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Classic Grotesque
3 October 2012

by Allan Haley

Rod McDonald was clearly concerned. The designer of the newly released Classic Grotesque typeface family called me the other day about what he thought could be a problem. “I just went to a web site a friend told me about,” he told me, “and it is using Classic Grotesque for the text copy.”

“Not that this is a problem,” McDonald continued, “but I also went to a bunch of other sites – and they are all using Classic Grotesque.” McDonald’s concern was that, somehow, unauthorized versions of his new typeface were finding their way into a wide variety of web sites.

A little sleuthing revealed that the sites were calling for a sans serif text typeface and that the desktop version of Classic Grotesque, on McDonald’s computer, was providing the default font. After his initial concern was alleviated, McDonald became quite happy with his discovery. “The surprise I got when Classic Grotesque turned up as the default on my browser opened my eyes to the fact that the design is pretty darn good as a screen face,” he exclaimed. “I’ve since discovered more sites that also default to Classic Grotesque and I am very pleased with what I’m seeing – and these are just the desktop fonts.”

What McDonald meant by “just the desktop fonts,” was that the Web fonts of Classic Grotesque will look even better in on-screen environments. Classic Grotesque, like all fonts available through the Fonts.com Web Fonts service, underwent special work to ensure that it was optimized for on-screen use. This means that Classic Grotesque will be as commanding a communicator on screen as it is in hardcopy. Click here to learn more about Classic Grotesque Web Fonts.

Allan Haley
Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.


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Customer Spotlight: Room & Board
20 September 2012

by Ryan Arruda

Room & Board — based in Minneapolis, Minnesota — produces distinct furniture and furnishings for nearly every room in the home. The aesthetics of the company’s website very much reflect the ethos of the products they produce — both are warm, inviting, quietly elegant, and well-crafted.

Utilized in the navigation, subheads, and body copy on the Room & Board site, the Gill Sans family is a modern, legible and genial design. Even when not employed as a headline face, the Gill Sans family acts as an indispensable supporting typeface, reinforcing the infrastructure and clarity of the information presented to viewers.

Available in over 37 styles, widths, and weights – ranging from delicate light to hulking ultra bold weights — the Gill Sans family possesses an essential versatility and grace suited for many arenas of design.

Customer Spotlight: Room & Board

Ryan Arruda
Ryan Arruda is the Web Content Strategist at Monotype Imaging. Ryan holds a bachelor’s degree in film studies from Clark University, and an MFA in graphic design from RISD.


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Font Rental Arrives Through the SkyFonts Service
18 September 2012

by Johnathan Zsittnik

Introducing the SkyFonts Font Rental ServiceHave you ever eyed a typeface for a specific job but were hesitant to purchase because you knew you wouldn’t have much use for it with future projects or clients? Have you ever been burned by a font purchase because it looked better on the website where you purchased it than it did in your document? A font purchase can sometimes be a big and pricey commitment. So, if it doesn’t seem fair to commit to a typeface that you’re only going to use for a short period of time, or to take the plunge with a font before you try it in your design doc, you may be surprised to hear that we agree. Allow us to introduce you to a revolutionary way to try out and license type.

Meet the SkyFonts service: a cloud-based font rental service made for those who love to try new type. Leveraging patent-pending technology and a catalog of thousands of top name typefaces, SkyFonts lets you try out any font for free. The service activates the actual font data on your machine for a short period so you can try it out in any of your applications. –No images or other hacks. You get the actual font data to experiment with. When you’ve found the right typeface, pay only for as long as you need it. You can rent fonts for a month or as little as a day. Click a button and SkyFonts will activate and synchronize the font on up to five workstations.

SkyFonts Font Rental Service

Browse SkyFonts.com for the font of your choice. Try any font for free, or use credits to rent fonts for a day or a month.

This represents a radical new way to work with type –and for many, a far better way. With broader and more affordable access to fonts, we expect users to be able to create higher quality designs while saving money. Those who design from multiple workstations will also save time by synchronizing their fonts from their SkyFonts account across all their workstations.

