Occasional news from Signal Type Foundry
#1 | December 2024 |
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Welcome to Noise
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Noise, Signal’s brand new newsletter. A few times a year, I’ll be scraping together some new and upcoming releases, notable commissions, works in progress, small victories, gallant defeats, bits from our flat files, and unasked-for opinions, and packing them off to the inboxes of the discerning few. Haven’t subscribed yet? Easily fixed. →
Introducing Exact
Exact, my reconsideration of the dourly ubiquitous Times New Roman, is finally live. The bold weights have a bit of 70s funk, and the light weights are a bit Olive Oyl, but fear not, the Regular is as prissy and straight-laced and generally TNR as anyone could wish. The name is a nod to my youthful days of kerning Typositor type with an X-Acto knife. Many thanks to Sebastian Carewe for font engineering and design support. Take a closer look. →
Two ISTD awards for the Irish Independent rebrand
When I moved to Dublin from NYC 11 years ago, I told my Irish wife I wouldn’t feel properly at home until someone paid me to draw a harp. And now someone has. Mark Porter Associates tapped Signal and Clare Bell to help them rebrand the Irish Independent, Ireland’s largest-circulation newspaper, which was reinventing itself as a multi-channel news source. In September, the team went to Brighton to pick up a couple of International Society of Typographic Designers Awards for the work: one for the rebrand as a whole, and another for the four-weight bespoke face I drew for it, Cláirseach (Irish for harp). Signal also snagged an ISTD award for our 2023 poster. Read more. →
New for Mortise: italics
What do you give the slab-serif family that has everything but italics? Italics. And about time, too. Font engineering and design support by Sebastian Carewe. Full showings here. →
eir sans for TBWA/Worldwide
As part of eir’s recent brand refresh, Fionán Healy and Robert Boyle at TBWA hired us to create a custom version of our Tenon typeface: clear, sturdy, open, and with horizontal terminals to suggest the speed of Ireland’s leading broadband provider. (The source face, Tenon, was designed in collaboration with my old comrade in arms Seán Mongey at Post Studio.) eir sans includes three weights and forms one of the main elements in a new nationwide integrated campaign: eir for all. Here’s the case study. →
Glammo is live
Originally designed for the Dublin Bowie Festival, Glammo is a modular, grid-based, retrofuturistic typeface that blends references to techno, AKIRA, and the Designers Republic. Inspired by 90s culture (Black Tie White Noise) but with faintly psychedelic roots, its bold shapes are best used in short, high-impact bursts. More techno-glam here. →
Ballinger speaks Greek
Delighted to announce that our oldest superfamily now supports the language of Aristotle, Sappho, and Yanni, along with Cyrillic, Vietnamese and over 150 Latin-script languages. Many thanks to Panos Haratzopoulos for expert consultation. See the full Ballinger family. →
Signal trial fonts are now full-featured
If you make fonts, people are going to steal them.
That’s a fact of the business, and it doesn’t worry me. We make type for people who know and care about type, and good typographers don’t tend to work with pirated fonts, any more than good carpenters tend to work with stolen lumber. Folks who pirate our stuff don’t represent lost sales. They were never going to be our customers anyway.
So I’ve decided to stop subsetting Signal’s trial fonts. The new batch have complete glyph sets and working OT features. You can use them for mockups and prototypes without worrying about .notdefs popping up all over the place. Onces the design’s approved, you can just license them properly through the site as before. Until then, they’re free, with no obligation. I trust you. →
Dublin, Ireland | |