-OC Revolt is a variable display font made for the protest graphics of the NYC based T*#@p Brexit era Non-Complicit project who initially made guerrilla type with masking tape applied directly in situ or to silk screens. An uppercase only font there are alternate versions of each character on the lowercase keyboard. Double letter ligatures are used to prevent direct mechanical repetition of letters in the static styles and the Shift axis can be used to make each letter variably unique.

Modena is a beautiful high fashion font duo that makes for gorgeous logos, posters, wedding invitations, blog posts, social media, and more! I love using them together with layer masks in Photoshop, so it looks like the script is running through the lines of the sans serif. The sans looks stunning with tracking set to 220, as well as where it falls normally at 0! Modena Script includes over 50 ligatures to make everything look totally hand-done, and alternates for each letter.

Like the name suggests, the pi font Afroculture from typeface designer Boule Yvan depicts symbols and figures from African folk art. Stylized masks with different expressions and a number of sculptures lend variety to this font. The figures are consciously simple but shown from different perspectives. The black and white surfaces contrast with another and suggest the interplay between shadow and light. The figures of Afroculture are perfect for illustrating texts in a related context and their details come through best in larger point sizes.

Ryno Slab is a superslab that was born out of a need for an aggressive, heavy, geometric display face that did not appear clunky. Its serifs are so thick, you could create reasonably legible word shapes by using all caps and masking the words out. Ryno Slab’s tough geometric exterior and squarish forms make it suitable for tight setting in posters, t-shirts, and artwork. Also, an extended character set with support for European languages make Ryno Slab a good fit for magazine headlines.

Tinkerer, TapedUp, and Rumpled are based on the template I used for several letterbat fonts—fonts made of wrenches and bolts, hammers, or paper clips. TapedUp can be thought of as a font made from masking tape, and Rumpled is the same design but the tape pieces are wavy. Tinkerer is the same design but with elements that resemble what might happen if one constructed letters from Tinker Toys. All are caps only, but some of the shapes on the lower-case keys differ from the corresponding shapes on the upper-case keys.

Preview Text Moghel Display More information about this Font Moghel display is a modern serif font with a unique ligature style, a high contrast and light font perfect for feminine logo signs, fashion heads & editorial designs, branding projects, Clothing Branding, packaging, magazine headings, advertising, T-shirts, postcards and much more. Moghel display is also included full set of: Uppercase and lowercase letters Automatic ligatures Multilingual characters Numerals Punctuation What will you get? Moghel display Regular.otf Moghel display Italic.otf If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you, Masa Type

Romeo Fans is a natural brush script with texture and similar to hand written. I designed it by hand and I really hope you will enjoy using this font. I love using this one with layer masks in Photoshop, it really looks natural written. Romeo Fans Script includes a couple ligatures to make everything look totally hand-done, it also contains other additional features like swashes and spots. What's Included: - Ligatures - Numbers + Punctuation - Non-English support - Swashes - Spots Please contact me if anything question, I'm glad to help. Happy Designing!

Naga is Hans van Maanen's original creation of art deco shapes interected with intricate mazes of what could be Celtic or Mesoamerican knotwork art. The totality of the typeface borders on the mysterious, exotic and yet clearly discernible as far as readability is concerned. Naga comes with a companion outline style that emphasizes its intricacy. Both fonts hold up quite strongly when combined with photo/illustration masks. The Naga family comes in both OTF and TTF formats, and includes an extended range of characters covering most Latin-based languages. A few unicase forms are also included.

TapedUp, Tinkerer, and Rumpled are based on the template I used for several letterbat fonts—fonts made of wrenches and bolts, hammers, or paper clips. TapedUp can be thought of as a font made from masking tape, and Rumpled is the same design but the tape pieces are wavy. Tinkerer is the same design but with elements that resemble what might happen if one constructed letters from Tinker Toys. All are caps only, but some of the shapes on the lower-case keys differ from the corresponding shapes on the upper-case keys. The Rumpled family has four members, the regular, an oblique, a shadowed, and an oblique shadowed.

