Mark’s Notebook - Page 38
I’m proud to announce the release of two new display fonts: Kinescope and Snicker. Both fonts were inspired by hand-lettered titles in the old Fleischer Brothers’ animated Superman cartoons from the 1940s.
Kinescope uses advanced OpenType magic to choose the most pleasing character shapes as you type and features extended language support. (An application with advanced OpenType support required for the magic stuff.) To find out more, check out the Kinescope User Guide (1.6mb PDF).
Advanced OpenType support is not required by Snicker, but it has some tricks up its sleeve, including case-sensitive punctuation, automatic fractions, and extended language support. To find out more, check out the Snicker User Guide (1.2mb PDF).
For the first month, Kinescope and Snicker will be available as low as $29 each exclusively from Font Bros. Follow these links for more details:
June 1 Update: Kinescope and Snicker are now available here at Mark Simonson Studio as well.
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I’ve been seeing more of these two typefaces lately. Here are some sightings I found in the last few days.
The first is Mostra all over the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine:
And here are two recent sightings of Coquette, the first on a television commercial for Archer Farms (Target), where they have used a neat letterpress effect:
The last is another use of Coquette on the beautifully designed cover of the new book American Food Writing:
I don’t know or care what this book is about, but the lettering on the cover is incredible. Seen in an antique store in West Salem, Wisconsin, on August 19, 2006.
Well, here it is the beginning of March and those three new fonts I wrote about in December are still not out. A few people have written me about this, so I should explain.
Basically, I keep getting sidetracked by client work, taking time away from finishing the new fonts. Client work has real deadlines—deadlines I have no control over. My self-imposed deadline for finishing the fonts was, by comparison, more flexible. So when push came to shove, you can imagine what happened.
The good news is that I’m on the case again and it shouldn’t be much longer. I hesitate to give a date except: soon.
Update: Kinescope and Snicker have now been released (April 30, 2007).
A line of meat products in Sweden is sporting Coquette on its packages. (Thanks to Peter at Fountain type foundry for the tip and the photo.)
Here’s a fun lettering job I did for the cover of “Two for the Road” by Jane & Michael Stern. The book is a bunch of recipes collected from roadside diners all over the U.S. Art director Martha Kennedy asked me to make the lettering look like something you might see on a sign for a diner. In fact, it’s somewhat based on the sign from a famous diner called Rosie’s.
(This work is actually not that recent, but just I realized that I never posted anything about it here when the book was published last year.)