Article

In Your Face - 11/2003 - Intro

THIS MONTH AT MYFONTS.COM - INTRODUCTION

Two whole months of news this time, since last month’s newsletter was sidelined by the Indie Fonts competition. The competition was a great success - see the 5 winners and 5 answers in the section below. Our congratulations go out to the winners, and our thanks to everybody who took part. We were able to persuade the foundries mentioned in the answers to put in place some great promotions relating to the competition - see the Promotions section for details. Rest assured, we'll be thinking of more fun competitions in the near future!

I'm pleased to announce we've now got on sale the complete Scriptorium collection. On our recent review through the collection, we were struck by (among other things) the mouth-watering collection of initial letter fonts. (Check out also the new “Sattler AS” from ASType.) Such fonts contain highly ornate alphabets, traditionally used as “drop capitals” at the start of chapters in books; we've also seen them used well on greetings cards and websites. (Most word processors and page layout programs have a “drop cap” feature: select the font you want to use, choose “drop cap”, tweak the position, and it’s done.) Typographic health warning: Using more than one decorative initial per page may overload the esthetic faculties of your readers!

This month sees the debut of the Masterfont collection of Hebrew typefaces - read more below about this definitive collection, designed by award-winning type designers. Interesting to note that the interest in pixel fonts - producing and consuming them - shows no signs of abating. For web design using Flash, there’s no more precise way to create menus and lay out text. The latest entrant is Pixietype (read more about them below) - who use a clever new method to reduce the blockiness of these fonts. A special mention goes out to Présence Typo, the small French foundry of Thierry Puyfoulhoux. His “Placebo Sans” impressed us particularly this month. This would appear to be his submission to the insatiable hunger for distinctive, highly-legible, sans-serif typefaces that we've seen from corporations for their typography and signage in recent years.

Every now and then (and the upcoming Holiday Season makes it a better time than most) we feel the urge to remind people of the convenience of Dingbat fonts. Dingbats are little pictures stored just like letters in font files. You can buy them, download them, and use them just like fonts, so they work in all your programs. You can colour them, overlap them, make cartoons out of them, even alter them to your own tastes! So much easier to manage than a folder full of clip-art. Almost always you get a set of thematically related images in Dingbat fonts, so it’s a great way to add character to your websites and other projects. We mention Linotype’s new Christmas-flavor font below, but do also check out the many others for all occasions from Scriptorium, Dingbatcave, and many other foundries: type “picture” into the Search box, adding optional extra terms to look for specific themes: “xmas”, “face”, “sport”, “animal”, and hundreds more.

Happy font finding!

-- Laurence Penney, Editor, “In Your Face”

This article refers to: In Your Face - 11/2003.

About Us — Testimonials — Sell Your Fonts — Become an Affiliate — Site Map — Sign In

MyFonts   500 Nickerson Road   Marlborough MA 01752   USA
MyFonts and MyFonts.com are registered trademarks of Bitstream Inc.
WhatTheFont and Starlets are trademarks of Bitstream Inc.
Copyright © 1999–2012 Bitstream Inc. PRIVACY POLICY