Right Female is an elegant bold script with natural texture. I designed it with my own hand-writting style. I really hope you will enjoy it so much when using this font. I love using this one with layer masks in Photoshop, really look natural written. Right Female Script includes over couple ligatures to make everything look totally hand-done. What's Included: - OTF files - Ligatures in script - Numbers + Punctuation - Non-English support - Swashes If you are interested in more fonts of mine: https://creativemarket.com/Haksen/3908083-Attention-l-Combine-with-Extra-Bonus Please contact me if anything question, I'm glad to help :) Happy Designing, Haksen

Siruca is a font created specifically for the Al Hamra Complex, in Kuwait City, which includes the extraordinary Al Hamra Tower, one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world. Siruca is a stencil font designed to be used both by the classical forms, both for possible use with neon tubes. Indeed, the rounded ends and the total absence of sharp corners to prevent abrasion during the use of masks and, simultaneously, provide a realistic neon circuit designer. The typeface is accompanied by a series of pictograms (designed following the same guidelines described above) to be used on signs inside the building. The originality and versatility of the font Siruca™ makes it particularly suitable for the characterization of tainted brands from the strong recognizable.

Over the years, I've used Impact a lot. But, not because I liked it—rather because it was the only font I could find with the bulk I needed for a given title or whatever. I finally decided to make my own. It was originally built off Librum Sans Bold, but I quickly made a mask of Impact for the widths, bumped the x-height way up, made the horizontals much heavier, and on and on. You know how it is when you start designing. The result is a black sans with the bulk of Impact and much more interesting character shapes. I suspect I'll use it a lot. My hope is that you like it as much as I do. Have fun!

Jester Jumble - Fun Clown Font is a whimsical and playful typeface designed with a clown and circus theme in mind. Its quirky characters add an element of chaos and fun to your designs, making it perfect for projects that require a playful touch. This font includes six adorable clown-themed decorative variations, featuring circus hats, masks, laughing mouths, and more. Perfect for clown-themed designs, such as invitation cards, birthday invites, party decorations, logos, stickers, clothing, packaging, children's books, magazines, and more, Jester Jumble adds a delightful and entertaining dimension to your creative projects. With its charming and playful style, this font captures the essence of circus merriment and clownish fun, making it an ideal choice for any project that aims to bring a smile to people's faces.

Don your Flying Suit and tighten up your Atomic Powered Jet Pack buckle! Pencil in your pencil-thin moustache and stick your head into that Rocketeering Helmet! It's Zero Hour, 9am, 1949! Five Days a Week, you ARE the King of the Rocket Men, ready to Burn out your Fuse on a Timeless Flight into Outer Space Alone! Mission Control has advised our Space Race Typeface that Mars is not the kind of place to raise your kids and, furthermore, it's gonna be a long, long time until touchdown brings you round again to find you're not the man they think you are at home. You are in fact a ROCKET MAN; not a postman or a milkman, you're a modern man, a higher-than-a kite flying masked hero on your first manned flight to Infinity and Beyond!

“Anisha”. This font is the Great choice for brand identity, branding and just branding ... we have studied various branding of modern products and we found a very interesting style, which is a combination of "calligraphy signature and clean sans". This is like combining two different elements and together in a composition that is very luxurious and elegant. Anisha calligraphy, bold and thin sans, all of which consist of regular and slant versions, so the number of fonts in this package consists of 6 fonts, the more choices the more design combinations you can make. Anisha is a beautiful high fashion font that makes for gorgeous logos, posters, blog posts, social media, and more! I love using them together with layer masks in Photoshop, so it looks like the script is running through the lines of the sans serif. Anisha Script includes 2 alternates for uppercase and 4-5 alternates for lowercase, and additional ligatures to make everything look totally hand-done.

