frear show how to use pre-digital typographic techniques to teach those of us who grew up, um, post-analog.
• NYC Type 2.0 has launched, and it’s enchanting. Matthew Anderson talked about its creation with Jakob Schiller for Wired.
• The fine people at Underware explain what went into the upgrading of that foundry’s font library.
• John Brownlee explores the history of the ‘@’ sign.
• Multiple discussions of peculiar characters and their evolution? I smell treble (this time courtesy Jimmy Stamp).
• Another trend: trends! First up is unusu all etters pacing.
• The second trend is hyphenation, sometimes in we-ird places.
• Let’s end this foray with a current non-trend that the Font Bureau would like to become one: dinkuses and asterisms.
• David Shields examines the work of the ACME Wood Type & Manufacturing Co.
• Brian Warren wrote an article on web typography for .net magazine, which is ironically not (yet) available on the web.
• Type.io can help you figure out what webfonts others are using.
• If [ed. — ‘if’? Ha!] anyone has been wishing for Berthold typefaces on the web, wish no more. Berthold Types has teamed with Typekit to make your dreams a reality.
• More webfonts! This time from Commercial Type, which are available for self-hosting — and are as carefully crafted as you’d expect from Paul Barnes, Christian Schwartz, and company.
• Meanwhile: the complete Freight family can be had on Webtype.
• TypeTogether recently announced that Sonja Keller, Irene Vlachou, and Elena Veguillas have joined the team. Congratulations, everyone!
• Creative Bloq takes a closer look at the type for Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby.
• Adrian Shaughnessy will give the keynote presentation at TypeCon2013: Portl&.
• One more scheduling note: Join Meredith Kasabian on June 15 at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art for a discussion on sign painting and the work of Barry McGee.
• Can a type designer’s work day be distilled to 30 seconds? Jessica Hische shows how.

Cast off!

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading; see you soon!

Thanks, too, to Grant Hutchinson for wrangling all of this week’s new type!

New Type

Pretty spry for a type guy. We should all be as unstoppable as octogenarian Georg Salden — who has managed to release yet another impressive family through the TypeManufactur foundry. Rolls is a five weight sans built around the “squircle” style made famous in mid-century geometrics such as Aldo Novarese’s Microgramma and Eurostile. For contrast, the Roman styles are as defined and straight up as they come, whereas the accompanying italics are gracefully calligraphic.

Hold Fast Foundry’s Gin is a similarly boozy, but less condensed brother for the previously released Bourbon. Once again Mattox Shuler tipples into the woodtype-flavoured lettering found on vintage liquor bottles, updating the stocky, serif’d characters with a splash of stylistic alternates and period-savvy, ligature-powered “wordshapes”.

Now here’s a font name that leaves nothing to the imagination. The Sketchnote Typeface was developed by Mike Rohde to replicate the spontaneous, hand-drawn quality of the visual note-taking process — as demonstrated in his book on that very topic. Regular, bold, and italic styles are matched up with a looser, sketchier display weight — all featuring an approachably bouncy baseline, a subtle textural quality, and plenty of automagical OpenType alternates.

The trio of styles that make up Mineral attribute part of their modular form and construction to the plank shaped Kapla building toy. Known for his exuberant experimental typefaces, designer Benoît Bodhuin goes even further, describing the fractured, abstract qualities of the face as a series of “tetragonal splinters, rectangular modules slightly spaced, like quartz and pixels.”

Dark Angel is a hybridized, blackletter-esque display face that oozes pure Doret — Michael Doret, that is. Not merely an updated version of an Old English style, this is a stylishly angular and severely graphic type system consisting of solid, handtooled “underlight”, and highlight variations — which can be combined for all manner of devilry.

News

From the severely graphic to the severely typographic, we transition to the news:

• Nina Stössinger shares her experience sketching type.
• Silas Dilworth proposes an approach to “Student Discounts and Classroom Licensing.”
• Ulrike Wilhelm of LiebeFonts stars in this month’s issue of Creative Characters.
• Angelynn Grant profiles Hamilton Wood Type.
• David Shields tracks down information about the Allied Wood Type Manufacturing Company.
• Matthew J.X. Malady considers the necessity of the apostrophe.
• Simon Horobin think’s we need to chill out about grammar and punctuation.
• Rounding out this week’s punctuation trifecta, Dave Bricker reopens old wounds by discussing the appropriate number of spaces after a period.
• Paul Shaw recounts his most recent TDC lettering walk.
• Get some impressive lettering-infused jewelry from Brevity.
• Michael Levy extends the Newspeak Dictionary, 2013.
• Process Type has a friendly approach to font upgrades.
• How about some more new typeface coverage with the latest “This Week in Fonts”?
• If you want to create typefaces in InDesign — who doesn’t? — take a look at IndyFont 1.1.
• Some impressive lettering accompanies this article on Rory Sutherland’s ability to save marketing.
• Help save marketing yourself by joining Punchcut as their visual designer for Marketing Communications.
• Or if you work with Japanese script, consider applying for the position of Senior Typeface Designer, Japanese Script, with Monotype (Tokyo).

Events

What’s happening? Everything, and some really soon:

• As of publication, three slots remain for the Type Lab with Glyphs.app at Mota Italic in Berlin, Germany, June 6–8.
• It’s not too late to make your way to Zagreb, Croatia, for FFWD.PRO, June 10–11.
• From there, head south and east to Istanbul, Turkey, for ISType 2013: Stroke, June 13–16.
• You have a little while longer to return to Berlin and then to the Bauhaus Archive, to check out On-Type: Texts on Typography, which runs through August 5.
• Someone is excited for TypeCon2013: Portl&, August 21–25 in Portland, Oregon.

Strike 3

Or not, I suppose we could keep popping fouls for a day or two. But in any case — until next week: we’re out!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for not stranding this week’s new type!

New Type

The modified majuscules of Esmeralda came from a project instigated during Guillermo Vizzari’s studies at the University of Buenos Aires. With guidance from illustrator Ana Sanfelippo and Sudtipos’ own Alejandro Paul, aspects of both “capitalis monumentalis” stonecarving and humanistic brushwork are blended into a cohensive, calligraphic titling style. Sturdy, sensual uppercase and lowercase characters are accompanied by a multitude of ligatures, alternates, inital caps, and miscellaneous “connector” glyphs.

Nearly ten years after Veer acquired his Jukebox collection, California’s Jason Walcott has launched the retro-flavoured CounterPoint Type Studio. Still focused on updating energetic display faces with a hand-lettered or phototypeset past, Jason kicks things off with a tidy threesome. First up is the bouncy, flare-serif’d Califunkia — straight out of the 1960s, sporting dozens of interlocking ligatures and Saturday morning cartoon style.

The swoopy Profiterole is an airy, handwritten script scribed with a decidedly feminine nib. Lightweight and casual, with a touch of extra ligature class.

The final CounterPoint newcomer is Raspberry Jam — a whimsical jarful of scratchy pen and inklings. Angular joints, sporadic strokes, and informal spacing combine together in what Walcott refers to as a “scrapbooking style”.

Adding more heft to his already impressive FF Signa superfamily, Ole Søndergaard serves up a solid serving of FF Signa Slab. The minimalist shapes and “concise” letterforms found in the previous sans and stencil variations echo their Danish architectural roots across all seven weights — and the “oblique-ish” italics — in this new slab collection.

Also fresh from the FontFont factory is Slávka Pauliková’s FF Dora — a “strong-willed” text family with charactistics stemming from a background in editorial and book design. Consisting of five styles, including a beefy display version, Dora balances curvaceous and sharp elements without being overtly angular, although details such as inktraps and hairpin transitions become more evident in the heavier weights.

