If you don’t already know, every month or so we send out the VirusFonts newsletter. If you want to be the first to find out about free downloads, new limited edition prints and any other random waffle we choose to include, sign up at VirusFonts.

If you are not a subscriber and you want to get a taste of what you are missing, you can view the latest newsletter here.

Following high demand, we have made Jonathan’s Biennale of Sydney artworks available to purchase as prints in the store section of virusfonts.com.

The images above show the artworks in situ at the 2010 biennale of Sydney. As well as designing the identity, Jonathan Barnbrook was one of the featured artist at the biennale.

These new limited edition prints of the artworks refer directly to artists, gallery owners and to the history of Cockatoo Island where the artworks are located. You can view larger images of the prints here.

A Cock or Two: They Continue to Preen
This artwork ironically refers to the birds that originally inhabited the island and the insular, self-congratulatory nature of art exhibition openings.

A Cock or Two: No Danger of Attack
This artwork is located next to the sea and parodies a shark warning sign. It is a reference to the white, rich private gallery owners that feed off the artists works but rarely are prepared to take a creative risk themselves.

A Cock or Two: Fatigue, Cynicism, Existential Pointlessness
Referring in a pragmatic and satirical manner to the experience of walking around a huge exhibition. This artwork offers a positive reminder of why we are all prepared to put up with the experience.

A Cock or Two: A Prison, A Gallery
Cockatoo Island once was a prison similar to Alcatraz. This artwork wryly compares the ‘confidence trick’ used by criminals in the past to the ones used by the artists to appear in the exhibition.

A Cock or Two: A Pilgrimage
There was once a shipbuilding facililty on Cockatoo Island. This artwork paradoxically portrays the artists as ‘empty vessels’ – a person without a brain who speaks loudly without saying anything of any depth. Taken from the English idiom “The emptiest vessels make the loudest sound”.

In conjunction with Emigre, VirusFonts are proud to announce the launch of a brand new typeface, Priori Acute. Part of the Priori family — which includes Priori Sans and Priori Serif — Priori Acute shares the same common core character as the aforementioned duo, but with radically different styling.

In 2009 our experiments into three-dimensional letter form design led us to the behemoth Hopeless Diamond, now in 2010 the addition of another unfathomable dimension twists the Priori skeleton into the highly unusual display face, Priori Acute.

Drawing heavily on the visual contradictions in the work of the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, Priori Acute is a playful exhibit of incongruous perspectives and twisting shapes that fold into themselves tricking the eye to shift the plane. At first glance and at small sizes the effect is subtle and the original letter forms themselves remain intact, retaining the history of British early 20th century typography, which was an inspiration for the original Priori family. But when blown up, the individual Priori Acute characters become beautifully animated and work well in selective situations such as initial caps, short headlines or logo design. Priori Acute is available to buy through Emigre.

As a little treat for mailing list subscribers, we announced our celebration of this years Buy Nothing Day by releasing Apocalypso Pictograms for free (for personal/non-commercial use) for a limited time.

Some Background to Apocalypso: Originally drawn in 1997, like our later later release Olympukes, Apocalypso is a conceptual pictogram font. Witty symbols such as Buy Before You Die and Shop Until The Bomb Drops ironically commented on many of the political and social issues that were facing society at the end of the last millennium. Looking on it now, its interesting to see how it foretold of many issues that we are dealing with now and how pertinent the font still is.

To get you in the festive spirit, we have released another set of free iPhone wallpapers through the store section of VirusFonts.com.

This month’s wallpapers include Olympuke, Disco Inferno, Expletive Pixel and Infidel Pattern (shown above, clockwise from top left). Olympuke features one of the most successful of the Olympukes pictograms, Drowning in Advertising, brightening it up with a suitable colour scheme. Disco Inferno takes another of the popular Apocalypso Pictogram series, jazzing it up a disco-tastic background. Expletive Pixel and Infidel Pattern use parts of the Expletive and Infidel typefaces, colourfully mixing them up with hidden messages.

After the success of the VirusFonts site relaunch we have re-started our mailing list, now in wonderful technicolour . To sign up, simply visit the Virus contact page and follow the link.

New to the downloads page of our store section this month, we have a selection of free new iPhone wallpapers for you to jazz up your beloved telephone (meaning you can take it out and look at it even more the 30 second intervals that you do at the moment).

There are four wallpapers (shown below), clockwise from top left they are called Hopeless Virus, Apocalypso Bang!, Virus Swear and Virus Meme. Hopeless Virus features a capital V from our recent new font, Hopeless Diamond. Bang! turns your mobile phone into an explosive device using a pictogram from the popular Apocalypso series. Virus Swear features a visualisation a swear word. The illustration was made using parts of the typeface Tourette. Virus Meme is a design based around the idea of a meme. Simplified, a meme is a cultural idea which is passed from person to person through speech, gestures and rituals.

We would love to release other peoples fonts from VirusFonts. If you think you have an appropriate font in PostScript or OpenType format, please contact us via this website for details of how to send your font to us.

A few guidelines: We would prefer finished fonts, not illustrator files as we will only do minimal work to make the font sellable. The fonts need to have an interesting or extreme voice. Do not send us works which look similar to existing typefaces or lack an interesting edge.

It’s been a long time coming with a lot of hard work behind the scenes, but we are very pleased to unveil the updated VirusFonts.com

The new site features more ways to view our fonts than ever before — download a pdf, or set some text in our new font tester.

We have introduced a new pricing structure which means better value—more characters for your cash. You can now view your purchase in your chosen currency, so no more confusion over dollar rates, unless you like to shop in dollars of course.

You can now shop using our new account system. Starting an account means you can save items in your shopping cart and return to purchase them later as well as tracking the status of your orders and accessing your font downloads.

Today we a launching the first in a new range of limited edition merchandise from Virus Editions.

The limited edition t-shirt, “Words Have No Power” is available from today in a range of sizes.
For more information, head for virusfonts.com/store/virus-editions