February is shaping up to be a busy month at FontShop. As we hunker down in the office, sheltered from San Francisco’s rainy season, we’re churning out new website features and content to inspire and improve your typography. But first, the latest fonts.

Effra

Jonas Schudel’s initial sketches for Effra were inspired by an early 19th century grotesque from the Caslon font foundry. Several years and transformations later, Effra became a contemporary sans, updated from its antique origins with a large x-height and modern forms like the sleek ‘g’ and ‘q’, and ‘M’ with angled verticals.

Baksheesh
Stuart Brown set out to create a family of constructed letterforms built upon a flexible system. The aesthetic of the font is influenced by the characters drawn by Wim Crouwel in 1976 for Olivetti’s typewriter font that could support varying character widths, hence Baksheesh’s faux-monospace appearance.

Comenia Sans
With open counters and humanist letterforms that are easily distinguished from each other, Comenia joins ranks with the few successful sans serifs that emulate the handwritten origins of their oldstyle serif forebearers.

These aspects make Comenia Sans ideal for long reading. After all, it was designed for academia from the start. Each style includes a number of ligatures, automatic replacement of small caps and caps punctuation, a collection of mathematical symbols, and several types of numerals which make it easy to set texts of all sorts.

Industry Focus Newsletters

A few weeks ago we launched a special series of email dispatches, each with information specific to a particular area of design. Sent so far: the debut issues of Book, Logo, Packaging, and Web Design. Unlike standard FontShop newsletters, we send Industry Focus updates to a select group of professionals in each field first, before they appear anywhere else. How do you get to be so special? Complete your Professional Profile and you’ll be on the list for future Industry Focus mailings.

DINFont.com

Since its release in 1995, FF DIN has always been a popular FontFont. But it’s recently gained a broad following worldwide, topping our bestseller list for the last two years. Designer Albert-Jan Pool explains why in a brand new microsite dedicated to the typeface. Like the sites recently launched for FF Meta Serif and FF Trixie, DINFont.com includes historical imagery, an evolving gallery, specimen PDF downloads, and a handy chart to help you find the FF DIN package that’s right for you.

New Feature: Favorites

New star buttons spangle the FontShop.com pages this week. Need to remember a font for a purchase later on? Want to keep a record of your most trusted type? The Favorites page makes it easy. Just click the star and it’s saved to your personal Favorites and will remain on the page between visits to the site.

The Favorites feature is one of many new little nuggets we’ll serve up on FontShop.com in the coming weeks. We welcome your feedback as we refine and add new functionality to these features.

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Font used in title graphic: Effra.

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