Hello again! I’m Mark, and this is the Specimen Digest, a weekly typography newsletter.

Well, that was an unintentional – but a very welcome – good few weeks off over the holidays. Very quiet here in Wales. Locked down. For once, over the holidays, we weren’t entertaining for 12 people or travelling hundreds of miles. I hope you’re well, and if you took some time off, you are still feeling those embers of relaxation. Batteries recharged?

Before the holidays, we started a series of lists from all the specimens I’ve published this year, starting with Monospace. We’ll kick that off again next week with the current trend of grotesque revivals and reimaginations. Plenty to chose from! Until then, I have a bunch of new specimens for you and we’ll pick things up next week.

Thanks for reading.

Mark

Specimens this week

Syncro Out of the Dark’s specimens are really unusual. Pretty great, too. The specimen is notable for the very large type, and excellent design-in-use examples. The unusual interface element is the typesetter carousel, moving through different pangram, sentences and settings of the typeface.

League Gothic Italic A bold, full screen type tester opens this specimen from Open Foundry before some equally large and bold illustrations.

Arteria This microsite for Arteria is full featured and sprinkled with witty, graphical moments. Subtle animations of interface elements add to the soecimen’s appeal. But don’t be fooled; this is a serious typeface for broad application.

Q font family Not sure where to start with this type tester for Q. Type tester is probably the wrong term anyway. ‘Constructor’ is probably more apt. The interface allows you to explore the various Lego-like build variables for the letterforms.

Huai This templated specimen from Positype is notable for the glyph table. In particular, I felt the preview of the glyphs – which are shown on click – display that choice in the context of other glyphs either side and simple cap height, x-height and baseline metrics.

Fabrikat Kompakt A functional specimen from HvD Fonts for Fabrikat Kompakt but notable because of the opening branding/illustration. Clean, simple, graphical lines present the typeface in simple juxtaposition. Another nice touch is the long-form feature explanation with toggles to see the difference.

There are more specimens added this last week on the Type Specimen website. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for daily updates, or follow along on Twitter, if that takes your fancy.

A few interesting typography links

Mass Driver release MD IO on Future Fonts together with an excellent accompanying article.

A thought-provoking piece on a project for Derwent Valley on the process of taking an open-source font and modifying it for use within an organisation or for a project.

A recent Twitter thread from Roel on experiments with recent font-metric override support in CSS.