Ivo’s Best Fonts of 2015

As a type designer who focuses much of his time on editorial concerns, Łukasz Dziedzic has come to appreciate the value of building and using type systems in his work. So when a friend approached with a small lettering job, a logo for his grocery store, Dziedzic began by imagining how the letters would shift from light to dark on a weight axis, and rather than provide a static sample, he drew a... Read More

Neue Haas Unica™ is Monotype’s revival of a typeface that has attained almost mythical status in the type community. Unica® was an attempt to create the ultimate sans-serif – a hybrid of Helvetica, Univers and Akzidenz Grotesk. Designed by André Gürtler Read More

Low stroke contrast, generous spacing, and fine-grained weights from Light to Extra Bold make FF Hertz a workhorse text typeface which holds up well under today’s widely varying output conditions from print to screen. The quite dark Book style works well on e-ink displays which usually tend to thin out letters, as well as in print when you want to evoke the solid letter image of the hot-metal... Read More

Forget that hipster coolness for a minute and design something cute and charming with LiebeLotte! Go ahead and make beautiful things with her: birthday cards, wedding invitations, love letters, new signage for your deli—so many things look sweeter when you use this well-crafted handwriting font. We’ve put all of our heart and soul into this typeface—it took us a whole year to draw, refine, and... Read More

Dieter Hofrichter’s blunted, spurless Carnas typeface maximizes its counter-forms by pushing its strokes outward, each character forming a straight-sided or superelliptical structure. The face treats the passing eye to a subtle diagonal jostling as tensioned upper-right and lower-left curves create radial symmetry.

FF Real was originally conceived by Erik Spiekermann as one text weight and one headline weight to be used as the only fonts in his biography ‘Hello I am Erik’, edited by Johannes Erler, and published in 2014. While Spiekermann drew the alphabets, he passed on the font data to Ralph du Carrois who cleaned it up and completed it. In the meantime FF Real has been extended to a family of two... Read More

FF Aad is a modern sans serif typeface with humanist touches. The terminals end horizontally, making the negative shape in between letters more open and simplified, resulting in clean and easy to read compositions. The family consists of five weights, each with genuine italics. Note the distinctive italic lowercase Y. Its neutral but elegant appearance makes it an ideal choice for corporate use.

Hannes von Döhren’s Americane is not based on any single existing wood type style, but rather it’s a combination of the most salient styles of Von Döhren’s survey of the American wood type landscape, applied to a broad-use display family. Starting at the lightest weights, the designer’s sensitivity to form delivers a lightline more representative of metal gothics of the period, exhibiting... Read More

Sabre takes cues from the work of stone masons whose inscribed letter shapes were largely dictated by their medium and process. Bear in mind that while these forms are highly graphic at large sizes, they’re also strong forms that reduce nicely at and below 6–7 points.