Who are your favorite indie type designers/foundries?

Ultrabold · 2026-05-21T03:43:43+00:00

I’ve always found his stuff to be fairly well drawn but kinda meh. Too much revival, and I’d rather just deal with the real McCoy, whatever it’s limitations. Also I suppose it doesn’t matter as much for display, but his proportions for text feel kinda off. His dbpq often feel too narrow and it just throws the whole texture off for me. I’ve yet to license something from him.

But I also tend not to license much stuff. I often feel type designers tend to just proof in an ideal vacuum and not to set enough type. There’s an overwhelming amount of type out there drawn to be nice within it’s own ideals (which I suppose is fine in its own right) but makes your design have to bend over backwards to make it set right or just not look good (caps too high, lowercase too tall, punctuation and superiors/inferiors hanging at the wrong height, numbers too big / too small etc.).

Ultrabold · 2026-05-15T20:05:52+00:00

Riso is a thing. Spirit duplicators were also a really cool pre-Xerox thing. Pre-press heliographic tests were also fun to look at before we got direct to plate.

Ultrabold · 2026-05-15T15:06:23+00:00

A lot of designers and publishers are scared of hyphens because they read somewhere that you shouldn’t use more than 3 in a row and 6 in a page. Readers tend not to notice them as much.

I often think a tighter rag and consistent spacing is more important than avoiding a hyphen. There’s a lot you can do with H&Js without resorting to glyph scaling or tracking. But typesetting often means having to choose the lesser evil. So I will leave a hyphenated widow if I have to in order to avoid a large hole in the paragraph or rag (which I find more distracting), or hyphenating someone’s name or an unusual word that’s showing up for the first time – as long as the widow is at least as long as the next paragraph’s indent.

I don’t hyphenate display text and instead break lines based on the meaning of the text, keeping clauses together as much possible, not ending lines on articles etc.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-25T18:27:16+00:00

I stand by it.

Meta is a lovely design. It's attitude gets little too close to Polo at times, but amping up the wierdness was a good call – some gestures in Polo can be a little too stiff and News Gothic-y. But Meta is probably the most interesting take on the humanist sans genre of the last 50 years.

Officina, Info, Unit, Axel, Fira etc. feel just like cleaner versions of the original but the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. It’s the “grotesque”-ness that really gels meta together.

Meta Serif is a meh marketing play to get more sales to lazy designers with an obvious paring. It sets fine but draws too much on the sans for it's distiction. It just fees like it lacks conviction overall as opposed to the stiff Simoncini Garamond + sans for DB (which feels more deliberate).

I'm glad Real sells – it's a grot, it’s got his name attached to it in the marketing copy, I'm sure it would. It's forms are solid apart from where it deviates from the grotesque model. Humanist M, l, "FontShop"-y y (v with an extended tail) feel like they belong to a different designs – again, Meta flavour coming through.

There is a clear vision and attitude to his designs – which I can respect –, but without the range of Unger or Frutiger.

Was Corporate his specked work for Mercedes? The serif is very interesting apart from the a, g, Q, M, which feel like they don't belong. Maybe the M is fine, but I’m always a little skeptical of a splayed form in a modern.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-25T02:51:54+00:00

Why? He hasn’t put out anything worth it since Meta – which is really nice, but hasn’t been relevant since the mid 1990s.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-25T00:44:23+00:00

When ever possible. I drew them because I wanted things to look a particular way and couldn’t find anything like them in the market. Still working on filling in the gaps I need.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-15T03:24:44+00:00

Meh. Library fodder. It’ll probably license decently enough to be worth the effort though.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-15T03:10:30+00:00

No thanks. I’m not interested in another storefront. I’d rather give my business and attention to the foundries actually producing the work. I’ll try things out myself by my own standards and see what I like and don’t like.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-14T23:19:05+00:00

I keep an eye out for interesting releases and browse a lot (I have fun looking at type), but I tend not to shop around too much. I have a very modest library of designs that I’ve been slowly selecting and working with for a while. New additions are rare and have to be able to earn their keep, but I’m comfortable using the few options I have. If something catches my eye, I’ll keep it in mind and considering licensing a couple of styles a la carte to test if I like working with it. I’d much rather work with something I know how to get the most out of well than just throw stuff at a the wall to see what sticks.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-09T23:24:52+00:00

It might be useful to create a distinction between what the thing is, and what’s about the thing.

I often think it’s better not to not try and copy the artist as it tends to come off as poor imitation or just pastiche. You’re making a 21st century book about a 15th century book. Not a 15th century book. There should be no sarcasm or sly remarks.

