Bimbo is a monoline script font family created in 2018 by Francesco Canovaro for Zetafonts as an extension & redesign of the original Arsenale White typeface created with italian illustrator Jonathan Calugi. Bimbo expands the original design with six new weights and over 300 new characters to cover over 70 languages using the latin, greek and cyrillic alphabets, while keeping the handmade aesthetic that made successful the original font. Bimbo is essentially a display font, born for minimal lettering and logos, with a handwritten sensibility enhanced by the built-in letter swapping open type feature that makes sure double letters are always different one from another. Open counters and a monoline design allow for great readability at small sizes, making Bimbo the ideal font for creating fake handwritten notes and meta-textual jokes.

Gimbo is bold. This heavy sans-serif design features thin counters. The interior spaces inside letterforms have been reduced as much as possible. Often, they seem abstract. There are three fonts in the Gimbo family: Black, Ultra, and Ultra Shadow. What do those terms mean? Well, Ultra is wider than Black. It takes up more pixels on-screen or brings more ink to the page.

Bilbo is a very legible calligraphic style that has a masculine feel. It can be used for more than just display. Use Bilbo in body copy that requires added warmth to a message.

First used by the designer on his personal letterhead, Jimbo has an informal modern style. Use the Jimbo font family on posters, in advertisements and on packaging.

The power of ND Bimbo is here now. If you like deep-fried candy bars you will like ND Bimbo. This playful design integrates art deco influences into a contemporary display style. As usual, it covers Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. Respect ND Bimbo now! Get ND Bimbo now! You want ND Bimbo now! Create Magic with ND Bimbo now!

If you need a simple way to get hand written / drawing style graphics – VVDS The BIMBO Collection is for you. Absolutely hand drawn lettering style collection gives you many styles for your graphic projects. Easy way to give your poster, or gift cards, or gift paper or something else a hand touch for really short time. 25 typefaces, 248 hand drawn graphics and 124 catchwords.

The origins of Bembo go back to one of the most famous printers of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius. In 1496, he used a new roman typeface to print the book de Aetna, a travelogue by the popular writer Pietro Bembo. This type was designed by Francesco Griffo, a prolific punchcutter who was one of the first to depart from the heavier pen-drawn look of humanist calligraphy to develop the more stylized look we associate with roman types today. In 1929, Stanley Morison and the design staff at the Monotype Corporation used Griffo's roman as the model for a revival type design named Bembo. They made a number of changes to the fifteenth-century letters to make the font more adaptable to machine composition. The italic is based on letters cut by the Renaissance scribe Giovanni Tagliente. Because of their quiet presence and graceful stability, the lighter weights of Bembo are popular for book typography. The heavier weights impart a look of conservative dependability to advertising and packaging projects. With 31 weights, including small caps, Old style figures, expert characters, and an alternate cap R, Bembo makes an excellent all-purpose font family.

The origins of Bembo go back to one of the most famous printers of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius. In 1496, he used a new roman typeface to print the book de Aetna, a travelogue by the popular writer Pietro Bembo. This type was designed by Francesco Griffo, a prolific punchcutter who was one of the first to depart from the heavier pen-drawn look of humanist calligraphy to develop the more stylized look we associate with roman types today. In 1929, Stanley Morison and the design staff at the Monotype Corporation used Griffo's roman as the model for a revival type design named Bembo. They made a number of changes to the fifteenth-century letters to make the font more adaptable to machine composition. The italic is based on letters cut by the Renaissance scribe Giovanni Tagliente. Because of their quiet presence and graceful stability, the lighter weights of Bembo are popular for book typography. The heavier weights impart a look of conservative dependability to advertising and packaging projects. With 31 weights, including small caps, Old style figures, expert characters, and an alternate cap R, Bembo makes an excellent all-purpose font family.

