This month’s catchword is “more”. First of all, the MyFonts website itself has been receiving some major (and rather amazing) updates, offering more and smoother ways of testing and installing fonts. Scroll down to the news section for more details. As for our Rising Stars, they are certainly not of the “Less is More” persuasion. Each offers a huge choice of options beyond the basic functions of a font — more ornaments, more swashes and ligatures; or fancy shadows and dynamic fillings for multicolored layering. Finally, this month’s recent text fonts are also rather maximalist in their approach, offering up to eight weights and lots of extra features.
Many of you must have marveled at the number of typefaces offered at astonishing introductory discounts these days. A large, well-equipped font family at the price of a single font — that would have sounded like commercial suicide three years ago. It has now proved to be an effective way of promoting fonts, at least for some. MyFonts, your humble distributor, doesn’t decide about promotions. It’s our partners, the foundries, that come up with these ideas. But one thing we’re certainly pleased about is that so many people buy complete font families now. To have many weights to play with, from Thin to Black, can be so much more rewarding than making do with a couple of weights, just because you can’t afford more... And as this newsletter shows, there are still fonts that become popular simply on the strength of a great design.
This month’s Rising Stars newsletter features the most diverse collection of successful new fonts in months. All popular modes of letter-making are represented: sketching, writing, constructing, reviving and standing on the shoulders of giants. There are fonts for entertainment, fonts for seducing potent loved ones or potential customers, and fonts for creating masterpieces of typographic design. There are even fonts for layering and automatic connecting. If you think that sounds dirty, then that’s not our fault.
As soon as we published our first Creative Characters interview last summer, requests began pouring in to interview the man behind Nick’s Fonts, one of our most successful foundries. “Please interview the prolific Nick Curtis!” wrote our customer Sandra. “He really seems to have his finger on the pulse of popular culture. I’m a fan, can you tell?” She is not the only one: Nick Curtis has many admirers, and it’s easy to see why. His fonts are among the tastiest, freshest and sassiest MyFonts has to offer. Plus, there’s an awful lot of them, and their variety is baffling. How does he do it?
He started up his foundry Alphabet Soup seven years ago, and has published one typeface family a year on average. But what typefaces they are! With up to 2000 glyphs per font, and endless ways of using digital technology to emulate hand-lettering, his fonts are clearly the work of a seasoned scriptmeister. Indeed, before entering the font business, Michael Doret was already a household name in the design world, producing iconic designs for the likes of The New York Knicks, KISS and TIME Magazine. Having learned the trade under the guidance of no less a guru than Ed Benguiat, this month’s interviewee has been a one-man force in lettering and logotype design since the mid ’70s. These days his partners in type are designers like Stuart Sandler, Patrick Griffin and Mark Simonson. Meet Michael Doret, a man with a past... creating fonts for the future.
