Process

We’re excited to announce our latest typeface, Moniker by Eric Olson. Moniker is a rounded sans serif that captures the informal tone of the genre while maintaining a sensible workhorse mentality. The family is made up of five weights with lively italics, and with features like small caps and multiple numeral styles, the fonts can take on the small (tables and text) and big (headlines and logos).

Moniker is available for desktop, webfont and app licenses. And it’s offered in full and basic versions. The basic version has a smaller character set — and price — so you can start there and always upgrade later.

Elena, designed by Nicole Dotin, has doubled in size with two new weights. Adding to the Regular and Bold, a Light and Medium bring a twist of variability to this modern serif typeface. The new styles form a trio of text weights – rather than follow a traditional linear weight model – and serve as lighter and heavier gradations of the Regular. These new fonts are designed to offer finer control over page color, hierarchy, and type pairings.

Originally released in 2011, Elena was made for extended reading. It has since found its way into every medium, from books to blogs, and even the popular reading app Instapaper. This release expands on that mission, reaffirming its commitment to text that’s meant to be read.

As before, the fonts are offered in Full and Basic versions. The Basic has a smaller character set — and price — so it’s a good way to test the family before you dive into all of its features. And if you’ve previously licensed Elena, you can upgrade without paying for what you already bought, whether that was a single style or family.

Getting webfonts up and running on a website can be challenging or just plain tedious. To take some of the sting out of it, we’ve written a quick start guide to help you implement the webfonts right away.

Take it Step-by-Step
The new guide, included in all our webfont packages, has step-by step instructions as well as a pre-written stylesheet for self-hosting webfonts. Just upload the included webfonts folder to your server, add a link to the stylesheet, style some text and you’re done. If it doesn’t go as smoothly as advertised, there’s a troubleshooting section too.

Jump Straight to the Code
You can also skip the steps and jump straight to pre-written CSS @font-face rules and classes. For packages with multiple weights or styles, the relationships between the fonts have already been worked out and are specific to the fonts in your order. The font-family name is shared, the font-weights use number values, and the font-styles are set to normal or italic, making it easier to manage related webfonts.

Need to deal with FOUT, want to make sure kerning is on, or prefer to serve fewer formats? Go for it! The quick start guide offers a solid beginning but isn’t prescriptive – feel free to adjust it based on the priorities of your site. Now go and enjoy the ten or twenty minutes you’ve been spared by not having to write @font-face code!

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If you’ve purchased webfonts from us in the past, re-download an order from your account to get the quick start guide.

HelloFresh is a delivery service that saves you time on shopping and meal planning – you pick recipes and they send a box full of pre-measured ingredients that you cook at home. It’s one of many such services popping up left and right. In this growing market, where websites replace store aisles, each brand’s take on photography, colors, and type will be key to luring in cooks.

The approach of HelloFresh is a bright orange and green color palette combined with Alice Savoie’s Capucine. Her typeface is used primarily for headings and its rich flavor is balanced by a generous amount of white space. Capucine’s distinct italics are also put to good use, adding a layer of hierarchy and a subtle sense of movement to the page.

The design carries over to their iOS app, where you can see recipes and rate meals. Paired with Adobe’s Source Sans, Capucine is used more extensively and at a wider range of sizes. The typefaces complement each other, creating a bright vibe and easy-to-follow instructions. Overall, the use of Capucine lends warmth to an experience that could easily feel cold.

Capucine is available for desktop and webfont formats, and has extended licensing options.

What began as a retooling of our production process ended up as a full-scale rebuild of every font in our library. The new, updated fonts are now available to all customers as free upgrades. The changes are almost entirely technical in nature – in other words, the design of the typefaces remains the same – but the improvements are beneficial to everyone, particularly those who licensed webfonts or who regularly use Microsoft Office applications on Windows. Many of the changes were based on customer feedback so if you ever experience problems with our fonts, get in touch – we’re here to help.

So, what changed?

Desktop Font Changes

• OpenType fonts now work better in Microsoft Office programs. If you’ve seen styles behave unusually or not show up at all, this should fix that.
• Certain fonts are now style-linked for better behavior in programs that require style changes be made using the Bold or Italic buttons.
• Font menu organization has changed for three families: Bryant Condensed, Bryant Compressed and Klavika Condensed. The fonts are now grouped as their own family rather than under their larger family name (see illustration below). Some programs were unable to handle the larger number of fonts in a single grouping. This also results in better cross-platform compatibility.
• Other minor improvements.

The way three families display in the font menu has changed. In this example, Bryant Compressed & Condensed are no longer grouped together under Bryant.

Webfont Changes

• WOFF 2.0 format added. Webfont packages now include WOFF2, WOFF, and EOT files for each style. This new format offers compression advantages over the original WOFF format.
• OpenType code, once stripped for file size, has been added back into the fonts. This does not add OpenType features, but restores the ability to access them via CSS for any OpenType features in the font. For most of the current webfont library that translates to ligatures and fractions.
• Fixed glitches that occurred in certain browsers hindering rendering or kerning.
• Further minor improvements to rendering of all non-manually hinted fonts.

We added the WOFF2 font format to all webfont packages for a total of three format options. The examples on the right show the file size differences between WOFF and WOFF2.

How to Upgrade
First, sign into your account and re-download your licensed fonts. Desktop users should uninstall existing fonts, restart, and then install the new fonts — in that order. Because the internal names of the fonts changed for the three reorganized families — Bryant Condensed or Compressed, and Klavika Condensed – existing documents using those fonts will have to replace the old fonts with the new fonts inside the document. Webfont users, upload the new versions to your server and check that the new font file names match the old. And for those of you using Typekit, republish your kits and the latest versions will be served.

The Nerf Ball. Masking tape. The Hüsker Dü logo. Cheerios and Wheaties. This is Minnesota design and we haven’t even mentioned the architecture. Or the chairs. Or the rollerblades (don’t roll your eyes). Or the magnetic poetry (don’t roll your eyes!).

Walker Art Center launched a web-based initiative called Minnesota by Design and as you can see, we can’t pick a favorite. That’s why it’s such an honor to have Klavika included in the collection. Eric, who designed Klavika in 2004, was born in Minnesota and we’re proud to uphold the culture that has been here long before us.

The virtual gallery allows the Walker to include works that can’t be practically collected – like a park. It also means webfonts. We were excited to see Maple chosen as the typeface for the project, used for everything from navigation to descriptions and even the map that represents the origins of the designs.

So if you’re interested in some design history – much of this work extends far beyond Minnesota – take a look yourself but beware the rabbit hole. Soon you’ll know plenty about the Honeycrisp apple. Tonka Toys. Paul Bunyan. Marcel Breuer…