Undeniably, both awards – the Type Direc­tors Club’s TDC² and Typographica’s Favorite Type­faces – are always long awaited by the design com­mu­nity. The selec­tion of world’s best pub­lished font releases are highly respected for years. While the TDC award is the tra­di­tional top dog, Typo­graph­ica is the aspir­ing spring chicken, asking 25 high-​ranking inter­na­tional design­ers to pick from the year’s fonts. Both lists give a useful view on what is new and hot in type design. For­tu­nately, if you’d like to increase the qual­ity of your own projects this year, most of the “Best of 2007” type­faces are avail­able at FontShop:

FF Beowolf OT and FF BeoSans OT, designed by Just van Rossum and Erik van Blok­land, pub­lished by Font­Font, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. The Open­Type ver­sion of world’s first type­face with a mind of its own: with 1,000s of alter­nates as well, the new Beo are as close to achiev­ing the orig­i­nal idea of ran­dom­iza­tion as nearly any com­poser can expect today.

Bistro­Script, designed by Tomáš Brousil, pub­lished by Suit­case Type Foundry, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. This con­tem­po­rary cal­li­graphic script was inspired by pro­mo­tional art in the 1960s. Thanks to Open­Type fea­tures, a vari­ety of lig­a­tures and alter­na­tive glyphs allow the user to create more authen­tic and varied con­nec­tions between letters.

Dancer, designed by Morten Olsen, pub­lished by Font­part­ners, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. The FP Dancer type family com­bines soft­ness and friend­li­ness with more strength. In com­par­i­sion to his former FF Olsen the designer tuned-​down the serifs, and, in gen­eral, gave the whole face more humanity.

Glo­ri­ola, designed by Tomáš Brousil, pub­lished by Suit­case Type Foundry, Winner TDC² 2008 and Typographica’s OFT 2007. The type­face is a mono­lin­ear sans serif with an extremely broad cut range. Their cuts with cor­re­spond­ing ital­ics are suited for the needs of common type­set­ting thanks to the open char­ac­ter of let­ters, to the suf­fi­cient x-height and clear forms, com­bined with the full pos­si­bil­i­ties of OpenType.

Greta Text, designed by Peter Biľak, pub­lished by Typotheque, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. It is a con­tem­po­rary type­face family specif­i­cally designed for the demands of news­pa­per print­ing. Greta Text con­sists of four pri­mary text weights that each comes in three grades and is opti­mized for use at small sizes.

Kinescope, designed by Mark Simon­son, pub­lished by Mark Simon­son Studio, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. This dash­ing 1940s-style brush script face was inspired by hand-​lettered titles in Fleis­cher Broth­ers’ Super­man car­toon series. Kinescope comes with beau­ti­ful Open­Type styl­is­tic sets.

Malaga, designed by Xavier Dupré, pub­lished by Emigre, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. Named after a port city in south­ern Spain Malaga is inspired by ideas rang­ing from black­let­ter to Latin fonts, and from the Quattrocento’s first Venet­ian anti­quas to brush stroke types. This makes it a richly ani­mated type­face sat­u­rated with unortho­dox detail.

FF Meta Serif, designed by Erik Spiek­er­mann, Chris­t­ian Schwartz, and Kris Sow­ersby, pub­lished by Font­Font, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. Finally the long-​awaited serif com­pan­ion to the most influ­en­tial sans serif of the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion is avail­able in four weights: Book, Medium, Bold, and Black, each with Italics.

Purista, designed by Tomáš Brousil, pub­lished by Suit­case Type Foundry, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. The strict, orderly type­face bases on a well-​tried prin­ci­ple of geo­met­ric sans serifs from mid-20th cen­tury. Its obses­sion with tech­no­log­i­cal pre­ci­sion makes it per­fect for use in cor­po­rate sys­tems and visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions of tech­no­cratic busi­nesses. Thanks to its broad range of cuts, Purista is also ideal for dis­play advertising.

MVB Sacre Bleu, designed by Mark van Bronkhorst, pub­lished by MVB Fonts, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. This Open­Type release with a raft of alter­nates and lig­a­tures, is cer­tainly the most flex­i­ble and acces­si­ble infor­mal script of the last year, and rivals some of the best faces in this vein from the past decade.

TAZ III, designed by Luc(as) de Groot, pub­lished by Lucas­Fonts, Winner Typographica’s OFT 2007. The third incar­na­tion of the TAZ family has a shock­ing 15 weights, more then ever before. The care­fully adjusted hair­line fonts let you safe ink in small to huge sizes.