A transmission from the deep south.
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”.
Richard Miller’s Westin Black is a great take on the friendly slab, by way of Cooper Black. It’s now available for desktop and web use from Fontspring, as part of a new collection of rounded faces that also includes Museo Sans Rounded and Proxima Nova Soft.
“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)
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.
Typotheque has launched its webfonts service, enabling site creators to legally embed any of its typefaces via CSS. Pricing for use on the web is set at a very reasonable 20% of the full license cost (plus any bandwidth overage charges), with a 30-day free trial available, and existing license holders of the foundry’s OpenType fonts can create web versions at no extra cost. The service provides helpful tools for subsetting into dozens of languages, and for specifying typographic details such as true small caps and old-style numerals. Read the FAQ and watch the demo video. Alas, the normal caveats apply:
Font rendering is handled by the operating system’s rasterizer. While Apple’s OS X does a great job of rendering all fine details of type on screen, the Windows rasterizer is less refined, so fonts in small sizes don’t look as good as in Mac OS.
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.
If a font file fails to return, the page is blocked in IE, the text isn’t displayed in Chrome, and the browser’s busy indicators never stop in IE, Firefox, and Chrome.
— Sobering advice from Steve Souders regarding the use of @font-face custom font declarations in websites, particularly in relation to possible outages if your files are hosted by a third-party service. (via Jeffrey Zeldman)
Useful tips from Paul Irish.
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
