Type News: Disparately Seeking
It’s another week of glorious new type and news. Will you find what you’re looking for?
In creating Garçon Grotesque, Thomas Jockin asked himself how Goudy’s stalwart Copperplate Gothic might look in contemporary clothing. Unbracketed serifs and consistently aligned terminals replace the rather awkward versions we’ve become used to in the classic engraver’s face. A sophisticated range of five weights includes visually appropriate lowercase, small caps, tabular figures, a trio of stylistic sets, and eastern European language support. More behind the scenes tales can be found in Thomas’ article for I Love Typography on the making of Garçon Grotesque.
The latest refurbished face to roll out of the Filmotype garage is a “high-style” mid-century brush by the name of Kitten. It’s contrasty, connected, and decked out with a nice set of alternates — tweaked and twiddled by none other than master scriptmeister Alejandro Paul.
Beefyish. Ultrablackish. Quadratish. Roman Shchyukin and Valery Zaveryaev’s squarely geometric face comes equipped with squinty solid and “thin” styles for straight-up or combined settings. Given the designers’ Russian whereabouts, it’s no surprise that there’s a complete Cyrillic character set included under the hood.
Wilton Foundry’s Marcus was named after the Roman emperor Marcus Ulpius Traianus (of “Trajan” column fame), but echoes the brush of a signpainter as much as the chisel of a stonecutter. The calligraphic influence is evident in the poetic curves and softened strokes. Setting it further part from other Trajanic titling types are the finessed lowercase glyphs, subtle endings, and a plethora of discretionary ligatures.
And now for the elusive news:
- Happy 25th Anniversary to the joyous union of Robert Slimbach and Adobe!
- Ellen Lupton shows us how typographic hierarchy works.
- Jump for joy, Unicode enthusiasts! This is your week. The Ideographic Variation Database has been updated. And Eric Meyer recounts solving his own hyphen-like symbol mystery.
- Marc Shur has photographed a beautiful collection of American signage.
- Destry Wion interviews Jean François Porchez.
- Grain Edit shows off the work of Marta Cerdà Alimbau.
- Looking for work? Fonts.com wants a type-loving content strategist, and Typekit needs some more engineers who love type.
- If that Typekit job sounds up your alley, you should check out how David Demaree works.
- With all that filthy lucre, you might want to decorate with these new prints from House Industries.
- Or support this Kickstarter project to cast a new typeface in metal.
- “Letters vs. Math” is a collection of “inspirational interpolation and automatic modification errors.” Even more fun than you might think.
- Reading typographers won an award and visited Buckingham Palace. Not bad!
- I love it when people make new things old. So of course I’m a fan of Lorenzo Cappelli’s fake movie title screens.
- Leap back to 1983 and supplement your education by reading Lynn Ruggles’ “Letterform Design Systems.”
- Here’s another pretty, useful typography [sic] timeline in informational and graphical form.
- Lovely, “typographic topography.”
- Abdallah Ahizoune has some fun with the number 3.
- MMMMMMMM junk food lettering.
- Beware those asterisks!
Oh, hi, web typography and friends:
- Molly Holzscshlag tells us about CSS and paged media.
- Harry Roberts considers practical font-sizing in CSS.
- Dave Artz explores webfont performance.
- Font Bros has been redesigned. Lookin’ good, bro.
- Tim Brown is the guest on this week’s episode of The Big Web Show.
Break out the calendar:
- March 5 continues the Portland Type Tuesday meetup.
- Learn about the cedilla and plenty of other stuff at a TDC event on March 8.
- Dan Reynolds will be talking type on March 21.
- If Germany’s not your thing, head to “German Athens,” a.k.a. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 21 for a Serigraphy Workshop with David Dodde of House Industries.
- Speaking of Milwaukee, the programming deadline has been extended for TypeCon2012: MKE SHFT. You can now procrastinate until March 9. That’s a long way off, right? [Ed. — today is March 3.] Oh. !!!
- Starting April 20 and running until June 29, be sure to check out Catapult’s exhibition, “Between Writing and Type: The Stencil Letter.”
Short. To the point. That’s this week for you. (OK, not short, but far from marathonic.) See you next week, when we might just slow down. Until then, keep on running — and singing!
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for letting us just catch our breath with this week’s new type!
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