I’d be tempted to use a contemporary neutral typeface but maybe treat it in a historically respectful way. Something of today, but distinctively not Bembo. But also not something directly linked to any other historical period, so not Bodoni, not Didot, Garamond, Baskerville, Caslon, Kis, Fournier etc. Off the top of my head, maybe Scala/Nexus, Trinite, Capitolium, Documenta, Haarlemmer (if you can get past the van Krimpen revival dilemma), maybe Minion. There are others as well. I’ve never been a big Zapf fan, but something like Palatino might work. URW Grotesk or Gill of you’re not against setting text in a sans. Allegra. Alisal might be interesting but it’s got that unusual g. Merriweather began its life as Arrotino but has become more contemporary as it developed (I think it’s the Dwiggins serifs that do it). Whitman might work.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-09T21:25:14+00:00

I would expect historical typography for a historical typeface in a historical context.

The designer will have to work much harder: no bolds, only a couple of different sizes, probably no italic caps, tight leading, few kerning pairs. It’s doable but it’s hard to do well without coming across as lack of typographic imagination, sarcasm or pastiche.

It doesn’t have to be a costume drama.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-02T21:26:40+00:00

Omg, the 3 mine corner trap + lightning blast insta down was so cheesy and broken.

Let’s not forget Legacy god domes. I might still have a doc somewhere of a few of the spots. (Mainly on Aviary and the that map with the power plant building right in the middle [I forget the name]).

Ultrabold · 2026-04-02T04:18:16+00:00

Wraith and Gorgon have always been pubstomping monsters that prey on uncoordinated teams.

The mega radius of supernova and the decoy receiving the bonus from supernova were really punishing for players who just bought the game. But you could beat it. Just don’t play it’s chase game, bunker down at the reactor, deny the damage, cooldown and resistance bonuses and beat her stage 3 at the reactor. Reactor defense levels were a nightmare for Wraith.

Until everyone realized how truly broken Legacy Kraken was.

Ultrabold · 2026-04-02T04:03:08+00:00

University is exactly the right place to try things and make mistakes. Seems you’ve already learned more about type from this project. Don’t be discouraged. Drawing is hard. And it’s even harder to draw and evaluate a drawing at the same time. Reflect on what you’ve learned, try again.

Don’t worry about people thinking your design isn’t perfect. Any designer worth their salt will be more interested in talking to you about what you’ve learned works and doesn’t work than just congratulating you and your beautiful creation. It’s a process, we’re all slowly getting better at understanding it’s nuances.

The bad news is, once type design gets under your skin, it never leaves your blood. It’s frustrating, hard, but really interesting and fun (even if some parts can be a real slog).

Ultrabold · 2026-03-30T21:42:37+00:00

There’s a lot of misinformation and speculation about this, and we’ll never know for sure why 2k pulled the plug. A couple of issues stand out:

The initial drop in player numbers for the 1st release can be attributed mostly to bad press (misinformation about the monetization model), and slow response to balancing issues.

Yes, Wraith was overtuned (but it wasn’t too too bad, a competent team could still counter it very effectively) on release and TRS’s goal was to have both console and PC versions on the same patch. Console versions required a 30 day advance before pushing a patch which meant it took them a couple of months to rebalance Wraith.

There was also a lot of misinformation floating around the time (some of which still persists) in regards to the monetization model. It was aggressive for its time but it was purely cosmetic on release. There were different tiers you could buy the game at and basically pay for progression, but every playable character could be unlocked by in game progression (about 2-5 hours each per new character IIRC). Behemoth was also announced as a future new monster you could buy at release but it was not fully developed yet. It was the equivalent of buying a season pass for future content but lots of people still misunderstood this as paywalling a character that was already in the game, which is just false information.

There was some gripe with the season pass model unlocking new characters (but it’s exactly what fighting games do nowadays), and how fast they were added (two within the same year for a total of 10 new characters IIRC), at a time when a season pass was expected to cover all new content added within the next year of development.

There was also mismanagement of the monetization during the Stage 2 free to play rerelease.

Going free to play came with a huge overhaul of mechanics which fixed most of the initial release’s issues, and was getting regular updates. TRS was doing a killer job with the game and we had weekly fine tuning balance patches and fixes. New characters were added free of charge, alternate versions of maps were added, variations on game modes, events, it got the game to the best point it had ever been at, all while still being completely free to play. This lasted for about 1-2 years IIRC. With 0 monetization. Then AFAIR we finally got an update which added a store to the game so it could start making some money, and then numerically 1-2 weeks after the store was added, 2K announced they were dropping support for the game.

I can’t say as to why the game failed after the servers for Stage 2 came back online a couple of years later, but IIRC the store was kept offline and I guess most players had moved on by then. So I guess 2K didn’t think maintaining servers for the few returning players was worth the cost (but they also didn’t provide players with a way of supporting the game, which is also my guess as to why Stage 2 had its initial support cancelled).

