Type News: Italicize My Straight Quotes
Why hello! It’s the Type News!
New Type
James Puckett pulls some charming 19th century alphabets into the current timezone with the release of The Becker Gothics. Inspired by the work of American lettering artist George Becker, Puckett has produced a simplified set of five woodtype-flavoured styles — the modified Tuscan being an especially tasty morsel.
According to Corey Holms, a significant number of his typefaces start out as rejected client logos. That’s fortunate for us, as it ultimately opens up his novel constructive approach and æsthetic to a much broader audience. An example of this is Compunabula — five styles worth of interwoven monoline forms, deftly blending its persnickety framework with a bitmap beat.
The first in a pair of fresh faces from the folks at FontFont is a long awaited addition to the popular FF Kievit family. Designers Mike Abbink and Paul van der Laan took nearly four years to sweat the serifs of FF Kievit Slab — a robust, nine weight companion to the existing sans sibling.
Billed front and centre as “Ze New Germanetric Sans”, FF Mark is the collaborative masterwork of Hannes von Döhren, Christoph Koeberlin, and the rest of the talented FontFont type department. Geometric precision and crisp details are delivered throughout the ten weight range — providing an extremely flexible collection of faces that are both headline-ready and text-savvy.
In his original Brooklyn-inspired Brownstone Sans, Alejandro Paul explored the underlying structure of decorative Victorian-era ironwork and architectural ornamentation. Brownstone Slab expands upon that idea with a set of serif’d variations that still follow the monolinear rules, but with a slightly more masculine vibe.
Chock full of “industrial brawn”, Quatie started out as one of the conceptual ideas for the Chattanooga, Tennessee Chatype project. Eventually, Jeremy Dooley dusted off the squat, bracketed slab — refining it into an impressive eight weight, three width superfamily replete with italics and an overall quirky charm.
Ooh la la. Maximiliano Sproviero’s Erotica is a story of extremes. Gracefully merging ample downstrokes with whisper thin flyaways and extravagant hairline embellishments, all the requirements for a “really sexy” copperplate script seem to have been met. The primary design is complemented by an equally sensual inline variation, plus a set of Roman-esque capitals that sport some tempting swashy twists of their own.
News
There’s a lot of good stuff in here: I suggest you tread lightly.
- Steven Heller celebrates the continuing work of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
- Tal Leming regales us on the creation of Balto.
- Bahman Eslami discusses Harir and less-noisy Arabic script.
- David Jonathan Ross’ great TypeCon talk on reversed-stress type now has a supplemental site: Backasswards!
- Dan Eden examines typeface superfamilies.
- It stinks when otherwise great documentaries get historical letters wrong.
- Kristin Hohenadel explores the history of the London Underground logo.
- If you don’t know about Donald E. Knuth, you should.
- Nike does athletic printing.
- Pepsi done made a mistake.
- Behold: letters drawn by a robot practicing calligraphy.
- Take a gander at the work House Industries did for The New Yorker.
- Monograms have returned.
- The latest Creative Characters has creative characters, plural: all of Fontyou.
- The iPhone keyboard owes a lot to The Simpsons.
- These letter-driven posters are pretty messed up.
- Are you feeling covetous? Focus your desires on this table.
- While you’re at it, pick up a copy of Marian Bantjes’ Pretty Pictures.
- Smooth lumber and celebrate type with The Ämpersänder.
- Get an additional new-type fix with the latest edition of “This Week in Fonts.”
- Congratulations to Sharon Oiga and Mary Catherine Pflug on joining the SOTA Board of Directors. (I’m honored to join, as well.) And thanks to Michelle Perham for her six years of service!
- Ampersand 2013 has posted videos from five presentations. Enjoy!
- Breaking Bad ended last Sunday. Relive the credits on any web page.
- “Nice letterform!”
- Last Tuesday was National Punctuation Day. Jason Santa Maria encourages us to use quotes correctly.
Events
It’s go time!
- This weekend is the Crafting Type workshop in Dublin — but if you missed it, fear not! There are additional workshops coming to Chicago (November 15–17) and Boston (November 22–24).
- Now through October 26, at the Herb Lubalin Gallery in New York: check out the “Image of the Studio” exhibition.
- Attend the TDC59 Exhibition party, October 9 in Minneapolis.
- October 19–20, hear from Charles Nix on eBooks at the Type Directors Club.
- There are a bunch of upcoming public workshops at the Cooper Union — featuring Ken Barber and John Downer!
Clever farewell heading
No more cooking — until the next batch, next week!
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for being the danger, the one who knocks.
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