Type News: Formerly Known As
[Imagine a single glyph that represents “Welcome to the latest Type News! Let’s get started.”]
New Type
There’s been a lot of pent up excitement surrounding the release of Toshi Omagari’s long awaited resuscitation of W. A. Dwiggin’s classic Metro. Now available through Linotype, Metro Nova is a versatile and expansive family, consisting of seven regular widths — from thin through extra black — and six condensed styles, plus their italic counterparts.
Also fresh from the Linotype factory comes Lucca — a “friendly humanist grotesque” by João Henrique Lopes. Bevelled terminals and angular strokes reminiscent of a square-nibbed pen provide a calligraphic flair, while remaining remarkably readable in longer text settings.
The bogglingly prolific Alejandro Paul has released yet another updated tribute to 19th century penmanship. Seashore Pro brings the refined, backslanted style of the reverse contrast script up to OpenType speed. This wavy display face sports in excess of 900 glyphs, including some serious swash — not white — caps.
The name of Kristians Šics Oro y Plata is Spanish for “gold and silver”. To emphasize the nomenclature, each of the three weights in this stylized blackletter refer to one of Mexico’s colonial silver mining cities — angular Taxco, rounded Zacatecas, and the decorative inline Guanajuato.
Fira Sans is a tidy, four weight family by Erik Spiekermann and Ralph Du Carrois — commissioned by Mozilla for their smartphone-optimized Firefox OS. The influential bones of Spiekermann’s FF Meta are more than evident in this slightly condensed, highly readable design. Give it try for yourself — the current version of this open source family can be downloaded from GitHub.
Lecter Johnson’s Grober Bleistift does more than just hint at the loose, dulled-pencil handwriting of someone in a hurry — it emulates it. Some nicely implemented OpenType programming automatically replaces every second lowercase glyph with a suitably scratchy variation.
Charmante is a simple — yet utterly charming — handstyle face by Slovakian designer Juraj Chrastina. The regular and bold weights each possess their own set of quirky misshapenness, inky details, and casual stroke-ending blobs.
News
There’s nothing dull or blobby about this week’s news!
- John Boardley has some excellent advice about pairing typefaces — and not freaking out about it. (Some of the comments are worth reading, too!)
- Nina Stössinger’s blog is generally a great read, but be sure to read her “Notes from Nederland” series.
- Ondrej Jób has created Context of Diacritics to help typeface designers do a bang-up job with multilingual support.
- Ralf Herrmann discusses “The Pronunciation of European Typefaces.”
- Xerox has a big problem.
- Tom Hanks likes to type.
- Do you want to be a good writer? Learn punctuation.
- Dan Eden provides a field guide to webfonts from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
- Douglas Murphy celebrates Edward Johnston’s Underground as “an overlooked triumph of modernist design.”
- Covet along with Mark Stuckert at Want That Font.
- Rani Molla asks, “What’s all the fuss about Apple and Helvetica Neue?” Graham Clifford, Stephen Coles, Jürgen Siebert, and Michael Simmons discuss. (Grab a cold one for while you read.)
- Matthew Carter, Kunihiko Okano and Masahiko Kozuka lectured in Akihabara, Tokyo on July 2. Find out what happened.
- Yves Peters reviews the Yearbook of Type.
- So you want a hipster logo.
- Get your hands on this stainless steel Ne10 typeface stencil from Fairgoods.
- The Typekit website is now available in Japanese.
- Type-based heroes and villains? Yes, please.
- Spend time at home with Erik Spiekermann.
- The FontFeed covers “Animography.”
- Half-way into the PDF of APA Journal #32, Rick van Holdt asks, “Morris Fuller Benton: Type Designer: Fact or Fiction?”
- Many books published in the middle of the Twentieth Century are unavailable, thanks to copyright.
- But you can view these letterheads from the 1960s.
- Get more of the type you crave with the latest issue of “This Week in Fonts.”
- Fonts.com has an extension to use fonts with Adobe Creative Cloud.
- Relish these covers from Typographische Monatsblätter.
- Gently kill a bunch of time by watching videos from TYPO Berlin 2013.
- Typewolf shows off type-centric web designs.
- Jamie Neely discusses prototyping web typography at the TDC.
- Doug Gapinksi shares a type-centric web design workflow.
- Behold: the space alphabet.
- Elliot Jay Stocks discusses the design behind the forthcoming Digest.
Events
Are you ready for these?
- TypeCon is only two weeks away! — August 21–25 in Portland, Oregon.
- The Communication Arts 2014 Typography Competition is now open for submissions, with a deadline of September 6 (unless you’re cool with a late fee: then the deadline is September 20).
- Enjoy Calgary in mid-Autumn at Type Camp focused on script lettering on October 5.
- Then on October 26, head west to Vancouver for a Type Camp focused on calligraphy.
Signing off, but how?
See you next week — don’t go changing!
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for another romp through the land of new type!
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