In the words of designer Christian Schwartz, Zizou is his attempt to “draw Antique Olive from memory”. The name Zizou is a clever and witty reference to the city where Excoffon was born: Marseille.

When Antique Olive was released in 1960 it was regarded as the French answer to the rise of the highly successful neo-grotesques of the time, most notably Univers and Helvetica. It is interesting to notice that this style, and in particular Helvetica, has seen a gigantic re-appreciation (or rather over-appreciation) during the last five years.

Will a similar thing happen to Antique Olive? Probably not, since it is too outspoken in comparison to its contemporaries. A prime characteristic of Antique Olive is its play with balance and imbalance thereby breaking conventional rules for stroke contrast. Excoffon believed that by deliberately thickening the most important parts of a letter it would gain legibility.

Zizou appears to have swapped this radical idea for a return to a more conventional stroke contrast. Some critics might argue that means the design was watered down, but that’s too easy. Zizou immediately conveys this very specific Antique Olive atmosphere in a manner that is unique and highly suitable for today’s design. It does its job beautifully and admirably in the tightly tracked headlines of FastCompany which has exclusive rights to the typeface.

Now let’s hope 2012 will bring us more spiritual successors to Excoffon’s legacy executed so well.

Paul van der Laan is a professional type designer and co-founder of Bold Monday. Since 2002 he has been a regular teacher at the Type & Media masters course at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.

The v-shaped notches, where round and straight parts meet, make a line set in Salvo varied and lively. This is even more apparent in the serif styles where angular top slabs and low-sitting bowls in the uppercase letters give the typeface almost a hint of Western style or reverse contrast Egyptians like Trilby. But for me it is the lowercase ‘a’ that is the most iconic in both families and which, to a very large extent, contributes to Salvo’s affable atmosphere. The bottom curve has only a small overshoot under the baseline. This – together with the angular serifs of ‘a’, ‘u’, ‘b’, and others – make the type seem to bounce slightly. Furthermore, the bowl of the ‘a’ reaches more left than its upper stroke, giving the impression of a smiling face. To tell the ridiculous truth, it reminds me of the tooth-bearing grin of Jolly Jumper (the equestrian companion of Belgian cowboy comic hero Lucky Luke). Even the serifs resemble his hoofs.

There are surprisingly stark differences between the normal and narrow variants. All the mentioned informality – the angular slabs in the serif, the cheeky ‘a’, and many other quirks – is not as present in the condensed styles. This is owed to the much smaller, less round counters and a shorter ‘a’ tail. Also, the bowl of ‘a’ retracts and now lines up with the upper curve. The extremely large x-height, or short extenders respectively, counter the bouncing tendency effectively. This visually ties the letters together, making it an ideal headline typeface.

With its umpteen styles the Salvo series is predestined for complex editorial applications and jobbing tasks such as magazines and advertising material. And this is also what the series was originally designed for: as a custom typeface called Boomer for AARP’s (the American Association of Retired Persons) numerous publications. Of course the two sets and different widths can just as well be used separately. The Sans Condensed is especially versatile, an all-around grotesque suitable for shorter texts and display, corporate design, or everywhere where a strong American Gothic is desired.

Obsessed with topics such as the history of sans serifs and the classification of typefaces, Indra Kupferschmid is a German typographer, teacher, and traveling activist for the good cause of good type.

The contemporary design aesthetic is full of objects with mass and humanism. Apple hardware and Audi cars, with their rounded corners, apparent density, and (visually or physically) low centers of gravity, are good examples. Abril’s “Display” styles exude a similar density (for instance, their chiseled, leaden ball terminals) and subtle humanism (the tapered stems and flexed stroke endings in the italics), while maintaining the formality of a Didone. Thin strokes, critical to the personality of a Didone, are sturdy enough to ensure the face survives on screen, yet they do not compromise its spirit – the thinnest among Abril Display’s four available weights still has plenty of contrast.

