You come in second, Paul.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend a lecture held by Dan Reynolds here in Frankfurt where he showed his Malabar and talked about its development. Good Job. Congrats.

Is Klimax miscredited?

Are there any women at all among this year's winners?

T

Congratulations!

Re Klimax: That’s what I’ve thought, too. Typotheque says it is by Ondrej Jób.

BRAVO Dan! Way to break in bigtime!

And how about Kris Sowersby TWO awards!

ChrisL

And how about Kris Sowersby TWO awards!

I think he’s chasing the Grand Prix.

yes. klimax is miscredited. i hope they will fix that soon :)

I wonder what came first, Optica or Dioptical.

Ondrej, Klimax is lovely, congratulations!

I forgot to mention our good friends Ale Paul and Carl Crossgrove!
Congrats to both of you AGAIN! Repeat winners once more! GOoD Work--and Carl, get your sample up!

ChrisL

Thanks Chris and everyone. I will send them something tonight! Congrats to Kris, Ale, Dan, Stephen and all. I feel honored.

Congratulations all around! Ondrej, Klimax might be my favorite of the lot.

Carl, I want to see more of Nebulon, too. Are we going to get to sell it soon? ;-)

Congratulations everyone! It's a particularly fine selection this years.

Karsten

Yeah, i feel very happy too! Come on Kris and Carl, show your samples! lol

Congratulations to our Typophile winners: Dan, Ale, Kris, Carl! Looking forward to seeing the samples.

our Typophile winners

Well, actually most of them are fellow typophiles!
At least Ondrej, Rui and Stephen are frequent contributors here.

OK, the sample I sent in is posted, as are Kris' 2. Dan, I still have to wrangle kerning and features, but yes, it will be available soon.

I think we could say any of the winners are present or potential Typophile members. Hasn't Mark Jamra posted here?

My sister said Klimax "gave me a suffocating inexplicable nightmare feeling".... Ha Ha! I like it a lot. There is something blacker than ultra!

That’s great, Carl! It’s amazing to look at Nebulon and think that you also did Beorcana—what a breadth of work!

Nebulon is great, Carl. Contemporary and clean with overtones of the Jetsons. ;-)

Carl, I'm relieved to see that our concepts were completely different! Now I can develop my take on futuristic Microgramma. hehe

thank you guys! and congrats to all the winners! especially the ones that won twice ;)

Congrats to all winners! Love all of the winning entries.
Nice to see Klimax on there too, since it was on the crit boards on Typophile! :)

Definitely lots of congratulations to go around.

Kris Sowersby is quickly becoming one of my favorite type designers.

I'd like to see more of Cassius--I found a type sample on the web, but I was confused about its status at the time. I saw Greek characters somewhere in the specimen, but they weren't listed as supported elsewhere.

It's great to see so much wonderful work.

Congratulations to all the winning entries, first of all.

Cassius was designed to support Arabic as well. You can find a specimen here: http://www.typefacedesign.org/2008/ Glad to see it recognized.

I knew Klimax was something special when I first saw it on the crit boards. That type sample is so much fun to look at.

Yeah, Mathieu definitely deserved the win with Cassius.

Nice to see many familiar faces, both human and typographic!
Congrats to all.

I think my favorite is Nebulon.

hhp

> I wonder what came first, Optica or Dioptical.

http://typophile.com/node/27833

http://www.gestalten.com/fonts/detail/?id=be0db8100c98034e010ca9ae0f240004

hhp

@ Thomas: This is a very good question. Thanks a lot.

Congrats to all winners. My favorite is Malabar. I wonder if there's a big problem with Optica Normall's readbility and legibility. Anyway, its' pretty cool and vertiginous.

congrats all, well done!

Excellent!

Sharon

Congratulations to everyone who won, Lirico and Kris Sowersby's work are some of my favourites. But a special congratulations to my fellow Type and Media students Ondrej (for Klimax) and Berton (for his exquisite Alda).

Congrats to all the winners! Impressive work. My favorites are Alda and Nebulon (which is strangely intriguing). Also, Dan, I'm intrigued with Malabar's tiny cap height. That should work great for German!

my congratulations to all. i wonder how many will enjoy commercial success. previously, this competition has not had a great track record in that regard.

Get them all to market, guys!

ChrisL

the tdc competition seems to highlight the gap between graphic designers and type designers... the tdc picks rarely translate into types graphic designers want to use... why is that?

Which graphic designers are those? I have never found your theory to have any validity.

ChrisL

The fact that experts have more refined taste than the average client should not be a surprise. In commercial art the designer doesn’t always get to do what they please.

