Screen fonts for optimal legibility on the computer monitor  20 Jun 2010

After launching our own webfont system, Typotheque now offers fonts specially engineered and optimised for exceptional readability on the computer monitor. These fonts use TrueType outlines, and were manually hinted to achieve crystal-clear results on computer screens.

More about hinting

Grey-scale rendering of an unhinted and hinted version of Fedra Sans, at 10 ppem, magnified to 200%

Screen fonts
These three font families are ideal for reading on screen with superior appearance at small sizes especially when using Microsoft® Windows operating systems. The fonts are of course perfectly cross-platform, so they work equally well on Mac OS, though the hinting instructions are ignored by the OS rasteriser.

Typotheque Screen fonts are style-linked, so the font styles (Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) are grouped under a single item in the font menu. Use the key commands or clicking on B for Bold, I for Italic.

Typotheque Screen font include tabular numerals, so the figures line up vertically when set in tables. Tabular numerals are those where each numeral has the same character width.

Fedra Sans Screen and Fedra Serif Screen are immediately available, Fedra Mono Screen will be available later this summer.

Tüpo 3D objects  29 May 2010

This may not be a typical application of Typotheque fonts.

German designer Tanja Huckenbeck created a series of three dimensional objects, ranging from pillows, pot holders, purses, or even armchairs and sofas. Tanja chose Klimax Plus, an extra heavy display font, which with its mass was perfect for the shape of pillows or bags. You can choose any letter or number of Latin alphabet, and an object will be custom made and shipped to you.

Those objects make for highly personal decoration, and a beautiful design accessoire. All products are manufactured in Germany, and are prices very reasonably.

Check the Tüpo online store

New book: hard cover specimen no.7  15 May 2010

Typotheque produces its free specimens and next to this, we make occassional hardcover specimen.

This one, is a limited hard cover edition of Typotheque specimen No.7. This 10 year anniversary book presents the complete Typotheque collection. The specimen is printed on a bible paper and is signed by its authors.

Typotheque hardcover specimen No.7

Typotheque licenses its Webfont engine & Character Set viewer  23 Apr 2010

Web Font Service
Typotheque now licenses the engine behind our Webfont service.

With Webfont Service you can serve your fonts to client's website. The service takes care of the font conversion from TTF to EOT, WOFF and SVG, font subsetting (including the GSUB layout tables), file hosting on a network of servers, and generation of CSS code for the end implementation.

Client has full control over the appearance of the user interface, with a possibility to fully integrate it in a third party website.

Character Set Viewer
Online application that presents all glyphs from a TTF or OTF font, including their OpenType alternatives (GSUB and GPOS). Glyphs in the fonts can be sorted by GID or Unicode, and presentation can be customised (grid size, font colour, font sizes, glyph descriptions, etc).

Fonts are hosted on a network of secure servers making the service extra fast and reliable, but the interface is fully integrated to client's website. Because browsers have limits on how many simultaneous requests they can make to individual servers, hosting fonts on third-party servers will utilise more connections, loading files much faster than if they were hosted on the same server.

See details on type-applications.com or email us for pricing, and implementation manual.

Typotheque introduces Phonts  01 Apr 2010

Bringing the world of rich typography to the visually impaired

Typotheque is proud to announce another pioneering advance in its quest to deliver fine typography to all people everywhere. The innovative font foundry began by designing fonts to cover almost 200 languages from Awadhi to Zulu, then designed a system to make them available for use on the World Wide Web. Now the company is focusing on a significant population which, up until now, has been unable to benefit from sophisticated type design: the estimated 314 million people worldwide who are visually impaired.

Historically, those who rely on text-to-speech systems to surf the Internet have been limited to a single synthesized voice set at the OS level. Typotheque’s revolutionary Phont® technology changes all that by linking web fonts to a complex database of meticulously digitized voice data. Each voice has been carefully selected to match the appearance of one of Typotheque’s more than 200 fonts, so while Fedra Sans Display Hairline is rendered by actress Tilda Swinton, Klimax is represented by singer Barry White. All the subtle differences between a font’s styles, sometimes as many as 10 different weights, are reflected in the intonation, stress, tempo and color of the voices, capturing the character of each font with psychological realism and emotional authenticity.

The development process included months of casting to find voice actors who could capture the true qualities of the fonts. “The biggest challenge was to find the right articulations for Roman and Italic fonts. This was simply new territory for the actors and type designers alike,” commented Typotheque CEO Peter Biľak. “Bold versions are easy to communicate, but italics are very subtle, not noticeable at first unless you are listening closely.” Biľak also described the difficulties representing Small Capitals: “While All Caps text is authoritative, almost like yelling, Small Caps is a different method of emphasis which needs to be audibly distinguished.”

The Phont® library is still a work in progress; Typotheque is still researching new solutions for articulating inferior and superior letters, ordinals and discretionary ligatures, bringing the full potential of typography to those who otherwise couldn’t appreciate it.

Typotheque Phonts® will be available for individual licensing just like their print versions, or as a bundle with a substantial discount.

