The 10th Annual Fall Fonts Festival
As we celebrate in the Design Center we tour the best boutique fonts foundries on the web -- and you can bet things have changed! The fonts are better, the samples are better and the selection is; well, simply out of this world. (Note that most of the links in all of our Fonts Festival pages will open in a new browser window, or will be a graphic pop-up.)
Ten Years for P22
First, we want to send out a big congratulations to the P22 Font Foundry who also celebrates their 10th Anniversary this year! And boy, they've come a long way too.
Richard Kegler, Daniel Farrell, William Woeffell, and Paul Fox first conceived of P22 as an artist's movement in the mid-1980's. The founders created paintings, mail art and poetry under the guise of a single mysterious identity, "P22." They submitted works to juried shows, infiltrated a national snow sculpture contest, and launched an ambitious mail art campaign featuring papier machŽ heads and the like.
Then, on April 22 1994, the first ever P22 font, Duchamp, was introduced to the public. Duchamp was a quirky handwriting font made for Richard Kegler's
(P22 President) Masters Thesis project. Almost as an after thought, Richard realized the potential that the font could have for other designers looking for a more casual handwriting font than previously unavailable. Within months, the font was officially introduced and the rest is history.
Since that auspicious beginning in 1994, the P22 line of packaged font sets now features over 40 titles, many of which have been commissioned by museums and foundations- such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and London Transport Museum UK.
BlancoNeg is one of P22's most recent decorative fonts with some unusual features. The font is designed with the "negative" spaces forming the basic shapes of each letter. Many design possibilities can be realized with this font as a textural element or bold headline use. (Pop up a Sample)
P22's Dyrynk Roman and Italic are two fonts that were originally designed in 1928
by Czech book-arts luminary Karel Dyrynk. This lightweight text face has a
hand drawn feel and is best used at larger sizes for display work, poetry
settings or titling layouts. (Pop up a Sample)
Part of P22 is the International House of Fonts. Probably one of the best features is the Try before you buy IHOF's TypeCaster. Here you can try out all their fonts with whatever text you choose to type. This previewing option makes the proper font selection a breeze: just type in your name or headline idea.
Congratulations to Jimmy, Carima, James, Jessica, Richard, Natalie, Christina and the whole gang from P22 -- great work, folks -- keep those excellent fonts coming!
www.p22.com/
Typeco Foundry
The next stop is the Typeco Foundry in Rochester, NY where James Grieshaber and other graphic designers fashion some of the most striking fonts you'll find. Not since Emigree has a foundry taken such risks, and evolved such masterpieces. They've won just about every major award, and presented their works in some of the most prestigious galleries and shows in the world. (Pop-up their show at TYPECON 2004.)
Gothic Gothic is a fusion of old and new that is both Gothic and Gothic. In typography Gothic can refer to German Blackletter or Old English styles. Gothic can also mean block or sans serif style lettering. By combining and balancing the elements from both of these ideas we have created a contemporary extended block letter typeface. (Pop Up a sample page) Gothic Gothic is a crepuscular family of 3 fontsÑRegular, Text and Black all of which are available from MyFonts.com.
Another great offering from Typeco is their Handwriting Font service where you get your handwriting made into a font. This can be fun to make documents that have that hand crafted look while still having the resources of your word processing application. It's easy and fairly inexpensive. All you have to do is printout this PDF, and follow the instructions. For $99.95 you get your handwriting embedded into a font within 2 weeks! WOW.
While you're visiting, check out their free fonts (once you've completed their survey) and enjoy some of their handy documents For typographers: a Character Reference Chart PDF for Macintosh and for Windows. There's also a Quick Character Reference Chart PDF you shouldn't be without! While you're there, checkout some nice backgrounds like this
classic ampersand, or their fancy chinese paper sample. And don't forget to sample all their fonts at www.Typeco.com
Next stop: The LetterHeads Foundry and others...
Or return to the Type Department
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