It’s the last Rising Stars newsletter of the year! Small and bigger companies know what this means. If your fiscal year ends on December 31, now is the time to spend the remainder of your software budget, fast. And what better way to make your pennies work than by getting some trendy new fonts at great prices? This month’s newsletter features some of the best new fonts in the most popular genres: readable sans-serifs, whimsical display families, layerable type for multi-colored layouts, bright new text fonts. They’ll also make a great holiday gift. Enjoy!
Welcome to our monthly newsletter, showcasing some of the most successful fonts of the moment. As usual, our four Rising Stars are selected from the best selling type families on our list of Hot New Fonts, which is updated daily. For those who design books and magazines, the Texts Fonts of the Month section offers a selection of type families that are equipped for complex editorial tasks and immersive reading.
As we are writing this newsletter, spectacular things are happening on soccer fields in Brazil. The world is holding its breath. How unpredictable can a game get? How euphoric a street full of fans? Most of us here at MyFonts are sports fans of one sort or another, but we can’t help wondering: in a world taken over by football*, who wants to read about fonts? Questions, questions. We don’t have a choice. We have to present you with simply the best and the most popular typefaces in a brave attempt to compete with twenty-two men having a ball, and maybe we’ll get your attention. The fonts, mind you, are worth it.
Trends in type come and go the way they do in fashion and music (anybody remember grunge?) but sometimes here at MyFonts we are surprised by the things that catch on. Take the current craze in chromatic fonts. That’s the specialist term for display alphabets in a range of variations that can be layered to decorative and dazzling multi-colored effect. We figured that layering text frames would be a bit too laborious for this technique to become a massive success, but guess what? Thousands are buying these fonts, and several recent families in this genre have become hits. We are getting curious to see what people make with them; scroll down to the news section for details on how to share your work with us.
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.
lettersoup is an independent type foundry based in Berlin, Germany. It was founded by Botio Nikoltchev in 2014. The main focus of lettersoup is cooking fonts with Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic taste.
René Bieder is an art director, graphic designer and type designer, born and raised in Berlin. “My roots are in advertising and graphic design,” he said in his 2014 interview for Creative Characters, “that’s what I did before I discovered the field of type design. Speaking generally, I simply love designing. I know that sounds cheesy, but to start with a blank page and to see the result after months of hard work is very satisfying to me, no matter if it’s a type family, a corporate design, a campaign or a website. I never intended to focus on one single thing, and I feel at home in different disciplines.”
Botio Nikoltchev was born in Sofia March 29, 1978. Growing up in the fields of Bulgaria, he once found a little brick of dry clay shaped like the city map of Berlin. Taking it as a sign he took all he had — which wasn’t much but heavy. Botio went all the way to the promised town, the place to be: Berlin! And one step further: He studied communication design at the University of Applied Science Potsdam and took type design classes with Luc(as) de Groot. After his studies Botio worked with Ole Schäfer (primetype) on the Cyrillic characters of PTL Manual, PTL Manual Mono and PTL Notes. Since 2010 he has been collaborating with Ralph du Carrois and Erik Spiekermann as type designer and art director at Carrois Type Design, focusing on Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic language extensions and CI projects. In 2014, Botio founded his own type foundry lettersoup. Retail fonts: Ropa Sans Pro, PTL Manohara, FF Meta Serif Cyrillic + Greek. Open-source fonts: Ropa Sans, Sofadi One, Fira Sans. Corporate fonts: MMH Netrange Cyrillic + Greek + Arabic, Cisco, Meta Science, Exploratorium Sans. Icons: Museo de Art de Ponce.
Leo Koppelkamm is a young graphic designer/illustrator/programmer currently studying at the Berlin University of Arts, UdK. He enjoys working on projects where design and technology overlap. When not working he likes to ride around on his bike, trying to find uncharted places in the city.
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.
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.
Her name does not rhyme with “bike”, but is pronounced “Ool-ree-kah” — a common girls’ name in her native Germany. Born and raised in Berlin, she studied at the University of Applied Sciences in nearby Potsdam, with a short but game-changing intermezzo in Florence, Italy. Four years ago she came to MyFonts with a collection of witty picture fonts; but it was an alphabetic typeface that gave her foundry LiebeFonts (“sweet fonts”) its first hit — LiebeErika was one of our Top Fonts of 2010. Ulrike’s skills are equal parts handicraft and digital savvy, and her fonts are as technically sophisticated as they are charming. Meet the talented Ulrike Wilhelm, in love with letterforms.
The award-winning Hipster Script by Alejandro Paul is based on a style of hand lettering that was created for advertising in the 1940s and 1950s yet stills looks fresh today. While the lettershapes have their roots in copperplate script styles, it’s the tool that made the difference. Painting the letters on board or paper with a round brush, the artist created thinner and thicker strokes by exerting less or more pressure, varied letterforms according to context, interrupted the connected flow by lifting the brush. A faithful digitization must emulate all these aspects of brush lettering, and Hipster Script does it very well. Have a close look at the various letter combinations in the sample above, such as the recurring “-er”, or letter pairs such as “ee” and “ll”. These variations are selected automatically for specific combinations using OpenType’s Contextual Alternates function. The result is a convincing imitation of hand-painted letters. Use with OpenType-enabled layout software!
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.
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.
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