Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Exljbris


Exljbris is Jos Buivenga's showcase site. I don't know much about Jos. One site has him describe himself as:

"Art-director working at an advertising agency in the Netherlands. He thinks himself not as multi talented, but as multi interested. Jos is also active in writing, painting and... type design."

The site hosts all of his free typefaces...

Delicious: a postmodern, slightly 'squished' (arcane typographic term for 'condensed') sans-serif, with true italics and consistent spacing across all weights. Reminiscent of Gill Sans and Bliss, it is a legible and useful typeface. My only real quibbles are that I'm not fond of the roman lower-case 'a' and 'l'.

Fontin & Fontin Sans: Jos has designed Fontin 'to be used at small sizes. The color is darkish, the spacing loose and the x-height tall'. The numbers have a 'hybrid' design. They carry the characteristics of medieval numbers, but their size is larger than the x-height. Balance-wise, I think it is his most successful typeface. He is busy creating an Opentype version.

Fertigo: I'll damn this one with faint praise, it is pleasant. Even Jos seems to recognise this, his description reads: "The font nobody is really waiting for. The more you get to know it, the more you'll (probably) appreciate it."

Tallys: An 'engraved'-style font, one degree slanted with large caps, a small x-height and long ascenders. Plus 'real' numbers. Just one weight though.

Diavlo: In Jos's words, "Diavlo is organic and a bit square and sharp. Great attention has been given to detail, spacing and kerning. Each weight contains more than 300 glyphs and over 1.300 kerning pairs" Oh, and a bunch of ligatures and symbols. I could see this one being used as a headline font, or maybe on a book or CD cover.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Brett.

It is good to have your comments alongside the site, both a discovery and education.

I will keep an eye on Jos.

 
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