Introducing the 100-Year Calendar  20 Mar 2010

Plan your future (and your children’s futures, possibly even your grandchildren’s futures), or just contemplate the beautiful pattern of numbers. This oversized A0 poster (84 × 119 cm) presents all the days of the 21st century, with weekends clearly marked in magenta. The 100-Year Calendar was produced for the Experimenta 2009 exhibition, exhibited as a one-off print, and is now available in a limited edition. You may not know what the future holds, but at least you will know when it will be.

http://www.typotheque.com/books/the_100-year_calendar

History of History (article)  09 Mar 2010

Two years after releasing History, Peter Biľak reflects on the process of creating this skeletal system where different styles are imposed on a Roman capitals base. Previous experiments are mentioned as well as inspiration sources for the typeface presented.

http://www.typotheque.com/articles/history_of_history

First published in Livraison No.13, contemporary arts journal, in French & English

New typeface: Plan Grotesque  23 Feb 2010

Plan Grotesque is a sturdy, unpretentious typeface for text of any kind; it is a functional workhorse, but has enough character to be distinctive at larger sizes. Plan Grotesque has distinguishing closing terminals, and unlike Grotesque typefaces of the previous century it comes with a true italic. Plan Grotesque comes in a comprehensive range of weights, widths and display versions (Normal, Condensed, Stencil, Stencil Condensed). It has friendly, subtly-modulated strokes and is more refined and economic than traditional grotesques.

Typotheque now supports WOFF in Firefox 3.6  25 Jan 2010

Last week, the Mozilla Foundation released version 3.6 of Firefox. Besides a snappier performance, this version includes also significant improvement for typography. It supports new font format Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The WOFF font files are compressed, so the font files are smaller and download time faster. Secondly it is a web specific format, which it can't be installed on your desktop, and it includes information about licensing. Lastly, it is a new standard format (XML wrapper), fully documented, and free to use by anyone.

In October we endorsed this format, and now we built it into our web font service. From today we serve WOFF fonts to Firefox 3.6. If you already use our web font service, there is nothing you have to do, we send the right fonts to right browsers.

We are excited about the new developments that can help to improve typography on the web.

Selection of websites using Typotheque Web Font Service  23 Jan 2010

Typotheque Web Font Service has been in use since October last year. In two months since the launch, the service has been used in over 290 sites, some of which we present in this small selection. It is exciting to see how quickly designers embraced the new typographic possibilities reserved until recently only for the print. It gives us more reasons to continue to improve our services (we work on improving rendering in older versions of Windows, and better support for mobile devices).

Here are some of our favourite samples:

http://www.engstfeld-weiss.de

Jazz band Engstfeld Weiss Quartet use Fedra Serif A for the main text.

http://www.poolinquinamento.it

Italian insurance group, consisting of 38 insurance companies, uses Fedra Sans on their main page.

http://www.bellafigura.com

Artisan letterpress print shop Bella Figura uses Greta Text and Fedra Sans on their site.

http://shop.mireo.hr

Croatian software company specialized for development of telematic technologies use Fedra Sans.

http://stepping-grounds.com

Culture management company Stepping Grounds use Irma for the identity of the company and the tetx headlines.

http://www.type-applications.com

Type application service use Irma for the headlines.

http://www.parkadesign.com

A one-man web design studio with Irma Slab.

http://risd.generic.cx

Rhode Island School of Design and its web design class has a page using Klimax Plus Italic Small Caps.

http://objectsinspaceandtime.com

Designer Alexander Bohn uses Greta Text and Fedra Sans on his personal page.

http://www.ui42.com

Web development company ui42 uses Brioni.

http://www.andre-goehlich.de

Graphic designer Andre Göhlich chose Irma Slab and Brioni. for his personal site.

http://www.seduteimpertinenti.it

Furniture collector Sedute Impertinenti chose Nara for the identity of their site.

http://www.webdrama.org

Personal site of Jean-Michel Géridan uses Irma for the headlines.

http://indesigning.net

Certified Adobe InDesign expert Thomas Silkjær chose Fedra Sans and Fedra Serif B for his site.

http://graphichug.com

Graphic design blog Graphic Hug uses Fedra Serif Display and Fedra Sans for both headlines and main text.

Open Manifesto  18 Jan 2010

We don’t have too many books to our shop. The reason is simple, we read all books before offering them for sale, so it take time to process them. Secondly, there aren’t many titles that we can recommend without reservations.

Here is a publication that we have been following from a distance (geographically it couldn’t get any further), and now are pleased to offer to on our site.

Open Manifesto comes out twice a year, offers eclectic, critical writing on a wide mix of disciplines seen from the lens of graphic designer. It is edited / published / designed by Kevin Finn in Australia.

Open Manifesto describes itself as ‘an independent, self-funded and self published journal of critical writing on graphic design culture. It is the first, and currently the only, journal of its kind based in Australia and was founded in 2003 by award-winning graphic designer, Kevin Finn. It is printed in one colour.’

‘Open Manifesto sits at the intersection between visual communications, media, politics, culture, economics and social issues. Each issue of Open Manifesto is devoted to a specific theme and seeks to explore the wider relationship graphic design has with society; how design influences society and how society influences design.’

