Join Us at TypeCon2008 in Buffalo

Hundreds of fontheads will descend upon the quiet enclave of Buffalo, NY next week for North America’s only annual conference dedicated to typography: TypeCon. FontShop is proud to be a perennial TypeCon sponsor, and this year our founder Erik Spiekermann will speak at the renowned Albright-Knox Gallery on Friday, July 18.

There is still time to register for Erik’s talk and TypeCon as a whole. It’s one of the most affordable design conferences in the world and it’s packed with valuable and interesting stuff for anyone even vaguely interested in type. But before you pull out that credit card: FontShop has a handful of TypeCon tickets available at no cost for our best friends. Who are our best friends, you ask? Whoever emails us (selecting “Marketing queries” from the menu on the contact form) revealing their favorite typeface available on FontShop.com, along with the reasons why they love it so much or an example of the typeface in use. That’s it! First come, first served until the few tickets we have are gone. Update: The tickets are now all spoken for. Thanks for playing!

The Fantastic Four: FF Pitu, FF Cube, FF Tisa, and FF Nuvo

The latest FontFont release introduces four brand new typefaces to our house foundry. Read about them all in this week’s upcoming email newsletter and get a deeper look in the following PDFs created by the type designers themselves.

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Revived, Refined, & Refreshed: MT, ITC, LT, & Adobe

The Monotype, ITC, Adobe, and Linotype libraries were all updated last month with new releases and specially priced value packs. Now available at FontShop are convenient family packs of your old favorites like Neue Helvetica, ITC Charter, Frutiger, Univers, and Trajan, along with new takes on the classics like Bembo Book and Garamond Premier Pro.

For something fresh, look to Monotype’s own Sebastian Lester who has followed his extremely popular Neo Sans and Neo Tech with an extensive slab serif family, Soho.

Read more about the update in our June 2008 newsletter.

OurType: New and Updated Fonts

Discover fresh contemporary type from the Netherlands. A new crop of fonts from OurType is now available at FontShop. New designs like Parry, Neue Sans, Eva, and Amalia fulfill the modern day typographers’ needs and are the perfect alternative to traditional typefaces. Many of OurType’s existing designs got an OpenType Pro update and are now available in full family packages.

Read more about the update in our May 2008 newsletter.

Entertain and Embellish

Click to enlarge.

Entertain and embellish with the typefaces of IHOF, Comicraft, and Norwegian Fonts. FontShop is known for workhorse text and corporate typefaces, but these new collections offer something slightly different from standard fare, proving that we are your source for decorative and novelty typefaces, too.

View some of FontShop's new intensive fonts of strong character now in our March 2008 newsletter.

New FontFonts: Release 44

FF Utility by Lukas Schneider. Click to enlarge.

Our new font blog entries have fallen a little bit behind. We won’t point you to all the new releases announced in recent newsletters, but do be sure to check out the issue showcasing the latest FontFonts. Aside from FF Celeste™ Sans’ OpenType version and numerous character set extensions to foundry favorites, three new designs were announced in February newsletter: FF Polymorph™, an exploration of global forms in the FontFont’s experimental tradition, developed by Stefanie Schwarz for her Thesis; FF Unit™ Rounded, in which our founder reveals the softer side of his “strict sans”; and FF Utility™, a hard-working sans serif for text and information design by newcomer Lukas Schneider.

FF Polymorph by Stefanie Schwarz. Click to enlarge.

Types & Characters: Xavier Dupré and Martin Majoor

Type design super heroes Xavier Dupré and Martin Majoor are featured in FontFont’s new Types & Characters brochures. Their excellent typefaces and their approach to design is presented to provide an insight into the work of the people behind the letters. The Types & Characters series, designed by students of University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany reveals type designers’ sources of inspiration, their sketches and computer work, as well as some very personal statements. The good news? The PDF files are free:

• Xavier Dupré (4.7M PDF)
• Martin Majoor (2.4M PDF)

A Few Good Words for the Good Book

A little over a year has passed since we released the long-awaited Fourth Edition of FontBook and the praise is still pouring in. We chose a few of our favorite quotes for this week’s newsletter.

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Meta Reaction

If you missed the newsletter, this month’s FontFont release was one of FontShop’s most exciting in years: FF Meta Serif. Yves Peters wrote an excellent piece for FontShop Benelux on the new typeface. The article, with quotes from the creators — Spiekermann (the old master), Schwartz (the new master), and Sowersby (the impressive newcomer) — is a rare look into the process of collaborative type design.

The blogosphere is buzzing about FF Meta Serif. You can find a rundown of coverage on Spiekermann’s own journal.

Update: FF Meta Serif is the current Featured Face on the popular forum Typophile, gracing the dynamic homepage background and all topic titles.

See also: The History of FF Meta

Join Us at the Typophile Film Fest in SF

Punchcut presents

The Typophile Film Fest 4, San Francisco

in association with FontShop

The Typophile Film Festival 4 is best described as a three-hour party centered around an unequaled one-hour presentation. The short films — hailing from Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, Canada and the US — create a visual mashup of motion design, typographic animation and short stories. This is the fourth such festival. It includes broadcast motion design, documentaries and typographic eye candy from Trollbäck + Company, Strange Attractors, Heebok Lee, Nick Shinn, Juan Leguizamon and others.

The San Francisco screening will also include exclusive (never before seen) interviews and outtakes from Gary Hustwit’s acclaimed documentary film Helvetica.

After the film presentation, we’ll keep the food, drinks and music going until the place kicks us out.

Continue reading…