Today, enjoy several new fonts from Typofonderie — including the celebrated AW Conqueror. Available in inline and chromatic “Carved” styles, as well as slab, serif, and sans, AW Conqueror is a multitalented titling face. We serve it with PostScript-based outlines for smooth rendering on Windows.
Top to bottom: AW Conqueror Didot, Slab, and alternating Sans/Inline
AW Conqueror Carved is assembled and ready, but some of its chromatic components are also available separately as AW Conqueror Carved One, Two, and Four. Layering chromatic type styles like these is easy, and can produce striking results.
Top to bottom: AW Conqueror Carved, Carved Two, Carved Four, and Carved One
In addition, four additional styles of Le Monde Courrier are now available: Book, Book Italic, Extra Demi, and Extra Demi Italic.
Upgrade to a Personal plan or higher to use these Typofonderie faces. If you’re already a paying Typekit customer, well, enjoy the new fonts! If you’ve never given Typekit a try, sign up (it’s free!) and upgrade to a paid plan whenever you’re ready.
Freight Micro from Phil’s Fonts
January 8, 2013
Today we’re delighted to welcome Freight Micro to the Typekit library. This third member of Joshua Darden’s Freight superfamily (see also: Freight Sans, Freight Text) from Phil’s Fonts was designed for small sizes in print. On screen, its open, angular forms feel textured and rhythmic at small sizes. For larger headers, its sharp angles appear crisp and dynamic.
Top to bottom: Freight Micro Medium, Book Italic, Black Italic, and Light
Freight Micro is available in six weights, each with a matching italic. Its four basic styles (Book, Book Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic) have been manually TrueType hinted to render well at text sizes, and the remaining eight styles are served with PostScript-based outlines for smooth rendering at larger sizes.
Upgrade to a Portfolio plan or higher to use Freight Micro. If you’re already a paying Typekit customer, enjoy the new typeface! If you’ve never given Typekit a try, sign up (it’s free!) and upgrade to a paid plan whenever you’re ready.
Sites We Like: Uber, Desk.com, and HistoryMiami
December 21, 2012
A new Uber app, great customer support, and Miami’s history in this week’s sites we like.
Uber turns the stressful ordeal of hailing a cab into an easy, modern experience. Fittingly, their website achieves a similar effect with the legible and contemporary sans serif, FF Clan. The high x-height and no-frills architecture makes FF Clan a perfect choice for both Uber’s new website and their mobile app. You can license FF Clan Web from FontShop and bring your license over to Typekit.
Desk.com, a customer support management platform (which we proudly use for our own support here at Typekit), pairs the approachable Myriad with the workmanlike FF Basic Gothic, an excellent alternative to Verdana. The result is a pleasing, easy-to-navigate website.
HistoryMiami is a cultural institution dedicated to teaching and celebrating the history of Miami, Florida. They establish a nice contrast of geometric sans and humanist serif, using Proxima Nova for headings and navigation and Adobe Garamond for body copy.
That’s all for this week; share sites that you like in the comments!
Details on Tuesday’s font serving outage
December 20, 2012
This past Tuesday, 18 December 2012, from approximately 6:00 PM PST to 6:45 PM PST, our font network experienced a partial outage for many users around the world.
Our font network uses a worldwide system of servers run by a major commercial content delivery network (or CDN). Each request for fonts is routed to the nearest server in order to return a response as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, our CDN provider pushed a bad configuration on Tuesday evening, and a change that was meant for only one of their customers got applied to many customers instead, including Typekit. From our CDN provider’s post-mortem:
The outage occurred as a result of a change we made to a configuration in our core caching platform. It’s important to note that this was not a security issue, or even a bug, but a simple human error that was not flagged by our standard staging and testing procedures.
This mistake resulted in font requests failing, which meant that some visitors saw fallback fonts on sites using Typekit for a period of about 45 minutes. The configuration change rolled out slowly, which meant that more and more traffic was affected over time. Typekit Enterprise customers who use their own CDN environment weren’t affected by the outage.
We have external and internal monitoring to detect problems with our font serving network, but our monitoring didn’t pick up on the growing issue until approximately 6:18 PM PST. At that time, we quickly got in touch with both our CDN provider and our customers (via the status blog and Twitter). At approximately 6:45 PM PST, our CDN provider finished rolling back the bad configuration changes, and font serving was restored to normal.
Requests for fonts failed quickly during the outage, and the fallback fonts specified in each site’s CSS were shown instead. This illustrates one reason why designing and implementing good fallback fonts is important. Not only does it improve the appearance of your site during an unlikely outage, but it’s also important for older browsers that don’t support web fonts.
We know that our customers have high expectations for uptime on our font network and prompt communication about issues and downtime. We sincerely apologize for the impact that this outage had on our customers and their visitors, and our delay in detecting the problem. Our CDN provider has responded proactively to prevent this type of configuration error in the future. At Typekit we’re working to improve our monitoring so we can detect and respond to outages like this one more quickly.
If you have questions or concerns, please get in touch with us at support@typekit.com.
Monokrom joins Typekit
December 18, 2012
Please join us in welcoming Monokrom to Typekit. Just two weeks ago, this new Norwegian foundry by Frode Helland and Sindre Bremnes opened its doors with a small catalog of thoughtfully crafted type — “high quality, original designs with a Nordic touch.” For starters, Faunus, Telefon, and Vinter are available in the Typekit library. These are for use at larger-than-body-text sizes, but are not all display faces.
Top to bottom: Vinter Regular and Italic, Telefon Bold, and Faunus
Each of these Monokrom typefaces is rich in character: Vinter evokes the sweeping chill of Norwegian wintertime; Telefon, the warmth and romance of a bygone visual language; and Faunus, the lively blend of pen, ink, sunlight, and earthy, wooded landscape. The Monokrom site has a page about each design.
