New Additions: January 2018
17th February 2018
We add hundreds of fonts to the Identifont database every month. Most of these are recent releases, and some are simply new acquisitions from foundries who were not yet represented on our site. Stephen Coles gives his take on the most interesting recent additions.
Dave Rowland’s Schizotype has made its mark over the last few years with casual brush scripts, but some of his most interesting designs are playful takes on traditional styles, such as Tusque, a whimsical rendering of ornamental “Tuscans” of the Victorian era with four layers for multi-color effects.
Another spirited and cheery Schizotype is 2016’s Revla Serif, a single-style face reiminscent of mid-century advertising lettering. It was recently followed by Revla Sans, a nearly monoline, serifless version with three additional weights. I appreciate that it includes alternates to prevent repeating shapes, and thus retain the flavor of hand-lettering. If you want to see this in action, sample the fonts on Fontspring with the Contextual Alternates option enabled (MyFonts does not provide this setting). Try words like “Greenroof”, “lilly”, and “hopper”.
In 2008, Swiss Typefaces (then B+P) released SangBleu, SangBleu Sans, and Romain. These slightly idiosyncratic designs based on 19th-century French type were unique and well crafted, but the font families were relatively limited in scope and utility. Now the team (led by Ian Party and Emmanuel Rey) has reimagined these typefaces as a new suite with several additional styles, each with a broader range of weights than the original incarnation. The subfamilies — Empire, Kingdom, Republic, Versailles, and Sunrise — are generally bound by a common skeleton, but are not related in the traditional way (such as sans, serif, slab, etc.). To learn more about this unusual superfamily, I recommend reading Florian Hardwig’s description at Swiss Typefaces’ website.
We see painted letters like these on streets all over the world. When seen from directly overhead they appear distorted, stretched to almost ridiculous proportions. But these signs were designed to be seen at a low angle, from the seat of a car or bike, so the peculiar proportions are intentional — optical adjustments for the effect of foreshortening. Emmanuel Besse’s latest release from Production Type, Signal Compressed, is a simple celebration of these road markings. As one might expect, it comes with several directional arrows and symbols inspired by road signage.
Gryffith CF’s construction is clearly based on the strokes of a broad nib pen, but its influences — which designer Connary Fagan says range from “medieval calligraphy to art deco lettering to high technology” — are more difficult to place. That’s perhaps what makes it so intriguing. I'm not a fan of the terminus of some of the curved strokes (a, b, d, p, q), and I feel the dots (i, j) might be too light for some settings. Still, I’m impressed with the originality of Fagan’s design, which feels fresher than most historically inspired typefaces.