Christmas may be over but you might just think about treating yourself to a post holiday present (or Groundhog’s Day is soon approaching). Indie Fonts 3 is just off the press and begging for a slot on your bookshelf. Chock full with 1,900 fonts and covering over 400 crisply printed pages, not to mention a CD sampler with 53 Indie fonts, Indie3 is like a taste test from your favorite candy store.
The book reminds me of when type samples were a regular treat in your snail-mail box. Other than the minor chance of getting a paper-cut, real printed samples were healthy food for the typophile’s soul. Indie 3 does that one better by being a hard-bound book you can put on your coffee table. It is a smorgasbord meal with hearty main courses of text fonts, salads and sides of display faces, and desert trays of scripts. All of this from the type design chefs of 20 independent foundries. As examples, Tomás Brousil brings his Dederon and Pavel Teimer’s Teimer Antiqua to life on the Suitcase Foundry pages.
Whether your tastes run towards Robbie de Villers fresh Pippin, Tangy treats from Tomi Haaparanta, Kenn Munk’s bitmap blackletter Influenza, Jeremy Tankard’s Wayfarer and Kingfisher or you like Sparky stuff from David Buck, Walburn or Nicholas from Nick Shinn, Jim Rimmer’s Amethyst, Neil Summerour’s Ayumi, or just giggle over Letterhead’s sidesplitting print ads, you will find it all dished out here.
My only quibble with the book is Virus Fonts green diagonal stripes under every one of their foundries pages. It makes you wonder what the type might look like without the op-art distraction behind it.
To make finding your font du jour quickly, you get a one-liner sample as a reference and full showings with fun presentations from each of the participating foundries. The fully indexed book has an “Eight is Not Enough” foreword by our own Yves Peters and an informative and readable essay on “learning to love the EULA” by Tiffany Wardle. There is also a handy contact list of the Indie houses.
Editors Richard Keglar, James Grieshaber, and Tamye Riggs have much to be proud of in this showcase presentation of the work of independent typeface designers.
I’ll just bet you can buy the thing at P22 site any day now so go feed your “gotta have it” urges—it’s a thumbs up no brainer buy :-)
ChrisL
