Create your graphs right in InDesign with Chartwell, an OpenType infographic font that converts your data into simple pie graphs, bar graphs and line graphs using ligatures. It's all live text so it's completely editable. Neat!
Showing posts with label font. Show all posts
Showing posts with label font. Show all posts
Chartwell Font - Automatic Graph Creation
Font Squirrel - 100% Free Fonts for Commercial Use
If you're tired of searching through the thousands of fonts on sites like dafont.com (current free font count over 12,000) Font Squirrel is a great resource. They hand-pick free high quality commercial-use fonts. Their total font list is a manageable 659. It's such a relief not to plow through junk to find a few gems — the gems are already separated out!
Brent Couchman
This typographical graphic from Friends of Type's feature on Brent Couchman caught my eye. I'm not usually a fan of multi-colored lettering (or brown - I'm really not a fan of the color brown) but the swirling type, texture and colors create a pleasing vintage feel.
The League of Movable Type: Free Open Source Fonts
The League of Movable Type provides free well-designed open source fonts. Some fonts are newly designed. Some are old but have become public domain from expired copyrights or for other reasons. Most of the fonts seem to be only 1 or 2 cuts but it's a high quality selection, well worth browsing.
Fonts in Use
Fonts in Use is a site that has in depth features on fonts in use in identities, web design, advertising and books. It's interesting for me to see real word design examples and actually learn what font is being used, not have to guess. I like the fonts in The Daily, which Fonts in Use reveals are Founders Grotesk and FF Unit Slab.
FontShop's Type Navigator
From the official description: Meet TypeNavigator, the world's first interactive visual font search system. "Visual" means you don't need to know anything about what you're looking for - all you need is that image in your head."
Update: It looks like this feature no longer exists on FontShop's site. Here is a similar service from Identifont.
Free Comic Sans Font Alternatives from Ban Comic Sans.com
Comic Sans - the font designers love to hate. Ban Comic Sans.com pokes fun at the inappropriate uses of Comic Sans (for example doctor's office letters or informational signs). Check out their free font list with Comic Sans alternatives.
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Typography: Ligature, Loop & Stem Poster
Everything you ever wanted to know about the the actual parts and pieces of a font is on this elegant typography poster from FPO.
Jupiter Pro
Jupiter Pro, a better Trajan? Or just a really great titling font with lots of extra swashes? Beautiful either way. And there's a condensed version too.
The Daily Dropcap
Visit The Daily Dropcap for original and interesting dropcaps. These are some of my favorites from the last few weeks.
Lady René
A sweet way to promote a vintage style font - design a vintage style book. The font: Lady René
Aphrodite Pro
With a name like Aphrodite, how could this script font not be elegant, feminine and gorgeous? Snapshot from myfonts.com below:
Initial Caps
Decorative initial capital letters, like art, serve a purpose: to bring beauty and provide a resting point for the eye on the page. I don't get to use initial caps often but I can appreciate them as the beautiful objects of art that they are.
Haikus and Warnock Pro
"A picture is worth a thousand words." Does that also mean that a thousand words are worth a picture? What about 17 syllables? Surprisingly, quite a clear picture can be created from beautifully short haiku - poems limited to 17 syllables.
About the font: Warnock Pro is another favorite font of mine. I love the quirky serifs and the modern interpretation of classic serif style. The italics have a lot of character and sharpness.
P.S. Just for fun, create your own haiku with the click of a button at Everypoet. The results are hilarious!
Avenir
Avenir is a graceful sans serif with options. With Avenir, I never run into the problem I sometimes have with other fonts: the roman cut is too heavy but the light cut is too light. Avenir's font weight increases gradually: light, book, roman, medium, heavy, black. I wish all fonts came in 6 cuts!
Font Prejudice
At no time is it more clear that I have font prejudice than when I'm trying to choose a font for a new logo. I was browsing through FontExplorer today, looking for fonts and noting how many of them I don't like.
Some of my dislikes are (in my opinion) somewhat reasonable, dislikes for:
- badly designed fonts (like Gill Sans which has great letterforms but crappy word spacing in every version I've ever used)
- fonts that suit a very specific purpose but are so broadly misused/overused that I can't stand seeing them anymore (Comic Sans, Papyrus, Marigold, Tekton)
- fonts that are just ugly (Matura Script Capitals) and
- fonts that represent the worst of Microsoft Word to me (Times New Roman, anything Lucida).
But then there are other fonts like Optima, Goudy and Zapfino. Perfectly good fonts that never hurt anyone. I just don't like them.
Take today. I was browsing through my fonts and noticed a font the logo name looked pretty good in. I look closer and "Oh no, not Goudy!" Here I am ready to reject a perfectly good font because of my unreasonable prejudice. Just to prove I'm not letting my prejudices overcome my good design sense, I'm going to try and design a logo version with Goudy. If it's appropriate and looks good, just use it.
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