Search Results: Romain Roger Galaxy Type Poster Bauer Bodoni 2012

Over the past year or so, we’ve seen a subtle shift in typographic tastes. While until recently the top 10 of our Hot New Fonts was dominated by witty, wild display fonts and scripts, these days there’s a more serious-looking bunch of fonts up there.

As the northern hemisphere slips into summer — almost imperceptibly, in some places — our type designers make every effort to provide us with fonts that lighten up our screens and emanate a sense of fun. This month’s display fonts offer soulful grooves, well-wrought decoration, soft-spoken clarity and bouncy mirth; and our text fonts are the latest in smart, elegant yet modest functionality. It’s June: the new season in typographic finesse begins here.

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.

Just over a year ago, a brand new foundry appeared on MyFonts — Hoftype. In twelve months the foundry published an astounding array of useful, elegant and original text typefaces. The man behind Hoftype is Dieter Hofrichter, type designer in Oberschleißheim, near Munich in southern Germany. Hofrichter’s career as a professional type designer began in 1989 when he was hired by H. Berthold AG. In the company’s famous studio he worked with the late Günter Gerhard Lange, the most exacting taskmaster in post-war German typography. This issue of Creative Characters was co-edited with Berlin-based type designer Dan Reynolds, who asked most of the questions and transcribed the answers. Many thanks!

Linotype has made an enormous impact on the type industry for over a century, continuously producing high-quality, world-renowned fonts.

Adobe Systems, based in San Jose, California, was started by John Warnock and Chuck Geschke in 1982. In 1999 it became a billion dollar company. Adobe has long offered many applications for handling images and text, as well as a fine type library.

Just over a year ago, a brand new foundry appeared on MyFonts — Hoftype. In twelve months the foundry published an astounding array of useful, elegant and original text typefaces. The man behind Hoftype is Dieter Hofrichter, type designer in Oberschleißheim, near Munich in southern Germany. Hofrichter’s career as a professional type designer began in 1989 when he was hired by H. Berthold AG. In the company’s famous studio he worked with the late Günter Gerhard Lange, the most exacting taskmaster in post-war German typography. This issue of Creative Characters was co-edited with Berlin-based type designer Dan Reynolds, who asked most of the questions and transcribed the answers. Many thanks!

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.

"Melle Diete interview, December 2011"

Jim Parkinson has probably designed more magazine and newspaper nameplates than any other designer on earth. Some of his designs have become true icons, like the logos he made for Rolling Stone, the quintessential American rock magazine, and for Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Drawing on techniques such as hand-lettering and signpainting, Parkinson’s typefaces often evoke past styles and shapes, subtly updated to fit present contexts. You can find most of his fonts at MyFonts, including the faces published by his own company Parkinson Type Design. Meet Jim Parkinson, an expert forger who likes fooling with time.

"In Your Face Summer 2007"