The origins of Bembo go back to one of the most famous printers of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius. In 1496, he used a new roman typeface to print the book de Aetna, a travelogue by the popular writer Pietro Bembo. This type was designed by Francesco Griffo, a prolific punchcutter who was one of the first to depart from the heavier pen-drawn look of humanist calligraphy to develop the more stylized look we associate with roman types today. In 1929, Stanley Morison and the design staff at the Monotype Corporation used Griffo's roman as the model for a revival type design named Bembo. They made a number of changes to the fifteenth-century letters to make the font more adaptable to machine composition. The italic is based on letters cut by the Renaissance scribe Giovanni Tagliente. Because of their quiet presence and graceful stability, the lighter weights of Bembo are popular for book typography. The heavier weights impart a look of conservative dependability to advertising and packaging projects. With 31 weights, including small caps, Old style figures, expert characters, and an alternate cap R, Bembo makes an excellent all-purpose font family. Bembo® Book font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Akira Jimbo Vintage Font will gives a feel of vintage, classic, old, handmade looked like by Muhammad Afif Ersya. It contains uppercase, lowercase, punctuation and symbols. Freudian is is perfect for people looking for vintage aesthetic or hand drawn logo. Suitable for any graphic designs such as branding materials, t-shirt, print, business cards, logo, poster, t-shirt, photography, quotes, etc.

Bembo is a script typeface with noble and vintage looks. It has serifs at the beginnings of the strokes, swash capitals and formal design. Bembo has lots of alternate characters, swashes and ligatures. It has also a bunch of tails with different shapes and widths to give the vintage logotype or sports look to your design. These alternates makes Bembo very versatile. You can design beautiful, elegant and diverse typographic elements with it. It’s well suited for logos, lettering artwork, t-shirt designs, editorial illustrations to name a few.

This is a playful collection of 135 diagrams based on letterforms from different styles. You can use this symbols as bullets, ornaments, but also to make your own mandala-like exercises and release some stress out! Nimbo, by the way, is the word for "halo" in spanish.

This freeform exercise in typographic design echoes the looseness of early 1960's advertising. Brian breaks almost every typographic rule we can think of — but so what? The bold letterforms of Big Limbo are anything but stuck!

Aldine 401 is a Bitstream version of Bembo type family. It was designed on the base of artwork of Francesco Griffo for Aldus Manutius. Originally the font appeared in “De Aetna” in 1495 — the book by Pietro Bembo about his journey to Mount Etna. Griffo’s design was one of the first old style typefaces followed by Garamond. It was the forerunner for the standard text types in Europe for the next two centuries. A modern version of Bembo was designed at Monotype under the supervision of Stanley Morison in 1929. Aldine 401 is still very popular in book design due to its well-proportioned classic letterforms and lack of peculiarities. Italic was based on the handwriting of Giovanni Tagliente. Books and other texts set in Aldine 401 can encompass a large variety of subjects and formats because of its classical beauty and high readability. Cyrillic version was developed by Isabella Chaeva and released by ParaType in 2008.

Monotype Bembo is generally regarded as one of the most handsome revivals of Aldus Manutius' 15th century roman type, but the original had no italic counterpart. The story is told that Stanley Morison commissioned Alfred Fairbank, a renowned calligrapher, to create the first italic for Bembo, which was released as metal fonts in 1929. Alfred Fairbank, however, claimed that he drew the design as an independent project and then sold his drawings to Monotype. According to him, the statement has been made that I was asked to design an italic for the Bembo roman. This is not so. Had the request been made, the italic type produced would have been different." Whichever version you believe, it was obvious that Fairbank's design - while undeniably beautiful - was not harmonious with Bembo roman. A second, more conventional italic was eventually drawn and added to the Bembo family. Fairbank's first design, which was based on the work of sixteenth-century writing master Ludovico degli Arrighi, managed to have a modest life of its own as a standalone font of metal type. It never made the leap into phototype fonts, however, and the face could have been lost, were it not for Robin Nicholas, Monotype Imaging's Head of Typography in the United Kingdom, and Carl Crossgrove, a senior designer for Monotype Imaging in the US. Nicholas and Crossgrove used the original drawings for Fairbank as the starting point for a new digital design, but this was only the beginning. They improved spacing, added subtle kerning and optimized the design for digital imaging. In addition, Nicholas created an alternative set of lowercase letters, fancy and swash capitals and enough alternate characters to personalize virtually any design project. By the time his work was complete, Nicholas and Crossgrove had created a small type family that included Fairbank, a revived version of the earlier metal font, and Fairbank Chancery, a more calligraphic rendition of the design. An additional suite of ornate caps, elegant ligatures, and beginning and ending letters accompanies both fonts, as does a full complement of lowercase swash characters. Now, instead of a failed Bembo italic, Fairbank emerges in its true glory: a sumptuous, elegant design that will lend a note of grace to holiday greetings, invitations, and any application where its Italianate beauty is called for."