Upgrade to a Portfolio plan or higher to use Monokrom fonts. If you’ve never given Typekit a try, sign up (it’s free!) and upgrade to a paid plan whenever you’re ready.
Sites We Like: An Event Apart, Ballard Pizza Company, Reno Chicago, and MuleNog ’12
December 7, 2012
There’s plenty of pizza, an AEA redesign, and some holiday cheer in this week’s sites we like.
Ballard Pizza Company serves whole pies and fat slices to the pizza lovers of Seattle. Their website packs a lot of information into a narrow space, while exuding hard work and quick service; two widths of Proxima Nova (regular and Extra Condensed) deliver.
Taut type, glossy photography, and a burlap background emphasize the attention to surface and texture at Reno Chicago. A simple composition built with no-frills Refrigerator Deluxe helps bring out the content’s warm glow.
For people who make websites, the An Event Apart redesign might be as educational as the conference itself. From its new RESS-based design to its masterful application of the upbeat and clever Freight Sans, the new site is worth studying.
Alright, that’s enough working hard, paying attention, and studying — it’s time to make a fake moon landing video and get invited to MuleNog ’12. When you get there, be sure to compliment Alaska Dave on the pertinent use of BD Geminis. Source Sans does a fine, upstanding job despite the surrounding nonsense.
That’s all for this week! Share sites that you like in the comments!
More original typefaces from Adobe
December 6, 2012
Today we’re happy to announce that many more original typefaces from Adobe are available on Typekit — including new optical sizes and styles of legendary typefaces like Arno, Brioso, Adobe Jenson, Kepler, Minion, Sanvito, Utopia, and Warnock, and an array of popular decorative fonts for display use. Browse and filter the entire Adobe catalog on Typekit.
Top to bottom: Kepler Condensed Display, Kepler Extended Display, Brioso Poster, Arno Display, Minion Condensed Display, Minion Black, and Utopia Headline
Stately and elegant, familiar and durable, the Adobe catalog is brimming with typefaces that do their jobs humbly and admirably. With optical styles for display use, subheads, and more, these beautiful typefaces will suit a variety of nuanced purposes — and the Kepler family takes the cake with four optical sizes, four widths, and six weights, for a total of 168 individually drawn styles.
Adobe has already refined the quality in many of its web fonts, and will continue to look for opportunities for improvement in the future. Every font meant for display use is served with PostScript-based outlines for smooth rendering in Windows. Display and Subhead opticals, as well as all decorative fonts, are offered this way.
Top to bottom: Willow Std, Blackoak Std, Postino Std, and Caliban Std
Tasteful novelty fonts can breathe life into a web experience, and the Adobe catalog offers many different, but equally well made, types for exactly that reason.
Select new Adobe fonts are available from our Trial plan, while others require an upgrade to Personal or higher. If you’re already a paying Typekit customer, well, enjoy them all! If you’ve never given Typekit a try, sign up (it’s free!) and upgrade to a paid plan whenever you’re ready.
Sites We Like: Rosemary Butcher, Hamacama, and Santa Monica Pier
November 30, 2012
A choreographer, hammocks, and the Santa Monica Pier in this week’s sites we like.
The website of Rosemary Butcher is a beautifully simple representation of her career, with a clever scrolling timeline to contextualize the expansive scope of her résumé. Adobe Text lends an appropriate elegance and is a welcome departure from the web-standard Georgia.
Hamacama sells what we all wish we were laying in right now: hammocks. Museo Slab and Museo Sans unify the site, and the superfamily’s relaxed aesthetic pairs well with the subject matter.
The storied history of Santa Monica Pier takes on a fun, quirky attitude with this attractive site. Letter Gothic, Futura PT, and Alternate Gothic No. 3 D work together to achieve a spunky retro vibe.
That’s all for this week; share sites that you like in the comments.
Hamilton Wood Type needs your help
November 21, 2012
Photo © Jason Santa Maria
The historic Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum is being forced to shut its doors, and needs your help in finding and moving its vast collection to a new location where it can open them again. From the museum’s press release:
Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum will no longer reside in the building that bears its name. The property owners recently informed the museum that the 1619 Jefferson St. building in Two Rivers, Wisconsin will close and must be vacated, perhaps as early as February 2013. Hamilton Wood Type is urgently seeking donations to address this sudden need and to protect its vast collection of wood type, antique printing equipment and rare type specimen catalogs. The museum’s director Jim Moran, artistic director Bill Moran and assistant director Stephanie Carpenter remain committed to transitioning to a new space. [Read the full press release.]
Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum houses one of the world’s largest collections of wood type, with over 1.5 million specimens. Read more about their history and continued efforts in preserving, producing, and teaching about wood type. And check out HWT American Chromatic, a collaboration between Hamilton Wood Type Foundry and P22 Type Foundry, here at Typekit.
Please join Typekit and Adobe in donating, volunteering, and spreading the word.
Sites We Like: The Arm Letterpress, Farmigo, and Pixelivery
November 20, 2012
A letterpress studio, farm-fresh food, and pixellated tees in this week’s sites we like.
The Arm Letterpress is a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has a variety of workshops and classes as well as press time available to the public. Both the navigation and the slideshow headlines are set in the elegant (and versatile) Freight Sans, which pairs neatly with FF Tisa in the body.
Farmigo helps farmers across the country bring fresh, locally-grown food to their communities. Museo’s good-natured and sturdy form goes hand-in-hand with the site’s cheerful illustrations and bright color.
And United Pixelworkers are bringing style to your wardrobe as well as your website with Pixelivery, choosing classic Futura PT for the same fun, bold expression as their iconic designs.
That’s all for this week; share sites that you like in the comments.
