This week in type: ä 4 SVG

joeclark

As sure as there’s an X in Christmas, you the typophile, or you the typedrawer, will want a Neue Haas Unica mug bearing the letter ä.

Colour SVG fonts in Firefox will light up your “holiday tree,” or would have done so 14 months ago when they were demoed.

Speaking of those, I’m not sure I understand Tim Brown’s Universal Typography or how it differs from many other such demos I have bookmarked over the centuries, including a previous project by Brown discussed in these drawers. Or look at this one: “FontReach scans the top million sites to show font usage across the [W]eb.” (Lexicon? “No matches found.”)

“Which piece of work from the last year do you feel has been most significant to your portfolio/career?” Neville Brody: “The Channel 4 font.” (Slash in original!) Compare Sawdust Studio’s numerals for Wired UK (Twitter; Instagram [start with 9]).

Sawdust has allegedly “carved a niche in the bespoke-typeface business mostly working with editorial clients,” though what we’re talking about here are custom fonts for basketball players that have the feel of techno music blasted at an NBA game. (“Y’all ready for this?”) Let’s not forget what was also allegedly the first NHL team to include accented letters on player jerseys, the Habs.

This is really just a seriously terrible article, dutifully copied by clickbait kidz, about what clearly is not “Canada’s new typeface” in any guise. (“Canada 150 is among a handful of typefaces to bridge multiple languages.” Then why can I already buy a coffee mug with an ä on it?)

“Now Carter & Cone and Font Bureau are releasing an expanded family of this typeface.”

“Why Proxima Nova Is Everywhere” fails to account for the obvious explanation that “Proxima Nova” is a beautifully evocative and memorable locution that works in essentially every language spoken by Web designers and art directors. Further, it makes you feel like you’ve got one up on the competition because you’re using the new-hotness Nova version of Proxima, not whatever old-and-busted Proxima your grampappy used.

Our type-designer colleague with the most multilingual name, Joachim Müller-Lancé, surely cannot claim to have a coffee mug with ü or é on it but did just release a Lego-like blackletter typeface. Blackletter, the folk music of type classifications, can be and is used for basically everything, from Vietnamese book covers to skin illustrations to dummy Swiss newspaper layouts. I’m a fan.