Playtype Concept Store

Danish type foundry Playtpe has opened a street level type concept store, called, yes, the Playtype Concept Store. Not only do they sell their fonts, but also all kinds of other typographic products.

I can’t wait to visit it next time I’m in Copenhagen.

Here’s a blurb describing the store:
The Playtype™ Concept Store was launched in conjunction with the revamp and redesign of Playtype.com. Located in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro, the store is the physical manifestation of the online shop — and then some. Created as a place to further our typographic practice, the store provides a street level entry to typography — it is a place to share our passion with the general public and a place where our designers can experiment with their craft outside of the studio. Aside from type, the store continuously features new editions, events and products created by e-Types alongside friends and colleagues in the design and art world.

Adobe buys Typekit

Early web font pioneers Typekit, (who have helped move the internet from the dreary and depressing land of Arial & Times New Roman, to the warm and sunny land of real typography) has just announced they have been purchased by Adobe. Very exciting, and means that the bleeding edge of web fonts is about to get bigger and better.

Here’s the press release from Typekit CEO Jeffrey Veen

Adobe acquires Typekit
Just a few moments ago, Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch took the stage at their annual MAX conference and explained the company’s Creative Cloud strategy. Part of that announcement is very big news for us: Typekit has been acquired by Adobe.

We are thrilled. There honestly is no better place for us to continue building our platform. But perhaps even more significantly, this represents a huge step forward in bringing fonts to the web.

Not very long ago, web fonts were a curious and controversial debate. When the four of us founded this company, nobody knew if it would even work. We set up shop in a former morgue, sketched out a plan, and nervously published our first blog post. The response was immediate and not completely positive, but we’d fired the starter’s pistol. The race was on.

It seems odd to look back not even three years with a sense of nostalgia, but the environment in which we build the web has changed so much in so little time. At the end of 2008, HTML5 and CSS3 were becoming both viable and popular. Firefox, Safari, and Chrome were leapfrogging each other with amazing new capabilities, including the long-neglected @font-face spec. On the server side, a similarly important shift was happening: processing and storage could be rented by the hour and scaled at will. The so-called “cloud” was forming.

That was where we started. We asked ourselves what would happen at the intersection between web design and cloud computing. We quickly realized we could do two really interesting things. First, by serving hosted fonts, we could provide compatibility to all browsers and devices — both old and still to come — using the latest, most up-to-date best practices. Designers using our platform would no longer have to track browser hacks and bulletproof syntax. They could focus instead on creativity and expression.

Second, we could innovate on the business side as well. We could sell fonts as a service, and use a subscription model to eliminate Byzantine licensing and usage issues. We gave designers all-you-can-eat access to a library of font families, shared revenue with our partners, and carefully cultivated our business as it began to grow.

And grow it did. Few sites used web fonts when we got started; today, new sites seldom launch without them. Typekit now serves nearly three billion fonts per month on over one million different sites, including some of the most recognized brands on the web. We host the iconic typefaces of the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, among others. We’re forging new ground with web-native companies like Zynga, Twitter, and the Gawker Network. And we’re making web fonts available to as broad an audience as possible, offering integration with platforms like About.me, WordPress.com , Posterous, and Behance. And that just scratches the surface: our blog is full of examples of the most innovative typography on the web today — all powered by Typekit.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without an amazing collection of typefaces, created by the most talented type designers in the world. They have gone out on the proverbial limb with us as we’ve repeatedly tried new things. For a craft that traces its roots back 600 years, reinventing itself at internet speed is significant.

If you’re one of our customers, this announcement means things will only get better. Typekit will remain a standalone product, as well as become a vital part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Our team will stay together, and we’re excited to start working on even easier ways to integrate web fonts into your workflow.

From the start, our vision has been to make the web more beautiful, readable, and fast. Joining Adobe will give us the opportunity to do that at an even larger scale. This news doesn’t mean we’ve crossed the finish line. Actually, we’ve really only just completed the first lap. The race to improve the web will only get faster. I hope you’re enjoying the ride.

— Jeffrey Veen, CEO, Typekit

You can find out more about the announcement in Adobe’s press release.

Dinick & Howells – D&H 3D experiments

Haven’t posted in a little while, and because I haven’t seen anything out there that’s knocked my socks off,  I thought I’d show some of my own stuff – why not!  These are part of an ongoing series of 3D experiments that use the letterforms D&H (my company name) as the starting point (all created in the glorious Cinema 4D).  Hope you enjoy them. Will do a new post with brand new experiments in a few months.

Designer Scrabble

Though this isn’t real yet (just a prototype), I think it definitely would be a popular product.  It’s consistent with what I see as the general public’s growing awareness and interest in “fonts” (aka typography, folks). It’s a proposed designer edition of the classic word game Scrabble, featuring an array of type options. The concept was created by Andrew Clifford Capener who explains:

“The idea was to excite people about typography by giving them the ability to choose what font their scrabble set would come in. The set would be available in the font of your choice or with an assorted font pack. Additional font packs (including your favorite font) could be ordered through Scrabble’s website.”

AICP 08 Opening Titles

Very nice opening titles created by Thornberg and Forester for the AICP 08 event featuring wall signage that comes to life in a reaching, winding, tentacle kinda way. This is another one of those “damn-I-working-on-something-very-similar-then-I-found-this” moments! Oh, well – my letterforms are wooden! Anyway, really lovely work nonetheless. You can view the full clip here.

Dude, Where’s My Music: Main Titles

From time to time, I feature my own work here on the blog, and thought I’d share a new one with you. I just completed the main titles for the upcoming feature rock-doc, “Dude, Where’s My Music“, directed by Ravi Parsan. Nothing like a little heavy metal to inspire, some serious headbanging typography.
Stay tuned – there a loads more title sequences to be done throughout the whole film.

ABC 3D

I had to offer some praise for this amazing, new ABC book – if you review some of the recent posts here at Graphic Definer, you’ll see it fits right in!

French author Marion Bataille, who is a illustrator and designer, has created this inventive, pop up book that is entirely typographic and though I haven’t held one in my own hands yet, the video below will give you a very good tour of how it works. Really wonderful!