Abril’s “Text” styles draw more inspiration from Scotch Roman types than Didones. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of mass and humanism in Abril Text, and plenty of family resemblance – same chiseled ball terminals, flexed stroke endings, and stroke axis as the Display styles, but with beefy, bracketed serifs, and a toned down contrast. There are also a variety of features that make the type more readable, like a stronger sense of continuous rhythm in letterforms and spacing, as well as subdued idiosyncrasies (the lowercase ‘g’, for example).

The fact that Abril comes in separate Text and Display styles is itself a mark of distinction. Desktop publishing seems to have given us the idea that one size fits all when it comes to digital type, but that’s certainly not true. Abril is also a study in how to successfully release a font across distribution channels and media. It was simultaneously made available on TypeTogether’s own site and via web font partnerships with Typekit and Fontdeck, and its basic styles had been manually TrueType hinted prior to release. Plus, Abril’s Fatface was made freely available as an introduction to the family.

I hope Abril’s culturally relevant style and astute release strategy earn it the success it deserves. I, for one, will be using it.

Tim Brown is Type Manager for Typekit and he makes Nice Web Type.

Wait, let’s try that again.

Now that I’m of a certain age, once in a while I find myself lamenting all the books I’ll never read, all the places I’ll never visit, all the languages I’ll never speak, all the people I’ll never meet, all the typefaces I’ll never set.

Okay, that’s more like it.

The thing about lamenting all the typefaces I’ll never set is that, unlike all the other multitudes of things I’ll never accomplish in my lifetime, the fact that there are freakishly too many typefaces for any one individual to ever make use of is a fairly recent phenomenon. The digital revolution caused the number of available typefaces to grow from hundreds to thousands quite quickly. However, a large portion of that early surge was rubbish.

These days, we have legions of highly-skilled type designers releasing excellent typefaces every month and several fine educational programs in type design turning out new talent every semester. Like all the great books, places, languages and people in the world, contemplating the sheer volume of stunning typefaces is magnificent, and bittersweet.

Periódico is one of those lovely new typefaces that I probably would have never set had I not been hired as a typesetting consultant for WIRED magazine’s recent redesign. Not that I did not admire it, but I might have dismissed it for being too similar to some serif text faces I already use. After setting it for the last few months, I now appreciate how a few of its bony-shaped glyphs like ‘a’ and ‘g’, along with its chunky sharp serifs, give this face a subtle vitality on the page that is unlike most others of its genre. I also enjoy the elegant script-like gestures of its boldest italic weights.

The designer, Eduardo Manso of Emtype in Barcelona, seems to have followed the trajectory of many of today’s fine type designers, starting his career with more experimental alphabets (Eroxion and ITC Merss) and moving into the design of more legible, sophisticated faces like Periódico, as well as his splendid Relato family and the popular Geogrotesque.

As you might expect from a face originally designed for a newspaper and even named with the Spanish word for “newspaper”, Periódico comes in an ample range of weights: 20 for display (with higher stroke contrast) and 10 for text, making it a highly versatile and appealing editorial choice. Muy simpático.

Carolina de Bartolo teaches typography and design history in San Francisco. She is the designer, author and publisher of “Explorations in Typography”, a project that provided her the joyful opportunity to set hundreds of beautiful typefaces.

Originally designed for Chilean newspaper La Tercera in 2010, Acta is the serif part of an extensive type system for demanding and complex publication design. It consists of a text and a display version, an impressive collection of symbols for newspapers and magazines, and a heavy poster weight. The family – with its generous proportions and large x-height – achieves the perfect balance between down-to-earth reliability and sensual elegance. Acta Text looks as if Dino dissected Times, removed all the stuffiness, sprinkled it with some Cooper, and injected it with his characteristic Latin flair. The high-contrast Acta Display veers towards Didone territory, yet devoid of any rigidity. Both variants offer an impressive range from delicate Light to impact-full Black. Cherry on the cake is the breath-taking Acta Poster – a joyful yet controlled take on the fat faces of the ’70s, complete with flamboyant swashes, alternates, and an extended set of delightful, sometimes surprising ligatures. Many of these special features were designed by Pedro Leal, who also created Acta Symbols.