Warit Chaiyakul’s mysterious Mist is an unconventional upright script from the Bankok based Typomancer foundry. A trio of calligraphic qualities — ink, dry, and rough — provide a textural progression through the swashy, staccato script and its uninhibited, colliding forms.

Marcus Sterz’s latest for FaceType is the deceivingly subtle Substance. Covering an ample eight weight range, this slightly stocky grotesque sans features a variety of OpenType treats including voluminous currency symbols, figural sets, and uncommon arrow glyphs — well suited for signage and wayfinding.

News

Find your way to this week’s news, made with fresh ingredients from our organic free-range link farm:

• Jessica Hische shows us how to up our type game.
• These examples of semicolon usage are highly improper, but we’ll allow them; who are we to judge?
• Get your punctuation straight with help from David Sudweeks.
• Jan Constantin revisits Smashing Magazine’s survey of typographic design patterns and current practices, three years after the original.
• Alex Jay examines the evolution of the Star Wars logo.
• Rui Abreu provides a sneak peek at Aria Text.
• Elliot Jay Stocks is joining Typekit! (Read the official announcement, too.)
• Erik Spiekermann eloquently calls bullshit on the question, “What is the future of typography?”
• See the new location of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum — before the painting and unpacking begin in earnest.
• John D. Berry reviews The Briem Report.
• The FontFont blog has published an interview with Travis Kochel, the designer of FF Chartwell.
• Robbie Manson reveals a process for choosing a typeface.
• Yves Peters’ latest installment of ScreenFonts is thoroughly enjoyable (as usual).
• Now, this is a poster.
• If you know Czech, you’ll get a lot out of David Březina’s “Type on the Web.”
• Make color bitmap fonts for use with Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8.
• Find out what you missed at TYPO Berlin.

Finally, we’re saddened to report that Bo Berndal has passed away. Witness some of his legacy in this profile from Creative Characters.

Events

Grab your lanyard and your paperwork — it’s time to go conferencing and adventuring:

• The Typographic Circle presents an evening with the founders of Unit Editions in London on May 30.
• June 3–15: travel to Nicosia, Cyprus, for the fifth International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication.
• Join the latest FontStruct competition; entries are due June 14.
• It’s not too late to register for Ampersand, June 28 in Brighton and November 2 in New York City.
• On July 16 in New York, attend the opening reception and exhibition of the winners of the 59th Annual Type Directors Club Competitions.
• The education forum program and list of conference speakers have been announced for TypeCon2013: Portl& (which takes place August 21–25).
• Have passport, will travel? Register for Typism, September 4 on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.

Farewell

The Type News is moving to Mondays! See you next week.

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

New Type

Nick Shinn’s Richler is a highly readable book face commemorating its namesake, prodigious Canadian author and essayist Mordecai Richler. This airy, modernized antiqua comes in five styles — including a dapper highlight cut — and has been outfitted with a delightfully complete OpenType feature set and pan-European language support. Deliberately called out as being “spaced like a sans”, the recent introduction of the family on the Typophile forums has produced no shortage of discussion, debate, and huzzah … as well as the occasional brickbat.

From casual to formal. From nostalgic to contemporary. Rob Leuschke’s lively Style Script is more than just an update of an classic upright advertising script. Through the use of stylistic sets, a veritable sliding scale of typographic panache and complexity is available — making this an extremely flexible and fashionable face.

Wigrum is the first commercial typeface from Anouk Pennel and Raphaël Daudelin of Montréal’s Feed design studio. Just released through the Bureau des Affaires Typographiques foundry, this heavily geometric sans manages to add colour and personality to the otherwise rational shapes with minute optical adjustments, wedge-shaped details, and a sprinkle of refreshingly designed alternates.

Keeping the notion of “a subtly curved and slightly modulated line” in mind, Sebastian Nagel’s Canapé has been a labour of typographic love since its inception seven years ago, under the working title of “Sofa”. Although the family consists of just four styles, it encompasses an astonishing 4,200 glyphs — including small capitals, swashes, standard and discretionary ligatures, a whopping ten figure sets, and a “small sofa building kit”.

The first of many mid-century retro revivals from the Filmotype folks is the lovely Lakeside — an informal display script straight from the signpainter’s showcard arsenal. Decked out with a respectable set of alternates, ligatures, and automatic fractions, this connected brush style is ready to update all manner of storefront eyegrabbers and greengrocer flyers.

Also sporting a shopping cart full of fresh OpenType essentials is Filmotype Kellog, a slightly wider and lower contrast take on the commercial brush script style.

The final font refit is a freestyle Filmotype Parade. Originally introduced in 1955 as a standalone companion to its ever so slightly slimmer cousin Orlando, the Parade family has been expanded (literally) by type designer Charles Gibbons to include a trio each of weight and width variations.

News

From a variety of new typefaces to a variety of type-related links:

• Ed Fella has retired from the California Institute of the Arts. Michael Dooley and company send him off in style.
• Watch Dave Foster discuss typography.
• Upgrade all your Underware fonts!
• The above news means its an opportune time to link to Jens Tenhaeff’s “If Fonts Were Software,” which we missed the first time around.
• Michael Surtees covers Monotype’s Pencil to Pixel.
• The Alphabet Card looks lovely.
• Uniball has an intriguing new campaign.
• It’s never too late for a good “best of” list; the Typecache top 20 from 2012 is worth a look.
• Help create a typeface based on a city.
• Find all the Unicode.
• Steven Heller interviews Ben Barry about the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory.
• Riccardo Mori reveals one of the dangers of webfonts.
• Sign painting makes the news news!
• Is the “crank text” a thing?
• From Fabio Lopez comes “Police Raid Type.”
• If you’re still craving coverage of new type releases, check out the latest issue of This Week in Fonts.
• Type Worship takes a peek at Stephen Coles’ Geometry of Type.
• Here’s further proof that font size matters.

Events

Plan ahead and get in on these current and upcoming events:

• Text Support: A Library Exhibit about Paper takes place now through June 28 at the University of Wisconsin (Madison).
• You have an additional day to take in Word Jazz at the Mota Italic Gallery — now through June 29.
• Make your way to the University of Chichester for the Print Networks Conference, July 23–25.

Slammed

The next Type News will arrive all aflutter on Tuesday, May 28. Thanks for riding along — and covering gas.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing in all the new type!

New Type

Marconi Lima adds some panache to his tidy, transitional Adriane Text family with Adriane Swash. This single weight, italic-only counterpart provides a subtle, elegant upgrade by way of swashed capitals, lowercase initials and finials, plus a handful of custom ligature pairs.

A recent addition to the Gestalten library is an eponymous sans from Norbert Prell. Blending humanist and geometric forms with a “cheeky and flirtatious” style and unexpected details, Prell is admittedly reflective of the designer’s own personality. The family covers a five weight range — thin through bold — all of which are equipped with a vast assortment of alternates, ligatures, and other OpenType niceties.

Animated strokes and boundless energy are traits common to many of Laura Worthington’s handwritten scripts. Harlean easily proves that point — rough around the nibbed-pen edges, but with plenty of pep in its step. Naturally, like all of Worthington’s tricked out scripts, its chockablock with hundreds of unbridled swashes, tweaky alternates, and assorted ornamentals.

Typotheque pulls out all the editorial stops with Nikola Djurek’s extensive Lumin type system. Intended for use in a broad range of publication scenarios, four connected families combine subtle constrast with distinctive “chiseled” connections, producing an intriguing hybrid. The extended collection includes four weights of slab serif’d Lumin, six flavours of “straight-talking” Lumin Sans, its compact Condensed companion, and a trio of headline-savvy Display variations.

Back on the road with his Tour de Force foundry, Serbian designer Dušan Jelesijević is pumping up the scratchy jam with some Nervatica. This two weight handstyle sans bounces across the stage, bringing with it a busload of dingbats, textures, and other lively characters.

