Type News: Special Characters
This week we catch up with some leading figures in the world of type design, encounter new type, wind our way through a labyrinth of news, and bid farewell to a great designer and teacher.
This is the week of the interview, it seems. Imprint has Paul Shaw interviewing Matthew Carter. For wwword, Lucy Sisman profiles Mark Simonson. And over at The Case & Point, Abi Huynh interviews César Puertas about his custom type design for La República.
But enough about creators for now, let’s see some creations—this week’s new type:
The generous Pablo Impallari has updated Cabin, his friendly humanist sans just released a few months ago. Even with the addition of small caps, superiors, inferiors, improved hinting, and a trio of new weights—Cabin is still absolutely free through the Google Font Directory.
Sweet, indeed. Mark van Bronkhorst’s Sweet Sans is a delightful, contemporary engraver’s sans covering a range of styles and weights rarely associated with a face of this pedigree.
Tipping its bowler towards Gill Sans and the famous typography of the London Underground, Nick Job’s “unashamedly English” Camphor has a narrower stance and is decidedly less quirky than similar humanist sans families.
Originally designed for YouWorkForThem as a set of EPS files, Travis Stearns and Taechit Jiropaskosol have revisited YWFT Herzog—kicking some OpenType sense into the five year old display face along the way.
The first of a pair of new releases from Canada Type is Orpheus Pro, an impressive OpenType revival of Walter Tiemann’s somewhat obscure Orpheus and Euphorion typefaces developed in the late 1920s.
Also from Canada Type comes Naga, an intricate—and deco-flavored—display face by Hans van Maanen. Mesmerizingly complex, with a sprinkling of unicase alternates.
There’s something unabashedly jovial about a “pulpy serif” … perhaps best exemplified by the infamous ITC American Typewriter. You either love the style or you hate it. That’s why Treza by Parisian designer Benjamin Gomez really turns our platen. A typewriterish reinterpretation with oomph.
Sofie Beier’s Ovink was inspired by Danish street signage and named after legibility researcher Gerrit Willem. It’s easy to see how this extensive sans family of sturdy, highly readable faces would work well for both display and text.
The name refers to the “three different personalities” James Montalbano built into the design of Trilon through the use of OpenType stylistic sets. Spread those personalities across 10 weights and 4 widths, and you’ve got one humdinger of a gothic superfamily on your hands.
We’ve met this week’s new typefaces; let’s move on to opportunities to meet other people at some upcoming events. On Monday, March 7, head over to the Cooper Union for Type Design as a Second Career.
Looking further ahead, registration is still open for Type Camp California in San Luis Obispo and Type Camp Bauhaus in Weimar and Berlin this summer. Spend some concentrated, typographic quality time with experts such as Shelley Gruendler, Tiffany Wardle de Sousa, Stephen Coles, Gerd Fleischmann, Jay Rutherford, and the Jan Middendorp. Type Camp Bauhaus is also available as a credit class in New Media Studies from Lyndon State College.
You can travel the world to learn about type, and you can travel to learn about type on the web. There’s still time to register for Ampersand: The Web Typography Conference, which takes place on June 17 in Brighton and features a great lineup of speakers, with Vincent Connare delivering the keynote.
Speaking of webfonts, Typotheque reports steady growth for its webfont service since its launch in 2009. (Do you use Typotheque’s service? They’d love to see what you’re doing with it.) While Typotheque’s screen fonts perform well in just about any environment, not all type is so lucky. FontsLive provides some striking examples of type rendered using different operating systems. Ralph Hermann discusses @font-face for Smashing Magazine. And while the next release of Mac OS X isn’t exactly webfont-related, it might impact type on the web; Apple Insider has some information on Lion’s Font Book 3 and Emoji support.
And now, on to the rest of this week’s noteworthy items:
- Be sure to bookmark or subscribe to the feed of Keith Houston’s Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation.
- You can continue delving into the past through the latest installment of Mike Parker’s Story of Type.
- Visit Rome through Paul Soulellis’ photo collection of found type in Rome on Flickr.
- Do you love Perpetua? How about royal weddings? If your answer is “yes” to both, then prepare to be delighted by the invitation to the wedding of Catherine Middleton and Prince William.
- If you aren’t prone to seizures, you might enjoy the type in Kanye West’s new video, “All of the Lights.”
- Jean François Porchez discusses the economics of font design.
- A different type of economy is developing on Kickstarter, and until April 20 you can help fund a virtual letterpress for iPad.
- While we’re on the subject of kickstarting something, someone really ought to convince Andrew Capener to start producing his beautiful edition of Scrabble, and soon.
- Richard Kegler’s film Making Faces is about to be released on DVD; you can order a copy from P22 Type Foundry.
- Let’s round out our list of things to buy (or covet) with some good old print. You can order Departures: Five Milestone Font Families by Emigre, which celebrates the inclusion of five font families in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
- If you’re strapped for cash, we’ve still got you covered. Download a free copy of Theodore Low De Vinne’s Practice of Typography from 1904.
- Or maybe you could get a job at Extensis: they’re hiring.
Finally, this week marks the passing of Doyald Young, a wonderful, beloved teacher and craftsman, who died on February 28. Art Center College of Design confirmed the sad news and has a beautiful video to remember him by. Jean François Porchez has a touching tribute to Young’s life and work, including a nice collection of photos and links. And idsgn has several examples of his work. Doyald Young is and will continue to be missed.
That brings us to the end of this week’s Type News. Did we miss anything important (or not so important)? Please let us know in the comments.
Thanks again to Grant Hutchinson for covering this week’s new type. And a special thanks to Grant and to Stephen Coles for filling in the last two weeks!
Update: In the second paragraph, we linked to Paul Shaw interviewing Matthew Carter (not Matthew Parker, which would be a mind-blowing get). We regret the error. We also mistakenly linked to an interview from over a year ago about the previous redesign of The New York Times Magazine. Let’s chalk it up to sleep deprivation, shall we?
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