What's up at FontShop.com, from
new and recommended fonts to website features, plus the latest ideas and inspiration from the FontFeed.
The Gallery now showcases over 1,300 typeface samples and examples of fonts in use in the real world. These images were added by FontShop staffers as we scouted our favorite typography on the web. You can view the latest additions on the Gallery page and images specific to any font family on its Gallery tab.
Now it’s time to open it up to your favorites. Submit your own work or work you admire using a simple bookmarklet. Just add the bookmarklet to your browser and click it whenever you visit a website with images worthy of submission. You can find the tool on the Gallery page — click “Submit images to the Gallery”.
We welcome your feedback on this new feature. Give it a go and let us know how it’s working for you.
Suomi Hand Script
Finland’s Tomi Haaparanta joins FontShop with a remarkable font that simulates everyday handwriting better than any we’ve seen. It accomplishes the feat not with hi-tech OpenType magic but with hundreds of ligatures, connecting pairs and trios of letters the way most of us do when we write. Suomi Hand Script strikes a balance between legibility and authenticity, readable at nearly any size because it demonstrates the natural rhythm and contrast made by the human hand.
Test Suomi Hand Script for yourself in the custom sampler on FontShop.com »
Loreto
From the Latin American foundry, Tipo, comes a sturdy yet elegant text face by Pablo Cosgaya and Eduardo Tunni. Loreto gets its inspiration from the typography of the “Manuale ad Usum” (1721), printed by jesuit missionaries who worked at the beginning of the XVIII century with communities of “Guaraní” native indians from the Northeast region of Argentina.
MVB Solano Gothic
Designed for the City of Albany, California, MVB Solano Gothic pays tribute to the 1930s–’50s era main street for which it was named. Yet it can evoke a more contemporary flavor by using the less retro forms.
Watch or subscribe now:
Font Aid IV
Designers from around the world are invited to contribute artwork for a typeface to raise relief funds for Haiti. To participate: Submit a black and white “ampersand” icon for the benefit font.
Helvetica and the NYC Subway System
Lettering expert Paul Shaw painstakingly researched the evolution of New York’s Subway signage for this fascinating tome. A great lesson in wayfinding, typography, and design history.
Cookie Cutters
Speaking of Helvetica, Beverly Hsu, a designer for PBS’s “America’s Test Kitchen”, combined her loves for design and baking to create some tasty type. Swell idea, but Helv is pretty stale. May we suggest the more flavorful FF Bau instead?
Bestsellers by Classification and Region
Our Bestsellers list has always been a gauge for the most successful and interesting typefaces of the last few months. Now you can break it down by classification (Sans, Serif, Script, etc.) or region (US/Canada, UK, Benelux, Australia, etc.) or both. Get a view of what’s popular in your neck of the woods, and check back often — the lists are always changing.
This serif/sans combo has all the right ingredients to become a workhorse family for the new decade of design. It draws from the familiar traditions of French (Garalde) and British (Gill) stalwarts, but steps forward confidently with a swing and soul that is typically Xavier Dupré. FF Yoga will lend a progressive credibility to magazine and newspaper design in 2010 and the family will expand with new cuts for display use.
Despite its narrow stature, Tempera is handsome and readable, allowing more text to fit in today’s shrinking page sizes without sacrificing comprehension. A type system with unusual versatility, Tempera not only shares common proportions across the family, it also includes book styles available in three levels of weight (A, B, C). Tempera Sans, the non-rounded brother of Tempera Rose, will be available soon. Designer Nikola Djurek is acclaimed by the critics but largely unknown to the public. Look for 2010 to be his breakout year.
Dino dos Santos has a knack for delivering new typefaces that hit a nerve with contemporary designers. Dobra is no different. Not only is it stylistically current, this family is extensive (5 weights + italics), professional (small caps, full figure sets), and affordable.
Square serifs have gained favor in recent months and we expect that trend to continue. 2010 will be the year of the slab. Particularly popular are unbracketed slab serifs with humanist and grotesque forms. Adelle capitalizes on both these categories with a sturdy shape that is entirely new and very pleasing to the eye.
If it was at all possible to bring the 19th century Clarendon-style slab into the modern age you would count on the foward-thinking OurType foundry to do it. Designed in 2007, Parry isn’t brand new, but it’s definitely picking up steam. We think it looks wonderfully at home in a variety of contexts, classic or contemporary.
Designed behind the Berlin Wall for the state-run foundry Typoart, Superla is a geometric sans seen by few outside the Iron Curtain. Until now. Primetype’s Ole Schäfer worked directly with Typoart veteran Karl-Heinz Lange to digitize this family along with Minimala and Publicala. Those who are fatigued with Futura will find new life in PTL Superla, a large family full of surprises despite its simple geometric basis.
The most obvious new trend in text typefaces is a move away from the anemic, fragile forms so common with hasty digitizations of classic metal type and towards something meatier. Premiéra is the kind of book face that holds its own at any size or under any circumstance, yet does so with grace. If you’re designing a book, magazine, or annual report in 2010 you would do well to set your copy in Thomas Gabriel’s well-tested type.
Generell is a prototypical Gestalten release, embracing the banality of everyday design yet spinning something dynamic and new. The aesthetic of the typewriter, both the machine and its marks, is increasingly in vogue. Mika Mischler infused those famililar, generic typewriter forms with a subtle flow between letters. The result is interesting wordshapes for logos, headlines, or brief text.
Specimens are nice, but when selecting type it’s often more useful to do a reality check.