We offer now first 5 issues of Open Manifesto magazine (with the exception of issue 2, which is out of print)

http://www.typotheque.com/books/open_manifesto_no_1
http://www.typotheque.com/books/open_manifesto_no_3
http://www.typotheque.com/books/open_manifesto_no_4
http://www.typotheque.com/books/open_manifesto_no_5

Publisher’s website: http://www.openmanifesto.net

Reviews:
“Open Manifesto is what graphic designers are all about. While it has both feet solidly planted in the world of graphic design, it often strays far and wide from this topic serving up an eclectic mix of essays and interviews in an understated yet handsome package. What more could one wish for?”
Rudy VanderLans, Emigre

“With so many weblogs devoted to graphic design, I am truly grateful for an intelligently written and edited “hard copy” journal devoted to design culture. Open Manifesto is truly ahead of the curve.”
Steven Heller, The School of Visual Arts, New York / Heller Books

“Self-initiated publishing projects often provide momentary thrills but not much of lasting value. Not Open Manifesto. Each issue contains writing of consequence and ideas that are worth returning to. Open Manifesto is quietly and confidently making an enduring contribution to our ongoing conversation about graphic design.”
Michael Bierut, Pentagram / Design Observer

“Open Manifesto... is an ambitious bid to enter Emigre and Dot Dot Dot territory.”
Rick Poynor, Author and Critic

Gore’s choice  07 Jan 2010

Last summer, I received a phone call from Michael, a designer from mgmtdesign in Brooklyn, New York. After the initial how-do-you-do’s, he explained that they were designing a new book for Al Gore, Our Choice, the sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

“Great project”, I said.

And it got even better. They had chosen Brioni, one of our typefaces, for the body text.

“And this is why I am calling now”, said Michael, his voice dropping a level. “You see, Al is really involved with the project and we spend a lot of time working together in the publisher’s office. When he was reviewing the proofs, he had a comment about the typeface.”

I took a deep breath and asked what the comment was.

“Basically, he wants you to change the numeral one.”

“Interesting”, I said. “And how did he come to this conclusion?”

“Well, in the book there’re a lot of examples of scientific nomenclature and this particular numeral one is causing confusion when it’s combined with capitals.”

Brioni is a book typeface and comes with old style figures. Because of the fairly low x-height, the numeral one looks like a Roman one, like a shorter version of a capital letter I. It looks very elegant, but when combined into acronyms, it could be confusing.

“OK, we’ll have a look.”

I called Nikola, the author of the font, and informed him of the situation.

“Hi Nikola, Al Gore wants you to change the numeral one in Brioni.”

“Huh?!”

I explained, and Nikola agreed to make some modifications. That same day, we sketched alternatives, printed samples, tweaked it a bit further, made new fonts, sent them to New York, and waited for the reaction.

A short email arrived the next day. Al liked the change.

“There was a great cheer from upstairs when they presented the layouts in question to Al. So I would say that it is good to go”, the email read.

Al was right. The new numeral is a lot less confusing when combined with letters. We already changed it for all other weights of Brioni. We’ll call this ‘Gore’s choice’.

. . .

If you have purchased a licence to Brioni, you can download a free update of the fonts from your online account.

Typotheque Web Font System now supports Chrome  23 Dec 2009

Google recently released a new Beta of their Chrome browser. This is great news for web typography as every major browser now supports @font-face web font linking: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Safari. According to Wikipedia, the percentage of web browsers that support @font-face declaration is by now 98.63%.

We’ve just updated our Web Font Service, and now support Google Chrome. Typotheque makes heavy subsetting of fonts, and to make the font files as small as possible, we remove some font tables that web browsers do not require. One of this tables however was required by Chrome, so we had to update the system.

If you used Typotheque Web Font System before you need to update the CSS and fonts. Simply login to your account, go to Web fonts section, Edit the project, and click Save.

New articles: Methods of distribution  21 Dec 2009

Peter Biľak wrote a text for this year’s edition of Graphisme en France. The text discusses conventional distribution methods of digital typefaces and their alternatives. Read the English or French version.

Typotheque licenses its online tools  26 Nov 2009

We at Typotheque have been not only developing our typefaces but also tools to present them online. Some of them are products of years of developement, and occasionally we received questions if they are publicly available. We developed documented Application Programming Interface (API), and offer now our tools for licensing via our new website type-applications.com.

First tool that we offer for licensing is the OpenType Font Tester. The tester renders both GPOS and GSUB tables, making this suitable for multilingual fonts, or fonts with advanced OpenType substitutions.

Fonts are hosted on a network of secure servers making the service extra fast and reliable, but the interface is fully integrated to client's website. Because browsers have limits on how many simultaneous requests they can make to individual servers, hosting fonts on third-party servers will utilise more connections, loading files much faster than if they were hosted on the same server. Client has full control over the appearance of the tester and which OpenType features are offered for testing.

Get in touch if you have questions about the tools, or you are interested in giving it a try.

