Headline Heads Up — No. 4

One Tues­day every month, I’m going to round up a cou­ple (maybe a few) awe­some dis­play type­faces to show­case and give a lit­tle break­down on each one. If you have a sug­ges­tion you want me to take a look at, drop me a line. Let’s jump straight into some head­line goodness.

Miltonian

Foundry : Pablo Impallari

Designer(s) : Pablo Impallari

Cost: FREE

So, I was perus­ing the Google web fonts list and noticed this addi­tion by the same guy who did Lobster which I already show­cased a while back. The trend of the two ver­sions — one open and one fill — strikes again. The type­face ref­er­ences a dis­tinct tat­too style with its rough edges, high con­trast, and slight embell­ish­ments. It’s because of the uneven­ness that a long text set­ting never gets into a real rhythm. It does have punc­tu­a­tion, accents, and enough char­ac­ters to cover the Latin char­ac­ter set so there is some flex­i­bil­i­ty there.

Six Caps

Foundry : newtypography

Designer(s) : Vernon Adams

Cost: FREE

Another type­face on the list the stuck out to me for set­ting head­lines, was this Six Caps by Vernon Adams. An extreme­ly con­densed sans serif, these let­ters are tight. Text set­ting is out of the ques­tion as it is an all-uppercase font with the low­er­case replaced by a small-caps copy of each let­ter. So you’re basi­cal­ly typ­ing in ALL CAPS all the time. But, say you want­ed to set the first word or two of para­graph apart in drop-cap fash­ion; then Six Caps might be a great choice. Or if you need to squeeze a four word bit into a tiny space, the econ­o­my of these let­ters tight­ness might just do the trick. That con­densed form does lend to a mod­ern, stream­lined feel so be aware of that when using Six Caps.

And final­ly, I’d like to men­tion some­thing dif­fer­ent. It’s not a font or type­face per se but it com­plete­ly falls in the realm of dis­play typog­ra­phy and set­ting head­lines. House Industries has final­ly released their Photo-Lettering project. It allows you to set some type with old PLINC alpha­bets, set lay­er­ing col­ors, maybe some alter­nate or lig­a­ture options then buy the head­line and receive it as a vec­tor that you can mess with some more or drop into your design. They have start­ed out with 38 styles and say they plan to release more. Definitely worth tak­ing a look at and play­ing with a lit­tle bit. The inter­face is won­der­ful and intu­itive; every­thing works like a charm. The site itself looks great as to be expected.

Now for the crit­i­cal part. I’m not sold yet on the pric­ing or real­ly the whole busi­ness model. I think of fonts as an invest­ment in a tool that I can carry around in my tool­box and pull out when­ev­er the need might arise. With a font installed on my com­put­er, I can tweak and style and size to my hearts con­tent in a Character palette. I can access all sorts of OpenType features.

Then again, maybe I’m not the niche audi­ence. I’m a graph­ic design­er with the Adobe Creative Suite and tons of knowl­edge on how to use those pro­grams. You get a vec­tor PDF which can be edit­ed in Illustrator but more impor­tant­ly, could also just as eas­i­ly be dropped into some­one’s Office Word doc­u­ment above a page of Comic Sans.

That should­n’t sound too harsh because I don’t mean it to be. I think there is a def­i­nite cost/benefit analy­sis to be done based on the quan­ti­ty of head­lines that you need. I still total­ly rec­om­mend that you check it out. Heck, even sign up for an account and get one FREE set­ting to down­load. Then let me know what you think in the comments.