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TypeTogether
is the type foundry of Veronika Burian and José Scaglione. Only a year or so young, the foundry has come out with fonts of great assurance. Already, in May 2007, their talent has been recognized – the ED-Awards for best original typeface was won by TypeTogether.
That award winner, Karmina, is our favorite so far. It’s a text face coming in the usual four weights, and has a large x-height allowing it to be set smaller while preserving legibility. It’s built to withstand adverse printing conditions – the x-height helps here, but so do the chunky serifs, the avoidance of flashy detail, and those savage cuts of the ink-traps.
Yet turn up the font size and a strong humanistic aspect becomes apparent: the stroke treatment is calligraphic, and those ink-traps really are rather svelte – look at the italic ‘r’ to see what we mean. Masculine on the assault course of cheap newsprint, feminine in response to the red carpet treatment of coated paper: a new typographic ideal?
Ronnia
is a humanist sans-serif, economical of width. If you ever set anything in Trade Gothic, a switch to Ronnia will produce a friendlier yet not over-casual appearance. These characteristics, along with the bundled arrows and symbols, suggest a future as a signage font for schools and hospitals.
Crete
is essentially a display face, but would work well for short texts too such as in CD liner notes, concert programs or art catalogs. It was inspired by wall lettering inside a small chapel on the island of Crete. As with other TypeTogether fonts, enlarging it reveals subtleties: the slab serifs’ wedge shapes become apparent, provoking a tension akin to drops of water.
Some background:
Jose’s originally from Argentina and has worked in advertising and multimedia, now running his own design studio. Veronika, from Prague, studied in Munich, went to work at design firms in Milan and London, and now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
The two joined forces after graduating from the M.A. in Type Design at Reading University in England. The spirited font Veronika designed as part of that course, Maiola, was awarded the TDC Certificate of Excellence in 2004.
TypeTogether all 25% off for 4 weeks!
Otto Maurer,
a print, web and Flash designer, runs an active tattoo website from his base in Dinslaken, Germany. Find out about the history and meaning of tattoos if you speak German (or can bear the Google translation!) He’s here at MyFonts because he’s released a line of fun fonts that you can use to create tattoo themed graphics or even to develop ideas for your own tattoos.
Try out Sailors fonts (with Waves and Special variants) for a Popeye theme, Preussen for that blackletter gothic look, and the delightfully named Corpse Fairy to get into the horror vibe. Tribal Dingbats is fancy tattoo symbols.
CRMFontCo are
from Glasgow, Scotland. The CRM in the name stands for Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), the famous architect and designer who almost single-handedly ensured Scotland – Glasgow in particular – made a huge contribution to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement.
Architects have often used distinctive lettering on their drawings, but perhaps none is as individual as Mackintosh’s.
CRMFontCo’s conversion into a super digital font, Rennie Mackintosh, has been widely used by museums and projects, and even Hollywood film sets. Their other fonts are Rennie Mackintosh Glasgow, which includes a Mackintosh-inspired lowercase, possibly the first, and Rennie Mackintosh Artlover, a splendid font packed full of emblems to transform your designs into really artistic pieces.
Haiku Monkey
fonts are the work of Alec Julien of Burlington, Vermont. His 16 fonts (12 families) are all fun, hand-drawn lettering. We particularly like the lively, unponcy handwriting of AJHand, and Mineola, which uses double strokes to good effect.
Haiku Monkey all 35% off for 4 weeks!
Estranho Tipo
is the foundry of Adreson of Ilha Solteira, in Brazil. His font is the trendy, narrow sans-serif Aline II. He suggests using it for sports-related themes.
Estranho Tipo 20% off for 4 weeks!
ARTypes of
Chicago brings us 13 families of revivals of 18th, 19th and 20th century type classics, all newly digitized by typographer Ari Rafaeli.
Fry’s Ornamented (originally 1796) is proving the most popular so far: Ari’s been diligent in preparing two versions, each from a separate master size in the original. Freie Initialen-AR are supremely elegant capitals (1928) that’ll work well at huge sizes as drop capitals, on posters, and for classically elegant signage. Georg Trump’s Gravur (1960) and Jacques François Rosart’s
eponymous Rosart (1759), designed two centuries apart, are similar to the typographic neophyte yet one can note that all trace of arbitrariness is banished from the later design. In one mood you’ll pick Rosart, in another Gravur. Jan van Krimpen’s types Romulus Capitals, Romulus Open and Lutetia Open all have a spare elegance about them that will always appeal. Finally, a mention for the remarkable blackletter by F.H.E. Schneidler, Zentenar Initialen.
Resident
are the fonts of V.H. Fleisher of New York City. He offers us three fonts, all hand-drawn then digitized. Our favorite is Eric Script, ideal for adding a naïve signature to your funky posters and CD covers!
