Rising Stars*

Based in Edinburgh, UK, designer Elena Genova has always felt passionate about handwriting. A year ago she started her successful foundry My Creative Land to fully explore hand lettering and calligraphy. It was an instant hit. Storyteller, her first co-ordinated suite of fonts, is the perfect family at the perfect moment. It consists of scripts in several variations with swashes, ligatures and alternates; an all-caps sans serif in normal, condensed and extra condensed widths; and an all-caps serif face. The fonts look elegant yet casual, and were lovingly handwritten and hand-traced to give your designs that human, personal touch. They come with numerous extras: playful loop fills for the scripts, engraved styles and catchword ligatures for the sans and the serif fonts, an ornament font with frames and borders, and a collection of adorable Spring and Easter-themed illustrations.

The large sans serif family Ridley Grotesk is the latest release from Bulgarian graphic, web and type designer Radomir Tinkov. Taking his cue from current trends in design and advertising, he created a modern geometric sans serif with generous proportions. Radomir introduced elements from architectural lettering and some humanist accents in the design to soften the strict geometry. In combination with the rather wide proportions and large x-height these lend the family a warm, friendly atmosphere. Ridley Grotesk comes in nine weights from a delicate Thin to a powerful Black with matching italics. An alternate ‘a’ allows the user to subtly shift the typographic tone from geometric to grotesk. Each feature-rich OpenType font includes true small capitals, extended language support, ligatures and more. The family is perfectly suited for display and signage use, while the middle weights can easily handle body text. Designed with corporate and editorial design in mind, the family works as well in print as on screen.

Yellow Design Studio — the type design and fine arts studio run by Rena and Ryan Martinson — brings texture back to digital type in a big way. Do you like some crunch to your letters, some grit to your scripts? The Canvas Acrylic Megafamily is a collection of nine distinct hand-painted font families. They range from refreshingly festive to folky and organic — be it a brush script, an eccentric unicase family, a casual sans and serif with accent layers, or a curly all-caps sans. Six of the families include unique layering options for added dimension and impact. With authentic, hi-res texture the fonts maintain their realism even at very large sizes. “Tiny” versions of the Sans, Slab and Brush are included for setting small type. A collection of 340 tasty shapes, icons and seasonal elements, and a series of unique floral icons and patterns designed by Rena Martinson complement the fonts.

Since publishing his first typeface to MyFonts in 2012, Rene Bieder has been on an upward trajectory. His latest release confirms this trend, as Rational effortlessly reached the top 3 in the Hot New Fonts. This contemporary representative of the Grotesk genre is inspired by drawings dating back to the early 20th century. Bieder approached the design with a strong modernist attitude, focusing on clarity and simplicity. This resulted in a highly utilitarian modern type family, rooted in Swiss traditional and pragmatic design, with subtle references to the American Gothics. Horizontal terminals and uniform widths are juxtaposed with circular and subtle calligraphic elements, infusing the rational characters with a warm and approachable flavor. The feature-rich OpenType family of 10 weights with matching italics offers numerous alternate characters and special features like arrows and numerals in circles, making Rational an excellent choice for contemporary professional typography.

Barely three months after we discovered Haboro, Jeremy Dooley releases Haboro Slab, the slab serif companion to his neo-classical didone. Because the type family is built on the same skeleton as Haboro and shares the same weights and widths, the siblings play nice together. Consistent with Haboro, too, the simplified geometric features lend your message the clarity it deserves. Haboro Slab has almost no contrast and sturdy, wedge-molded serifs. Its straightforward character shapes cut through the clutter in applications as varied as editorial design, corporate communication, fashion and packaging, and business software. Small caps and ball terminal variants broaden its scope. Grab Haboro Slab while it’s still available for a great introductory price — ends June 3, 2016.

From Vassil Kateliev’s small independent Bulgarian type design studio Karandash comes Sybilla Pro. The soft, almost cursive letter forms of this humanist slab serif make it a warm and friendly text face that is very legible and easy on the eyes. The distinct ink traps are not just functional; they add character to the letter forms. The type family consists of seven weights in regular, narrow and condensed widths, all with complementary true italics. This wide range makes the family ideally suited for advertising and packaging, editorial design and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, posters and billboards, small text and signage as well as web and screen design. Sybilla Pro has extensive language support and includes the full Cyrillic character set, making it the perfect choice for projects where both writing systems need to work harmoniously side by side. The introductory discount ends May 28, 2016.

Paulo Goode only started designing typefaces at the age of 45, and Eponymous is the fifth release from his (pardon the pun) eponymous one-man foundry. The distinctive characteristics of this Egyptian-style slab serif typeface are the chunky, scalloped serifs and sturdy ball terminals. While the low contrast of the lighter weights make them reminiscent of typewriter faces, the heavier weights conjure up images of newspaper headlines, vintage album covers, and beer labels. The font family is available in five weights in roman and italic. The more than 30 stylistic alternates include a single-storey ‘a’ and ‘g’ in the roman weights, and additional ball terminals. A unique feature is that the small caps — present in both roman and italic styles — have the same height as the lowercase. This allows mixing and matching to create interesting unicase typography.

Conference Season is in Full Swing

Like we hinted in our introduction, with the arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere comes conference season. And like every year, we’re supporting a broad range of interesting and exciting events catering to the type, design, web and creative communities. A complete list is up on our blog — we hope to see you at one of them!