Has the Type News risen from the grave? It may seem that way after our rather dysrhythmic schedule of late. However, rather than mourning over missed deadlines and linkrot, let’s dig right into some bloody good type.

New Type

The recent tasty revamp of the Village site also brought a pair of smashing, new display faces along for the ride. First up is Ondrej Jób’s Odesta — a stencil-esque, seven weight script packed with tweaky typographic features that include alternate cuts, small and “short” capitals, plus some sweet ball-tipped initials and finials.

Likewise added to the Village roster, Jeremy Mickel’s Superior Title provides “a kind of missing link between Bodoni and Times” in a transitional vein. Mickel is currently working on Superior Deck and Superior Text — companion families to work alongside this pentad of contrasty headliners.

From the multiscript Rosetta foundry comes a titling-focused extension to Sergei Egorov’s 15th century Italian revival Neacademia. The aptly named Neacademia Display returns to its calligraphic roots, rather than relying exclusively on the optimized typographic structure of its text sibling.

Lydia is Benjamin Critton’s updated take on Lydian, Warren Chappell’s famous calligraphic sans for American Type Founders. Emboldened and condensed, the upright and italic variations still manage to embrace the drafted and crafted sensibilities of the 1938 original.

Typonine’s Nocturno is a complex typeface. With both text and headline varieties, this calligraphic face features a large x-height, stubby ascenders and descenders, and an intriguing oblique axis. The “rather hefty” slabs of the text weights are replaced by sharpened and honed serifs and strokes on the dramatically detailed Nocturno Display.

In what seems to be a recurrent theme this week, Fountain also released a stylistic adjunct to Rui Abreu’s romantic Aria family. The more subdued Aria Text was designed for use in book publishing, but maintains most of decorative mannerisms and attributes of its display-savvy sister across six styles and three optical ranges.

Denis Serebryakov’s distinctively graphic Displace Cut is a more pronounced stencil edition of Displace — his calligraphic, humanist sans released earlier this year.

Peter Biľak initially designed Lava specifically for use in his Works That Work periodical. A “no-nonsense workhorse” meant to be applied liberally to all manner of publication situations, the four weight family is outfitted with symbolic ligatures, multiple numeral sets, and comprehensive language support — including a Cyrillic script designed by Ilya Ruderman. Diving deeper, Biľak relates the initial inklings and subsequent development of the typeface for I Love Typography in Lava — Voice of a Magazine.

News

They’re not dead yet! (The links, that is.)

Events

Save the date! Don’t be late!

Have mercy on our souls

Your patience is appreciated while we dust ourselves off and pump some life back into our publishing schedule. Suffice it to say, we’re back from the dead.

Thanks to Erik Vorhes for letting me drive the ambulance this week.