Type News: Cheeziwyg
Get your crackers and a knife, we’re spreading it thick this week.
New Type
Sounding like the name of someone who performs stand up in eastern Europe, Andi Masry’s Coomeec is the first of two new (and rather comically named) typefaces from Linotype. This brush-influenced display script is energetic, but thoroughly readable — at both headline and text sizes — and provides quite a bit of unexpected glyphic texture amidst the characters. Regular, bold, and italic styles are outfitted with an abundance of alternate forms, lively swash capitals, plus oldstyle and lining figures.
Designer George Ryan describes his Koorkin as “a calligraphic typeface through and through.” However, it’s much easier to imagine this bouncy handwritten face as a replacement for the ubiquitous Comic Sans — instead of something sprung from the calligrapher’s quill. This tidy family features two weights of fresh-faced, friendly, and felt-tipped casualness — including italic variations and a extended set of handy, double character ligatures.
You’d be hard pressed to find a more accurate typeface name than Valery Zaveryaev’s Wide Display — it’s just that — and a bit more. A unicase, extended slab family sporting four weights, multiple alternates, plus an array of layerable variations including shadow, dimensional, and some snappy-looking “ribbon” styles.
The latest addition to Ulrike Wilhelm’s delightfully monolinear LiebeFonts series is a welcome italic companion to LiebeErika and LiebeOrnaments. The sweet and swashy LiebeKlara is filled with tasty ligatures and alternates, sharing the same economical footprint as her upright sister.
Type Supply’s Tal Leming admits to being fascinated by a certain “sans serif, high contrast, geometric style of lettering”. His Timonium family is the result of that lengthy fascination — familiar and straightforward in design, yet still maintaining an “un-generic” edge. The family’s five powerful weights cruise from light to ultra and include both small caps and “really aggressive” italics.
Ramiro Espinoza takes an deep, appreciative look at the “extreme” end of Spanish baroque calligraphy with the gloriously flourished Dulcinea. According to Espinoza, this is a contemporary revisiting — not a revival — featuring copious ligatures and alternates, complex swashes, and a somewhat aloof attitude. A stark contrast to uniformity and angular shapes found in the cancellaresca style of scripts from the same period.
Now See Here
From ligatures and calligraphy and sentences about letters — to links and writing, beginning with a few letters about sentences:
- Verlyn Klinkenborg demystifies the origin of sentences.
- Yves Peters reviews Tipos Latinos 2012.
- John Gruber discusses the aesthetics of screen type and retina displays and converses about the same topic with Michael Lopp.
- Christopher Slye looks forward to the day when we only need to practice “good typography with good typefaces.”
- Dan Mall has an interesting approach to responsive line breaks.
- Meet Singularity, a new responsive grid system.
- WebINK has a redesigned website — and a new WordPress plugin.
- Typekit has improved the performance of its service.
- TYPO is available as an iPad app.
- Gerry Leonidas has posted his TypeCon workshop slides, “Redefining Typographic Teaching for Shiny Places.”
- This is a lovely ampersand table.
- As are these four typographic maps.
- Is there a day that goes by without our needing to think about wayfinding? Consider this new proposal for US road signs.
- March 7–9: head to the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati for Typography Day 2013.
TTFNBBQ
Some day I’ll get this whole “work on the news when you have internet access” thing figured out. YEAH RIGHT. See you next time!
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for his always-timely showcase of new type!
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