Bouwsma Script, based on Philip Bouwsma's own handwriting, was originally released in 1994 and settled for nothing less than being an instant classic. One of Bouwsma's widely used works in the 1990s, Bouwsma Script finds its home now at Canada Type, where it was updated with the Euro symbol and complete support for Turkish, Baltic, and Central and Eastern European languages. It now also comes in all popular font formats, including OpenType. Real, casual, friendly, and loaded with the designer's artistic touch, Bouwsma Script can be seen around the globe on plenty of store signs, book covers, product packaging, promotional posters and a variety of other paraphernalia.

Bollatica from Philip Bouwsma is a nice interpretation of the scrittura bollatica. It has a floreal historical lettering and can be used for historical documents.

Mirabel is based on the handwriting of Beverly Bouwsma (Philip's mother), which she developed in the 1930s in, as she puts it, an act of teenage rebellion. In the 1960s, Philip gave her a broad-edged Osmiroid fountain pen which she took to immediately and has used ever since, along with the computer fonts he made from her script. Since Beverly Bouwsma mixed loops and straight ascenders, two interchangeable fonts have emerged, a formal package that sacrifices some flamboyance for classical balance and legibility, but retains the quality of the writing and celebrates the personality of its creator. The Mirabel fonts are available in all popular font formats, and the character sets cover a wide range of codepages, including Central and Eastern European languages, Esperanto, Turkish, Baltic, Celtic/Welsh.

Philip Bouwsma makes use of his extensive calligraphy and type design experience by reaching into his vault and completing one of his unfinished projects from the mid-1990s. The result is Styx, a four-font connected-script family, with rough and smooth variations, each containing two sets of majuscules and plenty of alternates sprinkled throughout the character map. The Styx family comes in all popular font formats, and includes an extended range of language support covering Western and Central/Eastern European languages, Turkish, Baltic, Esperanto and Celtic/Welsh. The OpenType fonts contain both flat and class-based kerning.

Philip Bouwsma’s offbeat mind, always working in mysterious ways, brings us one of the unlikeliest syntheses of historical influences in a perfectly fluid, organic, and highly expressive connected script. Tupelo takes its inspirational roots from the handwritings of two of the most influential men in world history: Elvis Presley and Abraham Lincoln. It took a little research and analysis on Bouwsma’s part to reveal that The King’s and Honest Abe’s methods of writing shared a common ancestor: a writing system they had both learned as youths during their early school years. While Tupelo’s lowercase maintains the slant, color, texture, and flourish of Elvis’s handwriting, its uppercase is the embodiment of Lincoln’s well-versed originality. This is the closest a typeface has ever come, in its timeliness and historic relevance, to making a statement about these modern days' fusion of politics and popular culture. Tupelo comes in two main fonts, plus a set of beginning lowercase, a set of ending lowercase, and plenty of alternates and extras. The non-Pro set consists of five fonts, while Tupelo Pro combines the lot in a single font of over 840 characters, which includes programming for push-button swash caps, stylistic alternates, oldstyle figures, beginning and ending letters. Elvis and Abe would be proud!

Philip Bouwsma returns with yet another great manifestation of historical calligraphy. Luminari is an amalgam of High Middle Ages writing, a blend that combines the ornate Church hands with the simple Carolingian from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Its majuscules are particularly influenced by the versals found in the famous Monmouth psalters, as well as those done by the Ramsey Abbey abbots in the twelfth century. The minuscules also exhibit some influence from the book hand of prolific humanist Poggio Bracciolini from the early fifteenth century. Italian and essentially romanesque in style, Luminari exercises a slight tension between the round forms and the angular “gothic” styling. Luminari was updated with plenty of alternates and expanded language support in 2012. It now supports a very wide range of codepages, including Cyrillic, Greek, Central and Eastern European, Turkish, Baltic, Vietnamese, and of course Celtic/Welsh.

Philip Bouwsma's Symposium Pro is a wide Carolingian script that can be set simply or with a wide range of flourishes. It takes its inspiration from the scriptoria of the twelfth century, particularly in Spain, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived harmoniously in a brilliant culture for two centuries. As manuscripts were translated and copied to meet the Western demand for classical texts, calligraphic elements from Arabic and Hebrew spread throughout Europe, sparking a proliferation of new styles that brought the simple book hand to a higher level. Symposium Pro spans a broad range of time and space, from the court of Charlemagne to the Arabian nights and Renaissance Florence. Symposium Pro comes in four weights, ranging from Light to Bold, with each font containing over 1200 glyphs. Variations on every letter form, from swashes to subtle alterations, are plenty, with some even having up to 40 alternates. Also plenty are the embedded ornaments and flourishes, over a hundred of them. Keep that glyph palette handy for many pleasant surprises and easy setting solutions.