Artane, Tony Fahy's first typeface for Bitstream Inc., has a specific philosophy at the core of it's creation. He decided he would try to create a Roman sans that would have the elegance of a serifed italic, such as Stempel Garamond, Bembo, or Baskerville.

In searching for a Roman to use, I found there were bits of Bembo, Times, Garamond, etc., that I liked and bits that I did not. So I set out to take the best bits of all my favorite Romans and tried to create the ultimate Roman Typeface.

Albion’s Marker No.1, as the name suggests is the first in a series of ‘Marker Pen’ typefaces- merging good type design practice with deliberately casual and hand-drawn letter forms. Inspired by the great classic typefaces such as Bembo and Caslon, the design of Marker No.1 offers a unique blend of legibility and relaxed randomness.

Poliphilus is a facsimile of the text of the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili', after which it is named, published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499, using a type that had been cut by Francesco Griffo. As a design, Poliphilus is related to Bembo, but whereas Bembo was redrawn, with the intention of making a new face based on an old design, Poliphilus is an exact copy of fifteenth century printing on hand made paper. So exact in fact that even the original ink spread is reproduced. This may not seem like a very sound idea for a typeface, but the letterforms are good and the design is functionally successful. Blado, the italic for use with Poliphilus, was used by Antonio Blado in 1539, and designed by the calligrapher Ludovico degli Arrighi. The Poliphilus type is used mainly for book and text work."

Good for typography, good for close paragraphs, good for titles logo, markers, use with numbers, Capitals and Cases. use Special symbols as design elements. One can be used for others. Good for closed groups. Limbos, good to go with Serif, Sans serif or old english. use it with variety and any design light or heavy. the weight is black, so it wont matter. hope you enjoy the font and use it.

Loosely based on Bembo and Plantin, the Perrywood font family retains some old style characteristics which give the face a familiar feel, however much attention has been paid to optimizing the design to give good quality output at small point sizes and from low resolution output devices. The consistency of character shapes allows close letter spacing to give compact word shapes, excellent word recognition and an overall economy in text. Perrywood offers good legibility and, coupled with an even text color will be very useful for text setting, in correspondence, for faxes and reports.

JY Ætna was designed originally by Francesco Griffo in 1495, and appeared in a book by Cardinal Bembo the following year. The typeface was re-created by Jack Yan in 1994, in time for its 500th anniversary. The original x-heights, quaint letters and other niceties have been restored. An italic complement, based on the design by Giovantonio Tagliente, has also been developed. JY Ætna has been one of JY&A Fonts’ more popular families over the years, with some typographers preferring its taller ascenders and descenders for headline work.

Aldo New Roman (1000+ glyphs, incl. medieval Latin, Cyrillic, some Greek, ornaments, small capitals, nut fractions...) Renaissance antiqua · Venetian types · Venetian serif · Humanist serif · Old style antiqua A modern version of the typeface cut by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius around 1490 AD. Intentionally not the original Griffo / Aldus / Bembo — but the part of the large project on revival and further development (by drawing many additional glyphs, sometimes over 1000) of the 20th century's typewriters’ fonts. Triple pun here :: :: #1 Aldine Roman type; #2 Since it is equalized, modernized version — the parallel to the Times New Roman; #3 He called himself Aldus Pius Manutius Romanus — he was a new Roman during his Renaissance times.