Tatty is a sans serif, monoline font that is distinguished by the gentle, rounded, backward curves on the ascenders. I created it because I had a picture in my mind of a font that I wanted to use when designing images and logos for clients' websites but I could never find one that was just exactly right. Many years ago I worked for a sign-writing company. My job was to copy and enlarge letter sets from printed copy and then cut masks for airbrushing. One morning I arrived at my desk to find that the airbrush artist had written on a rough, rubbed out, scribbled on drawing of the letter ‘a’ - “make a letter happy, make it beautiful”. That was the brief I set myself in the design of Tatty - to make every letter happy and beautiful. The result is a flowing, elegant yet simple type which I believe works particularly well for poetry.

I just visited my good friend Jakob Fischer from Pizzadude.dk in Denmark. As always we talked fonts, drank coffee and walked endlessly through Copenhagen, the city where he lives. We thought it would be a fun idea to each create a font from a handmade sign we saw in the city. We only had like 7 glyphs to work with, so the rest was up to our imagination. We also thought it would be nice to give the fonts a similar name. Mundbind means mask in Danish. When you Google translate it, it will give you the wrong translation (it will say 'mouth piece'), so trust me on this one! My font is called Mundbind NL - where the NL stands for Netherlands. Jakob will hopefully call his finished font Mundbind DK - where the DK stands for Denmark. Mundbind NL comes with a monster load of diacritics (including Vietnamese) and two alternate glyphs for the lower case letters that will cycle as you type.

Because Contenu is designed for text use, it is spaced for body copy in the 9-12 point range. That is far too much spacing for heads, subheads, and the like. So I made the display version of Contenu Book to use for headers. In the process of tightening the spacing at the very large sizes, I also made some minor modifications to the glyph shapes to make this version a little more elegant. Contenu Opentype has two Opentype families for print design. Contenu Book has five fonts: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, and Display. Contenu has Medium, Medium Italic, Black, and Black Italic. The name is French for content and this is what the family is designed for: text, body copy, and book layout. If it has a style, it is a modern take on oldstyle serif font using Jenson as a mask. There are no plans for display versions of the bolder weights or the italics. If you want them, use Contenu Medium, Book Bold, Contenu Black, or any of the four italics and tighten the tracking.

SuperLine Typeface. A striking modern display font in three styles. SuperLine is a modern, all caps display font. Specifically developed for contemporary design styles and applications, it is supplied in three styles; regular, lined and outline. Although it can be used at smaller sizes, it has been designed primarily for use at larger scales. Perfect for branding projects, striking posters and as a unique display font for web or app development, you can make a statement with SuperLine. Extensions shape backgrounds are included. Designed to compliment the angles in the SuperLine typeface, these shapes are perfect for using as masks, image overlays or solid color background fills. They are supplied in Illustrator (ai and eps) vector format. Whats Include: Meticulously designed All uppercase display Comes in 3 styles, Regular, Lined and Outlined Allows for a vast range visual styles Webfont kit included (created via fontsquirrel) Licensed for Personal or Commercial use (OFL) Vector Extensions included (In Illustrator vector format) As ever, drop me a message if you have any questions.

Because Contenu is designed for text use, it is spaced for body copy in the 9-12 point range. That is far too much spacing for heads, subheads, and the like. So I made the display version of Contenu Book to use for headers. In the process of tightening the spacing at the very large sizes, I also made some minor modifications to the glyph shapes to make this version a little more elegant. Contenu Opentype has two Opentype families for print design. Contenu Book has five fonts: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, and Display. Contenu has Medium, Medium Italic, Black, and Black Italic. The name is French for content and this is what the family is designed for: text, body copy, and book layout. If it has a style, it is a modern take on oldstyle serif font using Jenson as a mask. There are no plans for display versions of the bolder weights or the italics. If you want them, use Contenu Medium, Book Bold, Contenu Black, or any of the four italics and tighten the tracking.

Iridium™ was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1972 for Linotype. It is in the modern" style like Bodoni or Didot, in that it has the sparkle created by a high thick/thin contrast and a symmetrical distribution of weight. But the sometimes harsh and rigid texture of the modern style is tempered by Frutiger's graceful interpretation. Iridium itself is a very hard, brittle and strong metal; yet the Latin and Greek roots of the word mean rainbow, or iridescence. And indeed, this font is infused with a more lustrous and complex spirit than the average rather stark modern typeface - note the stems that gently taper from waist to serif, the nicely curved ovals of the round characters, and the slight bracketing of the serifs. Iridium was originally designed for phototypesetting, and Frutiger himself cut the final master photo-mask films by hand. This digital version has all the craftsmanship of that original and includes the roman, a true italic, and the bold weight. Iridium works particularly well for book and magazine text and headlines."

