I think I need an iPad.
FontBook, now in version 2.0, is the world’s most comprehensive typographic reference tool, containing 110 type foundries and featuring over 620,000 typeface specimens. This 7 min tour explains the main features of FontBook.

Description on their site:
If typography were a religion, this would be the Bible. FontBook is the world’s most comprehensive typographic reference tool, containing 110 type foundries and featuring over 620,000 typeface specimens. Use the FontBook app to look up and view fonts by name, style category, typographical subclassification, designer name, foundry name, year of publication, or by similarity of design. Compile your own list of favorite fonts, and use the “compare” tool to test-drive fonts. Specially designed for fast, easy navigation and also works as a fun playground for finding inspiration.

Aria Pro is a beautiful typeface by Rui Abreu, available at Fountain.

In his own words:

The inspiration for this typeface came from the epigraph on a frame of a nineteenth century painting. I was fascinated by the peculiar capitals of the inscription. The high contrast, and the overall quirkiness, especially the tail of the R and the oblique stems on the M, was interesting.

I decided to draw a display font with high contrast and a vertical axis, in a reference to the transitional form. Still I wanted to capture the spirit of the original letters, which to me are so imbued with Romanticism. This approach allowed for some exuberance on the regular style, but also led to more calligraphic letterforms in the italic – in which “the flow of the curves” lead the way.

To add to this epigraphic nature there is a number of ornaments that accompany words accordingly to their uppercase or lowercase form. For versatility there’s also a good amount of ligatures, alternative glyphs, and a special set of ornamental numbers.

Typeface design: Rui Abreu
Movie trailer: Rui Abreu

Since 1995.
Lovely work from Iñigo Jerez…

I think it´s great! I already loved the Neutraface, and I guess House Industries made a very nice job with this new “raising the bar” design.

Neutraface No. 2 is a completely reconceptualized, redrawn and re-engineered version of our venerable best-selling Neutraface collection. The new collection complements the original Neutraface by satisfying a broader range of typographic needs with stylistic nuances that express ideas clearly and accurately. Neutraface No. 2 also includes an inline version of the titling weight for eye-catching yet classic and timeless headlines.

Boldoni font is available at Myfonts and T26. I specially like the gray version.
Download the presentation PDF here.

The excelent PingMag has a great article on VEB Typoart, the official foundry of the German Democratic Republic.
The Typoart Freunde limited edition comes inside a nostalgic wooden ‘Freundschaftspaket’ [friendship package]!

Continue and read the entire article…

Boris Dworschak just told me has released his new font over at Die-Gestalten.

IkiruSerif is a contemporary Slab-Serif font family with enough esprit to make your graphic language teem with zest and power. Ikiru means “to live, to exist” in Japanese and the typeface comes in 10 weights including thin, light, medium, bold and their italic versions – all of which are designed from the thin version giving the typeface an elegant, sharp and discreet appearance and a forceful, concise look in the bold versions. The IkiruSerif font family is suitable for composing texts of various lengths – effective for a wide range of daily use. The thin version is especially designed for usage in big point sizes, for instance in posters or banners.

www.borisdworschak.de

KLIM is a typographic design studio run by Kris Sowersby.
Presented here is Feijoa, a very elegant typeface, with lots of open type features (download PDF).

Feijoa is my first serious book typeface, representing four summer’s worth of bloody hard work. I wanted a feeling of softness in a typeface, to design a type that didn’t have all the sharp points and edges that can make digital type so stale and inhuman. The saying “a straight line is a dead line” was very inspirational, I initially took that rather seriously. However, it became apparent that this need not be taken literally, as many of the baseline curves became irrelevant at smaller sizes.

Available at Village.
Also take a look at his moleskine section, very inspiring.

Typotheque launched a new product: Fedra Arabic.

It takes into consideration the contemporary uses of Arabic type and offers a pragmatic solution for multilingual typesetting. The simplified forms of Arabic are stripped of all decoration while keeping the intrinsic structure of the Arabic writing system.

The typeface is available either as a separate Arabic font, or as part of the large Multiscript font package, which includes support for extended Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic, with advanced typographic features.

The characteristics that were carried over to the design of the Arabic version are mainly the proportions of the Latin: the baseline, ascender and descender, which were kept identical. On the other hand, two middle heights were defined, which are different than the x-height of the Latin font. Rather than directly bringing shapes from Latin, it was mainly the character of the curves that has been adopted for the Arabic counterpart. In Fedra, the curves start fairly fl at and begin to turn relatively late, which creates a particular tension of shapes. The contrast between the thick and thin is maintained. This has allowed for keeping the same color in both the Latin and the Arabic text. Of course many things are not possible to translate from Latin to Arabic directly, so oneto be very sensitive not to impose the Latin structure on Arabic. The Arabic version uses the proportions and formal attributes of Fedra, but not its individual shapes. Because of the Semitic roots, the angle of the contrast is inverted, and what was the thickest horizontal in Latin, becomes the thickest vertical in Arabic. The same is true of the thinnest strokes, it is again rotated 90 degrees.

Fedra Arabic was designed so it can be combined with either Fedra Serif or Sans, by carefully matching the typographic ‘colour’ of the typeface.

Matrix II is a complete reworking of the Matrix type family which was originally designed by Zuzana Licko in 1985. The redesign, which started in January 2007, was initiated by the need to create an OpenType version of Matrix. With the hood open, so to speak, Licko used the opportunity to make subtle changes and to fine tune many of the existing characters which were designed some 20 years ago. The contrast between thick and thin strokes was decreased in some instances, and overshoots were corrected. The width of various characters was adjusted and regularized. The cross stroke on the f was simplified on most weights. The design of the lower case g was revisited and an alternate single story version was designed and added to the OpenType version. Seven new fonts were also added to the family: a Semi Narrow, Semi Wide, Semi Tall, Inline Italic, and 3 weights of Italic – a less flamboyant version of Matrix Script. To clearly set this version apart from the original Matrix, and to avoid conflict with previous versions, its name was amended to Matrix II.

To read the full story behind the design and redesign of Matrix, please visit our website:
http://www.emigre.com/EFfeature.php?di=105