Unlike most of our interviewees, Crystal Kluge never dreamt of working OpenType magic or getting the most out of FontLab software. Pens, pencils and brushes are her tools of choice. She’d already found her own enchanting style of lettering and illustration when she was approached by Font Diner’s Stuart Sandler, who had spotted her work when shopping for wedding invitations in Minneapolis’ Uptown area. In 2006 the twosome started the Tart Workshop. It’s a dream team: Kluge draws cheerful, sassy letterforms and pictograms, Sandler makes them into smart and usable fonts with a catchy swing. And the beat, as they say, goes on.
Our July interviewee is the co-founder of Alias, a London design studio that made a name for itself producing cutting-edge designs for magazine publishers, music labels, fashion designers and more. To lend their designs an unmistakable personal touch, they make individualist fonts that MyFonts offers under two labels: Alias Collection and Alias. Most of the Alias typefaces were designed by the man whose offbeat headline font for the London 2012 Olympics will be on a billion TV screens as of this week. Meet Gareth Hague, not your average type designer.
Is it an exaggeration to say that he’s one of the unsung heroes of digital type design? Whenever you read texts on a digital device, chances are you’re looking at a font he’s had a hand in, such as Microsoft’s versions of Arial, Times New Roman or Courier New. Having led the California office of Monotype Imaging in the 1990s, he became a founding partner of Ascender Corp in 2005 and, as their chief type designer, created a huge range of functional type families including the Droid fonts for Google. He rejoined Monotype when they acquired Ascender in late 2010 and recently published the wonderful Massif Pro typeface. While he excels in making useful digital type, he is by no means a pallid geek: he balances supple curves with steep slopes, and nodes with knots-per-hour. No ODS for Steve Matteson, our man at the top.
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.
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.
Best wishes for the brand new year from the MyFonts team — all twelve of us. From our respective locations in Massachusetts, Berlin, Sacramento, Bristol, and Siem Reap, we wish you a splendid, happy and successful 2012 wherever you are.
The name of his one-man foundry is modest: insigne, with a lowercase ‘i’. But his achievements, in the eight years since he launched his first font family on MyFonts, are remarkable. His label carries over ninety typefaces, from informal fun fonts to distressed scripts to ambitious suites, one of which — Aviano — made our Best of the Year list not once, but twice, and has graced Hollywood blockbusters. He has seen more of the world than most of us, and remains hungry for new experiences. Introducing Jeremy Dooley, his eyes firmly on the future.
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