Type News: Fraktur Friday
Happy belated Thanksgiving to our U.S. readers! (And a very belated happy Canadian Thanksgiving!) This week we have more new type, a few savory pieces of news, and a sampling of potential holiday gifts for those of you willing to brave some online stores.
First up, type on the web! Apple recently released iOS 4.2, which includes support for TrueType fonts in Mobile Safari. Take advantage of this improved support with a couple new webfont families from the Font Bureau, Poynter Serif RE and Giza RE, availabe on Webtype.
Is designing with type your thing? Be sure to check out Tim Brown’s excellent talk from the recent Build Conference in Belfast, “More Perfect Typography.” (Many of the other talks from Build are available, too.) And Yves Peters keeps us squarely in Monovember with a great piece up on Unzipped, about form design.
And now, how about some new type?
Emanuela Conidi has created what is described as a “spiky, lively, and versatile” sans family in FS Blake, her latest design for Fontsmith. Even as a cohesive family, each of the four weights (and their matching italics) present very specific characteristics and visual idiosyncrasies.
Another week, another free font from Svetoslav Simov of Fontfabric fame. Hero is an unassuming, monoline sans face … something we’ve probably seen before, but pleasant nonetheless. Two weights, no waiting. Did we mention it was free?
They’re not new, but the collection is. Linotype has put together a special Werner Schneider Selection comprising of five fonts from the award-winning designer. Various cuts of Satero Sans, Satero Serif, Vialog, and the brush script Sunetta Magic are included.
Jeremy Dooley’s Foverdis is a flowing, ornate script face, with a modernized Spencerian flavour. The selection of weights, from hairline to black, the thoughtful contextual and alternate characters, plus the extensive OpenType features make for an impressive package.
Feast your eyes on this fitting new face for U.S. Thanksgiving! It’s the full-bodied Fatquad 4F from the 4th February foundry. Say that five times fast with a face full of fowl.
Seventeen years after its original release, Jeremy Tankard revisits his infamous FF Disturbance with Redisturbed. It’s a stunning expansion of its unicase predecessor, with legibility, readability, and functionality in mind.
We’ve already been bombarded with holiday decorations and advertisements for what seems like ages. Who are we to buck a trend? If you’re looking for type-related gifts this season, we’ve got you covered with these gems:
- Numbers placemats from Veer
- Shirts with out of print book covers on them
- Custom hand-lettered shop signs from Three Potato Four
- Mango wood letters from Nkuku, also available “distressed”
- Type Sketcher pocket notebooks from Scout Books
- Fabulous Fonts knowledge cards, by Gwyn Headley
If none of those strike your fancy, you could always get some new type for that certain someone on your list. And if you’re into handmade gifts, you could always make your own font. (If you don’t know where to start, check out Font Standards, a wiki-based resource for font-creation.)
A few other items of note:
- John D. Berry has a nice write-up of the Type Americana conference that took place in Seattle earlier this month.
- Gestalten has launched a new site dedicated to independent font foundries.
- If the tryptophan hasn’t kicked in, be sure to check out some recently published MyFonts statistics.
- November 19 marked the 73rd anniversary of Frederic Goudy’s famous statement about sheep theft. That day is also the 20th anniversary of FF Kosmik and The Kosmik Movie.
Finally, if you’re looking for a way to unwind after a day filled with Thanksgiving Day leftovers, shopping, or a hard day at work, be sure to check out these short films by Barnbrook Studio.
Have a great weekend, everyone! Feel free to let us know what we missed (or discuss the news!) in the comments.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for writing about this week’s new type!
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