Today SkyFonts debuts in beta. Each month of the beta, our participants will receive 110 SkyFonts credits. Use one credit to rent a font for a day. Use three credits to rent a font for a month. All credits issued during beta will expire at the conclusion of the beta so be sure to use them up! We’ll announce pricing for credits at the beta’s conclusion. If you’d like to give it a go, request your beta invitation on SkyFonts.com. We’ll be gradually working our way through our invitation requests over the coming weeks while we collect feedback, so please be patient. In the meantime, you check out the introductory video or learn more by browsing the FAQs from the homepage.

Johnathan Zsittnik
Johnathan Zsittnik is the eCommerce Marketing Manager at Monotype Imaging. Johnathan holds both a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in business administration from Bentley University.


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Introducing Classic Grotesque
5 September 2012

by Allan Haley

Classic Grotesque

“The Classic Grotesque typeface began as a fairly straightforward reinterpretation of the early 20th century Monotype Grotesques,” recalls Rod McDonald, the face’s designer. “While I am delighted with the final results, I had no idea how difficult the design process would be.”

“The trouble was that I spent a lot of time looking at just the early Monotype Grotesques,” McDonald continues. “As a result, that face and its newer rendition, the Arial family, kept creeping into my design.” McDonald’s solution was to broaden his research.

“The Monotype Grotesques had strong influences from two other designs from the same time period: Venus and Ideal Grotesk. Once I began to let all three designs influence my work, I realized that this was what I wanted to do all along – and the problem when away.”Designer Rod McDonald

McDonald’s final product is a family of seven weights, each with a complementary italic, for a total of 14 designs. When asked about the size of the family, McDonald’s response was, “Normally I would not produce seven weights but I realized that I could ‘squeeze’ in an extra weight and it would give graphic designers more choices when reversing type and in dealing with the hierarchy of complex documents.”

In addition to the large suite of family weights, McDonald also drew a number of alternate characters. “I included the alternate characters for two reasons,” says McDonald. “I wanted to give designers more choice, and I wanted to better match the older grotesques which often had different characters (especially the lowercase g) in different weights or styles.”

McDonald wanted to ensure that the family was also versatile and a strong performer in other ways. “High legibility was an important goal,” he says. “I can’t imagine producing a typeface today that doesn’t take into consideration the restrictions of the small screen.”

Classic Grotesque

The complete Classic Grotesque family is available as desktop fonts from the Fonts.com, Linotype.com and ITCFonts.com websites. It is also available as Web fonts.

Click here to learn more about – and to license – the Classic Grotesque family

More information about Rod McDonald and images of Classic Grotesque and its influencers can be enjoyed by clicking here.

Allan Haley
Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.


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U&lc Volume 23
29 August 2012

by Allan Haley

New Fonts – Lots Of New Fonts – And A Leap Into The Digital Age

Volume 23, Number 2 of U&lc asks the question, “Is the availability of 50,000 to 60,000 digital fonts too many?” That was in the fall of 1996. In the 16 years since then, that number has probably quadrupled – and new fonts are still being released daily. While the desktop revolution of the mid 1980s democratized the making of fonts, it was the Internet that made it practical. Prior to the Internet and Web font stores, it would have simply been impossible to display, market, and sell this many fonts. ITC added their share of new typefaces (over two dozen) in the pages of U&lc, Volume 23.

ITC Kallos, by Phill Grimshaw, was announced in Volume 23, Number 1. Grimshaw was passionate about both disciplines of letterform creation: calligraphy and typeface design. Although he drew many display typefaces, ITC Kallos was his first design aimed at both text and display uses. He went on to design ITC Klepto, ITC Obelisk, ITC Rene Mackintosh and several other typefaces before his untimely death in 1998.

The revival of Eric Gill’s Golden Cockerel typeface family was announced in Volume 23, Number 2, along with a suite of six display typeface designs from Phill Grimshaw, Jill Bell, Frank Marciuliano and J.R. Cuaz. (The preceding links will take you to showings of all the typefaces from these designers.)

U&lc Volume 23 Number 3 was the “auteur” issue; a term applied to cinema directors who had strong signature styles that usually emerged from taking complete control of a project, from authoring the screenplay to overseeing the final edit. This concept has been broadened to denote an artist in any medium whose particular style and conceptual control make the work distinctive and influential. The auteurs covered in this issue were Pablo Picasso, Saul Bass, Philippe Starck, Peter Greenaway, Fred Woodward and Richard McGuire. The articles, though somewhat dated, are excellent views into the lives of six exceptionally creative artists.

