Type News: Fair is foul and foul is fair
What bloody thing is this that can report? Not two spent swimmers — but a good and hardy edition of the Type News!
Is this type I see before me?
Sometimes beauty (and ugly) is in the eye of the beholder. Typotheque’s Karloff is beholden to both — exploring how two designs at extreme ends of typographic spectrum might be “combined into a coherent whole”. On one hand we have a gorgeous, high contrast Didone — on the other, the infamous reverse contrast Italian. These two styles are represented as Positive and Negative in the Karloff family — along with an aptly designated Neutral — splitting the difference. It all makes for a curiously satisfying solution. Originally conceived by Peter Biľak, these split personalities were designed by Bold Monday’s Pieter van Rosmalen with the help of Typonine’s Nikola Djurek. For more on the design process itself, read Biľak’s “Beauty and Ugliness in Type design.”
Jeremy Dooley’s Coegit is billed as a face optimized for web applications, but focusing on that feature alone would be selling it short. This is a warm, humanist sans that covers a lot of ground while still conserving real estate. The compressed, compact, and condensed widths are clean, without being cramped. A nice range of weights — thin through black — are kicked up with a full set of OpenType niceties, including “Art Deco” capitals and a selection of softer alternate forms.
Cursive is as cursive does, and Laura Worthington certainly does cursive. Hummingbird is an effortlessly elegant connected script, oozing with old-fashioned pen and ink sensibilities. It features organically illuminated capitals, decorative flourishes, and an impressive number of fanciful contextual and stylistic alternates to play with.
As a Dutch graphic designer living in Spain, Floris Voorveld named his neogrotesque FV Granada after his adopted home town. This simple three weight family breaks away from contemporary sans convention — eliminating visually jarring spurs and notches, embracing softened oblong shapes — giving the face a unique, if not whimsical quality. Try it out for yourself — the regular weight is available for free.
When Adobe released Source Sans Pro earlier this year, it was evident that Paul Hunt was working on a fixed-width variant of this highly anticipated open source family. Sharing the same six weight range as its proportionally spaced sister, Source Code Pro is clean and thoughtfully designed — it’s also free for the downloading via SourceForge or as part of Adobe’s recently announced Edge Web Fonts service.
All links and fury, signifying something
From new type, let’s plunge straight into the news!
- This week marked the end of manufacturing at the Hamilton in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.
- But it also saw the announcement of a partnership between the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and P22 to digitize a wide number of wood type designs.
- Get your hands on some of these Beautiful Bitmaps.
- And be on the lookout for some handy pocket guides from Five Simple Steps.
- Bryan Connor reviews the webfont version of FF Chartwell and includes a handy guide.
- Typewritten Blackletter? Jennifer Kennard shows when and how.
- Steven Heller shares excerpts from vintage writing handbooks.
- Bruno Maag is the face of this month’s Creative Characters.
- Paul Shaw reviews Type Revivals.
- Relive Apple advertising from the 1970s and 1980s.
- Lovely, these silkscreened bus roller curtains.
- FontShop has assembled quite the collection of Batman-related type and lettering.
- Play with Christine Gertsch’s Modono type system by using Modonomat.
- Just what we needed — more skeuomorphism.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Coming soon to a calendar near you?
- The III Typography Meeting takes place October 5–6 in Porto, Portugal.
- ATypI Hong Kong 2012 is October 10–14! John Berry will be there — will you?
- Or take a walking tour through Chicago’s Loop with Paul Shaw as a part of “At the Crossroads: Living Letterform Traditions,” October 12–13.
- Thursday, October 18, join the TDC and Harry Pearce in New York for Typographic Tapestry.
- Go on tour with Thomas Phinney starting last Tuesday and continuing through October 24. He was or will be at a bunch of events with a schedule too complicate to repeat here. (“So click that link,” implores your faithful, i.e., lazy, news reporter!)
The hurlyburly’s done
Alack, ’tis time to bid adieu. But fret not — we shall meet again, anon!
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for putting up with this Shakespeherian rag while putting up some lovely new type!
Comments are closed on this entry.