Typeface nerds, prepare to scrutinize the new logo design of that just-announced Biden-Harris ticket. Read the rest

I've posted about the Oldschool PC Font Resource before, but the latest version of its ultimate font pack radically expands the project. The new pack adds 133 new font families, embedded bitmaps to sharpen TrueType rendering, .woffs for use on the web, and bugfixes throughout the entire set, released under a free Creative Commons license.

Check out the showcase page.

Leech 'em all! [int10h.org]

If you have any fonts from v1.x of the pack installed on your systems, I *strongly recommend* removing all older "Bm" and "Px" fonts before you install any from v2.0. Quite a few fonts have been renamed or have changed roles, so keeping the older versions will leave you with duplicates and with an inconsistent set.

Goldman Sachs has released its own eponymous font, Goldman Sans, a contemporary sans-serif that garnishes merciless formality with a charming typographic "wink" here and there [h/t Matt Round]. It is free of charge, but perhaps the least Free font on Earth, as its unique license forbids criticism of Goldman Sachs with it. The license is also booby-trapped: it can be changed and revoked unilaterally by Goldman Sachs, turning anything that ever uses it into a legal time bomb.

(C)(2)(d) The User may not use the Licensed Font Software to disparage or suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs.

(E)(2) Further, Goldman Sachs may terminate this License, without notice to the User, for any reason or no reason at all and at any time, completely at Goldman Sachs’s sole discretion.

Vox made a good video about the history of the Cooper Black typeface, created in 1919 and still in common use today.

There’s a typeface that has made a resurgence in the last couple of years. It’s appeared on hip hop album covers, food packaging, and advertising. Perhaps you know it from the Garfield comics, Tootsie Roll logo, or the Pet Sounds album cover by the Beach Boys. It's called Cooper Black, and its popularity and ubiquity has never waned in the hundred years since it was first designed.

In the video above, Steven Heller and Bethany Heck tell the story of Cooper Black and deconstruct all the reasons it's been pop culture's favorite font for so long.

Image: By Evan-Amos - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Modified, Link Read the rest

Scunthorpe Sans is a font based on Aileron that adds auto-censoring ligatures for a selection naughty words.

It’s able to detect the words f***, s***, p***, t***, w***, c*** and dozens more, but with a special exemption for “Scunthorpe”; that town has suffered enough.

It's available as a free download (Aileron is CC0 1.0/No Right Reserved). Read the rest

TT2020 is "an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!" As there already are so many, why another? Creator Fredrick Brennan (previously) points out that most fonts which attempt to create the look of a real analog typewriter lack alternative glyphs and other modern features, displaying tell-tale repetitions of aberrations and flaws. He spotted some recent howlers in expensive Hollywood productions that should know better, such as The Joker.

The absurd lack of realism displayed here let me know that I could put this project off no longer. In case you don't see anything wrong ... In the second image, there are three ‹N›’s. Yet, they all look exactly the same. A real typewriter can, quite rarely, have one of its letters damaged, or misaligned, such that that letter regularly makes an inferior strike to all the other letters. However, this degree of regularity is impossible; could Underwood or Remington have acheived it, they would have leapt for joy. It is therefore clearly a digital facsimile and not a real typewritten document.

The example he shows from The Irishman is similarly egregious. Doesn't anyone in Hollywood own a real typewriter?

TT2020 comes in a variety of weights and styles to emulate specific reproduction environments. It's open-source, too, with technical notes to enjoy.

TT2020 [ctrlcctrlv.github.io] Read the rest

The New York Times' logo looks like it might be set in a classic blackletter typeface, but it is in fact hand-made. Enter Chomsky, a typeface designed by Fredrick Brennan (yes, the Fredrick Brennan) and derived from the NYT's distinctive old-timey nameplate.

This font is not an exact copy of the New York Times masthead. Rather, it aims to be suitable for running text as well, so I used a larger stem size. The difference between some of the characters are shown below; the N.Y.T. logo is above, and Chomsky below... :

I was quite surprised, that to my knowledge, I am the first to have undertaken this project. Many other famous brands, for example that of CNN, Sega, and Coca Cola have fonts in homage to them; indeed, most of these fonts were made in the pre-Unicode era and are branded in terms of metadata with the name of the defunct, but once prominent, Macromedia Fontographer; the CNN copy cat font is itself going on twenty years old.