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Aerotype
are the fonts from Steve Miggas of Glendale, CA. Some of his 44 font families you may know already – the funky fonts Khaki, Fiesta, Siesta and others have been available via Adobe since the 1990s. But we’re delighted now to offer the complete & unabriged Aerotype collection direct.
Boundless is his easy-going script that’s flying off our web shelves. Sans-serif Coldsmith and heavy slab-serif Blackstock are scuffed and rugged, suggesting the sturdiness of the pre-digital world. Steve’s also a dab hand at blackletter faces: of the five Dractura is the most original, its novel-but-ancient shapes ideal for monastic murder mysteries!
Tipo was
founded by typographers Dario Muhafara and Eduardo Rodríguez Tunni, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Their goal is to bring a Latin American design aesthetic to an international audience – it’s evident that they concentrate on typefaces that work for their living.
Eduardo’s text family Lineare is a highly legible text face that, though brimming with spirit, will behave obediently as a corporate workhorse.
His Titulata is a heavyweight sans that’ll make for dramatic ads.
Malena is a general purpose text face with shades of Gill by Dario and Felix Lentino. And Botija is an unshowy sans-serif – look hard and you’ll see some of the curves and proportions of Bodoni, from which Tipo explains the forms were interpreted.
Tipo fonts are 20% off for 4 weeks!
Stone Type Foundry.
Sumner Stone is one of those designers whose body of work is measured by quality and attention to detail, not by quantity. After leading the Adobe type group for five years, during which he art-directed Adobe Garamond, Adobe Caslon and Trajan, and also launched his own “superfamily” ITC Stone (1987), in 1989 this calligrapher-cum-mathematician left to start the Stone Type Foundry. Then in 1999 he moved out to his Alphabet Farm in North California to grow walnuts too.
One of Stone’s areas of interest has been optical scaling of typefaces, a technique that font-making punchcutters perfected over the centuries. As each font size was individually cast in metal, font makers would use finer details and tighter spacing when cutting the typeface in a large size, and use sturdy shapes and a loose fit when producing a small-sized font. This prevented text printed in small sizes from appearing too weak or breaking up, while titles and initials would still appear elegant. This fine aspect of the craft was abandoned in the 20th century, when phototypesetters and computers allowed fonts to be scaled to any size. Much cheaper to produce than ever, the “good enough”, bean-counted results were often compromises or of limited use.
Sumner Stone promoted optical type scaling at Adobe. He invented multiple master fonts, which morph smoothly between pre-defined shapes – ideal for smooth optical scaling. Stone also supervised the design of the ITC Bodoni family that has separate “masters” to be used at 6, 12 and 72 points.
A “superfamily”
from STF comprises a large number of typefaces that come with four names. Stone Print is a highly legible, yet condensed design, making for economical use of the page and ideal for magazines and newspapers.
SFPL is a little wider, comes in 3 styles (plus small caps) and is intented as an easy-to-use family for correspondence, newsletters, reports. But the big one, in which perfected the optical scaling principle, in his Cycles family. It comes in seven optical sizes: all sizes from a tiny 5 pt up to 36 pt and larger make use of outlines tailored for use at just a small size range. Not recommended for typographic beginners! The final member of the clan is Arepo, designed especially for huge sizes.
Magma proves
that flared humanist sanserifs can exist beyond Hermann Zapf’s Optima, and its uncial relative Munc allows playful mixing of classical and medieval letterforms. Silica provides a slabserif complement to his seminal ITC Stone superfamily. In the words of fellow type designer Matthew Carter, “Sumner is the conscience of present-day type design: he does the right things, he does them in the right way, he only does them right, and he always does them right.”
Stone fonts are 50% off for 4 weeks!
Jonah Fonts
come from the hand of John Nahmias (you get the name now?). He started his career in New York in 1952 alongside the renowned Lucian Bernhard. Now semi-retired, he is satisfying a long desire to design typefaces, living in Mexico City, painting and designing in his home studio. He offers: two friendly handwriting fonts,
Scriptonah and Fountain Pen; an intense script written with a wide, angled nib, Feather Pen; and Interum, a 4-weight text family with classic proportions but novel shapes. “Five more fonts are on the way!” adds John.
JonahFonts are 20% off for 4 weeks!
Mark Ihrig
brings us his Oregon Dingbat font. A diverse mix of symbols – plants, footprints, skyscrapers – it has been used in magazines and novels. Why not add interest to plain text blocks with this collection of natural and urban icons?
Mark Ihrig fonts 20% off for 4 weeks!
Stephen Synnott
from Dublin, Ireland offers a font to of cute business-related icons. It’s called Briefcase and we can’t think of any better way of giving your PowerPoint presentations and nagging posters a friendly touch!
Stephen Synnott fonts 30% off for 4 weeks!
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