“The bigger a group gets, the lower its intellectual common denominator falls.”
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Marais
Sitting as the first commercial release by Aaron Carambula, co-founder of Friends of Type, Marais is super fun. As of now, the face is only available in ultra (in both Roman & Italic), but Aaron has indicated that he plans to finish the family with more weights.
I’ve enjoyed playing around with it and made a little coffee shop word treatment. Easter egg: the bean is made from Marais parentheses. :-)
So, if all of you who buy fonts, if you care about the future of typography, you have to vote with your wallet. So support working type designers. Buy recently designed fonts. Use them in your projects. Give them exposure. I know you’re concerned about Adobe, that’s why you keep Minion on the bestseller list. But really, I checked with them. They’re going to be okay. They’ve got some other things going on that they think are going to be a real hit.
Storefront
Storefront is a newish script from Sudtipos modeled after American sign painters of old, but with contemporary influences. From Storefront’s pdf specimen:
Though the main shapes, especially the majuscules, are almost a standard recitation of the natural evolution of nineteenth century scripts, the additional variants available within the font provide a leap in time to what sign makers and packagers are doing today. I can honestly say that Storefront's influences are probably less historic and more in line with my recent travels and frequent supermarket visits. It's difficult to avoid current visual culture when you're constantly bombarded with it. Not that I try. I certainly welcome the overflow. I'm probably addicted to it by now.
It has a ton of alternate characters to play with and makes for a very nice addition to your script library.
The sans seen beneath is a free release from TypeTogether called Jockey.
“The iNames have been around for almost a decade and a half now. It was high time for a cleaner naming convention, one that would reflect the progressively sleeker and cleaner design of the products themselves. It’s a love letter to Jonathan Ve [formerly Jonathan Ive].” The source added, “it’s what Steve would have wanted.”
Pitch and Split
Pitch, from Klim Type Foundry is Kris Sowersby’s love letter to the typewriter. The face is monospaced (something Wired doesn’t want to respect), but has quite a few distinctive characteristics that give it a wonderful amount of charm (notable are the angled brackets and ball terminals). It’s a fascinating typeface and Kris has a wonderful history of its creation on his blog.
Lickety Split is a simple, messy, but fun handwritten font by Tyler Finck. On its creation, Tyler writes:
Each character/accent/detail was created on a 3″ x 5″ index card with fat crayola crayons, scanned, tweaked, packed up and shipped out.
Pick up a license for Pitch and Lickety Split now. (script and image above from There Will Be Blood and, yes, this means Type Tuesday is back)
So I thought about soda and how full of rage God must be at us humans.