Perhaps it was the difficulty of creating the extra letters in a blackletter face that scared away would be font authors. Perhaps it was lack of knowledge about the law in this area. Either way, I do believe that I am the first.

Mark Davis designed a font for BuzzFeed News based on Trump's distinctive handwriting (as seen on the I WANT NOTHING script he hand wrote yesterday). It's called Tiny Hand and you can download it for free. Read the rest

Hellvetica, by Zack Roif and Matthew Woodward, is the classic typeface Helvetica, but with random spacing everwhere. [via Jeff Atwood]

(If you want random nonsensical changes to the letterforms instead of the spacing, try Arial) Read the rest

There are many articles about nice monospace typefaces, but Programming Fonts lets you see all the good ones live on-screen—and how your work looks in it. I'm a big fan of APL385, with a truly ancient pedigree, whose eccentricities land perfectly at the needs of the moment: high-dpi fixed-width legibility that's fun without drowning in nostalgia for old displays and their stupid pixels. Read the rest

Uno's Greta Grotesk is a free font based on Greta Thunberg's hand-lettered signs. Read the rest

Leon Sans is a generative typeface for the web, meaning that its weight and other characteristics can be animated, colorized, fine-tuned or otherwise messed with on-the-fly using javascript. Check out the demo page.

The Mask Tiling example is nice!

Read the rest

Comic Code is a monospace version of the classic and "over-hated" Comic Sans.

Comic Code was designed by Toshi Omagari and published by Tabular Type Foundry. Comic Code contains 14 styles and family package options. The font is currently #21 in Hot New Fonts.

I'd make a screenshot of it in vivo, but apparently they want money for it. Read the rest

National Park is a free typeface from The Design Outside Studio based on the "National Park Service signs that are carved using a router bit." Studio founder and University of Kansas design professor Jeremy Shellhorn was visiting Rocky Mountain National Park when inspiration hit. He writes:

I had a sketchbook with me and took some rubbings of the letterforms and asked my friend Miles Barger, the Visual Information Specialist for Rocky, if he had the typeface. He asked the sign shop. No one has it? Turns out it isn’t a typeface at all but a system of paths, points and curves that a router follows.

The router’s "bit" follows the path and gives the letters its stroke weight or thickness only when engraving a sign.

It doesn't really exist as a typeface unless a sign is made.

So my design colleague, Andrea Herstowski, students Chloe Hubler and Jenny O'Grady, NPS Ranger Miles Barger and myself decided to make this router typeface a thing.

Our National Parks belong to the people, so this typeface should too.

National Park Typeface (via Kottke)

Read the rest

Helvetica Now is Monototype's new typeface created for today's screens. Read the rest

Chobani's new custom typeface heralded a headlong return to swirly 1970s type.

It's not just nostalgia. Blame high DPI displays, too!

Today’s movement toward fonts reminiscent of the ’70s is partly a matter of advancing technology, Jen says: As phone and TV screens have improved, designers don’t have to worry as much about pixelation when working with curves. But nostalgia is a powerful factor, too. Elizabeth Goodspeed, a graphic designer who works at the branding agency RoAndCo, believes that for many consumers, ’70s-esque fonts represent a safe retreat into the past — a safer retreat, importantly, than the one currently offered by midcentury Swiss Style, which inspired all of those minimalist startup logos with its grid layouts and sans serif fonts.

The recent use of 70s type in corporate branding is showy in a way that suggests a fad rather than a sustained trend, but such a trend does exist toward more utilitarian typefaces from the era. You might be seeing a lot of Windsor, Souvenir and chunky Caslons in the next few years. However ugly and cheesy you might consider all this, it's a merciful antidote to 2010s tech culture anglegrinding every logo into the same sort of bland, soulless sans-serif font.

Off you go to the groovy section of dafonts for your new side-hustle logo! Read the rest

Public Sans is a free, open font (available in weights from 100-900, download here) from the federal United States Web Design System with a Github project that you can contribute to: it's billed as "A strong, neutral typeface for text or display." (via Four Short Links) Read the rest