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Typography trends for 2012
Will tall, skinny typefaces and tight kerning become even more popular? Slab serif faces seemed to explode out of nowhere and it seems like everyone and their little brother jumped on the custom typography bandwagon. What are your predictions for the next year?
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9 Jan 2012 — 12:03pm
Everybody will make very heavy fonts with hairline counters.
BTW, slabs didn't come out of nowhere: they convey
stability and honesty, which are valued attributes
since the recent -and ongoing- financial tomfoolery.
hhp
9 Jan 2012 — 12:52pm
I think that "women" fonts will overwhelm the market. When I said "women", I mean on letter shape - sweet, (half) handwritten, with a lot of extra glyphs, with a lot OT features, for weddings, curly, tatoo, sketch, girly, with swashes, organic (whatever that means), chick, flourish, perfume, party... faces! Also, from our angle - 70-80% buyers of our fonts in 2011 were women even we don't have an font that fits fully into "women" typeface description. Also, plus the trend that new foundries follow is to make an easy-to-do (I mean, easier then sans or serif families) faces.
(I hope I didn't sounded like some fashion gay expert).
9 Jan 2012 — 1:42pm
Let’s hope the “ugly as in geometric with no optical correction and a bit vernacular” fad will end (I’m not holding my breath, tough).
9 Jan 2012 — 8:02pm
I’m predicting lots of unicase.
9 Jan 2012 — 11:08pm
I don’t see a clear trend. But I think that the number of super-families will grow even more in 2012 (that may have to do with the fact that it is getting harder to do original design).
10 Jan 2012 — 7:58am
Sorta in the middle, I think... more faces than 2011, fewer faces than 2013. People will continue to make faces the way they want to make them, including at each other.
10 Jan 2012 — 8:09am
You could make a superfamily spanning the last 500 years of type, with point compatible masters, and extrapolate the future.
10 Jan 2012 — 8:16am
Brilliant!
10 Jan 2012 — 8:30am
Frode, what you said reminded me of this:
http://www.typotheque.com/fonts/history
Related: http://typophile.com/node/138
BTW check out the node number there. Oldschool.
hhp
12 Jan 2012 — 4:47pm
Well, here’s a starting point.
12 Jan 2012 — 8:07pm
You could make a superfamily spanning the last 500 years of type, with point compatible masters, and extrapolate the future.
If you chose samples from the middle of the “Marian” range and extrapolated backwards and forwards, how closely would the results correspond to what actually happened?
13 Jan 2012 — 9:31am
Extrapolate into the future and you get Eurostile. No point in trying to fight it.
13 Jan 2012 — 12:17pm
I actually hope I'm wrong, but:
We will see a boatload of fonts that follow the "go wild with
the styles" philosophy of deviating the Italic, Bold etc. from
the Roman (as seen in Alda and some of Yanone's work).
I want to be wrong because -although there's some potential
glimmer of merit to this admittedly interesting idea- I have
to believe that it's going to be a backfiring gimmick almost
every time.
There's a universe of fertile land (already being explored)
between 100% interpolation versus going full-on 90s again.
hhp
13 Jan 2012 — 7:29pm
I predict, and wish, more LIBRE fonts for 2012!
And since Firefox and IE10* are supporting OT features:
I also wish that in 2012 all web browser will support them.
* http://typophile.com/node/88938
17 Jan 2012 — 5:16pm
I predict lots of Benguiat influence and pastel colors for the third quarter of 2012.