New Typotheque diary for 2010  18 Nov 2009

Limited edition of the pocket-size, no-nonsense Typotheque calendar and sketchbook. Vinyl cover offers extra protection, and inside you find week overviews on a double pages, year overview, 12 different pre-printed grids in the sketchbook. International holidays, design events and other days of interest are indicated on the index page, as well as on day overviews. Vinyl cover offers extra protection, and the book is specially bound to ensure that it lies flat when opened.

http://www.typotheque.com/books/pocket_calendar_2010

Major update of Fedra Sans, Fedra Serif, Fedra Sans Condensed  03 Nov 2009

Fedra Sans, the flagship of Typotheque, has been first released in 2001. At that time, standards for fonts were slightly different, and Typotheque was selling only PostScript fonts, with each font including about 250 glyphs. 

There have been two more updates of Fedra Sans since, version 2.0 coming in 2002, and in summer 2005. Typotheque expanded Fedra to support Greek and Cyrillic, creating Fedra Sans Pro package, with version number 3.0. This is the version which we were licensing until now.

Besides developing new fonts, we continuosly listen to the feedback of users, reviewing hundreds of samples of real life application of our fonts, and respond now with this latest updated version.

When the Typotheque fonts were adopted by the French National Library (Bibliothèque national de France), we created those new glyphs to support Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese and Sanskript transliteration. The total number of glyphs in the OpenType Pro fonts is now 2.540 glyphs.

New fonts also include combining diacritics, so even more accented glyphs can be made if needed.

Fedra Sans 4.0 is a brand new font, using familiar shapes of Fedra, but all glyphs were reviewed. In the OpenType Pro version 825 new glyphs were created, all fonts were completely respaced and kerned. Screen appearance was improved, small bugs squashed, and new OpenType substitutions offered.

Fedra Sans, Fedra Sans Alt, Fedra Sans Condensed, Fedra Sans Condensed Alt are using the same encodings now and same including same number of glyphs. Fedra Serif has been also updated, and its OpenType Pro fonts includes now 739 new glyphs totaling in 2746 glyphs per font.

• version 1, Fedra Sans, 2001, 246 glyphs
• version 2, Fedra Sans, 2002, 246 glyphs
• version 3, Fedra Sans Pro, 2005, 1715 glyphs
• version 4, Fedra Sans Pro, 2009, 2540 glyphs

While the most visible changes were made in the Pro fonts, Std fonts were also changed and updated. They now include more alternate shapes.

CAUTION
Please note that because the fonts include completely new kerning and spacing, your existing layout may change. Use the updated fonts only in new projects to avoid the possible complications. Using the updated fonts in older documents will cause text reflowing, as fonts have modified spacing and kerning information.

The updated fonts have identical font menu names as the old font versions. You should remove old versions from your font management software before installing the new ones.

Free Upgrade
All existing licence holders can upgrade to these latest versions of Fedra fonts free of charge by simply logging in into personal account, and downloading the fonts again. In your account, only the latest versions of the fonts are shown.

End of PostScript font support
This announces also Typotheque's end of support of PostScript fonts. We will not create PostScript versions of our new fonts, but focus on creation of OpenType fonts instead. In special situations, PostScript subsets can be made for clients (some newspaper typesetting systems work only with PostScript fonts), but this will be considered font customisation, and it will be a paid service.

Typotheque launches its Web Fonts Service  20 Oct 2009

Typotheque has become one of the first commercial type foundries to license its entire font collection for use on the World Wide Web.

Typotheque’s Web Font Service frees webpage designers from the restriction of using Times, Helvetica and the other dozen or so “web-safe” fonts. Although most browsers support the use of other fonts, font companies have been reluctant to license their fonts for use on the web because there has been no convenient and reliable method of preventing site visitors from downloading the font files illegally. Typotheque’s method, which is based on W3C standards, gives web designers unprecedented creative possibilities while at the same time making it simple to use fonts securely on the web.
http://www.typotheque.com/webfonts

Typotheque’s system enables webpages to use the CSS @font-face rule to access font files stored on a global network of secure servers. Because the rule is supported by the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, over 95% of all users worldwide can view such pages properly. For the first time, designers can create consistent visual identities across all necessary media without having to convert text into images. Typotheque’s OpenType fonts support over 100 languages written in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts.

All End-User Licences (including those previously purchased) for its OpenType fonts have been upgraded at no extra cost to permit font embedding in webpages using a secure proprietary system. Licensed users receive 500MB of free bandwidth per month per font (equal to approximately 25.000 free views monthly); paying only €0.005 for each additional Megabyte.
http://www.typotheque.com/webfonts/faq

Watch a short tutorial, or sign up right away for 30 days free Trial licence and give it a try. If you like it, you can upgrade to full licence at any time.

Create Web Fonts in 4 easy steps
1 Browse fonts & choose a licence type
2 Create your Web Font
3 Copy & Paste the CSS code
4 Ready! Just refresh your page

Typotheque endorses new font format WOFF  15 Oct 2009

Summer, which is usually the quietest period of the year, has been unusually active and exciting time for people interested in typography on the Web. There has been several font proposals for a new font format specific for the use on the Web, and plenty of discussions about future of typography, and font licensing.

