Drop #562 (2024-11-26): Typography Tuesday
The Type Archive; Advent Of Fonts; Free Font: Perfect Moment
Programming note: Today is my “Friday”, and #2.1 + #2.2 are in town, so Drops may be thin or non-existent the remainder of the week.
History, seasonal celebrations, and a freebie await Drop readers in this weekly typography-centric edition of the newsletter.
TL;DR
(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop using Ollama + llama 3.2 and a custom prompt.)
The Type Archive was established in 1992 as a repository for England’s typographic heritage, but it closed in 2022 due to financial struggles and has since been digitized by the Science Museum Group. (http://www.typearchive.org/)
Damien Guard’s 2023 Advent of Fonts is a creative exploration of typography and fonts, featuring daily typographic creations throughout December 2023.
The free font Perfect Moment is a brush-style SVG font with dynamic brushstroke textures that captures authentic handcrafted aesthetics.
The Type Archive
The Type Archive was established in 1992 by Susan Shaw in Stockwell, South London, as a repository safeguarding England’s rich typographic heritage. For three decades, it housed over 6 million artifacts representing the legacy of type founding, including original forms, punches, matrices, and patterns from England’s most successful metal and wood type foundries.
The facility maintained a unique operational capability through Monotype Hot-Metal Ltd., where four former Monotype Corporation pensioners manufactured matrices for hot-metal typesetting equipment, serving letterpress printing enthusiasts and commercial firms worldwide. The Archive’s location at Hackford Road in Stockwell had an interesting past – the buildings previously served as Price & King’s veterinary medicine and quarantine station, occasionally housing baby elephants, which inspired Shaw to adopt an elephant as the Archive’s symbol.
In mid-2022, the Type Archive announced its closure and the dispersal of its collections. The Science Museum Group (SMG) took responsibility for the Monotype collection, relocating it to their National Collections Centre near Swindon. The Stephenson Blake collection, temporarily owned by the V&A, was also transferred to SMG’s care. The closure came after years of financial struggles and the inability to fund necessary building repairs and accessibility improvements.
While the physical archive has closed, the SMG has digitized significant portions of the Monotype Collection, creating over 5,800 records with photographs and insights that remain accessible to the public. The SMG also conducted oral history interviews and filmed documentation with Type Archive volunteers to preserve the knowledge of typefounding manufacture for future generations.
I mention them, both for historical awareness, and to note they launched a crowd-funded project to produce “Type Archived“, a new book by Richard Ardagh, a long-serving Type Archive volunteer, that documents the remarkable story of the TA.
The book organizes the Archive’s typographic treasures by material — iron, steel, copper, brass, bronze, lead, wood, and paper — showcasing everything from engraved punches (master letters) to matrices (dies for casting) and letterpress type. These artifacts represented supreme mechanical engineering and type design achievements spanning six centuries of Western communication.
The book features contributions from distinguished practitioners associated with the Archive, including Berthold Wolpe, Quentin Blake, Toshi Omagari, and MinaLima (known for their work on the Harry Potter films). It includes specially commissioned photography, detailed summaries of the Archive’s accomplishments, essays on typefounding techniques, and a comprehensive glossary.
I’m all sorts of 😊 we will have a nigh-permanent record of this significant institution’s contributions to typography and printing history, thanks to this effort.
Advent Of Fonts
We’ve featured works by Damien Guard before, but — with the holiday season fast approaching, I thought this week would be a good time to feature their 2023 Advent of Fonts. It’s a creative exploration of typography and fonts, featuring daily typographic creations throughout December 2023. Each day reveals a new typographic piece, making it an fun way to pass the time whilst making merry.
Rather than blather, go take some time to peruse the collection and Damien’s previous font advent celebrations.
Free Font: Perfect Moment
Perfect Moment is a fun-yet-fancy brush-style SVG font that captures authentic handcrafted aesthetics through dynamic brushstroke textures (modern digital font technical features are so cool). The font maintains a fine balance between raw artistic expression and functional legibility, which is pretty handy if you’re trying to evoke some emotional resonance with your craftings.
The brushstroke implementation captures natural variations and imperfections typically found in hand lettering, creating an believable “painted” appearance. This authenticity is maintained across different sizes (not all fancy fonts have this attention to detail), with the font remaining legible while preserving its distinctive artistic character.
The font package includes WOFF2, WOFF, EOT, TTF, OTF, and SVG formats in a 31MB bundle, ensuring broad compatibility across platforms while preserving the intricate brush textures that give it its distinctive character.
FIN
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