Search Results: Helena Ohman Studio 2013

This month’s most popular fonts exude the smell of gingerbread, candles and fresh fir twigs. Not that they’re literally Christmas fonts — we have outgrown snow-covered serifs and star-topped swashes, haven’t we? But there certainly is something festive, cozy and Decemberish about this lot. Perhaps it’s just our imagination, or lack of it. What is absolutely true, however, is that each of these fonts comes from a microfoundry somewhere in this big world — a company run by just one or two hard-working independent designers who dedicate their life to the pursuit of typographic excellence. Beautiful, isn’t it?

It does not happen very often that we interview designers right after they’ve signed up with MyFonts, and we’ve never interviewed a group as large as Fontyou. But then, the subject of this month’s Creative Characters interview is not your average type design studio. The Paris-based initiative has an ambitious plan: finding new ways to design and produce fonts. Using online tools, Fontyou establishes fruitful relationships between people with complementary skills — lettering artists, type designers, font technicians, and more. The outcome: something that’s greater than the sum of the parts — collaborative font designs with originality, quality, and character.

Clavo is the third font family from Warsaw’s Dada Studio. Its approach to the contemporary oldstyle genre is somewhat similar to Ludwig Übele’s Marat or Elena Albertoni’s Acuta (while being in no way an imitation). With its distinctive shapes, pronounced serifs and marked transitions, it has an animated energy about it that makes it stand out at display sizes. When used in smaller texts, Clavo is attractive and flexible, with proportions that are easy on the eye and help immersive reading. It comes in ten weights with matching italics, carefully adjusted for optical harmony. With a large set of numerals, small capitals, fractions and other OpenType goodies, it’s a bargain at its full price… and almost too good to be true at its current 90% discount, valid through July 28, 2013!

If the Best Seller lists on MyFonts are something of a barometer of trends in typography, then there are two main currents — and they are diametrically opposed. One: the minimalism of cool, clean slab and sans-serif fonts. Two: the delight in exuberance, ornament, cheerful irregularity and all that looks handmade. This month, with summer in the air for many of us, the scale has most definitely tipped towards the latter. It’s May, and our Rising Stars — even the Text Fonts of the month — are bursting with joie de vivre. Enjoy!

January is a packed month at MyFonts. Following the ever-popular Fonts of the Year newsletter, we go back to the future with this edition of Rising Stars, our choice of best-selling new typefaces. Attention all bargain hunters: we probably never had this many fonts at such breathtaking introductory discounts. Each of our four top Stars can be had at less than $20 for the entire family — make your decision before the end date of each promo!

Belated best wishes for 2014 from the MyFonts team! Convinced, as usual, that the year ain’t over till its over, we waited longer than most other list-makers to compile our overview of the Fonts of 2013. This is a list that you, as our customers, have voted for — with your wallet. It is a font hit parade that is based on average sales (revenue, not number of copies sold), with some correction for what we sometimes call the Introduction Sales Peak, and making sure that popular genres are fairly represented. There you go: your annual barometer of trends in type. Thanks for helping us put it together.

He is not one of those type designers who produces a new font family every two or three months. Each of his typefaces has taken considerable time to mature, and it shows: they are thoughtful, original and well-wrought. Rather than responding to passing trends, his Emtype Foundry publishes fonts that are aimed at having a long shelf-life, and his Geogrotesque has been a bestseller ever since it came out five years ago. He is also prepared to pull his weight when it comes to nourishing international typographic culture — he’ll be co-organizer of next year’s ATypI conference, the world’s major annual get-together of type designers. Meet Eduardo Manso, an Argentinian who has made Barcelona his home.

He’s arguably the most widely read type designer in the world. Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma, Skia: all ubiquitous, all his. Miller, one of North America’s most popular news faces — his initiative. Bell Centennial, drawn for AT&T, has been used in millions of phone books. His typefaces are all across the stylistic spectrum, from elegant renaissance oldstyles via meticulous scripts to indestructible sans-serifs. Having started as an apprentice at age 19, he has been in the business for the best part of six decades and is still passionately interested in the latest technological developments. He revels in working with demanding technicians and challenging projects. Here is our long-awaited interview with Matthew Carter.

"Sibylle Hagmann interview, April 2013"

They are four designers from Barcelona: Laura Meseguer, José Manuel (aka Josema) Urós, Joan Barjau and Enric Jardí. They’re a loosely-knit collective of independent individuals, each with their own activities as graphic designers, writers and teachers. They have been making and publishing fonts since the early days of desktop type design, and pioneered digital techniques that are now commonplace. Their fonts represent an approach that is, perhaps, typically Catalan: simultaneously adventurous and serious, witty and well-conceived. They recently released a string of new typefaces by Laura and Josema alongside some by other brilliant Barcelona designers. Meet the delegates of Type-Ø-Tones, a foundry that deserves respect.

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.

