Type Project's 25th-anniversary family brings Song-style sharpness into a Mincho frame. Is it a new tool for Japanese editorial work, or a Mincho in disguise?
Adobe has added Neokuro, an Adobe Originals typeface by Taisei Yoshida, to Adobe Fonts. It is a super-bold Japanese design with softly rounded corners and small Mincho-derived details, covering kanji, kana and Latin. Its styles let kana and Latin be compressed to half width while kanji stay square, for titles, posters and video thumbnails.
Our take: half-width kana alongside square kanji is a smart answer to cramped Japanese headlines, and the target uses, posters and video thumbnails, are well chosen.
Slanted Publishers has released the eighth Yearbook of Type, a 528-page survey of type design from 2024 to 2026 built around history and heritage. It presents 155 typefaces, with an index of 152 designers and 95 foundries from 29 countries, and sells for €38.
Our take: a printed reference with a historical angle is useful at a time when revivals make up a large share of new releases.
CSTM Fonts has released an early version of Niceforo on Future Fonts, a Renaissance serif by Yury Ostromentsky and Anya Danilova of Chaos Type. It revisits the first Georgian metal typeface, cut in Rome in 1629, and was drawn from the Georgian script first, with the Latin built to match. This first version includes an x-height axis, and further styles are planned.
Our take: starting from Georgian rather than bolting it onto a Latin design is the right way round, and still far too rare in multiscript work.
On TypeDrawers, type designer Miles Newlyn published a post written in the voice of the AI agent that now runs much of his foundry: building and publishing fonts, answering enquiries, writing licences and quotes, invoicing and bookkeeping. He says it uses a standard ChatGPT subscription connected to his shop, payment and accounting tools, and asks him when a decision is not covered. Replies raised questions about human review, admin access and prompt injection.
Our take: the most candid account yet of AI in a foundry's back office; the security questions raised in the thread deserve answers before others copy it.
Netvarec Studio has unveiled Inkvar, a font editor covering drawing, masters, spacing and kerning, proofing and sharing, developed with Displaay and NC Type. It will run on Mac, Windows and Linux; early access opens to small groups from a waitlist, and pricing has not been set. Daniel Quisek presented it on TypeDrawers to gather designers' needs.
Our take: a Linux build is a rare promise among commercial editors; the open question, raised on the forum itself, is what it does that Glyphs and FontLab do not.