Brea is one those left-field ideas only Corey Holms can dream up: An interpolatable pixel blackletter alphabet going from nearly invisible to true in-your-face 1980s. In other news, Orpheus Pro gets three condensed weights, and Fido and Stretto go real Pro with a massive Pan-European expansion. […]

Brea + Updates

Brea

Interesting design is almost always binary, in the sense that it either reduces communication to a central idea or efficiently combines different ideas demonstrating diverse or intricate relationships. That’s kind of oversimplifying it, but we’re close to getting the picture there. It’s less or more, more or less — especially with design done using modern machines and software, the medium considerably affecting the message.

Within this realm of ones and zeroes, Corey Holms brings his beautifully strange design thinking and comes out to play. In Brea, our latest release, he takes shapes that once were the most human of expressions and translates them through the cold eyes of early dot matrix machines. The result is a set of blackletter pixel fonts the likes of which was perhaps fleetingly seen some four decades ago on tube screens.

To transcend the novelty of it all and do some more arbitrary time travel, we took the original single-font design and had some fun scaling the dots/pixels in an interpolative environment, and we’re very happy with the end product. The lighter fonts are surprisingly dystopian-modern, and the heavier end of the spectrum places the alphabet firmly in an 1980s emulation world.

Font updates

We recently introduced some significant updates to three of our typefaces:

• The Orpheus Pro family became very popular right out of the gate when it was released almost a decade ago. Somewhere in Hollywood it was determined that it would make a great entertainment design tool, and it really took off. Now, partly by popular demand and partly because of a curiosity-triggered revisit, three condensed weights are available as part of the family. Same spirit as the Orpheus Pro fonts you love, but now with additional possibilities to elegantly cram information in small spaces.

Fido has been popular in quite a few industries, but very much so in video games, children entertainment and toy packaging. The latest version of the font is a Pro one, with Cyrillic and Greek support now built into it, and more than 100 additional interlocking ligatures.

Stretto, our take on an early-1970s Novarese film font (the original having been the striking reversed-contrast face of Hunky Dory and Life on Mars), also sees a major update with Cyrillic and Greek support added, as well as a few new alternates sprinkled throughout.

0
0
0
0