|
 THE MYFONTS.COM NEWSLETTER — MAY 2004
 |
|
In This Issue
1. Font Flags
Bringing color to fonts.
2. TypeCon 2004
We'll be there. Will you?
3. EU+10 = 25!
Fonts for the new European Union.
4. New foundries
Eleven new foundries join MyFonts.com since the last newsletter.
5. More Fonts From Our Existing
Foundries
They never cease to impress us.
6. Regulars
Bestsellers, promotions, subscribing.
Letter from the Editor
We’re in color! And we show font samples! The new HTML look for
In Your Face should give you a much better impression of
what’s new at MyFonts.com.
The main news this month is our obsession with images, and it’s
spread way beyond just the newsletter. Foundries jumped at the chance to
illustrate their fonts with little “flags”, as we call them.
We selected some of our favorites for In Your Face.
As for new fonts, we have Matthew Carter’s Skia, Test Pilot
Collective, the bitmap fonts from MiniFonts.com (11 new foundries in
total), and a great number of new fonts from foundries that have been with
us for some time — a lively couple of months!
Our new sister newsletter, Rising Stars, went down really well.
Thanks for all your feedback. In Your Face continues to feature
each new foundry as they join MyFonts.com. We’ll also bring you news
from the world of typography, new features at MyFonts.com, and of course
the brightest of the new fonts from our existing foundries.
Happy font finding!
— Laurence Penney
In Your Face Editor
MyFonts Search
Remember that you can search MyFonts using human-friendly terms, and you don’t need to remember font names. Try wild-west, dirty typewriter, animals, script... and 1000s more terms.
|
Flag-waving fonts!
In response to customers who’ve told us they like to see
fonts in use, we came up with a new concept: Font Flags. They are
little images, one for each font family page, designed by the foundry to
show off the font at its best. To our delight, foundries responded so
enthusiastically that now over 1000 font families have flags! We think
you’ll agree they’re not just appealing, but also really
helpful when choosing fonts.
Go to the Font Flag
List at MyFonts.com to see all the current flags, or click on the
selection of flags above to go to that font’s page!
http://www.myfonts.com/images/flags/
TypeCon 2004
San Francisco, July 21-25 is this summer’s essential destination for the font crowd. The Society
of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) is putting on TypeCon2004: Type High, the annual font fest that just gets better and better. At dozens of presentations, discussions and workshops, typophiles get to live and breathe typography for a long weekend — students $100, others $165 for early registration. See you there! Read more at the TypeCon2004 official site.
EU+10 = 25!
On May 1st 2004, ten countries joined the European Union:
Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta,
Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia — so currently, the European Union consists
of 25 countries with a total population of 458 million. Most of the new EU
member countries are located in the Central & Eastern Europe.
 These countries use languages that are
written with Roman letters, but extensively use accents (diacritics) that
are not found in the regular Western fonts as you know them. To write
correspondence or make designs targeted for the new EU countries, you need
fonts with the Central European
character set (also called “CE fonts”). Such fonts come in
two different forms:
Unicode fonts  
One font contains both the Central European and the Western diacritics
and is Unicode-compatible. If you want to mix Spanish and Polish in
one text, you just need to install the appropriate keyboard layout in your
system or use a utility such as Character Map, Glyph Palette or PopChar to
type in the diacritics.
If you work with Microsoft Word (Windows only), Adobe InDesign, Adobe
Illustrator CS, Adobe Photoshop 7 or CS, Corel DRAW 12, or any other
application that supports Unicode, then you should purchase Unicode
fonts in the TrueType or the OpenType format.
MyFonts.com usually displays these fonts with a “CE” icon and
a “Unicode” icon.
Codepage fonts
A separate font contains Central European diacritics but does not
contain Western diacritics. When you want to mix French and Czech, you
will need to switch between “YourFontName” and
“YourFontName CE” in the font menu. In addition, you
should install the appropriate keyboard layout in your system or use a
utility such as Character Map, Glyph Palette or PopChar to type in the
diacritics.
 If you work with QuarkXPress for
Windows or Mac, Microsoft Word for Mac, any Macromedia application for
Windows or Mac, Adobe Illustrator 10 or older, Adobe Photoshop 6 or older,
Corel DRAW 11 or older, or other applications that do not support Unicode
(or you are unsure whether they do), you should purchase codepage fonts in
the Type 1 format. MyFonts.com usually displays these fonts with a
“CE” icon but without a “Unicode” icon. Also,
typically, the font name includes a “CE” suffix.
