Design Edge Canada

New fonts for 2008

Online Extra from "Type trends" in the May/June 2008 issue of Design Edge Canada

New for 2008 from p22 Type Foundry in Buffalo are Hoy and Spiggie, two font families designed by freelancer Torleiv Sverdrup. A sans serif combining the exotic with a bit of Art Deco, Spiggie has so far appeared in materials for Sharm El Sheikh resorts in Egypt. Both fonts include regular, italic, bold and bold italic variations.

Bob Atkinson of Tool Tips recommends ideal add-ons for your workstation

Online Extra from "The perfect workstation" in the May/June 2008 issue of Design Edge Canada

Once you have the perfect system in place, there are some logical add-ons you may want to consider.

If you do a lot of illustration or photo retouching, a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet is a nice addition. Wacom (www.wacom.com) offers a wide range of tablets, from its Bamboo series (starting at about $80), all the way up to its stunning draw-on Cintiq LCD monitors (up to $2,500).

Built-in webcam, mic and speakers are now fairly common in good laptops but it will cost you about $150 extra on most desktop systems – more than worth it if you videoconference with clients or friends.

A desktop image scanner is still a handy extra, allowing you to capture images from photo prints, paper illustrations or transparencies. Epson (www.epson.com) is the market leader here in graphic arts – its Perfection 4490 photo scanner is a great basic scanner: