Week 09, 2021
A Weekly Review of the World of Typography
Releases:
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Mark Simonson has released Proxima Vara, a variable font version of his most prolific and arguably most successful type family Proxima Nova. (Check out the mini-site here.) While the claim of "5 million fonts" is a bit hyperbolic, the advantage of releasing such a mega family as a single variable font is unquestionable… something we expect most major foundries will be doing with their own mega families in the coming months and years.
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Job Clarendon is a beautifully crafted condensed news clarendon produced by David Jonathan Ross in collaboration with Bethany Heck, sold exclusively as part of the Font of the Month Club. It’s worth subscribing just for this family.
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Almost is a broad-nib pen derivate family of 20 fonts sporting a look somewhere between gothic and roman stylings from the upstart Poem Foundry.
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Forward, a funky display type experiment gone right. It’s an homage to technologic aesthetics and an almost brutalist mentality. Forward is available as a V.01 release on Future Fonts.
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Heliuum, released by 205TF, is billed as “a playful typographic system” of 7 different character sets that bring a very sporadic dancing feeling to the typeset line. Fun to play around with, although the jury’s still out on whether it will be easy to control in design softwares.
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Newsreader is an open sourced editorial serif family of 42 fonts from Production Type commissioned by Google Fonts. It’s got three optical size styles with roman and italics, and yes, completely free. Its a great family to contend with Darden’s Freight family, or another open-source font family Source.
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Noi Grotesk from Studio Fiexen is a Neo-Grotesk Sans family that makes the most of variable font tech and loads of stylistic alternates. It may seem plain, but there was obviously no detail overlooked, from ink traps to alternate constructions, and my new favorite type style—Spaghetti Mode.
Links:
Variable Fonts: Variable fonts for the win! Audi has refined their brand identity by rendering their custom corporate type as a variable font, and taking that a step further by extending the advantages of variable font technology to their iconic four rings logo. (via Brand New.)
NFTs: What do you think about NFTs? How about an NFTbased font marketplace? Well, meet font.community, "a new radical approach towards the marketplace. Decentralized – owned and managed by its users.”… Where do we go from here?
Article: Some Type Foundries Want to Restrict Usage of Their Fonts on Ethical Grounds. Will It Work? (via Eye on Design)
New Fonts: Toshi Omagari, fresh off the heels of a departure from Monotype has released Codelia, a very friendly, non-threatening, jovial even, humanist monospaced family of 24 fonts designed specifically for coding environments. *(Note, the only reason mention this spectacular release in the Links section, and not the releases section, is because it is only available through MyFonts, and in order to more directly serve the independent type community, we like to limit the presence of such big distributors in our coverage. Do not let this diminish the quality this release —it’s still awesome—, or your impression of Toshi’s work.)
Inspo: The most elegant and stylish typographic theater signs from around the globe, according to Typeroom.
Community: Alphabettes is throwing a digital 24-hour hang out in honor of International Women’s Day March 8th. Tune in, hang out, feel like a part of something. Here’s how.
Video: Watch and play along with all of Sarah Hyndman’s fun and quick Fontastical Games on YouTube.
Custom Fonts: Bureau Brut’s custom type family for the Byblos Hotel in downtown Saint-Tropez is sharp, fun, and very Greeky.