FSI FontShop International today announced the latest additions to its award-winning FontFont typeface collection. Four new designs were released in tandem with long-awaited extensions to three of the independent foundry’s bestselling font families. Several key FontFonts were also upgraded to OpenType®.
The New FontFonts
Classically trained French lettering artist and designer Xavier Dupré created
FF Megano™, a six-weight sans serif encompassing both humanistic and calligraphic shapes. The typeface, while evocative of feminine curves, offers high readability and a fun yet functional complement of stars and arrows in all weights.
Martin L’Allier, a recent graduate of the University of Quebec at Montreal, mixed the classic and the contemporary in designing FF Karo™. The three-variant display typeface combines the calligraphic heritage of Fraktur letterforms with the rational and optical dynamics of the grid.
FF Headz™ is the first typeface by German designer and illustrator Florian Zietz. The concept for the playful, interactive picture font is similar to the effect found in some children’s books, where pages are split into sections that can be grouped in unusual and humorous combinations. Each “complete” head in FF Headz is composed of four separate characters (upper part of the head, eyes and nose, mouth, and chin), which may be combined to create ten thousand funny faces.
FF PicLig™, by Berlin-based designer Christina Schultz, is a smart OpenType font that makes it possible to create symbols out of typed characters. While OpenType’s “discretionary ligatures” usually connect two or more characters to create a typographic ligature, Schultz used this feature of the technology to combine several glyphs into an icon, or picture ligature. The automatic substitution of certain character combinations allows the direct integration of icons into text, enabling users to communicate more expressively.
FontFont Extensions and OpenType
In an effort to offer type users increasingly useful tools, the FontFont team frequently updates existing designs. FF Kievit™ 3 adds thin, extra light, and light weights with complementary small caps and italics to a versatile, legible sans. FF DIN® has been extended with Baltic, Cyrillic, and Turkish character sets, while FF Nexus™ now features Baltic, Central European, and Turkish character sets in its Sans, Serif, Typewriter, and Mix variants.
Type designers and type users worldwide have embraced the cross-platform OpenType format, which offers advanced typographic features and extended language support. Four of the most well known FontFont designs are now available in OpenType: FF Dax®, FF DIN®, FF Meta®, and FF Scala®. Other OpenType FontFonts in this release include FF Eddie™, FF Nexus™, and the newly published designs, FF Karo™, FF Megano™, FF Headz™, and FF PicLig™.
The entire FontFont collection is available at fontfont.com, fontshopping.com and from local distributors.
About FontFonts
Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody launched the FontFont library of digital typefaces in 1990 with the goal of producing innovative typefaces by designers for designers. FontFonts represent the work of more than 100 designers worldwide, with over 3,000 contemporary fonts in the collection. The FontFont library features some of the most popular typefaces in use today, including FF Meta®, FF DIN®, FF Scala®, FF Eureka® Sans, FF Kievit™, and FF Fago™.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on November 30, 2005
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