Since the beginning of December very many people have registered and got a copy of Xmas Rudolph.
Thank you for many nice and friendly comments about the font on the blog and by email.

Most of the registrations were honest. Only a few did not register the way they should have.
For some strange reason many of those are german, according to the email address that was necessary to get the font.

The Xmas-Rudolph-Offer will end on christmas. Go and get your copy!

Merry christmas and a happy new year to everybody!

You + 16 Friends + These = Comfy These numerical keypad chairs might not be very practical in their intended configuration. Maybe in your home theater room during viewings parties of The Office, or in the waiting room at an accountant's office. You'll find them, along with plenty of other curiosities, on permanent display at PantoGraph. via Gizmodo

A san serif is easy in one way. You have a vertical stroke that ends like a square. Most of the time the outline is even. There is not much happening at the border of black and white. In the 19th century when the sans serifs got popular people called them GROTESQUES. Not used to the forms of the sans they might have thought, there is something missing, something cut away, not complete.
In the last few years I worked more on serifs then on sans serifs. One of the first things you discover when doing this, is that the spacing is completely different. The serifs and other elements create other shapes and a much more complex system of proportion. Many more decisions have to be made and many more form components have to be designed and be harmonized.
For me as a designer who still grew up in this German Bauhaus/HFG athmosphere where less was always more, this experience is very interesting. When your approach is always less is more you loose the ability to design complex compositions. You tend to take things out that might have been important.
Dont get me wrong. I still love sans serifs and I am working on a new one at the moment. But serifs are much more challenging.

The first ideas of Alida I had about two years ago. It started with a display serif with thin hairlines and thin but clear serifs. For a long time I did not know what to do with it. Usually I tend to work very quick on a typeface, because I think that keeps life and character in the stroke. With Alida several new approaches were needed to finally find the right way for it. So it took its time.

Alida for text has got 7 different weights with italics and smallcaps and a display version with 7 weights and italics







At the end I decided to keep both roots the display and the text.



(Display, Text, Display-Italic, Text-Italic)


I know, the »s« in the display version is quite eccentric.
(from left to right, Display, Text, Display, Text, Display, Text)

Smallcaps are available for the text version



I am thinking of a sans serif, but I am not sure yet



Alida Text
Alida Display

Movie posters can be hit or miss, but the Batman franchise has a long (slightly tarnished) history of greatness. Two weeks before the latest film entry, there's another poster for the (art) history books. Google searches have yet to surrender the name of the poster artist... maybe you know the artist? Maybe you are the artist?

Voice has been published December 2005 in the URW++ library.
But after I decided to build my own shop it is now available only here.
The new oldstyle figures and smallcaps version has the extention OS






The idea of Voice started with a simple, easy to use, easy to space, easy to scale sans serif. I spent quite a bit of time finding the right shapes for the lower case. The way the strokes end in the a, the c, the e and the s tell a lot about the structure of the lower case.

In a typeface like Helvetica the stroke-ends those letters makes them look very closed up.



The other extreme is Argo with open almost horizontal ends.


In Voice  a, c, e and s therefore play an important role in the rhythm of the whole typeface. To keep the spacing simple those letters needed to fill their space without the need of much kerning.

That also helped to design an extreme Ultrabold.


Ascenders, descenders and proportion are relatively compact for the use in narrow columns with tight leading as well as headlines.

The basic sans serif has got two variants. Called Voice Edge and Voice Shoulder. Little alternations to the stroke of the lower case lead to very different styles.

There is one serif for all variants


Every family has got 9 weights with italics and in the OS/SC version (oldstyle figures/smallcaps) all 9 weights with smallcaps


There are 3 kinds of figures in the typeface. normal lining figures in the basic families.
Oldstyle figures and smallcaps figures in the OS families.


Lining figures, currency symbols and mathematical symbols have the same width.



Voice
VoiceEdge
VoiceShoulder
VoiceSerif
TeleVoice

VoiceOS
VoiceEdgeOS
VoiceShoulderOS
VoiceSerifOS
TeleVoiceOS