In this debut issue of our new monthly column, design legend Steven Heller takes a look at René Bieder’s Magnat font family. Heller is not only an award-winning designer, design educator, and author and editor of hundreds of books, but is also one of the world’s foremost commentators and historians of graphic design.

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font of the month new fonts

Issue #3 of Fonts in Focus takes a look at Joona Louhi’s weird and wonderful, high contrast display typeface, Louche. Unusual weight distribution and some unorthodox and quirky details make this new release well worth a second look.

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fonts in focus new fonts

For the first in this new series of Fonts in Focus, we visited the New York offices of Hoefler & Co. For this second installment, we remain in New York, just fifteen minutes’ walk from Broadway to Lafayette street and the stateside offices of Commercial Type, established in 2007 and headed by Christian Schwartz in […]

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fonts in focus new fonts

Type designers take care of the details so that we aren’t unnecessarily distracted by them. And good type designers relish those details. To listen to them explain their craft and describe their font-making processes is like watching the child of zero-sugar parents eat its first candy bar.

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fonts in focus new fonts

In late August 2015, Korean type designer Minjoo Ham arrived in Berlin to figure out if the city could offer her an interesting new phase in her life. Minjoo was a fresh graduate from the TypeMedia program at The Hague’s KABK (Royal Art Academy). Berlin, possibly the world’s capital of independent type design, was an […]

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make a font new fonts

In February of 2016 designer and photographer Alistair Hall tweeted an image of a vintage luggage tag from the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company. I was struck by the type used for the word CABIN. It was heavy and compressed with straight sides and asymmetric stroke contrast reminiscent of American wood type. I saw […]

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make a font new fonts

Notes on Designing and Producing the Typeface Wind Hansje van Halem is a graphic designer who works with type. She blurs the boundaries between type and image, between foreground and background, often creating seductive patterns that only reveal their texts only when viewed from the distance, making the reader work hard to decode their message. […]

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make a font new fonts type design

Just to be clear from the start: I don’t speak Hebrew. When I first started working with Hebrew type, I couldn’t tell one letter from another, or even whether the page was right-side-up or upside-down. In short, I was completely unqualified to work with the Hebrew alphabet.

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make a font new fonts

Informal is not an adjective that readily comes to mind in describing anything in the type catalogue of New York foundry, Hoefler & Co. From the highly formal sparkle of Renaissance inspired text romans like Requiem through its humanist sans, Ideal Sans, to the precision and aplomb of the shaded and layered Obsidian, all walk […]

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new fonts

David Ricardo (1772–1823) was a versatile man. A stock trader, politician and, most importantly, an economist. He is considered the first of the classical economists, thus symbolizing the transition from mercantilism to capitalism. While his theories are mostly derived from mathematical abstractions, he communicated his ideas in understandable, down-to-earth language. Besides a versatile man, Ricardo […]

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make a font new fonts