News

Lively discussions and lively characters populate our list of links this week:

• Stephen Coles wonders whether font library subscriptions are the future we really want.
• David Sudweeks shows us a thing or two about visual hierarchy.
• Ben Barrett-Forrest discusses his animated history of typography.
• Cyrus Highsmith made some great tee-shirts. (I wish we weren’t already past the funding deadline.)
• As if there weren’t enough things to covet, these Penguin Drop Cap book covers are incredible. (Especially the one for Lord of the Flies. Just look at that thing. Look at it!)
• Mike Rohde reviews different font styles in the latest episode of the Sketchnote Podcast.
• With the whole web becoming editable, the text box fades away.
• Choosing the wrong typeface can be hazardous to your health.
• Christopher DeCaro has been busy: check out his lettering experiments and other nifty things.
• There’s a brief update on Erik van Blokland’s digitisation project.
• It’s late spring: a perfect time for lovers of letterpress to make a pilgrimage to the Chapel of the Blessed Eutectic in Prescott, Arizona.
• The New Yorker doubles certain consonants — and does the Orrmulum proud.
• Robbie Manson shares his process for selecting type.
• Posters! — made with love, by a cat.
• Coming soon: sync Typekit webfonts to your desktop.
• But you can use this type kit on your desktop today!
• This shipping label is all kinds of amped up.
• Jeffrey Zeldman shows some love for Adobe.
• Our penultimate item is Ben Yagoda’s handy treatise, “7 grammar rules you really should pay attention to.”
• Unicode and skywriting: what could possibly go wrong?

Events

Float around the world for these upcoming things:

• On May 15 the Mota Italic Gallery hosts the pre-TYPO Berlin party.
• May 16 and 17, in Appleton, Wisconsin: an incredible-sounding garage / estate sale, with 10% of all proceeds going to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
• Partake of London’s diverse lettering on a walk guided by Phil Baines, May 23.
• On June 4 in London, hear Henrik Kubel discuss “New work, new fonts, New Transport.”
• Sign up to help unbox the Hamilton in June and July.

Lonely wandering

That’s it for this week — see you soon!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for gathering this week’s typefaces while I danced with daffodils, or something.

New Type

It all started with a tweet. Nina Stössinger’s Sélavy came to life after an off the cuff request by artist Paul Soulellis relating to his Library of the Printed Web project. Based on the handful of characters found on Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Green Box” — La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même (Boîte verte) — Stössinger extrapolated a complete deco-esque typeface, generously releasing it under an open font license.

With the help of James Todd’s mad digitizing skills, the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry pushed a hefty seven width sans out the factory door this week. Originally released by Hamilton in 1907, HWT Unit Gothic presaged more contemporary type “systems” (like Adrian Frutiger’s expansive Univers) by half a decade. Each style of this eccentric sans has been updated and packed to the Gothic gills with glyphs, Greek and Cyrillic language support included.

Like the name implies, DSType’s Diversa explores the diversity and contrast of styles within the constructs of a single design. Using a stocky, Latin display face as a creative foundation, designers Dino dos Santos and Pedro Leal have stuffed nearly 3,000 glyphs into the nine stylistic sets. Among the typographic flavours to be sampled are a barebones sans, a chunky slab, a bracketed serif, stencilled diversions, a whimsical “baroque”, and a hodge-podge set which mixes the whole works together in one feel swoop.

Kyle Steed’s eponymous Steedicons is the latest addition to the growing Symbolset stable. The pitch is “243 Symbols, 370 Keywords, 1 Mustache” drawn in a loose, sketchy style — a welcome change from the usual hypertidy geometry found in most icon font collections.

News

No witty transition: we begin with the sad news that Joseph Churchward has passed away. Here are a couple noteworthy tributes (there are probably others):

• A loving tribute from the Museum of New Zealand.
• Heath Killen bids farewell.

Feel free to peruse Churchward’s work in greater depth. It’s well worth your time.

And now, on with our regularly-scheduled programming:

• Glory be, 8 Faces #6 is out!
• Congratulations to the winners of the Fine Press Book Association’s Student Design Competition.
• Steven Heller exposes us to Robert Hunter Middleton’s Eden typeface — and is not ashamed.
• This old chest contains some amazing treasures.
• David Sudweeks elaborates on appropriate typographic scale.
• David Demaree walks us through the world of high-DPI web typography.
• Hoefler & Frere-Jones supports the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. You should, too!
• Peter Biľak guest stars in the latest Talking Types podcast.
• Chris Petrillo has a new pet project: Bikes and Type on Bikes.
• Ben Barrett Forrest has animated a history of typography.
• Enjoy another great installment of ScreenFonts.
• Love type? Love type releases? Then you’ll dig the latest installment of This Week in Fonts.
• Tim Brown reminds us that progressive enhancement is part of web typography.
• Erik Spiekermann walks us through printing a poster.
• Adobe has contributed font rasterizer technology to FreeType.
• Download Google webfonts, thanks to Monotype.
• Speaking of Google, their webfont service got a facelift.
• Speaking of Monotype, they have a new “Master Subscription,” which costs a bunch but promises to give you loads in return.
• Justice! Anne Brontë has a new gravestone.
• This is an impressive animal alphabet.
• More ASCII, more emotion.
• Happy Cog designers discuss readability in design.
• In the grand tradition of “realign, don’t redesign”: Instagram has a new logo.
• Learn about the art of designing cattle brands.
• Not safe for work: calligraphy on girls.
• Handy: the Karl Gerstner design archive
• Apparently the best way to design a typeface is to lift it from the work of Peter Biľak.
• Roar through the 1920s with The Great Gatsby.
• Tim Brown’s webfont specimen is now available in Cyrillic, thanks to Dimo Buko.
• Dan Hoopert designs letters made of wire
• Gavin Lucas takes a closer look at Doctrine.
• Jonathan Barnbrook talks about his work for David Bowie.
• Bees!

Events

Swarm to some of these upcoming events:

• Learn Robofont with Frederik Berlaen, June 1–2, at the Cooper Union.
• Andy Clymer continues our Cooper Union blitz with a June 3 workshop on interpolation
• Stic k around and learn about kerning with Ben Keil, June 4 at the Cooper Union.
• Come to Eventbrite in San Francisco for a screening of Sign Painters on June 26.

Farewell!

That’s it for this week. We’ll get back to our regular schedule as soon as possible!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for finding all the finds this week!

New Type

Shamelessly uninhibited. Neil Summerour’s Shameless makes no excuses for its unabashedly feisty behaviour. An angular handwritten script with a relentless motion — like the teeth of a reciprocating saw — produced through the smart application of a seemingly endless supply of contextual variations. Multiple stylistic sorts, swashes, flyaways, and “responsive titling alts” prove just how unencumbered this design really is, with over 2,200 glyphs in the “standard” version alone. As if that number wasn’t audacious enough, the “deluxe” variation sports a couple hundred more — plus Summerour’s promise of future additions and upgrades.

With a sophistication uncommon to many of Virus’ more idiosyncratic typefaces, Doctrine provides a large family that deftly blends mid-century neo-grotesque, humanist, and geometric sans influences. Throughout the five weight range, the typographic tag team of Jonathan Abbott, Jonathan Barnbrook, and Julián Moncada apply consistency (and unorthodox charm) with an ample helping of those trademark Virus alternates, an voluminous selection of ligatures, and numerous figure sets.

Bringing a bit more muscle to the table is Doctrine Stencil, a “utilitarian” display version based on the same sans frame. Taking inspiration from the wordmark of North Korea’s rather iffy national airline, this five weight family features four stylistic sets, incorporating both the alternate letterforms found in the text styles and various stencil cut options.

