Digested on December 24, 2002
Posted by David Earls

After the giant posting last time round, this one is short and sweet as the typography world unwinds for the holiday season.

House Industries have released Neutraface, a pleasing new family of faces, chairs and architectural lettering. Chairs? I kid you not.

The forums at Typophile have been taken down for the holidays, to re-emerge, phoenix-like, with a host of new features on the 6th of January, 2003.

You should all try out Textile, by Textism's Dean Allen. Its pretty cool. I am going to be using it for all posts from the next one on, but my ear hurts too much today.

Good bits of 2002: Sabon Next and Eric Sans. Stuff to look out for in 2003: TextPattern and LetterSpace (a little typographer.com side project that you're all invited to).

And finally, as if we didn't know the end of the world is nigh, NORAD proves it with this site. Happy Holidays and take care.


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Digested on December 10, 2002
Posted by David Earls

The release of FontLab 4.5 for Mac OS X last week could well turn out to be a watershed. A handfull of developers and suits in Russia and the US have managed to produce a font editor that the multi-squillion dollar concern of Macromedia has no desire to provide. So far things look good too. After a few hours playing with the demo, I was impressed enough to hand over my credit card details, receiving a serial number about 3 hours later. For the last week I have been merrily playing with it, editing away at various type designs that have been on hold for far too long.

Firstly, the glyph editing tools are vastly improved with reasonably decent bezier controls, and I now prefer editing directly within FontLab to editing in Freehand. I also like the anti-aliased previews (and indeed the live preview pane for text strings), though I am sure many will shriek like shoolgirls at the very thought. A neat feature is the addition of a magic wand tool, which I have found myself using quite a bit to help remove duplicated overlayed contours on traced glyphs copied over from Freehand. The blending tools seem to be a double-edged sword. Yes, they might provide a good starting point for creating intermediate weights, but I have this terrible feeling that they're going to be hideously misused over the coming months by people who probably dont know any better. Likewise some of those filters.

Interface-wise, if you're a Mac user with a one-button mouse, now is the time to splash out on a new rodent. The interface works far more coherently if you can right-click, with sensible contextual menus. That's good. What isn't so nifty is the clutter hell; a glut of buttons, windows and palettes that could put earlier versions of Macromedia Director to shame. The interface is fairly configuable, at least, and most of the floating palettes will dock in strips, a-la Microsoft.

This is starting to sound suspiciously like a review, I should stop (I'll be sure to let you know of my progress with FontLab 4.5 in latter posts though), on to other news.

Computer Arts has a typography special out in the UK this month. There are a couple of type design tutorials using FontLab and FOG, along with effects-type tutorials on After Effects and PhotoShop. Two funky cover discs come with a big pile of fonts (of varying quality, as is usually the way with such discs), FOG and FontLab 4.5 demos and other bits and pieces.

MyFonts.com has added its 100th type foundry, with none other than Emigre joining, much to the amusement of some in the community (judging by a few postings to Typophile). Also new at the graphic-goofy-font-store is the new typeface by Typeco, Chunkfeeder. There are 27,000 fonts there now. Scary.

Linotype want you to buy 50 fonts for $53, thats a saving of $1147 on the price you'd have paid in the rather unlikely scenario of buying those exact fonts individually. Hmmm. The set includes Zapfino, Wiesbaden Swing, Agincourt, Arnold Boecklin, Shelly Script and Linotype Xmas Pi. How festive. ITC are doing a similar, slightly stingier offer. FontDiner win the award for most interesting bundle though. Ten fonts, one 3D movie on DVD, two pairs of 3D glasses, some funky retro desktop wallpapers and a giant movie ticket greetings card. Neat.

But what better way to celebrate the birth of Christianity, along with all the murder, dispair and pain introduced over the last 2000 years in its name, than with some freebies. Chank has a Christmas dingbat font for free download! Typotheque have a Christmas dingbat font for free download! P22 have a Christmas dingbat font for free download! Spotting a pattern?

Alternatively, there are a few new typography books out there. Out this month is About Face by David Jury, an excellent re-examination of the rules of typography, updated for our modern times. Also out by the same publisher is Designing Typefaces, by, erm, me. A collection of interviews discussing type design with Matthew Carter, Jonathan Hoefler, Erik Spiekermann, Akira Kobayashi, Zuzana Licko, Jean-Francois Porchez, Carlos Segura, Jeremy Tankard, Erik van Blokland, Rian Hughes and Jonathan Barnbrook. I disown that cover.

So we have our new font-related gifts to take along to the Christmas party, now we need some intelligent typographic banter. Enter the Typophile Small Talk Generator - repeat after me, "Undoubtedly, you've heard that I've recently begun blogging on my site about jagged dingbats."

Finally, British readers will be amused by the release of the world's rudest-ever typeface. SpunkFlakes! I have to type that again. SpunkFlakes! Why does Monica Lewinsky's dress spring to mind?

Edited: 11th December 2002


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