One of them, originally named .webfont, now renamed to WOFF has reached a wider support of type community, and has been warmly embraced by smaller type foundries such as Commercial Type, Emigre, Underware, etc, but also large companies such as Adobe, Linotype, and Monotype*. This proposal by Erik van Blokland (LettError), Jonathan Kew (Mozilla Corporation), Tal Leming (Type Supply) addresses the concerns about unlicensed distribution expressed by many type designers and foundries and holds the promise of a web-friendly, interoperable font format for the future. It it an inclusive format, where glyph outlines can be defined as PostScript or TrueType (or anything else that might come in the future).

Typotheque has been busy developing our own Web font service, which right now uses TrueType and EOT fonts. However, we have been supportive of a new specific web font format from the very beggining, and now that the format has been officially supported by the upcoming version of Firefox 3.6, Typotheque endorses the WOFF specification, as a Web font format, and expects to license fonts for Web use in this format in the future.

We hope that other browsers will join in implementing the WOFF format.

* See the full list of supporting type foundries.

Typotheque speaks in Vienna, Paris, Ljubljana  03 Oct 2009

October is a busy conference, lecture, symposium time. Typotheque joins a few events in the coming weeks. If you happen to be in Vienna, Paris, or Ljubljana, please join us for the talk, and drinks afterward.

Peter Bilak: On typography & unrelated matter
Vienna Design Week
Thursday, 8 Oktober 2009, 19:00

Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien
Altbau, Dachgeschoß, Seminarraum B
Oskar Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

View Map

Graphisme en France
Lecture and Round Table discussion (in French)

Friday, 16 October 2009, 18:00
Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou, Paris

View Map

Une séance consacrée à la typographie et organisée avec le CNAP dans le prolongement de la publication de Graphisme en France.

Peter Bilak, Work presentation
Visual Communications Biennial
The Brumen Foundation
Jakopič Gallery in Ljubljana
26 October 2009

The works of jury members will be presented to the Slovenian public at a separate exhibition at the Jakopic Gallery in Ljubljana.

Typotheque Celebrates Its First 10 Years  24 Sep 2009

We decided to do something special to celebrate Typotheque’s first 10 years. No, not a self-congratulatory book or retrospective exhibition, but something simple and useful. We asked four of our colleagues to design t-shirts for the occasion. The project brief was carte blanche, no strings attached: design a T-shirt that you yourself would like to wear.

We sent the brief to Irma Boom, Max Kisman, Karel Martens and Catherine Zask, four designers who have had exceptionally long and successful careers, but more importantly, who produce their work themselves, rather than putting their names on the work of anonymous employees. This is a principle which we admire, and which governs our work as well.

We hoped that if the authors designed t-shirts that they’d like to wear, we might enjoy wearing them too. We now present these t-shirts in a limited edition.

Let's have a look first at the sketches:

Catherine Zask (sketches)

Irma Boom (sketches)

Karel Martens (sketches)

Max Kisman (sketches)

And now, the actual T-shirts:

Catherine Zask used Indian ink and with rough gestural brushstrokes spelled the name T Y P O T H E Q U E. The simplicity and brutal power of black and white makes this type composition an intriguing and powerful image.

http://www.typotheque.com/tshirts/catherine_zask

Irma Boom used the recurring theme of her work, and created a ‘colour bar code’, of her favourite colours. Printed in 5 colour silkscreen on Navy blue t-shirts.

http://www.typotheque.com/tshirts/irma_boom

Karel Martens revisited his Mecano games on the t-shirt spelling T 10 made from a single Mecano part.

http://www.typotheque.com/tshirts/karel_martens

Max Kisman used his signature style to reduces complex symbols to its most minimal form, spelling our number 10 as a result.

http://www.typotheque.com/tshirts/max_kisman

All t-shirts cost €30.

DanceWriter at Experimenta Lisbon  15 Sep 2009

Back in 2007, we created an online utility DanceWriter, which converts text to a simple dance moves. In summer 2009, we were invited to present it during the Experimenta Lisbon (EXD’09) exhibition Quick Quick Slow, curated by Emily King.

Instead of showing the older work, we created a new version to be presented as an interactive installation on display in the Museu Colecção Berardo. Visitors could simply type their message on the touch screen, and the dancer would render the text by her elegant movement.

This exhibition surveys the dimension of time in graphic design, looking as far back as the early 20th century and tracing the mutual influences and exchanges between motion graphics and print. On display are original works of artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, Piet Zwart, Ed Ruscha, John Maeda, Bruce Mau, and many others.

The exhibition is open from 11 September until 29 December 2009.

Here is a simple documentation of DanceWriter 2.0

See it in High Definition on Vimeo or YouTube.

This is the A to Z movie performed by Valentina Scaglia

See it in High Definition on Vimeo, or YouTube.

And finally, the complete video shoot accelerated to 30 seconds.

See it in High Definition on Vimeo, or YouTube.

