Type News: Janus and Moxie
Welcome to the first Type News of 2011! Here’s a lovely calendar for you to enjoy for the rest of the year.
The end of a year almost always begets lists upon lists upon lists, and 2010 is no exception. From Typefacts comes a list of the best fonts released during the year. At Imprint Paul Shaw recounds the year’s top ten typographic events. Dan Reynolds recommends several good books. MyFonts released its list of its most popular fonts for the year. Ascender has assembled a list of its ten “most innovative fonts from 2010” (one of the ten hardly qualifies as a font, but it remains an exciting development).
For webfonts, the general consensus seems to be that 2010 was exciting, as Jürgen Mantzke captures in his “Web Font Revolution.” In a year-end roundup for the Font Bureau, David Berlow agrees that 2010 was extraordinary. Richard Fink argues that the rise of webfonts and advances in CSS have almost made it possible for us to consider the modern web browser a desktop publishing app. In other webfont news, fonts.info has made three of its type families available through MyFonts for use on the web. Not to be left out from year-end lists or webfont news, WebINK has compiled the ten most popular webfonts on its service, a list dominated by the work of Jos Buivenga.
Jos isn’t one to rest on his laurels (unless his laurels are unusually comfortable)—and he leads off this week’s new type:
Jos Buivenga has come full circle with Calluna Sans, seeing as Calluna began as an experiment to see if additional serifs could be welded onto his semiserif Museo. This humanist variation of its serif cousin sports small caps, a whack of ligatures, and four sets of numerals across five weights, plus true italics.
The lineage of Jean François Porchez’s latest design can be traced back well over a decade. Continuous experimentation and expansion of the custom Charente face led to the creation of 45 styles for Ardoise PTF. A highly readable sans of simple forms, Ardoise has the bones of a workaday newspaper face—with a subtle nod to Excoffon’s Antique Olive.
Pablo Impallari, whose popular Lobster script face has been making the rounds for quite a while, has recently published the personable Cabin. A humanist sans inspired by some of the more recognizable works of Edward Johnston and Eric Gill, but with updated proportions and tweaked details. Cabin is absolutely free and available through the Google Font Directory.
While not a new typeface, the release of Lukasz Dziedzic’s enormous FF Clan Web deserves special mention this week. It’s arguably the world’s largest webfont superfamily … 168 styles, no waiting.
If you find yourself interested in designing your own digital typefaces but are intimidated by some of the arcane tools, Derek Weathersbee might offer a suitable solution with his TypeBridge Script, which helps prepare Illustrator files for use in FontLab or TypeTool. In other technical news, Erik van Blokland and Colin Ford have released an InDesign plugin for sizing type in Gerrits. And if you have a web browser with Flash installed, you can preview text in all your installed fonts using wordmark.it.
Here’s a handy list of some other noteworthy items:
- Over at The Browser, Anna Blundy interviews Simon Garfield about typefaces and some of his favorite type-related books.
- Mandy Brown calls our attention to the recent reprinting of Bodoni’s Manual of Typography.
- Bruno Maag reports on the progress of Hebrew and Arabic characters for the Ubuntu font.
- Taha Al-Hiti describes the art of Arabic calligraphy.
- Jess Righthand reports on “Postmodernism’s New Typography.”
- Aaron Rester needs help deciding what to do with some type slugs he has acquired.
- Be sure to check out Chris Berthe’s “Paper & Love” typeface.
- Wolfgang Homola’s dissertation on the Breite Grotesk is available as a PDF.
- The winning projects for the 2011 Typography Annual from Communication Arts have been announced.
- Speaking of competitions, Wednesday, January 12, is the deadline for submissions for TDC Annual #32.
Finally, we’re sad to report that Boudewijn Ietswaart passed away on December 23, 2010, the day after Fontshop declared his Balduina collection among the best fonts of 2010.
That’s it for this week. With a weeklong gap, we’re sure to have missed something important. Why not tell us about it in the comments?
Grant Hutchinson wrote about this week’s new type. That was right neighbourly of him!
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