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

Sorry, missed a week last week. Pandemic, covid testing, false alarms, kids off school. You know how it is.

As we wind up (or is it down) into summer, the type releases have slowed down. The second largest of all arbitrary deadlines – the start of summer – is a rush to put things off not complete them. A steady decline of productivity as the good weather starts rolling in from the Atlantic and building from the near continent. I don’t blame them, do you? Putting new things into the world can be exhausting and there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into releasing a typeface once it’s finished.

So let’s take the natural break. A pause amongst the pollen. To recharge the batteries, take stock, and gather our energy for that next arbitrary deadline on December 25th.

Until next week!

Mark

Specimens this week

Felfel It’s refreshing to see an Arabic specimen so comprehensive. Felfel is made to celebrate the elegance and timeliness of Arabic calligraphy while solving the problem of the cascading nature of Ruq’ah that results in increased line spacing.

Eiko A beautiful specimen for Eiko from Pangram Pangram. The sophisticated branding is what this specimen is all about. Multiple vertical panels of photography and refreshing graphic design followed by images of enormous glyphs and long-form specimens.

Midnight Sans The standard catalogue specimen for Midnight Sans but punctuated by some visually interesting large panels of glyphs. Really good explanatory illustrations for opentype features.

Idem & Idem Display An interesting idea from DSType. Sort of an interstitial page before the standard catalogue specimens. This is a nice way to introduce the type in a bespoke way – that templated specimens will not allow – without the overhead of creating a mini site.

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

A load of links for you this week:

Rotor is a cool variable typeface. Look at that rotation axis!

Roel brilliantly demonstrates optical size with a mushroom.

An entire website about Romek Marber. Brilliant.

More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web

Size adjust is not for the faint-hearted.

Rosetta Type Foundry’s David Březina on his interchangeable and variable typeface Handjet