Lyra is an Italian Renaissance script that might have developed if metal type had not broken the evolution of broad pen calligraphy. It lies in the area between the humanist bookhand and the chancery cursive, combining the fullness and articulation of the Roman letters with a moderate italic slant and condensation. A steep pen-angle allows use of a broader pen relative to the x-height, giving the letters more contrast with light verticals and heavy curves. Lyra embodies the Renaissance spirit of refining technical advances of the late middle ages with reintroduction of ancient classical principles. Based on the moving penstroke with constantly changing pen-angle, it brings the vitality of handwriting to the ordered legibility of type. Lyra is a formal italic, too slow for copying books. By eliminating the element of speed, digital technology opens up a new level of calligraphy, bringing it into the sphere of typography as would naturally have happened if metalworkers had not controlled the process. If classical Western traditions are respected, digital calligraphy has the potential to recapture the work of the past and restart its stalled evolution. There is of course no substitute for the charm of actual writing, with each letter made for its space; but the tradeoff is for the formal harmony of classical calligraphy as every curve resonates in tune with every other. This three-weight font family marks Philip Bouwsma's much-requested return from a three year hiatus. It also reminds us of his solid vision in regards to how calligraphy, typography and technology can interact to produce digital beauty and vesatility. Each of the three Lyra fonts contains almost three character sets in a single file. Aside from the usual wealth of alternates normally built into Bouwsma's work, Lyra offers two unique features for the user who appreciates the availability of handy solutions to subtle design space issues: At least three (and as many as six) length variations on ascending and descending forms, and 65 snap-on swashes which can be attached to either end of the majuscules or minuscules. The series also offers 24 dividers and ornaments built into each weight, and a stand-alone font containing 90 stars/snowflakes/flowers, symmetric contstructs for building frames or separators, masking, watermarking, or just good old psychedelia.

Out of a lifelong inner struggle, Philip Bouwsma unleashes a masterpiece that reconciles classic calligraphy with type in a way never before attempted. Maestro takes its cue from the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century. By this time type ruled the publishing world, but official court documents were still presented in calligraphy, in a new formal style of the high Renaissance that was integrated with Roman letters and matched the refined order of type. The copybooks of Arrighi and others, printed from engraved wood blocks, spread the Italian cancellaresca across Europe, but the medium was too clumsy and the size too small to show what was really happening in the stroke. Arrighi and others also made metal fonts that pushed type in the direction of calligraphy, but again the medium did not support the superb artistry of these masters or sustain the vitality in their work. As the elegant sensitive moving stroke of the broad pen was reduced to a static outline, the human quality, the variety and the excitement of a living act were lost. Because the high level of skill could not be reproduced, the broad pen was largely replaced by the pointed tool. The modern italic handwriting revival is based on a simplified model and does not approach the level of this formal calligraphy with its relationship to the Roman forms. Maestro is the font that Arrighi and his colleagues would have made if they had had digital technology. Like the calligraphic system of the papal chancery on which it is modelled, it was not drawn as a single finished alphabet, but evolved from a confluence of script and Roman; the script is formalized by the Roman to stand proudly in a world of type. Maestro came together on screen over the course of several years, through many versions ranging widely in style, formality, width, slant, weight and other parameters. On one end of the spectrum, looking back to tradition it embodies the formal harmony of the Roman capitals and the minuscule which became the lower case. On the other it is a flowing script letter drawing on the spirit of later pointed pen and engravers scripts. As its original designers intended, it works with simple Roman capitals and serifs or swash capitals and baroque flourishes. The broad pen supplies weight and substance to the stroke which carries energy through tension in balanced s-curves. Above all it is meant to convey the life and motion of formal calligraphy as a worthy counterbalance to the stolid gravity of metal type. The Maestro family consists of forty fonts distributed over two weights. The OpenType version compresses the family considerably down to two fonts, regular and bold, each containing the entire character set of twenty fonts, for a total of more than 3350 characters per font. These include a wide variety of stylistic alternates, ligatures, beginning and ending letters, flourishes, borders, rules, and other extras. The Pro version also includes extended linguistic support for Latin-based scripts (Western, Central and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Welsh/Celtic, Maltese) as well as Greek. For more thoughts on Maestro, its background and character sets, please read the PDF accompanying the family.