Type News: Memento
History, awards, new type, and a metric ton of news await you. Proceed with caution!
The Linotype machine is 125 years old! John Hendel celebrates its history for The Atlantic — and plugs Doug Wilson’s imminent Linotype: The Film.
Doug was at TYPO Berlin 2011 to talk about the Linotype machine and show it in use. The conference itself is over, but its impact lives on. Find out what you missed, on YouTube. Meanwhile, Dan Reynolds covers the new type and publications that were announced, for I Love Typography.
Congratulations to Matthew Carter on being receiving a 2011 National Design Award for lifetime achievement. Also among the honorees is the Hoefler & Frere-Jones type foundry — which is also looking for a full-time front-end web developer.
Let’s stop looking at past accomplishments, no matter how noteworthy, and dive into this week’s new type.
You’ve seen it on the web, now use it on your desktop. Our friends under the red A have finally pushed out the commercial version of Adobe Text Pro. Now everyone can have a piece of Robert Slimbach’s latest serif — which up until recently has only been available in webfont format or as a bribe for registering your CS5 install.
Adobe also released a pair of quiet updates to their Japanese type collection. Kozuka Gothic Pr6N and Kozuka Mincho Pr6N replace the previous “Pro” versions of Masahiko Kozuka’s multi-weight Adobe Originals. So what’s new? Each style now contains 23,058 glyphs instead of the previous 15,444. 驚異！
Cyrus Highsmith’s rather appropriately named “Boomer” type families were originally designed for various AARP publications. Recently renamed and released by The Font Bureau, Salvo Sans and Salvo Serif provide an approachable, sixty-style range of text and headline-savvy faces.
Amongst the half dozen new additions to the Google Webfonts Directory this week, Playfair Display caught our collective eye. This slightly condensed, transitional style serif by Claus Eggers Sørensen features an ample x-height and compact descenders — making it perfectly suited for headline settings of all sizes and whims.
A day without bifurcation is like a day without Tuscan sunshine. The deliciously appointed (and devilishly pointy) Davison Baroque — yet another star from the Photo-Lettering film archives — has been brought up from the basement to see the light of day.
We’d never accuse The League of Moveable Type of burying their head in the sans. Ostrich Sans is an all-caps, variety pack of condensed, linear display faces by Tyler Finck. The “race track style double line” of the bold weight is particularly snappy. As with all open source goodies from the League, this family is totally free.
While we’re on the topic of free (and a purposeful lack of lowercase), might we interest you in something with a wider footprint? Given that designer Jan Tonellato splits his time between Paris and Milan, it’s no surprise that Novecento — a geometric sans with “optical proportions” — was inspired by a plethora of early 20th century sans serifs.
And now, the rest of the news:
- Joe Newton sings the praises of type specimens.
- When Neacademia from Sergei Egorov is released, we’ll give it proper coverage. For now enjoy this sneak peek.
- Speaking of things coming soon, Typography Insight looks like a promising iPad app.
- Characters Font Foundry has a new, Flash-free website design.
- Around here, type is on our minds almost all the time. But on our heads? You’ll need to go elsewhere for that.
- Apparently Steve Jobs was a sign painter. Who knew?
- Louise Fili and Steven Heller have a book on elegant lettering out, and Felt & Wire has the scoop.
- Check out these lovely letters, auf Deutsch.
- David Sleight found a beautiful ampersand.
- Here is some more lettering from the disappearing face of New York.
- iABC is indeed “a collection of beautiful letters.”
- ASCII seems to be all the rage with the kids these days. ASCIImeo converts videos from Vimeo into animated ASCII art, while Textify converts any image into text in HTML.
- Typoretum is offering a series of short courses on letterpress typesetting and printing.
- The first issue Codex is off to the printers and looks great.
- Anna Craemer interviews Karel Martens.
- Dan Rhatigan has joined Monotype.
- Hardware acceleration on WebKit browsers impacts antialiasing.
- Have you tired of the “spaces or no spaces around an em dash” debate? You could follow Noreen Malone’s lead — or rather, her attempted lead — and stop using them — but who would want to do that? — I mean, really!
If you’ve been looking to enhance your collection of type-related paraphernalia, this week might bankrupt you:
- House Industries has fifteen new prints.
- Glyphs, “the font editor for everyone,” is available on the Mac App Store (and directly, if you haven’t yet upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6).
- Typoster has “pretty type for your wall.”
- And Fontable has a fine selection of “alphanumeric furniture.”
That’s it for this week’s news. How badly did we screw up? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for covering this week’s new type!
Comments are closed on this entry.
1.
David Březina May 27, 2011
And if you want to save some $, two foundries are offering 30% discounts on their fonts until the end of this week (Sunday, May 29th.) These are the Rosetta Type Foundry celebrating Cyrillic alphabet day (which happened on 24 May) and Typejockeys celebrating their third birthday!
2.
Erik Vorhes May 27, 2011
Thanks, David!
Let’s add OurType to that list, too.