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Next up in the series of font alternatives for popular fonts is Thesis – or better known as TheSans, TheSerif, TheMix, TheSans Mono. I’ve found 7 interesting alternatives – from huge and expensive to very big and resonable priced. …click here to continue…
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The font DIN typeface family is inspired by the classic industrial German engineering designs, DIN 1451 Engschrift and DIN 1451 Mittelschrift. This font comes since 1995 from two different foundries. While Linotype has the original designs, Fontshop made their interpretation with the aid of Albert-Jan Pool under the name FF DIN. FF DIN became quite popular because it had a few more widths and was optimized for graphic design.
Linotype on the other hand just launched their new DIN interpretation called DIN Next under the direction of Akira Kobayashi. In this new interpretation you find 25 fonts and 7 weights. An impressive re-work with many additional features. Find out more on the official website of Linotype.
While this are good news in the tradition of this series I’ve looked around the foundries to find some other alternatives and found some interesting ones. So enjoy. …click here to continue…
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An important part of corporate design and branding in general is the font used online and offline. That’s no secret – the typeface must be readable (or not) and transport in a distilled way the character of the brand. But how unique can you be when 90% of the logos and corporate designs are made with the 8 most popular fonts (Helvetica, Univers, Futura, Thesis, Eurostile, Bank Gothic, Avenir)? Not much.
It is therefore a good idea to search for a special font or even better to ask a type designer to make a custom font. The custom font can push your brand experience further than you could by just using a common font as they can be tailored to the profile of the company.
A nice example is the font “Serrano” a custom font made for the Bank of New Zealand made by Klim Type Foundry under the direction of DNA.
If you think that having a new font from scratch is too expensive you might also contract with the type foundry that you don’t have the exclusive rights to the font to bring down the price. But in the end the benefits from having your own font is priceless;-)
PS: Thanks to Graham for inspiring me to this post – follow him immediately on Twitter
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Back again with some more alternative fonts for your graphic design pleasure. This time I want to show you some very fresh fonts, none of the presented fonts are designed prior to 1999. This is partly because Interstate itself is quite new (1993) and it would be strange if I found an alternative that is older than the original. A bit of history – Interstate is based on the font used by the Federal Highway Administration and was one of the most popular typefaces in the 90s. Used often for corporate design and quite flexible enough for a broad range of “topics”. Enough bla bla, lets get started. …click here to continue…
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Let’s get fshionable. Gill Sans is for sure one of the most used fonts for corporate design in the fashion industry. Whe a brand claims elegance and self confidence this font is a sure shot. But with the wide use (since Mac OSX it’s even a standard system font) one brand looks like another, so let’s get some alternatives.
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Next in our series of alternatives to classic fonts comes Garamond. Garamond is available from nearly every bigger font vendor as you font geeks know. There is no “the Garamond” and even at the time Claude Garamond lived, the font name Garamond indicated a style of type. But if you like to choose a Garamond I will recommend you the edition of Adobe, designed by Robert Slimbach. And now lets see the candidates. …click here to continue…
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To talk anymore about Helvetica seems pretty awkward. There is now even a movie with Interviews to important designers, featuring David Carson, Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel (availlable in DVD
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Here follows a handy macro I’ve written for converting text written with Dual Greek Codepage to Unicode. Since I worked for a lot of firms operating internationally I’ve run into a lot of language and font issues. Here the solution to a common problem – converting legacy texts to unicode. …click here to continue…
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Are you bored to use always the same classic fonts? Helvetica, Garamond and Gill are awesome fonts, but don’t help your graphic design project to be unique. There are thousands of alternatives fonts available, but which ones are right for your project. This little guide will help you choose an alternative starting from the classic fonts. You wanted to use Helvetica? Why not try FF Fago. This is the first of a 12 part series featuring Zapfino, the classic script font. …click here to continue…
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Are you using too small font?
In the last lessons I talked about the mindset of an art director. It’s different from a graphic designer in many aspects. It is often difficult to explain what is different, so I will try to make an example – a situation that every graphic designer who is working not just for himself has faced. The “too small font issue“. …click here to continue…
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