Type News: Ubi nunc sunt?
Welcome to a “Where are they now?” edition of the Type News. There are plenty of new goodies in store this week, but you’ll see a few familiar faces (ahem) crop up, too. So let’s have at it with some new and renewed type.
You can never have enough … swash or casual attitude for that matter. Photo-Lettering’s West Italiano delivers plenty of both. This rakishly good-looking italic has been lavishly ligature’d and blessed with a terminal case of ballsiness by creator Dave West.
Why settle for a single headline revival when you can have a couple more? Filmotype presents a pair of freshly scrubbed 1950s faces for your typesetting pleasure. Filmotype Gem is a beefy, all-caps Grotesque remastered by the deft hand of Mark Simonson. The revamped version includes an expanded character set, automatic fractions, ordinals, and an assortment of alternates.
The rejuvenated Filmotype Reef is James Lambert’s digitization of one of the company’s original wide-style serifs. Maintaining a calligraphic nod to its sign-painterly roots, Reef has been likewise buffed, polished, and tuned.
Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re arguably the most popular (and ubiquitous) typefaces on the web. The brains and brawn behind Font Bureau, Carter & Cone, and Monotype Imaging combined forces to expand the humble Georgia and Verdana into full-blown, multi-weight collections—each with buckets of OpenType niceties tossed in. Both Georgia Pro and Verdana Pro are impressively complete and flexible families for both print and the web. Don’t believe us? See the faces in action on the stunning “specimen” site designed by Christopher Clark and Nick Sherman.
Matthew Butterick has been proclaiming the need for better legal typography for years. Finally putting his Béziers where his brief is, he’s released Equity—a text family inspired by legal typography and the real world requirements of judicial scribes everywhere. Modeled on Monotype’s Ehrhardt, it features an economical pitch, truthful small caps, and a pair of “weight grades” optimized for suboptimal output devices.
As long as we’re being inspired … Henrik Kubel’s Antwerp for London’s A2 foundry is a typeface influenced by 16th century Plantin. Drenched in history, but with a modernized chassis. This five weight family is warm, welcoming, and inherently schooled in the classic European typographic aesthetic.
We bet you never knew you needed “on the fly serial weight dispersal” in a typeface, did you? Typonine has revved up their charmingly geometric Delvard sans with some weight-shifting, OpenType chutzpah. Delvard Gradient provides four varieties of densitometric magic … as … you … type!
And now for the rest of this week’s news:
- Zounds! Monotype is acquiring Bitstream’s font business.
- The League of Moveable Type has gotten a refresh.
- Delve Withrington has some provocative thoughts on the promise and perils of microfunding and new font development.
- Ilene Strizver shares her thoughts on the font and type games that have been cropping up of late.
- James Mosley reintroduces us to the Elzevir letter.
- Yves Peters returns with a welcome new episode of “My Type of Music.”
- Now available online is Paola Antonelli’s “States of Design 06: In your face,” first published in Domus 951.
- David Lemon looks back at (and forward to) 25 years of working with type at Adobe.
- Speaking of Adobe, Extensis’ webfont plugin for Photoshop now includes type from Google’s webfont service.
- Let’s have a little more from Monotype, this time in image form.
- Shapecatcher helps you find Unicode characters. (But its delicate sensibilities don’t recognize U+1F4A9 … yet.)
- See Akko, Neue Haas Grotesk, and Rotis II in the second annual Mill Co. exhibition.
- Next Thursday (November 17), head to the Type Directors Club for Mario Hugo’s “Shapes and Changes.”
- If you’re making letters out of leg hair … um … yeah.
- Less fleeting and far more worthwhile and enjoyable is the new Comedy Carpet in Blackpool, 160,000 granite letters set in concrete.
And that brings us to the end of this week’s news. Where will we be next week? Right here! Same type-time, same type-channel.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for figuring out where this week’s new type is.
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