Now each font on FontShop.com has a Gallery tab where you’ll find expanded sample graphics and examples of the type in use in the real world. See what designers all over the globe are doing with the fonts and make an informed decision.
We’re rapidly filling these Galleries with new images and soon FontShop visitors will have the opportunity to submit their own examples. You can find the most recent samples on our new Gallery page. We hope you’ll find it source of inspiration for the new year.
With gossamer strokes and a classical stature, SangBleu was born to be set at 150 pt. on the pages of a glossy magazine. Read more about the release »
At the very moment the design world called for a perfect blend of geometry and legibility, Geogrotesque answered the call. Read more about the release »
It’s hard to imagine a more charming tribute to 1930s ad art than this careful revival and expansion of Stephenson Blake’s Glenmoy. Read more about the release »
The large, round forms of a comfortable old gothic remodeled with subtle modern touches throughout, Effra is an appealing, versatile family for any subject matter or use.
This year we welcomed the new TypeTrust collection and you quickly welcomed Heroic to your hard drives, making it one of their bestselling faces and reminding us how useful a space-efficient headliner can be.
This long-awaited update to the original set of FontFont pictograms is so comprehensive and useful we gave it its own home on the Web.
Released in May at a special introductory price, Axel not only saved wallets it also saved space in Excel® tables and on the printed page. It’s still one of the most affordable Spiekermann families available and one of the few fonts you can embed on the web without a special license.
Very few handwriting scripts sway across the page with such natural grace. Read more about the release »
2009 brought us a companion to Mike Abbink’s FF Milo, heralding a truly useful, contemporary text system.
FontShop’s exclusive relationship with Berlin-based publisher and foundry Gestalten yielded ten new families this year, including the popular Blender and T-Star.
The result of formal studies at the premier type design school in Reading, UK, Michael Hochleitner’s Ingeborg is a serious text face, but its headline weights are also a helluva lot of fun. Read more about the release »
Proof that stencil letters needn’t always come from course industrial signage. Read more about the release »
Symbolize the sleek power of sports cars and computer terminals. Read more about the release »
Emigre gave us the long awaited sans serif mate for Mrs Eaves and he comes with two different wardrobes: oldstyle and modern.
Three of Chris Dickinson’s contemporary sans serifs were bestsellers this year, but the ultra modern Mic 32 New edged out the others. Read more about the release »
Designed to be used with its sans serif sister FF Unit, but also FF Meta and FF Meta Serif, this release by Spiekermann & co. completes a quadfecta of versatile type families for corporate or editorial design.
Lexia was updated in 2009 with an extra bold Advertising weight for headlines, making this readable slab even more versatile.
A peek inside our 2009 record books
Tracking the Rise of OpenType
2009 marks the first year that OpenType has finally taken hold as the most popular font format.
Most Popular FontFeed Articles
Bestselling Text Families
Bestselling Scripts & Display Faces
Some of our favorite custom sample phrases used by fontshop.com customers.
“Hello Kitty, I am testing you”
“Spiekermango”
“The dangers of piloting an airship”
See more at FontShop: 20 Years
Onward
Keep an eye out for the next newsletter in which we’ll cover the most exciting past and future FontShop.com improvements, and take a look at the fonts and updates to come for 2010.
Some Bestselling Fonts by Country
We’ve selected a few countries and omitted the most common bestsellers to give a sense of how styles and traditions vary by region.
United Kingdom
Denmark
The Netherlands
France
Italy
Spain
Poland
Japan
Australia
Brazil
Bestselling Fonts from FontShop Exclusive Collections
In 1990, FontShop followed its launch with FF Scala, a serif typeface which paid homage to traditional serifs, but offered something refreshingly new, a text face for a new era. Twenty years later, FF Yoga takes the same big step for this generation, offering a soulful, contemporary alternative to the overused classics.
The family is a type system by Xavier Dupré conceived for newspapers and magazines thanks to its strong personality and good legibility. FF Yoga, with its sturdy serifs is a good choice for body text, but it also serves as an original headline face with its subtly chiseled counters. The face mixes the dynamic tension of angular cuts with the balanced rhythm and elegant curves of Garalde typefaces. FF Yoga Sans is a contemporary alternative to Gill Sans and a sober companion to the serif FF Yoga.
The family was made to work together, sharing the same proportions, x-height, and relative weight. The design also has much in common with Dupré’s other recent typeface, FF Masala, which could be used to deliver more informal content alongside FF Yoga.
FF Yoga OT and Pro fonts come with standard ligatures, small caps, case-sensitive forms, lining and oldstyle figures in tabular and proportional widths, and arbitrary fractions. FF Yoga Pro fonts add support for Central/Eastern European languages like Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Turkish. The fonts are also available in Offc format for Office® users.
FF Yoga Info Guide »
FF Yoga Spec Sheet »
While creating the letterforms for Mister K, a typeface inspired by manuscripts of Franz Kafka, Julia Sysmäläinen was moved to sketch pictograms in the same personal, hand penned style.
Her imagination — and digital ink — ran wild, resulting in nearly 600 images including animals, plants, stars, famous buildings, faces, food, flags, arrows, and various symbols for sports, hobbies, professions, traffic, and weather.
All the pictograms are available in a single font accessible via keycode or glyph palette.
 Founded by Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody in 1989, FontShop is the original independent retailer of digital type. We offer more than 100,000 fonts from dozens of expert-selected foundries, including our house brand: FontFont.
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