There may be some truth to farquart's assertion. FF Netto, for example, has seen great commercial success, but wasn't selected by the jury (along with other FontFonts).

On the other hand, I do see practical value in many of the winners — especially Alda, Novel, and Malabar. And as further evidence against the theory, Sowersby's two winners were both commissioned designs, so there was a obviously a group of graphic designers who demanded each of those typefaces.

I think a careful and balanced statistical analysis is in order.

hhp

it strikes me that the winners of the competition are types that have very strong personalities... i would think most graphic designers are drawn to more neutral looking designs... allowing the designer to put their personality on the work rather than fight with a type with such strong personality... the fact that mr sowersby's designs were commissions and the most neutral looking of the winners may bear this out... also mr paul's beautiful script faces have won a few times, they are very beautiful, but how many graphic designers actually use script fonts in their work? maybe a few times in their career... i know that veer's and most other on-line resellers point to scripts as their most popular sellers, but the question has to be asked... who is licensing these designs, and how come they turn up so rarely in general commercial work... are they more objects than tools?

If you look at packaging in the food industry, you will see plenty of scripts.

ChrisL

> most graphic designers are drawn to more neutral looking designs

Really? Maybe 40 years ago.

> how many graphic designers actually use script fonts in their work?

?
Script fonts are always best-sellers.

The hardest thing to sell (at least retail) is a serious serif.

> who is licensing these designs

You think it's people who buy the font, install it and just look at pangrams?
(Wow, I wish people bought fonts for that!)

hhp

It seems as if there are three things people are talking about, combining two if they want to bolster their argument. Specifically, 1) design recognition, 2) use by graphic designers, and 3) commercial success. Farquart complains that 1 and 2 don't correlate, and Stewf chimes in that plenty of 3s that were not 1s.

I wonder how much graphic designers go for something "timeless" in their designs, which might involve using (as farquart notes) something with a more neutral personality. Witness the continuing usage of Helvetica.

On the other hand, commercial success for a font publisher often involves convincing graphic designers that last year's typeface is now passe and needs to be replaced with the hottest, latest typeface. "You don't want to use Fnorkle Script for Shazbat, Inc., because Blah Industries used it in their ad campaign last year." Nevermind that both the Shazbat and Blah logos are Helvetica.

I'm not how sure how commercial success should be brought into type design competitions (this one, or others). The TDC2, for example, does not require that submitted designs already have been released. I guess that some winners might never get released… that is at least a theoretical possibility.

Moreover, since the contest is supposed to be blind, should judges really consider how successful a typeface may have already been? When you submit your PDFs to the contest, you don't include the designer's name, typeface name, or foundry name in the layout. So you couldn't well write "Dear judge, this typeface has already sold xxx copies! Love, foundry y."

Now, I guess that individual judges could look at a design, and try to guess how successful a design might be. But that is a slightly different question. Also, I suspect that "success" is defined differently at each foundry. I also think that each foundry has—to an extent—its own unique customer base. The customers that really like a certain kind of typeface may always drift to foundry A, while foundry B gets customers who like their popular typefaces a bit better.

Like Stephen Coles, I've been involved with submitting designs from a foundry to this competition for five years now. I also can think of several designs I think were submitted to the contest this year that did not win, and of course I wish that they would have. But I am sure that this year's judges had good reasoning for their choices. I am honored to be on the list of those designers whose typefaces were selected for recognition. When we all read the published TDC annual that comes out later in the year, we can read what the judges had to think about this year's entries and this year's competition.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that judges take commercial success into account in any way. Mine was merely an observation, not a complaint.

> Script fonts are always best-sellers.

For Veer, yes. But not for every vendor.

I remember Jim Parkinson telling me that one of his designs that won the TDC competition has never been licensed by anyone. Not one sale! Maybe there is something to this.

Dan,

I think the TDC does require that the design submitted be something that was created in the previous year. I'm not sure of the language as it relates to "released" but I think the spirit of the competition requires that only the previous year's work be entered.

A large number of MyFonts bestsellers are also script fonts. Among Adobe's fonts, new releases of the past decade which were script fonts were more likely to sell really well than other new releases. I don't think I'd say "script fonts are always best-sellers," but they are more likely to be, it seems.

Cheers,

T

Hrant do you really think that a preference for neutral type went out of style 40 years ago? How do you explain the continued popularity of Trade/News/Franklin Gothic? Why would Font Bureau work so hard at releasing a new Franklin or Benton Sans if there wasn't a desire by GD's for neutral looking fonts.

Didn't Jeremy Tankard's "Blue Island" win a few years ago. Has anyone ever used Blue Island in a commercial project?

I think Farquart may be on to something here.