Europe by designers

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Smiling typefaces

More smiling type at designjunction

MyFonts goes Web 2.0

Looks exciting! Test it here

Michael Cla yton

Amazing movie, but what a terrible type treatment. A Y is only the most obvious part. And the credits were set in Arial, which really distracted me from Clooney's outstanding last 30 seconds.

Masterfile

USA Rice Federation

Dear Adobe

Do it. Now.
dearadobe

Type of tomorrow

Only the few results of TM0708, a one year post-graduate course in type design at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Many more weights, widths and even OpenType features can be tested with their LetterTester.

Corporate type

Via Utrecht Manifest 2005. Also great: wall of icons

The Akzidenz Grotesk song

Made me laugh:

C broadcasting

Fuck!

Paul Wu

Looks like I've been hating colour lately.

Business Secret

White Bear Bar

OK

Quick meals

Wild Flour lettering

Kris Sowersby for Wild FLour, hijacked from the excellent thread on Typophile.

Canadian Doors

Caviar Productions

ED Awards: type shortlist

The winner of this year's European Design Awards in the typeface category is Centro Pro by Parachute. Excellent typeface, and here is how they designed it.

Also on the shortlist: Enighet by Pangea design


And Skolar/Surat by David Březina

Better tag clouds

Over at Wordle you can input any text and turn it to a customizable tag cloud. Too bad you can't replace your so very outdated Web 2.0 tags with that.

Jack Daniel's type

Jack Daniel's may have all those gold medals, but the AWA pair needs a lot of work.

Hairy type

Wonderful work for a British Airways campaign by Alex Trochut, more to see here

Sexy type

Great work, see the rest of the calendar here. Who's your favourite Miss?

USA Network

Font of the day: Morice

Morice by Letterbox can build a solid base of a magazine as a headline font. Although it's not really solid, but rather playful itself :) Also nice: Kevlar, Berber

WWF

Font of the day: Rebecca Samuels

Samuels Type runs the foundry as a family :) Then Rebecca Samuels would be the elder sister I guess. Also great: Rosemary Samuels, Colin Samuels

London 2012 Olympics

Font of the day: Neubaubet

Neubau is widely known for selling (excellent) vector stuff, but they also make trendy fonts. You can buy Neubaubet at NBLaden, and I love the type treatment there.
Also great: NeubauGrotesk you see here. There will be an exhibition in Eindhoven on September 5., 2008, don't miss it!

Unilever

Font of the day: Pauline

Pauline is a script face that is not that scripty at all, but still warm and kind of naive. I particularly like the italics. Get it at Insigne, and also look at Valfieris, Sommet, and Aviano Slab (my favourite of the three)

Brightlines Translation

3 free fonts for Webdesign

Serif, Sans and Pixel, what else do you need? And the best thing: it's for free at Ten by Twenty!

Font of the day: Hamburgotische

Hamburgotische by TypeType is a modern interpretation of a blackletter. For €40 you get 2 styles, may come in handy next time you design a beer lable for kids :) Other fonts to check out: Mono, Perform.
Their freebie page doesn't offer anything as of now, but looks promising.

Curious Pictures

Font of the day: WeddingSans

WeddingSans is not really an appropriate name, this font is clean, mechanical, there's nothing soft or romantic about it. And it's one of the few fonts designed by a female type designer: Andrea Tinnes. You can get it at Typecuts for only €140/16 cuts (which isn't much if you ask me). Other fonts to check out: Skopex Serif, DasDeck and Broadway Hollywood (not for sale, but beautiful).

Rich type

BBC reports that Zimbabwe has issued a 500m dollar banknote (obviously not pictured). Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate is 165,000% and the banknote you see is only worth about $1 (today in the evening). In that case it's no surprise that the fonts used are Arial and Times.

Various pictures of money can be found in this Flickr pool.

