Week 17, 2021
A Weekly Review of the World of Typography
Releases:
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Grilli Type released their long-awaited rounded sans family GT Maru this week. GT Maru is the result of a years-long design exploration of roundness. Inspired by construction site lettering and sign painting in Japan, and the more jovial nature rounded sans typefaces have in his local Swiss vernacular, designer Thierry Blancpain has brought a new approach to the seldom explored genre. GT Maru comes as a collection of sub-families: Normal, Mono, the super kawaii Mega style, and a collection of emojis.
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Vocal Type has released VTC Ruby — a set of layerable wood-type ‘shaded’ sans styles. VTC Ruby is a revival design of a deplorable piece of typographic history, reclaimed and renamed after Ruby Bridges, the six year old girl who bravely began the integration of U.S. Public Schools during the Civil Rights Era.
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Penina is the latest release from Feliciano Type Foundry. Penina is a somewhat wide, relatively thin, pen-derived serif variable font with one contrast axis, which spells out a range of presentations that closely resemble text and display styles.
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Positype has released Faubourg, an experimental higher-contrast display font with an eye for fashion editorials. Faubourg walks the line between convention and experimentation, featuring a mashup of seriffed and monolinear character styles. Faubourg marks the first professional typeface release by Marie Boulanger.
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Tatras, a narrow, all caps, sans design, and Tatras Shaded, its dimensional counterpart, are two families designed by Love Letters, billed as “a homage to eastern European design and its socialist heritage. The typeface takes its inspiration from the lettering that is emblematic of mid-century design from Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and the Balkans.” This is a Version 0.1 release through Future Fonts.
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TypeTogether released Postea, a very thorough geometric sans family of 14 fonts imbued with a human feel. Inspired by the geometric sans styles widely prevalent in Germany, Postea’s aim is to re-approach this style with new life and revisit what makes them so geometric in the first place. Read the extensive write-up on Postea here.
Links:
TOOLS: Slice is a new cross-platform GUI application to slice variable font design spaces into smaller static instance and variable sub-space fonts.
NEWS: The default Microsoft Office font is changing in 2022, after 15 years of Calibri. This is usually news in itself, but the bigger deal is that Microsoft has commissioned 5 new fonts that will battle it out to win the spot as default. Read more about all the new fonts here.
CUSTOM FONTS: Dalton Mag has published some info and slides about Splunk, their latest custom font for U.S. software firm of the same name.
NEW SITE: Vienna based type foundry Schriftlabor launched a new foundry site. Go, click all the things.
NEWS: ATypI announced that their board has voted to de-adopt the Vox-ATypI typeface classification and has withdrawn endorsement of the system. Read the full press release here. As type people, we’re somewhat embarrassed to say that we didn’t really even know what that was and had to look it up. Bottom line: the hunt is on for a new way to classify fonts.
READ: If you’re looking for more information on classification in type, check out this awesome article on AI and type classification by Indra Kupferschmidt.
PERFUME?: This olfactory kickstarter asks the question we’ve all been asking for so long: How would the alphabet smell?