This year the sans serif counterpart Acto was released, completing the super family. Dino thawed out the American Gothic model and optimized its legibility by incorporating humanist influences. More than sharing just the basic character structure, Acto displays the serif variants’ openness and confidence. Its slightly more subdued personality increases its versatility. The number of weights is even more impressive – eleven, with matching italics, from Hairline to Ultra Black.

Dino dos Santos is bringing sexy back to newspaper type. Art directors take note.

Yves Peters is a [typo]graphic designer, rock drummer with Rosa Luxe* and Troubleman, and father of three. He writes about type and typography for The FontFeed and Unzipped, his blog for FontShop Benelux. His talent for being able to identify most typefaces on sight is utterly useless in daily life.

Highsmith based Zócalo’s text cut on two historical typefaces, Chauncey Griffith’s newsface Ionic No. 5, and Nicholas Kis’ oldstyle. The Display cut, however, is much freer in its interpretations, drawing inspiration from the “energetic character of Mexico City”. These inspirations combined create a sturdy, readable text face that’s loose in the details. While the roots of the historical models are still apparent, the elongation of the tails, more oblong balls, and curvaceous points of contrast all indicate Zócalo’s Latin flavor.

Highsmith has taken special care to visually unite the family. By drawing aspects of both the Display and Text cuts into Banner, a weight meant for subheads and pull quotes, Highsmith creates both a gradation for size specific use, but also unites the elegant display size with the rough text face.

Highsmith clearly considered cultural context in this design for the Mexican daily El Universal. In addition to the Latin characteristics of the face, special attention was paid to the unique character repetitions of Spanish language texts in a wonderful marriage of form and function. A success on many levels, Zócalo’s unexpected combinations and thoughtful details form something wholly new.

Chris Hamamoto is a visual designer for FontShop in San Francisco. He also co-designed Typographica.

The design reminds me of Goudy, Garamond, Baskerville, Fournier, Cochin, Bell… hard to tell exactly. Lo Celso cites “Baroque and Mannerist typography of 17th and 18th centuries” in describing its origins. It doesn’t matter to me, because I like this design more than any of its influences. (Maybe not Fournier. That’s a tough choice.) The “Locos” distressed treatments demonstrate what different algorithms can achieve in the right hands. Arlt’s breadth and variety complement its well-executed design rather than making up for an unremarkable foundation, which is sometimes a danger with other large families.

There are some very distinct glyphs (roman a, g, k, q, 2, 3, ampersand, italic g) that will make it easy to identify if you look for more than one glyph. The color is beautiful, the design is striking — too much for the type-should-be-invisible mindset — and Lo Celso either warns against its usage outside “literary contexts” or otherwise dares you to. It is his finest design to date, and in good company with the rest of his library. The site and the specimen (220K ZIPPED PDF) are worth poring over.

John Butler is a font engineering consultant and general end-user IT consultant based in Murphy, North Carolina and working in the Atlanta area. John’s work includes some of the earliest OpenType font migrations outside of Adobe and extends to other smart font technologies including Graphite and AAT.

Arlt specimen by Chris Hamamoto.

Some famous typefaces have their roots in the Bauhaus ateliers: Super Grotesk (Arno Drescher), Futura (Paul Renner), Kombinationsschrift (Joseph Albers) and Universal (Herbert Bayer), the model for ITC Bauhaus, designed by Ed Benguiat and Victor Caruso in 1975.

