Type News: Open Emigretion
It’s only the second week of January, but big things are already afoot, so let’s get right to it.
We begin with news from the wide world of webfonts. First, welcome Mr. & Mrs. Eaves — and the rest of Emigre Font Library! Emigre is offering self-hosted licenses for “five-year renewable” and “one-time perpetual” terms. In other exciting news, Microsoft has announced that the latest beta release of Internet Explorer 10 supports OpenType features, joining Firefox on the edge of web typography. Christopher Clark and Nick Sherman have put together a lovely showcase of OpenType on the web. And the Fontdeck blog shares how to do some of these things yourself.
But you’re not here just to read about web-related type news. How about we move on to big things of a whole other sort: this week’s new type!
The clean, humanistic Mantika Sans came about after Jürgen Weltin revisited an older, unreleased serif design and used it as an inspirational starting point. The roman and bold weights are defined through their compact ascenders and descenders, bevelled stroke endings, slight variations in the verticals, and attention to detail in the differentiation of similar glyphs. Although clearly an easy-reading text face, Mantika Sans maintains some calligraphic qualities which are similar to — but certainly less deliberate than — its more cursively Informal cousin.
Often vernacular, always impressive. Paul Barnes has been playing with the concept of “reducing historical models to their basic skeletal forms” since 2000. Finally available as a complete family, the reductionist Marian consists of nine serif faces, delicate matching italics, and a single blackletter style — trimmed down to their fundamentals and reinvented as sinewy hairlines. For the full experience, we suggest that you dip your toes into the exhaustingly thorough PDFs showing the family specimen and OpenType features.
Ryan Martinson’s Anodyne is not just another weathered and worn wood type replicant. Sure, we’ve all seen the chewed-up, caps-only condensed sans with the grotesque pedigree … but there’s more to this face than meets the eye. Four sets of distressed characters per style, special “double-letter ligatures” to eliminate repeating textures, and independent shadow variations add to this face’s flexible and rustic realism.
Maga is a fresh, five weight serif family from Dino dos Santos’ eponymous DSTYpe foundry. Initially designed for use in a Portuguese newspaper supplement, it shares some of the underlying structure found in Quaestor Sans — one of Dino’s first typefaces — but takes things much further. Solid uprights and wedge-shaped serifs are married with large counters and a compact stance — com muito estilo.
From fresh type, to some fresh news:
- The Design Museum has announced the nominees for Design of the Year, which include Dalton Maag’s type design work for Nokia and House Industries’ Photo-Lettering.
- Typetoken features some animated typefaces.
- Larry Buchanan interviews Mandy Brown about “design, news and, ahem, reading.”
- Stephen Wildish has created some neat film-inspired alphabets.
- Ivo Gabrowitsch has been busy — identifying the best typefaces of 2011 and explaining “why native app fonts still suck.”
- Check out these animated books.
- FontShop has introduced FF Skill Sets, the new “font collection CD” (sans the CD).
- John Berry reminds us to pay attention to writing and printing surfaces.
- Stephen Coles shares some bathroom notice poetry.
- Classily rock out to the unholy union of Swiss modernism and punk, from Mike Joyce.
- Nikola Tesla’s letterhead is awesome.
- See what’s up with work on the typeface Marais.
- Buy typefaces from a brick-and-mortar store.
- Richard Turgeon shares why type matters for your brand.
- William Addison Dwiggins wrote to Rudolph Ruzicka, and you can read it on the Internet Archive.
- Get your fill of free fonts, courtesy Smashing Magazine.
- Typography, Referenced sounds pretty thorough.
Get your calendars ready, here are a few upcoming exhibitions, deadlines, and events:
- TSI: Type Scene Investigation, with Thomas Phinney at the Type Directors Club in New York, January 19;
- La typo dans tous ses états (Typography in all its forms), January 31 – March 16, in Paris;
- Rotation, Reflection, Repetition, Repetition, January 4–29, at the Mota Italic Gallery Gallery in Berlin Berlin (echo echo);
- 50% off You Work for Them font purchases until February 1; and
- Submissions for the Mota Italic Gallery’s upcoming New Vintage Digital Vernacular Letters exhibition, due January 25.
That’s it for this week. Now: get out! and enjoy your weekend.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for escorting this week’s new type!
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