Lev Berry’s Monstre brings a quaint set of dimensional characters out of the realm of French ephemera and up to OpenType speed. Five carefully prepared layers — retaining the “slight imperfections” of the hand-painted orginal — can be manipulated for limitless lighting and shading effects. Try it out for yourself. It’s a free download under Creative Commons licensing.

The latest release from Fontsmith is Phil Garnham’s impressive (and expansive) FS Emeric. Covering an eleven-weight range, the entire family maintains a clean, sharp aesthetic — open counters, chiselled terminals, subtle “micro-modulations”, and an overall textual warmth. Tying together the ideals and the design of Garnham’s glyphic progeny, a series of limited edition screenprinted posters were created specifically for the launch — one celebrating each weight in the family.

If ever there was a perfect name to apply to a geometric sans, Lineto’s Circular might well be it. This is the second release from Berlin’s Laurenz Brunner after his acclaimed, Swiss-flavoured Akkurat. The functional book, medium, bold, and black weights — along with their tidy italic mates — maintain a balance between what Brunner refers to in Squaring the Circle as “conceptual rigour, skilled workmanship, and measured idiosyncrasy.”

Ulrike Wilhelm’s LiebeRuth mixes the mojo found in chewy, retro headliners like ITC American Typewriter with the welcoming, organic handstyle we’ve come to know and love. The four slabby weights are simply jam-packed full of quirky curlycues, loopy swashes, ball terminalia, and more alternates than you can shake a stick at.

Designed by Mark and Doris Ho-Kane, Uchronia takes its name from a term coined by French philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier in 1876, referring to a fictional — often utopian — version of history. This is a classic titling face befitting the idyls of the definition — with graceful lines, minimal adornment, and a modicum of alternates, including inscriptional and calligraphic punctuation.

News

• Laura Meseguer writes about the creation of Magasin.
• Get yourself a copy of Tim Brown’s Pocket Guide to Combining Typefaces. £2 — cheap!
• Spice up your sheet music with some advice from Mayene de Leon.
• Sibylle Hagmann appears in this month’s Creative Characters.
• Meet Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones (again, for the first time!) in a short video from the presentation of the 2013 AIGA Medal.
• Travel back to 1944 and check out some type for advertising and architecture.
• Or only go back to 1996 and find out what Roger Black has to say about web design.
• Bless the buh-buh sound of letter ‘B’. (This ‘A’ is pretty nice, too.)
• The people behind KALQ think you need a new keyboard layout for your touchscreen device.
• Learn about working with right-to-left scripts in HTML.
• Every day in November 2012, Michael Crowe and Lenka Clayton used typewriters to draw things they’d seen that day.
• Chris Clark and James Dempsey discuss using beautiful text on iOS.
• The latest FontFont newsletter is out.
• Monotype is looking to hire a type director for its Noida, India operations. Be glad it’s not a posting for ClearType hinter.
• The UK has a nifty Government Service Design Manual to help government agencies meet a new Digital by Default Service Standard.
• So much chrome type, so little time.
• Romesh Naik has uploaded a specimen for Granby to Flickr.
• Listen to and watch Mandy Brown speak on editing.
• Ralf Herrmann finds instances of the capital sharp ‘S’ in use.
• Someone should typeset this blog comment spammer’s source template.
• Many of these vintage designs have lovely letters.
• Behold: the last poster printed at the orignal Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
• The Lord’s Prayer on a 12-point square piece of type is quite the achievement — and a true “marvel of modern punch-cutting,” courtesy Dan Rhatigan and Monotype.
• Fabio Haag recounts some of the happenings at TPC10.
• Bernie Quah’s sketchnotes from TYPO San Francisco are available as a PDF.
• Fonts in Use has a whole section dedicated to type and typography conferences. Which is a perfect lead-in to …

Events

Segue, this way:

• See and hear Tim Brown on “Universal Typography,” at Adobe MAX, May 4–8 in Los Angeles.
• ISType 2013 takes place June 13–16, in Istanbul; there’s a “pre-event” with Alejandro Paul on May 7.
• Also May 7: walk Tribeca with Paul Shaw.

Shake out those shoes

It’s time to go home! See you next week.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for risking life and limb to lead this week’s new type into our little oasis.

New Type

Got asterisk? You’ll have no shortage of stars when you nab the Font Aid VI: Aster Affects typeface from the Society of Typographic Aficionados. Created to raise funds after the events of Hurricane Sandy, over 250 designers from around the globe contributed star-inspired glyphs to the project. All proceeds from the sale of the font go directly to Red Cross relief efforts.

After the iconic Jim Rimmer passed away in 2010, Canada Type began the process of “repatriating” and updating Jim’s voluminous body of work. This past week saw the rerelease of three popular Rimmer type families — newly remastered, expanded, and buffed up right.

Rimmer’s Albertan was his first face to make the shift from metal to digital in the early 1980s. Albertan Pro — and it’s distinctive “almost-slab” serifs — expands the original calligraphic Roman into a robust 14 style family that deftly covers a six weight range. A vast amount of ligatures, alternates, figural sets, and a tasty inline variation are just some of the updated components under the newly polished hood.

The second Rimmer face to receive a typographic tune up is Isabelle Pro — a calligraphic Roman and arguably “one of the most beautiful italics ever made.” Among the OpenType-powered additions are proper small caps; an expanded set of ligatures; plus stylistic alternates offering options for lowercase serif angle and looped ascenders and descenders.

Drawn by Jim just before his passing, the charming Loxley gets the final revamp nod. Glyphs that flowed from the master’s hand have been modernized with care and attention, painstakingly fleshed out and subtly improved through the inclusion of copious ligatures, alternates, and historical forms.

The folks behind the counter at the Lost Type Co-op have certainly been busy stocking the shelves with fresh produce lately. Following up on the release of Mission Gothic earlier this month, the co-operative has just put another pair of faces on the aisle end. For example, Dai Foldes’ Cylburn takes structural cues from elegant roundhand scripts, but mixes it up with some casual, semi-connected brushwork.

The second face from the Co-op is a straight-up, single weight sans by the name of Fairview. Designer Riley Cran has placed stripped-down, geometric forms on a condensed linear frame, successfully echoing a familiar 20th century industrial vernacular.

Roman Shchyukin’s Delgado Sans shares the same whisper thin frame and playful attitude as his beautifully ball-terminal’d Delgado. Although lacking serif accoutrements, this stand-alone sans is fully outfitted with display-savvy features … including plenty of Latin and Cyrillic ligatures, oldstyle figures, and more.

The outlook from Symbolset is clear with a 100% chance of usefulness. Especially since their latest release is Jory Raphael’s meteorologically focused SS Forecast — a simply designed symbol font for all seasons.

News

Partly steamy, but still a great weekend to grill some links:

• Paul Robert Lloyd has released Bradshaw’s Guide, “based on the 1866 edition of George Bradshaw’s handbook for tourists using Britain’s nascent railway network.”
• Tiffany Wardle de Sousa and Shelley Gruendler discuss type lock-up aesthetic.
• Jordan Moore discusses “Fallback Fonts on Mobile Devices” and created a mobile system font incompatibility table to go along with it.
• [Cue classic movie preview voice] “In a world … where bookstores are no more”: watch The Last Bookshop.
• Not safe for work but worth your time: The Kama Sutra Project, an erotic conceptual alphabet, with each letter available as a limited-edititon print. The alphabet’s creator, Malika Favre, is interviewed by Glenn Garriock for FormFiftyFive.
• Safe for work — safe for kids, even! — is this whimsical Creature Alphabet from Cuddlefish Press.
• Kent Anderson interviews Michael Bierut about type and communication.
• This is an impressive hand-painted saw by Zachary Smith.
• The Starshaped Press shows off work made with typefaces from the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry.
• Sean Mitchell shares a bunch of beautiful typefaces released last month.
• If you missed TYPO San Francisco, you can still watch some of the talks. Or at least check out some of Bernie Quah’s sketchnotes.

