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?
Released in October, PoW Dumbria is a crude advertising grotesque with concave terminals, designed by Reymund Schröder in 2016 and based on a wood type made by Sach & Co. in Mannheim in the late 19th century. Produced by Léo Guibert and Fanny Hamelin, it comes in five weights from Regular to Black, with alternates, square dots and stacked fractions; demo fonts are free to download.
Our take: a historically grounded oddball: the concave terminals give it bite at poster sizes, though with five bold-leaning weights and no italics it is strictly a display face.
Released in October, Kant is a humanist serif that Georg Salden, now 96, drew as a companion to Polo, his 1974 sans often cited as a forerunner of FF Meta. Ludwig Übele produced the digital fonts for Ludwig Type's Georg Salden Library: five weights with italics, true small caps, several sets of figures, and Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, the latter two with more handwritten italics. A free trial is available.
Our take: sharing Polo's skeleton makes Kant an easy partner for it, and its compact, firmly serifed forms look built for small sizes and hard working conditions rather than for show.
Blaze Type has released Nosferatu, a slanted, monolinear script by Sarah Salome Deletain and Jules Durand. It is loosely inspired by the lettering of the German intertitle cards of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, drawn with a round nib by an uncredited calligrapher in a style based on Kurrent cursive. It comes in one weight with three stylistic sets and interlaced ligatures, for Latin European languages.
Disclosure: The Font News is published by the team behind Blaze Type. Critiques of its typefaces are written by outside authors.
Blaze Type has released Sagiri, a serif family by Kotomi Morrill with gentle slopes and pointed flare serifs, named after the Japanese word for fog. It comes in seven weights from Thin to Bold, without italics, plus a variable font, for Latin European languages. Details include a diamond-shaped dot on the i, a round a and a looping g.
Disclosure: The Font News is published by the team behind Blaze Type. Critiques of its typefaces are written by outside authors.
Blaze Type has released Brucke, a contemporary serif family by Eunice Su that combines organic curves with angular details, tapered terminals and sharp serifs. It comes in seven weights from ExtraLight to ExtraBold with matching italics, 14 styles in all, plus a variable font. It covers Latin including Vietnamese and adds tree, bear and rock icons.
Disclosure: The Font News is published by the team behind Blaze Type. Critiques of its typefaces are written by outside authors.
Blaze Type has released Medieval, a transitional serif by Matthieu Salvaggio, Pauline Fourest and Yann Esnault. It is a free interpretation of Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke's Mediaeval, published by Stempel in 1922, with 45° serif segments, ink traps and tall ascenders. It comes in a single Regular style for Latin and Cyrillic, with an alternate t and ampersand.
Disclosure: The Font News is published by the team behind Blaze Type. Critiques of its typefaces are written by outside authors.
Production Type has released Vendôme Nouveau, its redrawing of Vendôme, the French serif that François Ganeau drew under Roger Excoffon's art direction for Fonderie Olive in 1950. Started by Jean-Baptiste Levée in 2007 and completed by Léa Bruneau and Charly Derouault, it comes in three optical sizes (Caption, Text, Display), three widths and seven weights with italics: 126 styles, the largest serif system the foundry has published. Single styles start at €90.
Our take: nearly twenty years of work for a face most people know only from blunted digitisations; the Caption cut, which the metal original never had, is the part to test first.
Commercial Type has released Schenk, a display family by Hrvoje Živčić based on lowercase lettering that Walter Haettenschweiler drew in the 1950s, seen on a poster for Swiss booksellers. It comes in five weights from Regular to Ultra, without italics, plus a variable version. Alternate capitals with flipped diagonals (A, M, V, W) let letters lock together.
Our take: a documented Swiss source and interlocking capitals give Schenk real character; its tight spacing makes clear it is meant for headlines only.
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.
At Adobe MAX on 10 November, Monotype launched a Monotype Connect panel for Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. It syncs a team's approved font libraries into the apps and flags fonts in a layout that fall outside a chosen library, leaving designers to approve each replacement. It is included in Monotype Connect, Connect Pro and Connect for Agencies plans with the Creative Cloud 2027 updates; a Monotype Fonts panel is planned later.
Our take: brand teams will welcome the guardrails; for designers, it moves font policing from the brand book into the application itself.