Type News: Carriage Return
This week we share the spotlight with NASA’s last space shuttle mission. Apparently there’s a wedding today, too.
Let’s begin with news related to the joyous union of type and the web. Imagine that there’s a typeface available from Google’s webfont service whose ampersand you can’t live without; now you can generate a version of the webfont that contains only that character, thanks to Google’s on-the-fly font subsetting. But be careful to examine how that character renders in pre-DirectWrite rendering systems for Windows; if the hinting’s off, you might want to call the whole thing off. Ross Mills explores the state of webfont quality — and his post (and the comments) have some excellent thoughts on the topic. If you’re curious about what’s available through Webtype, you’re free to explore your options more thoroughly, through the service’s handy new Font Swapper. About that wedding in the lede: Fontdeck celebrates the latest royal marriage by showcasing British type.
And now: from familiar faces to the brand new!
Before ploughing into the bulk of the brand new, let’s take a quick look at a couple of supplements.
Rodrigo Saiani has added a thin weight to Plau, his recent sans face. Plau Thin retains the comfortable, rounded forms and generous letterspacing of its bolder brother — yet speaks with a much softer voice.
Ginza Narrow is not just a spatially economical version of Neil Summerour’s already sparse Ginza. The freshly condensed family has also been topped up with Cyrillic localization.
Revisiting yet another recent news item, Matt Braun and Matt Griffin are giving away a taste of type from their letterpress-themed Kickstarter project. Fatboy Husky is the first of ten digitally reconditioned designs that Matt² are planning to release. This extended Egyptian has even spawned its own Dribbble playoff with dozens of examples of Fatboy in use.
There’s more than a passing resemblance to mid-century display scripts in Damion, one of a pair of notable newbies from the Google Web Fonts directory. Vernon Adams channels some classic Max Kaufmann, tipping his topper to the bold, brush script style while still managing to add a few original forms along the way.
Also from the Google this week is Astigmatic’s Aclonica. (We dare you to say that five times, fast.) Brian J. Bonislawsky describes Aclonica as having “a slight deco/techno essence” — something which is emanating from a arguably humanist substrate.
Edgar Walthert’s Agile grew out of his postgraduate exam project while attending TypeMedia in The Hague. For as peek into the design process that produced this lively, “organic” text family, Edgar has kindly posted the contents of his Agile sketchbook.
Kinney, a “friendly” and “neutral” serif family from Terminal Design and the tireless James Montalbano, is furnished with the standard complement of text friendly OpenType goodies. As is often the case, James’ description of his latest creation sparked a lively debate over at Typophile — “How can it be friendly and neutral?”
Named after her “super cute” nephew, Laura Worthington’s Liam is playful, bouncy, and packed with spontaneity by being equipped with ample contextual alternates and matching ornaments.
While it’s not commercially available, Copan is certainly worthy of mention this week. Created by UK design studio Julia for the “Born in Brazil” issue of Wallpaper magazine, Copan features strong geometry and two varieties of graduated shading.
And now for the rest of this week’s news:
- Congratulations to Erin McLaughlin, winner of the 2011 SoTA Catalyst Award, for her incredible Katari.
- The first issue of Codex is available for pre-order, and it looks lovely. Make sure to get your copy while you still can.
- Speling is hard, especially when you have options. James Mosely explores the spelling of Garamond.
- Paul Shaw discusses Louise Fili’s homage to New York’s subway signs.
- Leah Yin uncovers the etymology of calluna, coincidental namesake of Jos Buivenga’s lovely serif family.
- The London Design Museum is showing the work of Wim Crouwel.
- The typewriter is dead, long live the typewriter! India Real Time has the story.
- Help the WNY Book Arts Centre purchase a collection of dormant wood type and make it available to the community.
- Jean-François Porchez discusses some of the issues in converting PostScript to TrueType, with some great follow-up from Beat Stamm.
- John Berry reviews the play Futura.
- Apple released an update to fix those persnickety OpenType font problems that showed up in Snow Leopard.
- TypeCon2011 has issued a call for entries for the Handmade Design silent auction. The submission deadline is May 18; all proceeds will support the Greater New Orleans Foundation Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund.
That’s it for this week. Did we miss anything? Notice any post-launch errors? Blast away in the comments. (But please, no mooning!)
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson, who took time out from preparing for his Royal wedding party to bring us this week’s new type.
Comments are closed on this entry.
1.
Erik Vorhes Apr 29, 2011
Phooey, the shuttle launch has been postponed.