Deirdre Saoirse Moen

I know you know I love type. And fonts.

Here are my favorite indie type foundries in alphabetical order. I seem to have a thing for Latin American foundries.

Albatross

Jay Hilgert’s an Oklahoma designer with some cool fonts like Altus and Boom! Featured up top is Oil Change.

Artimasa

Artimasa’s one of several Indonesian type foundries. Up above is Hipsteria, but I also love Zakia, Casually, and Prada.

Borges Lettering

If you’re going to start doing historical romance covers and want a great cover font, investing $99 (currently on sale for $89) in Borges Lettering’s Desire will go a long way. Sadly, I’ve not personally been able to justify it yet, but I do paw at the monitor every now and again while the page is open.

Cruzine

Peter, a designer from Bratislava, Slovakia does some great design, but he’s also done some great fonts. Up top is Brooklyn coffee. My personal favorite is Rocknroll, and when I look at Memento, I always think it’s an Indonesian design.

Dai Foldes

Dai’s font, Eubie Script, is fun and bouncy, and you really need to see the demo site for it. It has an amazing try me box (better than any other I’ve seen). Nicely done, and I’ve just picked it up. (Naturally, after I finished the header graphic.)

Dexsar Harry Fonts aka Majestype

One of the interesting Indonesian font designers, of whom there are several. Dexsar Harry has several lovely designs. Featured up top is Roverd. I haven’t yet picked up Bandung, but I’m looking forward to getting it soon.

Fenotype

Emil Bertell from Finland produces some lovely swashy faces like Alek (shown in the sample above).

Kimmy Design

Kimmy Design is based out of Santa Monica, California, about ten miles from where I’m typing this. (Away for the holiday weekend.) I have most of her fonts and some of her non-font graphics. I reuse this watercolor template frequently. Up top is Lunchbox Slab

Latinotype

Latinotype’s based in Chile and has lots of great fonts. Shown in the header image is Macarons. Up at the top of the page, my name’s in Courtney, and blog post headlines are in Four Seasons Pro. (So yeah, this entire site uses South American fonts.) I also use Showcase on desamo.graphics

Laura Worthington

I’m so pleased I got to meet Laura at Typecon. Awesome experience. I was tongue-tied and everything. I couldn’t remember the name of a single font when I was trying to tell her how many of hers I had.

One of the cool things about her fonts is that she has font families that are coordinating but dissimilar fonts, all designed to go together. Adorn, in particular, is a brilliant collection. Shown up top is Voltage, one of her newest.

Nicky Laatz

Nicky’s a designer from Cape Town, South Africa, who does awesome hand-drawn things including hand-drawn type. Here’s her shop. Shown in the pic above is Vanilla Frosting.

PintassilgoPrints

PintassilgoPrints is an amazing foundry from Brazil. If I had to describe their type collection, it’s of the type of fonts you’d expect to see on small label mid-century jazz covers. Some of their stuff draws from earlier (30s) and some later, but always with a fresh new twist.

The font I used above is called Brush Up, though I keep wanting to call it Olio because of one of the promo photos.

As a bonus, the bird is from a different font, Card-o-Mat Buddy Birds.

RodrigoTypo

Rodrigo Typo is from Chile and specializes in unusual and fun typefaes, especially display faces suitable for children’s work. Another aspect that may come in useful is that they always include Greek and Cyrillic letters, which is quite unusual for most indie foundries. Shown up top is Pequena.

Thinkdust

Thinkdust is based out of the UK and has made some pretty popular modern fonts. Shown is Nanami HM.

Tipotype

Tipotype’s the first type foundry in Montevideo, Uruguay. It produces, among other things, Quiroga, the typeface I use for the body face on this site. (Meaning: this paragraph is set in Quiroga as you read this if you didn’t override styles.)

