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.
They’re based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a city that, like Liverpool and Manchester, was a one-time center of the industrial revolution. Jonathan Hill is from Sheffield, where he worked as a graphic designer for the thriving local music industry. After several years in a London studio he moved back to North East England to set up his own logo and type design studio. Mariya Pigoulevskaya came to the region from Belarus in 2006 to study Art and Design and joined Jonathan’s studio after graduation. Their company’s type library is a fast-growing and increasingly popular collection of type families — many of them clean, modern sans serifs with an industrial or tech touch. Getting better all the time: here is The Northern Block.
A decade ago, he was the prince of free fonts. Today, his Typodermic foundry is one of MyFonts’ most successful type libraries, although hundreds of his freeware fonts are still out there. His output is awe-inspiring, his tastes as diverse as can be, and his sense of style spot-on. His tool of choice is the computer. Don’t look for pencil sketches or brush-drawn alphabets in this newsletter; it was all done on the screen — with a trackball. Meet Ray Larabie, a Canadian in Nagoya, Japan.
Each typefoundry is unique, but some are more unique than others. Initiated by David Březina from Brno in the Czech Republic, the Rosetta foundry specializes in fonts for writing systems other than the Latin script (the one you’re reading now). Contributing to its growing library of beyond-Latin typefaces is a group of young designers from eight different countries, several of whom have acquired an MA in Type Design at the University of Reading (pronounced “redding” — a town not far from London). We managed to capture three of them at their alma mater, as shown above; they agreed to answer our questions about designing type for the world.
This month’s interviewee was an international free-font hero while still in his teens, before attending design college, dropping out, and becoming a well-known graphic designer and illustrator. Having made stunning illustrations and typographic posters for clients in the cultural and editorial sectors, he eventually specialized in energetic script and display fonts. His foundry Fenotype has been at MyFonts for a mere three years, but it feels as if it’s been longer. His fonts were featured in our Fonts-of-the-Year lists of 2011 and 2012, making him the most successful type designer from the Nordic countries currently on MyFonts. Meet Emil Bertell, our man in Turku, Finland.
The last few months of 2007 bring a number of new fonts and several new foundries to MyFonts. We are especially excited to say hello to the Adobe Type Library – not to mention many new small foundries: Big Typephoon, Paragraph, Lorenzo Geiger’s Typewerk, Very Good Fonts, Fictilia, Forte Type, WCM, Letrizmo, Perrens, Melissa Lapadula and Typefolio.
He started up his foundry Alphabet Soup seven years ago, and has published one typeface family a year on average. But what typefaces they are! With up to 2000 glyphs per font, and endless ways of using digital technology to emulate hand-lettering, his fonts are clearly the work of a seasoned scriptmeister. Indeed, before entering the font business, Michael Doret was already a household name in the design world, producing iconic designs for the likes of The New York Knicks, KISS and TIME Magazine. Having learned the trade under the guidance of no less a guru than Ed Benguiat, this month’s interviewee has been a one-man force in lettering and logotype design since the mid ’70s. These days his partners in type are designers like Stuart Sandler, Patrick Griffin and Mark Simonson. Meet Michael Doret, a man with a past... creating fonts for the future.
Welcome to another jam-packed issue of In Your Face! This quarter, we have more new type than ever, both from new foundries as well as from designers who are already established with MyFonts. Highlights abound — from full-featured multi-weight/width sans-serif families to some of the most original display type in the world — and we are certain that you'll find plenty of useful bits and pieces to add to your type library.
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