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Category: Typography

Lazyfont

Invoking the LazyWeb. I am trying to find this typeface:

It is not Bernhard Gothic, although it’s close. However, the “W” is stepped, like Burghley (although much more regular). I have a PDF with this typeface in it, and it’s identified as Malloy, but I cannot find Malloy on the Web.

I’m perfectly willing to pay for this, I just can’t find the damned thing.

Edit: found it myself; it’s Martin Gothic Bold. (And while I’m at it: ITC Garamond Book Condensed.)

Got font?

The Got Milk? typeface is Phenix American. Looks like it needs a little kerning before it looks right, but that’s OK. Agfa will sell it to you for twenty-two bucks. I know I wanted this information for some reason, so I’ll just tuck it away here until I can remember why I wanted it.

Late edit: no, I will not send you the font. Someone spent a great deal of time creating the font, and if you want to use it you ought to pay for it.

Pod music

All Apple news sites are frantically clogged right now. Not a surprise. MacInTouch: Mac news, information and analysis has some news on the Apple announcement, and I’ve pieced together some more stuff from here and there.

Three new things:

1) New iPods. Yay, 30 GB iPod. Some kind of a docking station, too, which seems unnecessary but whatever. I actually like my Firewire cable that doubles as a power cable when I go mobile so a docking station might be a step back.

2) New iTunes. Supports AAC, which is I guess MPEG-4 audio. Five bucks says that change was so that Jobs could tell the music people that his new online music thingie wouldn’t support evil MP3s. The new iTunes supports Rendezvous for auto-discovery of other iTunes users on your network. I don’t know what that means either — auto-discovery is cool but what does iTunes do with it? Shared music libraries?

Also, the new iTunes supports streaming (“streams can’t be saved”). That’s very cool and steals a march on Microsoft. Hope that works across the Internet. Also hope it’s a stream that WinAmp can read. Anyhow, it’ll take maybe a month before someone figures out how to save the streams.

3) The iTunes Music Store. 99 cents a track, tracks are AAC, and you can burn ‘em to CD. Then you can rip your CD to MP3. Jobs blasted the subscription model, but you know, emusic.com is only ten bucks a month for unlimited downloads. Jobs better have a really good music library. Emusic has a deal with a lot of labels for their back catalogs, but it also has a substantial library of current indie labels. If Jobs neglected the offbeat stuff… well, maybe not so many people care about that.

Ah. What Jobs needs is a way for people to get their music into his service easily. If he did a deal with MP3.com, for example, that’d go a long way towards solving the problem. Ease of publishing entry is the key, and you’d think Jobs would know that — it’s certainly a pitch he’s been making since the LaserWriter. It’ll be interesting to see if he listens to himself.

Plus Futura

daidala is another one of those cursed typographical blogs; lovely stuff, written by a man with a wise enthusiasm for the craft of typography. He points me at Bitstream’s Cambridge Collection. $200 for 200 fonts, none of them spectacular showy display fonts, most of them rather nice: that’s what I call a good deal. And the license is for five users! And it comes with a poster! And a Gill Sans clone in three weights!

Nick, Phil, something like that

I always go through this whole painful fifteen minute searching process when trying to find Nick’s Fonts. Phil’s Fonts has a place of precedence in my memory palace, so I invariably go there first after a bit of guessing. Philfonts? Philsfont? Philsfonts! Oh, wait, wrong site.

So now I’m logging it. Excellent, excellent source for art deco typefaces. I love his stuff. I want it all.

Gamesmanship

I have very fond memories of The Westing Game. Today, I stumbled across a link to an Ellen Raskin page of rare quality. Turns out she was a graphic designer and an illustrator as well.

The page includes scans of her original manuscript for The Westing Game and a pretty extensive discussion of her typesetting directions. Good reading. There’s also, of course, a bibliography and biography.