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September 27, 2020
Curated from some of my favorite type foundries, I am sharing a round up of my favorite fonts this month.
This font designed for Pangram Pangram has so much personality—making it the perfect display font for a book cover or logo. This is the north star of a primary font in a design system that I just sort of crave. I like it's condensed features without it feeling like it needs to be categorized as a condensed font. I love when I come across a serif that doesn't feel too traditional. The slant in the bowl of the "O"'s on this font makes it feel a bit more modern. I just finished reading Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo and if I could replace her decorative font on her book cover with anything, it would be this font.
Migra is a spiky serif typeface inspired by the features in migratory birds. Its weights span from an austere and elegant light cut to a hawkish and powerful black one. Packed with a set of even more gestural Italics and sundry special ligatures, this typeface is guaranteed to add sparkle and grace to any of your designs.
This screams feminism. It feels delicate but yet strong at the same time. This past Spring, I was bouncing ideas around with another entrepreneurial friend on launching a female focused healthcare startup—I wanted to name it Persephone, knowing from Greek Mythology that her special power was "Fertility Manipulation". She was essentially the goddess of fertility. I had the perfect name, the perfect font for the logo, and a pretty sexy mood board but I was missing the most fundamental aspect of a new business venture—a partner. I got to the point of finding OBGYN's who would be advisors but I knew I didn't want to do it alone and that finding the right co-founder would be important to me. As life happens sometimes, it got messy with some setbacks I had from an accident. It put things into perspective for me and although, I did not end up pursuing this startup idea, I absolutely love some of the preliminary design and naming work I did for it.
Dahlia typeface grew from a land filled with elegance, 1910’s Italian lake posters and Art Nouveau feeling. Like so many flowers, it translates a sense of perfect balance between eccentricity and delicacy. It was designed in 2021 by Jérémy Schneider for VJ Type. Dahlia typeface is a display serif typeface, useful for headlines or short to medium-length texts. It comes with 3 weights, regular, medium and bold, and 2 widths, normal and condensed. Dahlia is nonconformist, romantic, delicate and has some extravagant alternates. Its atypical curves and refined details create a lot of rhythm, and timeless elegance. The Bold version uses high contrast to be as noticeable as possible. With a touch of Art Nouveau inspiration, its counter forms are highly expressive.
Just like in the description below from the type foundry, I whole-heartedly agree that this this font nods to Classic Victorian styles. It takes on a past era but it stands on its own, departing from the traditional expectations of calligraphy and fonts created in this time period. It feels more modern but ties perfectly into history making it the perfect logo font and primary font for a design system I created for Founders Law. This startup wanted to strike the balance being taken seriously but also serving a modern audience of startups. I've included a thumbnail image below showing this font in use. You can click into the case study here if you want to see this font in use across all applications.
At various moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, typographers have cast an eye back to Victorian styles – not so much in a rejection of Modernism as a whole, but perhaps in response to the sterile and banal way it is often applied. Many serif faces of the late 1800s exhibit characteristics that run counter to the regularity and soberness of modern type, yet depart unabashedly from traditional calligraphic ideals. Ronaldson (MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan, 1884), Caxton Old Style (Marder, Luse & Co, 1889), and West Old Style (Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, 1892) exemplify a string of American releases from that period, each with an “old style” structure but exaggerated elements, such as long, sharp terminal serifs, thin hairlines, and truncated descenders.
Saol is an interpretation of this genre, drawn with present-day needs in mind. While the proportions and finish are reconsidered for contemporary use, the eccentric spirit of its sources remains.
Saol also offers modern conveniences that the 19th-century families did not: a wide range of weights, broad language support, and a set of opulent swash italic caps. Yet, borrowing wisdom from the size-specific reality of metal type, Saol comes in three optical sizes: While Saol Display features delicate hairlines for maximum contrast, Saol Standard is intended for medium size use. Saol Text is optimized for smaller sizes and has modest contrast. With this comprehensive palette, the Saol family is designed for creating detailed typographic hierarchies, from striking headlines to pleasantly readable body copy. It lends itself to be used in magazines and other publications seeking a lavish flair, or a voice that is confidently enigmatic. Lastly, a Monospaced style adds one more option for curious typography, inviting readers to ponder the origin of this time-traveling type.
It's that sans serif style everyone loves but it has these little nuances that make it unique. The description "rounded square" really stuck out to me when finding a font for my client, Oval Fire Products—a modern Fire Extinguisher company. OFP's one of a kind fire extinguishers also have a "round square edge" to make their product accessible for handicapped people with easier installation processes and specs built to keep buildings ADA compliant. The font itself felt technical working well for a manufacturing company putting the engineering into a world-changing product. Below you can see the font in use as Oval Fire Products new logo identity. A full case study will be coming soon!
Roobert is a mono-linear geometrical sans-serif font family. Initially designed in collaboration with Anymade Studio as a bespoke typeface for Moogfest 2017 (see Roobert MF project). The basic and simple idea comes from the Moog logotype. Where you can find characteristic “g” with the rounded corner in the bottom part. These specific moments you can find in Roobert typeface e.g. in “a, g, r, alternative t, G, R and so on”. Feeling from the typeface could be “rounded square” like in Eurostyle, but it’s definitely not like that. Italics are kind of semi slanted in some parts of selected letters, see “t, g, r”.
It's approachable. It's cute. It's a font family with a lot to offer. I feel this universal type of font can be used across a number of friendly clients making it very versatile. If one of your brand words is "friendly", use this font.
The conceit behind Aperçu was to create a synopsis or amalgamation of classic realist typefaces: Johnston, Gill Sans, Neuzeit & Franklin Gothic. Becoming, a sum of parts, building upon its initial reference points to create an extensive and usable family.
