Type News: Mr. President
It’s hot, it’s August. Let’s chill with this week’s news and new type!
Look who just moved into the Village. We’ll admit to doing a double-take when we first spotted Ondrej Jób’s Doko. This solid, calligraphic serif props a few nods to hand-lettering and illustration—like our favourite faces from the Underware boys. Equally at home in both text and display settings, Doko conveys a wide range of tone and expression—an impressive accomplishment, given that there’s only four styles in the entire family.
Using the single weight of his chunky CA Cula Superfat as a starting point, Cape Arcona’s Thomas Schostok has expanded CA Cula into a fully outfitted text family. The four new weights in this compact, easy-reading sans maintain the smooth, low contrast uniformity and “denaturalized ink traps” of the original display face. Intrigued? You can download CA Cula Light absolutely free.
Following up on last year’s release of classically proportioned Pona, Barcelona-based Tipografies recently completed a luscious display version. Pona Display is an elegant, meticulously detailed six weight typeface with sensitive italics. Small caps, multiple figure styles, and significant language support are amongst the OpenType features in this face. Perpetuating what appears to be a common theme this week, there’s also a free demo version of the book weight available.
Coche is a bit of a departure for the dynamic typographic duo of Angel Koziupa and Alejandro Paul. Yes, it’s a connected display script with plenty of chutzpah. And yes, it’s loaded to the gills with alternates — something we’ve come to expect from the Sudtipos foundry. But it’s also rather squat, at least compared to previous Koziupa and Paul collaborations. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. One of most striking features of Coche are the small caps. When combined with the lowercase, you end up with a very flexible unicase semi-script.
Last of all, we have Martín Sommaruga’s Rambla, his fresh take on a unassuming, humanist sans. The three weights and matching italics feature airy letterspacing, a generous x-height, and compact descenders. This combination makes for a highly readable, space-saving text family.
And now it’s time to chew on this week’s news:
- “Off Book: Typography” is a neat short documentary from PBS.
- You have until August 26 to participate in (i.e., bid on items from) “Handmade Design,” a silent auction whose proceeds benefit the Greater New Orleans Foundation Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund.
- In a tour-de-force essay for the Typekit blog, Laura Brunow Miner asks, “Is anyone paying attention?” (Well, are you?)
- The Movie Title Stills Collection is fascinating and beautifully designed.
- The Fontdeck crew have been busy, suggesting a way to work with chromatic type on the web and offering up improved language support.
- Jason Santa Maria kicks off a new column on the Typekit blog by analyzing Omnes.
- OMG THE FONT-BOTPROJECT.
- James Todd would like your feedback on an in-progress type design.
- Maria Popova covers “10 Essential Books on Typography.”
- The Boxing Cats blog reviews Photo-lettering from House Industries. (Check out their new catalog, too!)
- Check out whether the Type Truck is coming to a town near you!
- Julie Lasky celebrates the 50th birthday of the IBM Selectric typewriter.
- Learn about digital type rendering from the Linotype blog.
- Edward Mendelson finally watched Helvetica and has a lot to say about it in “The Human Face of Type” for The New York Review of Books blog.
- Paul Shaw talks about Helvetica and the New York City subway system on The Leonard Lopate Show.
- Neacademia looks great in theory, but it looks even better in use.
- Lamis Harib recounts some of his initial experiences as a student member of the TDC.
- The MyFonts Webfonts Showcase has gotten a facelift.
- WebINK has introduced Fontdropper 1000, a way to test or design with their webfonts.
- Along similar lines, Chip Cullen has introduced The Web Font Combinator, which currently works with fonts from Google’s webfont service.
- Somehow we missed that Doug Wilson has posted some new footage from Linotype: The Film.
- Welcome back, Week in Type! We missed you.
- UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and Good magazine are attempting to rethink the nutrition information label.
- Post Typography shares the title sequence they designed for The Harvest.
- Massimo Gentile uses type to mourn the death of Amy Winehouse.
- Fonts.com is now offering agencies free (limited) use of all its webfonts.
- Thomas Phinney reports on various spellings of sanserif, I mean sans-serif, er … sans serif. Yeah.
- Ralph Herrmann asks, “What makes letters legible?”
- He also discusses how to draw a capital ß.
- And Mr. Herrmann introduces us to the still-in-beta Typecast. Quite the busy week!
- If you can read Spanish and enjoy what Erik Spiekermann has to say, check out his interview in Gràffica.
- India Amos compares how various eReaders handle type.
- Registration is open for Ilene Strizver’s fall course on typography at the School of Visual Arts.
- Or travel to São Paulo and learn about manual composition, typographical engraving, and other good things.
- Finally, WOFF is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation! (This is a good thing.)
That’s it for this week. Have an itch? Scratch it in the comments!
Thanks, Grant Hutchinson, for fetching this week’s new type and for so carefully laying it at our feet!
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