Happy new year, typophiles! In the spirit of looking back on the year that was, I thought it’d be interesting to parse through the seemingly limitless font releases of 2010 and give a few hat-tips. There are far too many excellent fonts from last year to mention even a fraction of them, but here, in no particular order, are ten of my favorites, chosen from the realm of display fonts: fonts that shine for few words at large sizes — for headlines, logos, and the like.
Placarto 4F is a striking and unique ultra-bold display face from Sergiy Tkachenko. Perfect for eye-catching posters and big ads, and to add a dose of modern, industrial vibe to your designs.
Affair, from Alejandro Paul, is a lovely script font that is likely to make a lot of top-fonts-of-2010 lists. Lots of alternate glyphs and ligatures make Affair really fun to work with, and give designers a lot of latitude. It is elegant without being yet another stodgy wedding-invitation font.
Biographer is another script font with Alejandro Paul’s hand in it, designed in conjunction with Angel Koziupa. Note the long, lean, and unusual upright forms. Lovely. The creators suggest it for use on book covers and packaging.
Monroe is a slab serif with interesting swashes and alternate glyphs. I didn’t realize it until just now, but this is the third font from the Sudtipos foundry to make my list. Monroe combines the strength and stability of a slab serif with gentle curves and a sense of playfulness.
LaSalle is a font design from the 1950s, brought into the digital age with great care and a full compliment of professional features. If you’re going for that 50s, hand-painted sign effect, this is the font for you.
Caudrifonte is a playful, bold, hand-drawn font, with three styles and an available set of illustrated dingbats. It manages to do three things that are difficult to pull of in a handwriting sort of typeface: it maintains its hand-drawn look; it has a unique character; and the letterforms all cohere beautifully.
Speaking of handwriting… Sheila is a lovely hand-lettered script font from Laura Worthington. Designed to look like it was written with a ballpoint pen, Sheila would be great for taglines or quotations in ads.
Breathe is an incredibly complex and carefully crafted script font with nearly limitless combinatorial possibilities for use. It pulls off a very elegant calligraphic look without being boring. Wonderful for posters, declarations, invitations, and other display uses.
Voodoo Script is a wonderful display font that has a great retro feel to it. A really unique font, great for signs and packaging projects.
Fusion Sans is a strong, condensed font, great for headlines and other large displays of text. It stems from a proud line of other similar fonts, but has some genuinely unique features that make it stand out from the crowd (as well as support for Greek and Cyrillic).
