Type News: 25% Invisible
This week: three type specimens for the middle of the Triduum, another unseen — and more good news and events than we can handle. Let’s get right to it, shall we?
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!
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