July 2021, Type Digest

One hundred best posters, half a hundred best books and covers, impressive new font releases, and the most helpful public talks

August 5, 2021

Typefaces of July as chosen by TypeCache

Every day, Shohei Itoh, Taro Yumiba, Akira Yoshino inform the subscribers of TypeCache.com about new type releases. Here are the key novelties of the past month, according to those guys.

fifty

50 Books | 50 Covers: the best books of 2020

aiga.org/professional-development/competitions-campaigns/50-books-50-covers/

The American Institute of Graphic Arts, AIGA, announced the winners of their 50 Books | 50 Covers competition which considered books issued in 2020. Two of the winners are the book Open Systems designed by Konstantin Eremenko (two years ago we published an interview with him), and the four-volume edition about the photographer Mikhail Dashevsky, designed by Anna Gvirtz who deployed our Styrene B typeface.

ktf

Kyiv Type Foundry

kyivtypefoundry.com

Yevgeniy Anfalov (author of Heymland typeface) and Oleś Gergun launched Kyiv Type Foundry, aka Київська словолитня. Currently their collection offers three typefaces based on the Post-Soviet vernacular lettering, Rublenaya (sans-serif) typeface, and a 1982’s Reklamizdat poster. Nostalgic without being toxic, brutalist, warm — and nothing wrong with setting їі combination.

gauge-ru

Gauge in detail

type.today/ru/journal/gauge_id/

We have thought that it is indeed a good idea to tell about the good stuff for the second, tenth, or even hundredth time — which is why now we are writing and posting big and beautiful pieces about our typefaces. Gauge was our first call — please, enjoy and share this link with book, digital or just any kinds of designers that you know.

doreuli

Doreuli, Gordon on Type@Cooper

coopertype.org/event/it_is_not_only_about_type/
coopertype.org/event/text_that_tastes_like_honey/

Type@Cooper continues its Herb Lubalin Lecture Series. The two most recent talks were presented by Cyrillic type designers: Maria Doreuli tells how she benefits from her interests in near-type and non-type areas, and Yuri Gordon speaks of type as a taste, type and poetry, and type when it comes to glossy magazines.

gau

Gaudeamus, a Cyrillic texture type with details and a personality

behance.net/gallery/122708305/Gaudeamus-blackletter/

Yan Snim has released his Gaudeamus for private sale — a texture typeface with Cyrillic, combining confident rhythm with not boring constructions (all because of the author’s calligraphic background!).

modcyr

Modern Cyrillic 2021

moderncyrillic.org

Modern Cyrillic 2021 has announced this year winners — among them, you’ll see our Spectral, Factor A, Halvar, Stratos, Epos, Spektra, Tomasa, and Lurk. Heymland by Yevgeniy Anfalov won a public choice award.

dinamo

Dinamo at Strelka Institute

youtube.com/watch?v=fG_o6U8HaQM/

Possessors of light and productive hands, Fabian Harb and Johannes Breyer from Dinamo type design agency visited Moscow, carried out a variable font design workshop on Strelka premises — and delivered a detailed and free talk on hardship and joy in their work after that.

hundred

‘100 Beste Plakate’ of 2020

100-beste-plakate.de/archiv-plakate/

100 Beste Plakate foundation presented the selection of the past year (click on the link and select 2020 in the ‘Jahr’ field). The images on the website give some idea, but (when possible) it is always better to see the real posters — recently, the collection went on tour with stops in Lausanne, Seoul, Vienna, and Chișinău.

man-ru

Manual: •.,:;…!?·

type.today/ru/journal/dots/

In the new episode of our manual, we are speaking of using periods, commas, exclamation marks, question marks and some other symbols —  dashes, regional variations, misspells in a state standard, and even interrobang.

serbia

Cyrillic in Serbia

eyeondesign.aiga.org/how-type-designers-are-digitizing-and-preserving-cyrillic-typefaces-in-serbia/

Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian languages formed out of the common Serbo-Croatian language as a result of independence movements in parts of former Yugoslavia. In the previous federative state, Latin and Cyrillic had nominally equal rights — but in practice Croatia used Latin script exclusively. Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and even Serbia began increasingly using Latin — in large part due to the fact that the early digital standards didn’t support the Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic. The author of the piece on Eye On Design talked to Serbian type designers about working on typefaces under the bombs, how digital media impact the use of Cyrillic, and governmental restrictions on using Latin script.

fontstand

Fontstand News

fontstand.com/news/

Fontstand is a super friendly service for testing and leasing fonts, founded by dozens of independent type foundries — ranging from Commercial Type to CSTM Fonts. In July, they launched Fontstand News, a media about typefaces and type design which is made together, through the common effort of professionals from all over the world. Type reviews, essays and historical papers, book reviews, type foundries profiles — and each headline is set in its own font from the huge Fontstand library.

cera1

Our new release: Cera Round Italic

type.today/ru/journal/cera_round_italic/

Geometric, but rounded. Nice, yet clear. — The sans Cera Round now has italics. A great excuse to take a look at the entire Cera collection — which has regular styles as well as rounded, stencil, narrow, and even super narrow ones, each of them coming in six weight options.

dia

DIA Studio at Ultrafett fest

youtube.com/watch?v=YQMjOj-MJfs/

The founder of DIA Studio Mitch Paone is not only the key world leader of kinetic typography, but a jazz pianist as well — the fact of this relation becomes especially apparent from his talk at Ultrafett. Rhythm, physics, psychology, music, graphics, video — short, but super intense and useful online lecture.

proofer

MiniProofer

miniproofer.com

When a type designer works, they always print a lot. Small, extra small, medium sizes, one style next to another, real texts and meaningless letter combinations: all this needs to be looked at for assessing, marking, correcting and adjusting — again and again. The MiniProofer plugin (for Glyphs and Robofont) is designed to optimise this work — now they offer a closed beta version, and you can take part in testing by leaving your contact details on the website (chances are higher if you as well work with something else than Latin).

sreda

Sreda: gender representation and type category

facebook.com/festivalSreda/posts/1161814684309164/

Sreda, the Russian festival of new design, has been critised for their predominantly male jury — following which Philipp Tretyakov from ESH Gruppa left, while Alexander Gladkikh gave his seat up for his partner in Charmer studio, Anastasia Sokirko. And another important news: the festival introduces a new type category — one can submit their mass market or bespoke typeface released in 2020/21, will be judged by our co-founder Ilya Ruderman among others.

Thanks to Anna Baydinger for the wonderful July on our Instagram!

You can see all the posts of the month using hashtag #typetoday072021. Dmitry Kavka has already reported for his August duty shift.

Mentioned fonts