Chank Blog

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.