Showcase MKII

Our Webfont Showcase relaunches today with a slight change in layout and organization.

Most prominantly, we’ve aimed to simplify the whole shebang, from an unnecessarily deep and multiply-stranded sub-wiki-like thing into one stream of content much more like a blog feed in character.

We’ve split the main content feed into two categories: “Webfonts in action”, where you can browse our hand-picked selection of interesting, curious and noteworthy examples of webfont enhanced sites, tagged for use in display, headline or text settings; and “Webfont Know-how” where you can findin depth features, guest articles, technical pieces, focuses on new webfont releases and the odd bit of news (like this one).

Like almost everything nowadays, it’s an perpetual work in progress, so we’ll be tweaking and fine tuning and growing up in public. Therefore, we would welcome your views — hit us up at webfonts@myfonts.com.

Please Welcome Letterbox

Australian type designer Stephen Banham’s foundry Letterbox is making its debut on MyFonts this week with a number of impressive releases. My favorite, Lan Huang & Claire Ghyzel’s Brunswick Black, is a really well-executed and extensive (small and petit caps make it excellent as a titling face!) slab serif display face based loosely on Oz Cooper’s hand-lettering and type designs.

Other standouts include the paperclipesque Morice Round, in-your-face League, and Gordon, a slightly soft but heavy headline face that comes with a nice range of unique word art.

Ampersand web typography conference

MyFonts will be promenading it this Thursday and Friday for Clearleft’s Ampersand web typography conference in Brighton, on England’s sunny south coast.

We’re hoping it stays good and hot – but even if it doesn’t, there’s plenty to fire our interest, with speakers like David Berlow, Vincent Connare, Tim Brown and Jonathan Hoefler.

We’d love to know who we might get to see there – and if you want to grab us a for a chat, we’ll be pretty easy to find, either at our pre-party (more on that further down the page) or thanks to some cool new shirts we’ve just taken delivery of…

All those making a long weekend of it are welcome to help us kick things off at our pre-party at The Basement, 24 Kensington Street (BN1 4AJ). We’re flying in (not literally) a pair of gifted musicians to strum, stroke and, maybe, pluck our heartstrings, and a DJ to unwind them again. And of course, we’ve put some pennies in the tills to keep the evening lubricated. Drop us a line if you plan to be there, we’ll try to say hi to everyone!

Buying Choices & Cart UI updates

We’ve made some changes to the Buying Choices and Cart UIs to reduce clutter and confusion.

Click to read more ...

Kurt Weidemann, Designer of Influential Corporate Identities and Typefaces

Indra Kupferschmid relays the sad news that the great typeface and graphic designer Kurt Weidemann has passed on at age 89. Indra was close to Kurt and has written a short but touching remembrance of her friend; other obituaries of this important designer appear in the Stuttgarter Zeitung and, from Jürgen Siebert, on the Font Blog.

Erik Spiekermann writes, originally in German but translated to English:

The first books on typography I read were either written or compiled by Kurt or he had written the foreword… His trilogy of corporate faces for Daimler Benz was awesome and ahead of the times… Who will I fight with now? (editor’s note: that final question is a reference to Erik & Kurt’s “legendary” but always polite on & offline arguments over type design and history.)

Weidemann is perhaps best known for the economical text face ITC Weidemann, originally commissioned by the German Bible Society, and Berthold’s Corporate superfamily. He will also be remembered for his sense of humor, his snazzy dress sense, and his red sneakers.

photograph by Marc Eckardt

A New Type for Bath from Re-Type

This morning’s inbox contained a short note from Ramiro Espinoza, originally of Argentina, at his Dutch typefoundry Re-Type, best known for Tomate and a number of edgy sans display families:

When, in 2010, David Quay was asked by communication agency FWDesign to create a custom type family to be used as the new signage and orientation system of the City of Bath, he teamed up with ReType.