Currently, MyFonts.com offers 3045 fonts in 415 families with the
Central European character set! Moreover, we have an International
section where you can easily find fonts with the CE character set
(both multilingual and codepage versions):
http://www.myfonts.com/International
Not only do we sell fonts with CE characters, we also have fonts that
were designed by typographers from that region of Europe. Visit our
Country section and click on a country name how it sits in the typographic
world:
http://www.myfonts.com/country/
|
Eleven new foundries join
MyFonts.com
|
|
TEST PILOT
COLLECTIVE is a small digital type foundry that started in
Minneapolis in 1998. Technology and history are the themes that have fired
up designers Matt Desmond and Joe Kral to draw an amazing 343 styles at
the last count.
To take but one example, Curbdog is one
of those rare designs that confidently betrays an amazingly diverse array
of influences — high-legibility computer fonts, 19th century wood
type, the geometry of the circle and straight line — and comes out
with something fresh, demanding to be put to good use. Whether it’s
a contemporary twist on a well-run theme, or a hi-tech look that declares
that not all of history is bunk, we have no trouble imagining Curbdog in
logos, signs, book covers and magazine titles.
CARTER & CONE
TYPE of Cambridge, Massachusetts is the font foundry of Matthew
Carter and Cherie Cone. Matthew Carter is one of the finest and best known
type designers
in the world; his career spans nearly 50 years. He has designed typefaces
for the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Devanagari alphabets. Mr Carter is
proficient in designing text typefaces for books, newspapers and magazines
(ITC Charter, ITC Galliard, Miller, Olympian), special typefaces for
low-resolution printing or computer screens (Bell Centennial, Georgia,
Verdana), beautiful script typefaces (Cascade Script, Snell Roundhand,
Shelley Script) and fascinating display faces (Sophia, Mantinia, Big
Caslon).
In 1994 Carter designed Skia, a
relaxed sans-serif inspired by ancient Greek letterforms. Unlike Adobe
Lithos (which has similar origins)
Skia has a fine lower-case. Apple Computer released the font as a showcase
for their font technology (today called AAT) that allows advanced
typographic features such as ligatures, old-style numerals and even
seamless blending of the font’s weight. Until recently, the font was
only available as as TrueType packaged with Mac OS, but due to popular
demand Carter & Cone now release Skia CC in PostScript format for both
Windows and Mac OS. It leapt straight into our bestseller charts!
ARUBAN FONT
FOUNDRY is George Ryan’s independent venture. George has
been in the font biz quite a while. Since 1978 he’s held senior
positions at Linotype and Bitstream, and has been involved in the
production of well over 2500 fonts! His own designs have been published by
Galapagos, Bitstream, and ITC.
Now as an independent, he releases Rescue, a readable
sans-serif that is available in an impressive array of widths and weights.
Its distinctive, unusually large lowercase forms are derived from
handwriting, yet it’s so legible it could be used instead of
Verdana. George has another 8 display & script families too!
FONTBOY of San
Anselmo, California, was established in 1995 as the font design spin-off
of the design office of Bob Aufuldish and Kathy Warinner.
They’ve had designs released through another foundry, and here
release their other designs. We like the overlay capability of the Punctual family,
the abstract designs of RoarShock, the
friendly-zany charm of Baufy and Viscosity, and
the quirky-classical New Clear
Era. Now get these award-winning fonts from MyFonts.com!
|
MINIFONTS.COM
is the name on the pixel fonts from multi-talented, multimedia designer
Joe Gillespie from London. From his website Web Page Design for Designers
this former musician, robot designer, and ad agency art director
demystifies HTML, CSS and Flash for a grateful public. With capital
letters just 5 pixels high, his font Mini 7 has become
probably the most popular pixel font in use on the web today, and Joe is
surely the most prolific designer in this field. Choose from an amazing
279 styles. Prices from just $8.
WIESCHER
DESIGN is the Munich studio of German designer Gert Wiescher.
Already known among some of you for his work released in the FontFont
library (FF Bodoni Classic perhaps the best known),
he now releases Scriptissimo,
a calligraphic hand with fine detailing that rewards use at large sizes.
It has versions named Start, Middle and End, tweaked for their ideal
position in the word, and there’s a splendid Ligatures font
containing not just ff and fl, but dozens of hand-tuned common
combinations.
RICARDO SANTOS
is a young designer living in Lisbon, and has been working on his major
family Van for the past six years.
