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!

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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)

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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) Read the rest

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) Read the rest

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.

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