Today we find many digitized Bauhaus style typefaces in different libraries, e. g. Linotype, Elsner + Flake, FontFont, P22, and The Foundry. The latest edition is Dessau, a 11 font set designed by Gábor Kóthay for Fountain (Sweden). Kóthay is a multi-disciplinary artist and type designer, who works in a sunny southern Hungarian town as a graphic designer and teaches second-form art students. He is the co-founder of Fontana Type Foundry.

Kóthay focused his Dessau is on the Hungarian influences of the Bauhaus: “I wanted to commemorate Hungarian designers and teachers, e. g. Breuer, Moholy-Nagy, Molnár, or Kassák. We’re under influences of these design personalities for more than sixty years.”

Kóthay was authentic with letterforms and based his work on original samples. He started his work in 1987, when letters have been originally designed for different installations in 1987 for the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest. The Dessau collection offers a broad variety of Bauhaus type styles. We find the Futura-like “Dessau Future”, two “Stenzil” weights that are close to Universal, the hand drawn “Dessau Alt” and a contemporary looking “Dessau Neu”; “Geometrik” and “Plakat” are two extraordinary Display typefaces.

Chief Marketing Officer of FontShop AG, Jürgen Siebert also co-founded the German graphic arts magazine PAGE, and co-edited FontBook. He is a member of the FontFont Typeboard and since 1997 he has hosted TYPO Berlin, arguably the largest annual design conference in Europe. Jürgen posts daily at Fontblog.de.

The style was very popular in the 19th century and is distinct from the Bodonis, Walbaums, and Didots. But it lost favor in the 20th century. As a result, such faces tend to have rather incomplete families, usually having only a roman and italic.

Nick Shinn comes to the rescue with his insanely complete Scotch Modern, which includes three optical sizes, extensive language support (including Cyrillic and Greek), small caps, old style figures and loads of other typographic goodies. As a type designer, I am astonished at the amount of time and care that must have gone into it.

As if that were not enough, Nick has also created a companion sans called Figgins Sans, based on a late 19th century contemporary of the “Scotch Modern” style. Figgins Sans is a style of sans serif that was eclipsed by the grotesques and grotesks that became so popular in the 20th century. It’s great to see this style of sans return to the typographic palette after a century-long absence.

The two families complement each other nicely to form the Modern Suite. I hope Nick continues to add to this suite. Perhaps a slab serif or fat face?

— Mark Simonson began his career in 1976 as an art director and/or graphic designer, working for clients such as TWA Ambassador, Minnesota Public Radio, The Utne Reader, HighBridge Audio and Target. In 2000, he completely changed his career direction and is now an independent type designer and font developer.

The three members of the prolific Czech type scene who teamed up for Comenia address a problem that hasn’t really been approached so far: the creation of a holistic type system, specially designed to meet the requirements of school.

This system consists of three branches. Comenia Serif by František Štorm is a contemporary 4-style roman with a whiff of brushiness in the details — see its foxtail terminals; a shapely reading face for longer texts. Comenia Sans by Tomáš Brousil is the humanist sans to go with it. It comes in 3 weights, each with pleasing italics, all of them also provided as condensed styles.

The extremely open counters and the large x-height are the outcome of in-depth research in readability. Particular attention was paid to the design of the diacritics — an important aspect in Czech and other European languages. Vertical metrics and colour of sans and serif are coordinated to match each other harmoniously. Still, Comenia is not as homogenous as other superfamilies, and in my opinion, that’s a good thing.

What really makes the school type system unique is Comenia Script, by Radana Lencová. This is what an up-to-date base handwriting model for abecedarians should look like! Upright, unconnected, and simple in principle; while slant, connections and swashes may come in later, with individual variations. Its entry and exit strokes help develop a flowing hand.

Let’s hope that publishers and authorities realize the significance of typography and start to improve their textbooks. The typographic toolbox necessary to do so is now available.

Florian Hardwig is a graphic designer and letter aficionado based in Berlin, Germany. He teaches typography at Braunschweig University of Art. In his “Manuscribe” project he is researching the diverse forms of school scripts.