Ida Tikhonova

East is a sans serif condensed font. It has six weights between Light and Extra Bold. A variable font is also available.

Clarity and versatility make East a good choice for app design, branding, film titles, information, packages, posters, and publications. It is simple, friendly, and confident.

Its condensed design makes it easy to fit text in tight spaces. The light weight has excellent clarity for easy reading, even at small sizes. The Extra Bold weight will capture attention as a headline or large body text.

The name «East» is intended to evoke optimism, movement, travel, and the sunrise. It is timeless and current with a subtle nostalgia—inspired by the charming one-off sans serifs on early Jazz albums, film titles, newspapers, and road signage.

East has many OpenType features (please see slides). It offers eight stylistic sets. These can quickly alter large amounts of text. It has a set for a one-story “a” for simpler paragraph textures, and a set for hooked letters (f, j, l, r, t, y) for a warmer and playful personality. A seriffed uppercase I and 1 along with a slashed zero offer better legibility when needed. There are also sets for a curly German eszett, cap-aligned punctuation for Spanish, and a raised colon. Other OpenType alternates include; three different uppercase German eszetts, a tapered exclamation point, an alternate 4, standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, a tapered asterisk, and a set of bullets (round, square, and diamond).

It also contains vertically stacked pre-built fractions. Diagonally built alternatives are offered for the common fractions (one quarter, one half, and three quarters, percent, per thousand).

It will support western and central European languages as well as other Latin-based written languages (check for your language). There are some Greek math-related glyphs and math symbols beyond the common ones.

Read on if you are not familiar with variable fonts.

What makes a variable font special is that all font weights are inside of one file and you can incrementally control the width and italic slant between Light (300) and ExtraBold (800). These changes are commonly made with slide controls in the font/type palette of the software. Variable fonts are also smaller in file size, benefitting both web and software performance.

Currently variable fonts are supported by Adobe, Sketch, Corel Draw, and most web browsers. Check for your software support here: www.v-fonts.com/support.

A sturdy workhorse with the grace of a gazelle, the FF Pastoral typeface family marries pure craftsmanship with rapturous excesses of form. With his fifteenth release under the FontFont brand, prolific French designer Xavier Dupré has filled a typographic toolbox with plentiful options ranging from a tender, feathery Thin to a robust, healthy Black. At a glance, FF Pastoral appears deceptively simple, particularly in the middle weights. That surface serenity is intentional and allows for easy reading and quick comprehension of short blocks of copy. Upon closer inspection, FF Pastoral is complex and nuanced, carrying a balanced tension in its forms. This plays particularly well in magazine spreads and corporate logos, where uniqueness is a virtue. In creating his latest design, Dupré drew inspiration from a tasteful mix of references, combining diverse elements with a deft hand. While its letter shapes were informed by humanist-geometric hybrid Gill Sans, FF Pastoral’s proportions have been optimized for contemporary typography. Slightly condensed but generously spaced, FF Pastoral features a tall x-height, open counters, and subtle, sprightly italics slanted at just 5°. Proportional oldstyle figures are the default in the family, with tabular and lining numbers and fractions accessible through OpenType features. Elegant details evocative of calligraphy judiciously pepper the FF Pastoral glyph set. The ‘e’ bears an oblique crossbar, while the right leg of the ‘K’ and the ‘R’ are insouciantly curved in both the upright and italic variants. Further flourishes appear throughout the italics, notably in the ‘T’ and the ‘Z’, the gloriously looped tail of the ‘G’, and an extraordinary ampersand. Sharp-eyed fans of Dupré’s work may feel like they’re in familiar territory, and they would be right. An early version of FF Pastoral sprang to life in 2017 as Malis, a family in four weights on the heavier side of the spectrum. Over time, Dupré refined his original design, expanding it with four lighter styles and including true italics for all. The lightest weights are ethereal, with exquisitely delicate strokes drawing the eye in and across a line of type. The most substantial styles are tremendous in their power, allowing text to make a deep impression in print or on screen. Fully fleshed out, FF Pastoral works sublimely in a vast array of text and display settings. Dupré sees his latest FontFont offering as a ‘cultural’ typeface, perfect for the pages of an oversized coffee-table book or business communications where warmth and informality will win the day. Born in Aubenas, France (1977), Xavier Dupré is a gifted user of type as well as an award-winning type designer and lettering artist. After training in graphic design in Paris, Dupré studied calligraphy and typography at the Scriptorium de Toulouse. Since releasing FF Parango in 2001, Dupré has published such FontFont classics as the FF Absara and FF Sanuk superfamilies, FF Megano, FF Tartine, and FF Yoga. A designer of Khmer fonts as well as Latin typefaces, Dupré splits his time between Europe and Asia.

Styro is a family of modernist-style stencil fonts. There are eight weights available, ranging in color from Thin through Black. All of the typeface’s weights are virtually monospaced, and with each weight of the family, the outside ‘strokes’ building up the letterforms increase in thickness. Styro’s characters are very condensed, and their design employs a reductionist formal vocabulary. For example, the counter-forms are expressed by thin lines that run inside of the letters, from their tops to their bottoms. These ‘counters’ are optically of the same width as the spaces between each letter. Many of the fonts’ stroke terminals – like those on the top of the ‘a’ or on the bottom of the ‘g’ – are reduced to simple geometric shapes. Diacritic marks take the form of light thin lines, which create a nice degree of contrast with their base letters. This thin-line treatment is also applied to many of the fonts’ punctuation marks. Styro is reminiscent of a series of stencil letters designed at the Bauhaus by Josef Albers, although Styro includes separate shapes for both uppercase and lowercase letters, instead of being a unicameral design. The Styro fonts were developed by Aarya Purohit at Indian Type Foundry, and they are an excellent choice for use in editorial design pieces about modern art and design.