Brigent Display - a Retro Font look with simple, clean and visual elegance with smooth curves and beautiful ligatures, A very versatile font that works in both large and small sizes. This font is suitable for a wide variety of projects such as: headlines, logos, labels, branding projects, magazines, homeware designs, product packaging, mugs, quotes, posters, and more. It can also be more expressive and fun, thanks to the many alternatives and binders that combine harmoniously in this font and make it more interesting and versatile. Try to change alternatives, binders and you will get many options for your project which will make it bold & beautiful. Features: • Full set of uppercase, lowercase • Ligatures • Alternative • A wide variety of numbers, symbols & punctuation • Characters with accents • Support Multiple Languages • PUA encoded WHAT IS INCLUDED: • Brigent Display – Regular This type of family has become the work of true love, making it as easy and fun as possible. I really hope you enjoy it! I can't wait to see what you do with Brigent Display! Feel free to use the #Masa Type and #Brigent Display font tags to show what you've done Thank You.

Bugisha Display - a sans serif look with simple, clean and visual elegance with smooth curves and beautiful ligatures, A very versatile font that works in both large and small sizes. This font is suitable for a wide variety of projects such as: headlines, logos, labels, branding projects, magazines, homeware designs, product packaging, mugs, quotes, posters, and more. It can also be more expressive and fun, thanks to the many alternatives and binders that combine harmoniously in this font and make it more interesting and versatile. Try to change alternatives, binders and you will get many options for your project which will make it bold & beautiful. Features: • Full set of uppercase, lowercase • Ligatures • Alternative • A wide variety of numbers, symbols & punctuation • Characters with accents • Support Multiple Languages • PUA encoded WHAT IS INCLUDED: • Bugisha Display– Regular This type of family has become the work of true love, making it as easy and fun as possible. I really hope you enjoy it! I can't wait to see what you do with Bugisha Display! Feel free to use the #Masa Type and #Bugisha Display font tags to show what you've done Thank You.

Everything your head should not be or would rather not do is here. A complete collection of 225 illustrations (plus bonus shadows) in three fonts. The illustrations collected in the Capsbats keep the free-flowing lines of the ink-on-paper sketches. As a dingbat, or pictorial typeface, the Capsbats are very versatile: you can use them immediately in any application. The vectorial format of the font file means they are scalable with no loss of quality. And you can customize them in no time in your favourite graphics program. They can be used out of the box, as accents or spot illustration, or enlarged, combined, coloured, textured... to achieve an infinite variety of results easily. With Capsbats you have an incredible resource for your concept illustration needs: enlarge them and you can create a high impact page layout, posters, magazine covers and book jackets, advertising... The Capsbats Shadows are bonus silhouettes that you can use in very different situations. Use these shadows to fill them with your own patterns, or use them as a mask or clipping path, to paste the images you want inside them. The possibilities are endless. We didn't limit our imagination in drawing them, so why would you when using them? The book 1000 Heads is a compendium of the drawings featured in the Capsbats and Entestats and it gives a glimpse of the limitless applications of this collection.

Jazz Gothic is a digitization and expansion of an early 1970s film type from Franklin Photolettering called Pinto Flare. This type became an instant titling classic with jazz and soul album designers; then it caught on wildly with film and television designers. Blue Note and Motown would not have been the same without this face. Jazz Gothic is a simple geometric idea, quite likely originally inspired by the heavier display weights of Futura. The resulting product is a versatile message-driver that stands quite strong and cherishes the limelight, yet shows a playful and artistic side within its curvy thick swashes and rebellious unicase forms. In the hands of a good designer, Jazz Gothic eliminates any doubt about the delivery of the message or the attractive purposeful way it is delivered. It is the kind of typeface that loves a design program's bells and whistles. Knock it out of dark or light backgrounds, shade it, mask-alize it, roughen it, stretch it, squeeze it, and the message will still stand larger than life. Jazz Gothic comes in two fonts, a main one with a full character set to accommodate the majority of Latin-based languages, and a second one that contains about 50 alternates and swashed forms. The OpenType version is a single font that has all the alternates and swashes at the disposal of the buttons of OT-savvy program palettes.

