Chris Dickman (bio)

It has to be said that Microsoft made a valiant stab at this, providing an approach way back in the era of Internet Explorer 4 (!) that employed the CSS @font-face tag and the use of embedded .eot files. However, the indifference of the Mac-based design community, the continuing lack of support in Safari for .eot files and the outright hostility on the part of type designers pretty much put a stake through the heart of this approach. But now the @font-face tag is back, this time with—surprise—Apple as its champion.

Basically, support for downloadable fonts via @font-face will be possible in the near future in Safari, with this Apple announcement linking to a good description of the process on A List Apart. Will Microsoft rush to embrace Apple's approach, when its own was so cruelly scorned? Don't hold your breath. So if you're a type-loving site designer, get ready to make both approaches available to your visitors. Designing for the web, ya gotta love it! But who knows, if this catches on, it might just be enough to give browsers a new lease on life. Which would be good. I think.

Die Gestalten Verlag
DGV continues to publish a small but carefully chosen selection of quirky typefaces. It recently began the practice of making some of them available in the form of a free download containing a restricted character set, an interesting idea which more vendors should consider adopting. The latest free release is Boris Dworschak's Basic Light Ltd, shown below, a simplified font that is clearly grid based, with strong letters echoing those of architectural stencils of an earlier era. The Basic family includes six weights and is available in PostScript format for Mac and Windows.

Also released is Boris' IkiruSerif, derived from the Japanese ikiru, literally "to live, to exist." Indeed, the face puts some life back into the slab serif category and is available in 10 weights, in PostScript format for Mac and Windows. Designed for general use, the thin weight is intended to be employed at large sizes, for such applications as posters.

FontShop
You have to hand it to FontShop, they keep adding fresh new typographic talent at an amazing rate. This month the Sudtipos Argentinian type foundry collective is featured, with Diego Giaccone's Plumero, shown below, being a standout. Seems there is an insatiable appetite for script fonts and Plumero certainly carves out a fresh approach. However, it's a shame this exuberant creation is only available in Mac PostScript and PC TrueType formats, since OpenType would have made it possible to provide alternate character sets and additional glyphs.

FontShop's current free font is also the work of Sudipos, this time designed by Alejandro Paul. Available for purchase in four styles, both sans and serif, Mobley was apparently inspired by the typographic treatment of the cover of a 1960's jazz album (I'm guessing the name is a reference to underrated horn player (Hank Mobley). It's not for everyday use, but Mobley Serif is currently yours for the downloading.

Archive Type
I have to confess a fondness for eccentric, retro typefaces, and I've mentioned Archive Type as a source for such gems before. Its most recent release is Archive Thermo, available in OpenType format, which was originally published in a 1930's American Typefounders catalog. Archive Type describes this face as being Art Deco in nature, although for me it's more in line with the type treatments of the earlier American Arts & Crafts movement, as exemplified in publications by the Roycrofters, and to some extent the lettering of Frank Lloyd Wright. Don't let the jaggy example below put you off, most of them seem to be that way on the Archive Type site.

P22
Strange the consistent appeal of faces designed originally for signage. P22's most recent release is Underground Pro, a font set based on Edward Johnston's type design for the London Underground. This is quite a comprehensive system, including as it does six weights and support for a wide variety of languages via extended Latin, Greek (monotonic and polytonic) and extended Cyrillic. This adds up to over 5,000 glyphs for each of the weights in the Pro version, with Small and Petite Caps for all weights, titling options that are said to mimic London Transport signage and the addition of lower case characters to the bold weight. In a thoughtful touch, a basic OpenType version is included for use in applications that don't support Pro features.

While the abilities of OpenType were tapped to provide flexibility, the characteristics of the original 1916 design were kept intact, with designer Paul Hunt stating that, "Ultimately, I wanted to make a typeface system which was thoroughly customizable so that the user could change its appearance to suit their particular needs." Hard to argue with that. Underground Pro is provided as a single set, with individual weights also available separately.

While not new, I'll conclude with a mention of the third volume of P22's Indie Fonts, available in hardcover directly from P22 and in softcover from Rockport Publishers. With the large number of fonts currently being released it's almost impossible to keep on top of everything, so this series of books makes a noble effort to provide periodic snapshots of fresh offerings from independent font creators, with 20 foundries and 1,900 fonts covered in volume 3. I find all those fonts, packed into a small, tidily-designed space, a great resource to flip through just to trigger new lines of thought. There's also a CD included that provides 53 licensed fonts but these are of the extreme display variety, more suited to casual use than professional design applications.

Chris Dickman
Graphics.com