Video shoot ‘Dance Writer’ for an installation at Experimenta 2009, Lisbon. Dance: Valentina Scaglia, Video: Taco Zwaanswijk, Programming: Bart van der Ploeg & Edwin de Koning (Resolume), Choreography Lukas Timulak, Concept & Photography: Peter Bilak

experimentadesign.pt/2009/blog/?p=551

Typotheque Web Font Service screencast demo  07 Sep 2009

Typotheque is in the final stage of testing our Web Font Service. The service offers some unique features:

— Multilingual support
— No JavaScript required
— One license for print & web
— One time license cost
— Advanced OpenType features

The video below presents some of the features in detail, and show how to use Typotheque fonts online under 4 minutes.

See it in High Definition on Vimeo or YouTube

And here is the page from the screencast demo.
www.typotheque.com/webfonts/sample_2

New company: The Indian Type Foundry  04 Sep 2009

Mumbai, The Hague, 4 September 2009

The Indian Type Foundry will be the first specialised company to develop and directly distribute Unicode-compliant digital fonts in India.

The Indian Type Foundry (ITF) is the first company to develop and directly distribute digital fonts in India. ITF was initiated by Peter Biľak of Typotheque in partnership with SN Rajpurohit and Rajesh Kejriwal (Kyoorius Exchange). “Rajesh has been incredibly active in bringing the Indian design community together. He has created the first Indian design magazine and first Indian design conference, and been a catalyst behind many collaborative projects in India”, says Peter Biľak. “That’s why I was very pleased that Rajesh agreed to join us to create ITF. And I have worked with the very talented Satya Rajpurohit for the past two years on Fedra Hindi, our first typeface specifically designed for the Indian market.”

ITF will develop typefaces for all major scripts in India: Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. Besides designing and directly distributing them in India, ITF will also serve as an educational platform for typography. ITF is committed to organising lectures and workshops, as well as to actively promoting the publishing and exchanging of ideas. The intention is to give the same attention to Indian typography as Latin typography has received in the last few decades.

Fedra Hindi, the award-winning Devanagari companion to Fedra Sans is the first typeface in the ITF collection. It is a typeface developed for visual identities, designed to work equally well on paper and on the computer screen. Fedra Hindi comes in 5 weights with full support for conjuncts.

www.indiantypefoundry.com

Full press release

New t-shirt: A Piece of Text  31 Aug 2009

‘A piece of text that looks good but doesn’t say anything’, printed in typeface Irma, using its OpenType features mixing positive and negative spaces of letters. Printed on Organic Fine Jersey T-Shirt from American Apparel.

Piece of Text, T-shirt

Designed by Peter Biľak and distributed exclusively by Typotheque.

New font release: Irma  21 Aug 2009

Irma is an elegant capital-only display typeface in 9 weights that is available in simple Sans & geometric Slab. Irma includes over 200 discretionary ligatures in each style to make the setting of text even more compact and unique. The round characters of Irma, such as O, C and G, have no overshoots (the degree to which the highest and lowest points exceed the flat baseline to achieve the optical effect of being the same size), which allows setting text with no space between the lines, as all letters are equally tall.

Both Sans and Slab version include 9 weights.

Inspired by the principles of the Arabic alphabet, Irma provides different conditional letterforms, depending on whether characters occur at the beginning, middle, or the end of the word. Letters can have four different forms (initial, medial, final and isolated). The choice of these forms is controlled by a powerful OpenType feature (Stylistic Set 1), which allows creation of typographic patterns using the negative spaces of the letterforms.

Some sketches from the development

Typotheque new font release Irma
Typotheque new font release Irma Slab

Designed by Peter Biľak and distributed exclusively by Typotheque.

Form = Content  20 Jul 2009

We were delighted to receive this photo. It is a bookshelf in 'Literarny Klub' in a shape of letter 'k' from Greta Text.

Finely built by Petr Kvanta. Now, we wish to have a full set of those shelves a-z. Allright, the 'o' would be a little unstable, but a beautiful object nevertheless.

Better yet, inside of the shelf, there are books set in Greta Text exclusively. Literarny Klub has been using Greta Text since 2007 for all their publications.

Typotheque Web Font Service preview  15 Jul 2009

Elementar preview  02 Jul 2009

Typotheque gets social  24 Jun 2009

We are pleased to introduce more ways to stay in touch with our beloved customers, visitors, and fans. The most direct way to get information from Typotheque is to subscribe to our newsletter where we inform about official releases. We send 3-4 messages, and your personal information is never shared with anyone.

There is another direct channel, our RSS feed, where we inform about major changes on the website.

And now, there is also Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr page for Typotheque, where we inform about work in progress, upcoming events and behind the scene news. Join us today.

New font release: Nara  01 Jun 2009

Nara explores gaps in traditional type classification. It exhibits characteristics of humanist typefaces, such as an oblique axis of contrast between the thick and thin strokes (as in Garamond, Bembo, etc.), but also characteristics of modern typefaces, such as high contrast, narrower underlying letter structures, and flat, unbracketed serifs (as in Bodoni, Didot, etc). The result is a lively, dynamic typeface that comes with two different styles for emphasis—narrow upright cursive, and slanted italic. The typeface’s character is even more distinctive in its heavy weights, where the slanted humanist axis of contrast produces surprisingly contemporary lettershapes.

