Hundreds of fontheads will descend upon the quiet enclave of Buffalo, NY next week for North America’s only annual conference dedicated to typography: TypeCon. FontShop is proud to be a perennial TypeCon sponsor, and this year our founder Erik Spiekermann will speak at the renowned Albright-Knox Gallery on Friday, July 18.

While Erik’s lecture may be overbooked, there is still time to register for TypeCon as a whole, and we strongly recommend it. It’s one of the most affordable design conferences in the world and it’s packed with valuable and interesting stuff for anyone even vaguely interested in type. But before you pull out that credit card: FontShop has a handful of TypeCon tickets available at no cost for our best friends. Who are our best friends, you ask? Whoever emails us revealing their favorite typeface available on FontShop.com, along with the reasons why they love it so much or an example of the typeface in use. That’s it! First come, first served until the few tickets we have are gone.

We’ve already given Intel props for modernizing their identity with a suitably modern typeface, Sebastian Lester’s Neo® Sans. Data Robotics, Inc. — makers of the Drobo storage device that is sweeping the tech community — have made fine use of another member of the Neo® family, Neo® Tech.

Read more about Neo® in this PDF issued by Monotype® upon its release, and download and print detailed specimens of Neo® Sans and Neo® Tech.

There are various purchase options for the two font families, but we strongly recommend the OpenType Value Packs for efficient access to numerals and alternate glyphs, and, you guessed it, value — getting an OT family all at once costs much less per font.

• Neo® Sans Std
• Neo® Tech Std
• Neo® Sans Pro – support for Central European languages
• Neo® Tech Pro – support for Central European languages

The latest FontFont release introduces four brand new typefaces to our house foundry. Read about them all in this week’s upcoming email newsletter and get a deeper look in the following PDFs created by the type designers themselves.

FF Pitu’s most characteristic features are probably the pronounced stroke modulation and blade-shaped sharp stroke endings, which are slightly softened by generous calligraphic loops with “foxtail” terminals.

» See more: download the PDF

FF Cube is a geometric sans serif, and is with its industrial design akin to Eurostile, but with more open counters.

» See more: download the PDF

FF Tisa has has a tone that suits the casual fare of magazines and advertising as well as more the serious content of newspapers and annual reports. It earned the Type Directors Club’s highest honor: a “Certificate of Excellence in Type Design”.

» See more: download the PDF

FF Nuvo’s soft, calligraphic touch, small caps, multiple figure sets, and italics make it a useful family for editorial, advertising and packaging. Its alternate glyphs add typographic versatility.

» See more: download the PDF

The Pergamon Museum in Berlin is presenting their Babylon exhibition unraveling the deep treasures, myths and truths behind the legendary city of Babylon. For their promotional designs, the exhibit has chosen Achaz Reuss’ contemporary typeface FF QType. FF QType’s structural and square-based letterforms are the modern day alternative to the ancient cuneiform of Babylonian tablets. Using strong blocks of type in all capital letters, their bus ads and promotional designs showcase simple yet bold statements to bring Babylonian history back to life.

The Monotype, ITC, Adobe, and Linotype libraries were all updated last month with new releases and specially priced value packs. Now available at FontShop are convenient family packs of your old favorites like Neue Helvetica, ITC Charter, Frutiger, Univers, and Trajan, along with new takes on the classics like Bembo Book and Garamond Premier Pro.

For something fresh, look to Monotype’s own Sebastian Lester who has followed his extremely popular Neo Sans and Neo Tech with an extensive slab serif family, Soho.

Read more about the update in our June 2008 newsletter.

Discover fresh contemporary type from the Netherlands. A new crop of fonts from OurType is now available at FontShop. New designs like Parry, Neue Sans, Eva, and Amalia fulfill the modern day typographers’ needs and are the perfect alternative to traditional typefaces. Many of OurType’s existing designs got an OpenType Pro update and are now available in full family packages.

Read more about the update in our May 2008 newsletter.