Process

Illustrator Brian Stauffer worked with Studio A art director and designer Antonio Alcalá and designer Ricky Altizer to create this stamp, using our typeface Locator, for the US Postal Service released in 2018.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way — we redesigned our website! Besides a visual refresh, we made a number of changes to make buying fonts from us easier and more convenient. So, what changed?

Currency
If you’d prefer to pay in another currency besides USD, you can! Forget currency exchange fees from your credit card company and pay in Euro, GBP, Australian or Canadian Dollars as well.

OpenType-featured webfonts
Font families with advanced OpenType features are now available as webfonts. Go ahead, use the small caps on your website!

Compare font families
Test different font families side-by-side. Whether you want to simply compare fonts, or find headline and body companions, it’s now possible to see fonts from different families together in the new type tester.

Mobile app licenses
You can now purchase a license for your mobile app directly on our website.

Clearer licenses
Usually the first thing you want to know when reading a font license is what you can and can’t do with the fonts. Knowing this, we reorganized the usage portion of our licenses into two sections — 1) what you can and 2) what you can’t do with the fonts. We hope this makes the license clearer and gets you to what you want to know faster.

No more domain limits
We removed the single domain limit from our webfont license. This makes purchasing easier on a number of fronts, for example, when you aren’t sure what the domain name will be, working in multiple development environments, or when organizations have multiple websites.

Email and digital campaigns
With the domain restriction removed, it paved the way for adding email campaign and digital advertisement usage rights in our webfont license. No need to purchase a separate license, just licenses the number of pageviews that cover those multiple uses.

Subsetting allowed
Want to knock down the file size of a webfont? Removing characters in a font, or subsetting, is now allowed by our webfont license. Chisel away, but do it carefully!

Those are the big changes. There are smaller tweaks here and there, too. For instance, some of you weren’t sure whether our fonts could be used for commercial purposes (they can!). Even though we felt this was implicit in the act of purchasing a license, we didn’t want anyone to have to guess or worry so we added it into our licenses. Problem solved.

One more thing before you go.
If you’ve previously purchase a webfont license from us, the license you purchased at the time is still in effect and none of these new terms apply. You can upgrade to the new license at any time though. Just sign in to your account and visit the purchase options page of your previously purchased webfont to see upgrade options.

Pasted is a collage app, from James Mercer of The Shins and Zeke Howard and Ben Fogarty of The Brigade, a design studio in Portland. It’s an inventive tool that lets you mask photos, add filters, and layer graphics to make artwork. After creating their logo with Scandia Stencil, they expanded the concept into a full alphabet pack, so you can paste the two-tone letters into your collage and they’ll react to the filters. It’s always fun to see our fonts used in creative ways — if you’re ever interested in licensing for a mobile app, just get in touch.

“Stencil fonts feel like they have a unique place in collage art. As a result, Scandia really felt right. It’s almost like some of the geometric stickers were used to assemble the logo.”—Ben Fogarty

A couple of Pique things turned up at once so here we are. Check out Nicole Dotin’s typeface in use for an important NYC Health campaign and then watch two videos about its design. While we’re at it, go ahead and take 10% off any license of Pique offered on the site until end-of-day Friday, August 4th (that’s the ‘week’ in Pique Week). Just use the coupon code ‘piqueweek’ at checkout.

In Use: Bare it All
Thanks to Quentin Schmerber for tipping us off to this NYC campaign, after spotting Pique on the subway. “Bare it All” encourages LGBTQ patients to have open discussions with their doctors. And to spread the message, Pique boldly sweeps in across black and white images in print ads and their video.

How was it made?
In the latest Fontribute video, Erin McLaughlin and Thomas Jockin deconstruct and discuss Pique and Lokal Script in some detail.

After watching the video, Nicole picked up her brush marker to (re)construct Pique and show how the marker underpins the design.

To learn more about Pique, visit Pique’s page. #piqueweek

© Norman Posselt (Monotype)

More than a week ago, I was in Berlin leading a workshop on bash shell scripting at the TYPO Labs 2017 conference (get a run down of my workshop on the TYPO blog). Shell scripting definitely sounds mysterious and impenetrable if you’ve never indulged. However, it’s a relatively straightforward way (or it can be) of telling your computer what you’d like it to do in a text file rather than clicking around a GUI. What’s great about it is that even writing simple scripts, however inelegant they may be, can save you valuable time.

I started learning bash shell scripting by looking at other scripts that dealt with fonts. So, I’m posting the script we wrote in my workshop to help someone else get started.

The script: make-specimens.sh
The script takes a folder of TrueType fonts and creates an HTML webfont specimen for each one. The specimen is a pre-written HTML file that gets copied over into a specimen folder, along with other required files, and a find/replace is performed to insert the name of the font in the @font-face path. There is also an option to run the fonts through TTFAutohint, but it must be installed for that to work. There are instructions on how to run the script in the script itself (just open the file in a text editor) but they assume a small amount of knowledge.

Keep in mind the important thing isn’t necessarily what the script does, but the methods it presents — looping through fonts, using and modifying variables, or writing if statements, for example. They are useful beginnings.

Download the script and supporting files: Make-Specimens-Script.zip

Learning More
There are more shell scripting tutorials then you could possibly ever read. Here are some I’ve bookmarked at varying levels of depth:

Writing Shell Scripts
A quick guide to writing scripts using the bash shell
Shell Script Basics
Bash scripting quirks & safety tips

One Last Thing
In my workshop, I started by showing a script I wrote that packages our fonts — creating folders, putting the right fonts in the right folders, injecting a license into each one and finally zipping them all up. Here are lines for two important steps in that process:

One license for each folder

The line below copies a file into every folder in the working directory. It will not copy the file into subdirectories of those folders. Change <path to license file> to the path of the file you want to copy into each directory.

echo */ | xargs -n 1 cp -R -p <path to license file>

Zip each folder

This line zips every folder in the working directory and puts the zipped folders in a folder called ‘xFinalZips’. It will zip the ‘xFinalZips’ folder too but who cares, just delete it! You have to create the ‘xFinalZips’ folder for this to work, so that’s what the mkdir line does. The folder name can be changed to anything you want, of course.

mkdir xFinalZips
find . -type d -d 1 -exec zip -r xFinalZips/{} {} \;

Happy scripting! — Nicole