FÖDA, an Austin-based design studio, has renamed and rebranded their neighbor, Hewn, a wood shop, fabricator, and mill. The hefty Colfax Black logo sets the tone – spanning 8' wide on the hopper above! — and Colfax webfonts extend the identity online. Check out their brand guidelines, patterned business cards, and striking sliding door below.
Photographs by Nick Simonite.
There’s a new way to test our typefaces, and not just that – you can rent them too. Fontstand, a desktop Mac application, lets you try fonts for free for one hour as well as rent them on a monthly basis at 10% of the normal license cost. Whether you rent or trial, the chosen fonts work right away in your design apps without you having to install them. At launch, Fontstand offers hundreds of typefaces from over twenty independent foundries.
Clicking a ‘buy’ button isn’t always easy. Maybe you need to test the fonts before committing, maybe you want to make sure the client approves, or maybe you’re a design student on a tight budget. We get that – we’ve been there – and we think Fontstand can help. This new approach to licensing is a great way to get your hands on high-quality typefaces and ensure that you’re using the right font for the job. You can think of renting as an extensive test or as a way to use fonts for a limited time – you can always rent the fonts again when you revisit a project – and once you rent for twelve total months, the fonts are yours to download.
To get started with Fontstand, visit fontstand.com. And the links below will take you directly to the fonts we currently offer. If there are any typefaces you’d love to see on Fontstand, send us an email or tweet.
Process on Fontstand:
Over the years, we’ve been refining our webfonts for better performance but today we’re happy to announce significant improvements to select fonts. Colfax Web, Klavika Web and Klavika Condensed Web are now manually hinted — for ClearType and greyscale — providing a high degree of readability across browsers. In addition to manual hinting, some character shapes were adjusted to render nicely down to 14 pixels.
So what does this look like? Although auto-hinting can do a decent job, it often fails to describe the nuances of certain character shapes across a range of sizes leaving a typeface perfectly readable at some sizes while leaving others muddy. The examples below show where auto-hinting failed the hardest (on the left) with manual hinting to the rescue (on the right).
Before hinting, on the left; after, right.
From top to bottom: Klavika Web Condensed Regular, Klavika Web Medium and Colfax Web Bold. All samples are set at 14px and rendered by Firefox 28 on Windows 8.
How can I take advantage of the updates?
Download the new fonts. For previous webfont purchasers, start by logging into your account. The font packages have been updated so simply re-download your order. Or, send us a quick request for the new fonts and we’ll email them to you (be sure to include your order number).
Republish your kit on Typekit. If you’re using Typekit, republish any kits containing the updated fonts to use the latest versions.
Up next
The web versions of Colfax, Klavika and Klavika Condensed were the first in line for the updates, but Elena Web, Stratum 1 & 2 Web and Bryant 2 Web are on deck.
Our Colfax has been finding a home for itself on the web as of late. You won’t find tiny type in this lot of featured sites, but generous sizing that gives the type room to breath and shine. Below are a few websites using Colfax to great effect.
Thankful, a wedding gift registry site, with headlines set in Colfax Thin and body copy (and some display) set in Elena.
From Normative, a multidisciplinary design firm based in Toronto, Canada, a website showcasing the firm set exclusively in Colfax.
Watch your screen burn in this Pitchfork cover story on Daft Punk, with headlines set in Colfax.
If you happened by the FontFeed recently, you’ll find an interview with Process Type Foundry partners Eric Olson and Nicole Dotin by Yves Peters. Go ahead, read the words. Sometimes, though, we just want to ogle the pictures. Here are photos from the interview along with extended annotations, outtakes and some extras.
Eric and Nicole standing in the doorway of the Process Type Foundry studio.
At some point, our photo shoot started to sour after taking shot after shot. There was nothing left to do but lighten the mood. Obviously, Eric grabbed a house number designed by Erik Spiekermann and placed it where it belonged.
This is Charlie, the silent third partner of Process, in the studio along with Bob Dylan, an old Mac Cube, our record player and various drawings by 3-year-olds.
After posing for his photo, Charlie popped by Nicole’s desk to see what she was working on and offer insight. Or, he might have been looking for a treat.
Designed and published by Ryan and Tina Essmaker, The Great Discontent features various weights of Stratum 1 alongside body text set in FontFont’s Meta Serif. More importantly, it features interviews with the makers of today.
“Do you guys know that thing that Ira Glass talks about? Where you start out and you know your taste is really good, but your ability needs to catch up to that taste?” An interview with Olga Bell on The Great Discontent.
Bryant and yellow belong together. This bag was one part of a larger rebrand of Raffles, a design school based in Sydney, Australia. Find more of the identity using Bryant on the Naughtyfish website, the firm that handled the redesign.
A test print for Elena Italic. Most of Nicole’s test prints are marked up in colored pen. Red, pink, blue and green are favorite colors for making messy, almost indecipherable notes for later decryption and then correction. The arm of the k needs … finesse.
Elena found its way into Instapaper, a popular app by Marco Arment for collecting and saving content to read later. If you happen to click on the link above for Marco, notice his personal site is set in Elena too (at the time of posting).
It’s no secret we love seeing our fonts in use and used well. It is a secret however, that we hope to one day see every font in our library used in a single magazine. As far as we know, Seattle Met is the front-runner in our imagined competition. Capucine, Anchor, Bryant, Bryant Compressed and Colfax have all graced the magazine since design director André Mora took the helm. Only 13 more fonts to go, Mr. Mora.
During the summer of 2010, we jumped into the seemingly rarefied world of print and made a limited-edition poster celebrating Anchor (long since sold out). Designed by Abi Chase, it was a three-color screenprint featuring an unusually pastel palette when compared to our typical propensity towards CMYK.
And last but not least, a random bonus. >Wants for Sale was started in July of 2007 by Christine and Justin Gignac. A couple of months later, they took the same basic concept and started Needs for Sale. The concept? The couple paints pictures of needs, anything from basic necessities like food or shelter to research for curing diseases. The paintings are offered for purchase and 100% of the sale is donated to a charity whose mission it is to meet that need.
Anchor is used for all headlines and titling.
A nice way to end, right?
In our hearts, Chrono will always be called Chrono. However, we inadvertently crossed paths with another similarly named font and decided the name needed to change. So Chrono, meet Colfax!
Residents of the Twin Cities will recognize the name Colfax as one of our city’s leafy, mostly residential streets. Consequently, it runs directly parallel to Bryant, another street-turned-font-name in our hands.
Already licensed Chrono?
There’s nothing you need to do except note the name change. You’ll still be able to upgrade to larger packages or add additional licenses but under the new name Colfax instead.
Similarly, Typekit users with Chrono already loaded in their library don’t need to make changes either. The fonts will function the same and the name won’t change to Colfax unless you republish your kit. If you’re using the default CSS selector (tk-chrono-web), this will still work after republishing, too.
We’re always on hand to answer questions, just get in touch.