Our new website is now running steady. The website was conceived to be both a user-friendly online catalogue and a source of information on Luc(as) de Groot and his typefaces.

Smooth navigator

The new site has several unique features that we hope will make your font searches and typographic explorations hassle-free and interesting. Designer Jan Fromm has produced hundreds of crystal-clear type specimens and complete character sets, providing an unambiguous overview of what each font offers. Proud owners of a large screen can view the font samples in gloriously detailed SuperSize mode. Interaction designer Frank Rausch has conceived a thoughtful underlying structure, which makes for a smooth, intuitive navigation. Frank also wrote TypeShow , a new online type tester that allows you to view your own text in any LucasFonts typeface.

www.lucasfonts.com/typeshow/

New, nice & narrow: Taz Condensed

The Taz III family was originally designed as a headline font for newspapers. Being relatively condensed, the original Taz was always space-saving and compact. To enable you to get even more impact a tight space, LucasFonts now introduces Taz III Condensed, a truly narrow variant.

Taz III Condensed has the same family structure as the regular width, with multiple figure sets, extensive language support and a staggering 15 weights, including five carefully balanced Hairline varieties and a big bad UltraBlack.

Spiegel III OT

When the German magazine Der Spiegel was upgrading its Quark Xpress to version 7, which supports OpenType and Unicode, LucasFonts was asked to update the PostScript fonts to OpenType. The expanded Spiegel OT typefaces have now been made generally available.

Spiegel OpenType contains all the glyphs defined in ISO Latin 1 to 10. Lucas designed small caps for all weights (including the italics, of course), and three more figure sets: figures can now be used in tabular or proportional widths, both in lining and hanging (oldstyle) variants. With these additions, the Spiegel family has become more typographically sophisticated than ever.

Romanian design excellence

Last September, art director Petre Danoiu redesigned the Romanian daily newspaper Jurnalul National using LucasFonts’ QuaText, TheSans and TheSerif. A lighter version of QuaText was specially designed for the paper’s body text. All fonts had to be newly produced with custom encoding to support Romanian keyboards.

Thesis in Graphic Design Museum

Last year, the new Graphic Design Museum opened to international acclaim in Breda, the Netherlands. The Graphic Design Museum is the first of its kind worldwide and offers a large permanent exhibition on the history of Dutch graphic design alongside temporary exhibits of international design. For its corporate design, signage and wall lettering, designed by Frederik de Wal and KinKorn, the museum uses TheSans and TheMix as core typefaces. At de Wal’s request, Luc(as) designed special versions of characters from TheSans for the museum’s logo.

Have a look at our gallery of images from the new museum.

Luc(as) receives Medal for Cyrillic typefaces

During the typographic conference of the Association International Typographique (ATypI), held in St. Petersburg, Russia, Luc(as) was awarded a medal for his contribution towards contemporary Cyrillic type design. The medal was handed over by Sergey Bobryshev, Commercial Director of ParaType Inc.

Over the years, Luc(as) de Groot has developed a strong interest and growing expertise in Cyrillic, the script used to write Russian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and many other Eurasian languages. In 2005, he received honorary diplomas in the TypeArt Cyrillic typeface competition for the Cyrillic versions of Calibri and TheAntiqua. Read more about Luc(as) and Cyrillic on our website.

Design Award for The Big Issue Scotland

In our previous newsletter we featured The Big Issue Scotland, a great street newspaper sold by the homeless. It's even more than that – it is Scotland's biggest weekly current affairs and entertainment magazine, read by over 170,000 Scots every week.

Creative Director Mark Neil wrote to let us know that The Big Issue has won the award for Best Magazine Design (Consumer category) at the 2008 Scottish Magazine Awards. LucasFonts is proud to have contributed to this great achievement. The Big Issue uses several of our fonts: a broad range of weights from the Taz III family for headlines and short texts, as well as QuaText (aka EAntiqua) for features.

Quèfem is Best Designed Magazine

Quèfem magazine from Barcelona has been awarded Best Designed Magazine by the SND-E (Society for News Design). Quèfem is the weekly listings guide from Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper, designed by Pablo Martin and Oscar Germade (Grafica) using Taz III.