Revised Font Stack
A Way Back takes a fresh look at default font stack, first citing statistics about pre-installed fonts, then making recommendations for popular sites like Yahoo and Facebook.
Kyle Jones just released another hit with Haäfe & Haph, a set of gorgeous ampersands, not to mention a really lovely site to display them all.
Provided in EPS and Opentype formats for $10. Simply beautiful.
“Coming Home”, the showcase I guest designed for Laura Brunow Miner’s inspiring Pictory site, went live this morning. It’s a collection of photos both old and new around the theme of the houses we grew up in. A big thanks to Laura for her editorial guidance and exacting eye, and to the site’s readers for all the positive feedback I’ve received through various channels. (The introduction and quote typeface is FF Tisa served by Typekit.)
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)
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.
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)
Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room
Jeffrey Zeldman writes for 24 Ways on the vast, real problem of getting embedded type to render consistently across browsers and platforms. He explains why the appearance of type in Safari looks so different — Apple appears to have implemented its own hinting engine that ignores data in embedded font files in favour of its own rendering rules — and is rather glib about the likelihood of an easy cross-browser solution:
There are ways around this ugly type ugliness, but they involve complicated scripting and sniffing — the very nightmares from which web standards and the simplicity of
@font-facewere supposed to save us. I don’t know that even mighty Typekit has figured out every needed variation yet (although, working with foundries, they probably will).
Ugly rendering by browser makers is the key reason services like Typekit and its ilk are still a tough sell for most projects. Unless your audience is overwhelmingly using Webkit, results like these are hard to avoid. The tragedy of this is that Typekit is a terrific service doing its darnedest to conquer these issues through technical smarts and by working with type makers.
Update: I’ve edited the last paragraph to better convey my thoughts.
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.
