19 / The inverted issue 🙃

I was pretty mind-blown by Salvaje, a stunning typeface designed by Cristian Vargas (also known as Typozon) and distributed by Montreal’s Coppers and Brasses. Salvaje has two display styles, Regular and Italic, to which a very high, inverted contrast was applied, creating visual illusions of depth. The designer prefers not to suggest a specific use for it. “This typeface has a lot of personality and it’s not neutral at all,” he says.

Two text styles are also expected soon (of which you can have a preview here) but with a much lower contrast, in order to improve readability.

View Salvaje Display →

☞ Suggested pairings: Salvaje looks best with Sans Serif typefaces with regular roman proportions such as FF Scala Sans and Neue Plak. 

Designed by Lucas Sharp, Beatrice is dedicated to his mother, Beatrice Benjamin, “who continues to seek beauty, embraces originality and has never let convention hold her back.” The Beatrice superfamily includes two optical sizes: a super high-contrast Display cut, as well as a more standard low-contrast Sans designed to work beautifully in a wide range of contexts.

The Display cut, with its visually striking effect, might look like a reversed contrast display at first, but in fact, its contrast methodology is new, an innovation that Sharp Type decided to call the “internal contrast.” It consists of applying stroke emphasis to the outside of the letterforms, with the strokes on the inside being the hairlines (more about this).

I am personally particularly fond of the italics of Beatrice Display, which definitely deserve a look. Also, for the launch of the superfamily, Sharp Type teamed up with Justin Sloane to create a pretty neat limited edition long sleeve.

View Beatrice →
View Beatrice Display →

Warsaw-based designer and typographer Maciej Połczyński launched Laïc, his own foundry, with a starting catalogue of ten retail typefaces full of personality. The most recent one, or so it seems, Obibok is a modern Sans with round, geometric shapes, which was also made available with reversed contrast, and the outcome is just delightful. 

Also pictured above is Maruder, a reversed contrast display boasting heavy curves, making it well-suited for branding and editorial use. While I couldn’t feature all of them here, I strongly suggest to have a look at the complete font library of Laïc Type Foundry, as it is full of genuine work. 

View Obibok →
View Maruder →

Barcelona-based Emtype’s newest release, Aribau, is an interesting take on the grotesque genre, since it also integrates elements typical to the geometric style, such as its clean-shaped figures and circular dots. The typeface is available in eight weights, half of them being light ones – Thin, UltraLight, ExtraLight and Light, to be more precise – with matching italics. Get 50% off all styles until July 12, 2018.

Production Type released Sainte Colombe, a delicate Serif named after Jean de Sainte Colombe, a 17th-Century French composer and violist credited with adding the seventh string on the bass viol. While providing a classical look and feel, the typeface features a few irregularities here and there, for example in the lowercase italic g, with its notched stem curving into itself.

View Sainte Colombe →

Designed by French typographer Olivier Gourvat and published by his own foundry, Mostardesign, Marlon Pro is a rounded Sans Serif with a warm and modern feel. The typeface comes in nine weights with corresponding italics, and supports both Latin and Cyrillic scripts. For a limited time, get 80% off the complete family pack.

Syne is a type family designed by Lucas Descroix and Bonjour Monde for Synesthésie, an art center close to Paris. What makes Syne so interesting to me is that its five different cuts are diverse enough to create fresh and atypical associations among them. For instance, while Syne Regular is a geometric sans, it features short vertical proportions (most visible in the lowercase g above) and the Monospaced font received a special treatment to make its contours definitely unique. Open source, free for personal and commercial use.

Happy Times at the IKOB is a contemporary take of Times New Roman, designed by Lucas Le Bihan as a custom typeface for the new visual identity of the IKOB, a museum of contemporary art located in Eupen, Belgium. The typeface is available in two styles, Regular and Italic, and you can already see what it looks like in use on the website of the museum. Open source, free for personal and commercial use.

Download Happy Times at the IKOB →

Designed by Alfonso García, Multiple is a new superfamily consisting of a Sans as well as a Slab version. The Sans version includes four stylistic sets, while its Slab companion comes with three. With so many styles and alternates to play with, Multiple is an incredibly versatile typeface, well-suited for any design project. Furthermore, LatinoType is offering a special pre-release ‘pay what you want’ deal on the complete Multiple family (90 fonts). Pay what you want for personal and commercial use, starting from US$5.

View Multiple →