Valentype | Testify and Win The Typeface You Love!

If you know what it’s like to passionately love a typeface, here’s a golden opportunity. Declare your love for a typeface* and you could win an official single license to four (4) weights/styles** in OpenType, Offc or Webfont*** format of that typeface (for example Regular, Italic, Bold, Black). This love declaration can take any form you like: a poem, an image, a short text, whatever you feel like creating.

*	Only typefaces from the participating foundries apply (see the list below).
**	If the typeface you love has less than four (4) weights/styles, then so be it. We don’t condone cheating nor polygamy.
***	If the fonts of your choice are not available in any of those OpenType formats you can choose between Mac or PC, PostScript Type 1 or TrueType.

28 | Nina Stössinger (Basel, Switzerland) loves Parry, winner of Valentype 2011.

You can use any typeface to design your love declaration. For the previous edition you were limited to the sample setter on fontshop.com if you wanted to use the typeface itself. This time however, thanks to the revolutionary (and free!) FontShop plugin, you can create your love declaration directly in the Adobe Creative Suite programs Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or Indesign with the actual typeface you love!

The preferred language for text entries is English, but we accept Dutch, French, and German as well. Just make sure that we don’t have to do anything to add your entry to the dedicated gallery which will be posted soon (see technical details below).

37 | Gerhard Großmann (Regensburg, Germany) loves FF Quadraat, winner of Valentype 2011.

The contest starts now, and your submission must reach us before Valentine’s Day ends: next Thursday, February 14th 2013 at midnight AKST. But there is one catch – we want at least fifty (50) submissions or the contest is void, annulled, nihil, zilch, nada. Fortunately you can enter up to three (3) submissions, so in theory if twenty very motivated people compete we’re more than good. However if you submit more than one entry, your entries must be for different typefaces; you can’t submit more than one love declaration for a typeface/family.

49 | Paul Hunt (San Jose, CA, USA) loves Auto 3, winner of Valentype 2011.

The contest is open to anyone: amateurs, students and professionals alike, men and women and transgenders, straight and gay and everything in between, all races, all religions, Atlanteans and subterraneans, earthlings and aliens, no restrictions, no boundaries. So get busy in the name of love and testify! The first time we ran the competition you had a little under 48 hours; now with a week to go I don’t want to hear anyone complain. I expect submissions of the highest quality. ; )

52 | Maurice Meilleur (Champaign, IL, USA) loves Arnhem, winner of Valentype 2011.

Procedure

• Send us an e-mail with “Valentype2013” (no space) and the name of the typeface in the subject line. This is crucial because we filter incoming e-mails: no Valentype2013 in the subject line means we won’t see your submission. Include your name and full postal address in the message and your love declaration in attachment.
• Poems or short texts must be saved in .TXT format.
• Typographic art or design must be saved for web (Save for Web… command in Adobe Photoshop) as a High Quality JPEG (no progressive JPEG!), PNG, or GIF RGB image, measuring exactly 500 pixels wide and maximum 750 pixels high.
• The file name must read “YourFullName_FontName” (plus the file extension of course). Substitute “YourFullName” with your actual name (no spaces) and “FontName” with the name of the typeface you covet.

Important

As evaluating and posting the entries is a hell of a lot of work:

• We will not accept love declarations for fonts not included in the libraries of the participating foundries listed below.
• You can however design your submission with any typeface you like.
• We will not accept submissions of the wrong dimensions.
• We will not accept submissions that don’t conform to the naming rules.

58 | Tiffany Wardle (San Jose, CA, USA) loves Regime, winner of Valentype 2011

Participating foundries

If anyone wonders why Valentype is restricted to the foundries listed below – although the four fonts are given away, the designer does get the royalties, just like with any regular sale. As in everything we endeavour, we want to do right by the designers who create these beautiful typefaces for us to use. The following foundries responded to our e-mail invitation, and have agreed to this.

• Alan Meeks
• Alias
• Alphabet Soup
• Altered Ego
• Anatoletype
• Baseline Fonts
• Bold Monday
• Breaking the Norm
• Canada Type
• Cape Arcona Type Foundry
• Cocijotype
• Comicraft
• Dalton Maag
• Device Fonts
• DSType
• Emigre
• Emtype
• exljbris
• FaceType
• FontFont
• Fountain
• Gestalten
• G-Type
• HVD Fonts
• Indian Type Foundry (only Latin typefaces)
• James Todd Design
• Just Another Foundry
• Kevin Thrasher
• Letter Perfect
• Letters from Sweden
• Mark Simonson Studio
• Monokrom
• Moretype
• MvB Fonts
• Neapolitan
• Newlyn
• OurType
• Positype
• Process Type Foundry
• Rosetta Type Foundry
• ShinnType
• Sudtipos
• Suomi Type Foundry
• Teeline
• Tipo
• Typejockeys
• Type-Ø-Tones
• Typerepublic
• TypeTogether
• Typofonderie
• typographies.fr
• Typotheque
• Underware
• URW
• Vette Letters
• Willerstorfer Font Foundry

Missing foundries may simply have overlooked the invitation I sent out two weeks ago; it certainly doesn’t always mean they didn’t want to participate.
Header: Bellissima by Sudtipos

Tags: competition, contest, Valentine's Day, Valentype