Type News: The L Word
Help us celebrate the fiftieth edition of the Type News! We brought plenty of gifts for everyone — as long as you like news, new type, or both.
We’re back from TypeCon, and it was a blast. But don’t take our word for it! Stuart Thursby covers the conference for Applied Arts. The TypeCon group on Flickr has a ton of images from the conference, as do Scott Boms, Corey Holms, and a slew of other folks. But by far the most thorough and delightful coverage of TypeCon comes in the form of Carolyn Sewell’s sketchnotes for Uppercase (check out recaps #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5).
While we strive to showcase as many new typefaces as possible, it’s becoming less practical for us to do that each and every week. Keeping up with this unrelenting stream of fresh faces and revisited designs is akin to imbibing from the proverbial fire hose.
Case in point, the Lost Type Co-op released a quartet of new “pay-what-you-want” downloadables last week, including the Cuban-flavoured Habana, the Deco-esque sans Governor, the practical Wisdom Script, and the angular Tommaso.
Never one to rest on their open source laurels, Google Web Fonts not only flipped the switch on their revamped directory — they also pushed out a whack of refreshed and newly revealed webfonts. More than a dozen recent releases grace the current listings, along with updated versions of Vernon Adams’ Nunito and Dalton Maag’s Ubuntu.
Now, what say we show off some type?
Frido Narrow is Gunnar Link’s condensed take on his original Frido Black. With miserly counters, “kiss-tight” letterspacing, and a warm demeanor — this beefy display face deserves to be set as big as possible.
A recent addition to the Letterhead Fonts quiver, the energetic Mocha Script is a linear sign painter’s face by the typographic tag team of Bruce Bowers and Charles Borges. Featuring five related styles, plus plenty of flavorful alternates, ligatures, and ending forms.
Hannes von Döhren’s Pluto is a sweeping and invitingly informal geometric sans. The large x-height delivers a significant headline punch across sixteen styles and a pair of widths. There’s also just a sprinkling of alternates, including some delightfully loopy lowercase details.
Offering a nice alternative to more ubiquitous historical scripts such as P22’s Cézanne or Declaration, Altered Ego’s Prosperity is free-flowing and spontaneous with an arsenal of alternates at the ready, sir!
Nautinger is the first typeface released through the Gestalten foundry by upstart designer Moritz Esser. An inspired, modern slab of a family fleshed out with humanistic tones. Keep an eye out for some unexpected details, such as slightly tapered brackets and truncated spurs.
The Miller Type Foundry brings a brand new serif and complimentary sans onto the scene. Richard Miller drew Gilman entirely on paper before digitizing and then derived Gilman Sans from the result. Because of this hands-on design process, both families sport a “distinctly human touch” through a simple range of styles.
Legionary is a pleasant and somewhat organic sans by Ukrainian designer Cyrill Tkachev. With very little modulation in the strokes and a semi-serif flair, it mixes calligraphic energy with the sturdiness of a casual brush script. A boggling combination that just seems to work.
And now for the rest of this week’s news:
- One of the highlights of TypeCon was seeing a preview of a new documentary about the last Hamilton Wood Type cutters.
- Ilene Strizver discusses the pros and cons of hand-lettering and handwriting fonts.
- Andy Clymer of Hoefler & Frere-Jones plays with facial recognition as a tool for type design.
- Elliot Jay Stocks tantalizes us with news about 8 Faces #3.
- Greg Breeding sings the praises of some beautifully designed typefaces.
- Dan Reynolds interviews Gerard Unger.
- Ian Roberts wants your help to design ten awesome typefaces.
- After being sued by the Font Bureau, you’d think NBC Universal would’ve learned its lesson. Apparently not.
- The Case & Point takes a closer look at Jean François Porchez’ AW Conqueror.
- Target and Hamilton have partnered to create some fabulous type-inspired clothing.
- Oh, pretty — de Vicq Design has a new website design.
- Take a few minutes to enjoy 100 Días de tipografía.
- Then check out these poster poems.
- Dyslexie is a new typeface for dyslexics and has been receiving mixed reviews.
- FontShop has posted a survey for its online customers.
- If you’re interested in multilingual typesetting, you might find Typographica polyglotta useful.
- Is your typeface lacking the new Rupee symbol? Indian Type Foundry has your back.
- Learn how to play with your own kinetic typography.
- Speaking of kinetic, check out this “Type Fluid Experiment.”
- These bold typographic works are “kinetic” of another sort.
- Julia Rothman covers the work of Justin Thomas Kay for Grain Edit.
- Identifont has gotten an upgrade.
- Talk about esoteric and wonderful: Tweets cast by a Linotype machine.
- Learn something about Gotham.
- Over at Fonts in Use, Indra Kupferschmid and Matthew Butterick discuss the typographic eclecticism of Typography for Lawyers.
- If you like songs about typefaces, check out Yves Peters’ coverage of “German Bold Italic.” (While you’re at it, you might enjoy “Nonstop,” by Kaivama.)
- And since there’s never enough type-related reading, Blake Morrison has written a novel — The Justification of Johann Gutenberg.
And finally, from the world of webfonts:
- Fount is another browser bookmarklet for identifying webfonts & their CSS fallbacks.
- The slides from Butter Label’s TypeCon talk on webfonts are up on Slideshare.
- The League of Movable Type has moved its fonts onto Github.
- Micah Rich lists the top ten open source webfonts for .net.
- Chank Diesel is unimpressed by the quality of the webfonts available from Google.
That’s it for this week. We hope it was as good for you as it was for us. Either way, let us know in the comments!
Thanks as always to Grant Hutchinson for his coverage of this week’s new type!
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