Went to Teddy Newton’s talk at the Kilkenny Animation Festival on Saturday. It was a complete coincidence, we were there for the weekend so I didn’t plan it. I am ashamed to say, I didn’t even know the festival was on. TN was highly entertaining, he’s an ‘ideas’ man in the story development end of the business. He’s responsible for the short Jack-Attack on the Incredibles dvd which is hilarious, and for the character deisgn and development in the Incredibles as well as the title sequence at the end of the it. This sequence was produced in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects only – completed in three months by himself and one other person. He was advocating the use of these two programmes, saying he was amazed that more animators and film makers weren’t using them because they are cheap and produce great results. We are using these on our Design course at IADT so thats encouraging to hear, they certainly provide easy access into the motion graphics area for us and stop us getting swamped in complex post production systems which we don’t have anyway. Newton was refreshing to listen to, because he rails against uniformity and the studio system, its people like him that will keep Pixar fresh. He showed his sketches and concept drawings, they were madcap, really funny – he’s a free thinker.

Here are some typefaces designed specifically to be read from the screen and some links to web specific fonts.

Mircosoft will ship five new typefaces with the new version of the Windows OS sometime in 2006. These typefaces were commissioned and designed specifically to ease reading from screen. The new OS called Vista will also have an new UI font called Segoe.

Ascender has designed custom fonts for the Xbox 360. Check out the Convection custom typeface family here.