The Once a Decade Type Competition

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The Once a Decade Type Competition

By Chris Dickman on November 4, 2011 5:19 AM
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A few years ago there seemed to be a bit of lull in the introduction of new typefaces. Perhaps not surprising, given the hundreds of thousands already available, ranging rom the classics, through contemporary releases and on into experimental offerings from individual designers and small font shops. But there's no doubt about it—we're now in the golden age of typography, with an avalanche of new releases upon us. And this will only increase, as the use of webfonts picks up speed.

I subscribe to quite a few newsletters from font designers and vendors, and it's always a treat to poke through the latest releases and picturing what kind of project might be appropriate for some of the more compelling offerings. But this approach only scratches the surface. What's the best way to access the cream of the typographic crop? While design competitions are a great way to get a heads up on top current work, type competitions are much rarer. One of these, Letter.2, recently picked 53 entries from a field of 561 international submissions, based on their design excellence.

The completion was organized by Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), the leading typographic authority, so the choices can be trusted. Given the value of such a competition and the number of submissions, you would think this would be held yearly, but the last one took place... in 2001! So the winners in some cases go back a few years. And while showing examples is handled competently enough, there is no explanation of how the fonts exemplified "design excellence," or even a link to the site of the designers.

Take Chartwell, by Travis Kochel, shown above. You might think this is simply another condensed font, suitable for use in information graphics. Pleasant enough, but nothing to get excited about. If so, you'd be half right. In fact, Chartwell is available in three flavors for creating chart, line and pie graphics. Through ingenious use of OpenType ligatures, you type in a series of numbers and the font generates the graphic. Handy for quickly creating simple graphics directly within InDesign or XPress, for example. It even comes with the required JavaScript for using it as a webfont. Amazing. The characters in the illustration are simply provided in the form of a supporting alphabet. But there was no mention of any of this on the Letter.2 site.

Below are just a few of my favorites, with my links to more information, but it's well worth going through the winners to spot candidates for future design projects.

Aria - Rui Abreu, 2011