I’m a bit of a Sci-Fi buff and not surprisingly, after seeing Avatar today I thought the movie was excellent. The special effects are amazing, as is the 3D viewing technology which is becoming more common place in new movies. However…

As you’ve all no doubt seen by now, and to the bewilderment of designers the logotype for Avatar is papyrus. Even stranger is the choice to use it for the movies sub titles, which play a significant role throughout the film. I can’t think of anything worse for a paragraph of copy than papyrus.

For such technically ambitious effects and what will no doubt go on to be an extremely successful film, it seems bizarre to use the most overused font in history.

I understand the selection was to tie in with the ancient/tribal nature of the films characters, but surely there was something, anything else out there that would have done the job.

I mean, come on…

Papyrus logotype: 1/10, Papyrus subtitles: -100/10.

Nadine Chahine is a type designer and Arabic specialist for international type foundry Linotype GmbH. Nadine recently released her latest latin adaptation, Neue Helvetica Arabic.

The design is intended to be a companion to Neue Helvetica, and while the typeface was met much praise, there were an equal amount of unsure readers and a handful of slamming reviews.

Nadine describes the typeface as “a mono-linear design with very little contrast“, and yet Helvetica is neither of these.

Two key points of the design brief were;

• Design a typeface that would be the Arabic companion to Neue Helvetica.
• The Arabic version would be true to Arabic script aesthetics and be able to function on its own as well.

Admittedly I know nothing about Arabic typography, but when reading on, these objectives seem destined to conflict. Continue reading...

I realize this has been out for a while now but what can I say, going through 2300 fonts takes time. As well as including the classics, there are over 170 new fonts shipping with Adobes latest release.

Despite having been released several months ago there’s surprisingly little information or examples ( that I could find anyway… ) on Adobes site, so I thought I’d share a handful of the included fonts.

All the included fonts are in OpenType formats and obviously work for both PC and Mac, here’s a small taste.

Continue reading...

Nick over at Think Design Blog was kind enough yesterday to compile a list of great, and better yet free script fonts to view and download.

There are plenty of styles. Thick, thin, clean and grungey so you’re sure to find something you like, here’s a quick sample of some that caught my eye.

Monika, available here.

Jellyka, Saint-Andrews Queen, available here.

Scriptina, available here.

And many more.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, be sure to check out the full Think Design Blog article for the full 20.

As we all know there are thousand and thousands of fonts out there, of the few hundred of good ones you can probably remember one or two dozen, and beyond that you’ll need some reference. This is the post for you.

Cam Wilde from Squidspot recently posted his latest work, The Periodic Table of Typfaces, as shown above. The table consists of 100 “popular, influential and notorious fonts as collected by Cam from many reputable design blogs.

Continue reading...