Two special font collections...

In celebration of the new foundry, Hackberry is offering two new OpenType collections at huge discounts.

The first has the foundry's six most used font families for book design:

The professional book designers' collection

Aerle (5 fonts) Amitale (8 fonts) Artimas (8 fonts) Amico (8 fonts) Arturo (8 fonts) and NuevoLitho (3 fonts) for the spectacular price of $149.00. That's 38 fonts for under $4 each!

The second is for new designers building their collection. It is an expansion of my old student offering. Now it offers 32 fonts for only $49 — that's barely $1.50 per font!

Student Font Collection

I hope they'll be helpful to you. You'll need to be able to handle a 2-3 MB attachment.

More changes: New foundry name! Hackberry Fonts

There will be many changes. I've only got three pages changed so far.

Why?

Because it is no longer just me. I have an apprentice, and another person planning on apprenticing in the near future. We will be offering fonts from various font designers.

Now that I'm a full-time font designer, I have no idea which direction things will be moving.

Most typographers don't get it!

I'm in a small group in Linked-In for typography. It's rapidly proving to be a typical typography site in the world today. That's a disappointment. This is one of the graphics we were pointed to today. There were many more like it.

If you've studied under me, you know my basic definition and attitude about typographic design.

"If you notice the type you've failed as a typographer. The goal of type is clear, easy to grasp communication. The fonts chosen set the mood and can provide much of the graphic beauty, but if you look at the design and think, "That's a really neat design," you've wasted your client's time and money (UNLESS, of course, you are your own client).

The graphic at the top is proof of my theory. An amazing amount of effort was put into squeezing the type into shapes. This graphic had to take hours. I'm impressed with the amount of work that was done.

I have no idea what is being promoted here. Bad type? I think so.

A interesting font designer interview...

There was a nice interview of Alice Savoie, a font designer with Monotype in England (I think) in the "I love Typography" blog this morning. I found it interesting simply  to get an idea how academically trained font designers think. As most of you know, I am very leery of academic training even though I taught for many years.

It is very difficult to teach something like this without eliminating all the creativity and looseness that I find necessary to good design. Read the interview, I think you'll enjoy it also. There are some nice captures of her drawings also. Though, I am finding that many of us (font designers) rarely draw any more — simply working directly in FontLab seems to be more common (though logo designers like Cabarga seem to start in Illustrator).

Of course, I have very different taste in font design so I don't like her designs much. But that is to be expected. As I finished up the article I was struck by how gorgeous her personal design, Capucine, is. I love it!

A fun one this time: max x-height sans, Abrect

With this release I've tried to push the envelope a little by making the x-height as large as I could while maintaining usability. It's built off NuevoLitho but radically revised with experimental ligatures and so on. It has my 2009 display feature set for OpenType. For the first time in years, I did not add small caps. They seems silly for a font like this.

I had to pull it back a little. I started out with a 90% x-height, but this release is cut back to 78% of font size or 70% of the point size. I did have to add some built-in leading or it just became ridiculous. But it's a fun font that seems to be useful (to me anyway).

It's on sale at my site at 64% off for a month or two: only $9. If you need a downloadable version, that should be available from MyFonts or fonts.com by some time next week for Myfonts and next month for Monotype (fonts.com).

Please let me know what you think.

Matthew Carter talks on Type revivals and font design

There's a very nice article  in "I love Typography" about a presentation Matthew Carter did in England a while back. It's rare to get a glimpse into the mind of a great type designer like this. I think you'll really enjoy the read. There are also some good graphics.

Interestingly, he says that he works much like I do (but much more accomplished than my meager efforts) -- in other words, he's not a great drawer so as soon as possible he draws directly on the screen. He says that the production drawings we see are almost entirely done after the fact, after the fonts are released. I do that also and always felt guilty about it. Now I have a reference that says it is OK.

A man in love with a font

There is an excellent article on Creative pro today about a font found in SF.

Called a Love Letter to Letters, it a simple tale about a type nerd discovering a font he loves. But it's got some very nice stuff about how people react to fonts.

Also : from my point of view, it discusses some of the relevant stuff going on in sans serf design today. Whitney is a nice looking font. It is still a bit overly perfected for my taste, but the comments about adding personality to a sans need to be stressed.

I am finding that many, if not most, of the new designs I see for new fonts are so perfect that they feel mechanical. Of course, to a certain extent that is the nature of the beast. We can't step too far outside the the rather rigid norms before we start having problems with usability, readability, and so on. But somehow we need more than personality, we need access to a person. No, I'm not sure what that means, but I do know that this needs to be pursued.