This typeface came about by accident. It all started with an accident too, when Bas – unluckily – fell out of a tree. He was strapped to a stretcher and transported by ambulance to the hospital, where he heard the good news: it was ‘just’ a broken collarbone. Could have been worse. Unluckily for him, it was his right arm. Being right-handed and an avid sketch artist, well… it’s a disaster if you can’t use your favourite hand anymore.

Read the complete story

Coming monday we will give a lecture at a seminar on the future of web typography. This seminar takes places at the Brakke Grond in Amsterdam. In our lecture ‘Web typography sounds good, but looks awful’ we will highlight some often overlooked elements of web typography. The unsurpassable Frederik Berlaen will also give a presentation, and you can do a crypto typeface game with the madmen of Autobahn. If you are Dutch, concerned about type, screens, interfaces and ergonomics & want to flex up your brains, come over. Organised and presented by Grrr, what else should we say? Be there or be square.

Monday 23 Feb, 20:30 o’clock
Beeldmakers #1; with Frederik Berlaen, Underware, Autobahn, Jort de Vries (Blendle)

Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond
Nes 45, 1012 KD Amsterdam
Entrance at door €7,– / Online €5,–

Please welcome Tripper. He is not that friend you want to marry and wake up next to every day. You don’t want to discuss your financials with him. No, Tripper is that friend you invite when you want a really good party, when you wanna have a good time, when you want to impress your neighbours or family. But hey, who doesn’t want to have a really good party every now and then?

Tripper, a set of rock-hard stencil fonts

Introduction offer
Buy Tripper and give a free license to your friend. Make somebody happy, for free. Double-dipper pleasure! (runs till 01 March 2015)

Tripper comes in several flavours. Next to the plain style, there is a rough version (with that random look), a reversed stencil style (with automatic borders), and the multi-coloured font (tricolor). If that ain’t enough, Tripper Ornaments offers enough to play around with for the rest of the year. Take the Tripper tour

After a decade of not offering apprenticeships in our studio, we have room for one intern in Spring 2015 (Feb–April).

If you know how to design type, dream Adobe CS, talk PHP & Python, then you might be the match we’re looking for.

For this paid internship you’ll be working 4 days/week on 3 different projects. (Three days a week in our Amsterdam studio & one day somewhere else on earth)

Interested? Mail bio, portfolio, motivation & questions before 15 December to: bas@underware.nl

Recently we introduced Latin Plus, which is at the heart of our production line. Everything we do is based around this standard. Not only all our fonts, but also some upcoming tools are based on this touchstone. Because you’ll encounter this term more often in the future, here is the background story of Latin Plus and its languages.

Interested in how the overview was constructed, orthographic troubles, native speakers and local culture? Make a coffee, and read the story behind Latin Plus in the case-study Notes on Latin Plus.

Language support is one of the most important aspects of a font, together with the look and feel as well as the technical state & performance of course. You do not only want to know if a font supports a certain language, but also if it looks any good in that language. Those two can vary quite a lot.

After years of researching and improving our own character set with its accompanying language support, we are happy to reveal Latin Plus today. Well documented, pairing diacritics to languages, translated sample texts and offering the possibility to explore which of the Latin Plus languages are supported by the fonts on your computer.

Welcome to Latin Plus.

It’s been nice to see our fonts being used across the internet since we started selling webfonts some years ago. Our self-hostable webfonts are finding their ways from the happy medium up to the corners of the web. Meanwhile we are developing more tools to let you customize webfonts in a way which fits best to each specific occasion. Our recent library upgrade already reckoned with more of such possibilities. Eventually these tools will become automatically available in your account.

Underware Is Now on Webtype
While some prefer self-hosted webfonts, others might prefer a hosted service. Those people will be happy to hear that this is reality as of today. A hosted service also paves the way for easy accessible free trials, for testing the real font files in a real-life environment in your upcoming project. Therefore we are pleased to now offer hosted webfonts through Webtype.

Now. You are a typographer and do your best to achieve ultimate precision in details. You want to set a text in Dutch, as good as possible. You need to master the curious case of IJ.

