Hoefler & Frere-Jones have just announced the availability of their newest font family: Tungsten. Tungsten (I love that name) is a flat/square-sided sans. To me it is evocative of the sign paintings seen at the local butcher/grocer growing up in central Pennsylvania. It is available in 4 weights: Med, Semi, Bold, and Black. I wold also be remiss is I didn’t mention the support for what H&FJ calls its Latin-X® character set. What is Latin-X? It is an H&FJ OpenType font whose character set covers more than 100 languages throughout the world — including all of Central Europe. A nice trend that I intend to emulate in my own type design efforts.
H&FJ describe Tungsten as such: (via their blog)
A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a flat-sided sans serif that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another.
The result is Tungsten®, a tight family of high-impact fonts in four weights: muscular and persuasive, without sacrificing wit, versatility, or style. Now starting at $99.