Font of the day: Buffet Script

Sudtipos is well-know for their beautiful script fonts, and I had a hard time to choose one for the font of the day. It's Buffet Script, which is based on calligraphy by Alf Becker, a great American signpainter. Other great fonts: Grover Slab (not script), Downtempo (not script) and of course Affair (very, very script)

Batman

Fountain freebies

Fountain offers quite a lot of fun freebies

TypeSQL: everything is connected

TypeSQL is a nice app, that makes connections between various font info visible. Imagine they had the MyFonts database O.O
via Swissmiss

Font of the day: Blaktur

Knowing my love for really black type, it's no surprise that the font of the day from House is award-winning Blaktur; if you ever need a fun, contemporary blackletter, give it a go, for only $50 ;) Other fonts to check out: Neutraface, Paperback and Luxury

Frutiger Serif

Linotype introduces Frutiger Serif, which is actually reworked Meridian by Adrian Frutiger, who turns 80 in a few days. Together with Akira Kobayashi they've changed Meridian's metrics and proportions to match Frutiger, and added some new cuts.

10 typefaces you see everywhere

In no particular order:
I mean is there another typeface that has an own movie? Univers turned 50 and nobody cared, Futura will turn 80 and I don't see any poster contests or special t-shirts editions coming.
Give me 5 minutes 2 minutes in any city, I'll show you Helvetica. I'll show you Helvetica Neue, Helvetica Rounded, I'll show you Swiss 721, I'll show you Helvetica Ultra Light, Extra Black Condensed, Extended Oblique, Heavy Italic, well you get the picture.
Helvetica=Everywhere

I wrote it in all-caps for a reason, see that R? Ugly. Nonetheless Arial is probably the most used typeface ever, thanks to Microsoft of course, and it's the first typeface on the list quite often. Actually Arial is here as a represantative of all system fonts like Comic Sans, Times New Roman, Verdana etc. My grandma told me: if you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all, so I'll stop here.

Dare to be different? Use FF Meta! As a corporate type, for long copy in design magazines, for bold ad headlines, for signage, for just about everything. That was the motto 15 years ago, and now with the beautiful FF Meta Serif on the market, the usage may just explode again.


Advertising agencies love Futura. Fashion labels love Futura. Every big foundry has an own Futura. Why not, it's a sans with no strings attached: a j is only a line and a dot, as fresh as it was 80 years ago. But 8 out of 10 typography professors will tell you not to use Futura for long body copy. But 8 out of 10 people who own Futura never had a typography professor.


FF DIN, or any other DIN is used for everything that is supposed to look cool. Packaging? DIN! Fashion? DIN! Sports? DIN! Electronics? DIN! Portfolio? DIN! You see gray text on black, which is kind of hard to read? You probably see DIN.


Most used of Gill's weghts: Light and Ultra Bold, at least I feel that way. The weird thing about it is that the Ultra Bold lowercase is hideous. No wonder, that weight was designed only to beat Futura Extra Bold. At least the caps are ok.


I have seen one company after another to adopt FF Dax as their corporate typeface, making their logos look like subsidiaries of the ominous DaxCorp. If Google would want to change their logo, they will use FF Dax, I bet.


Frutiger is a typeface I'm admiring my whole (type-aware) life, a work by a true master. Whenever you want a type which is barely there, which offers the shortest distance between information, eyes and brain, choose Frutiger. Choose Frutiger if you don't know what to use, it will look friendly if you write to a friend, it will look sober if you raise an invoice. Maybe because this typeface adopts the emotions of the content, it is used so widely. Number of times I've used Frutiger: 1.


Of course Zapfino's usage reaches it's peak around December 24th, but it is everywhere. When you see Zapfino on a greeting card, it's like writing El Cheapo all over it.
On one hand, Hermann Zapf created a beautiful typeface, the calligraphic precision of which is unmatched. Unfortunately that precision is ruined by the content: the mentioned cheap greeting cards, anything involving Italian cuisine or anything that wants look artsy... Bad karma.


Gotham is a timeless piece, well-spaced, with beautiful numerals, graceful caps. Look at the M, R, G, Q, nothing to add, nothing to take away, proportions that can live on forever. A flawless sans? Gotham is closer to it than many others. And Gotham is everywhere.

Now, in no way I'm saying that the above typefaces (with exception of Arial) are bad and shouldn't be used. I've used some of them, and I probably will do so again. I only suggest that before using a certain typeface just because it's on your hard drive already, you think for a moment if you don't need something more... unique, that could do just as well, or better. There are plenty of alternatives ;)