Bath is a beautiful city to design for, and we were delighted to be involved in the project. The process was intensive, and demanded a well-documented research into local values, history, and vernacular lettering tradition. We didn’t want a ‘squarish’ sans with a ‘modern’ look, or indeed any ‘neutral’ type family. We wanted something a little more idiosyncratic, but rooted in the identity and tradition of the urban environment and its surroundings, rather than just appealing to our personal preferences. The new family had to be flexible enough to be employed in variable sizes, and to work harmoniously on the beautiful maps and orientation graphics devised by FWDesign.

for more on the project and to see samples of the type in use, visit Re-Type’s blog.

New Foundry: Latinotype

Please welcome Latinotype, a collaboration between several extremely talented Chilean type designers, all of whom have had successful releases via T-26, MendozaVergara, Sudtipos and other foundries/studios. Originally established in 2007 in Concepción, Latinotype currently offers three typefaces at MyFonts: Luciano Vergara’s Regia Sans Pro, a thin condensed display face with over 1,300 characters, including a huge number of unorthodox ligatures and alternates; Pincoya Black Pro by Daniel Hernández, a display face as heavy and wide as Regia is light and thin, also full of numerous alternates and ligatures; and Javier Quintana’s first release, Mazurquica, a narrow display family with a grotesk pedigree and roots in signpainting and other informal lettering.

Doyald Young: Artist, Technician, Educator

It is with great sadness that I relay the fact that the award-winning letterer, type designer, calligrapher, graphic designer and educator Doyald Young - one of the greats, and one of my greatest inspirations - has passed away.

Perhaps best known by most contemporary designers for his logotype work, Doyald was a perfectionist who could see the big picture and the tiniest details at the same time, and who worked hard to integrate meaning as well as beauty into his best work. He also designed several very attractive typefaces, each of which displayed the same attention to detail, a quality that was always present but which never overwhelmed the overall consistency of the entire piece.

Doyald will be fondly remembered by the many budding typographers and letterers he taught and inspired, and his work will resonate in that of the generations of commercial artists he made it his mission to teach.

His friend and colleague Marian Bantjes has a more extensive remembrance of his life and work available here.

photograph of Doyald Young by Eben Sorkin

Powerstation in Three Colors

Michael Doret’s layered face Powerstation - originally designed to be set in two different colors - was recently (and accidentally) found to be well-suited for three-color setting as well. What a happy accident!

I find these sorts of dimensional faces quite appealing, as they bring to mind some of the finest examples of 19th-century American signpainting. 

New Grotesques: Walbaum Grotesk & Supria

Regular readers will have already divined that I have a thing about well-designed sans faces, especially grots, so you can imagine my excitement when the following two families appeared in the MyFonts queue.

German designer Hannes van Döhren’s (subject of our July 2010 Creative Characters) Supria is a full type system - 36 fonts in all - which contains two widths, six weights and three styles (including a “curvy, feminine” italic, excellent for display use, as well as a conventional oblique). This is certainly one of the least formal and smoothest grotesques I’ve seen in some time, with all sorts of interesting and well-implemented features that most faces in this vein just don’t have. As an added bonus, the opentype features include arrows (arrow ligatures, even, which auto-substitute from the typed “->”), lining and oldstyle figures each with tabular and non-tabular varieties, case sensitive forms, small caps, a full range of alternates, and an extended character set that supports central and eastern European languages as well as the expected western European support. Purchasers of Supria will receive a gorgeous printed specimen while supplies last.

Another beautiful and unexpected release is František Štorm’s (subject of our August 2007 Creative Characters) Walbaum Grotesk Pro, a counterpart to Justus Erich Walbaum’s circa-1795 Walbaum; in fact, this face is designed to be the perfect sans counterpart for Storm’s Walbaum 2010 Pro, making an excellent text and display type system from the two families. As the designer notes, “the palette of weights is richer on the Grotesk side, since the serifed nature (of the original type) didn’t allow such kinky interpolation. Indeed, it’s usable separately as well as loud, inconspicuous, yet spicy poster typeface.”

Alluring, Illuminating Allumi

 

Jean François Porchez, the great logotype and typeface designer behind French foundry and design consultancy Porchez Typofonderie, has recently released Allumi - a large display sans family that might be his most unique and forward-looking type design to date.