A typeface is a tool. Sure, there are frilly fonts that are more art than craft, showy faces that exist merely to call attention to themselves. But, in the end, any functional typeface worth its salt lives to serve one thing first: the text, the content. Everything else—the fashion of the moment, the allure of individual words and letters—is secondary. MVB Solitaire™ epitomizes this universal typographic mandate. As a tempered sans serif somewhere between a humanist and a gothic, MVB Solitaire captures a 21st-century neutrality. But practical doesn’t have to mean banal. MVB Solitaire has a soul. While some “neutral” type is dead the moment the ink hits the page, MVB Solitaire delivers text that feels lively, contemporary, relevant. Readers will not tire of this type. Behind the useful exterior is an arsenal of thoughtful technical features. It’s no surprise that this family’s creator, Mark van Bronkhorst, was first a graphic designer before becoming a type designer. Mark built all the goodies into MVB Solitaire that he would appreciate as a user: case-sensitive punctuation; alternate forms that can be invoked individually or together; oldstyle and lining figures in both tabular and proportional widths; slightly shorter lining figures that don’t stand out in running text, but also cap-height figures for all-cap settings; and the ability to speak nearly any Latin-based language. MVB Solitaire aspires to be the sort of workhorse that a designer keeps installed on their system at all times. It is a family bound to have a permanent spot in the font menu, always at the ready for projects (those most common of all) where the typography mustn’t mask the message. It has that quality that all truly useful typefaces have: the capacity to get the job done without getting in the way.

Ambiguity is a type family with five distinct personalities or ‘states’, created as a tool for coaxing designers and brands out of their comfort zone. It embraces both tradition and radicality, as well as generosity and thrift, encouraging us to question our beliefs about the intersection of style and meaning. The family is designed by Charles Nix, who describes Ambiguity as “as much thought experiment as typeface.” Its five states—Tradition, Radical, Thrift, Generous and Normate—each express or subvert different aspects of typographic tradition. Tradition is conservative, relying on historical letter shapes. Radical rejects inherited ideas of proportion, making typically slender letterforms wide, and wide letterforms slender. “It’s contrarian,” says Nix. Thrift cherry picks the condensed shapes from Tradition and Radical, while Generous does the same for wide forms. Normate sits at the center, a synthetic blend of all of the others. “Tradition is very comforting,” says Nix. “It’s the mask of conservatism. It’s calming because it delivers the proportions we expect. With Thrift more fits into a smaller space, so it’s great where words want to get large, like gigantic headlines, or text needs to cram in, like small screen type. You get a sense of carefree and luxury from the Generous cut. One would expect the Radical to be used in a sort of Dadaist way, but in a classic context it provides an enjoyable jolt.” Ambiguity is a litmus test. Designers could spend hours trying on typefaces that offer just one of these voices. Ambiguity provides five different personalities—ideas—beliefs—each of which also work seamlessly together. “It’s a palettea, like idea cards,” he says. “It’s a way of making yourself see differently. My hope is that traditionalists will try on radical clothes and vice versa. It’s a way of exploring outside your comfort zone, breaking out of the doldrums, by stepping through a variety of voices.”

