Type News: X-Mas Height
What’s this? It’s the last full-on Type News of 2012, not the end of the world!
Type
Dino dos Santos has completely rethought the nearly ten year old, text-focused Cultura family and rereleased it as Cultura New. The original roman, italic, and bold styles have been expanded into a fine-tuned, five weight family that covers an ample of range from light to black. Finessed forms, extended language support, and a full set of OpenType accoutrements rounds out this significant update.
Crashing diacritics are no longer an issue with the latest release from Letters from Sweden. Adding an all-caps headliner to their uniquely truncated Trim family, Göran Söderström and Patch Hofweber created three styles of “custom adjusted” diacritics for each of Trim Poster’s six cuts. Tight linespacing be darned, your accents will be spared.
It’s been a while since we dived into the voluminous Google Web Fonts directory. By golly if we didn’t pop back up to the surface with a pair of retro-flavoured gems by Astigmatic’s Brian J. Bonislawsky. The first font is Freckle Face — a bouncy, rough and tumble handstyle inspired by lettering found on Pillsbury’s Funny Face drink mix packages from the 1960s.
Also from Bonislawsky (and partner Jim Lyles) is a upright, mostly monoline advertising script under the Grand Hotel moniker. Accentuated capitals are combined with a condensed, connected lowercase — striking a classic movie poster pose.
While we were swimming around the vintage type pool, Filmotype released a couple phototype revivals of their own. Dancer is an italicized mate for the previously resuscitated upright Adonis. A playful, mid-century sans straight off the end of the letterer’s sho-card brush.
Also fresh from the Filmotype factory is Jade. This bold, 1950s-era script gets its kicks on the upright side of the street. It’s ultra compact with plenty of smooth connections (and modern typographic features to boot).
Laura Worthington’s Buckley wraps up this week’s list of what’s new. Drawn on rough paper using her “favorite vintage Waterman Ideal #2 fountain pen,” Worthington created a roughened (but not too rustic) face with ample letterspacing and a lively baseline. Each character sports a trio of variations which are automatically swapped in and out using contextual alternates — adding to face’s the handcrafted appearance.
News
- Thomas Phinney reviews webfont trends in 2012 and looks at the most popular webfonts on WebINK.
- Claire Smith celebrates Ealing studio, which “commissioned some of the most memorable film posters of their time.”
- David Sudweeks demonstrates how to work with polychromatic type.
- Meet letterer and designer Jon Contino.
- The Eye Magazine blog reviews “Something to Say,” a recent letterpress conference at St. Bride Library.
- Speaking of Eye, issue 84 is all about typography.
- M. Asher Cantrell shares 12 letters that didn’t make the alphabet — some of which aren’t letters at all (we’re looking at you, ampersand, abbreviation of þæt, and symbol for ond) — but the list is still interesting.
- Javier García is back and shares a seasonal issue of Alumination Magazine.
- The New York Times has collected some favorite book cover designs from 2012.
- The FontBook app is now available on all iOS devices.
- And Typomapp 2.0 is out.
- Learn how to get your swash on with Serge.
- J.D. Biersdorpher [sic] recommends some resources phor typephace identiphication.
- Nick Sherman shares a list of NYC phototype abbreviations ending in C.
- Le Monde Livre Classic is appropriately used on elysee.fr.
- Bone up on the quotation mark.
- Neil Summerour has launched the beautiful Swash & Kern.
- And DSType has a redesigned website.
- Make your own Christmas tree out of Unicode.
- Happy Holidays from Adobe, and an early Happy 2013 from Erik van Blokland.
- Every year has its share of curated bad words; 2012 was literally epic in this regard. [Ed. — Really?! Ugh.]
Events
It’s never too late to plan for the near future!
- Time is running out to contribute to Typodarium 2014.
- Get on over to the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago for a full-day workshop with Paul Shaw on January 18.
God jul!
That’s it for this week. We’re off for the new year — but we shall return! on January 5. Have a great holiday season, everyone.
Thanks to Grant Hutchinson for bringing in that one last haul of new typefaces this year!
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1.
Erik Vorhes Dec 23, 2012
I’d be remiss if I neglected to encourage people to donate to the Hamilton. The hardy Two Rivers museum still needs your help!