Type News: Enjoy Agricola
Grab your favorite grain-based product, we’re in for another abundant week of news and new type.

Eduilson Wessler Coan’s Ninfa Serif builds on the subtle, calligraphic bones of his previous Ninfa family. The organic, familiar forms have been neatly meshed with the deliberate serifs and even colour of a true text face. Stroke transitions and a distinctive “inktrappiness” are accentuated, producing especially sexy italics.

Just as natural sinew provides strong anatomical connections, Jakob Runge’s Sinews Sans bridges and joins rigid geometric forms to more energetic humanist shapes. This brand new release from Gestalten provides a series of clean, compact faces that cover a range of weights from hairline to medium.

The eponymously named Kostic Serif was created by the father and son team of Zoran and Nikola Kostić, echoing the characteristics of transitional typefaces in the Baskerville and Caslon style. This three weight family started out as a simple roman and bold back in 2002 — featuring a prominent x-height, uncomplicated strokes, and fine detailing. It was put aside for nearly a decade before being revisited and expanded into its current iteration.

Fresh off the Photo-Lettering food truck comes Raymund Circus. An original by Bruce Raymund, this deft — but not daffy — display sans is soft on the corners and easy on the eyes. Inline, outline, and no-line styles are just the thing to take on a takeout menu or fine tune some fairground banners.

Until now, the majority of the “pay what you like” fonts in the Lost Type Co-op quiver have sported minimal — or at least reduced — character sets. They certainly haven’t included the advanced typographic features that are more common in higher priced, commercial offerings. Joe Prince’s ultra bold Bemio challenges that assumption, offering an carefully crafted humanist sans with broad language support, plenty of OpenType whiz, and a buckets of glyphs.

Go team! Team van Bronkhorst, that is. MVB Mascot is the latest typographic interpretation from the San Francisco-based designer. This casual, connected script is aching with vintage vernacular, including the “requisite underline swooshes” and “unvarnished spirit” of days gone by.
Teamwork leads off this week’s news, too:
- Check out Arkitypo, explorations in 3D type.
- J. M. Mosley takes a closer look at the work of Jean Jannon.
- Meagan Fisher has compiled an impressive collection of ampersands available through Typekit.
- Meanwhile, Chad Mazzola celebrates some of the beautiful type available from Google’s webfont service.
- Tim Brown wants to figure out something he’s calling “molten leading.”
- Patrick Wall profiles letterpress printer Earl Kallemeyn.
- More letterpress video: a letterpress film by Danny Cooke.
- Roger Black hits the confessional to tell you about being a font judge.
- Nick Cox introduces us to the lovely display face Urbana.
- Andreas Carlsson and Jaan Orvet want you to know that “The Future of Screen Typography Is in Your Hands.”
- The OpenTypography project seems like a promising step toward better web typography.
- The Ministry of Type will not translate something into Mongolian for a tattoo.
- Learn how web FontFont licenses work.
- Pennsylvania’s Society of Design pulled out all the stops to invite Jessica Hische to speak.
- Titus Nemeth writes about 2011, the future, and Nassim making Typographica’s epic collection of favorite typefaces from 2011.
- Commercial Type has an immediate opening for a font technician.
- G-Type has a redesigned website.
- Create big, bold, sometimes difficult-to-read headlines with the slabtext plugin for jQuery.
- Claus Eggers Sørensen has turned Werner Lemberg’s ttfautohint tool into a Mac OS X service.
- A whole lot of character is in the latest Unicode release. [Ed. — Do you mean “characters are”?]
- This is some pretty amazing calligraphy, by Timothy Donaldson.
- So is this work, by Kotaro Hachinohe.
- Ralf Herrmann calls attention to the specimen collection at the Silver Buckle Press in Madison, Wisconsin. (Say, Madison’s not that far from Milwaukee!)
- Enjoy these beautiful letters by Danielle Davis.
- Or these, by Luke Lucas.
- Finally, an oldie but a goodie: You can never have enough ipsum.
Be well! See you next week.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for braving the Picts, Celts, and other unwashed hordes to deliver this week’s new type!
Comments are closed on this entry.