New Additions: March 2019
25th April 2019
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. David Johnson-Davies reviews some of the most interesting recent additions.
Aglet Sans, released by Jesse Ragan in his XYZ Type foundry, is a companion to his Aglet Slab launched in 2017. It's reminscent of the type of lettering produced with a round pen and plastic stencil, like FF DIN Round and DIN Next Rounded. However, Aglet Sans has a more lively personality than these, with its distinctive open R, K, and k, and the slanted spurs on the m, n, p, and r.
Cool Kids is one of the first two fonts in the SevenType foundry, in the process of being launched by its Portuguese designers Vitória Neves and Luís Bandovas. The phrase "Cool Kids" is from the lyrics of the song "Signs of Life" by Arcade Fire, which they say was the inspiration for the typeface, and it certainly has the same bouncy character as the song. In particular, the large x-height of the lower-case characters helps to make it very readable, and give it an approachable appearance.
Ben Jones started work on Amrys as his coursework for an MA in typography at the University of Reading between 2000 and 2004. After running his own foundry, Protimient, he joined Monotype UK in 2010 and his first release there was Joanna Nova, a revival of Eric Gill's Joanna. As his second project he has completed Amrys, and expanded it to a family of 16 styles. It is quite a different design from Joanna Nova; the letters have a chiselled appearance, with virtually no straight lines, but its still highly readable.
Eckmannpsych is another original design by James Edmondson, released by his OH no type foundry. It's what you might have expected to get if Otto Eckmann had taken LSD while designing his 1900 font Eckmann. It's an interesting fusion of German blackletter fonts, like Eckmann and Behrens Schrift, and Sixties psychedelia like Pierrot or Wes Wilson. He has designed three variants, Large, Medium, and Small, with different proportions.
Tejuela was designed by the Chilean designer Raúl Israel for his Typography and Lettering Degree at the University de Chile. It was inspired by lettering on the old wooden churches on the island of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile, where he spends half his time. The curved strokes of the characters have an irregular appearance, reflecting the coarseness of wood carving, but the effect is more restrained than in fonts such as Preissig and Origami, making Tejuela a good choice for readable lettering that needs a bit of extra character.
As its name suggests, TT Trailers was designed by Vika Usmanova and the TypeType team specifically for use in movie credits and posters, where space is at a premium. One of the problems with such highly compressed fonts, such as Rama Gothic Condensed and Origin Super Condensed Bold, is that text can appear like a grid of parallel vertical lines, making it very hard to read. The designers of TT Trailers have tried to avoid this problem by incorporating more white space, and more curves, and the result is definitely more readable. The fonts also include several OpenType features, such as the ability to stack two letters vertically in the same space as one letter, and underscores under letters.
By David Johnson-Davies