Yellow Design Studio

Ryan Martinson’s Yellow Design Studio is the only foundry where I own all the fonts. I love them all. Shown is Veneer, one of my favorites.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

I have to admit I’m not usually a huge fan of branding campaigns, but Typecon 2014′s branding, designed by Build really knocked it out of the park.

The conference theme was “Redacted,” and the name was “Capitolized,” both homages to the conference’s Washington D.C. location. The theme also included double-speak and information combined with (justifiable) paranoia.

Welcome to the City of Magnificent Intentions

Typecon banner, photo by Akira Himei

Typecon Bureau of Dining, Imbibing, Navigating, and Inconspicuous Tourist Operations

Typecon Dining and Imbibing Guide, pic by Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Behold the Video Monitors

Here’s a link to the video one saw going down the escalators to the conference. (Note: Seizure disorder warning.)

All Neatly Leading into the Keynote

Tobias Frere-Jones speaks on the topic of In Letters We Trust. It was a fascinating talk I’ll write about in an upcoming post.

In Letters We Trust, photo by Helen Lysen

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

One of the things about Doing New Things This Year is the fact that I get to, you know, do new things this year.

It’s interesting to review various fields to see when “indie” started becoming mainstream and more than a curiosity. For type, it hit earlier than others. I remember that even in 1994 there were indie type designers making money, though it really took e-commerce and font sites like myfonts.com before anyone could make a career at it.

A convention I didn’t know about until a few days ago is Typecon. In the long tradition of using horrible pun names for convention titles, this year’s conference is in Washington D.C. and is therefore called Capitolized.

Typography’s a layer between script systems and the reader, one that communicates a lot of meta information about the message.

(Fonts, in order: Downcome by Misprinted Type (free), Eveleth, by Yellow Design Studio, Holden, by AlterDeco typefoundry, and Showcase Script by Latinotype.

Most people wouldn’t think the last really wasn’t communicating danger in any meaningful sense.

Anyhow, back to the conference.

The keynote speaker is Tobias Frere-Jones, one of the designers of some of the most amazing modern type. And also the plaintiff in the largest career divorce in recent typography history. The company that used to bear his initials, HF&J, is now Hoefler & Co.

Then there’s the program, which includes awesome things like type foundry ephemera, the typography at Medium, Victorian-Era calling cards, designing for audiences with low literacy skills, typography in medically-critical contexts, typography of food packaging in America, the evolution of Korean typesetting, typography of the American record industry from 1898 to 1967, problems of Hebrew typography, including Karmeli script, the special issues of typography for software development, the problems of creating Arabic typeface variants of fonts like Zapfino. I love the description of this talk:

As the Arabic companion to Zapfino, the first question that Zapfino Arabic had to address was: does it slant forward or backward? The next question that quickly followed: which Arabic calligraphic style would be a suitable companion to the distinctive flair of Zapfino?

I can’t even begin to imagine the issues in bidi (bidirectional, meaning mixed left-to-right and right-to-left lines) of a typeface as calligraphic as Zapfino.

Are we done yet? We are not.

We haven’t covered the workshops yet.

There’s a full-day workshop on calligraphy and fonts; one on developing Devanagari typefaces; the workshop where you bring a glyph design, use a CNC router to make a wooden version of your design. A second workshop is about letterpress printing, where one can bring one’s wooden glyph created the day before. The Letterpress Poster Sprint & Print sounds really awesome, but I went for the other option: flourishing rules. There’s a full day workshop in Hebrew type design, as well as a half-day one in watercolors. (And there are more.)

The one I’m really waiting for is called Pen Dance. Here’s the description:

Make a pen using a soda can and explore the marks it makes! This workshop will get your hands dirty as you experience the visceral pleasures of pushing ink through a pen. We will make our own writing tools, then learn how they work, starting from the simplest marks and working up to letters and words. Freeform letter styles with a lot of expression are the result … your letters will be unique and extraordinary.

Sounds like fun.

Random photo that I always think of when I think of typography: Maldivian Air Taxi’s safety card, complete with Dhivehi script.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.