Leaving his penchant for reinterpretations of the great typefaces and typographic themes of the past behind, Porchez has, with Allumi, created his most modern and least referential type family. Its sleekness and cool detachment are ideal for, as the designer notes, any materials dealing with “design, robotics, or functionality. Pushed to its extreme limits, the Allumi shapes are neither perfectly round or geometrically square. It’s a human design with a high tech touch.”

If Allumi has historical precursors, they’d be in the work of Aldo Novarese in the early 1960s, principally Eurostyle, although certainly this release has far more subtlety and a more defined persona than any iteration or revival of Eurostyle. While it certainly is an excellent display face for a wide range of purposes, Allumi’s unique shapes also make it an ideal addition to any logo designer’s toolbox.

The family incorporates two widths, a normal and extended style, and the italics are more a redrawn oblique roman rather than a completely new design - something which keeps the family as a whole much more consistent than other similar types.

Below, you can follow the evolution of Allumi from rough sketches through more polished drawings to the final release.

Sirba: Delicate, Beautiful, Readable

The most recent release from Veronika Burian and José Scaglione’s TypeTogether foundry is Sirba, from Dutch  graphic and type designer Nicolien van der Keur. Conceived as a friendly and approachable type for long, complex projects, Sirba is ideal for “dictionaries, academic texts, annual reports, novels and magazines.” Asymmetrical serifs, calligraphic terminals and slightly curved verticals all make the face that much more approachable without limiting its legibility.

Available in four styles - as well as a special black weight designed for use at very small sizes - Sirba is an excellent alternative to many of the drier types often considered for long, complicated projects, and its soft curves and other subtle design characteristics make it interesting at display sizes.

The designers recently produced a very attractive letterpress specimen of the type.

Progreso means Progress!

Jason Castle’s new Progreso - a sturdy, condensed unicase display design - is strongly influenced by the Soviet hand-lettering of the 1920s. It supports almost all European languages, including modern Green and Cyrillic-alphabet languages; its over 600 glyphs include those three alphabets, multiple forms, ornaments, and map and technical symbols.

Progreso is currently on sale. Usually $59, it is now - and for a very limited period - only $29.50.

below: two Stenberg Brothers posters of the late 1920s featuring condensed display lettering

Sevigne: A Luxurious Hairline Sans

Sevigne is a pared-down, geometric, extremely refined all-caps sans, available in two weights, as well as in stencil and non-stencil variants. 130+ ligatures and a number of alternate forms make it flexible and fun to set. Being that most of these ligatures and alternates exist for purely decorative purposes, Sevigne will work best at very large sizes; we recommend it for posters, non-directional signage, logo development and similar projects.

Sevigne’s designer, Mike Jarboe, lives in the beautiful Cardiff-by-the-Sea, near San Diego, California; he attempts to cram as much logo and type development time as possible into his days, which is not always possible given that he is the father to two very energetic young boys.

This isn’t his first exploration of stencil forms; his Vacant is another technically adept exploration of similar themes and is definitely worth checking out.

Hóka-héy! Today is a Good Day ... To Sans

We’ve had a really tremendous number of interesting additions to the MyFonts library in the past few weeks, including a number of full-featured sans text and display families. Recent standouts include:

Stereo Type Haus’ Bockhold, an industrial variant of the classic DIN design, includes two weights and italics. Designer Richard Grenados has softened up the coolness and rigidity of the face’s historical predecessor, with atypical endings and stresses taken from much more humanist influences.

Xtra Sans, from Typolar, combines aspects of the modern grotesk with almost calligraphic counters, making it ideal for display use - although, when used small, some of those quirks disappear, and it becomes an equally-useful and readable body type. Congratulations to designer Jarno Lukkarila, as an earlier versions of Xtra Sans received a Certificate of Excellence from the Type Director’s Club and a bronze award from Tokyo’s Morisawa Awards.

Olga Karpushina’s Private Sans - her first commercial release, and initially part of her graduate work - was just released by ParaType. It’s a soft and unassuming humanist face loosely based on the general feel of broad-nib calligraphy, with some interesting oddities - including irregularities throughout that mimic the rhythm of hand-written script (something very atypical for Cyrillic text faces, the designer notes). The soft terminals and asymmetrical counters are more visible at large sizes, giving it a bit more interest when used for display.

