Headline Heads Up — No. 3

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.

So, I sat down to round up some good dis­play faces today and sit­ting in my email was the lat­est Rising Stars from MyFonts. It’s like most of my work — at least the search­ing — was done for me. So that gave me a good start­ing point, and I just want­ed to give cred­it where cred­it is due.

Delight Script

Foundry : Sudtipos

Designer(s) : Angel Koziupa, Alejandro Paul

Cost: $59 USD

Any con­ver­sa­tion about script type­faces must include the Sudtipos foundry of Buenos Aires, Argentina and they con­tin­ue that con­ver­sa­tion with Delight Script. Super fun, with plen­ty of quirk — take a look at the cap­i­tal “F” and “L” — it has the spe­cial OpenType touch­es of sev­er­al styl­is­tic alter­nate char­ac­ters that makes Sudtipos stand out.

The script is boun­cy and has the awe­some fea­ture of mim­ic­k­ing a sign-painter’s need to reload the brush with ink by hav­ing some let­ters break the con­nect­ing flow of let­ters. Notice below the three dis­tinct parts of “A” “mer” “ican” as an exam­ple. This def­i­nite­ly can pull off a vin­tage look if that’s what you need, but also sug­gests a con­tem­po­rary sweet tooth for candy pack­ag­ing. Get you copy today!

 

Skitch

Foundry : Yellow Design Studio

Designer(s) : Ryan Martinson

Cost: $20 USD

Now this is a ver­sa­tile font. I seem to love the fonts designed to be over­laid and setup for multi-color use. Skitch has a solid ver­sion but where it looks real nice is when the open and fill styles come togeth­er with the slight off­set. All three are shown togeth­er in the sam­ple above. Coming from its hand drawn ori­gins, the rough edges and uneven­ness give it a very nat­ur­al qual­i­ty. This also holds it back at small­er sizes as things get a bit jumpy and the details dis­turb the flow of reading.

Other fea­tures that make it a great head­line type include some nifty lig­a­tures of the ball ter­mi­nals, about 100 extra beyond “fi” and “fl” includ­ing those shown below — “ra” “ch” “es”. Another awe­some fea­ture — an entire sec­ond set of upper­case, low­er­case, and numer­als with slight­ly dif­fer­ent con­tours under an OpenType styl­is­tic alter­nate option. This can increase the hand drawn qual­i­ty by intro­duc­ing vari­a­tion among letterforms.

And final­ly to round out the awe­some good­ness of Skitch — there are a set of Border Fonts and Ornament Fonts fol­low­ing the same solid, out­line, and fill setup. Those can go a long way in help­ing set great look­ing head­lines. Plus, check out those awe­some amper­sands and asterisks!

HVD Steinzeit

Foundry : HVD Fonts

Designer(s) : Hannes von Döhren

Cost: FREE

Let’s keep with the hand drawn, multi-layered theme but in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent style. These rough block let­ters are crude cut-outs with a ran­som let­ter look. It’d be per­fect for band posters or a kids book — those are two real­ly dif­fer­ent things which is why I think this type­face is a good choice to have in the tool­box. There aren’t any fancy OpenType fea­tures like lig­a­tures or alter­nates, but there’s a full set of punc­tu­a­tion and accent­ed char­ac­ters so that’s not hold­ing it back. Take a look and see what you can do with it!

The above illus­tra­tion is copy­right Feodor Rojankovsky — 1956 Caldecott Winner — and was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in John Langstaff’s ‘Frog Went A‑Courtin’!