Typographica has chosen their 53 favorite typefaces for 2013. What’s your favorite?
This year marks another step in the typographic diversification we observed in our previous annual. The global spread of independent font makers and the variety of new ideas in type design continues unabated.
As evidence of that diversity, the 53 typefaces selected from 2013 were created by designers from at least 20 countries…
This new phase of globalization and democratization of the font market began in earnest about a decade ago, propelled by newly accessible digital tools, online commerce, and post-graduate education in type design. It is a sea change. For centuries, places like Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Lebanon, and New Zealand were vastly underrepresented in a type design community that was dominated by western Europe and North America. (And this only goes for Latin-based type. The burgeoning production of fonts in other scripts tells another fascinating story.) We will have much more detail about these changes in an upcoming report by Ruxandra Duru on the current state of typefounding around the world.
The diversity of the contributors to our annual is also invigorating. This year’s writers are almost as international as the typefaces they cover. More importantly, they represent a variety of perspectives from both sides of font making and using. Type designers, print and web designers, educators, writers, historians — we can all learn from the manifold ways that people from such divergent backgrounds perceive a typeface.