A Spare Update — No. 3

With the way the hol­i­days are soak­ing up all my time, I’m going to wrap up this month’s Wall­pa­per Wednes­day and Head­line Heads-Up into one big update post. But first, here’s some other cool things to go check out.

Portfolio Site for Sean Wes
Some great let­ter­ing and all around good type & design.

Print Free Graph Paper
Need a A4 sheet of 1/4″ iso­met­ric graph paper? Print one here along with nor­mal boxed graph paper and other formats.

Portfolio Site for Anthony James Paglia
All around fun design and some nice type projects. (Plus I love the color.)

Icon Fonts are Awesome
A cool CSS trick with icon fonts.

Meaningful User Interface Transitions
A great overview of com­mon ani­ma­tion tech­niques for user interfaces.

Portfolio Site of Nate Williams
Fun, child­like illus­tra­tion and great lettering

 

Winter Blues

Feeling the chill of win­ter in your bones? Share those blues with your com­put­er desk­top by down­load­ing this month’s wall­pa­per. I’ve put this mon­th’s wall­pa­per togeth­er using some water­col­or brush­es from Bittbox and the type is set in Hand of Sean. As always, let me know what you like or if there is some­thing you want to see.

2560 x 1440
1920 x 1200
1440 x 900
1280 x 1024
1024 x 768
960 x 640 (iPhone 4)

 

How about some awe­some dis­play type?

Adec 2.0

Foundry : Serge Shi

Designer(s) : Serge Shi

Cost: FREE

First on the list is Adec 2.0 by Serge Shi. You should check out the Behance port­fo­lio for a cou­ple more awe­some fonts — Grogy and Boldin. As for Adec2.0, it is a sans serif with clear art deco inspi­ra­tion. I men­tion Adec2.0 because of the ini­tials set for build­ing tex­tures. Combine the ini­tials with the main forms and you can get some real­ly inter­est­ing shapes and pat­terns like the ones shown below.

 

Pronounce

Foundry : Ripe Type

Designer(s) : Cameron Sweeney

Cost: FREE

Have some­thing big to say? Do you like small coun­ters in your glyphs? Take a look at Pronounce from Ripe Type. It has a lit­tle bit of slab serif inspi­ra­tion, but as thick as it is you pay atten­tion to the weight and not the ser­ifs. Needless to say, the larg­er the point size the bet­ter to let this super heavy type show off. Also check out Ripe — a geo­met­ric slab serif with round­ed ter­mi­nals — while you’re over there.

 

Monoment

Foundry : Måns Gre­bäck

Designer(s) : Måns Gre­bäck

Cost: $59

Last on the list is Monoment — a 1930s / 40s inspired script with a super low x‑height and cal­li­graph­ic slant. For a con­nect­ed script, there isn’t any fancy OpenType extras or alter­nates for cre­at­ing vari­ety in your line. The read­abil­i­ty at small sizes is also pret­ty poor. But it’s built for head­lines and dis­play, where those draw­backs aren’t impor­tant. Where it does shine is by hav­ing a fam­i­ly of thin, con­densed, and slant­ed options that can help mix things up a bit. So if you’re look­ing for some retro flair, try out Monoment.

 

Final Mention

There’s a ton of new releas­es on the Lost Type Co-op so go check them out. In fact, just book­mark that browse page and keep check­ing in over there because awe­some stuff is always being released on their pay-what-you-want plan.