The Dutch IJ

There is a difference between typesetting Dutch and other languages regarding the ij. In Dutch the ij is a digraph, or – if you prefer – a ligature. We don’t care how you call it, as long as you consider the IJ as one letter. So in case you set a text vertically, you’ll have to put the I and the J on the same line.

This Dutch IJ might require a special design, depending on the design of the font. Most roman sans serif fonts can live with a regular ‘I’ and ‘J’ combination. Although not always perfect, that’s quite often acceptable. But in swashy fonts the need for a specially designed ‘IJ’ is obvious. A swashy I followed by a swashy J is a nightmare for the Dutch IJ. It needs a special glyph included in the font. And please remember to select the right language for your text, as these IJ’s only (should) show up in Dutch texts.

The missing dot

Okay, the ij is cleared. From now on you only work with fonts which have a special glyph for IJ and ij. But then the trouble starts in lowercase. Because fi-ligatures often remove the dot on i, the ij does not look like ij anymore in Dutch. In case the lowercase ij shouldn’t look like a handicapped, amputated lunatic, it needs two dots. To be able to have a nice f+i connection as well as two dots on the ij, you’ll need an additional ligature in your fonts: f+ij

Because some people love to cook their own words, an additional bonus ligature could be included to make sure any imaginable Dutch word looks perfect: f+f+ij

Oh, oh. Exceptions

However, not every i+j in Dutch should become ij. There are some Dutch words which would have their hyphenation in the middle of i and j. There is currently not a beautiful solution for this, so all official exceptions have to be hard coded in the OpenType code of the font.

IJ-acute

In case you want to stress a word, both letters of ij need an acute. Although one cannot enter a j-acute on a keyboard, the typeface should automatically create both acutes once an i-acute is followed by a j. This should of course only happen in Dutch. So make sure you’ve got your text set to the correct language, and you will have the ij-acute in your Dutch texts.

Our recent library update takes all these Dutch sensitivities into account, making all our fonts suitable for precise Dutch typesetting. All goes automatically, you don’t have to think about all this. Which means you can forget everything you just read.

If you don’t consider fonts chuck aways, and still want to use them after the weekend, you’ll be delighted that we continuously keep on improving all our fonts. Today we released an update for our complete library.

If you work for a longer period with our fonts, you get to know their possibilities better. Meanwhile know that we keep on improving (y)our fonts, because those fonts are valuable part of your work.

Most notable changes of this update:

• Improved language support for Dutch. All fonts now contain ijacute. Although you cannot enter this character on your keyboard, it will appear automatically once you type í (iacute) & j in a Dutch text. Additionally we added an f+ij as well as an f+f+ij ligature to all fonts, bringing back that missing dot for the ij, just to make sure your Dutch words always look piekfijn (spiffing).

• Small refinements for Turkish languages (Azerbaijani, Bashkir (Latin), Gagauz (Latin), Karakalpak (Latin), Turkish & Zazaki) for fonts with build in small caps.

• More under the bonnet improvements, offering new possibilities for type online.

• Sauna & Sauna Mono fonts got additional figure styles.

• Expanded language support for Liza. All our fonts support 219 Latin languages now. Liza has always been loaded to the max with glyphs and code, and we had a hard time to expand the language support due to this. Finally you can also set text in Bemba, Maasai or Welsh with our sexy and intelligent Liza Pro. In case you are curious, Liza now also support 18 additional languages: Atayal, Azerbaijani, Bashkir (Latin), Bemba, Chichewa, Ganda, Gikuyu, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), Igbo, Kaingang, Maasai, Rotuman, Sami (Inari Sami), Sami (Northern Sami), Welsh, Wolof, Zarma & Zazaki. This means all our fonts now have the same extensive Latin Plus language support.

Stay Pro, and update to version 2.5. Existing licensees can download the latest versions (for free) in their account. If you have any question about this update, mail info@underware.nl

Two weeks ago we opened a small world cup quiz, when we released Tripper Tricolor. It may be no surprise that most participants were wrong to completely wrong. However. However. One person predicted the final outcome correctly. Just one person? Yes, just one person. We’re trying to get in touch with him. Hopefully he provided his correct email address. Until that time we call him Jeremy the Oracle. Jeremy, you are amazing. Come, and pick up your prize.