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Pucker up and get your mason jars! Type, news, and non sequiturs won’t pickle themselves.

Bread and butter type

The experimental nature of Felix Braden’s Rollmops throws buckets of water in the face of traditional handwritten (or constructed) scripts. Playing with the concept of a strip of paper that has been folded to create a continuous series of characters, this heavily stylized display face gives a sharp, linear twist to common calligraphic principals.

Viktoriya Grabowska’s lively lettering can be found alive and well in a pair of recent releases through Sorkin Type and the Google Web Fonts juggernaut. Fruktur mixes an upright, blackletter-esque structure with some playfully modulated — almost cartoonish — strokes.

The second fresh number from Grabowska is the energetically named Kavoon — a single weight experimental display face. Although it shares the same lighthearted “brushiness” and condensed stance as Fruktur, it definitely crossed over from the serif side of the street.

Also showing up in the Google showroom this week was Eben Sorkin’s latest extension to his extremely readable and screen-savvy Merriweather family. More than two years after announcing the original project and releasing the inaugural Roman style, Merriweather Sans adds four low-contrast, comfortable text weights.

Chilean newcomer Paty Bean presents Handy Cut — a spontaneous and charming display type based on hand-torn paper. The design is childlike, naïve, and full of typographic whimsy — including dozens of alternates and a set of matching dingbats.

Kicking out some serious headline jam, Rui Abreu’s Azo Sans Uber is the newest addition to his popular geometric family. Featuring exaggerated optical adjustments and a handful of “flary” alternates, this beefy single weight adds quite a bass-line to the baseline.

Wrapping up this week’s new type is Steven Bonner’s Langdon. Commissioned as a free download for one of his client’s customers, this straight-up, condensed industrial sans comes with a limited, but flexible contingent of characters. Solid and shadow variations of the uppercase and numerals are accompanied by a basic set of punctuation and other glyphs — sporting several unique details.

Brined news

These links will keep longer when heavily salted. Trust us, you’ll need that extra preserving power.

• Behold, from Typographica: “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2012.” Go on, read about some great type — just come back when you’re done. (See you in a few weeks.)
• Stephen Coles has been busy, because he also took the time to uncover “The Other Times Modern” (now with the correct link).
• Tiffany Wardle de Sousa and Dr Shelley Gruendler kick off a grand discussion on “Modern Type Trends.”
• Gerry Leonidas charts the explosion of typographic awareness and its future.
• Mark Simonson is on a tear. He uncovered a 40-year-old issue of Industrial Art Methods. And check out the original artwork for his Felt Tip Roman typeface. Please keep sharing, Mark!
• Peter Biľak discusses bookbinding methods.
• Brian Suda declares this “The Era of Symbol Fonts.”
• And — conveniently — Symbolset now offers hosting.
• Take note: Eric Meyer has learned that “in Windows, Helvetica is not Helvetica: it’s Arial.”
• Firefox now makes it easier to inspect webfonts.
• Meanwhile, the “compatibility modes” in Internet Explorer 9 and 10 lie about webfont rendering.
• Do you use RoboFont? Give yourself to-do items directly in the app!
• Glory be, Marian Bantjes has prints for sale.
• Mario Livio explores the origins of the symbols for plus and minus.
• Fresh from House Industries: the Photolettering iOS app.
• Christopher Murphy and Chris Shiflett have created Glyph, a “tiny tome on typography” for Little Printer. A mobile version is forthcoming.
• Decide for yourself whether “Everything is beautiful in Bodoni.”
• Letters and signs dance in Husbands’ “Dream.”
• Ampergram seems like a fun way to spell things with Instagram photos. (They could make it more obvious for people to retrieve their own creations, however.)
• Mark Boulton considers (in)visible type.
• Kai Brach, founder of Offscreen magazine, is the guest on the latest episode of Talking Types.
• Riccardo Olocco reviews “Compulsive Bodoni.”
• Read Indra Kupferschmid on discounts.
• Baseline magazine can be had at a discount (ahem).
• Monotype has announced its fourth quarter and full 2012 results. “Creative Professionals” account for 25% of sales.
• Learn about the “Making of Franziska.” (Also available in English.)
• Among the lousy webtrends making a comeback: images-as-text and tiny type (the list itself suffers from the latter problem). Come on, people!
• See which typefaces were used on posters for Oscar-winning movies.
• “Can anyone design type?”
• Learn to create logos from type.
• Erik van Blokland and Paul van der Laan will again offer their Type Cooker workshop at TYPO Berlin.
• If you’re smart, you’ll apply for this summer internship at Typefounding.
• What an impressive collection of beer coasters, just in time for St. Patrick’s day!
• Tyler Etters designed his UTF-8 tattoo in BBEdit. His UTF-8 tattoo. In BBEdit.
• Finally, have your mind potentially blown by Zach Whalen’s “Videogame Typography and Its Antecedents.”

Dill events

A special delivery from the scheduling stork!

• Kerning, an international conference on typography, takes place May 2–3 in Faenza, Italy.
• Then make haste across the Atlantic for Pencil to Pixel, an exhibition of work for Monotype in New York, May 3–9.
• While you’re in New York, learn about web typography with a crash course on May 4.
• Meander back east to Cardiff for HybridConf, August 14–16.

Gherkin you later!

Wait, what?

We’re done for this week. Until next time, have fun chasing grasshoppers out of Finland.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for all his type-canning this week!

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