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After TypeCon wrapped, Grant and I were investigating whether a new typeface had led a happy life. The next thing I know, I’m on a farm, wearing a dress, and staring at the corpse of someone who looked an awful lot like Jason Sudeikis.

But enough about me. How are you?

New Type

The slightly softened Schoiffer Sans is Jérémie Hornus’ contemporary — and smooth — approach to a simplified humanist face. Friendly forms feel updated while still “respecting the structure of the historical model”. Light, regular, and bold weights are accompanied by a single mid-range italic.

Straight out of Vladivostok comes Evgeny Tkhorzhevsky’s energetic Braxton. Combining brash brushwork with angular calligraphic details, this five weight script features plenty of display-savvy alternates and ligatures, as well as case-sensitive punctuation. A single “taster” weight is available for free — sans all the OpenType gizmos and gewgaws, natch — so everyone can try before they buy.

The Canada Type tag team of Patrick Griffin and Kevin Allan King were admittedly “obsessed” in bringing Georg Trump’s overlooked Mauritius to life. The final typeface Trump designed, this transitional serif is based on the original metal cuts. Covering a trio of weights and two widths, it has been carefully expanded and brought up to the digital speed it deserves.

Oh yeah? Fontyou! With Fontyou’s Squirrel, that is. This juicy semi-serif, sorta-script by Franck Monfermé and Gia Tran oozes an overhauled vintage poster vibe — complete with high contrast construction, an assortment of alternates, plus a swinging set of ball terminals.

After “accidentally” falling in love with type design, Andrea Leksen decided that her debut face would be based on the engraved lettering found on Seattle’s historic Bemis building. This high-waisted, all-caps serif features a set of ¾-height capitals in the lowercase slots, plus a variety of suitably classic ornaments and rules.

Typegroup’s Noodge explores the geometry, modularity, and structural evolution pioneered by the likes of Wim Crouwel and 8vo. Three increasingly resolved, bitmap-inspired weights demonstrate an unsubtle progression from simple to the more complex.

Along with announcing the grand opening of his Type Supply foundry and its redesigned digs, Tal Leming also managed to squeeze out a significant new type release. With Balto, Leming takes his “passion for the classic American Gothic” and puts his characteristic (and awesomely persnickety) spin on the entire package. Eight weights — from a spaghetti-strap thin to a meaty ultra — are outfitted with all manner of figures, fractions, arrows, and sorts.

News

So much has happened since we were last together. No more clever lead-ins: let’s begin.

TypeCon

• Jeff Kellem’s thorough conference trip report is a great place to start.
• Michelle Furedy offers up a bunch of highlights.
• Peruse Dave Crossland’s notes for even more detail.
• The Flickr has plenty of good stuff to go around.
• A number of Jim Parkinson’s sign paintings made an appearance in the gallery.
• People found amazing ligatures — including ‘Gl’ and ‘tt’ and ‘Gu’.
• Check out David Ross’ “Parallel Universe” cube.
• My slides on accessibility and type are up, currently sans notes.
• Meet Josh Owen, who illustrated a couple pangrams for MyFonts.
• Portland has concrete poetry.
• Take an extended musical interlude with IBM 1401, a User’s Manual, composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Type on the Web

• Richard Ishida guides us through the state of (non-Latin) type on the web.
• David Sudweeks takes on CSS font-sizing.
• Subset your webfonts and get insane(ly awesome?) results. Maybe one day we’ll have a new Oulipo group.
• Prototypo promises to be a web-based type-creation tool. Witness the insanity.
• Watch Gerry Leonidas discuss “The Newest New Typography,” from Ampersand 2013. Then read Mark Simonson’s response, “The Quagmire of Print-Think.”
• Monotype has a cloud-based font-delivery platform.
• FlowType.js maintains a consistent number of characters per line no matter the container width.
• Play with short words by using TDC Generate.
• T.26 now offers webfonts.
• Alas, webfonts from Monotype will not be available through Typekit.
• But listen to this TypeCon panel from 2009 to realize how far we’ve come.

Type (& friends) in the news

• Örjan Nordling remembers Bo Berndal.
• Watch Louise Fili on typography and gastronomy.
• Rui Abreu is the latest of MyFonts’ Creative Characters.
• Learn to kern with Mr. Sudweeks.
• The Economist (!) covers chromatic type.
• Say hello to the interrollipsis.
• Learn about variants of our friend ‘Ø’, courtesy Florian Hardwig.
• This Week in Fonts ensures that we stay on top of our game.
• Harpel’s Typograph is an impressive archive.
• Keep your eyes peeled for Karbid, a trilingual (English, French, German) book by Verena Gerlach, Fritz Grögel, and Sébastien Morlighem.
• Peter Dawson tracks down some typefaces in their natural environment.
• Wood type! Made with lasers!
• There’s another edition of Scrabble based on “typography.”
• Mixing Fraktur and Textura is verboten — unless you’re Motörhead.
• Take in 21st Century Victorian for another great glimpse into the world of sign painting.
• Never again will you have trouble identifying the differences between Arial and Helvetica.

Designy things

• Learn how Adidas approaches product design.
• Check out this collection of Derek Jarman's sketchbooks.
• [Redacted]
• Learn about the redesigned Instapaper website.
• Keep cool with this “Coolifornia” shirt.
• This set of text-driven horror movie posters.
• Design cutting-edge logos for fun and profit.
• What does your handwriting reveal about you?
• House Industries is doing some interesting work for Chronicle Books.
• I love these these Star Trek.

Ya who?

• A certain massive internet property redid its logo and set it in Optima. (Goodbye, Harry Potter; hello, aftershave.)
• Oliver Reichenstein calls bullshit. (And has some good things to say about rebranding in general.)
• Glenn Fleishman explores the new word mark’s relationship to engineering while Dave Rahardja (an engineer!) picks apart its poor design.
• Other designs were explored.
• Nick Montfort has another option.
• Jessica Hische backs up her proposed alternate with science.
• Armin Vit charitably discusses the change and the way it was promoted.
• Rebecca Greenfield explains why we people about stuff like this.

General trivia

• Check out this list of so-called untranslatable words.
• Lexican shows some impressively obscure words.
• James Harbeck defends the semicolon.
• Meanwhile, the use of colons in movie titles is getting dumped on.

Upcoming events

Here are a few things to add to your already-full schedule:

• Make your way to Seoul to partake in Typojanchi 2013, which runs until October 11.
• Study “Principles of Typeface Design: An Introduction” with Sara Soskolne, October 1 – December 3 at the Type Directors Club in New York.
• Attend the InsideOut SF exhibit, silent auction, and fall gala takes place on November 12.

Did you read it?

Now that we’ve dug ourselves out, we’ll resume a more regular schedule. See you next week!

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for delivering a bunch of wicked typefaces, no matter their pedigree.

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