ITC continued to add to its display typeface offering by announcing 13 new designs in Volume 23, Number 3: ITC Aftershock, ITC Belter, ITC Braganza, ITC Freddo, ITC Juanita, ITC Kokoa, ITC Lennox, ITC Musica, ITC Out of the Fridge, ITC Riptide, ITC Static, ITC Temble, ITC Vintage and a bevy of dingbats and symbols in its “DesignFonts” collection.

In providing these posts – and the PDFs – we’ve discovered that we are missing a couple issues. Volume 18, Number 2, was the first. However, thanks to Simón Cherpitel, who kindly donated his copy, we will make this issue available soon – along with Volume 23, Number 4, which is missing from today’s post.

This will be the penultimate post in this series about U&lc. At the end of Volume 24, U&lc was downsized from its tabloid format to a more, in the words of its editor, “conventional 8.5 x 11 inches.” The downsizing was done for several reasons – most of them financial. The problem was that in doing so, U&lc also became more conventional. Previous issues of U&lc were powerful design statements that bristled with energy. The small issues – not so much.

Click the PDFs below to find out what else was in (most of) U&lc Volume 23.

Low Resolution:

Volume 23–1 (Low Res).pdf (8.6 MB)

Volume 23–2 (Low Res).pdf (18.2 MB)

Volume 23–3 (Low Res).pdf (5.9 MB)

Volume 23–4 (Low Res).pdf (currently unavailable)

High Resolution:

Volume 23–1.pdf (42.3 MB)

Volume 23–2.pdf (95.2 MB)

Volume 23–3.pdf (30.3 MB)

Volume 23–4.pdf (currently unavailable)

Allan Haley
Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.

 

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Customer Spotlight: USGA
28 August 2012

by Ryan Arruda

The United States Golf Association is both a steward of golf’s history, as well as an advocate for its future. The governing organization of the game, the USGA (and their website) provides an exhaustive slate of resources for both beginner golfers and seasoned veterans alike.

The organization’s site features the Memo typeface family, utilizing it for navigation, headlines, and subheads. The face is well-suited for the accessible subject matter the USGA site presents — the Memo family is decidedly well-read without being stodgy, and sophisticated without being ostentatious. The typefaces present a professional visual cachet without the overtly historical aesthetics of Old Style typography—it’s a well crafted amalgam, capturing the spirit of both new and old forms.

The Memo family is available in 8 styles – ranging from light to bold weights — for both desktop use, as well as use through the Fonts.com Web Fonts Service.

Ryan Arruda
Ryan Arruda is the Web Content Strategist at Monotype Imaging. Ryan holds a bachelor’s degree in film studies from Clark University, and an MFA in graphic design from RISD.


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Type Designer Q&A: Terrance Weinzierl
23 August 2012

by Ryan Arruda

A type designer with Monotype Imaging, Terrance Weinzierl has developed retail designs, as well as custom treatments for companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Ubisoft. Two of Terrance’s recent designs – JMC Engraver and Feldman Engraver typefaces – were released as companion fonts to Nancy Sharon Collins’ new book The Complete Engraver. You can download them for FREE from Fonts.com.

Terrance recently shared with us some insight into his type design practice:

Favorite text on typography
Karen Cheng’s Designing Type found me at just the right time, when I was a beginner.

Personal design luminary
 It’s hard to narrow it down to just one person. I like the type from Gill and Frutiger, but I’m also inspired by the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and Goudy, continuing after devastation.

Favorite era of design history
At the moment, I love Art Deco and the decades surrounding it.

Learned to design type
I started to teach myself type design in college, but most of my training has been from Steve Matteson and other generous colleagues at Ascender and Monotype.

Design mentors
In chronological order: my mother, a toy designer; my high school art teacher Richard Guimond; my typography professor Michelle Bowers; most recently, type designer Steve Matteson.

Longest a typeface has taken to design
My hobby project with JMC Engraver and Feldman Engraver took two years (on and off the shelf).

Shortest time to design a typeface
I’ve made a few tiny, custom fonts that only had a few glyphs in them, so one day!

Favorite typographic resource
Typophile has a wealth of knowledge and arguments recorded. I think Twitter has taken over, though. Follow some type junkies and you’ll get more links than you can possibly handle.

