Type News: Quid Pro Go
Welcome, December, month of cold and snow and multiple extended holidays! We’re piling on the gifts this week.
Before diving into the new type, let’s cover off a couple updates to existing faces.
The dashing Alejandro Paul and his Sudtipos foundry have just added a baker’s dozen to the Google Webfonts quiver. Along with basic Latin editions of Angel Koziupa collaborations such as Aladin and Aguafina Script, they’ve also included nine faces from the impressive Charles Bluemlein Script Collection. Word on the street is that updated pro versions of these “signature” scripts are also in the works.
A week after the initial release of Laura Worthington’s Shelby, we were informed that her 80lb Lab puppy (and typographic namesake) “… swiped a piece of pie and a turkey leg off of the counter while no one was looking” during last week’s Thanksgiving festivities. Shelby (the dog) was so bold — and subsequently emboldened — by his escapades, Laura decided to follow up with a new, bold weight of Shelby (the typeface.)
Felix Braden’s Floodfonts points us towards Polaris—an unusual slab with squarish forms and tapered serifs. In case you need more convincing to give this retro-flavoured display face the green light, it comes equipped with extensive language support and a non-existant price tag.
Debelly is an oddly attractive fatface sans from Dusan Jelesijevic and Serbia’s Tour de Force. Squat lowercase, ample letterspacing, beefy contrast, and a few unexpected curves give this single weight face some quirky, throwback charm.
Also new to the Tour de Force catalogue is Epitet. This quiet, six weight geometric sans sports an unusually small x-height. Compact and lean, it has several distinctive traits—in particular, a spunky binocular ‘g’.
Along with the basic Latin version of Bubblegum Sans that recently popped up as an open source webfont, Sudtipos released Bubblegum Sans Pro. It’s a bouncy “brushalicious” sans from the typographic tag team of Koziupa and Paul, featuring expanded language support, a handful of tasty alternates, and plenty of 1930s-era lettering style.
Righteous, brother. This freebie was inspired by the art deco posters of Hungarian artist Robert Berény, but channels some serious 70s album cover art. With solid geometric forms and spiky “rock horn” spurs, this headliner delivers.
Melle Diete’s Gingar steps across the page anything but gingerly. From the finessed ultra light through beefy extra black, this latest family from Volcano Type oozes slabby, playful warmth throughout its massive range of 30 styles.
Fluid, yet strong — with an organic, modulated structure like that of “… a flying bird.” Such is Bruno Mello’s calligraphic Caturrita — a four weight serif family, versatile enough for both text and titling. It’s also the first typeface released by Armasen, a fresh-faced collective of students and type designers based in Brazil.
Portugal’s DSType has pushed out an impressive number of significant typefaces this past year. The latest is no exception. Dino dos Santos presents Acto, a humanist sans in eleven weights. Although there’s very little background information on Acto, suffice it to say it’s an extremely clean and efficient series of faces—covering a lot of ground from hairline to ultra black.
New York based Pagan & Sharp have finally released an expanded version of Malleable Grotesque. This rounded, industrial — but nuanced — condensed sans has been kicking around the interwebs as a simple roman and oblique pair for the past couple of years. It now incorporates seven weights, a complete set of obliques, plus a striking bilinear “wire” style.
From wires to the web:
- Movember is gone, but we’re into Decembeard, so the Hairy Lipsum generator might still come in handy.
- December also means the return of Fontdeck’s Adfont Calendar.
- Letters from Sweden has a sweet new site design that, thanks to the clever use of webfonts, functions as a living type specimen.
- Christian Vasile offers a “short course” on how to improve your website’s typography.
- Typekit has shared its users’ favorite webfonts.
- Despite the unfortunately-placed ad, these web typography experiments are still worth a look.
- For more webfont trickery, check out Drew McLellan’s “Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range,” which kicks off this year’s 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends.
- Fonts in Use covers the use of webfonts on the new Boston Globe website.
- No custom webfonts? No problem! You can still create a CSS font stack.
But enough about webfonts, let’s see what else is going on in the world of type:
- Dina Silanteva has crafted some beautiful typographic music
- Yanone is working on a new type design tool.
- Almost four years after coining the word keming, David Friedman revisits the term.
- Heydon Pickering discusses “The Perfect Paragraph.”
- The Eye blog covers Edward McKnight Kauffer’s titles for Hitchcock’s The Lodger.
- YouWorkForThem has updated its font license to account for mobile apps and eBooks.
- There’s a new beta release of TypeTool 3.1 for Mac OS X.
- If you were wishing your grandmother had advice about life online, it might look something like this.
- Yo, Freckles! is a “collaborative typography project,” and you can participate in it.
- See almost 45 years of font format history, thanks to Pedro Amado. (See also the full-resolution timeline.)
- Yves Peters remembers Hans Reichel.
- Meet TypeBrowser, from YouWorkForThem.
There’s plenty for your calendars this month and into next year:
- Join Sumner Stone this Monday (December 5) at the Cooper Union for “Type, Technology, & Trade: Adobe’s Early Years.”
- Are you an AIGA member? Join Tim Brown on December 7 for Typography for the Web.
- December 8 is the TDC Holiday Party. Remember to wear your bells.
- On December 15, Ilene Strizver can help you solve Troubling Typesetting Mysteries.
- AIGA Philadelphia is hosting Penned: A Hands-on Lettering Workshop with Ken Barber, January 28, 2012.
- Registration is open for TYPO San Francisco 2012.
Finally, here are a few gift-related items that seem to crop up around this time:
- The 2011 edition of .net magazine’s web designer’s gift guide contains a few nice type-related gifts, as well.
- Or perhaps you’re looking for a good book. Maria Popova has some recommendations.
- You have until December 8 to get your hands on this Compugraphic Typesetter.
- And you might have even less time to obtain a print copy of 8 Faces #4.
Whew! Next time we’ll bring snowshoes—or pretend we’re in the southern hemisphere.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for digging out this week’s new type.
Comments are closed on this entry.
1.
Dino dos Santos Dec 04, 2011
Nice week in type, folks!
Grant Hutchinson get in touch via Twitter, asking for background info on our latest release Acto, but I was unable to email him the info. So I’m putting some details on the font as a comment:
Acto is a type system designed as the sans serif counterpart of the previous released Acta. Both type families were designed for the redesign of the chilean newspaper La Tercera, but unlike some of our previous fonts (i.e.: Leitura) Acto doesn’t exactly match Acta in terms of structure, so they can live on their own.
Acto is our first sans where the uppercase has the same height as the ascenders, so we decided to avoid common problems like the confusion between the I and the l, by drawing a curved l and we kept that spirit by removing the spurs on the b, g and q, resulting on a more warm typeface than Prelo, for instance. At the end is a very powerful sans family, with eleven weights with matching italics, for editorial and corporate design.
Best,
Dino dos Santos
DSType
2.
Erik Vorhes Dec 10, 2011
Thanks for the extra information, Dino!