Type News: Emphasis Addled
Digital repatriation, beautiful charity, and letters sure to fog up your monitor — starting now!
New Type
Got asterisk? You’ll have no shortage of stars when you nab the Font Aid VI: Aster Affects typeface from the Society of Typographic Aficionados. Created to raise funds after the events of Hurricane Sandy, over 250 designers from around the globe contributed star-inspired glyphs to the project. All proceeds from the sale of the font go directly to Red Cross relief efforts.
After the iconic Jim Rimmer passed away in 2010, Canada Type began the process of “repatriating” and updating Jim’s voluminous body of work. This past week saw the rerelease of three popular Rimmer type families — newly remastered, expanded, and buffed up right.
Rimmer’s Albertan was his first face to make the shift from metal to digital in the early 1980s. Albertan Pro — and it’s distinctive “almost-slab” serifs — expands the original calligraphic Roman into a robust 14 style family that deftly covers a six weight range. A vast amount of ligatures, alternates, figural sets, and a tasty inline variation are just some of the updated components under the newly polished hood.
The second Rimmer face to receive a typographic tune up is Isabelle Pro — a calligraphic Roman and arguably “one of the most beautiful italics ever made.” Among the OpenType-powered additions are proper small caps; an expanded set of ligatures; plus stylistic alternates offering options for lowercase serif angle and looped ascenders and descenders.
Drawn by Jim just before his passing, the charming Loxley gets the final revamp nod. Glyphs that flowed from the master’s hand have been modernized with care and attention, painstakingly fleshed out and subtly improved through the inclusion of copious ligatures, alternates, and historical forms.
The folks behind the counter at the Lost Type Co-op have certainly been busy stocking the shelves with fresh produce lately. Following up on the release of Mission Gothic earlier this month, the co-operative has just put another pair of faces on the aisle end. For example, Dai Foldes’ Cylburn takes structural cues from elegant roundhand scripts, but mixes it up with some casual, semi-connected brushwork.
The second face from the Co-op is a straight-up, single weight sans by the name of Fairview. Designer Riley Cran has placed stripped-down, geometric forms on a condensed linear frame, successfully echoing a familiar 20th century industrial vernacular.
Roman Shchyukin’s Delgado Sans shares the same whisper thin frame and playful attitude as his beautifully ball-terminal’d Delgado. Although lacking serif accoutrements, this stand-alone sans is fully outfitted with display-savvy features … including plenty of Latin and Cyrillic ligatures, oldstyle figures, and more.
The outlook from Symbolset is clear with a 100% chance of usefulness. Especially since their latest release is Jory Raphael’s meteorologically focused SS Forecast — a simply designed symbol font for all seasons.
News
Partly steamy, but still a great weekend to grill some links:
- Paul Robert Lloyd has released Bradshaw’s Guide, “based on the 1866 edition of George Bradshaw’s handbook for tourists using Britain’s nascent railway network.”
- Tiffany Wardle de Sousa and Shelley Gruendler discuss type lock-up aesthetic.
- Jordan Moore discusses “Fallback Fonts on Mobile Devices” and created a mobile system font incompatibility table to go along with it.
- [Cue classic movie preview voice] “In a world … where bookstores are no more”: watch The Last Bookshop.
- Not safe for work but worth your time: The Kama Sutra Project, an erotic conceptual alphabet, with each letter available as a limited-edititon print. The alphabet’s creator, Malika Favre, is interviewed by Glenn Garriock for FormFiftyFive.
- Safe for work — safe for kids, even! — is this whimsical Creature Alphabet from Cuddlefish Press.
- Kent Anderson interviews Michael Bierut about type and communication.
- This is an impressive hand-painted saw by Zachary Smith.
- The Starshaped Press shows off work made with typefaces from the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry.
- Sean Mitchell shares a bunch of beautiful typefaces released last month.
- If you missed TYPO San Francisco, you can still watch some of the talks. Or at least check out some of Bernie Quah’s sketchnotes.
Events
Now that we’re done reviewing what is and was, let’s take a look at what is yet to come:
- Through April 27, at the Ginza Graphic Gallery, check out the Tokyo TDC Award 2013 exhibition.
- Yves Peters previews the Kerning typography conference, which takes place May 2–3 in Faenza, Italy.
- Attend Moving Type Festival review and symposium at the National Museum in Warsaw and the Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology, May 27–29.
- Text Support: A Library Exhibit About Paper runs through June at the libraries of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
- Coming in September: Keith Houston’s Shady Characters book!
Brisk
And with that, this week’s breezy jaunt through news and new type comes to an end. Is our forecasting model off? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for finding all the finds.
Comments are closed on this entry.