There are just minutes to go until Friday arrives... what we need is some sort of typographically-related Flash-based interactive toy to make the pretense that Friday somehow offers us more freedom in our daily slave wagery than any other day.
Source: Serif

The latest freebies from Font Diner are Jazz Light and Jazz Dark.

Ahhh After Effects et al, is there nothing you can't do?
Ta, Aegir!

Ahhh Google Maps, is there nothing you can't do?
Ta, Yves

Probably the king of open source typography, Victor Gaultney's Gentium, has been expanded into Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic, with four weights in each. They're currently in beta testing (and as such do not have Gentium's Greek or Cyrillic support), but don't let that stop you.

Michael Bierut has posted to the Design Observer on the subject of the New Brutalism (or the New Ugly, if you prefer). All very interesting, but I can't help feeling that such utter contrivance (the subject, not the article itself) is bankrupt, and just a tad patronising. Don't we have a responsibility to our fellow type designers, graphic designers, layout artists, creative directors and so on to ensure that we don't end up with some braindead fucktard of a bean-counting client handing us a copy of [enter name of fashionable magazine with bastardised type here] and asking why it is that he should have to pay for that spiffy condensed typeface when we can just, you know, squish Arial instead? There is a line near the end of The Wicker Man where, being dragged to his firey death by religious crazed loons, Edward Woodward screams, "For God's sake, think what you're doing!" I'm with him, just, you know, atheist.
Source: Michael Oswell

Ascender Corp, usually more known for hawking Windows Vista fonts for more than the cost of Windows Vista (yes, I am a broken record) has announced Droid, a family of seven typefaces designed by Steve Matterson to be used in Google's Android mobile operating system. The press release is here, and there's even a 5 page PDF specimen here.

Yves has posted quite a neat piece on his blog over at FontShop regarding a custom typeface by Janno Hahn. The typeface was designed specifically for a series of letter sculptures by Rene Knip. The sculptures, commissioned by the municipality of Dokkum after a design competition, commemorate Saint Boniface, the patron saint for the Netherlands and Germany. It really is lovely to see such letterforms being updated and used in a modern context, and it is a jolly fine post by Yves. There's even sketches and production shots to oogle over. Go read!
Updated: Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The early nineties gave us Meta everywhere, will the late naughties result in Meta Serif overload? Welcome to your new favourite typeface.

Robots writing blackletter? Oh yes... Of course, some people think it's a good thing, but then that probably has more to do with the author actually wanting to be a robot.
Source: BoingBoing