Rui Abreu is no stranger to awards. The soft-spoken, thoughtful typeface designer has garnered many accolades; most recently no less than three awards for the corporate type family he designed with the creative direction of KW43 Branddesign for luxury brand Montblanc. Montblanc type was recognised with the iF Design Award 2015, with Gold by Germany’s Art Directors Club and the 2015 Corporate Design Preis. Signo, his examination of reverse-contrast typography, received a Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design at TDC 2015.

Another typeface to receive a Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design at TDC 2015 was Mike Abbink’s Brando, which was also a Judge’s Choice. It is published under the Bold Monday banner, the Dutch type foundry of Paul van der Laan and Pieter van Rosmalen. Abbink is the designer of the hugely popular FF Kievit® and FF Milo® which are gradually being expanded into super families.

The summer holidays are the ideal time of the year to study foreign license plates. At home you can see lots of tourists from abroad driving around, and when you’re on vacation yourself, well, basically everything around you is ‘abroad’. The letters and numerals on those plates can look quite different from the ones in your native country. Some look so special that they inspired type designers to adapt them into digital typefaces.

What is it about industrial typefaces that’s so alluring? They’re simple, uncluttered, sometimes clumsy. They get in and do their job and leave. And maybe that’s just it—a lack of artificial ingredients. No draftsman’s trying to wow you with his sophisticated handwork—what he’s trying to do is make some letters that people can read.

It’s relatively well known that some foundries offer single weights of their typefaces as free downloads—not trial versions mind you—these come fully loaded. Lesser known are the faces that offer single weights for, say, $1 or $5, or whatever. Let’s look at some of those.