Via The Browser, a look into a font design process I hadn’t really considered before. If “typography is about the spaces between the letters as much as it is about the letters”, then a popular way of evaluating how well those letters and spaces work together is through the use of ‘pangrams’, sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once. But perhaps the quick brown fox has had its day.
Text for proofing fonts – Fonts by Hoefler&Co.
The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform.
In 2015, I dumped the pangrams we’d accumulated and rewrote our proofs from scratch, trading their wacky and self-satisfied cleverness for lists of words that are actually illustrative.
These lists of words, whilst not being as easy to memorise, are far more useful—to the professional typeface designer, at least. Here’s just a part of them.
[…] Linden linden loads for the ulna monolog of the consul menthol and shallot. Milliner milliner modal for the alumna solomon of the album custom and summon. Number number nodule for the unmade economic of the shotgun bison and tunnel. […]
It reminds me a little of lorem ipsum. I wonder if these new typefaces went through a similar process.
Times New Arial is a new experiment utilising the latest technology of variable fonts – It’s Nice That
With Times New Arial, the collaborators combine the visual extremes of both Times and Arial into one interpolated typeface. With new technological possibilities, the hybrid represents a new era of font usage, challenging the role of variable fonts in the present cultural scape. As well as being poster children for web typography, Times and Arial also represent progress and proxies within digital design. “We wanted to combine this conventional aesthetic with new technical possibility in order to revive and refine them, so in turn, we could experiment with them in our projects,” continues David.
Scunthorpe Sans 🗯🚫 profanity-blocking font – Vole.wtf
A s*** font that f***ing censors bad language automatically. It’s able to detect the words f***, s***, p***, t***, w***, c*** and dozens more, but with a special exemption for “Scunthorpe”; that town has suffered enough.
Font Books – Turn your next font into your next read
Font Books is a collection of original typefaces designed to help people read and understand classic literature better.
Logofonts – Behance
Often when we see a logo, a question arises: “which font was used?” In this project I did some research on the logos of some of the most famous brands, trying to understand which font they use or which have been modified to get to the final result. Follow Logofonts on Instagram.
Miscellaneous Details 