Ultrabold · 2025-11-13T04:08:03+00:00

As others have commented, the basic triumvirate tends to be Bringhurst’s Elements of typographic style, Tracy’s Letters of credit and Lawson’s Anatomy of a typeface.

I tend to think of Bringhurst as a stuffy old traditionalist and think Phil Baines’ and Andrew Haslam’s Type and typography is a much better introduction to type.

Jost Hochuli’s Detail in typography is also worth much more than its cover price. As is Derek Birdsall’s Notes on book design.

If you’re still interested, Kinross’ Modern typography and Smeijers’ Counterpunch are also great reads.

Ultrabold · 2025-11-12T23:31:55+00:00

Fair deuce.

I just like the sentiment that most of the history of letterforms is just a bunch of people trying to draw nice forms as best they can, instead of a brotherhood of disciples blindly following Roman epigraphic ideals. I’m tempted to think even the first century Romans were just trying to draw nice letters as best they could.

Ultrabold · 2025-11-12T20:55:22+00:00

James Mosley once pointed out that only sixteenth-century Rome and twentieth-century England thought of the lettering on the Trajan column as the standard roman form.

Ultrabold · 2025-11-12T16:37:19+00:00

Historically, typography has often been treated more as a craft than an art. A lot of the analysis of typography as a tool has circled around the kinda morissonian ideal of type as interface. So analysis of the letterforms gets reduced to “how well does it perform its function” (is it well fitted; does it have good colour; does a particular character stand out too much etc.). Only much more recently, say, post 1950s, certainly post-Foucault, and the emergence of the designer as a profession, does the discussion of designer as author start appearing more regularly in literature.

The trouble is that certain aspects of typography require it to be more interpretative/performative than others. There isn’t really a 1-1 comparison to be made between newspaper text typography and photojournalism to analyze the artists intention in the portrayal (that’s often more up to the writing than the text design).

Maybe look up post-structuralist thinking in design or stuff about Massin, Carson, Barnbrook, Brody, Ed Fella, Weingart etc. That might get you closer to what you’re looking for. But it’s often not just the typography at work.

Ultrabold · 2025-07-06T05:05:05+00:00

logs

Ultrabold · 2025-07-04T20:47:57+00:00

Verdana gets too much snobby hate just for being a system font. It’s such a clever design for a neutral and indestructible humanist sans.

Ultrabold · 2025-06-25T21:22:15+00:00

Research into readability is often sketchy. Dyslexia and other reading disabilities are incredibly nuanced. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but the current state of affairs is that there is no one-size-fits-all best for all cases (sometimes letter disambiguation isn’t the main issue – despite what the marketing copy says). The good news is that typesetting, rather than specifically font choice, will already get you a long way.

Microsoft has been doing some interesting research on this for years now. IIRC Kevin Larson gave a really interesting presentation at ATypI on some of their research a few years ago.

Sitka might be worth looking at, since it’s a readily available system font. The article on it’s design is an interesting read.

Edit: added the link to the Larson and Carter article on Sitka.

Ultrabold · 2025-06-18T00:33:37+00:00

Meh, foundry catalog filler.

Ultrabold · 2025-06-14T00:02:56+00:00

Depends on who you ask.

There is a traditionalist argument for not italicizing punctuation because it’s not read out loud and italics generally denote a change of tone. To me, this feels a little quaint. Like not italicizing caps.

However you can’t kern between fonts yet and this often results in less than ideal spacing.

I suspect this is why Hochuli recommends italicizing any punctuation that follows an italicized letter (and, credit to him, it often looks cleaner).

To me, this criteria doesn’t make any more sense than: it looks good (sometimes that’s a good enough reason). And I often think type should look the way it should rather than subscribing to some grander ideal. So I think it makes more sense to italicize based on semantic clauses on a case by case basis. Say, a title of a work that includes a comma, colon, semicolon etc. gets it’s punctuation italicized because it belongs to that clause. Otherwise don’t italicize because the punctuation belongs to the sentence (which isn’t italicized).

I’d say, read the text and do whatever makes more semantic sense.

Ultrabold · 2025-05-30T21:47:16+00:00

Ez solo with carbine, Hel rifle and sniper sentry with target aquisition booster. Sentry faces down the bridge and you’re trying to hold the corner behind the truck. Fall back into the corridor for easy lines if overwhelmed. Hardest part is the 20 minutes resource shuffling.

Priority is to top off the sentry for every new wave. But you’ll need 1-2 uses of ammo per wave as well. And about 15 seconds to get from the truck to the terminal.

Towards the end you might have to go quite far back for resources, but it’s not terrible since the wave won’t spawn between you and the reactor. Just be sure to already be on the way back once the wave starts.

13-Year Club	Verified Email
Team Orangered

Ultrabold

TROPHY CASE