Letternews: Fresh from the Foundry

FRESH FROM THE FOUNDRY

Letternews November 5, 2014

Fresh, space saving and unconventional are just some of the words that can be used to describe the latest typefaces to be available from FontShop.com.

NOVEL SANS HAIR

In cases where Novel Sans Extra Light doesn’t quite achieve the delicate line quality desired when working at large display sizes, Christoph Dunst prepares this companion set of finely graduated hairlines in 12 weights. The lightest, for those who must know, has stems just six em units wide (less than 1% of its cap height). View Novel Sans Hair at FontShop

Think big. The finest of these hairlines is reliably reproducible in offset no smaller than 72pt.

ROPA SOFT

The soft corners on Ropa Soft mellow out the squarish, somewhat technical letter forms of the original Ropa. Bringing a warm and friendly feel to the space-saving sans serif even with its dramatic ink traps and humanistic italics. The medium weights are ideal for setting large texts in a limited space, the extreme weights in the light and dark spectrum create eye-catching headlines. Just like its sibling, Ropa Soft supports the Cyrillic and Greek alphabet. View Ropa Soft at FontShop

Between technology and humanity: the rounded Ropa Soft is convincing with its clear and benevolent appearance.

CARGAN

Taut and loose stroke interplay and conspicuous serif omission make Cargan a memorable and welcome new member of the squarish slab subgenre. Its broad range of weights and useful features like case-sensitive forms and multiple figure sets make it capable of producing sophisticated typographic systems. To ensure every reason to give it a try, Hoftype also offers a full version of Cargan Light, available at no charge. View Cargan at FontShop

Made for display work, its Regular and Light weights also hold up well in short sprints of running text.

SIDE NOTES

New TYPO Berlin speaker Johannes Bergerhausen

Under the title “Two ships that pass in the night” Bergerhausen asks the question of why there is hardly any connection between typography and semiotics.

Arabic and Hebrew updates for Aktiv Grotesk

Aktiv Grotesk’s latest update sees it gain Arabic and Hebrew language support for the following font styles: Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and matching Italics.

FontCast #19 — Mark Simonson

Mark Simonson, one of the industry’s most successful independent designers, sits down to discuss what the work of a type designer looked like in the 1970s, and where some of his better ideas have since originated.

Bookmania OpenType features reworked

Many of Bookmania’s swash characters previously available only through the Glyph palette are now accessible via OpenType Stylistic Sets. Prior customers upgrade free.