Events

Now that we’re done reviewing what is and was, let’s take a look at what is yet to come:

• Through April 27, at the Ginza Graphic Gallery, check out the Tokyo TDC Award 2013 exhibition.
• Yves Peters previews the Kerning typography conference, which takes place May 2–3 in Faenza, Italy.
• Attend Moving Type Festival review and symposium at the National Museum in Warsaw and the Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology, May 27–29.
• Text Support: A Library Exhibit About Paper runs through June at the libraries of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
• Coming in September: Keith Houston’s Shady Characters book!

Brisk

And with that, this week’s breezy jaunt through news and new type comes to an end. Is our forecasting model off? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for finding all the finds.

New Type

Aethereal calligraphic strokes and nuanced motion come together in Maximiliano Sproviero’s Bird Script — his latest handiwork for Lián Types. There’s a subtle rhythm whispering throughout the loose — but absolutely controlled — hand-drawn forms and swashes. Two breezy weights include an assortment of multi-glyph ligatures, flowing alternates, and stylistically appropriate ornaments.

One more time for effect. Jeremy Dooley has managed to find something else to explore amidst his already voluminous Aviano überfamily. Aviano Sans Layers consists of no less than 21 styles of inline, outline, dimensional, and textural options that can be mixed, matched, and layered (naturally) into all manner of marquee-esque headlines.

Following up on Mission Script — his other San Francisco–flavoured face — James T. Edmondson collaborated with Brooklyn’s Trevor Baum on the nostalgic Mission Gothic. Inspired by the hand-painted signs scattered throughout the city’s Mission District, this five weight sans features an intriguing backstory and a set of italics matching the angularity of its cousin script.

We don’t often feature vector format fonts, but we simply couldn’t resist this huggibly hirsute handset by Thailand’s Ukkrid “Lambda” Tosak. Created exclusively for YouWorkForThem, YWFT Lotes is a charming, chubby cartoon character of a face that “came from an egg that Dr. Seuss laid and Terry Gilliam hatched.”

Still legible after all these years … more so, even. Adrian Frutiger’s eponymous humanist sans gets an upgrade from Linotype, specifically complying with a new German DIN standard for public signage systems. Neue Frutiger 1450 provides the correct character proportions, line thickness, and letter spacing required for adherence to the standard, along with modified versions of the ‘0’ and ‘1’ and lowercase ‘l’ — characters which are often confused because of their similarity to other characters.

Something from the orchard this way comes. Linotype paints the town a fresh shade of Fruitygreen with an “idiosyncratic but appealing” display face by Indonesia’s Andi AW. Masry. This three weight display family is an interesting combination of organic brush lettering, calligraphic flow, and unconventional “fructiform” details. Each style includes true italics, swash capitals, and a set of distinctive ligatures.

Hannes von Döhren’s Mikado is a casual sans family that covers a bouncy seven weight range — from light to ultra. With its tight, headline-savvy letterspacing and loose, sign-painterly approachability, we can see why von Döhren describes it as face “for kids, games, and ice cream.” A nicely detailed set of italics and pan-European language support is icing on the cake.

If wishes were scripts, perhaps Wishes Script would grant them. Designed by Sabrina Mariela Lopez as a multifunctional script system, a trio of light-hearted, modulated faces include dozens of spirited OpenType alternates, swashes, endings, and ligatures. As if that wasn’t enough, Lopez has also provided both display and “text” variations of each weight, matching Roman titling capitals, plus an impressive number of calligraphic ornaments, frames, and other typographic accoutrements.

News

Let’s move on from wishing to a long line of links!

• Improve your online typography by experimenting with Tommi Kaikkonen’s Interactive Guide to Blog Typography.
• You may have heard of Daily Drop Cap; meet the Macclesfield Alphabet Book, 500 years its senior — and help solve a manuscript mystery in the process!
• Billy Whited identifies “Three Exemplary Typefaces for User Interfaces.”
• Over on TypeDrawers, Jan Schmoeger instigates a lively discussion on removing junk from character sets.
• The third and final installment of LetterCult’s best custom letters of 2012 is out. You can also also read all three installments at once.
• Matt Stevens “explodes” a popular technology.
• John Berry examines the work of Ivan Federov.
• Make your writing less mephitine with this list of animal adjectives.
• John Pavlus praises JAF Facit Web as “a massage chair for your eyeballs.”
• Erik Spiekermann teases us with a new typeface.
• Imagine a geometrically-constructed Fraktur.
• Ulrich Planer is “a passionate typography hunter.”
• Eye magazine interviews Dan Rhatigan.
• Gestalten.tv interviews Jessica Hische.
• Typecast interviews Steve Matteson.
• “How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?”
• John Nack shares some of Aaron Draplin’s favorite signs.
• Get your hands on Letter Fountain’s Calypso PF (and learn about how they made it).
• If you’re too cheap to license certain typefaces for the web, here are rough equivalents from Google’s free webfont service (apparently there’s a shortage of apostrophes).
• Amperbranch prints are still available.
• Julius Hui considers the 2-Lines English Egyptian by William Caslon IV.
• Dalton Maag is hiring.
• Collaboratively-designed typefaces? Fontyou.
• Need another round-up of new typefaces? Head over to I Love Typography for the latest “This Week in Fonts.”
• Enjoy a new number for each day of the year.
• The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum has joined Instagram.
• You can get the Talking Types podcast on iTunes.
• TYPO San Francisco has wrapped for this year. See what you missed!
• One of these signs is not like the others …

Scheduling

There’s a lot going on; try not to get overwhelmed:

• On April 18, log on for a seminar with Richard Rutter on typography in responsive design.
• Learn about Cyrillic type design in a workshop with Alexei Vanyashin, April 20–21, in Berlin.
• Brace yourselves, 8 Faces #6 is coming.
• On May 7, Paul Shaw leads a type walk through Tribeca.
• As a part of TYPO Berlin, on May 17 the FontFont TypeBoard inaugurates the FontFont TypeReview.
• Get your tickets for Beyond Tellerand, which takes place May 27–28 in Düsseldorf.
• Apply for the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique — the deadline is May 31.
• Ampersand 2013 takes place on June 28 in Brighton.

Shantih

That’s it for this week — don’t be cruel, and see you soon.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for another great week of new type!

New Type

Embracing all manner of parameter, Typonine’s Audree doesn’t suffer from multiple personalities — it embodies them. With the help of Marko Hrastovec, designer Nikola Djurek has produced a bogglingly flexible type system consisting of no less than fifteen serif styles, two “construction models”, high and low contrast forms, plus user-selectable options for stencil and inline variations. Using Typonine’s Audree App, you’re able to adjust and tweak to your heart’s content — producing just the right permutation. And how can you possibly go wrong with vintage blinkenlights, toggleswitchings, and clickybuttons promoting your absurdly configurable typeface? You can’t.

Rolling out yet another digital update from it’s seemingly endless inventory, the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry has just released HWT Republic Gothic — one the last original wood type designs to be manufactured in Two Rivers. This modified sans serif, with brush-lettering bones and signpainterly naïveté, sports solid and (rather beefy) outline styles designed to be used as a two-colour chromatic set.

Accompanying the aforementioned headline face is Hamilton’s HWT Star Ornaments — a font that pretty much describes exactly what it is. Nearly 100 variations on the five point motif, a smattering of other stylistically suitable symbols, and two sets of configurable border elements — with updated “connection options” — provide plenty of peripheral possibilities.

The nicely balanced Quant in the latest from Dieter Hofrichter’s eponymous Hoftype foundry. Contrasted and clean across a quartet of weights, Quant is classically structured without feeling stuffy. Graceful italics, sensible small caps, multiple figure sets, and extended language support are all part of the package. By the way, the light weight is free.

