Oh hey! 25 April 2026 marks 70 years since Paul Renner’s death. That means any claim to the “copyright” of Futura has officially lapsed.
So if you’ve got a Futura revival cooking, you can safely release it without getting hounded by Bauer ✌️
Remote
Kris Sowersby
@klim@typo.social
mastodon 4.6.9Typeface design.
1261 Followers
110 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 07, 2022
Website:
Latest font release:
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Replying to
@onpaperwings @behdad @tphinney Static fonts are fiddly enough for most designers and average users. VF’s moreso, an extra layer of unrequested and superfluous functionality that may or may not be fully supported in X app in Y environmental for Z version. I like em, we develop the VF toolchain. But actual paying customers just don’t really seem to care ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Replying to
@w__h_ Metal. Cos I’m lazy, here’s a pic from Pitch design info. The caption is a bit unhelpful,
“Above: 5pt Excelsior from the Linotype specimen book. Below: Pitch fractions.”
Replying to
@tphinney@typo.social it’s almost as if VF’s were never really intended at all for desktop apps
Replying to
@thierryblancpain @Stuarthazley Slap a PayPal button on a static specimen. Maybe a test font download too. If it works out, develop the site for future releases. You do not need a fully fledged foundry CMS early on.
Experimental Jetset’s Statement and Counter-Statement 2 is available for pre-order!
Does anyone know anything about “Garamond” by M. Ollière?
This scan is from The Fleuron Nº5. Part of Beatrice Warde’s (under the nom de plume Paul Beaujon) “The ’Garamond’ Types” article.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/20994543@N04/55255683301/in/dateposted-public/
Sick as poster series by Colin Forbes
Replying to
@productiontype@mastodon.social Burning books is fascist, so I think you might be be stuck in a real world, intractable philosophical conundrum
Replying to
@JTDType The problem with numbers is the Point/Pixel divide: does the number refer to the size in points or pixels?
XS
S
M
L
XL
Might be better… but the don’t sort alphabetically in font menus which is annoying 😅
Replying to
@onpaperwings I’m more a Calibre man myself
https://music.apple.com/nz/album/change-with-me/1552310231?i=1552310233&l=en-GB
I’ve got 4 free tickets for TDC / Type Drives Commerce on March 13:
PM me if you’re keen. First in, first served.
Replying to
@pixelambacht To be fair… it's not just a webfont thing, right?
“Marketers described spending time in client meetings justifying why a website costs money at all, let alone why using a web designer requires a different skillset than using a print designer. Many said they’ve simply defaulted to Canva in those situations because the explanation is too difficult.”
Replying to
@Okay@typo.social “The sweetness of low price never equals the bitterness of poor quality.”
Was the Adobe Originals Caslon specimen ever available as a PDF?
https://blog.typekit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/garamond-utopia-specimen.jpg
Replying to
@typographica@typo.social @djrrb@mastodon.social @SandrineNugue@typo.social
Oh, that’s a lovely lecture. Thanks for the mention — I had never made the connection between Siggy and Experimental 249!
Replying to
@crown Depends if you want everyone else to care about the names of your fonts… would you want someone else ripping one of yours?
Replying to
@pixelambacht@typo.social Regarding long-term archival plans for internet stuff
https://www.flickr.org/about-us/the-100-year-plan/
Replying to
@typographica@typo.social @db@typo.social To be fair, @typecache@bird.makeup has been solid for new releases for many many years, it still is.
Replying to
@pixelambacht Do you know anyone in the GLAM sector? Archives are really fucking hard. Everyone online is “curating an archive”, which usually means a website of jpgs that will be offline in a couple of years. Real archives cost money, time, expertise. They plan in timespans of several decades, have succession plans, redundancies, etc etc.
I feel your anxiety immensely. I think about this stuff a lot. I’ve got web designer friends who don’t archive their own work and it just gets… lost.
Replying to
@pixelambacht You've spent countless hours (years?) building an extremely complex and nuanced tool for inspecting the inner workings of fonts. And even you struggle to convince clients that fonts are worth paying for? This isn't an attack on you, more exasperation that the most informed type people struggle with this!
Replying to
@faux_icing Thanks for this! A couple of small things
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All the links are weird google.com redirect notices
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Netflix Sans was made before Gotham was sold to Monotype. IIRC, one of the very first articles announcing Netflix Sans had a quote (maybe from a DaMa employee/contractor) saying Gotham licensing was in the millions, and unsustainable. It was retracted quickly, and there was a scuffle on Twitter with Hoefler proclaiming “millions” wasn’t true at all. Maybe it’s all archived somewhere…
Replying to
@marsidesino@typo.social @mass_driver@typo.social “Invest” usually implies a return on that investment, either time or money. The investment can be sold later, or used to make more money, etc. It would be hard to prove a purchaser of a font used it directly to make money…
Replying to
@marsidesino What is the criteria for a 'lead position'?
https://fontlicensingmess.com/demographics/
https://mlq.ai/news/anthropic-partners-with-canva-to-embed-design-capabilities-in-claude/
“Anthropic and Canva have integrated design generation directly into Claude, allowing users to create fully editable designs from text descriptions without leaving the interface”
Replying to
@BijouType @kai Recently it’s been a lot of keynote requests for confs. I try to keep as basic as humanly possible. I make slides in Sketch, export to jpg, slap into keynote.
Replying to
@crown There’s only so much energy I can put into not making fonts. It doesn’t really bother me, I can only conduct myself as best I can!