The Van
Condensed package of six styles (three weights, upright and italic,
with lining and old-style figures) is a high-legibility geometric sans.
The inclusion of a Dingbats font of transport symbols indicates that
Ricardo is confident that airports and national railway systems should
have the package on their shopping lists!
TYPOTHETICALS
is the foundry of Graham Meade in Melbourne, Australia. His collection of
59 styles covers many genres, but we most like his scripts, the relaxed
calligraphy of Italican
Oblique in particular.
The neverending search for alternatives to Comic Sans gets a result here
too: Stripwriter
is very easy-going, highly legible, with nice 3D versions. Most
Typotheticals fonts are only $8 or $10.
UNDT is the
own-label brand of London designer Marcus McCallion, sometime co-worker of
bad boy Jonathan Barnbrook at Virus Fonts.
In his new fonts Marcus explores white-space, the mastery of which is the
mark of the accomplished type designer, say the experts. The modular Pills is based on
overlaid circular and square forms. The negative shapes in Punched appear like
serif letters and can be used to create complex text patterns.
ANDRIY
KONSTANTYNOV is from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev,
and debuts at MyFonts.com with two multilingual font families: Radix and Tecco. Each of
these sans-serif families includes Western, Central European and Cyrillic
glyphs.
DOOLEY TYPE
brings out the designs of Jeremy Dooley of Greenville, S. Carolina.
Shrike
2003 is his initial family of fonts. A ‘shrike’ is a
screeching butcher of a bird which enjoys impaling mice on thorns. Watch
out for this font’s strident call and those small yet sharp
serifs!
|
More Fonts from our
Existing Foundries
|
|
ASTIGMATIC
offers Hardliner,
a connecting monoline, biline, and triline script family unifying a retro
look of the 1950s with a techno flavor of the 2000s.
TYPECO,
James Grieshaber’s foundry, releases Gothic
Gothic, a fascinating, creative, award-winning mixture of two
“gothic” themes: in typography the word can refer to both
blackletter and sans-serif typefaces. We also like what must be the
toughest font ever made, Super Duty. Its
sharp mechanical angles and stencil option give the letterforms a
square-jawed and ready-for-action feel. Good work, James!
NICK’S
FONTS brings out a fresh set of playful new fonts. The wild, wacky
and slightly tacky Whoa
Nelly is suitable for the whole family. Hardy Har
Har is revival of an exotic but seriously funny typeface by Barnhard
Brothers and Spindler, a homage to poster designer Dudley Hardy. Krazy
Kracks is an affectionate parody of Cooper Black, a typeface who some
already consider a parody of lettering. We love the particularly krazy
italic.
PRESENCE
TYPO — Just as we were hoping, Thierry Puyfoulhoux has added
condensed weights to his very useful Placebo
Serif and Placebo
Sans.
BASELINE
brings us Avi Sans a
monocase, monolinear, multi-weight family created specifically for
nonlinear video editors.
|
SHINNTYPE
brings out Panoptica, a
monowidth typeface that is also a thorough exploration of the unicase idea
(the combination of lowercase and uppercase), and Preface, a
multi-style sans-serif that begs to be used instead of Helvetica or
Gill.
QUADRAT,
the foundry of David Vereschagin, has made Toronto
Sans, a digital version of the lettering originally used in the subway
system of his home town, developed from rubbings of the lettering on
station walls and photographs of painted signage.
SPIECE
GRAPHICS brings out Frisco
Antique Display, beautiful “Tuscan” wood-type that quite
simply reeks of the wild west.
ASTYPE, the
label of Andreas Seidel, brings out Missale
Incana, a new interpretation of a beautiful double-stem calligraphic
face from the legendary East German type designer, Herbert Thannhaeuser.
As we’ve seen before from Seidel, it’s delivered as a
feature-rich OpenType font.
Plus lots more new fonts from Pizzadude.dk, Typodermic, Bergsland, Woodside Graphics
(formerly Arroyo-Style), BA Graphics, P22, Elemeno, Enrich Design, Outside the
Line, Emboss, Gerald Gallo, E-phemera, MADType, Fatchair, SparkyType, Sander’s
Conspiracy, Ingrimayne, Blambot, Dennis Ortiz-Lopez,
and SoloType.
|
MyFonts.com, Inc.
245 First Street, 17th floor
Cambridge MA 02142
USA
Copyright © 2004 MyFonts.com, Inc.
|
|
|
|
