jQuery 1.4 Released
Highlights include siginificant performance improvements, per-property easing, better support for live events, and plenty of new methods (including a native delay()).
Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams, edited by Klaus Kemp and published by Gestalten, presents the career of the peerless industrial designer from concept to final product, with commentary placing the work in context. Available from Vitsoe and Amazon. (via Alex Cornell)
The New York Times previews Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s latest, Vitesse. Oh my. Also: dying to know about “the secret formula we can’t talk about yet”. (via Jez Burrows)
Really smart website for Commercial Type, the foundry of type designers Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz. I like the bold animated homepage, and the typeface pages are easy to navigate, with samples that fill even the most generous of browser windows. The EULA treatment is perfect, explaining each paragraph of the legal document in plain English. Good to see sIFR allowed under the basic licence, with WOFF and Cufón embedding available for a nominal additional fee. Am now saving for the Stag family, originally a commissioned work for Esquire magazine.
ITC Chino is a joint commercial release from talented young German type designers Hannes von Döhren and Livius Dietzel. Its straight stems and brush endings make for a friendly, legible sans, and there’s a playful companion display face for titling. US$700 for the complete pro family. (via Johno Boardley)
New from TypeTogether, Etica — the moralist typeface:
The challenge was to obtain the same force, versatility and colour that are, from our point of view, Helvetica’s greatest qualities. The same proportions have been maintained, albeit with slightly reduced letter width. The resulting design has soft strokes, open counters and terminals; aesthetically resting somewhere between a grotesque and humanist sans serif.
Comes in six weights, with OpenType features including four sets of numerals, fractions, several stylistic alternates and a set of arrows and dingbats. Designed by Italian studio Leftloft.
Jeremy Holmes, the illustrator behind this new book based on the beloved nursery rhyme There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, has kindly send me a link to its trailer, lovingly animated by Paul Berkbigler. “Don’t miss the ending. It’s to die for!”
Mark Caneso has released a new humanist sans serif family, Ratio. Looks to be a very versatile face, with certain details recalling both Whitney and Auto. No word on the site regarding embedding/licensing restrictions.
Update: Mark sent me his EULA, which allows for several popular forms of embedding, including sIFR, Cufón and font-face. Very good news, especially given some of the other faces he’s working on.
“Horchata”, the first single from Vampire Weekend’s forthcoming album Contra, due out in January. Download it from their site.
A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a flat-sided sans serif that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another. The result is Tungsten®, a tight family of high-impact fonts in four weights: muscular and persuasive, without sacrificing wit, versatility, or style.
I like the lighter weights in particular. Jonathan and Tobias can do no wrong. (via Mike McCarron)
