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Font Magazine Online
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FontShop International has added to its wide spectrum of text faces, display faces and scripts, giving designers even more raw material to forge a purpose-driven, context-based aesthetic.Those behind these new fonts include Erik Spiekermann, Ole Schäfer, Michael Abbink, Donald Beekman, Martin Majoor, Ole Søndergaard, Albert-Jan Pool, Fred Smeijers and other internationally known designers. Inspiration for these new fonts can be as diverse as street signs in East and West Berlin (Ole Schäfer and Verena Gerlach’s FF City Street Type), or airline ticketing and luggage-tag type (Daniel Fritz’s FF Ticket), or bitmappy cell phone displays (FF Call from Astrid Scheuerhorst, Stefan Kisters, and Maik Ignaszak). With each new release, the FontFont collection continues to respond to designers’ needs with typefaces by designers for designers.

FF DIN Condensed & FF DIN Italic. The ubiquitous FF DIN family has been without italics long enough. Albert Jan-Pool just added them. The stimulus for a narrow version of FF DIN came from Factor Design in Hamburg when it made C&A InfoType, a modified version of FF DIN for client C&A. The need for a true condensed version became obvious, so Olaf Stein and Uwe Melichar from Factor Design with Albert-Jan Pool created two new weights. Pool then developed FF DIN Condensed in five weights to harmonize with his original FF DIN family. See more.

FF Kievit. FF Kievit in 1995 as part of a school project and finished it several years later for a corporate client of San Francisco design firm Method, Inc. The openness of the characters makes it an ideal typeface for use in small print. The clarity of classic sans serif faces (like Frutiger and Univers) and the humanistic characteristics of old styles (such as Garamond and Granjon) were the inspiration for this contemporary design that is equally at home in a headline or a body of text. The FF Kievit family includes six weights, true italics, oldstyle figures and small caps. See more.
FF Prater. FF Prater was designed with the spontaneity of loose illustration. Designers Henning Wagenbreth and Steffen Sauerteig have re-created the irregularities of hand-lettering through variation in stroke width and angle as well as letter spacing. In order to create a convincing hand-drawn effect, the designers made two versions of every character in several weights and styles. See more.
FF Ropsen Script. In Prenzlauer Berg, a section of former East Berlin and home to type designer Jürgen Brinckmann, is a street named for the American singer Paul Robeson. The local population pronounce it “ropsen,” and Brinckmann thought it a fine name for a friendly typeface. FF Ropsen Script was created from various handwriting samples, and early versions were used in dialogue boxes of schoolbooks Brinckmann designed. Over several months the typeface was refined until an ideal was reached: the traits of handwritten characters in the framework of a versatile text face that works as well in a headline as in a block of text. See more.
FF Seria & FF Seria Sans. Book designer Martin Majoor wanted to supplement his FF Scala type family because the short ascenders and descenders seemed inappropriate for literature and poetry texts. So he created FF Seria with extremely long ascenders and descenders and very fine detailing. Inspired by the designed combination of FF Scala and FF Scala Sans, Majoor added a sans version to FF Seria. See more.

