Headline Heads Up — No. 2

One Tuesday every month, I’m going to round up a cou­ple (maybe a few) awe­some dis­play type­faces to show­case and give a lit­tle break­down on each one. If you have a sug­ges­tion you want me to take a look at, drop me a line. Let’s jump straight into some head­line goodness.

Fatquad 4F

Foundry : 4th february

Designer(s) : Sergiy Tkachenko

Cost: $30 USD

Ooooh, chunky, chunky! This is a new font released in November. I’m pret­ty sure I first saw it through the MyFonts RSS, which is a great address to have in your read­er for new inspi­ra­tion and new releases.

Fatquad 4F is truly fat. It makes its mark and takes over space with sheer force. The slight bulge of the edges makes it over­in­flat­ed, and some­thing about that is play­ful. For some rea­son, that play­ful­ness made me think Polynesian Tiki Torches. I think it has to do with the incised, wood­cut feel of the coun­ters and con­tours that define each let­ter. It also looks so dif­fer­ent than your nor­mal serif and sans faces that it works great when need­ing that other-worldly, alien feel.

Fatquad 4F has some real­ly nice tech­ni­cal fea­tures. It sup­ports Latin and Cyrillic char­ac­ter sets; it also has a set of boxed let­ters and numer­als that would work out great for page num­bers or sec­tion mark­ers. There is also a slant­ed “ital­ic” should the need arise for some type of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion or empha­sis in a medi­um to long head­line. Go grab your copy today!

SAF

Foundry : Font Fabric

Designer(s) : Svetoslav Simov

Cost: FREE

I’ve had this one lay­ing around for a few months. I like soc­cer, nowhere near being a hooli­gan though. World Cup years are good years. While watch­ing this year’s games in South Africa, I loved the type they were using and did a Google search which led me to SAF. It is not the orig­i­nal used by FIFA but a re-creation by a fan who redrew the vec­tors for the let­ters. (If any­body knows of an offi­cial, orig­i­nal font for this please let me know.)

It is def­i­nite­ly head­line mate­r­i­al, as it does not have a low­er­case. It does have a good set of accent char­ac­ters to cover a few lan­guages out­side of the nor­mal Latin char­ac­ter set. It also has a set of numer­als and punc­tu­a­tion marks — so you could set a sen­tence if you wanted.

The shapes, the curves, the slight uneven­ness in places all lend to the play­ful, danc­ing qual­i­ty the let­ters seem to have. They are alive and bounc­ing, full of ener­gy leak­ing out of every cor­ner. The play­ful­ness makes it anoth­er great alter­na­tive to the overused Comic Sans — though a com­pa­ny memo about the upcom­ing pic­nic will still look hor­ri­ble if the entire page is set only in SAF.

Lobster

Foundry : Pablo Impallari

Designer(s) : Pablo Impallari

Cost: FREE

The third and final head­line type­face I’m show­cas­ing this month is Lobster. It is an upright script with a very even char­ac­ter. It has a very restrained per­son­al­i­ty and very few let­ters even attempt to steal the show with a fancy detail. This is both a pro and con depend­ing on what you are try­ing to do with the type.

I do love the look of Lobster. My first thought is Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips from Maine. I also love the OpenType fea­tures being built into spe­cial styl­is­tic lig­a­tures and finial forms. Below you can see some of the sub­tle dif­fer­ences already built into the font — slight alter­ations to the “yp” con­nec­tion and a big change to the “phy” at the end.

One of the main rea­sons I picked Lobster is because it is released under the SIL Open Font License. This means when you down­load it, you also get the raw source files for edit­ing in FontLab. You can build on to the font and add your own char­ac­ters, lig­a­tures, styl­is­tic alter­nates, OpenType fea­tures, or any font trait you can think. (Albeit, you have to know your way around Fontlab!) It is a great type­face with where it is now, but also has a roadmap for expan­sion of alter­nates and lan­guage sup­port which will be excit­ing to see.