Dec
16

Quid Pro Go

posted on December 16th 2011 in Font Addiction with 0 Comments

Welcome, December, month of cold and snow and multiple extended holidays! Here’s a cool collection of yuletide joy for my fellow font freaks. Felix Braden’s Floodfonts points us towards Polaris—an unusual slab with squarish forms and tapered serifs. In case you need more convincing to give this retro-flavoured display face the green light, it comes equipped with extensive language support and a non-existant price tag. Debelly is an oddly attractive fatface sans from Dusan Jelesijevic and Serbia’s Tour de Force. Squat lowercase, ample letterspacing, beefy contrast, and a few unexpected curves give this single weight face some quirky, throwback charm. Also new to the Tour de Force catalogue is Epitet. This quiet, six weight geometric sans sports an unusually small x-height. Compact and lean, it has several distinctive traits—in particular, a spunky binocular ‘g’.

Along with the basic Latin version of Bubblegum Sans that recently popped up as an open source webfont, Sudtipos released Bubblegum Sans Pro. It’s a bouncy “brushalicious” sans from the typographic tag team of Koziupa and Paul, featuring expanded language support, a handful of tasty alternates, and plenty of 1930s-era lettering style.

Righteous, brother. This freebie was inspired by the art deco posters of Hungarian artist Robert Berény, but channels some serious 70s album cover art. With solid geometric forms and spiky “rock horn” spurs, this headliner delivers. Melle Diete’s Gingar steps across the page anything but gingerly. From the finessed ultra light through beefy extra black, this latest family from Volcano Type oozes slabby, playful warmth throughout its massive range of 30 styles.

Fluid, yet strong — with an organic, modulated structure like that of “… a flying bird.” Such is Bruno Mello’s calligraphic Caturrita — a four weight serif family, versatile enough for both text and titling. It’s also the first typeface released by Armasen, a fresh-faced collective of students and type designers based in Brazil.

Portugal’s DSType has pushed out an impressive number of significant typefaces this past year. The latest is no exception. Dino dos Santos presents Acto, a humanist sans in eleven weights. Although there’s very little background information on Acto, suffice it to say it’s an extremely clean and efficient series of faces—covering a lot of ground from hairline to ultra black.

New York based Pagan & Sharp have finally released an expanded version of Malleable Grotesque. This rounded, industrial — but nuanced — condensed sans has been kicking around the interwebs as a simple roman and oblique pair for the past couple of years. It now incorporates seven weights, a complete set of obliques, plus a striking bilinear “wire” style. collected by Erik Vorhes.

Web/Graphic instructor & designer, illustrator & recovering fontaholic.

We would love to hear your comments