Matthew Buchanan (Home)

FontShop’s best typefaces of 2011 have been announced:

To celebrate the end of another exciting year in type, our type experts put their heads together to compile our annual “Best Of” list, highlighting the typefaces that surprised, impressed, and delighted us.

Some nice picks, I’m a big fan of TypeTogether’s Abril which was lauded as a “Modern Romance”.

For the release of director Christopher Nolan’s latest science-fiction mind-bender Inception, Wired lists its favourite 15 films from the genre. It’s a good list, including — along with notable classics 2001 and Brazil — Darren Aronofsky’s Pi and The Fountain, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and my three favourite space films of the past few years, Duncan Jones’ Moon, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris. Biggest omission: they forgot Primer. Again.

My favourite albums of 2009

(Oh look, it’s February. Please file under embarrassingly late.)

The Antlers’ Peter Silberman teamed with new bandmates to craft his first non-solo record, the tender and affecting tale of a terminally ill lover’s painful decline. Epic and desolate in equal measure, the Brooklyn trio’s Hospice tops a list that looks like this:

1. Hospice — The Antlers
2. xx — The xx
3. Veckatimest — Grizzly Bear
4. Chant Darling — Lawrence Arabia
5. The Hazards Of Love — The Decemberists
6. Noble Beast — Andrew Bird
7. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix — Phoenix
8. Followed By A Trail Of Sparks — Good Laika
9. Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle — Bill Callahan
10. Lungs — Florence + The Machine

Biggest surprise of the year was four (now three) 20-year-olds from South London whose sleek, sexed-up debut (xx) demonstrated experience and a command of the craft far beyond their years. The kids these days.

My favourite local albums were Silver Scroll winner James Milne’s alter ego, Lawrence Arabia, with an infectious collection of finely-tuned pop classics, and Wellington collective Good Laika, who delivered a darker, more restrained sophomore album that wasn’t without its upbeat moments.

The Grizzly Bear album is the band’s most accessible to date but didn’t charm everyone; I don’t mind admitting it took me a few listens through. The passing similarity to local indie darlings past Bressa Creeting Cake on the odd track didn’t hurt either.

Possibly against better judgement, Florence and her machine sneak in there at the end on the back of repeated listens in the lead up to a superb headline performance at the first Auckland Laneway Festival this past weekend. The album is overly-dramatic, stylistically muddled and one or two tracks too long, but the girl sings so heartily about boys and coffins that most of this is easily forgiven.

Also rans: Fever Ray’s self-titled solo release, M. Ward’s timeless Hold Time, Annie “St Vincent” Clark’s Woody-Allen-inspired Actor, Bombay Bicycle Club’s I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose (thanks Jarred for the introduction) and Noah And The Whale’s The First Days Of Spring.

Past years: 2008, 2007.

FontShop’s Top Type of 2009. My favourites among these are Geogrotesque, Heroic Condensed, Typonine Stencil and Mr Eaves.

Well deserved! Underware’s Liza Pro (used for the header of this site) makes MyFonts’ Top 10 Typefaces of 2009 list, based on sales figures from the past year:

Its designers set impressive standards for the genre years ago with their seminal Bello. Liza Pro uses the wizardry of OpenType architecture to create a font that approaches human hand lettering as closely as possible. When using an OpenType-optimized design program, Liza will create the optimal combination for each word out of a stock of 4,000 handcrafted glyphs.

Robin Pen from Planet Books picked this striking cover for Brian James’s Zombie Blondes as one of the best executed for November. Anyone know the artist? (via Peter Nidzgorski)

Update: In this article for Tor.com the author credits British-born artist Sas Christian for the original painting.

Three favourites of mine — Shane Carruth’s Primer (above), Duncan Jones’s Moon and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris remake — made Wired readers’ list of the decade’s top science fiction films. Most surprising omission: Children Of Men.

Update: Hard-boiled notes, as I did earlier, that Children of Men is the only film from this decade to make the Wired editors’ official list, at the expense of Primer in particular. The two lists aren’t comparable though, as the official list is for the last three decades (hence the inclusion of Gattaca from 1997).