TDC 2005 Winning Entries

Written by Christian Palino on July 10, 2005

The winning entries for the TDC2 2005 Competition have been posted online. The jurors this year included Jean-François Porchez (from Porchez Typofonderie, France), Kris Holmes (of Bigelow & Holmes), Cyrus Highsmith (of the Font Bureau, Boston), and Rick Cusick (of Hallmark, Kansas City).

Being a fan of text faces, Thomas Huot-Marchand’s Minuscule, with its slab serifs and expressive light wells plays beautifully a line between the sensibility of recent contemporary serifed faces like Eplica and the quirkyness of a veteran like Clarendon. And on the type system side, FF Absara by Xavier Dupré makes a much deserved appearance.

Christian Palino is a designer and educator living in San Francisco. He is currently a Product Design Manager at Facebook and teaches Interaction Design at CCA. He previously worked at OpenTable, IDEO and Adaptive Path.

9 Comments

  1. Good selections this year. Except maybe Elementis, which looks really feeble in this year’s strong display category.

    The TDC makes a disclaimer about the low-resness, but I still think they could do a better job scanning and displaying the entries.

  2. Christian Palino says:

    I agree that the low-res scans seem a bit weak-handed�especially given the engines we have seen (for example OurType) to allow you to set and try different faces, weights, styles, etc.

  3. Cheshire Dave says:

    Is Minuscule available anywhere yet?

  4. Minuscule will be soon available (around September) on my website, http://www.256tm.com.

    For further informations or samples, you’ll find 16 pages in TM RSI (Swiss Typographic Magazine) 2 2004. I can also send PDF files.

    Thanks for the interest you show about my work!

  5. Christian – Well I don’t expect them to get that fancy. The TDC doesn’t have that kind of dough. I just want to see larger samples, and maybe more than one. I guess it’s all about buying the book.

  6. Nick Shinn says:

    Minuscule — some ideas in common with Clearface.
    An influence on it perhaps, or ideas typical of the time?
    Was Javal’s work well known?
    Did he design any typefaces?

    It’s funny, designers seem unwilling to spec anything but a sans serif for really small type settings, (think labelling, agate) — why is that?

    So is there a chance for this typeface?

  7. Hrant says:

    Well, hopefully some day this old thread will be revived; it contains the most online typographic info on Javal. Thomas, I’ve been interested in following your work (after gracious leads from Gary Munch and Jef Tombeur) and am really happy you’ve been pursuing this line; anything you can send me would be highly appreciated, since I’m severely addicted to lo-fi type.

    Clearface: I actually have a copy of the issue of the ATF bulletin (thanks to M Carter for the lead) that explains its genesis; it does cite a legibility study, in fact from around Javal’s time – but it was an American study (which I also have a copy of; it’s not too hot).

    BTW, TDC’s repro quality has historically been poor. The lowresness is one thing, but in the past not much attention has been paid to things like: using GIF instead of JPEG; proper “whitebalancing”; effective use of Posterize; etc. But I’ll have to see about this year’s.

    hhp

  8. shelley says:

    I’m impressed at the participation of non-USA folks. It’s good to see typography (and type contests and type publicity) on it’s way to being truly global.

  9. Hrant says:

    Indeed, especially when you look at the proportion of winners. On the other hand, as long as there’s an entry fee -and a high one at that- it can’t really be “global”. Note for example the conspicuous absence of South American entries (in fact ever since their economic meltdown, some years ago now) even though the typographic quality is quite high down there.

    The good news? The number of entries has gone up strongly this year!

    hhp

Post a Comment

Comments at Typographica are moderated and copyedited, just like newspaper “Letters to the Editor”. Abusive or off-topic comments are not published. We appreciate compliments, but don’t publish them unless they add to the dialog. Thank you!