We completely understand the tendancy to scoff at deliberately labelled discount products. But every once in a while we stumble across a low-cost gem that deserves some attention. Claus Grünstäudl’s Tau is a deceptively simple, two weight sans that contains some attractive details that belie its Ten Dollar Fonts home. Yes, the character sets are minimal and the metrics could use some love, but it’s things like Grünstäudl’s intriguing lowercase-only, hybrid italic “serif” style that have us looking forward to more.

João Henrique Lopes refers to Lucca as “a lovely humanist sans” … and it’s hard to argue with such a forthright assertion. Regular, bold, and italic styles are enriched with classic Italian Renaissance flavours. Each is accompanied by small cap versions, a handful of tasteful alternates, and thorough pan-European language support.

It’s always a treat when a new typeface appears in the Emigre quiver and this week provided a very tasty morsel. Zuzana Licko’s Program is billed as the “type designer's typeface” … featuring elements that are close to the heart of designers and typographers alike. Rounded elements and ink trap allusions remind us of the deteriorative effects of traditional printing and production techniques, whereas brush-influenced details bring out a humanist and craftsman-worthy warmth.

To wrap up this week’s new type, Typofonderie presents Mislab — Xavier Dupré’s continuing exploration of his “slab crush”. This time around, Dupré has produced a clearly slab family that features a number of sans (or “missing” serif) attributes throughout its voluminous range. Covering 32 styles and three widths, Mislab combines strength with a bright legibility.

News

No fooling: we have a metric ton of links for you this week.

• Tina Essmaker interviews Louise Fili for The Great Discontent.
• Dan Reynolds and Christoph Koeberlin share the rescue of Axel Bertram’s Videtur.
• “There is hope in a comma.”
• Vicente Lamónaca’s Tipografía Latinoamericana features a collection of of forty Latin American designers, typographers, researchers, and educators narrating their experiences, reflections, process, and results. (This is a big deal.)
• Neenah Paper has launched “The Beauty of Letterpress,” whose goal should be self-evident — but the site is also a way to support the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
• Rembert Browne laments the demise of the sitcom logos of the 1990s.
• Nick Sherman asserts that responsive typography should be a physical discipline.
• Conor Muirhead reveals how to combine icon font characters on the web to create some impressive complex icons.
• Justin Knopp shows off some type specimens from the Vincent Figgins Type Foundry.
• Enjoy part two of LetterCult’s best custom letters of 2012.
• And congratulations to this year’s TDC Typeface Design winners!
• Watch out for these over-the-top letters.
• David Sudweeks shows off the pairing of Malabar and Versa Sans.
• Ponder some “serendipitous poetry from The New York Times.” (And then find out how it works.)
• Happy fifth birthday to FontStruct!
• It sounds like the Adobe workshop at Typofonderie was a success.
• Glory goes to Elena for winning this year’s “March Madness” competition.
• Best wishes to André Mora on his next adventure.
• If you like hinting and have some free time, get in touch with James Puckett of Dunwich Type.
• Take a gander at the changing faces of David Bowie.
• Monotype has released a series of eText fonts to “provide quality e-reading experiences.” eGoody!
• Caitlin Dempsey looks at the typography of National Geographic maps.
• Many Indian scripts are fading away thanks to poorly designed digital versions.
• Even Sam Clemens enjoyed type.
• TypographyShop has announced the George Lois Poster Project and unveiled the first poster, “Work Is Worship,” by Massimo Vignelli.
• If I used a skateboard, I’d probably want one of these.
• I also kinda covet Helveticat. So cute!
• What could be better than Ed Benguiat and Pam Grier?
• Adobe has released some impressive new type specimens (that are unfortunately only available as PDFs).
• Nick Sherman traveled to São Paulo for the Tipocracia conference — and took some fine photos.
• If you have some cash lying around and know Swedish, you might want this signed first edition specimen of Berling Antikva.
• See what happens when code and type converge.
• Create erasures on the web using the erase_mark bookmarklet.

Fake News

So, April 1 happened this week, too. Some clever folks in the type world participated:

• David Sudweeks showed how to add flair to Word documents.
• Neil Summerour released Hobo Grunge.
• P22 announced that it will only be releasing typefaces in two formats.
• FontShop published a very special newsletter and announced that Frederic Goudy would speak at TYPO San Francisco.
• Yves Peters had fun with his “My Type of Music” series.
• This unicorn typeface is all too real.

Events

From the fake back to the real — and in some cases, the really soon:

• If you can, try to catch The National Poster Retrospectus, on tour now.
• Join José Scaglione as he discusses how to understand and analyze type on April 11 in Barcelona.
• Yves Peters has additional information on the TYPO SF Type Track on April 12.
• Apply for Open Set 2013, an intensive series of workshops August 19–31 in Breda, The Netherlands. The application deadline is June 15.
• Design Werkstatt has a new workshop on Tactile Systems with Lupi Asensio and Martin Lorenz — May 13–15 in Berlin. (There’s a discount if you’re going to be at TYPO Berlin.)

That’s it for this week.

Did we miss anything incredible (or incredibly silly)? Let us know in the comments.

We’ll leave you with this decidedly not safe for work Russian erotic alphabet book. Have a great week!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for making this week’s new type plausible, er, possible.

New Type

Rodrigo Saiani’s Guanabara Sans is only the third release from Plau (the foundry formerly known as Niramekko), and a very sophisticated one at that. Orginally designed as a personable wayfinding face fitting the flavour (and winding streets) of Rio de Janeiro, this flexible “typeface from Ipanema” sports eight weights of distinctive details, calligraphic flourishes, and fresh-faced italics.

Unexpected angles and notches, asymmetrical serifs, and intentionally “broken” strokes give Mateusz Machalski’s Korpo Serif an atypical feel when compared to other Egyptian-esque slabs. Two weights of low contrast, deliberately constructed forms are supported by italic, alternate, and small cap’d variations.

The prolific pen of young Swedish designer Måns Grebäck has produced yet another bouncy, brush script. With “headline” written all over it, Remachine Script is loose, lively, and literally popping with exaggerated cap action.

Did you see that? It was a complete specimen of Adobe Blank, a typeface designed to cover all Unicode points — with each point rendered by a non-spacing and non-marking glyph. Wait, what? We had the same reaction — so we’ll let Ken Lunde explain why Adobe Blank is useful.

News

From real insubstantiality to items of substance we go:

• Mark Simonson reveals the origin of Proxima Nova. Search your feelings: you know it to be true.
• John Berry wrote “Unbound Pages” for The Magazine. (He also discusses The Magazine itself on his blog.)
• Visit Casa do Conto and enjoy letters embedded in concrete.
• Read it and weep: an OurType email conversation with a customer.
• Part one of LetterCult’s best custom letters of 2012 is out. (You’re welcome!)
• The Herald Times Reporter reports on the relocation of the Hamilton Wood Type & Print Museum. (While we’re on the subject of the Hamilton, the museum could still use your support.)
• Matthew Young reviews Codex 2.
• Maykel Loomans reveals a different way to create pullquotes on the web.
• Stewart Curry shares what he has learned dealing with type on ePub, Mobi, and the web.
• Billy Whited explains some of the considerations that go into “Setting Type for User Interfaces.”
• See what Sean Mitchell has stumbled upon in the latest installation of “This Week in Fonts.”
• In a web “reprint” of an article in Emigre 18, Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum ask, “Is Best Really Better”?
• Hannes Famira explores what happens when two typefaces have the same name.
• Set aside 12 minutes and watch “The Film Before the Film,” an exploration of the history of opening movie titles.
• 52faces is Jack Clarke’s attempt to create a new typeface each week of the year.
• Check out the construction at 24 Georgia Street.
• Bruno Maag advocates for better design education.
• Trevor Baum discusses the origins of his Mission Gothic typeface.
• Set aside a few hours and immerse yourself in the Flickr photostream of the Penn Provenance Project.
• Coverjunkie has quite the collection of typographic magazine covers.
• Meet Type-Ø-Tones in the latest Creative Characters.
• Triangle Man wins in David MacKenzie’s “Word Frequencies in They Might Be Giants Lyrics.”
• David Sudweeks shows us how to use InDesign’s tabs and nested styles.
• Yves Peters and any other movie poster buffs out there will get a kick out of Adrian Curry’s Movie Poster of the Day.
• Aha! Neko Font: most lucky happy font cat.
• This third-party font bug in Word for Mac is all kinds of sad.
• “What Is the Business of Literature?”