The Combi collection includes Sans, Sans Oblique, a true Italic, Serif, Serif Oblique and a set of Openface capitals. Combi fonts have 5 compatible weights and metrics allowing them to be used in free combination. Inspiration came from Jan Van Krimpen’s 'Romulus' (Enschedé, 1931). In addition to the Roman style, Van Krimpen created a set of open capitals, a simple oblique variant and subsequently, an attractive calligraphic italic, Cancelleresca Bastarda. In addition to Van Krimpen’s idea, Combi has been influenced by features from many faces including Bembo, Melior and Optima. The object was to create a versatile family of body text and titling faces for use in books, magazines and on the web. Glyphs are available for most Latin based languages and all text fonts include small caps, proportional numerals and other Opentype features.

Dante was designed by Giovanni Mardersteig. Mardersteig started work on Dante after the Second World War when printing at the Officina Bodoni returned to full production. He drew on his experience of using Monotype Bembo and Centaur to design a new book face with an italic which worked harmoniously with the roman. Originally hand-cut by Charles Malin, Dante was adapted for mechanical composition by Monotype in 1957. The new digital font version has been re drawn, by Monotype's Ron Carpenter, free from any restrictions imposed by hot metal technology. The Dante font family was issued in 1993 in a range of three weights with a set of titling capitals. Dante is a beautiful book face which can also be used to good effect in magazines, periodicals etc. Dante® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Indigo Antiqua 2 is an old-style humanist serif typeface primarily based on personal studies of a typeface by Francesco Griffo (1450–1518) Italian punchcutter. But it is not a revival of the so called original Bembo (1496) or any other typeface. My Inspirations are of various kinds, but some outstanding old typeface masters like Guillaume le Bé, Miklós Kis, Peter de Walpergen and Christoffel van Dijck are important. Indigo Antiqua 2 is most commonly used for body text were legibility / readability matters – and is a reliable multi-purpose typeface. It has been applied for thousands of book titles and between the book covers made reading comfortable. By using Indigo Antiqua 2 with OpenType features You can reach additional ligatures, various figure sets, small caps, stylistic options and a lot of other typographical choices. Multi-Lingual support: Central European languages and many others. | See www.fontanova.se

Darkness Falls… beware the Moon and stick to the road. Keep clear of the moors, for there you will only find a bloody, UNNATURAL death. Tonight, as every night there is a Full Moon, the Blood Beast stalks the village. It is ready to catch the unwary one, the show-off, the FOOL! It walks the Earth in limbo from one month to the next and only one who is loving in spirit can bring an end to its Carnivorous Lunar Activities! Blood Beast arrives in three weights, Regular, Bold and Heavy, but we recommend you don’t tackle any of them unless you are brave of heart and prepared to save the soul of the poor victim who was left with the Mark of the Blood Beast! Features: Three weights with alternate upper and lowercase characters Languages: Western & Central Europe Automatic alternates & Crossbar I Technology™

Aloha to Waialua! Put on your lei and grab a drink umbrella as you kick back and start designing with this island beauty of a font. Soak in the unprecedented potential of this new font. Waialua is one of insigne’s first variable fonts. Avoid the font limbo with a set number of options from Thin to Black. Go with the flow and see where you feel the innumerable amount of weights taking you as you slide your design options along a spectrum of stunning possibilities. There's more, too. Waialua’s auto-replacing terminators allow you never to need connectors at the end of your words. Or if you want, you can dial up your design with optional swash endings. So set your course for the islands and get ready for a fun time with the tropical beauty of Waialua. This is one font vacation your work--and your reader--will never want to end. Production assistance from Lucas Azevedo.

