In the last few years ED Awards has been established as a major European venue which honors the best in the European design scene. Every year it is hosted by a different city and this year it was the main event which took place for 4 days in Rotterdam. The 4-day conference was followed by a formal reception at the City Hall and the ED-award ceremony. This year Panos Vassiliou of Parachute® received -in the original typeface category- a Silver Award for the superfamily Encore Sans Pro. It is the second time he is honored with an award from this establishment. Back in 2008, he received a Gold Award for his type system Centro Pro. In the same category this year’s Gold was given to Veronika Burian of TypeTogether and another silver to Thomas Gabriel of TypeJockeys.

Bronze was given to Atalier Bubentraum of Switzerland, Andreu Balius of Spain, and TypeTogether. Other companies, such as Monotype of the United Kingdom and Gobranding of Poland, were shortlisted as finalists.

The night was topped off by an extravagant winners party at a local hip club (photos not available due to the extreme ‘graphic’ nature of their content).

Photo Legend (top to bottom)
The silver award winner Encore Sans Pro (view the making of)
The beautiful conference posters designed by  Studio Dumbar
Happy winning (type)faces
Panoramic view of all the winners

PF Din Mono is the latest addition to the ever-growing set of DIN superfamilies by Parachute®. It was based on its proportional counterpart DIN Text Pro, but was completely redesigned to reflect its new identity. DIN Mono is a monospace typeface which is comprised of characters with fixed width. Traditionally, monospaced fonts have been used to create forms, tables and documents that require exact text line lengths and precise character alignment. DIN Monospace, on the other hand, can prove to be more than a useful typeface for technical applications. In the world of proportionality, DIN Monospace stands out as a fresh new alternative to the popular standard, particularly for publishing and branding applications. Additional care was given to the aesthetic form and its pleasing characteristics. The spacing attributes of the glyphs were redefined and legibility was further improved by revising or changing the shape of all the letterforms.

For instance, characters such as ‘m’ and ‘w’ were made narrower and other like ‘f’, ‘i’, ‘l’ and ‘t’ were made wider in order to fit into the default character width evenly. As a result, the stem thickness for some characters was altered but was balanced out by adjusting the overall color of the glyph.  Furthermore, kerning was not included in order to preserve the monospace nature of this typeface.

The Monospace family consists of 12 weights including true-italics. Currently, it supports Latin, Eastern European and Baltic. A new Din Mono Pro version is in the making and will be released soon. It will be offered as an upgrade to all licensees of the simple Mono version. Altogether the Parachute DIN series is a large set of 5 sophisticated super families with a total of 72 weights. It includes the following families: Text Pro, Display Pro, Text Condensed Pro, Text Compressed Pro and Mono.

From time to time we publish a number of inspiring typographic images from our popular Flickr Group. Here is ten of them.

By Like Minded Studio

By patrycja

By f!int

By Engin Korkmaz

By greg_papagrigoriou

By dadoqueiroz

By mil3n

By durandrud

By extraverage™


By 86era

Hermann Zapf is one of the most prominent type designers of the 20th century. He is best known for designing typefaces such as Palatino, Optima and Zapfino. Back in 1967, Hallmark Cards commissioned an educational film which documented Zapf’s techniques on type design and calligraphy. The purpose of this insightful film was to introduce aspiring calligraphers and art students to the art of calligraphy. Watch it in its entirety as you don’t get to see often this type of educational material by this master of the trade.
Mr. Zapf is a self taught typeface designer. It was during an exhibition in 1935 in honor of Rudolf Koch, when he got interested in calligraphy, so he purchased two books which introduced him to the art of calligraphy. Later he developed his craft with intensive periods of study at the Nuremberg City Library.
During his military service Mr. Zapf was placed in the cartography unit and due to his talent and his excellent eyesight on writing small size letters without using a magnifying glass he was never transferred to another unit. After the war Mr. Zapf moved to Frankfurt where the Stempel type foundry offered him a position as artistic head of the printshop. It is there where he created his first masterpieces Palatino and Optima. Sure Hermann Zapf’s life and work is a very important case of study for all us younger designers.

More info on this video

Mary Huang is from California, USA. She studied at UCLA design/media arts and Interaction Design at CIID. One of the resent project she has been working on for a while is the Typeface. Typeface is an application that produces a  unique typeface based on the user’s face characteristics. Typeface translates the facial dimensions of the user and at the same time it creates a natural handwriting typeface. Not only does this contrast with the geometric qualities generative type experiments tend to take, but also challenges the conventions of typing versus writing. During the whole process you can write in a text field and view the changing of the type. The project is currently under development so there is no downloadable version. We hope for one in the near future.

TYPEFACE from Mary Huang on Vimeo.