First, the important information…Nori is a hand-lettered typeface that contains over 1100 glyphs, 250 ligatures, 487 alternate characters, 125+ swash and titling alternates, lining and old style numerals. To make sure it is perfectly clear—Nori is the result of brush and ink on paper. The textures produced in each glyph are real and the imperfections are intentional and add to the sincerity of the letters. I say this to be as blunt as possible in order to avoid confusion and to frame what this typeface represents—calligraphic, handwritten letters captured digitally for their warmth and poetic variation for print and screen. Like my handwritten, calligraphic or brush-driven faces before it (the Baka series and the TDC2 2010 winning typeface, Fugu), Nori is a product of my analog and digital hand. To view the words and sentences formed by this typeface is to look at how my hands, yes hands, make letters. The fluidity, as well as the irregularity, is human, honest and intentional—to do so lets the brush I am holding breathe life into each letter. Once digital, any number of points and repetitive processes can’t mask its influences—and I like that. The brush, a simple instrument, my tool, my friend designed to emulate traditional Japanese sumi-e brushes... the Pilot Japan Kanji Fude brush pen. Each letter, each variation was written over and over again until I found the right combination. From there, each was scanned, digitized and optimized. Points were removed in order to ‘clean’ the glyphs up some but I did not want to compromise the integrity of the actual brush stroke. Once this base set of characters (about 350) were completed, the thoughtful manipulation of the glyphs, their gestures and forms were further expanded to solidify the embellishments used within the ligatures, alternates, swashes and additional features. This process was admittedly self-indulgent to an extent. I wanted the words created with this typeface to have the flexibility of variation and cohesiveness of movement that someone fluidly producing these letters by hand might have.  I hope you enjoy this typeface as much as I did during the six months working on it. A specimen and style guide is included with the purchased of Nori.

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.

The Postea font family is Veronika Burian and José Scaglione’s take on German geometric typefaces, reshaped with the right attributes for setting paragraphs and headings, and perfect for branding and text use. Some typefaces are a rough tool, like a pumice rock: abrasive to the senses, unforgiving, and unhelpful for most reading situations. Postea is an obsidian: smooth and classy, with attractive nuances in any light. The classic curves and purposeful details keep its individuality intact while allowing it to fit an incredible range of geometric font needs. Because of these qualities, Postea makes normal reading in paragraphs a cinch and your branding memorable. Compared to midcentury attributes of restraint and a sparse appearance, Postea’s deliberate play between character widths injects life and distinctiveness into its personality. The default ‘t, f’ have lyrical doses akin to a robust evening drink and are rounded out with a serpentine ‘s’ and rotund ‘o, g, b’. Another nice surprise awaits: spacing for the Hairline weight is tighter for optimal use in large headings and titles, while the regular weights have the expected, slightly looser spacing for text. Setting the test word ‘bogarts’ brings all this together nicely, invoking a balance between a constructed and human feel while brushing away the dust from a century of derivatives. Postea is opinionated and its modern stylistic sets allow it to be accommodating with softer, specially-designed alternative characters. SS01 replaces ‘b, f, M, m, t’, while SS02 changes only the lowercase ‘a’ to the round style, and SS03 swaps out the angled ‘y’ for a straight version. The fourth and sixth stylistic sets are packed with wallpaper-worthy geometric patterns, ornaments, arrows, and symbols aplenty. Postea’s 14 styles (seven upright and italic) and two variable fonts are accompanied by an all-new family of icons in three weights, which we developed a new, easy way to activate. Simply bookend the desired icon name with colons (:arrowUp: :chargingStation: :aid: :firstAid:), making sure to capitalise each word after the first word, then highlight and activate SS05. Icons include wayfinding, social interface, sanitary precautions like face masks, thermometers, and hand washing, and much more. Postea is resilient in the number of ways the family can be used, and its recognisable characters make it a prime selection for branding, signage, corporate typefaces, and magazines. Beginning with midcentury virtues, Postea is the rational response for text — a lyrical take on geometric sans serifs.