Garalde: the word itself sounds antique and arcane to anyone who isn’t fresh out of design school, but the sort of typeface it describes is actually quite familiar to all of us. Despite its age—born fairly early in printing’s history—the style has fared well; Garaldes are still the typefaces of choice for books and other long reading. And so we continue to see text set in old favorites—Garamond, Sabon®, and their Venetian predecessor, Bembo®. Yet many new books don’t feel as handsome and readable as older books printed in the original, metal type. The problem is that digital type revivals are typically facsimiles of their metal predecessors, merely duplicating the letterforms rather than capturing the impression—both physical and emotional—that the typefaces once left on the page. MVB Verdigris is a Garalde text face for the digital age. Inspired by the work of 16th-century punchcutters Robert Granjon (roman) and Pierre Haultin (italic), Verdigris celebrates tradition but is not beholden to it. Created specifically to deliver good typographic color as text, Mark van Bronkhorst’s design meets the needs of today’s designer using today’s paper and press. And now, as a full-featured OpenType release, it’s optimized for the latest typesetting technologies too. With MVB Verdigris Pro Text, Van Bronkhorst has revisited the family, adding small caps to all weights and styles, extensive language support, and other typographic refinements. Among the features: • Support for most Latin-based languages, including those of Central and Eastern Europe. • Precision spacing and kerning by type editor Linnea Lundquist. The fonts practically set beautiful text by themselves. • Proportional and tabular figure sets, each with oldstyle and lining forms with currency symbols to match. • Ligatures to maintain even spacing while accommodating Verdigris’ elegant, sweeping glyphs. • Numerators and denominators for automatic fractions of any denomination. • Useful, straightforward dingbats including arrows, checkboxes, and square and round bullets in three sizes. • Alternative ‘zero’ and ‘one’ oldstyle figures for those who prefer more contemporary versions over the traditional forms. • An alternative uppercase Q with a more reserved tail. • An optional, roman “Caps” font providing mid-caps, useful for titling settings, and for those situations when caps seem too big and small caps seem too small. __________ Sabon is a trademark of Linotype Corp. Bembo is a trademark of the Monotype Corporation.

Praxis® Next has the same robust shapes and proportions as the original 1976 Praxis design. Its large x-height, substantial counters and open apertures guarantee high levels of legibility and reading ease in print and on screen. More weights, condensed designs and true cursive italics differentiate Praxis Next from the older design. Praxis Next shines where space is at a premium. The regular designs are modestly narrow while the condensed typefaces perform with grace in the most crowded of environments. The bold designs create powerful headlines and banners and the lighter weights are ideal for both long and short-form text copy. Because of its many weights and proportions, Praxis Next is also an ideal design to build a brand identity. Praxis Next Variables are font files which are featuring two axis and have a preset instance from Light to Ultra and Condensed to Roman. Pair Praxis Next with old-style designs like Bembo® Book and Stempel Garamond™ to create a dynamic typographic contrast. Or complement the design with its serifed counterpart, Demos® Next . Unger also drew ITC Flora® as an alternative italic design. Looking for something a little different? Pair Praxis Next with Masqualero™ .

DIN has always been the typeface you root for—the one you wanted to use but just couldn’t bring yourself to because it was limited in its range of weights and widths, rendering it less useful than it could be. The century-old design has proven to be timeless, but modern use cases demanded an update, which resulted in DIN Next—a versatile sans serif family that will never go out of style. This classic design turned modern must-have includes seven weights that range from light to black, each of which has a complementary italic and condensed counterpart. The family also included four rounded designs, stretching the original concept’s range and core usability. DIN Next also boasts a suite of small capitals, old style figures, subscript, superscript and several alternate characters. A quintessential 20th-century design, its predecessor DIN was based on geometric shapes and was intended for use on traffic signs and technical documentation. Akira Kobayashi’s update made slight changes to the design, rounding the formerly squared-off corner angles to humanize the family. Rooted in over 100-years of history, it’s safe to say that there will always be a demand for the DIN design, and thanks to DIN Next, now it’s as usable as it is desired. Wondering what will pair with it perfectly? Check out Agmena™, Bembo® Book, Cardamon™, Joanna® Nova, FF Quadraat® and Quitador™. Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos, Best Fonts for Websites, Best Fonts for Tattoos

