This Week From the Desk
....has been bonkers
This week was an incredibly eventful week filled with all sorts of type news, events, and a swelling of typeface releases. This has resulted in one of the longest lists of noteworthy happenings to cross the Badson Desk since we started making these weekly reviews last year. We’ve peppered in a few news items amongst the relentless onslaught of typeface releases so you don’t get type blindness, but it is recommended that you take your time and sit with the list over a good cup of coffee this weekend to take it all in. This industry is incredibly vibrant and alive. ’Till next week!
Commercial Type is back to doing what it does best: Type design with a specific client in mind. (Well, they're not really 'back', they've been consistently killing it since they opened up shop in 2004.) Irregardless! Their latest contribution tot he newspaper type genre is Sanomat, released this week. It's a strong showing of restraint and conscious choice in a corner of the type market that is more saturated than a glass of water sitting out in the rain. Discover Sonomat at the Commercial site.
Ohno Type Company released an expanded character set to their iconic Viktor Script this week with a small wide caps. Edmondson describes these caps best on the Ohno Blog: “Though wide typefaces designed for all caps settings are common, they are very rarely done so with brush features: swelling strokes, kinked whitespaces, and soft terminals. These qualities allow Viktor Script Caps to match Viktor Script, while supporting the opposite end of the hierarchy.” These caps are a great match to Viktor's brushy stylings, and actually come with the complete Viktor Script. This is another interesting move from Ohno, mixing up how fonts are bought and sold, and subtly subverting the expectation of what comes standard in a font package. Viktor Caps are available for sale on the Ohno Type Co website.
Hello, Halyard. Darden Studio released the Halyard set of families this week with Halyard Display, Text, and Micro. Halyard is a robust sans reminiscent of Benton and sturdy workhorse Sans fromt he 20th Century yet remains delightfully weird in the all the right moments. In describing Halyard, Darden states that “Distinctiveness is achieved by bringing an almost impetuous vigor to Halyard’s shapes and through a willingness to adapt surprising historical forms into genuinely useful ones, which is so characteristic of Darden Studio designs.” I couldn’t agree more. Play around with this exciting new release from Darden on this incredibly fun and informative mini-site.
The work of Two Points was on the mood and inspiration boards at Badson this week. The firm has been run by Lupi Asensio and Martin Lorenz out of Hamburg, Germany since 2007, but continue to make some of the most fresh typographically-minded work out there today. Their portfolio of work is deep, but their work done for the ADI Awards is an especially poignant project to pour over. Although this project is not new, it's a refreshing example of type-design-meets-visual-identity-done-well to revisit. See the full ADI Project an their other outstanding work on their site here.
Pilot is described as “an informal jobbing typeface for short texts and striking display use.” It was designed by Aleksandra Samuļenkova, who has taken this design from a working project at the Type & Media Program at KABK in the Hague to a robust and enticing family release with Bold Monday. I'm a fan of the way the angularity of the letterforms don't feel gimmicky or stale after a while—something very difficult to pull off. See the full family of 10 styles, available through Bold Monday here.
TPTQ Arabic releases Teshrin
TPTQ Arabic has been publishing Arabic types to accompany their deep and prolific catalog of Latin typefaces since 2011, and this week, they released Teshrin—a beautiful Arabic counterpart to their October type family. Designed by Kristyan Sarkis with love, skill, and care and it shows! From the rounded terminals to the mastery of weight distribution from character to character, Teshrin carries the flag with pride for TPTQ Arabic's mission of supplying the globe with more innovative and versatile Arabic types. Discover more about Teshrin here.
Google doubled down on their emoji investments this week, releasing an all new redesigned emoji font... that's over 2000 characters, people! They took to Medium to give a few more in depth details on the emoji, how animation plays into the emoji landscape, and how the new emoji are not only better for Android devices but easier to make on the back end. A good read. 👍🏻👍🏻
Last week, Victoria Rushton released her latest typeface Gautreaux through Type Network. Sometimes typefaces can be incredibly personal, and Gautreaux is a rather poised example of this. Inspired by a lettering style from Tommy Thompson’s The Script Letter called “free style lettering”, Gautreaux is packed with Open Type wizardry and marks a return to a love of script typefaces for Rushton. Read the Type Network article on Gautreaux here.
Rui Abreu adds to the growing repatoire of homerun typefaces at R-Typography this week with Sul Mono. Sul Mono is a monospaced font with some interesting geometries. Although there have been lots of monospace typefaces produced in the last few years, Sul is Rui's first offering to the category. See all of Sul Mono here.
The famed punchcutter François Guyot is back! Well, at least his style is. The week saw the release of Guyot, a stunning new display face derived from the printed work of Guyot by ReType. Guyot seems to not fall too far from the original tree in how it handles the reviving of such a distinct style as Guyot's. Guyot has the potential to be a truly essential go-to in the font menu for years to come. See more specimens of Guyot here.
Fun fact, ReType joined the roster at TypeNetwork this week too. Big week. Congrats to ReType!
Congratulations to Ramakrishna Saiteja of Bangalore, India for being awarded the Society of Typographic Aficionados Catalyst Award! Saiteja's work is already so well rounded and so necessary in the world of Indic Scripts. SoTA has chosen the right winner. See the full announcement here, and congrats again. Welcome to the club, Ramakrishna!