Type News: Pied Piper
Lovely print design, webfonts, interviews, and plenty of other news greets us this week. So let’s not get too beguiled by this week’s new type:
So soft, it’s hot. Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova Soft is a tasty, rounded version of his popular Proxima Nova family. Specifically designed to be used for the live text headers on the MyFonts site, it is now available to clamoring designers everywhere.
We haven’t heard from the Colophon foundry for a while, but this week they bring us a pair of faces. With a tongue planted firmly in its geometric cheek, Raisonné is a single weight sans by Benjamin Critton.
The second face from Colophon is an extended and redrawn version of Peggs. Initially created as a bold weight for the identity of UK clothier Peggs & Son, this witty typewriter face features open counters, spurious serifs, and a gobsmacking lowercase g.
Tired of Cooper Black? Perish the thought. However, if it ever should happen, Miller Type Foundry’s new Westin Black might be a decent alternative. A beefy, display serif that’s been coerced by a clarendon, but handled by a humanist.
Jasper De Waard has unleashed his four weight Expletus Sans family through the Google Font Directory. Even though it’s a pleasant enough semi-stencil, it would be nice to have a bit more differentiation between the individual weights. Fortunately, Jasper is working on a set of corresponding italics to be available later this year.
We round out this week’s new type with Chartwell, a face that takes advantage of OpenType ligatures to dynamically build pie, bar, and line charts. Designer Travis Kochel has outdone himself with this thoroughly-considered set of fonts. And although there may be some accessibility concerns with how the charts are constructed, as browsers become better able to handle ligatures, Chartwell could also serve as a useful webfont.
Speaking of type on the web … as if Lettering.JS didn’t already offer excessive typographical control, along comes an enhancement for it, Kern.JS, which allows you to do exactly what you think it would. Mark Pilgrim has assembled Open Source Ampersands, a collection of single-character webfonts. And Underware has a redesigned website, which employs many of the foundry’s typefaces—reworked as webfonts. Underware will be offering these for use by the public at some point in the future (soon, we hope).
Another notable website launched this week, for the forthcoming inaugural issue of Codex: The Journal of Typography, where you can learn a little more about the magazine and sign up to be notified when you can order it. John Boardley recently shared a sneak peek at the cover on Dribbble. (Word has it that its primary typefaces will be Knockout and Lyon, blending the historical and with the contemporary.) For more timely updates leading up to the first issue, you can follow @codex on Twitter.
And now for the rest of this week’s news:
- Ligature, Loop & Stem have released “Lesson Plan Second Flight,” a lovely silkscreen print. This time around, they’re reserving 50 prints exclusively for educators. It remains a limited run, though: act quickly if you want it.
- Aymie Spitzer is attempting to carve one linocut letter a day in March.
- LetterCult has begun noting “The Best in Custom Letters, 2010.” So far, you can check out part one and part two, with more to follow.
- An Instagram for type, or something more? Find out in April, when Typeplace hopes to have survived Apple’s iOS App Store review process.
- Nick Cox has written a primer on ligatures
- Typejockeys will be offering a workshop aimed at beginning type designers, April 8 – 10, in Brno, Czech Republic.
- Going to Berlin any time soon? The Bauhaus-Archiv Museum of Design is hosting an exhibit of Erik Spiekermann’s work, March 26 – June 6.
- David Jonathan Ross has written “Through Thick and Thin,” an exploration of stress and contrast and the balancing of letterforms for I Love Typography.
- Veerle Pieters interviews Diederik Corvers about his forthcoming Ogentroost typeface.
- Don’t miss the amazing Mr. Porter, Underware’s recent custom handwriting face with “fully controlled imperfections.”
- Interested in reading and eye fatigue? Watch “Better than a Poke in the Eye,” by Kevin Larson.
- See and hear Conan O’Brien’s farewell to NBC as part of an exercise in kinetic type.
Last week we reported on the death of Doyald Young. Since then, more memorials have cropped up, including this one by Stephen Heller for The New York Times. Also worthwhile is this post on LetterCult, which also includes links to many of the other beautiful tributes on the web.
That’s it for this week, or so we think. Let us know what we missed in the comments.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for covering this week’s new type!
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