Fonts in Focus, July 2007

Aqua Life™ is a pictogram font from the Monotype Design Studio. It contains 26 vibrantly drawn images of fish and other wildlife you might find at the seashore or in your aquarium. Some of the fish look out at you rather inquisitively! Don’t miss the shark, the giant squid, the octopus, the happy slug, the diving seal, or even the old-fashioned deep-sea diver and coy mermaid! Each of these symbols is best used in a very large point size. Perhaps one of them will illustrate you next newsletter or classroom poster?

Argentinean designer Eduardo Manso created the Bohemia™ type family in 2003. Bohemia’s cunning and elegant essence shows off refined letters that evoke the Transitional style typefaces like Baskerville™, though most Baskerville-like designs tend not to be as curvaceous as Manso’s! True to form, Bohemia shines in smaller text sizes, like 9 point and above, while still maintaining a unique character and spirit. Bohemia is a great alternative to better-known text faces.

ITC Coconino™ is the work of Serbian designer Slobodan Miladinov. His original inspiration for this monostroked typeface “was the idea of translating certain auditory impressions into type, in this case, the surprising and confusing music of the Serbian hip hop musician Voodoo Popeye.” Miladinov is an art director in Belgrade and created Coconino using a “freemouse” technique with Adobe Illustrator and sees his work as “computer calligraphy which allows for a specific directness and immediacy in notation.” The strokes of this font are simple and abrupt with a studied irregularity. The forms can look either cheerful and lighthearted or chaotic and subtly disturbing. Coconino was named for the home of hte Krazy Kat comics and even includes a few additional characters from the strip.

Eagle Bold was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1933. It is a heavy geometric Sans Serif font with unusual spurs on Capital G and Q. An all-Capitals design, the Eagle Bold font is perfect for magazine and book covers, posters and packaging.

Flood™ was designed by Joachim Müller-Lancé and is not just another handwritten face. At smaller point sizes it exhibits the natural, dynamic, and spontaneous flow of felt tip marker writing. At larger sizes Flood is immediate, urgent, and provocative in its stylized detailing, without being overly dramatic. Flood’s energetic rhythm is well suited for informal menus, logos, and brief ad copy, as well as personal correspondence.

ITC Bailey™ Sans is the first typeface family created by Kevin Bailey;, a graphic designer in Dallas, Texas. He was once looking for an understated block serif for a design project and could find nothing suitable. Bailey began working on his own serif face but then found that the basics of his new design worked well as a sans serif and continued on that track. ITC Bailey Sans font is available in four weights: book, book italic, bold and bold italic and even has a companion serif display font, ITC Bailey Quad Bold.

ITC Korigan™ is a work of French designer Thierry Puyfoulhoux, an uncial typeface which he wanted to offer as an alternative to Victor Hammer’s American Uncial™, which remains for him “the uncial character of reference.” The roundness of an uncial gives it the look of pearls on a string, as Hammer said, and ITC Korigan is true to its heritage in this respect. Despite the roundness, however, the forms remain familiar and legible to the modern eye.

Monotype Lydian™ is an unusual sans serif face with strongly calligraphic letter shapes, originally cut by American Type Founders. The eye-catching nature of the Lydian font family has made it popular for use in magazines and advertising as well as in newspapers for headlines and introductions. The cursive has an even more marked pen-drawn structure.

Flyers, Intros from James Bond films and PlayStation games as well as the typeface Senator from Zuzane Licko inspired the Dutch designer Paul van der Laan to create his font Linotype Rezident™. To its design, van der Laan says, “I was designing a business card for a friend and I had a certain mood in mind for the typography. I tried to capture this mood in a couple of sketches, drew a few characters directly onscreen and just expanded them into a typeface.” And so began Linotype Rezident, with its cool, technical and constructivist appearance which brings to mind computers and virtual reality. And the name? “The name of the font comes from the game Resident Evil. One of the main characters in the game is called Leon and the typeface was initially drawn for a friend of mine called Leon. It also refers to the city of The Hague – where I live and got my education - since it’s often called ‘de residentie’”, where the queen and parliament of The Netherlands are seated.

Octavian™ font was designed by Will Carter and David Kindersley for the Monotype Corporation in 1961. Mr. Carter writes: “While the ultimate authority is the ancient inscriptional pattern, the physical characteristics of the present rendering are manifest in the economic proportions of the shapes and the modified relations of the strokes. Thus, the letters are narrower than the classical forms and their weight heavier.” Octavian is a fine book font and works well for other text settings that are less demanding, such as magazines and brochures.

Poplar™ is an Adobe Originals typeface designed by Barbara Lind in 1990 for the Adobe Wood Type series. Poplar, a Gothic condensed, was designed from photographs taken by Rob Roy Kelly of the one surviving copy of an 1830 William Leavenworth type specimen book. Leavenworth possessed unusual artistic abilities, and his treatment of the letterform counters as narrow slits made it the only wood type of its kind displayed during the nineteenth century. Poplar is an excellent display face, its simplicity making it useful for a broad range of work.

“Zero Gravity” is the motto of modern digital economy and culture: clear statements and no extra baggage result in optimal mobility and adaptation to quick changes. These principles apply to the Veto typeface, from Swiss designer Marco Ganz. Dynamic, functional, and unencumbered by the past, Veto has no frills, just everything that makes a font suitable for any use. Both light and normal weights are appropriate for body text, the italics are legible and the true bold weights can serve as striking display typefaces.