Tonal blog
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Tonal is the blog of Goodhertz, makers of audio plugins such as “Megaverb” that was introduced with a video previously shown on Fonts In Use. Another Goodhertz product is the “Vulf Compressor”, named after the band Vulfpeck – which in turn was the namesake of OH no Type Co’s Vulf Mono.
OH no’s James Edmondson also designed the typeface used for for links and emphasis on the Tonal blog. Hobeaux was started during his TypeMedia year at the KABK in The Hague. The headlines and body text of the blog are set in a design by another TypeMedia graduate from a few years later: Messer (incl. Messer Condensed), a reinterpretation of Weiß-Antiqua by Inga Plönnigs. To complete the circle: Messer was among the first typefaces available at Future Fonts, the font-in-progress platform created by Scribble Type with assistance of, you guessed it: James Edmondson.
While the blog itself uses Hobeaux and Messer for all typography, some videos and interactive plugins are inserted, using more type. Here, a tutorial pairs Messer with Export Stencil, Vulf Mono and Metallophile Sp8, among many other fonts.
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Messer Condensed is used for headings, with Messer Regular and Italic for text. Author names, date, and drop cap brought to you by Hobeaux Bold and Black.
Interactive example of a plugin that mimics hearing loss, with typography set in Covik Sans Mono, a typeface that evolved from Edmondson’s graduation project at the KABK.
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Some of the blog posts (and plugin interfaces) have been translated to Portuguese.
4 Comments on “Tonal blog”
The logo is served in the form of a (character-limited) font named Very Rough Gothic made by Rob Stenson. It’s a digitization of Ernst Schneidler’s Ganz Grobe Gotisch. While this German name may very well be translated to “very rough gothic”, the word grob (rough, rude, coarse, crude, gross) here is, strictly speaking, an old-fashioned term for boldface. When Ganz Grobe Gotisch came out in 1930, it had largely fallen out of fashion already. As far as I can tell, Kabel (1927) was about the last major release that used grob for designating the bold weight. In the case of Ganz Grobe Gotisch, it was obviously chosen for the alliteration. An alternative translation would be “Totally Black Gothic”. I only add this smartassery here so that Dan doesn’t have to. The Tonal blog is rad, and so is the logo!
Do have to admit that “Very Rough Gothic” was a Google Translate, so it’s nice to see a more accurate translation! That said, the digitization was one of my first experiments in Robofont, so “very rough” made a lot of poetic sense to me as a description of my very rough digitization abilities. Glad you like the logo!
The font selection has changed? I no longer see Messer.
Confirmed – this post is from 2019. The fonts currently used for the Tonal blog are Quadrant Text and HEX Franklin.