Type News: Desert Chrome
This week’s things are shiny, but they’re no strawberry shortcake. Ahem. Partake of some news and new type!
New Type
Shamelessly uninhibited. Neil Summerour’s Shameless makes no excuses for its unabashedly feisty behaviour. An angular handwritten script with a relentless motion — like the teeth of a reciprocating saw — produced through the smart application of a seemingly endless supply of contextual variations. Multiple stylistic sorts, swashes, flyaways, and “responsive titling alts” prove just how unencumbered this design really is, with over 2,200 glyphs in the “standard” version alone. As if that number wasn’t audacious enough, the “deluxe” variation sports a couple hundred more — plus Summerour’s promise of future additions and upgrades.
With a sophistication uncommon to many of Virus’ more idiosyncratic typefaces, Doctrine provides a large family that deftly blends mid-century neo-grotesque, humanist, and geometric sans influences. Throughout the five weight range, the typographic tag team of Jonathan Abbott, Jonathan Barnbrook, and Julián Moncada apply consistency (and unorthodox charm) with an ample helping of those trademark Virus alternates, an voluminous selection of ligatures, and numerous figure sets.
Bringing a bit more muscle to the table is Doctrine Stencil, a “utilitarian” display version based on the same sans frame. Taking inspiration from the wordmark of North Korea’s rather iffy national airline, this five weight family features four stylistic sets, incorporating both the alternate letterforms found in the text styles and various stencil cut options.
Lev Berry’s Monstre brings a quaint set of dimensional characters out of the realm of French ephemera and up to OpenType speed. Five carefully prepared layers — retaining the “slight imperfections” of the hand-painted orginal — can be manipulated for limitless lighting and shading effects. Try it out for yourself. It’s a free download under Creative Commons licensing.
The latest release from Fontsmith is Phil Garnham’s impressive (and expansive) FS Emeric. Covering an eleven-weight range, the entire family maintains a clean, sharp aesthetic — open counters, chiselled terminals, subtle “micro-modulations”, and an overall textual warmth. Tying together the ideals and the design of Garnham’s glyphic progeny, a series of limited edition screenprinted posters were created specifically for the launch — one celebrating each weight in the family.
If ever there was a perfect name to apply to a geometric sans, Lineto’s Circular might well be it. This is the second release from Berlin’s Laurenz Brunner after his acclaimed, Swiss-flavoured Akkurat. The functional book, medium, bold, and black weights — along with their tidy italic mates — maintain a balance between what Brunner refers to in Squaring the Circle as “conceptual rigour, skilled workmanship, and measured idiosyncrasy.”
Ulrike Wilhelm’s LiebeRuth mixes the mojo found in chewy, retro headliners like ITC American Typewriter with the welcoming, organic handstyle we’ve come to know and love. The four slabby weights are simply jam-packed full of quirky curlycues, loopy swashes, ball terminalia, and more alternates than you can shake a stick at.
Designed by Mark and Doris Ho-Kane, Uchronia takes its name from a term coined by French philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier in 1876, referring to a fictional — often utopian — version of history. This is a classic titling face befitting the idyls of the definition — with graceful lines, minimal adornment, and a modicum of alternates, including inscriptional and calligraphic punctuation.
News
- Laura Meseguer writes about the creation of Magasin.
- Get yourself a copy of Tim Brown’s Pocket Guide to Combining Typefaces. £2 — cheap!
- Spice up your sheet music with some advice from Mayene de Leon.
- Sibylle Hagmann appears in this month’s Creative Characters.
- Meet Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones (again, for the first time!) in a short video from the presentation of the 2013 AIGA Medal.
- Travel back to 1944 and check out some type for advertising and architecture.
- Or only go back to 1996 and find out what Roger Black has to say about web design.
- Bless the buh-buh sound of letter ‘B’. (This ‘A’ is pretty nice, too.)
- The people behind KALQ think you need a new keyboard layout for your touchscreen device.
- Learn about working with right-to-left scripts in HTML.
- Every day in November 2012, Michael Crowe and Lenka Clayton used typewriters to draw things they’d seen that day.
- Chris Clark and James Dempsey discuss using beautiful text on iOS.
- The latest FontFont newsletter is out.
- Monotype is looking to hire a type director for its Noida, India operations. Be glad it’s not a posting for ClearType hinter.
- The UK has a nifty Government Service Design Manual to help government agencies meet a new Digital by Default Service Standard.
- So much chrome type, so little time.
- Romesh Naik has uploaded a specimen for Granby to Flickr.
- Listen to and watch Mandy Brown speak on editing.
- Ralf Herrmann finds instances of the capital sharp ‘S’ in use.
- Someone should typeset this blog comment spammer’s source template.
- Many of these vintage designs have lovely letters.
- Behold: the last poster printed at the orignal Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
- The Lord’s Prayer on a 12-point square piece of type is quite the achievement — and a true “marvel of modern punch-cutting,” courtesy Dan Rhatigan and Monotype.
- Fabio Haag recounts some of the happenings at TPC10.
- Bernie Quah’s sketchnotes from TYPO San Francisco are available as a PDF.
- Fonts in Use has a whole section dedicated to type and typography conferences. Which is a perfect lead-in to …
Events
Segue, this way:
- See and hear Tim Brown on “Universal Typography,” at Adobe MAX, May 4–8 in Los Angeles.
- ISType 2013 takes place June 13–16, in Istanbul; there’s a “pre-event” with Alejandro Paul on May 7.
- Also May 7: walk Tribeca with Paul Shaw.
Shake out those shoes
It’s time to go home! See you next week.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for risking life and limb to lead this week’s new type into our little oasis.
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