35 / Ink traps are back in style 🌓

David Jonathan Ross released Gimlet Banner, an energetic contemporary serif with high contrast. Designed for use at large sizes, the font is available to members of his Font of the Month Club, for which memberships go for as little as $6/month. By joining the club now, you’ll not only get your hands on Gimlet Banner, but you’ll also receive a brand new font designed by David every single month. And if you do so now, you’ll get one for free.

🎁 For a limited time, Fresh Fonts readers get one month free when signing up for Font of the Month.

Variable fonts inspired Dinamo’s designers to bring back ink traps, a feature traditionally used in typefaces for printing in small sizes, so that the excess ink would spread into these gaps rather than soak outwards. Their latest release, Whyte, therefore features exaggerated ink traps at its joints, although for maximum versatility, it comes with a sister family that doesn’t, and a variable font version will soon let you choose how deep you’d like the ink traps to be.

The newest release of Kontour Type, the independent foundry of Sibylle Hagmann, is one of my favourite typefaces of the year already. To cover a broad range of uses, Utile comes in two versions, Text and Display, each one in seven weights with italics. While Utile Text features compensating ink traps, its Display counterpart has sharp transitions – a design decision that is not surprising, given that ink traps are normally used for small text.

London-based Fontsmith also chose to incorporate ink traps into its latest release, although in a much more subtle way. Designed by Kristína Jandová, the typeface is a geometric grotesque with quirky details, and a deep cut ink trap in its capital ‘G’. I find it to be an interesting use of ink traps – applied only to a specific character rather than to the whole family. Also, I love the capital ‘Q’ which comes with three delightful alternative options.

Construk Sans is a typeface that employs ligatures to provide an alternate version of the English language that is void of gendered words, including gendered pronouns, by replacing words such as “she” and “he” with the neutral “they.” This is probably the most clever use of ligatures I’ve ever seen, so kudos to design student Ryan S. Hicks for coming up with this brilliant idea. The typeface is currently available in one weight, Regular, but more styles are in the making. Free for personal and commercial use.

Designed by Sydney-based Paul Conley, Badd Mono is an experimental reinterpretation of Christian Robertson’s Roboto Mono typeface. This all uppercase variant is available in one style (Regular), but featuring interesting alternates, such as characters that seem to have been squashed down towards the baseline. Free for personal and commercial use.

Although Ebony was released back in 2015, I recently found out that TypeTogether generously made two of its styles available for free, Heavy and Heavy Italic. With its dark weight and tight curves, Ebony Heavy provides great performance on both print and digital – just like the other eight weights in its family. Free for personal and commercial use.