Recently in Type Category
I'm sure you meticulously scroll through the entire End User Licence Agreement (EULA) before installing new software. Ditto when downloading stock images purchased online. No? Frankly, I'm shocked. Well, in that case there's little chance that you're familiar with the license terms of the last font you purchased. You didn't know fonts also had EULAs? Fonts are just software, after all, and commercial software simply grants the purchaser a limited ability to use it. Same with fonts. So for designers, knowing what they legally can and can't do with their fonts is not insignificant.
That's right, ATT is back with its take on what's new in the world of fonts, font applications, notable font usage and general fontiness. This time out I'll focus on recent font releases from Fountain, Gestalten, Kapitza, Linotype and Mårten Nettelblad.
It was about half way through the tour of the Château of Germolles that our aimiable and erudite guide—who it turned out was one of the current owners—ushered our little group into a darkened room. The shutters on the large windows were almost closed, allowing just a few rays to penetrate what seemed to be a high-ceilinged chamber. There was just the hint of a smile on our guide's lips as he admonished us to not bump into the walls.
s the browser, as we know it, on the road to extinction? The rise of sophisticated web applications has been making it look increasingly tired of late, in no small part due to the pathetic manner it displays text. Sure, CSS is great, but we're still forced to render text with a tiny set of arbitrary fonts that's looking more restrictive every day. With no one except designers to champion tapping the thousands of available fonts, and type creators themselves spooked about the possible unauthorized use of their creations, what's been missing is a champion of the typographic cause to move things forward.
f the tools of document design, such as InDesign and QuarkXPress, have for years provided pretty much the same functionality, whether employed on a Mac or a PC, the same can not be said of font management. To put it bluntly, font management on Windows systems has been primitive. Happily, recent initiatives by the two main developers in the field have gone a long way to achieving font management parity between platforms.
ow many fonts do you think are now available in digital form? 25,000? 50,000? From what I can determine, designers are now in the luxurious position of being able to pick and choose from more than 100,000 fonts online. If that wasn't overwhelming enough, we seem to be in the thick of a typographic renaissance, with new fonts flooding onto the market, covering everything from carefully-crafted revivals and reinterpretations of classic faces to edgy new designs that are totally of this moment. That's the good news, but as is often the case it's also the bad news.
