Filed under: Chank Art
The “Ding” sculpture keeps moving around the Twin Cities, popping up in front of a house for a few days before moving on to the next one. I haven’t seen him in a few weeks, but he’s out there. It’s a nice public art project that actually involves the public by having them host it. He’s really nice this time of year, when it’s all grey and brown everywhere, to add a spot of bright, lively color to the scenery. Go ding go!
The Haitian benefit font “Coming Together” is now available! Can a font make the world a better place? “Coming Together” is a new fundraiser font to help raise money for earthquake relief in Haiti. The font is part of FONT AID IV and all money from the sale of the font goes to Doctors Without Borders. The font consists entirely of ampersands, representing the theme of coming together, featuring artwork by almost 400 designers from 37 countries. Not only is it a font with a good cause, but it’s also a very functional and helpful font. Go go get it now.It’s available from MyFonts, Veer, FontShop and Ascender.
Filed under: Font News
It’s only a week into testing out my new $1.99 per font price point, but I gotta say the response to the change is a resounding “meh.” No big upside surprise, but nothing really bad happened either. A couple fonts were reduced from $49 to $1.99, but mostly it was free fonts that were taken out of free circulation and priced up to two bucks. I figured $1.99 is the sweet spot for iPhone apps, so I might try that with my fonts. Seems to be that’s the cost that people will buy something without thinking too hard about it. Sure would be nice if there were more impulse buyers in the font world. Or if they sold fonts at the iTunes store.
Who knows? Maybe things’d be different if I accepted PayPal at my site. That’s coming soon. I personally find PayPal is a much easier way to pay for less-expensive items. No worry about credit card security when you don’t even have to take out your wallet. Trusting PayPal is pretty easy, whereas a independent little website that just sells fonts might seem a little shadier.
And I guess I never really mentioned that I updated all the font files on those old freefonts, either. For the last few years I’ve been dishing out nothing but TTF-format freefonts, optimized for your computer screen. (Technically they’re TTF-flavored OpenType, but still TrueType nonetheless.) The new versions I’m selling at $1.99 now are all .OTF-flavored OpenType, which looks just about as good on your monitor, but also uses the Post-Script style outlines that old-school designers are so fond of. It’s a pretty slight technical difference, so I never even mentioned it anywhere, but the $1.99 version is a bit better than older versions of these former freefonts.
And they come with a Commercial Use license upgrade, too. As freefonts, these typefaces were served to you with a Personal Use license. The new for-sale versions come with a limited Commercial Use license, which lets a small biz use the fonts for just about anything (except a logo) and big biz can use ’em, too (just contact me for an upgrade if you’ve got lots of users at one site). Yeah, so that’s something else that’s really nice for customers who get the $1.99 fonts.
Like I said I never really mentioned any of this stuff, so it just looks like I changed some prices. But there was a little more going on behind the scenes. I guess that’s good enough content for a blog, right? I apologize in advance for any confusion, and I hope you continue to enjoy the freefonts and quality pay-fonts I make available for you at Chank.com.
Now, let’s continue on to my previous post, where I salute my top ten freefonts of 2009, which sadly are mostly NOT free anymore…
We quietly launched a whole new Chank.com this year, and populated it with some old fonts and a bunch of new fonts, too. Some fonts are free, some cost money, but needless to say the free ones get a lot more downloads than the ones you have to pay for. Here’s a list of the year’s most popular freefonts at Chank.com, with download totals year-to-date:
1. Farmers Delight (942)
2. Millesime (715)
3. Chummmmmley (695)
4. Sarcastic Robot* (681)
5. Atomic Vegas Seasnakes (553)
6. Flower Power (525)
7. Flubber (426)
8. Chrylser Electric* (407)
9. Ballers Delight (402)
10. Tortuga (328)
(*Sarcastic Robot and Chrylser Electric turned out to be so popular they aren’t free anymore, but they were for a while. Others on this list might not be free some day, so get ’em now while you still can.)