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which can be translated in English as “Dreaming Love Fighting of Poliphilus”, is a romance about a mysterious arcane allegory in which the main protagonist, Poliphilo, pursues his love, Polia, through a dreamlike landscape. In the end, he is reconciled with her by the “Fountain of Venus”. The author of the book is anonymous, however, an acrostic formed by the first, elaborately decorated letter in each chapter in the original Italian reads “POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCVS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT”, which means “Brother Francesco Colonna has dearly loved Polia”. Despite this clue, the book has also been attributed to many other authors. The identity of the illustrator is less certain than that of the author. It was first published in Venice, in December 1499, by Aldo Manutio. This first edition presents an elegant and unique page layout, with refined woodcut illustrations in an Early Renaissance style and a refined Roman font, cut by Francesco da Bologna, which is a revised version of the type used in 1496 for the De Aetna of Pietro Bembo. The print quality is very high for the time, but nevertheless it presents many inconsistencies and imperfections due to the non-ideal inking and adherence of the matrix to the paper. For that reason numerous samples of the original have been used to create every single glyph which will result in an appropriate reconstruction and not a mere and humble reproduction. Some letters like \J, \U and \W were extrapolated, because they are not part of the original alphabet of the period. Some letters like \Q, \X, \Y, \Z and \h have been updated to more modern variants, but the original shape is accessible by Stylistic Alternates Opentype Feature, which also changes the shape of the \V and the \v. The original numerals \zero, \one, \tree, \four and \six have been accompanied by reconstructions of the missing numbers and extended by modern figures. Finally, swashed lower cases and original scribal abbreviations were also included. The font has joined by a matching Italic variant, closely inspired from Aldo Manuzio's 1501 "Vergilius", the first book printed entirely in Italic type by Francesco da Bologna.

“There is just something magical about type design,” says Sebastian Lester. “If you draw a successful typeface it can travel the world, taking a part of you with it.” If this is true, his Soho® Gothic family has taken him far and wide. Understated, modern and exceptionally versatile, the family has been put to good use in just about every application imaginable. A good choice for virtually any type of project, The Soho Gothic family performs equally well as the backbone of a global brand as it would in an edgy fashion magazine. Versatile, extensive, customizable, and multilingual – the Soho Gothic typeface family has it all.With the same proportions as Soho, its slab serif cousin, Soho Gothic ranges across seven weights, from a willowy hairline to a brawny ultra – each with a complementary italic.Lester took care to ensure that the Soho and Soho Gothic designs work in perfect harmony. According to him, “The typefaces were developed alongside each other so that I could consider every aspect of each design and be certain that they would be absolutely compatible.”Soho Gothic is a more understated and more subtle design than Soho. Features that give the design its distinctive tone are the flat, crisp apexes of the diagonal characters like the A and V, and the marked horizontal stress in the a, g and s. “I wanted the family as a whole to radiate effortless modernity,” recalls Lester, “to be a master communicator that works in all conditions and at all sizes.” A collection of alternate and “semi-slab” characters were also part of Lester’s plan. “I like to develop alternate characters for all my type designs,” he says. “I believe they give graphic designers greater flexibility and make a typeface more valuable.” Soho Gothic is available as OpenType® Pro fonts that have an extended character set which supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages. If you’re looking to complete your designs, consider pairing it with Bembo® Book,Joanna® Nova,Neue Frutiger®,PMN Caecilia®,or ITC Stone® Serif.

