Type News: Capital Sharp
This week: a crisp, well-dressed trio of typefaces and an unruly amount of news — it’s a sans sans sans sans world.

Sofia Pro is Olivier Gourvat’s redesign and expansion of his rigidly geometric sans family, originally released in 2008. This year’s overhaul included a general sprucing up, the addition of case sensitive forms, proper small caps, alternates, and extended numerics, plus two more weights — added to the ends of the range.

According to Emigre, Zuzana Licko’s Mr Eaves XL Sans Narrow & Modern Narrow are the “final installments” in what was already an extensive (and intricately named) Eaves superfamily. These moderately slenderized versions of the humanist Sans and more geometric Modern both set tighter, while maintaining the comfortable readability of the x-heighten’d “XL” series.

Ralf Herrmann’s Wayfinding Sans has finally come to fruition after years of exhaustive field study and documentation. Much of Herrmann’s research process is chronicled in his article Designing the Ultimate Wayfinding Typeface — where it’s noted that he even developed his own Legibility Test Tool for the task. Although designed specifically for visual clarity in less than optimal circumstances, this twenty style family is also an impressive (and tidy) modern sans that can hold its own in situations well beyond signage.
If you’d kindly make your way over to the holding area — no, it’s this way, not that way — we have a number of news items that may interest you:
- Welcome, Stella Roberts Fonts!
- Jean François Porchez writes about Roger Excoffon and his place in French typographic history.
- Learn some more about pairing typefaces with Type Connection, by Aura Seltzer.
- Ilene Strizver takes a closer look at James Montalbano’s Insouciant.
- Nick Cox introduces us to Ambroise.
- “Love Hotels and Unicode” — need we say more?
- Paul Shaw interviews Michael Harvey.
- Ralf Hermann traces the adoption history of the Capital Sharp S and its evolution in the new Zehlendorfer Form.
- The Times of India profiles David Březina’s work on Gujarati script. (Also available in Czech!)
- Craig Mod writes about making Flipboard for iPhone.
- Check out the design evolution of railroad company logos.
- FontShop has a new Photoshop plugin that allows you to preview over 150,000 typefaces in your work.
- FontSlice seems like a peculiar, albeit innovative, approach to selling type.
- The same goes for Ten Dollar Fonts.
- This is f—d up.
- Jeannie Huang introduces us to Martzi Hegedűs’ Frustro.
- Typografie.info interviews Jürgen Huber and Martin Wenzel on their work in collaboration with MetaDesign for Germany’s Press and Information Office.
- What the world needs is more Lorem ipsum generators. Here are fourteen of them, in inconvenient “slideshow” form.
- Creative Characters interviews Nick Cooke.
- Yves Peters recounts his experience at SxSW Interactive 2012.
- Erik Spiekermann reviews The German Genius.
- Steven Heller shows us how to typeset a poster.
- It’s hard to argue with free, and if you need an animated typeface for your Adobe After Effects projects, Anodine might be for you.
- The Independent takes a look at type in London.
- Have a sneak peek at the first episode from typesetting.tv.
- Joe Newton’s Specimania! is back!
- Behold the miracle of Birth of a Book.
- And try not to be frightened by ABC Monsters.
- Hurry to House Industries if you want one of their nine new prints, each a limited edition of 33.
A few calendar items:
- Starting April 9, Alex White teaches The Provocative Life of Type: Unearthing Expressive Value — asynchronously!
- Head over to the TDC for Veronika Burian’s “4-Hand Typography,” on April 12.
- Also on April 12, sign up for a webinar on “Creating concept-driven, one-of-a-kind type solutions.”
- Make your way to Two Rivers, Wisconsin, on April 14 for a public workshop at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum.
- Then fly to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, for Schrift/Macht/Welten, May 4–5.
And that brings us to the end of another dapper and obstreperous week — and month! — of type news. Remember to back up your computers.
Thanks to the master of backing-up, Grant Hutchinson, for procuring this week’s new type!
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