Ingram BT might be described as Deco, or Arts & Crafts, in style. Created by Alex Marshall, it is a very condensed design with high-waisted uppercase glyphs that feature dots rather than straight lines for the middle hairlines. There are two sets of alternate glyphs accessible via stylistic and contextual OpenType features. The contextual alternates offer the most interesting glyph substitutions. There are also oldstyle and tabular figures, superiors and inferiors, as well as unlimited fractions. Ingram is a very handsome, casual typeface, with a slightly rough finish. The compact lowercase remains very readable at text sizes and it is a pleasure to turn on the earth tone colors and typeset left and right justified paragraphs! The extended character set supports Baltic and Central European languages.

Ronna Penner's Sketchley is a 2001 winner of ATypI's bukva:raz! design competition, held recently in Moscow. Inspired by handwriting samples and unable to find a typeface to satisfy her needs, Ms. Penner decided to create her own. The result is this warm, casual script. The compliment of characters demanded the creation of two fonts. Sketchley is considered the base font and should be used for basic layouts. Sketchley Swash has numerous initial, medial and final swash characters that, when used thoughtfully with Sketchley, can recreate the look of hand drawn calligraphy.

Perhaps one of the more difficult typeface styles to space convincingly, Irakly, a serif-sans by Russian designer Oleg Karpinsky imparts an unfamiliar elegance. The odd mixture of superficial details such as the half serifs and the protruding horizontal strokes confuse your visual senses, yet the simple geometric roots of the letterforms are apparent and ultimately reassuring. Irakly Light and Bold make a great addition to any library. The OpenType versions have alternates that are more conservative in design and broaden the usefulness of the typefaces

Chianti was designed at Bitstream by senior designer Dennis Pasternak in 1991 and initially released in 1995. The intent behind the design was to provide a humanist sanserif of high readability at a wide range of sizes and weights. Humanist sanserifs (others that fall into this category are Linotype’s Frutiger and Optima, and Monotype’s Gill Sans) are an attempt to improve the readability of sanserifs by applying classical roman structure to the letterforms. To enhance its versatility, Mr. Pasternak designed a wide variety of alternate characters, rare ligatures, ornaments and swashes. Chianti is a friendly sanserif useful for a broad range of typographic needs.

The hand-hewn Islander looks like it could have been liberated from granite blocks.These demonstrative letter forms leave no doubt when it comes to conveying your message, yet they remain playful.

Introducing VeraCruz BT, a fanciful display typeface by Ray Cruz. A tasteful, flair serif design, VeraCruz BT is available as an OpenType font. By selecting the Contextual Alternates feature in OT savvy applications, many of the cap and lowercase characters will change automatically as you type to give the text an informal, animated look. There are also tabular and proportional figure sets, and the extended glyph set supports Central Europe.

Ecliptica is an extended family of five very condensed typefaces in a single bold weight. The creation of Australian designer Robert Bell. Ecliptica has a Sans, a Semi-Serif, a Serif and a single Cursive that can be used with any of the other three styles. As an added bonus, Robert also designed a modern Blackletter companion. The Ecliptica family is an unusual layout of styles and all work equally well with one another. The OpenType versions of the Ecliptica fonts support an extended Latin character set that includes a full array of fractions as well as additional ligatures. The Sans and Cursive fonts contain some cap and lowercase alternates.

A meeting of Byzantine and Art Deco forms, Aphasia began as a series of handwritten captions to accompany drawings in the early 1990s. The drawings were abandoned to allow the lettering to become the real composition. Playfully set in blocks of verse with each line shaped through free-association, the only visual rule was that all the lines of capitals be of equal length. The challenge of the game required extensive abbreviations, ligatures, small caps, and superiors. With the advent of Letraset’s FontStudio program, the project moved into the typographic realm.