Nara (under its working name Adriq) originated in the late 1980s as a student project of Andrej Krátky at the Prague Academy of Applied Arts. It was digitised in METAFONT, and was probably the first digital font in Czechoslovakia, before PostScript was readily available. It took 20 years to complete it, to convert the original drawings to bézier curves, to complete the character set, and most importantly, to give it the refined details and advanced OpenType features of a 21st century font. Andrej Krátky worked with Typotheque's Peter Bilak and Nikola Djurek to complete the project.

Fedra Hindi wins at the European Design Awards 2009 competition  30 May 2009

Typotheque pays as much attention to ‘non-Latin’ fonts as to our Latin fonts, and by now our fonts support over 190 languages spoken by over 1.5 billion native speakers. Latest expansion of Fedra family is Devanagari version.

The Devanagari script is a Brahmi-derived writing system used originally to write Sanskrit. It is used in India and Nepal to write many languages, including the official language of the Indian government.

Fedra Hindi is Typotheque’s most ambitious ‘non-Latin’ project. After 2 years in development, Fedra Hindi comes in 5 weights with full support for conjuncts. Designed by Peter Biľak and SN Rajpurohit.

Fedra Hindi was awarded Bronze medal at the European Design Awards 2009 competition.

Typographica's Favorite Typefaces of 2008  23 Apr 2009

The newly redesigned Typographica published their Favorite Typefaces of 2008. Two Typotheque's typefaces were selected: Brioni and History. Caren Litherland reviewed Brioni and called it “a sober but friendly and eminently readable face that can cross borders and make itself at home in disparate contexts.” She also asks a question: “What new redesign will take the plunge with this versatile up-and-comer?” We already know of two newspapers which are preparing their redesign using Brioni.

Ellen Lupton selected History, our system of layering styles. According to Lupton, History “speaks to the current interest across the design fields in engaging users in the design process.” She explained her choice: “[Bilak ]has done it in an astonishingly sophisticated way. By breaking down the typeface into components that can be recombined in endless combinations, he has designed an open situation rather than a fixed product.”

Read original review here: http://new.typographica.org/2009/features/our-favorite-typefaces-of-2008/

Back Cover No.2 now available  10 Apr 2009

Back Cover (formerly known as Marie Louise) is the only serious French magazine, as far as we are concerned, interested in graphic design and its history. Now with full English translation. In this issue: An interview with Elektrosmog; Illustrating Photography by Catherine de Smet; Interview with Benoît Rosemont, illusionist; About 'Pioneers of Modern Typography' by Étienne Robial; Christoph Keller on Books and Art; François Chastanet on 'About Structures of Connections' by Władisław Pluta, and more.

Typotheque Fonts Now Support Klingon  01 Apr 2009

To meet the growing demand for for global communication, Typotheque has taken another step towards true internationalisation by extending all its fonts to support Klingon. Typotheque CEO Peter Bilak officially announced this revolutionary development today: “Having extended language support to Greek, Cyrillic, Devanagari and Armenian, tlhIngan pIqaD (the Klingon alphabet) is just another logical step towards market domination in the field of multilingual fonts.”

The Klingon alphabet is the most widespread alien script used today, just as Klingon is the fastest growing alien language on Earth. In the words of Nikola Djurek, Typotheque Klingon specialist, “It was frustrating to always see Klingon in the same spiky style. Klingon speakers finally have a range of letterforms to choose from now, as we have developed Fedra Sans Klingon, Fedra Serif Klingon and Fedra Sans Condensed Klingon, plus a number of display fonts.” Typotheque Klingon fonts come with extensive support of OpenType layout features, including small caps, three different sets of numerals, and Klingon superior and inferior letters, which are especially useful for the setting of Klingon academic publications. All future Typotheque fonts will include Klingon characters in Typotheque Standard encoding, and currently registered users will be able to upgrade their fonts to include the new characters for the standard fee.

It is expected that the newly revised Klingon translation of the complete works of William Shakespeare will be typeset in Fedra Serif Klingon later this year.

The National Grid No.5  13 Mar 2009

A graphic design publication from New Zealand. According to the editors: 'The National Grid is interested in the artefacts and methodologies of the practitioner - the designers of everyday things, who seek to transform, in some small way, both their own and their audiences' experience of the world around them.' The magazine offers an eclectic mix of contents ranging from design definitions to fiction and music. Contributions from Bruce Rotherham, unknown, Steve Kerr, David Bennewith, Kelvin Soh, Sarah Hopkinson, Peter Gilderdale, Wayne Daly, Russel Bestly, and Zak Kyes.

www.typotheque.com/books/the_national_grid_no_5

Letter to Robin Kinross  13 Mar 2009

22-year-old Andy de Fiets, on the verge of graduating from his graphic design studies, writes to his hero: Hyphen Press publisher Robin Kinross. Andy offers unsolicited advice, seeks much-needed guidance, and shares his thoughts on matters such as typography, The Smiths, Islamic fundamentalism, proper clothing, the homeless, dust covers. Andy spots every comma but misses every point. A delightful typographic comedy, mocking the perverse fanaticism in design.

www.typotheque.com/books/letter_to_robin_kinross

New typeface Klimax (TDC 2009 winner)  20 Feb 2009

Klimax is a display typeface (meant for use in extremely large sizes) with four styles and OpenType features. Klimax includes two basic styles, Plus and Minus — the heaviest and the lightest possible styles that can be made.

