Type News: One Down
Hello and welcome to this week’s Type News. Take it down, pass it around — beginning with this week’s new type:
Named for Lux Typo designer Greg Lindy’s young daughter, Colette evokes a soft, friendly face. Instead of the rigid diagonals found in many rounded sans families, you’ll find curved strokes and subdued modulation throughout the five weights. Colette is a pleasant and welcome follow up to Gustan — Lindy’s “orderly” and much stricter sans workhorse released last year.
Foundry Types have unveiled a pair of designs based on the work of illustrious Dutch designer and typographer Wim Crouwel. Architype Vierkant is the newest face to grace the foundry’s Architype Crouwel collection and was derived from a handful of characters that appeared in a catalogue for the 1972 Drupa exhibition. With a softened bitmap aesthetic and an adherence to the expected Crouwel gridishness, Vierkant has an contemporary, experimental flavour.
The second Crouwel face from Foundry Types is Architype Ingenieur, taking inspiration from the designer’s stark, geometric forms dating back to the late 1950s. Four weights — including a textural “dot matrix” variation — follow a strict monolinear grid, utilizing 45° corners and extremely tight letterspacing.
Another foundry doubling down on the new typeface releases is Belgium’s OurType. This week saw the release André Simard’s significant Corbeau family. A gentle, precise, and squarish sans that spans eight weights and three subtle widths.
Also from OurType comes Fred Smeijers’ Arnhem Display — a headline-savvy, high performance add-on to his dependable editorial families, Arnhem and Arnhem Fine. On a related note, the entertainingly animated OurType site has finally ditched Flash for the mobile set. Huzzah!
Commercial Type brings us a final font twofer with works from Atelier Carvalho Bernau. With help from the illustrious Christian Schwartz, designers Kai Bernau and Susana Carvalho have released Atlas Grotesk — a “European grotesk with American proportions” — taking cues from classic san serifs from the 1950s. Six weights from thin to black, with well-considered italics and relatively spacious letterspacing.
The second family from Bernau and Carvalho is Atlas Typewriter. This clean, monospaced sans maintains the “clear, optimistic tone” of Dutch Modernist design, while providing the same textual clarity and range of weights as its grotesk cousin.
David Březina and Vaibhav Singh have added to the Skolar family with the recent release of Skolar Devanagari, and it fits right in. Use it to set Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali or one of a seemingly limitless number of regional languages that use Devanagari. Speaking of numbers …
Get your money’s worth from House Industries — Worthe Numerals that is. Ben Kiel has punched up a limited (but utterly useful) set of “made to be large” didot characters. The numerically adriot regular and drop shadow styles cash in with extensive use of bulbous terminals and curvaceous typographic accoutrements. Of course, a fully customizable, candy-striped variation may be obtained from the Photo-Lettering annex.
Now that you’ve slaked your thirst for new type, take the news as a chaser:
- Gail Anderson interviews and shows off the beautiful work of Pablo Medina.
- Jessica Hische has a doodle blog, even better than you might expect.
- Liz Farrelly reviews Ampersand 2012
- Emily Conners is this month’s Creative Character.
- If you missed this month’s Type Camp in Templeton, California, Ken Barber recounts day one and day two.
- Be sure to read this FontFont interview with Nick Shinn.
- Words + tennis = all kinds of awesome.
- Take a close look at Typography with a View.
- Are you looking for some pithy quotes on typography and type design? Well there you go.
- Gareth Hague discusses graphic, not typographic, type design.
- You might notice something slightly different with MyFonts: the ratings system appears to be no more.
- Congratulations this year’s winners at the European Design Awards.
- FontShop wants to know which of this year’s typefaces are the ones you love.
Get your calendars ready:
- Irina Smirnova is offering a quick introduction to Cyrillic in The Hague, July 6–7.
- Earlybird registration for TypeCon2012: MKE SHIFT has been extended until July 7. Get a move-on!
- The evening of July 12 marks the 58th Annual Type Directors Club Exhibition, in New York.
- Head to Portland, Oregon, for the 2012 American Typecasting Fellowship Conference, August 15–20.
- Get ready for “Industry and Genius: John Baskerville, art, industry and technology in the Enlightenment,” a conference scheduled for April 6–7, 2013. October 1 is the deadline for proposals.
And that brings us to the end of another week of all this. Next week is the 100th Type News. We might even do something special.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing us another lovely round of new type.
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