Type News: Casey at the Bracket
There may be no joy in Mudville, but we’ve got plenty to spare in our latest round-up of news and 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 does
n’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!
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