Dino dos Santos’ masterful Velino includes a number of faces, serif and sans, display and non, all in a variety of widths. Velino Sans, however, is notable in that it matches the proportions and spacing of its text counterpart exactly, making it a must-have if you’ve got your eye set on Velino Text or the slab display alternate, Velino Poster. To put this in context, many designers don’t match the metrics between their serif faces and (often later-designed) sans complements, which means you can’t easily use them interchangeably in longer documents, tables, or big display materials where spacing really counts.

I Like Big Fonts and I Cannot Lie

Ukrainian graphic and type designer Sergiy Tkachenko’s 4th February foundry (named after Tkachenko’s birthdate in 1979) has an epic release this week: the monumental, enormous, Brobdingnagian Fatquad. Like all of this designer’s other releases, Fatquad includes both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, as well as a number of graphic ornaments, special boxed numbers and a full range of accented characters for Central and Eastern European typesetting.

#MyFontsStats

I recently posed a question on Twitter asking: “What’s a random statistic about MyFonts that you’d like to know?” Little was I prepared for the immediate onslaught that would head our way. I spent the rest of that day researching and answering questions that poured in faster than I was able to type numbers into my calculator. 

When the storm died down a few hours later, I’d answered about 30 questions.

For those of you who are not slaves to Twitter, or just want to see all the answers in one place, here’s a rundown of stats people were interested in.

Click to read more ...

Steinweiss Script

Extremely talented letterer, type designer, graphic designer and illustrator - as well as all-around nice guy - Michael Doret has at last unveiled his latest project, a gorgeous typeface based on the calligraphy of Alex Steinweiss, “inventor of the modern album cover.” Here’s one of Steinweiss’ many album covers, featuring his famous lettering, the “Steinweiss Scrawl.”

Steinweiss Script is a fully-developed connecting script available in three progressively more detailed styles (simple, fancy, and titling) and three weights (light, medium, and bold). Doret writes that “(t)hese (stylistic) variations relate to the size/ratio of the caps to the lowercase, the complexity of those caps, and the size of the ascenders/descenders on the lowercase characters.”

A lively rhythm makes the letterforms jump up and down along the baseline, and is accommodated by a staggeringly large number of alternates and ligatures (the font has over 2,200 characters, including a number of full-word ligatures); special swash beginning ligatures pair capital forms with one or two lower-case characters to give proper nouns and the beginnings of phrases a truly custom look. Add a full range of accents for European language support, and you have one of the most useful and flexible casual scripts of all time, partly due to the OpenType programming genius of Canada Type’s Patrick Griffin.

Peruse the User’s Guide (PDF, 1.3mb) to see Steinweiss in action.

The New Arabic Face of DIN

Parachute’s recently released DIN Text Arabic, the newest expansion of their popular reinterpretation of DIN 1451, is one of the most succesful contemporary Arabic typefaces in years. It is as readable and attractive as it is strict and consistent - that is to say, extremely. The full PF DIN superfamily includes over 60 fonts (including the very successful DIN Text Pro faces) with Greek, Roman and Cyrillic alphabets and an average of 1280 glyphs per font (and more than 270 useful copyright-free symbols), which includes a wide variety of weights and styles. This particular subfamily includes 8 weights, from hairline to xblack, and a very complete Arabic and Roman alphabet with over 2000 glyphs.

Skyhook: A New Kind of Mono

David Waschbüsch’s Skyhook Mono is quite possibly the most flexible monospaced font in years. It includes dozens of features you wouldn’t expect in a modern and ultra-simplified design: case-sensitive forms, true italics, both old style and lining numerals, fractions, titling forms, arrows, both decorative uppercase and lowercase ligatures, multiple weights (which maintain the same metrics), a full Greek alphabet, and an enormous range of accented characters. At over 600 glyphs per cut, it is perfectly suited for many of the tasks and involved projects that only the richest booktype families were capable of in the past.

Try it out for yourself - currently, a free sample weight is available for download.

This is the premiere release from Germany’s FontomType; if future releases are even half as original, interesting and well-executed as Skyhook, we will be very interested in following their progress.