Events

Make some of these time-sensitive items your business:

• Minneapolis-based Chowgirls Killer Catering presents “a unique, hands-on food and font experience” with Chank Diesel on April 1 — for serious.
• Dado Queiroz examines the development of lettering design in “False Volumes, Real Letters,” April 4 at the Type Directors Club in New York.
• On April 8, Peter Biľak speaks on “Depth & Width” as a part of the Emily Carr Speaker Series in Vancouver, BC.
• You have until May 8 to back the Sigmund Freud typeface project on Kickstarter.
• Enter your work in the Canberra Centenary Typeface Design Competition: the deadline is July 14.

Valete

We’ll be back next week. Until then: be excellent to each other.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for unearthing some great new type!

New Type

Angling for some new type? Type Together’s largest family just doubled in size (and usefulness) with the addition of a complete set of obliques. Tablet Gothic Oblique adds six widths worth of slanted companions to Veronika Burian and José Scaglione’s sturdy, grotesque sans — now consisting of seven dozen individual styles.

Inspired by a handful of characters spotted in a vintage pajama advertisement (you can’t make these things up), Harold’s Fonts has pulled out a pair of textural inline headliners. The smooth as silk Penstripe and its sketchier Pencilstripe cousin both feature five lanes of funky linear strokage — in a trio of weights.

David James and Gareth Hague have been busy finishing up several new releases for their Alias foundry. Noah Text and Noah Bold feature sharp angles and connections reminiscent of incised forms, brushed with just a touch of modernized blackletter. Three styles of each weight include a unicase variation, as well as something called “upper lower” — where the traditional uppercase has been replaced with stretched and modified lowercase characters.

Also out the Alias shop are two takes on minimalist stencils. The serif stylings of Grist are constructed (and implied) through the subtle placement of circles, simplified stems, and other “curvaceous, dramatic shapes.”

Glue is a companion design to Grist, abstracting the already stark forms into even simpler and more graphic components. Both stencils feature several alternate characters that can be easily accessed by changing case.

Canada Type’s Patrick Griffin has again done a bang up job reinvigorating the once film-bound faces of the Filmotype collection. Filmotype Keynote is a bold, mid-century advertising face — substantially updated with extended language support, alternates, and handy OpenType goodness.

The informal, monolinear appearance of Filmotype LaCrosse comes from the world of luxury goods and high-end catalogues. Once again, the casual 1950s aesthetic has been amped up with a significant set of alternates, contextual ending characters, and “flawless” ligatures.

The latest face from Argentina’s Sudtipos foundry has been described as “Pretty, edgy, and pretty edgy.” Heráldica Script is easily one of the most expressive and ornamented scripts produced by the typographic tag team of Angel Koziupa and Alejandro Paul. Contrasting and “conjoined” calligraphic strokes provide an engraved flavour. The flourishes and swashes take it right over the top.

News

After such a glowing batch of reviews, there’s only one way to begin this week’s round of type-related links:

• Brighten your evenings by reading about a New York lit by gaslight signs.
• You know “Responsive Design” has made the big-time when it appears in Wired — and author Paul McKeever advocates beginning with type.
• Matt Griffin explores different type sizing for different screen sizes.
• Roman Rudenko reveals other uses for the CSS root em unit than font size.
• Mark Simonson found this lovely 1957 brochure for the creepy-looking Vari-Typer Model 160.
• J.M. Mosley looks at fragments of engraved slate headstones.
• This is a promising beginning to an illustrated alphabet of rock bands.
• Nick Sherman presents highlights from a 1979 book showing Cyrillic versions of popular typefaces, including Hobo, Mistral, and Signal.
• Janine Vangool documents the kerning of Canada … er, Can ada … um, Canad a.
• Bitmapped blackletter works better than you might think.
• Hubert Jocham has a lovely redesigned website.
• Creative Bloq compiled their list of “the top 25 movie posters of all time.” Of all time!
• While we’re on the topic of movie posters, be sure to check out Yves Peters’ most recent “ScreenFonts.”
• Get inspired with Typespire.
• Ronit Bigal calligraphically covers her models with quotes from the Bible.
• Incrementally resize type in InDesign thanks to a handy plugin from LettError.
• Buy a copy of Worn Gothic, and you could win a painting.
• Get another fix of new type with the latest issue of “This Week in Fonts.”
• MPQD features artwork comprised of iOS icons and strategic letter- and word-placement.
• Jon Parker shows that C.S. “Hotes” Houghtaling knew his stuff.
• Who wouldn’t like a neat Scotch-inspired typeface?

Events

Write these down before the lights go out:

• Enroll by March 30 to study type design at the Siena Art Insititute in Italy, June 15–28.
• Get in on the TYPO San Francisco “Type Track,” April 11.
• Help fund Nancy Sharon Collins’ west coast book tour on Kickstarter; you have until April 13.
• On April 18 travel through the vast series of tubes on the internet to learn about typography in responsive web design with Richard Rutter.
• The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz has an open call for type through May 5. Participation is free, and winners will be presented as a part of the “Call for Type” exhibition, June 6 – September 8.
• Pae White’s Too Much Night, Again features words made from 48 kilometers of string and is at the South London Gallery through May 12.

Whoosh

And with that, it’s time to put out the light and put out the light. Have a great (and not at all ominous) week!

Thanks, Grant for guiding us through type (previously) unknown!

Bread and butter type

The experimental nature of Felix Braden’s Rollmops throws buckets of water in the face of traditional handwritten (or constructed) scripts. Playing with the concept of a strip of paper that has been folded to create a continuous series of characters, this heavily stylized display face gives a sharp, linear twist to common calligraphic principals.

Viktoriya Grabowska’s lively lettering can be found alive and well in a pair of recent releases through Sorkin Type and the Google Web Fonts juggernaut. Fruktur mixes an upright, blackletter-esque structure with some playfully modulated — almost cartoonish — strokes.

The second fresh number from Grabowska is the energetically named Kavoon — a single weight experimental display face. Although it shares the same lighthearted “brushiness” and condensed stance as Fruktur, it definitely crossed over from the serif side of the street.

Also showing up in the Google showroom this week was Eben Sorkin’s latest extension to his extremely readable and screen-savvy Merriweather family. More than two years after announcing the original project and releasing the inaugural Roman style, Merriweather Sans adds four low-contrast, comfortable text weights.

Chilean newcomer Paty Bean presents Handy Cut — a spontaneous and charming display type based on hand-torn paper. The design is childlike, naïve, and full of typographic whimsy — including dozens of alternates and a set of matching dingbats.

Kicking out some serious headline jam, Rui Abreu’s Azo Sans Uber is the newest addition to his popular geometric family. Featuring exaggerated optical adjustments and a handful of “flary” alternates, this beefy single weight adds quite a bass-line to the baseline.

Wrapping up this week’s new type is Steven Bonner’s Langdon. Commissioned as a free download for one of his client’s customers, this straight-up, condensed industrial sans comes with a limited, but flexible contingent of characters. Solid and shadow variations of the uppercase and numerals are accompanied by a basic set of punctuation and other glyphs — sporting several unique details.

