With swooping necks, quaint ears and abstract loops, the lowercase g has become a beautiful character to fall in love with, and type designers have been creating some extremely lovely and mesmerizing ones for years.
LAIKA, the dynamic typeface.
Douglas Bonneville lists 19 combinations of fonts, each set pairing one serif with one sans. While I don’t agree with every use or font combination, it makes for a great case study.
For those who haven’t been keeping up (myself included), The League of Movable Type has released some great new open source fonts ready for CSS3 embedding. My current favorite is now “League Gothic“—A revival of Alternate Gothic No. 1. As with most of the fonts they offer, I only wish there were a few more weights in the family.
New from HFJ, Tungsten® is “a tight family of high-impact fonts in four weights: muscular and persuasive, without sacrificing wit, versatility, or style.” This really hits at the center of my love for HFJ: Their ability to create classic, timeless fonts, often refining a style which has been around for decades. Tungsten looks to be a great, modern improvement over older condensed sans serifs like Akzidenz Grotesk and Franklin Gothic. Another recent release, Sentinel, likewise improves and expands on the ever-popular slab serif, Clarendon. (via mikemccarron)
Typedia is “a shared encyclopedia of typefaces,” created by Daniel Mall and Jason Santa Maria. They explain further:
Think of it as IMDb.com for type, but anyone can contribute. You can list typefaces (as well as foundries and designers), and other members can add to or complete your entries. We’ve also started a section of the site to learn about different terms related to type and the different ways they are classified.
