Typ-ound manifesto poster
Contributed by Aamina Ganser on Nov 13th, 2018. Artwork published in
May 2016
.
Typ-ound is designed entirely with free fonts from dafont.com. The poster is a living manifesto through its composition: it suggests that the usage and typesetting of fonts results in an interesting aesthetic, regardless of a font’s imperfect or rough finishing. The Typ-ound manifesto includes the following:
1. Praise to be ready-made!
2. Ugly is no sin.
3. Remember your childhood.
4. At the same time, look around the present.
5. Purchased typefaces are not acceptable.
6. Follow grid and destroy it.
7. No texture is a sin.
8. Copy & Paste.
9. Do not lose contemporary aesthetics.
10. Must remind the audience of some specific eras or places.
4 Comments on “Typ-ound manifesto poster”
Oh my … what a mess. I don’t agree that the choices made here result in an interesting aesthetic. To me, it’s just an uncoordinated pile of elements. But then again, it’s hard to argue about beauty when “ugly is no sin”, I guess! I give you that in this case it’s not the fonts’ fault – this layout wouldn’t be any more appealing if it used different fonts.
Why? There’s a vast and growing range of interesting and well-made fonts that are free to use. But why limit yourself to this subset of all available fonts? You’re missing out!
You state that this poster was made entirely with free fonts. However, most of the text uses (the Latin characters of) Adobe Myungjo and HanYang Gulim, two fonts that are not free to use, and can’t be found on sites like Dafont. They come bundled with operating systems. That means you paid for the font license as part of the OS license.
Furthermore, it’s important to point out that several of the other fonts used here are free only for personal use, like True Lies, Curse of the Zombie, Creamy Butter, or Turtles. The accompanying EULAs or read-me files explicitly state that you need to purchase a commercial license if you want to use the font for client work. The free version of Guakala only has around 60 unique glyphs. If English caps is all you need, good for you! There’s also a version that has accented characters as well as Greek and Cyrillics. Unsurprisingly, it comes with a price tag.
Correction: This does not appear to be Poetsen, but the commercial version, Market, which has multiple weights. You can see the lighter weights being used in such things as the paragraph that begins “Dutch design…” on the top left of the top picture.
Nevermind my previous comment, it must be a lighter weight from some other font.
As far as I can tell, “Dutch design that was affected …” is in slanted Gulim, see the short g descender as well as the hyphen (–) that is too high and too long for Latin typography.