Brined news

These links will keep longer when heavily salted. Trust us, you’ll need that extra preserving power.

• Behold, from Typographica: “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2012.” Go on, read about some great type — just come back when you’re done. (See you in a few weeks.)
• Stephen Coles has been busy, because he also took the time to uncover “The Other Times Modern” (now with the correct link).
• Tiffany Wardle de Sousa and Dr Shelley Gruendler kick off a grand discussion on “Modern Type Trends.”
• Gerry Leonidas charts the explosion of typographic awareness and its future.
• Mark Simonson is on a tear. He uncovered a 40-year-old issue of Industrial Art Methods. And check out the original artwork for his Felt Tip Roman typeface. Please keep sharing, Mark!
• Peter Biľak discusses bookbinding methods.
• Brian Suda declares this “The Era of Symbol Fonts.”
• And — conveniently — Symbolset now offers hosting.
• Take note: Eric Meyer has learned that “in Windows, Helvetica is not Helvetica: it’s Arial.”
• Firefox now makes it easier to inspect webfonts.
• Meanwhile, the “compatibility modes” in Internet Explorer 9 and 10 lie about webfont rendering.
• Do you use RoboFont? Give yourself to-do items directly in the app!
• Glory be, Marian Bantjes has prints for sale.
• Mario Livio explores the origins of the symbols for plus and minus.
• Fresh from House Industries: the Photolettering iOS app.
• Christopher Murphy and Chris Shiflett have created Glyph, a “tiny tome on typography” for Little Printer. A mobile version is forthcoming.
• Decide for yourself whether “Everything is beautiful in Bodoni.”
• Letters and signs dance in Husbands’ “Dream.”
• Ampergram seems like a fun way to spell things with Instagram photos. (They could make it more obvious for people to retrieve their own creations, however.)
• Mark Boulton considers (in)visible type.
• Kai Brach, founder of Offscreen magazine, is the guest on the latest episode of Talking Types.
• Riccardo Olocco reviews “Compulsive Bodoni.”
• Read Indra Kupferschmid on discounts.
• Baseline magazine can be had at a discount (ahem).
• Monotype has announced its fourth quarter and full 2012 results. “Creative Professionals” account for 25% of sales.
• Learn about the “Making of Franziska.” (Also available in English.)
• Among the lousy webtrends making a comeback: images-as-text and tiny type (the list itself suffers from the latter problem). Come on, people!
• See which typefaces were used on posters for Oscar-winning movies.
• “Can anyone design type?”
• Learn to create logos from type.
• Erik van Blokland and Paul van der Laan will again offer their Type Cooker workshop at TYPO Berlin.
• If you’re smart, you’ll apply for this summer internship at Typefounding.
• What an impressive collection of beer coasters, just in time for St. Patrick’s day!
• Tyler Etters designed his UTF-8 tattoo in BBEdit. His UTF-8 tattoo. In BBEdit.
• Finally, have your mind potentially blown by Zach Whalen’s “Videogame Typography and Its Antecedents.”

Dill events

A special delivery from the scheduling stork!

• Kerning, an international conference on typography, takes place May 2–3 in Faenza, Italy.
• Then make haste across the Atlantic for Pencil to Pixel, an exhibition of work for Monotype in New York, May 3–9.
• While you’re in New York, learn about web typography with a crash course on May 4.
• Meander back east to Cardiff for HybridConf, August 14–16.

Gherkin you later!

Wait, what?

We’re done for this week. Until next time, have fun chasing grasshoppers out of Finland.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for all his type-canning this week!

Type

Best. Five. Ever. Clement Numbers is Pablo Impallari’s revival of some handsomely expressive, 19th century “French” numerals originally produced by the Fonderie Clement. This tidy handful of digits won’t leave you hanging — basic puncutation and math symbols are also included.

For such an aggressively named face, the latest release from Berlin’s Type Department sports a sedate charm. Crocodile Brokenscript combines multiple historical influences and typographic elements into a modernized, handwritten blackletter. Adding to this face’s distinctiveness — and versatility — are the inclusion of old style figures and small caps.

The newest confection from Fenotype is Emil Karl Bertell’s Bonbon — a tasty, condensed script in three weights. Deliciously flexible, each style provides at least four glyph variations for each primary character, including swash and titling alternates, plus a set of bouncy small caps.

We’ll admit that we love the optic dazzle of “neon” typefaces. And why settle for a geometric triline when Stereotypes’ Prism pulls off some seriously sexy, four-lane action inspired by Prisma — Rudolf Koch’s inline display version of Kabel. For graphic impact and colour, each of the ten weights in the range — from extra light through black — share the same proportions and widths.

Ramiro Espinoza’s Medusa pays homage to the masterful work of 19th century Spanish calligrapher, Ramón Stirling. Drawn with sensitivity to the source, the swash capitals are wonderfully ornate, but delicately balanced. The face avoids the common “artificial” practice of connecting roundhand forms in the middle of each glyph, instead creating a more realistic baseline flow. An unexpected set of serif’d small caps is also included, along with numerous “modular” swashes and cartouches. Summing up what makes Medusa work so well, Nick Shinn expounds, “It’s good to see [Espinoza’s] own historically informed penmanship expressed in these letters and flourishes, providing a rare degree of authenticity.” We’d have to agree.

In the midst of relocating their massive working museum in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry is still managing to crank out an impressive number of revivals. The first of three new releases is HWT Arabesque, an eccentrically organic (and arguably groovy) Art Nouveau headliner.

Next out of the Hamilton chute is a mid-century script originally designed for the Morgan Sign Machine Company. HWT Bon Air features exaggerated contrast, playfully odd forms, and a somewhat “exotic” feel. A number of alternates and ligatures supply just enough variation (and personable quirkiness) to simulate a signpainter’s whimsy.

“Words to punctuate wood type inspired layouts.” That’s how the folks at Hamilton describe the decorative typographic add-ons in their HWT Catchwords collection. This eclectic set of preformatted words, phrases, and abbreviations sports a variety of 19th and early 20th century vernacular styles and treatments.

News

Say good-bye to some time; several of this week’s links are truly engrossing.

• If our weekly round-up of new typefaces isn’t satisfying on its own, you might want to check out Sean Mitchell’s new “This Week in Fonts,” over at I Love Typography.
• Mark Simonson has a lovely new website.
• David Sudweeks continues his quest to justify type; be sure to read the lively discussion in the comments.
• Enjoy a random Font Bureau glyph each day, courtesy David Jonathan Ross.
• Linotype is now Monotype.
• Jessica Hische shares how to create quotes, dashes, and accents on a Mac.
• Learn “how emoji conquered the world.”
• Do you wonder about Unicode private-use characters, noncharacters, and sentinels? You’re apparently not alone!
• Use Fontastic and Processing to create fonts.
• Faythe Levine and Sam Macon have released a trailer for the Sign Painters documentary.
• Tampa Press has published Richard Hopkins’ Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting.
• Who knew that an interrobang could be so delicious‽
• Thanks to signs with the wrong typeface, thousands of speeding convictions may be overturned.
• The folks at Typofonderie review several recent books that amplify their content.
• Stephen Coles has updated his list of typography as furniture.
• It looks like the Vatican sent Pope Benedict XVI out in style.

Headings

Deadlines approach. Command?

• View this year’s Film Design Awards finalists, which will also be screened on March 11 at South by Southwest.
• March 15 is the deadline for programming submissions for TypeCon2013: Portl&.
• Head to São Paulo, March 19–25, for TPC10.
• Get tickets for Ampersand NYC, which takes place November 2.

Are fun

Another week blew by. See you again before we know it!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing us this week in fonts. ;)