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)
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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)
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Inter UI is a family of freeware fonts with ""a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text" designed for small screen text. (via Four Short Links)
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Dotsies is a typeface that abandons the latin alphabet completely in favor of dots. Not pixelated letterforms, like a pixel font: seeemingly random agglomerations of noise. It looks like something designed to be seen by machines, like QR codes, but which would remain human-readable to those in the know. [via Jeff Atwood]
How much better is it?
It is significantly more horizontally condensed than normal fonts, letting about twice as much fall within the area of your field of vision that perceives fine detail. As to overall space efficiency in practice, the jury is still out.
This sounds hard
It's easier than you think. There are only 26 letters. Numbers and punctuation aren't altered.
The linked demo page is set up to let you accomodate yourself to dotsies by scrolling down the page. ZALGO!!
Previously: Tzump_(Wikipedia article from the future) Read the rest
Spoiler: a mix of corporate vanity and to avoid recurring licensing fees, though Arun Venkatesan elaborates a complex trend.
Sadly, much of the justification behind typefaces from some very admirable companies is quite shallow. I can’t help but feel that some of these companies wanted a custom typeface simply because that’s what everyone else is doing. This cargo cult mentality that is so prevalent in design is at best wasteful and at worst illegal.
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Viznut created a set of bitmapped Unicode fonts for use on your bulletin boards.
Years ago, I noticed that Unicode had a bunch of pseudographic characters that could be used to enrichen Ansi art. However, no one seemed to use them. Even MUDs that used the 256-color Xterm palette and had no issues with Unicode still preferred to stick to the blocks available in the MS-DOS codepage 437.
After looking into existing Unicode fonts, the reason became obvious: the implementation of non-CP437 graphics characters was shaky at best. Unicode Consortium doesn't even care how pseudographics are implemented. It was a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: No commonly accepted Unicode graphics font, no Unicode art scene; no art scene, no font support. The idea of an art-compatible Unicode font was born.
They're based on fonts from the Commodores 64 and Amiga, the Amstrad CPC, the IBM PC's original ROM font, and iconic Atari arcade fonts. Read the rest
Created by James White (previously), the Neo-Noire font represents the apogee of 80s-style brush type. It's $30 at his online store and comes with uppercase and alternate caps for the lowercase, numbers and a layered PSD exemplar so you can see how those glowy gradients are done. Read the rest
Obviously it won't do if you hand in work digitally, but old-school teachers will surely be fooled by Times Newer Roman, a clone of the default font that fills about 10% more space. A clever mix of wider letterforms and kerning is at hand, and you can be sure of getting away with it because if teacher knew enough about type to notice they wouldn't be insisting on Times New Roman and page counts in the first place. [via Lifehacker] Read the rest
Creative studio Hello Velocity's Brand New Roman is "the most corporate Corporate Font ever created!"
(via Laughing Squid) Read the rest
Web Typography Resources is a list of apps, tools, plugins and other stuff that will help you make words look nice on the world-wide web. Highlights include Bram Stein's typography inspector, Monotype's new SkyFonts webfont management service, and Matej Latin's book Better Web Typography for a Better Web. [Amazon]
Previously: Practical Typography [Matthew Butterick] Read the rest
Pressing On: The Letterpress Film has just released a trailer for their film that been screening at film festivals to great reviews. It's a beautifully shot homage to the art and craft of letterpress. Read the rest
36 Days of Type is a long-running collaborative design project where different artists render letters and numbers in a unique style. This year's entries are as delightful as always. Read the rest
Nicolas Damiens and Julien Sans thought it would be cool to offer inspiring fonts based on the scrawl of some of their favorite recording artists like Bowie, Lennon, and Cobain, whose handwriting appears on the cool cover of his published journals (above). IP lawyers put the kibosh on their SongwritersFonts project real quick-like. Read the rest
In a tweet that's gone viral, Amsterdam-based designer James Cullen referenced a 2015 Fonts In Use article that uncovers the many typefaces on the iconic Huy Fong sriracha hot sauce bottle label.
Nick Sherman, the author of the article, writes:
Both the packaging and contents of tương ớt sriracha hot chili sauce bottles from Huy Fong Foods, Inc. have become condiment icons in recent decades. Sometimes referred to as “rooster sauce” because of the rooster on its label (the illustrator of which is unknown), the chili sauce features a chaotic jumble of elements on its packaging in multiple writing systems.
The most prominent Latin text elements are rendered in a variety of informal script typefaces released by American Type Founders in the 20th century, namely Balloon and its shaded counterpart, Balloon Drop Shadow, as well as Brody. Smaller text on the back of the bottle is set in Impress and Tekton.
Unfortunately my skills with recognizing fonts for Chinese text aren’t good enough to identify those used on the label. Any insight is welcome.
Naturally the internet did its thing:
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Signato is a handsome, readable script typeface based upon the Lithuanian declaration of independence.
The whole project took more than 6 months. First of all, a high-resolution scan of the Act of Independence of Lithuania had to be obtained from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Then the person who wrote the Act had to be identified because some characters were missing in the resolution of February the 16th. When the handwriting was established as Jurgis Šaulys’s, the missing characters were created according to other documents written by J. Šaulys and found in the archives. It took a highly skilled typographer over 120 hours to construct the font.
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