Type News: Cold Gray
As winter winds sweep across the plains, let us warm ourselves with thoughts of webfonts, news, and bold new type!
Type on the web is all over the news this week. Fontdeck has put together an “Adfont Calendar,” with a different webfont being offered for free each day until Christmas. It’s also time for this year’s installment of 24 Ways, where Richard Rutter shares how to use the WebFont Loader to good effect. The winners of the Web Font Awards have been announced, and the Macaroni Brothers recently launched The Web Fonts Gallery, which promotes sites that use webfonts well. Meanwhile, Jon Tan celebrates the beauty of Armenian type on the web.
But all is not rosy with the use of @font-face. Stephen Coles exposes the primary weakness in the current crop of webfonts: poor rendering, especially for the many users of Windows XP. Many webfonts perform reasonably well, but it takes effort to find the best ones. If you’re a designer, a tool that might help you better understand the readability of your favorite webfonts is Crisp Text, a new, Mac-only extension for Google Chrome. But it’s no substitute for testing grayscale and ClearType antialiasing on an actual (or virtual) Win XP machine.
Well, that was a bit of a downer. Let’s brighten things up with some new type!
Dala Floda takes visual cues from Renaissance forms, but also incorporates more than one nod to the weathered lettering found on gravestones and shipping crates. Paul Barnes has produced a very elegant—and rather unexpected—stencil in the latest release from Commercial Type.
Richard Lipton has amped up Matthew Carter’s voluminous Miller family with headline-seizing style. The stunning Miller Banner features sharpened hairlines and subtle improvements to overall contrast throughout a variety of weights. It’s a typeface that’s definitely all about “the big.”
You had me at italic. Alice Savoie’s Capucine is a fresh, versatile sans with a distinctively French lineage. Ten weights ranging from thin to black—and a relaxed, gestural quality—allow Capucine to fit in nicely amidst both display and text settings. And the italics—my word—are especially tasty at larger sizes.
Another week, another significant release from OurType. Valentin Brustaux’s Tiina is a contemporary, highly readable serif typeface that has a small surprise up its sleeve. At larger sizes, many of the strokes display a restrained, calligraphic touch.
Decorative faces don’t get much more decorated than Gestalten’s Sea Ark Sheep—a heavily ornamented, somewhat unpredictable display type. It’s complex, curious, and potentially confounding. Just how confounding? The folks at Gestalten have thoughtfully prepared a short video giving the user some idea of how the multitude of contextual alternates actually work.
Wait. What do you mean there’s two new typefaces from Font Bureau this week? Do these people ever sleep? Apparently not, seeing as today is the flight of David Jonathan Ross’ Condor. This sans superfamily consists of no less than 60 weights of high-contrast, Deco-flavored goodness.
From seeing new type to reading about well-established type designers:
The Economist profiles Matthew Carter and Mario García interviews Cyrus Highsmith.
Here are some other items of interest this week:
- Rick Ponyor reconsiders conceptual type design.
- The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, is hosting a “Make Your Own Typeface” workshop during the morning of December 11.
- The Playtype online foundry is launching soon; to celebrate, they’re offering a free download of the intriguing Zetta Sans.
- “Reverting to Type,” a showcase of contemporary letterpress practitioners, will be at Standpoint Gallery in London, England, December 10–24, 2010, and January 4–22, 2011.
- Be sure to watch “Animation Alphabet” on Vimeo.
- Michael Critz has compiled a list of fonts available on iOS devices.
- Did last week’s collection of type-related gifts not suit you? Check out this gift guide from design work life.
That’s the news for this week. In our post-Thanksgiving hangover, did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments!
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for writing about this week’s new type!
Comments are closed on this entry.
1.
Richard Fink Dec 04, 2010
Just one question: are the Macaroni Brothers related in any way to the Super Mario Brothers?
2.
Richard Fink Dec 04, 2010
And oh yeah, Grant, nice post.
3.
Grant Hutchinson Dec 04, 2010
The Macaroni Brothers are actually related to the Marconi brothers, Guglielmo and Alfonso. They did shifts doing a radio show in Newfoundland … something about the various uses for barrels of preserved fish. What?
4.
Erik Vorhes Dec 06, 2010
I probably should’ve linked to the Macaroni Bros. directly. Not that that would stave off the peanut gallery!
5.
macaronibros Jan 04, 2011
Hi all!
We’re related to Italian Macaroni pasta :)
Thanks for mentioning our Web Fonts Gallery. It seems a lot of designers haven’t understood yet what font embedding is, as I said in this post: http://www.macaronibros.it/en/font-face-to-web-renaissance.
Thanks ;)