A typeface with lightly-worn futurism, Sagittarius is equally at home among the beauty and wellness aisles, or the coils of the warp core. The Sagittarius typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2021. A decorative adaptation of Hoefler’s Peristyle typeface (2017), Sagittarius’s rounded corners and streamlined shapes recall the digital aesthetic of the first alphabets designed for machine reading, a style that survives as a cheeky Space Age invocation of futurism. Sagittarius was created for The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, where it first appeared in 2021. From the desk of the designer: Typeface designers spend a lot of time chasing down strange valences. We try to figure out what’s producing that whiff of Art Deco, or that vaguely militaristic air, or what’s making a once solemn typeface suddenly feel tongue-in-cheek. If we can identify the source of these qualities, we can cultivate them, and change the direction of the design; more often, we just extinguish them without mercy. Sometimes, we get the chance to follow a third path, which is how we arrived at Sagittarius. During the development of Peristyle, our family of compact, high-contrast sans serifs, I often found myself unwittingly humming space-age pop songs. Nothing about Peristyle’s chic and elegant letterforms suggested the deadpan romp of “The Planet Plan” by United Future Organization, let alone “Music To Watch Space Girls By” from the ill-advised (but delicious) Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, but there they were. Something in the fonts was provoking an afterimage of the otherworldly, as if the typeface was sliding in and out of a parallel universe of high-tech spycraft and low-tech brawls with rubber-masked aliens. It might have had something to do with a new eyeglass prescription. But I liked the effect, and started thinking about creating an alternate, space-age version of the typeface, one with a little more funk, and a lot more fun. I wondered if softer edges, a measured dose of seventies retrofuturism, and some proper draftsmanship might produce a typeface not only suitable for sci-fi potboilers, but for more serious projects, too: why not a line of skin care products, a fitness system, a high-end digital camera, or a music festival? I put a pin in the idea, wondering if there’d ever be a project that called for equal parts sobriety and fantasy. And almost immediately, exactly such a project appeared. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Jesse Sheidlower is a lexicographer, a former Editor at Large for the Oxford English Dictionary, and a longtime friend. He’s someone who takes equal pleasure in the words ‘usufructuary’ and ‘megaboss,’ and therefore a welcome collaborator for the typeface designer whose love of the Flemish baroque is matched by a fondness for alphabets made of logs. Jesse was preparing to launch The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a comprehensive online resource dedicated to the terminology of the genre, whose combination of scholarship and joy was a perfect fit for the typeface I imagined. For linguists, there’d be well-researched citations to explain how the hitherto uninvented ‘force field’ and ‘warp speed’ came to enter the lexicon. For science fiction fans, there’d be definitive (and sometimes surprising) histories of the argot of Stars both Trek and Wars. And for everyone, there’d be the pleasure of discovering science fiction’s less enduring contributions, from ‘saucerman’ to ‘braintape,’ each ripe for a comeback. A moderated, crowdsourced project, the dictionary is now online and growing every day. You’ll find it dressed in three font families from H&Co: Whitney ScreenSmart for its text, Decimal for its navigational icons, and Sagittarius for its headlines — with some of the font’s more fantastical alternate characters turned on. The New Typeface Sagittarius is a typeface whose rounded corners and streamlined forms give it a romantically scientific voice. In the interest of versatility, its letterforms make only oblique references to specific technologies, helping the typeface remain open to interpretation. But for projects that need the full-throated voice of science fiction, a few sets of digital accessories are included, which designers can introduce at their own discretion. There are alternate letters with futuristic pedigrees, from the barless A popularized by Danne & Blackburn’s 1975 ‘worm’ logo for NASA, to a disconnected K recalling the 1968 RCA logo by Lippincott & Margulies. A collection of digitally-inspired symbols are included for decorative use, from the evocative MICR symbols of electronic banking, to the obligatory barcodes that forever haunt human–machine interactions. More widely applicable are the font’s arrows and manicules, and the automatic substitutions that resolve thirty-four awkward combinations of letters with streamlined ligatures. About the Name Sagittarius is one of thirteen constellations of the zodiac, and home to some of astronomy’s most inspiring discoveries. In 1977, a powerful radio signal originating in the Sagittarius constellation was considered by many to be the most compelling recorded evidence of extraterrestrial life. Thanks to an astronomer’s enthusiastically penned comment, the 72-second transmission became known as the Wow! signal, and it galvanized support for one of science’s most affecting projects, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). More recently, Sagittarius has been identified as the location of a staggering celestial discovery: a supermassive black hole, some 44 million kilometers in diameter, in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. <