Habitually challenging glyphs to design
I find Greek lowercase difficult to draw. Italics too. The ampersand can be fussy. It took some practice to conquer the S’s.

Favorite pursuits outside of type design
I enjoy movies and dining out quite a bit. I love Netflix. Video games have also been an enduring hobby, from the original NES up to my PS3. I’m also addicted to tech news, like The Verge. I put software launches on my calendar. I’ve cut back recently as type is taking more of my hobby time over.

Typefaces folks might know you for
Probably the Comic Sans Pro extension, if I had to choose. 99 percent of my work is on custom typefaces. I’ve spent a lot of time working on the Segoe design for Windows Phone and Windows 8. Most of my blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t get seen in the retail market.

Favorite type classification to design
I haven’t even drawn a design in many classifications yet, so it’s hard to say, but I’ve been enjoying drawing brush scripts lately.

Percent of type design that’s art vs. percent that’s science
Difficult question. Maybe 80/20? Could you argue that a private press design is more artful than usual? Probably. Is the Bell Centennial typeface more scientific than usual? Probably.

Your typeface families that pair especially well
Try  JMC Engraver and Feldman Engraver, and then ask me again in 10 years.


Common personality of your typefaces

The typefaces I’ve done that weren’t custom are organic and sometimes wacky. I’m working on a serious humanist sans that you’ll see soon.

Most underrated letterform or glyph
The pilcrow, or paragraph symbol, can be awesome. It’s just not used very often anymore. Now, it’s almost like a software Easter egg. ¶

Aspiring type designers should possess
 Patience. Type design routinely requires a lot of patience. It may take a while to draw smooth curves, and there is a technical learning curve with building fonts. Have thick skin too.

What typeface classifications should they study?
I think the lessons in geometric sans serifs are important. The subtle tapers, overshoots, optical adjustments will apply everywhere. Study Old Style serifs to embrace detail variation. Look at calligraphy and script to see how writing instruments influence shape. Also, figure-ground relationships are very important.

Favorite medium to see your typefaces
I love seeing the Segoe, Droid Sans and Open Sans typefaces being used everywhere, even though I only contributed to those big projects. My favorite party trick is telling someone with an Android or Windows Phone: “I worked on those fonts.”

Endeavors which hone type design skills
 Drawing, not just type, but anything. Observing type in use. Setting type.

Most egregious typographic error in common practice today
 I’d have to agree with Jim Wasco, script in all caps is nasty. Not using kerning when available is ludicrous.

Recommended online design resources
There are so many out there that come and go. I never have enough time to read everything. Ilovetypography.com is excellent, and I like Brand New.

Ryan Arruda
Ryan Arruda is the Web Content Strategist at Monotype Imaging. Ryan holds a bachelor’s degree in film studies from Clark University, and an MFA in graphic design from RISD.


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Customer Spotlight: Vizify
16 August 2012

by Ryan Arruda

Vizify is a new online service offering users the ability to create visual biographies. Instead of the standard, soporific online resume, Vizify offers an interactive and aesthetically bold alternative: a personalized visual narrative that employs engaging typography as its cornerstone.

The Vizify homepage features a main headline set in the black weight of the VAG Rounded typeface, while subheads employ the family’s bold weight. The use of the VAG Rounded family complements the site’s visual ethos exceptionally well — both type and image on Vizify are friendly, engaging, and playful.

Anchoring the rest of the site’s typography is the Trade Gothic typeface family. Headlines are set in the robust Trade Gothic Bold #2 face, in all caps, while subheads read handsomely in a title case treatment using the roman weight of the family.

Vizify’s website is a perfect illustration of the Trade Gothic family’s utility; known most prominently for its strong and sober typographic applications, paired with bright colorways, the family provides a glimpse of a subtly blithe personality.

Vizify Homepage

Ryan Arruda
Ryan Arruda is the Web Content Strategist at Monotype Imaging. Ryan holds a bachelor’s degree in film studies from Clark University, and an MFA in graphic design from RISD.


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Koorkin
7 August 2012

by Allan Haley

The basis for the Koorkin typeface family was a custom font proposal gone awry. “Many years ago I worked on a typeface to brand a new product,” recalls George Ryan, Koorkin’s designer. “The design request, however, was withdrawn before I got much done on the face. I don’t think the product ever saw the light of day,” he continues. “As, I normally do, I saved my sketches. When I recently stumbled on them by accident 10 years later, I remembered there was a lot about the design I liked.”