Okay, I think this may be my worst public art idea ever, but I had to share it with someone to get it out of my head. You might have to click on the pic to get a better, bigger view. As it turns out it’s not the child’s pose at all, it’s really the “Uttana Shishosana (Extended Puppy Pose).” This public art project is not slated for groundbreaking at this time.
Still working on that public art project. Here’s sketch #2. A bit better but still not quite right.
From my sketchbook, working on a yoga pose for a public art project. First sketch of the “pose of the child,” a failure.
Filed under: Font News
Just for fun, I’m trying out a new blog platform at chankfonts.blogspot.com. I’ve been playing with all eight font families you get to choose from there, because I can’t figure out how to change the font of my blog here at WordPress.
Filed under: Bizarre, Font News | Tags: booze, fixed-width, fonts, freefonts, monospaced, smoke, typography
How did I spend my summer? Well I guess you might think I was taking Mad Men’s lead by smoking and drinking on a boat with my buds while my intern was hard at work in my studio making new fonts for you.
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, so let me just get down to business and get it all out. First, I’ll start with the most exciting news for you: there are two new fonts up at Chank.com today. One’s free and the other’s on sale for $10 today.
Sarcastic Robot is the freefont and it’s the result of years of R&D on the subject of creating a flavorful new monospaced font for programmers. A fixed-width handwriting font is a bit geeky, but even if you didn’t know it was technically dazzling, you still may be impressed by it’s quirky jauntiness.
GFY Sunny is a new handwriting font by my summer intern Ali Eickhoff. She wanted to learn all about type design during her tenure at Chank Co, so she got the toughest assignment possible: a cursive handwriting font. She made it look simple and effortless, creating a fluid, clean, modern cursive, partly inspired by textbook handwriting instructions, partly infused with just a little stylistic flare. Mostly it’s a no-nonsense, contemporary American script handwriting font, with ligatures and a few swash characters for those who can make use of OpenType’s smart functionality.
Now, the most exciting news for me: I’m featured on the new installment of Design Smoke! I’ve been gnawing my own flesh in a jealous rage as I’ve watched my friend Jeff Johnson of Spunk Design Machine smoke and drink with design luminaries like Stephen Heller, Craig Duffney, Mike Cina, Eight Hour Day and Sarah Nelson Forss over the past few years. Jeff finally took me for a ride and I got to expunge some of my fontmaking insights to his smoke-loving audience.
Spunk is proud to have made one of the strangest Design Smoke’s yet, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it. If you’ve ever wanted to have a smoke and a drink with an experienced font designer, here’s your chance. Get a smoke, get a drink, and settle down at your browser to watch Jeff’s drunken riverboat cruise with yours truly. We talk about Minneapolis, fonts, art, Facebook, Miley Cyrus, beards and more, all while getting liquored up and enjoying a beautiful summer day on the upper Mississippi. It’s starts calm enough, but once the booze gets flowing and the breeze a-blowing things got a little weird. It’s a 6-part interview, culminating with an outdoor, shirts-off daydream where two burly bears let it all hang out and groom each other in front of nature’s splendor along the ol’ Miss.
Other news? Well for advanced web designers, I should point out that all the new browsers that came out this summer making use of HTML5 now have an incredible new type resource available to them. It’s a CSS-call named “@font-face” and it allows you to embed fonts right in the HTML of your web page. No longer are you reliant on Georgia, Verdana, Arial and their ilk. You have hundreds of fonts to choose from, which can be displayed right in the text of your browser, as searchable HTML that can be copied and pasted. Works like magic, and experienced designers say it’s incredibly easy to use.
To make use of this exciting new flavor of web typography just sign up for either Typekit or Kernest. Both offer 3rd-party subscription services that dish out the encrypted fonts on your behalf. They’re up and running now, and both have free trial versions of Chank Fonts ready for you to use in your web pages.
Chank Blog 