First off, Happy Monday! Second, there has been a plethora of wonderful typefaces that have been flooding my inbox lately and I thought I would gather up a series of them for you to drool over, too.
1A: Dolly – Created by Bas Jacobs, Akiem Helming and Sami Kortemäki in 2001, released in 2002. This book typeface is great for setting long text and contains old-style figures. It really shines in small sizes, but can also be used as display type. It comes in four weights–Roman, Small Caps, Italic and Bold. These four weights provide great solutions for most book typography. I just love that bold weight, it is really playful and legible.
2A: FS Jack – Designers Jason Smith and Fernando Mello were firing on cylinders in 2009, when they created this san serif typeface–FS Jack, briming with confience. It’s easy to read and just plain good looking. Small caps, Old Style Figures and Fractions come along with this handsome OpenType font.
3A: FF Spinoza – Max Phillips slaved over FF Spinoza for over 11 years. Phillips developed this font with readability in mind, so it was fitting that he named the font after rationalist Baruch Spinoza, a man whose job it was to help people see the truth. The font family is meant to be a workhorse as well as a classic text family, but with an elegant twist and enough pizazz to stand on its own when used in larger sizes.
1B: Garage Gothic – Tobias Frere-Jones designed this font based on the numbered tickets you’re given at city parking garages. He purposely left in the rough alignments found in ticket lettering, but made sure to contain and restrain those flourishes for a respectable typeface. First released in 1992, this font really shines in all caps for me. It comes in 3 style weights as tickets received from other garages contained heavier weights.
2B: Periódico – Designer Eduardo Manso is responsible for this amazing new font family from the Emtype Foundry. Released in February of this year, Periódico (Newspaper in Spanish) is inspired by old spanish typography engravings, mostly from the second half of the XVIII century. However, instead of just reviving an old typeface, he started from scratch to create a truly original and distinct type family. Periódico is available in 30 different styles, 10 for text and 20 for display sizes, a very extensive system of capable hard-working fonts, solving all the needs of a large pub. Just look at those letterforms, que bonita!
3B: Freight – Josh Daren designed this expansive type family in 2005. When I say expansive I mean it, as this family features 100 styles. For now, I’ll focus on the serif side of things, as the charming details found in each letterform are what drew me in at first glance. So many wonderful details I almost don’t know where to start. That italic ‘k’ is probably the best starting point for me though. The dip in the capital ‘A’ is superb. I can’t imagine how long it must have taken to produce this family, but I’m glad he did.