A graduate of Kazakh National Pedagogical University Abai, Vyacheslav has worked as a graphic designer for Forty Studio, Why Smart Branding Agency, and USP Advertising Agency. His work has been widely acclaimed, included in numerous international books and periodicals, and won an award from Granshan international type design competition, 2013. Type designer at Brownfox type studio.

“The ambitious people who stand out,” Jonathan Hill said in a Creative Characters interview, “are the ones who make their ideas a reality.” Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Jonathan created The Northern Block after having worked as a graphic designer in the thriving local music industry in Sheffield. “My breakthrough came,” he said, “with a job offer at a company called Mainartery, a London-based studio working mainly for clients in the music industry. They helped to refine my typographic skills which then led to a more professional interest in fonts.” After several years in a London studio, he moved back to North East England to set up his own logo and type design studio.

A graduate of Moscow State University of Printing Arts, Gayaneh has designed Cyrillic localizations for most major type libraries, including Linotype, Bitstream, The Font Bureau, ITC, Berthold, Typotheque, Emigre, and ParaType. She began her type design career at ParaType in 1996 and started her independent business with Brownfox type studio in 2012. Gayaneh is a member of ATypI and TDC and sits on Non-Latin Advisory Boards for TDC² and Granshan type design competitions. Her work has won awards from a number of international type design competitions, including Kyrillitsa’99, TDC² 2000, and Granshan 2013. Gayaneh is the mastermind behind Serebro Nabora, a prominent annual international type conference held in Russia.

Nils Types is the result of one talented young designer putting a business behind his life-long passion for lettering and graffiti. In 2013 Nils Thomsen decided to focus on his love of drawing letters and conceptualizing font families and start his own foundry.

Jim Ford is a visual artist and designer from Chicago. Jim works predominantly in type design, but includes custom lettering, art and illustration in his growing portfolio. He has designed custom typefaces for agencies, corporations, publishers, software and hardware manufacturers, video games, devices, you name it! In addition to customer-driven work, Jim also has a wealth of original typeface designs, ranging from traditional text faces to innovative display lettering.

Founded in 2013, LCT (La Casse Typographique) is the space created by the workshop La Casse to distribute its propers typographic creations. The graphic design studio & typographical “The Nutcracker” is composed of four entities, a plethora of knowledge and a passion to make sense.

We know — it’s a busy month at MyFonts, with newsletters landing in your mailbox in quick succession. Don’t panic! It happens only once a year, and last week’s Most Popular Fonts of 2014 is a newsletter many of you devour — literally, if such a thing is possible. With this edition of Rising Stars, it’s back to the future: here are some of the most successful fonts of this month, and the next. Enjoy!

We know — it’s a busy month at MyFonts, with newsletters landing in your mailbox in quick succession. Don’t panic! It happens only once a year, and last week’s Most Popular Fonts of 2014 is a newsletter many of you devour — literally, if such a thing is possible. With this edition of Rising Stars, it’s back to the future: here are some of the most successful fonts of this month, and the next. Enjoy!

We know — it’s a busy month at MyFonts, with newsletters landing in your mailbox in quick succession. Don’t panic! It happens only once a year, and last week’s Most Popular Fonts of 2014 is a newsletter many of you devour — literally, if such a thing is possible. With this edition of Rising Stars, it’s back to the future: here are some of the most successful fonts of this month, and the next. Enjoy!

The number of successful type designers living and working in Berlin today is staggering. Some individual careers are no less impressive. Born and raised in Berlin, this month’s interviewee started up his own typefoundry the moment he submitted his first typeface to MyFonts in 2012 — and he’s been on an upward trajectory from there. Two of his font families made our 2012 and 2013 lists of Fonts of the Year. He hasn’t brought out a single family yet that has not done well. His designs are powerful, unadorned, straightforward, and well-made. Meet the energetic and purposeful René Bieder.

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!”

Based in Santiago, Chile, Latinotype has been one of the most successful foundries on MyFonts in recent years. Their type library is a rapidly growing collection of typefaces in a wide array of genres. They specialize in colorful display and script faces, but have recently focused on sophisticated text faces as well. The foundry is owned and managed by a trio of type designers, two of whom have the same family name but are unrelated: Miguel Hernández, Luciano Vergara and Daniel Hernández. Yet Latinotype has worked with about a dozen talented, young designers and hopes to welcome more. Meet three of the most productive type designers in Latin America.

Belated best wishes for 2013 from the MyFonts team! The time for our Fonts-of-the-Year list has finally come. Perhaps you wonder how it was put together. We’ll be brief. Basically, this is a list that you, as our users, have voted for — with your wallet. It is based on sales (revenue, not number of copies sold) of fonts that have first appeared on MyFonts since December 1st, 2011. It’s not simply the total sales volume across the year, because that would give an unfair advantage to those that have been on sale longest. So we’ve looked at average sales, correcting for what we might call the Introduction Sales Peak (ISP), kept the number of font families from the same foundry down to a maximum of two, and made sure popular genres are fairly represented. There you go: a type hit parade like no other. Thanks for helping us put it together.