Type News: Embooked
This week, we leap from the page to the screen. Or something like that. In any case, we’ll do it with vigor. So step lively, here comes a brace and bevy of new type.

Designed by Dino dos Santos and Pedro Leai, DSType’s Girga combines the features and details found in nineteenth century Egyptian woodtypes with a strong display sans. The result is a no-nonsense salute to headline type in regular, italic, stencil, engraved, and banner-style cuts.

Dude, it’s time to catch some serious style with Måns Grebäck’s Xtreem — a fresh-faced, staccato script with a totally 80s name and some gnarly, hand-lettered attitude.

Bulgaria’s Karandash foundry has produced an intriguing pair of decorative display faces based on archaic, eastern European letterforms. Vassil Kateliev’s unicase Gaytan Sans and Gaytan Serif are organic and subtly calligraphic display types built on a solid, monoline base. Both styles contain plenty of undulating alternates and — as expected — full Cyrillic language support.

The latest family from Vienna-based Typejockeys is Michael Hochleiter’s extensively researched Henriette. Although it incorporates the flavour of classic Viennese street signs datng back to the 1920s, this beefy serif is not a simple digital clone. Instead, the design was influenced by the numerous historical iterations (and phototype propagated bastardizations) of the original “standardized” typefaces. From this, Hochleiter extrapolated thirty styles across five weights and three width variations. A factory full of additional typographic extras accompany the family, including a “frames” font. All that, plus a lovingly prepared (and voluminously informative) PDF specimen to peruse.

There’s another “Storm” system on the horizon — from the Storm Type Foundry, that is. Rostislav Vaněk set out to create both the sans and serif versions of his Clara type system concurrently. The stylistically coherent families share an ample x-height, a broad range of weights, and an expression of “national character” embodied by his native Czech Republic.

Are you ready to reel in a quartet of mid-century photoset revivals from the Filmotype collection? We are. The artful eye of Rian “Device” Hughes places a pile of playfulness into both Filmotype Power and Filmotype Major — two bouncy sans headliners. Look familiar? The narrower number was used as the titling face for Dr. Seuss’ seminal One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Filmotype Panama is a “tipsy” serif that blends casual, Latin-esque style with an extended vacation. This particular face was brought up to OpenType speed by Canada Type’s Patrick Griffin. The final font in the foursome is Charles Gibbons’ updating of Filmotype Adonis — a lightly modulated, hand-lettered sans.

Ramiz Guseynov has expanded his foxy series of faces with Fox Grotesque — sitting comfortably between the loopy, upright italic of Fox and the controlled geometry of Fox Sans. This display-focused family sports curvy tails, jaunty tittles, and a handsome set of blockish alternates.

Although the name may suggest otherwise, Martin Aleith’s Gratis certainly not a freebie. This blackletter headline grabber from the Gestalten garage is seriously angular, astonishingly readable, and heavy metal ready.

When Hubert Jocham redesigned the logotype for his eponymous foundry last summer, people asked him repeatedly what typeface it was based on. Well, it wasn’t based on anything … until now. After much fretting and fiddling, Jocham was born — a bold, single weight script in lively upright and italic styles.
With a singular mind, let’s venture into a riot of news:
- Welcome to Typecache, a promising new website that professes to be “a repository of type.” Be sure to check out the inaugural interview with Cyrus Highsmith.
- Christoph Dunst discusses the creation of his typeface Novel.
- Thomas Phinney ponders whether dyslexics should unite on a typeface.
- What was your first favorite font? Don’t be embarrassed!
- Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you — each of these images contains at least one upside-down N.
- Stephen Coles answers a question about recent typographic decisions in The New York Times Magazine.
- Symbolset is a “semantic symbol font” powered by OpenType instructions.
- Here is a lovely vignette on “Trust (and the Shift Key).”
- Sensitive eyes should turn away — behold the Rise of the Living Type.
- Brand New covers the rebranding of Telefonica.
- Grok the shell command feature in RoboFont 1.3.
- Tweeterpress looks like an interesting project by Wu Hanyen.
- The Hamilton has produced some impressive wood type specimen facsimiles.
- Patrick Haney takes a look at FF Chartwell.
- If you thought politicians or software companies could go after each other with abandon, wait until you get a load of “The Font Wars.”
- Grain Edit covers Page 1: Great Expectations, “a typographic experiment designed to explore the relationship between graphic design, typography, and the reading of a page.”
- Joshua Scott has created an alphabet of toys.
- Process Type has given Chrono a new name — Colfax.
- Thomas Docherty of the Royal Mint discusses typography and coins.
- Should you come across the “Type Rider,” be sure to take your true heart and write it down.
- And finally, congratulations to Nadine Chahine for being among Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” for 2012!
There’s a whole slew of web-specific news this week:
- Lea Verou explains how to mask text using current web standards.
- Elliot Jay Stocks has been quite busy, with his series on “Tomorrow’s Web Type Today.” He covers ligatures, subsets, swashes, and character alternates.
- Eric Meyer explores “Backgrounds, Shadows, Fonts, and the Cascade” and the
ch
unit.
Get your calendars at the ready:
- Are you going to be in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, this evening (May 19)? Make your way to the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum between 6:00 and 9:00 p.m. for a reception for Paul Brown. His work will be on display through June 30.
- Brace yourselves: June 1 – 6 mark Type Masters Week NYC.
- June 6 in Durham is what promises to be a fascinating workshop on illuminated manuscripts and their uses
- Be sure to attend TypeShorts on June 21 in Brno, for an evening of presentations scheduled to be “exactly 321 seconds long.”
- Registration is open for TypeCon2012: MKE SHIFT! Early registration pricing runs through June 30.
- If you can’t make it to TypeCon, consider heading to Type Design Week 2012, July 29 – August 3, at ISIA Urbino.
And that brings us to the end of yet another large collection of small details, your weekly Type News. Thanks for joining us; see you next week!
Thanks to Dave Dawson for covering so ably for me last week and to Grant Hutchinson for once again bringing us such an abundant mid-Spring harvest typefaces!
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