Also of interest, the recommended pairings for Romany.
For contrast;

• Ultra Bodoni
• Franklin Gothic

For harmony;

• Stymie
• Bernhard Gothic
• Cloister Oldstyle

Some great copywriting from the specimen:

“A typographic contribution to graceful informality”

“American Type… the best in any case.”

“Because of it’s general utility, Romany will pay its own way in printshops large and small.”

Coming up in the second quarter, my Engravers fonts will be complete and hopefully in the market by the fall. I hope to get more pieces made for my Lessons Learned Lettering series, and I’ve got a serious, ambitious sans serif family in the works.

A birthday card for my friend Christian

A re-make of a hand-painted sign in the GVSU Sculpture studio, for Nate

Self-promotion lettering for business cards

New business cards with custom lettering

More info about my presentation

More about the GDC

The modern day (post 2007 re-brand) Applebee’s has a menu with House Script, along with a geometric sans for contrast, DIN. It looks like they have left the ligatures off (not supported in all browsers yet) and added some tracking, which is usually not desirable for script typefaces. Notice how the exit strokes show up in between the letters in ‘Introducing.’ It’s not too jarring in this setting but it helps that this design has nicely shaped joins unlike, say, the notorious Mistral typeface. House Script degrades well in the sometimes harsh world of web typesetting. Compare Applebee’s web usage with Steak ‘n Shake’s print use below.

In general when using connecting script fonts it’s best to turn ligatures on (text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;) and do not add tracking, or {letter-spacing:*px} for CSS.

Steak ‘n Shake

The House Script typeface is also used by Steak ‘n Shake. Again, seen contrasting with a geometric sans, the beefy-looking Neutra No. 2 Display Titling. The menu also has the old standby Optima including the Optima Extra Black weight. I think the Steak ‘n Shake logo could be a heavily modified version of Salzburg Bold, encircled by Optima caps.

My point is, using script typefaces with modern browsers and CSS, we can turn on ligatures (when available with text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;) and avoid letterspacing (letter-spacing:*px) and make web typesetting on par with print.

1. Open the Terminal app’s Perferences
2. Under the Settings tab, you’ll see the theme options. Select ‘Homebrew’ and then the gear icon for more options in a drop-down menu, and choose Duplicate. You can rename the new style, to something like ‘Space Shuttle’ as I did.
3. With the new theme selected, change the text selection color to a red. I did [163, 0, 0] in RGB values.
4. Then click the ‘Window’ sub tab and change the background color to a dark blue. I set it to the Midnight color crayon from the color picker, or [0, 0, 128] in RGB.

Terminal rocking the AFDKO with my Space Shuttle theme

See the full story and more details about the tireless volunteers at the SoTA site. You can license a copy of the font, with proceeds going to charity, from MyFonts, Veer, Fonts.com, and Linotype.

My contribution was this landscape-inspired glyph, which happens to be in the inverted exclamation point position in the font (¡), which I describe as:

“The circular head of this flower represents Japan and their sun-symbol flag. It grows out of a heart shape representing the indestructible human spirit. Set on an upward flowing landscape, the grass continues to grow higher representing recovery and growth ahead.”

All of these are pretty hardy designs, with a low stroke contrast (for Old Styles) for even color text rendering. The tall x-heights on all of them also give the lowercase more space, and essentially, more pixels for the shapes. Both of these attributes are common for UI or on-screen reading designs such as Lucida or Caecilia. I’m glad that Apple is sticking with the book typography tradition of Old Style serif faces, but also pleasantly surprised by Seravek, which is a neo-humanist design, I’d say. In other words, a sexy cousin of Verdana.

In the process of adding these new designs, Apple has removed some fonts from the options including Verdana, Cochin, and Baskerville. Cochin, I believe is too flamboyant to be a great text face, especially in the italics. Like I mentioned above, I see Seravek as an alternate to Verdana. But Baskerville is a classic book typeface, and they didn’t replace it with a design in the Transitional genre, but Old Style instead— peculiar.

I’m looking forward to the next version, as always.

Update 12/13/11: Read more commentary about iBooks on the FontFeed blog from author Yves Peters.

Update 12/17/11: Also more comments from John Berry, a former Microsoft employee.

Update 12/29/11: Updated formatting and grammar in first paragraph.

Sources:

iBooks in Apple App Store

Macworld

Engadget

www.engadget.com

They use the typeface DIN in their old-school graphic headlines, and web-safe Arial and Georgia for text. Pretty standard use of fonts on the web. They have interesting features in the design of the site, just not aided by web fonts.

This is My Next

This site featured the Museo fonts served from TypeKit. It was an improvement to be using live web fonts, but an unimaginative choice for branding. I know, I know, it was only temporary. I like the Museo series, but I think the market has been over saturated with them. The URL is now forwarding to…

The Verge

www.theverge.com

The branding for the Verge was released months prior to the launch, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that they used the ITC Serif Gothic Black font in the logo. They did a little custom treatment with a T-H ligature, and a swash-like stroke on the interior of the V. Branding for The Verge was done by Area 17.

The Verge homepage

With the exciting launch of The Verge, I was pleased to see that they had chosen a more sophisticated design for the news site; the beautiful slab serif Adelle. I suppose they couldn’t give up on the geometric kingpin FF DIN Web Condensed, which contrasts nicely with Adelle in all caps and italics. Design for the Verge was done by Code and Theory, which I can only assume was responsible for the CSS.

For suggestions, I would say they could benefit from turning on the kerning, via the optimizeLegibility; CSS tag. Adelle will benefit from kerning, as most designs do, at all sizes.

I know that it’s a news site, and long headline text is an issue, but setting the letter-spacing: -1px; is just too extreme in this case. The letters get mashed together and actually decrease legibility. This would be a perfect fit for a Condensed weight, if available.

Congratulations on the launch of The Verge, and I’m looking forward to the next story, the next re-design, and your next font choices.

Terrance

My tormented, stenciled, and ate-up blackletter typeface, Stenblak, is featured in the October newsletter from Ascender Fonts. Stenblak is perfect for Halloween or Dia de los Muertos headlines.

• View October 2011 Newsletter from Ascender Fonts