A FontList

Curated by
Stephen Coles

Filed in
Staff Picks

For this month’s picks I thought I’d call out some faces that have been around for a while but are rarely seen in public. Their scarcity has nothing to do with their quality. These are all fine, usable fonts, with the added bonus that they are not in danger of oversaturating the design landscape anytime soon.

Best known for his work at Brand New School, Jens Gelhaar is a designer with years of custom type experience under his belt. Capricorn is his first family available at FontShop and I think it is perfectly suited for today’s social webernet — a rigid, technical structure with a friendly, energetic flavor.

First up is ARS Maquette, a grotesque from the underappreciated talent of Angus R. Shamal. It’s a nice antidote to Helvetica and other overused gothics and grots, and it's now available in OpenType for single-file-per-weight cross-platform convenience.

Elmhurst is gracing Typophile this week as the featured face for page heads. Christohper Slye’s serif family is sharp but warm, unique but familiar and usable. Recently expanded for Rolling Stone magazine, Elmhurst also now available in OpenType, combing lining and oldstyle figures together into each style for ease of use.

When Fountain updated their library in April we didn’t pay Malmö Sans much attention, but it’s held a place on the Bestseller list for months. Perhaps it’s its unusual but solid construction, a gothic with a mild contrast on a vertical axis and perpendicular terminals. Or maybe it’s the extra bold, unicase Headline style.

Leslie Cabarga is a master at capturing the lettering styles of early 20th century Americana. His Atomic Age Pack is perhaps the most popular tribute to chrome scripts, but the underused Streamline is also delightful.

Cargo Collective employed Streamline for their Counterform portfolio themes by day and by night.

As one of the progenitors of the spurless sans genre, FF Dax is always at the top of the FontFont charts. But many folks don’t know about its successor, FF Daxline. Hans Reichel’s revision is more monolinear, more contemporary, more appropriate for corporate design, from annual reports to business cards.

Rounding out the rest of the list are my current favorites from FontShop’s exclusive foundries.