A Venetian serif in 6 styles The Apolline typeface family was created by Jean François Porchez as a means to study the transition from Renaissance writing into the first printing types. Rather than sticking to the method commonly used these days for the creation of revivals of Jenson or Bembo types, it seemed more interesting to try and get in the same mindset as those exceptional designers during this pivotal period in the history of typography. Thus Apolline is an exploration of the design methods used by people like Nicolas Jenson and his contemporaries for adapting handwriting with its multiple occurrences (a, a, a, b, b, b…) into single, unique signs (a, b…). Initially Jean François made drawings modelled after his own calligraphy. They were done at a very small size on tracing paper (2 cm high for the capitals) to preserve the irregularity of human handwriting. Besides emphasising the horizontal parts of the letter forms, the serifs were designed asymmetrically to reinforce the rhythm of the writing. The final drawings were produced at a large size (10 cm high for the capitals) to allow for subtle optimisation of specific details. The very narrow and fluid Apolline italic Influenced by various concepts for an ideal italic by Van Krimpen, Gill, etc. Apolline italic was designed at 8° degrees. Although the structure of the letterforms were informed by chancery scripts, the italic has full serifs like the roman. Very narrow and fluid, its unique design creates a good contrast when used in combination with its upright counterparts. Thanks to the presence of the serifs similar to roman typefaces it sets very neatly in large sizes. The next step was digitising the drawings with Ikarus (the pre-Bézier-curves era) to create the final roman and italic fonts. Two years later, when the family was expanded to six series the same method was used, this time with Fontographer. This was necessary for correcting a few problems caused by the conversion to Bézier outlines, and to add intermediate weights. Before the advent of feature-rich OpenType, quality type families consisted of several separate fonts for each weight to provide users with various sets of numerals, an extended ligature set and alternates, ornaments, and so on. Introducing Apolline Morisawa Awards 1993

Worldly Even though it’s a new arrival, FS Brabo has seen the world. Designed by a Brazilian working in London and studying in Belgium under a Dutchman, it’s certainly well-travelled. And it was inspired by the extraordinary archive of early book typefaces at the world-renowned Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, while Fernando Mello was attending Frank Blokland’s Expert class Type Design course at the Plantin Institute of Typography. It was there that Fernando became engrossed in the collection of early metal type, matrices, punches and type samples by figures such as Garamond and Granjon. So much so that he took on the mighty task of developing ‘a beautiful, functional, serifed text font’ of his own. Heroic FS Brabo’s journey from sketch to font family took an epic three years, starting in Antwerp, continuing at Fontsmith in London, and reaching its conclusion back in Fernando’s home city of São Paulo. No wonder Fernando was reminded of another titanic face-off: that of Antwerp’s Roman hero of legend, Silvius Brabo, and the evil ogre, Antigoon. Brabo came to the town’s rescue after the tyrannical giant had been charging ships’ captains extortionate taxes and chopping off the hands of those who refused to pay up. Having finally downed Antigoon after a long and terrible duel, Brabo cut off the giant’s own hand and threw it into the river Scheldt, unwittingly giving the town its name: the Dutch for ‘hand-throw’ is hand werpen. What better way for Fernando to name his literary typeface than after the hero of Antwerp’s oldest tale? The garalde factor FS Brabo is not a revival, but a very much a contemporary, personal interpretation of a garalde – a class of typeface originating in the 16th century that includes Bembo, Garamond and Plantin, with characteristically rounded serifs and moderate contrast between strokes. Brabo’s ‘ct’ and ‘st’ ligatures, upper-case italic swashes and contextual ending ligatures – ‘as’, ‘is’, ‘us’ – all preserve the beauty and character of traditional typefaces, but its serifs are chunkier than a garalde. Their sharp cuts and squared edges give them a crispness at text sizes, helping to bring a beautifully bookish personality to hardworking modern applications. A workhorse with pedigree It may give the appearance of a simple, four-weight typeface, but FS Brabo has hidden depths beneath its simplicity and beauty. OpenType features such as cap italic swashes, contextual ending swashes – programmed only to appear at the end of words – and stylistic alternatives make this a complete and well-equipped typeface. Comprehensive testing was carried out at text and display sizes, too, to prevent counters from filling in. All of which makes FS Brabo a very modern take on a traditional workhorse serif typeface: colourful and versatile enough to adorn not just editorial projects but also signage, advertising and logotypes.