FF Eureka Mono & FF Eureka Sans Condensed. Peter Bilak has created a monospaced version of his FF Eureka. Those familiar with his contribution to the magazine dot dot dot (...) will no doubt recognize this soon-to-be-everywhere face. He has also created condensed versions for his popular FF Eureka Sans family. See more.
FF City Street Type. For decades two different signage systems divided East and West Berlin. The West used a sans serif dating back to the 1930s, while the East preferred a more technically drawn face from the 1950s. Ole Schäfer and Verena Gerlach based their new type designs on the actual street signs resulting in two versions for the East and a single version for the West. The FontFont character set also includes many characters that would never be found on street signage, so Schäfer and Gerlach designed the missing letters, punctuation and symbols. They also designed special headline fonts for both East and West available in three weights. See more.
FF Fago Office Sans & FF Fago Office Serif. Ole Schäfer designed these additions to the FF Fago family with office correspondence in mind. Both offer four weights (Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic) plus expert sets, alternative numbers, a variety of dingbats and ligatures. The serif version is well-suited to long text, and both versions work well in headlines and offer sufficient contrast for emphasizing words in text. See more.
FF Zine. The starting point for FF Zine was a single headline font made for the German newspaper Sächsische Zeitung. For FF Zine, Ole Schäfer redrew the face, adjusting letterforms and adding weights. He also addressed something that has long been a problem in newspaper and magazine design: finding sans and serif faces that work well together as headline fonts. His solution was to draw them all right from the start: serif, sans serif and slab serif. As display fonts, the FF Zine types are best suited to headlines, sublines, titles, etc. See more.
FF Govan. Ole Schäfer and Erik Spiekermann’s new co-production is based on the acclaimed type concept developed for Glasgow 1999 City of Architecture and Design. The Glasgow fonts were reworked by Schäfer and extended to include three widths each of six variations with dingbats. The strength of the family lies in the innovative manner in which the three widths, two descender lengths and dingbats can be combined. The results are striking and offer a unique way to create emphasis in a sentence or within a single word. The expert sets also include a large selection of ligatures that represent the most common letter combinations in English, German and French. With FF Govan, type-setting can become type-sculpting. See more.
FF Info Text/Display updates. Erik Spiekermann and Ole Schäfer have revisited the FF Info Text and FF Info Display families. To both Schäfer has added new italic designs and updated the original weights to harmonize with them. The new families also have Adobe Standard encoding and integrated Euro symbols. There are now two sets of figures (proportional and monospaced), as well as expert sets with arrows, math symbols and fractions. See more.
FF Rattle Script. FF Rattle Script was inspired by Mårten Thavenius’s trip to Death Valley where he was struck by the similarity of marks made in the sand by a sindwinder to the flow of handwriting. FF Rattle Script’s open and friendly appearance makes it highly suitable for an informal context where other handwritten faces may be less readable. The family is made up of four weights, each available in six styles. See more.
FF Motter Festival. Othmar Motter’s FF Motter Festival was born of the desire to forge an alliance of a universally legible serif face with the rhythm and elegance of a gothic. The result is a striking design with a particular interchange of pointed and rounded endings. The lighter-than-normal connection between vertical and horizontal elements results in more openness than normally found in a condensed design. FF Motter Festival comes in three weights: Light, Book and Bold. See more.
FF Manga. Donald Beekman got the idea for FF Manga Steel and FF Manga Stone while reading Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima. The two headline faces are constructed with elements from Japanese script and work equally well set horizontally or vertically. See more.
FF Noni. Donald Beekman’s vacation to Thailand served as inspiration for the FF Noni family: a combination of Thai aesthetic and techno methodology. Beekman also created alternative characters with longer tails and pointier serifs resulting in FF Noni Too, which works alone or with FF Noni Wan. See more.
FF Imperial. FF Imperial Spike was originally developed as a logo for Imperial Recordings, a Dutch techno/trance record label. The proposed logo embodied a “sword and sorcery” sensibility. Donald Beekman recognized merit in the lettering, and decided to develop it as a complete typeface. See more.
FF Signa. Ole Søndergaard’s contemporary sans serif family in two widths and four weights was originally designed for the Danish Design Center for use in its print, exhibitions and signage. See more.
FF Ottofont. Barbara Klunder describes her FF Ottofont design as “an urban, handmade font with some ‘grit.’ The dingbats reflect what we might need in the near future in our publications: images of cells, biology, rats, death, but also images of hope—leaves, babies, food, music.” See more.
FF Bodoni Classic Text. Gert Wiescher has added text versions to his FF Bodoni Classic family in Light, Roman, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic weights. See more.
FF Call. For work in cell phone advertising, FF Call designers Astrid Scheuerhorst, Stefan Kisters and Maik Ignaszak were in need of display type matching cellular phone displays of Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, and others. As these fonts weren’t commercially available, they decided to make their own. The result is FF Call, a package of over 70 fonts corresponding to a dozen brands of cellular phones. Each design comes in three versions: Regular, Italic and Negative, plus Expert Sets. See more.
FF Quadraat. Fred Smeijers continues to add to his popular FF Quadraat family. With its enormous x-height, the new FF Quadraat Headliner takes the notion of “display” to new limits. His new FF Quadraat Sans Monospaced offers a friendlier alternative to the many cold monospaced faces presently in use. See more.
FF Dax Caps. Hans Reichel’s popular FF Dax family now includes small caps with non-lining figures. FF Dax Caps includes six weights corresponding to the earlier FF Dax fonts. See more.
FF Routes. FF Routes is a new direction for Hans Reichel, designer of FF Dax. FF Routes ‘A’ contains forms for streets and crossings, bridges and tunnels, highways and special symbols. FF Routes ‘B’ contains background layers for the ‘A’ elements. The FF Routes fonts can be used to construct complex, multicolored maps. See more.
FF Ticket. Daniel Fritz’s FF Ticket re-creates the look of thermal printer type as found on airline tickets, luggage tags, forms, etc. See more.
Fonts from the entire FontFont collection can be browsed and purchased online.

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