Type News: Half-Past a Loonie
It’s Canada Day! — and the 150th Type News. What an auspicious day, eh? Put on your shit-kickers, and let’s get started.
New Type
It seems like ages since we’ve had the pleasure of playing with something new from the brilliant folks at Underware. Well, the wait is over. Sauna Mono adds a quartet of handy, fixed-width styles to their brush-flavoured Sauna family — building on the familiar flair and appealing swashiness of the proportional (and lively) original.
Taking its name from the Slavic word for raspberry, Ksenia Yerulevich’s Malina is a pleasantly plump, single weight display face from the illustrious Art. Lebedev Studio. Upon closer inspection, the casual brush-informed characters seem to be kicking a slight backslant, mainly due to the undulating uprights and playfully organic stroke endings.
Fresh from the ominous sounding Typetanic foundry is a five weight “rational sibling” for Gregory Shutters’ deco-flavoured Transat. Sharing the same geometric underpinnings, Transat Text has been performance-tuned, eccentricity-reduced, and specially-equipped — featuring optically-corrected obliques, an increased x-height, plus a vast assortment of alternates, ligatures, and figure sets.
Giuseppe Salerno’s gestural Starburst embodies an uninhibited calligraphic energy. Originally crafted with a fine-point, oblique nib and pencil, the wispy characters haven‘t been overworked or over-thought — making for a script that’s lightweight, loose, and windswept.
Consisting of three distinct, yet entirely complementary styles, Alianza unifies serif, italic, and script variations into a cohesive system. Each squarish style covers a voluminous nine weight range — while managing to keep the “slab soul” alive throughout. Designers Manuel Eduardo Corradine and Sergio Ramírez have even included three sets of matching ornamental elements.
Combining his interests in historical calligraphy and pop technology, Alejandro Paul has released Rolling Pen — a monolinear connected script that pulls together aspects of precise, ornamented penmanship and minimalist, modern æsthetic. Properly pumped-up with OpenType chutzpah, this single weight script practically overflows with swashes, ligatures, initials, finials, and other typographic treats. In a nod to its techno-vernacular side, the face has been brought to dimensional life in a series of illuminated neon visuals by Tomás García.
News
Feeling gut-foundered? Or maybe just peckish? These links should sate you:
- You can stop holding your breath in anticipation or dreading another Rickroll — webfonts from Hoefler & Frere-Jones are actually here!
- Bruno Maag argues in favor of paid internships.
- Jaimie Clarke shares what happened at this year’s Ampersand Conference.
- Yves Peters has collected a number of “Video Impressions of the Fifth International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication.”
- Font Walk showcases Tabac, Number Five, and FF Dora in a set of scroll-triggered transformations.
- Behold: results from the FontStruct Connected Script competition.
- Typekit has added OpenSearch support.
- Instagram is a perfect format for capturing Japanese characters.
- Are You My Typeface? is a book project on Kickstarter and tells the story of “a little lost ‘a’ searching for its typeface.”
- Break out your pencil crayons: Microsoft is working on color font support for Windows 8.1.
- It’s the classic “stuck on a desert island” question — about typefaces, and asked on Quora.
- David Březina of Rosetta Type Foundry is this month’s “Creative Character.”
- Get Neil Summerour’s lovely hand-swashed shirt and do some good in the process.
Zee’s Dead, Baby. Zee’s Dead.
It may feel like a light week, but consider it our gift to you: there’s that much more room for poutine, back-bacon, and Kraft Dinner. Maybe next week will feel more like a double double — tune in to find out!
A toque-tip to Grant Hutchinson, that font rat, for another round of new type!
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