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The only trap here is for your time, but trust us, it’s worth it.

New Type

Check your head … or at least check your headline as Hoefler & Frere-Jones present The New Tungstens. Their savvy, slim-build sans has expanded — but not horizontally — with an addition of three slenderized widths and four lighter weights.

Speaking of expansion packs, Eric Olson has popped out a set of headline companions for Process Type Foundry’s popular Klavika and Klavika Condensed series. Klavika Display clamps four tightly-spaced weights onto either end of the two existing families — from a “skeletal” thin to “extra stuffed” ultra black.

On the non-Latin end of the spectrum, Rosetta has released Skolar Gujarati — a multi-weight companion face to the pan-European and Devanagari flavours of David Březina’s flexible text family.

Typotheque keeps the typographic addenda coming with Irma Text Narrow. This is a slightly condensed version of Peter Biľak’s “generously” proportioned Irma Text, preserving the subtle balance of geometric structure and cursive-influenced charm. Like the other cousin collections in this growing superfamily, the slimmer version comes fully equipped with nine weights and accompanying italics.

Prague’s Suitcase Type Foundry decided to take a walk around the vicinity of its Tabac Sans family and slap a little serif across its humanistic face. Tomáš Brousil’s Tabac Slab is inherently linear with calligraphic details — but with the soul of an Egyptienne. Eight weights glide from hairline to black, complete with true italics and a boggling assortment of OpenType features.

Not one to rest on his glyphic laurels, Brousil also produced a set of fixed pitch fonts for the same family. Tabac Mono includes the same range of weights, broad language support, and typographic features as its slab’d and sans’d sisters.

Take this face and lock it. Photo-Lettering’s self-explanatory Swiss Interlock Stencil provides two styles of no-nonsense, condensed headline action — packed with some Benguiat-style interlocking behavior. The whole deal has been dusted off, buffed up, and brought up to digital speed by Christian Schwartz and Adam Cruz.

It can be argued that no one does “poetic” typefaces like Jovica Veljović. His latest design for Linotype is Agmena — a serif family created with a masterful calligrapher’s hand. The four weight family features finessed proportions, a generous x-height, and details that have been thoroughly sweated.

News

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

• Steven Heller provides more context about the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum’s situation. It’s not too late to help save the Hamilton.
• Take a peek at some of tomorrow’s typefaces today, straight from the latest type designs from the University of Reading.
• Mark McCormick illustrates the Dictionary.com word of the day.
• Sadaf Fareed discusses some techniques to optimize typography for responsive design.
• Dmitry Fadeyev pleads with us to stop “fixing” font smoothing on the web.
• Yow. If you’re going to write vitriolic anonymous comments, make sure they’re anonymous, OK?
• Yves Peters explains how typography predicted the US presidential election.
• Yves also makes this month’s ScreenFonts a double.
• David Sudweeks examines the Erbar a.
• Type Worship interviews Doug Wilson about Linotype: The Film.
• If you love Unicode, set aside a little more than 150 minutes and watch decodeunicode.
• Bill Gardner reviews some of the logo trends of 2012.
• Paul Dijstelberge and Amsterdam’s Boekwetenschap en Handschriftenkunde have quite the collection of images documenting the history of the book on Flickr.
• Relive typesetting from the 1970s.
• Policing one’s designs is hard work.

Events

The things, they are happening!

• Head to Pencil to Pixel, an exhibition of original work from Monotype runs November 19–23, in London. Eye magazine has more information.
• On November 22, make your way to Edmonton to hear Grant Hutchinson, Michelle McBride, and Gord Montgomery talk about their process and work.
• November 27 marks the inaugural Babel International Type Symposium, in Offenbach am Main, Germany.
• Chromeography is on exhibit at the Mota Italic Gallery in Berlin until December 22.

Stuff

We’re nearing a time of rampant consumerism. Who are we to dissuade you?

• Stephen Coles has written a book! — and it promises to be a good one. Grab a copy of The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces.
• Celebrate pixels while learning the alphabet with Bitblox.
• Hide your wallet, the Friends of Type have a shop.
• Peter Biľak’s latest project, Works that Work, begins publication in early 2013, but you can order the first issue today.

Thanks

All tarps and traps avoided? Good! See you next week.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing us this week’s new type and for helping me break the “Played Words” list in Letterpress.

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  1. Stephen Coles Nov 18, 2012

  This may be the best week of new fonts since Type News debuted. Not a stinker in the bunch.

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