Hasta La Ideas

The first of a monthly pick of new type faces, projects and events, including an interactive installation in Amsterdam, a new font family from Commercial Type and a website inviting developers to create animated letters using code.

New faces

Ginger

Ginger is the latest release from Face37 designer Rick Banks. A modernist Swiss style “with a contemporary geometric twist,” it comes in four weights – thin, light, regular and bold – and is inspired by the work of Herb Lubalin, Jan Tischold and Paul Renner.

Ginger will be available to purchase at Hype for Type later this month – to mark its release, Banks has designed a limited edition, 20-page specimen booklet (above) with fluorescent embossed cover showcasing a range of characters, styles and weights.

Velik

Velik is The Northern Block’s first hand drawn typeface. It was painted by Mariya Pigoulevskaya and is her eighth design for the Sheffield-based foundry. While most of Pigoulevskaya’s faces reference modernist designs and her love of “rational geometry,” Velik is inspired by her background in illustration, she says.

Oskar

Paul van der Laan has been working on Bold Monday’s latest release, Oskar (above) since 2002. The typeface references Dutch advertising lettering from the early twentieth century such as those used on walls, shop fronts and metal signs. It was originally designed for use in a school in The Hague and his since been expanded to include six split line styles and multiple weights.

Duplicate

In 2007, Commercial Type partner Christian Schwartz attempted to redraw Roger Excoffon’s Antique Olive typeface from memory, in the hope of producing a contemporary homage to the French designer’s work. The resulting Duplicate Sans was completed in 2011 at the request of Fast Company creative director Florian Bachleda, who used the typeface when rebranding the media outlet.

Schwartz later designed an accompanying slab serif before collaborating with Miguel Reyes on Duplicate Ionic – the full family is now available to buy at commercialtype.com

Type/Dynamics

Open at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum until February 9, Type/Dynamics is an exhibition celebrating the work of the late graphic designer Jurriaan Schrofer. Dutch studio LUST has created an immersive digital installation for the show that visualises real-time information about locations currently in the news, such as “Tiananmen Square” and “Reichstag”.

The installation extracts typographic information from Google Streetview images and media coverage to present a wall of type that is continuously updated.

Anitype

Jono Brandel, a designer at Google’s Creative Lab in San Francisco, has launched a new website, Anitype, inviting developers to create animated letterforms using only Javascript. The site was set up to offer a simple, automated way of creating moving text without the use of painstaking animation techniques and questions the static nature of text on the web – particularly when almost every other element of today’s web pages, from gifs to banner ads and icons, are now animated.

Edible type

Design duo Sawdust (Rob Gonzalez and Jonathan Quainton) recently teamed up with art director Andrew Stellitano and photographer Dominic Davies for an unusual project combining typography, food and literary theory.

The group created typographic pasta laser cut in the shape of Sawdust’s new typeface, Lunetta, which was arranged to form the words initiation, depart, return: the three common narrative stages presented by American writer Joseph Campbell in his text Monomyth, which supposedly form the basis for countless literary works.

It’s certainly a more high brow alternative to Alphabetti Spaghetti and an interesting way to promote a new font release. Gonzalez and Quainton have also produced a hand made typeface, Flow, using acrylic paints (below):