Archive for Europe
March 4, 2005 at 12:11 am / Foundries, Europe
Want to know a secret about so-called “techno” fonts? Aside from handwriting (and possibly bitmap) typefaces, they’re probably the easiest kind of font for a lazy designer to throw together. Think about it: lots of straight lines, tons of repeatable characters and low expectations from Battlestar Galactica webmasters just looking for a headline font for their fan fiction. Needless to say, it’s always refreshing to see high-tech fonts done well.
onezero pulls it off. I’m not sure who this person is, but visit the portfolio section of their site (Flash ahead) for several nice techno fonts to choose from. Check out: Quer, Racer and Television.
Thanks to John McHugh for the link.
March 3, 2005 at 12:33 pm / Foundries, Europe
If you thought Dieter Steffmann had cornered the “old German guy with a billion free fonts” market, boy were you wrong! Manfred Klein puts Dieter to shame with his mind-boggling collection.
Browse by year:
Archive: 2001
Archive: 2002
Archive: 2003
Archive: 2004
Fonts so far: 2005
2001 & 2002 suffer from an interface that cramps my Firefox tab-launching lunatic style, so I didn’t dig as deep there. But here are some great finds for those of you who don’t feel like spending all day with Mr. Klein: EmkaSansCondensed, Nonserif, PetitLatin, SlimSansSerif, TraditionSans XL Light, TypoLatinSerifBold, U-Bahn.
March 3, 2005 at 12:33 am / Foundries, Europe
Matthew Gotth-Olsen sends a link to Fountain, the one man Swedish foundry that I just hadn’t gotten around to posting about yet. Designer Peter Bruhn offers several “pro bono” fonts for download. CloseCall, Coma and Partisan are all highly recommended. And speaking of pixel fonts, Fountain’s Sevenet is a nice bitmap font that served as the basis for Silkscreen.
I like the idea of a lone, noble Swede sitting at an Ikea desk somewhere, churning out beautiful fonts as an unpaid service to the general public. It almost makes me wish I didn’t spend all my free time watching American Idol in a drunken stupor.
Almost.
March 2, 2005 at 8:02 am / Foundries, Europe
I still have a few megapixels of bitmap fonts to get through, but why not spotlight one of the masters of the form?
Sven Stüber’s Vectorize features some of my favorite free pixel fonts on the web. Make sure to click both the “Fonts” and the “New” links to check everything out. I would link directly to them, but the site’s a little crazy.
Sven’s Superlooper has even more great fonts. Stüber really cranks this stuff out!
Spend a few minutes exploring those sites and you’ll get to see his fonts put to very good use. His type design manages to find the sweet spot somewhere between usability and adventurousness. It’s rare that you find someone giving away so much good work.
March 1, 2005 at 8:48 am / Foundries, Europe
Our friend Brian Donnelly points us toward a huge archive of Dieter Steffmann’s fonts. A lot of them are of the gothic/novelty/not-very-useful variety, but I found several great fonts in the mix. I like Marketing Script and Faktos a lot and Maximilian has some nice lowercase characters.
I’m a little worried though, because I know I’ve seen some of these fonts elsewhere. Let’s hope that someone’s ripping off Dieter’s work and not the other way around.
February 25, 2005 at 10:22 am / Single fonts, Resources, Europe
Phil’s Fonts has District Thin available for free download. GarageFonts sells the District family for $159, so this is a pretty sweet opportunity to get possibly the most useful typeface from that family for nothing!
I discovered this font at Gerrit van Aaken’s praegnanz.de, an excellent repository of essays on about a dozen high-quality free fonts. Oh, in German. For a slightly less indecipherable surfing experience, try translating it with Google.
Comments off
February 24, 2005 at 8:39 am / Single fonts, Europe
In a move that’s sure to spark international controversy, the Danish Ministry of Education has decided to pull their free font Union from the web, replacing it with a page of made up words. Now, I’m not the kind of guy who likes to throw the word “sanctions” around, but… I’m just saying.
Danes: if it’s bandwidth you’re worried about, maybe you could let someone else mirror the fonts? And seriously, try some diplomacy. The last thing we need is sparks flying around the Scandinavian powder keg!
February 23, 2005 at 11:36 am / Single fonts, Europe
Alert reader Morten Wulff points us towards another free Danish font (after yesterday’s Union): Kontrapunkt Light won the Danish Design Prize in 2004 and is available for free from, well, Kontrapunkt. I’m not sure why the Danes are just handing out all these great fonts. Maybe someone should teach them about good old-fashioned American capitalism! Oh, wait. Don’t do that.
