Brand New website (2017)

Brand New is the place on the web for writing and critique on branding and identity design, published and maintained by UnderConsideration LCC. In February 2017, they launched a new version of their website, meta-reviewed here. Highlights from the post include:

We are rocking Hoefler & Co.’s Mercury Text ScreenSmart and Operator ScreenSmart, served from their Cloud.typography service. Mercury has always been one of my favorite serifs and I have been wanting to use Operator since it came out; it works amazingly well at small sizes and I was surprised at how readable it is, despite having an off-beat structure. […]

Because I end up on Lineto.com often, usually getting the link to Circular or Brown, I decided to poke through all their fonts, especially the display fonts. Prismaset caught my attention (because I have a thing for concentric letterforms) and the style with five lines was starting to look pretty cool. […]

When I typeset “Brand New” in Prismaset Five I immediately liked it but I hated how fuzzy it got once I used it as a web graphic, even as an SVG because those strokes start to show up as 1.5pt thick and they get fuzzy. So, based on Prismaset Five — I paid for a license, yes — I redrew the characters so that the vertical and horizontal lines would render, always, as 1-pixel-thick lines and look perfectly sharp. So each line is 1 pixel thick with 3 pixels in between. This forced me to change some of the original shapes of Prismaset, primarily the “B” but pretty much all letters are different as the proportions changed. As an SVG file the logo looks even crisper and it’s only the diagonals and circles that have a little bit of unavoidable fuzz. As the site shrinks responsively, the logo stays at the same size, keeping its 1-pixel lines intact. (Except for the mobile version; that had to budge.