Posts tagged fonts
Badger Spine is a font by Holly Dennis created in FontStruct, which means it’s made of modular “bricks” in basic shapes like circles, rectangles, and diagonals. Really. Even ignoring that incredible fact, it’s a beautiful design inspired by some of nature’s own building blocks.
Cadence, a pattern typeface by Jonathan Perez
This typeface is a revival of an ornamental metal type font, which comes from a French type specimen of the nineteenth century. I do not know who is the author of the original ornamental design. This work is not a strict revival of the original design: the main thing was to retain the strong aesthetic and conceptual bias, while making the system evolving, notably because of the evolution from metal typesetting to digital typesetting. Cadence is remarkable for its process of construction: contrary to a classic ornamental font combining a lot of simple geometric elements, this one combines a few number of highly-complex non-geometric elements.
Bookmania, the ultimate digital Bookman typeface finally available.
I’ve never been a big fan of Bookman, but it’s undeniably a big fat apple slice of Americana, and it’s been picked apart and hacked to mush by amateurs and pseudo-professionals for years. If anyone was going to do a proper, complete digital version, it would be Mark Simonson. 5 weights, 35 discretionary ligatures, 680 swashes, 3,177 glyphs, all backed up by affectionate research (PDF). Like Mark says, it’s his “love letter to Bookman”.
Miguel Hernández’s new Fatta is about as heavy as a brush typeface can get. The 3-font family is $9.20 for a limited time.
“ Font designers who are able to marry critical and commercial success are a unique mixture of two basic clichés: the artist and the scientist. They are eclectic, curious, obsessive and absorbed, as well as rigorous, punctilious, enamoured of rules and limitations, and loyal to a higher code of design behaviour. They are an even more different breed among the many different breeds of designers working today. Contending now with the dynamic methods of communication provided by tablet computers, smartphones and other supports for text and brand, they deal with each family of fonts as if it were truly made of individuals, live characters that need to be able to fend for themselves once released into the wider world. In this vein, font design might just be the most advanced form of design existing today.”
Letraset brochure, via Linzie Hunter.
Most type is sold to designers. Letraset fonts were a rare exception, marketed to everyone for everyday use.
72pt. Blanchard Solid (by Justin LaRosa)
As a contributor to the previous edition of FontBook, I’m very proud to be a small part of this new version. (Thank you, Jürgen Siebert!) It’s bittersweet to say goodbye to print, but the iPad incarnation offers many thousands more entries and samples that are interactive and updatable. That means the typefaces shown, the classifications Indra Kupferschmid applied, and the “see also” cross references that Yves Peters and I created are not set in stone. Rather than printing supplements and errata, we simply edit a database. Rather than being stuck with a book that is out of date the moment it’s off the press, FontBook app users have a guide that is perpetually more current and useful.
While most of this data is on the web at FontShop.com, the iPad experience is unique. This format solves problems with navigation, hierarchy, and interaction that aren’t as easily addressed in a desktop web browser. A website has its own advantages, but this is a more natural evolution of the book. It is truly the best typeface reference in the best format possible.
Free Font: ARS Novelty
To celebrate the launch of a new website and the wonderful ARS Maquette Pro, ARS Type is giving away a sample of several upcoming projects — in the form of a hybrid font. Very clever.
Supria Sans, a grotesque with one foot in the early 1900s and one firmly in the now. Hannes von Döhren has a knack for tapping trends while infusing his own personality.
Fonts In Use – Comedy Central
Two new typefaces perfectly complement the successful rebrand of a more mature, but still funny, cable network.