Klimax received the Type Directors Club’s Certificate of Excellence in Type Design in 2009. Klimax also received the Judgeʼs Choice award.


www.typotheque.com/fonts/klimax
PDF presentation

typographers-calendar.com site launched  20 Feb 2009

Did you miss out on our limited edition of pocket calendars? As the physical calendar sells very quickly, we have created a website which shows you every day what holidays are observed in various cultures. Additionally, you can generate PDF’s with monthly or yearly overviews, download iCal calendars and see previous editions of our printed calendars.

If you are using our calendars, we’d love to see how you use them, so please upload images to the In Use section. If you have suggestions on how to further improve the calendar, please fill out our Survey.

Font License Calculator  19 Feb 2009

The question that we receive most often is 'How much are your fonts?'. Our response is of course, 'Well it depends'. Indeed, it is the font format, the number of users, and specific font that make the final price of a font license. To make life easier for ourselves, and also for our beloved customers, we created Font License Calculator that will calculate the final price (including possible discounts) for you, and email you a quote.

Typotheque has designed the basic typographic template for the Slovak Euro stamps  23 Jan 2009

Typotheque has designed the basic typographic template for the Slovak Euro stamps. Fedra Sans Condensed Al Bold is used for the denomination of the stamps, domicile is in Fedra Sans Display Thin, and the name of the monument is in Fedra Sans Alt Medium. The post stamps are printed on rotary recess press combined with gravure. Stamps are engraved by various artists, and layout is implemented by Peter Augustovič following the basic template designed by Peter Biľak.

Preview of Klimax, a new typeface  19 Nov 2008

Klimax, a new typeface scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2009 by Typotheque, will consists of two extremes: the ultra-light and ultra-black, and their proper cursive italics. Design by Ondrej Jób, current student of Type]Media course at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.

http://www.typotheque.com/site/font_in_development.php?id=65
http://www.typotheque.com/site/font_in_development.php?id=66
http://www.typotheque.com/site/font_in_development.php?id=67

Pocket calendar 2009 sold out  12 Nov 2008

It took exactly 10 days to sell out the entire edition of the Typotheque 2009 pocket calendar. As it comes with limited editions, there will be no reprint. But you are invited to reserve the diary for 2010here.

Pocket calendar / sketchbook 2009  02 Nov 2008

Limited edition of the pocket-size, no-nonsense Typotheque calendar and sketchbook. Main features are: week overview on a double page, year overview, 12 different pre-printed grids in the sketchbook. International holidays (multi-religious), design events and other days of interest are indicated on the index page, as well as on day overviews.

Hurry up, last year’s edition was sold out in three weeks.

Greta Narrow  02 Nov 2008

The Narrow series complete the Greta type family. Available for all three of the optical sizes (Text, Display and Grande), and of course up to the Typotheque standards with extended Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.

Typotheque work 1999-2008  21 Oct 2008

We at Typotheque have spent quite some time developing typefaces. These typefaces are presented in detail on your website. However, we have also spent a considerable amount of time using typefaces in diverse projects. These projects range from books, postage stamps, posters, webpages, t-shirt designs and exhibition architecture/design to more unexpected disciplines such as conceptual proposals for modern dance performances or event organisation. You can now see our projects online

Mixing Typotheque fonts  15 Oct 2008

After developing an advanced OpenType FontTester, we now offer another useful application. Would you like to see how different Typotheque fonts work together? Simply select a Headline, Sub-head, and Text typeface and see how they work together. Or choose one of the Presets, that we created. Better yet, ther eis a downloadable PDF file with suggested combinations.

In the Name Of the Father (or the troubles with L-caron)  28 Sep 2008

Real life situation that forced a type designer to evaluate his profession. One small typographic detail (incorrect version of the diacritics over the letter L) causing troubles with authorities. With a happy end. This article was commissioned and first published in the book KAPITAL KM by Onomatopee.net

New Typeface: Brioni & Brioni Text  17 Sep 2008

An elegant new typeface suitable for setting books and magazines. Brioni developed spontaneously from practice with a broad-nib pen, but the result is a hybrid of calligraphic influences and subtle manipulation of the stroke terminals. Available also as Brioni Text, a sturdy slab serif for text of all sizes, but especially suitable for fine print. A highly functional typeface family that is easy to work with and inviting to read.

Greta fonts in Greek and Cyrillic  17 Sep 2008

Following the release of Greta Grande Pro, we now follow with Pro versions of Greta Text and Display. Typotheque OpenType Pro encoding supports over 80 languages, including Greek and Russian.