This month’s interviewee was an international free-font hero while still in his teens, before attending design college, dropping out, and becoming a well-known graphic designer and illustrator. Having made stunning illustrations and typographic posters for clients in the cultural and editorial sectors, he eventually specialized in energetic script and display fonts. His foundry Fenotype has been at MyFonts for a mere three years, but it feels as if it’s been longer. His fonts were featured in our Fonts-of-the-Year lists of 2011 and 2012, making him the most successful type designer from the Nordic countries currently on MyFonts. Meet Emil Bertell, our man in Turku, Finland.
He is one of those lettering artists who learned the craft right at the time when it was becoming obsolete. While passionate about calligraphy and sign painting, he loves working with digital design tools. He has drawn custom logos and titles for prestigious companies. He has produced a string of successful font families, of which the most recent — Desire — took him an estimated 7,000 working hours. He was a mentor to fellow lettering artists Laura Worthington and Debi Sementelli, both of whom he helped to perfect their digital skills. Meet Charles Borges de Oliveira from Borges Lettering, building bridges between hand crafts and digital savvy.
Trick — or treat? The nice thing about modern typefaces is that you can have both. Many of the fonts offered in this month’s newsletter are amazing bags of tricks. Some offer a totally different set of capital letters if you ask them to, link characters with surprising ligatures, look just like messy handwriting, or offer the perfect conditions for reading a 500-page novel. And of course, each of these fonts is a treat — not just visually. Their introductory discounts also make many of them very affordable. Now, it’s not always easy to use all the goodies that these fonts offer. Many layout applications make it unneccesarily difficult to take advantage of OpenType, and keep the fonts’ features hidden from the user. A worldwide group of designers and experts is now asking a major software manufacturer to finally get its typographic act together. Scroll down to learn more about this, and chip in.
This series is gradually growing into a kind of typographic world tour. During the past year or so, we have interviewed designers from Sweden to Thailand, from Brazil to Siberia, from Chattanooga to Japan. This month’s interview takes us to Ukraine — not its capital Kiev (or Kyiv, as Ukrainians prefer to transcribe their cyrillic spelling), but a pleasant southern town on the Sea of Azov. Here, in Berdyansk, is the seat of AndrijType, one of several likable Eastern European font foundries that have joined MyFonts in the past few years. Its one-man typeface library successfully blends Ukrainian-flavored sensibilities with universal typographic common sense. Meet designer Andrij Shevchenko, coming in from the cold.
Jim Parkinson has probably designed more magazine and newspaper nameplates than any other designer on earth. Some of his designs have become true icons, like the logos he made for Rolling Stone, the quintessential American rock magazine, and for Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Drawing on techniques such as hand-lettering and signpainting, Parkinson’s typefaces often evoke past styles and shapes, subtly updated to fit present contexts. You can find most of his fonts at MyFonts, including the faces published by his own company Parkinson Type Design. Meet Jim Parkinson, an expert forger who likes fooling with time.