Ryan first quickly drew the letters for Koorkin with a felt-tip marker, ensuring that shapes were free-flowing and spontaneous. The result is a playful, full-bodied handwriting script with fluid forms and bold proportions. Koorkin is a delightful confectionery of a typeface design, awash with swashes and deliciously long ascenders and descenders. While strokes are virtually monotone in weight, an ample x-height combined with generous counters guarantees that, even though a handwriting script, Koorkin ranks high on the legibility scale.

To give the design added character, Ryan also created a suite of swash and alternate characters that are available in OpenType format. “I added many ligatures and alternate versions of key characters to the character set,” says Ryan. “For instance, a word with an ‘ee’ combination can take advantage of a ligature I designed rather than using two of the same e’s to do the job. As a result, a word such as ‘breeze’ will have three slightly different e’s in it – making the copy look truly handwritten.”

With all this personality, Koorkin is at home in such diverse places as posters, restaurant menus, social announcements and product brochures.

The complete Koorkin family is available as desktop fonts from the Fonts.com, Linotype.com and ITCFonts.com websites. It is also available as dynamically downloadable Web fonts.

Click here to learn more about the Koorkin family, and click here to purchase the fonts.

Allan Haley
Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.


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U&lc Volume 22
2 August 2012

by Allan Haley

New Fonts – Lots Of New Fonts – And A Leap Into The Digital Age

Prior to 1995, ITC released about four new typeface families per year. From the summer of 1995 to the spring of 1996, nearly 40 new ITC families became available, along with a suite of Cyrillic extensions to existing designs, swashes and ornaments for the ITC Bodoni family, and a bevy of symbol fonts – all in the pages of U&lc, Volume 22. Articles on Web and video typography also peppered the pages of Volume 22, and the designers of a couple of issues had fun playing with the U&lc logo on the cover.

In addition to announcing six new display typeface designs, Volume 22, Number 1 contained two articles about books on CD (the beginning of e-publishing) and a roundup of early websites for children. It also featured the first ad for the Creative Alliance, an endeavor by the Type Division of Agfa (the precursor to Monotype Imaging) to build its own exclusive typeface library. Many of the typefaces in the Creative Alliance have since found their way into the ITC and Monotype typeface libraries. Oh, and on page 48, there is an ad for Graphic Solutions, a newsletter that I published for about three years – and that taught me how difficult the publishing business can be.

Volume 22, Number 2, continued to address the issues of publishing in a digital age and provided some guidance in designing with HTML – this was when the Times New Roman and Courier typefaces were considered the basic text designs. Chip Kidd also wrote about designing the cover of Nicholas Negroponte’s book, Being Digital, an analog solution for a hardcopy book on the future of digital technology, which is now online. Announcements for 21 new ITC typefaces (10 typeface families) filled many of the remaining pages of Volume 22, Number 2.

Volume 22, Number 3 was dedicated to “Graphics and the Cinema.” The issue also ushered in over 20 new ITC display typefaces, Cyrillic fonts for the ITC Franklin Gothic, ITC Korinna and ITC Flora typeface families, the ITC Humana super family, and a collection of swash and ornament characters for the ITC Bodoni family. ITC continued to look to the future of typography in several articles about type in film and video.

Volume 22, Number 4 focused on education and contained a wide range of articles, from advice for schools on preparing students to create meaningful digital content to a story about four educators in Japan who used experimental methods to teach students about sensitivity to the elements of design. New typeface releases included six new single-weight display typefaces, two new families and three ITC Goony ’Toons image fonts.

Click the PDFs below to find out what else was in U&lc Volume 22.

Low Resolution:

Volume 22–1 (Low Res).pdf (9.9 MB)

Volume 22–2 (Low Res).pdf (10.6 MB)

Volume 22–3 (Low Res).pdf (11.1 MB)

Volume 22–4 (Low Res).pdf (9.5 MB)

High Resolution:

Volume 22–1.pdf (48.3 MB)

Volume 22–2.pdf (58.5 MB)

Volume 22–3.pdf (58.8 MB)

Volume 22–4.pdf (50.8 MB)

Allan Haley
Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs.

 

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