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

I have a screenshot of it below, but this week India Type Foundry launched Fontshare. This is amazing from a few perspectives: first the free licensing and availability of this library to non-profit, personal projects, and students/education. This is a smart move.

When I was in university, we used software that was used in Industry: Photoshop, Quark XPress, Illustrator but also commercial type libraries. We got to know some digital versions of typefaces really, really well. So, that, when we moved into industry and we needed to choose typefaces for clients as part of our work, we’d turn to those we were most familiar with. For foundries, it’s a tried and tested way of increasing revenue by increasing familiarity in designer’s minds early in their careers.

This release from India Type Foundry is a slick package. A really nice interface that makes searching, browsing and downloading simple and easy. The whole thing just gets out of your way. So next time you’re considering a font for a project, include this on your go-to list.

Until next week!

Mark

Specimens this week

Arizona Dinamo does it again. Vibrant, useful, exciting specimen for a monster typeface release. Of particular interest is Arizona Flare – a nice blend between Serif and Sans and a natural progression from the variable font design space.

Le Rosart Display There has been an increase of this type of digital specimen over the last year; stacked type testers of set text in the various weights of the typeface. And that’s it. The best of both worlds. Interesting enough from a design perspective to really show the glyphs off, but with the added functionality to really start probing the typeface for your own needs.

Fontshare This is a little different. Indian Type Foundry have created this free offering of their entire catalogue for non-profit or personal use. Brilliant. And the specimens to display the catalogue are really well done with some nifty, subtle design elements.

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

System fonts don’t have to be ugly

A companion article from DINAMO on the design of Arizona (mentioned above).

A great article on the design of Gooper on Future Fonts.

An interesting idea for a service. Font Brief is a service for curated fonts based on some axes to fit with your brand.

ATypI has put all their 2020 videos on YouTube!