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.
There are many ways of looking at typefaces. Most of the time we’re not even looking at all: we just read. That’s what good type designers keep in mind when they labor to add something meaningful to the huge arsenal of available typefaces. Just like chairs or shoes, fonts can be a means of self-expression or a way to make the world prettier (that’s why people keep thinking of new chairs, shoes and fonts) but their goal first and foremost is to perform a well-defined task — in the case of type, it’s to give people access to a written text. But contrary to popular belief, type is not invisible. It’s a kind of packaging for texts: it carries a subtle message about its content and may bring the reader into a specific mood. The bigger it is, the louder the message. Get ready for yet another selection of popular, recent typefaces that whisper, ask, or shout: “Look at me!”
Last year Daniel Hernández left his native Chile for Buenos Aires, Argentina — arguably the typographic capital of South America — to become a full-time type designer. His dedication has paid off. In the brief period since his first typefaces appeared on MyFonts, he has become a regular on our bestseller lists. His typefaces are also quite special, with that mixture of novelty, fun and craftsmanship that we have come to know as, somehow, typically “latino”. Having published his first fonts with Sudtipos, he is now part of LatinoType, a successful new Chilean foundry with international ambitions.
Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, has been at the forefront of graphic design in Latin America for decades. Today, one of that city’s most prominent forces in type design is Sudtipos, a remarkable type collective founded in 2001 by four experienced designers from the world of corporate and packaging design. This month’s interviewee is Sudtipos’ spokesman, who became famous for drawing and programming some of the most intricate script fonts ever digitized. Meet Alejandro “Ale” Paul, a man who likes to raise bars — and we don’t just mean chocolate bars.
Spring is in the air in many parts of the world, and each year that feeling of a new start somehow coincides with a crop of fresh new script fonts. Our newsletter, however, has more to offer than an excess of swashes and loops. From Germany come two of the most interesting sans-serifs to recently hit our shelves. Another German masterpiece is beamed up to us from the early twentieth century via Toronto, Canada. All this and more is possible at MyFonts.
Dear Reader: Get ready for the longest Creative Characters interview ever. It’s not just that Stuart Sandler is a talented talker, he also has a lot to talk about. He runs and co-directs no less than five foundries and labels that MyFonts represents: the Font Diner, Sideshow, Breaking The Norm, the Tart Workshop and, most recently, Filmotype. He runs a handful of other companies and web shops as well, including Mister Retro. He is enamored with the lettering and typefaces of the 1920s through the 1960s, a period when letter-making was a very different craft indeed. Meet Stuart Sandler, a master of digital retro-americana.
