Mistral is a loose running script based directly on the handwriting of its designer, Roger Excoffon. His goal was to create a typeface with a true handwritten style, but in this case, the writing looks as though it were done with a brush or heavy felt tip.

Named after the strong cold winds on Southern France, the Mistral font family is another original creation displaying the panache of the French graphic artist Roger Excoffon. Mistral is an informal script in which all letters link up in vigorous strokes. First issued in 1953, its brush-like stems look spontaneous and fresh. The descenders are fairly long and the whole alphabet has a distinctive and unforgettable effect on the page. Mistral is a good complement to sans serif typefaces. Mistral is a trademark of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, which may be registered in certain jurisdictions, exclusively licensed through Linotype Library GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.

The handmade title on the cover for the 1939 edition of “A Wand’ring Minstrel” [from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado”] was rendered with a round nib lettering pen in an Art Deco style. This type design is now available as Cover Letter JNL in both regular and oblique versions. However, the font’s name is a bit of a pun, as it has nothing to do with cover letters, but rather the lettering found on the cover of the sheet music.

Nouvelle Vague is a display script typeface of a distinguished look defined by a steady rhythm, only broken by its offbeat, dynamic uppercase initials. It's directly inspired by french advertising scripts from the fifties, particularly by Roger Excoffon's Mistral. In order to accentuate this influences and to reproduce their graphic impact, simply structured connections between letters are preferred over OpenType fanciness.

The first Antique Olive fonts were produced by the French type foundry Olive, in 1962-1966 and designed by poster designer Roger Excoffon (1910-1983). All Excoffons fonts are flamboyant, elegant and highly stylistic. They include the Banco, Mistral, and Calypso fonts. Antique Olive was launched to rival Helvetica and Univers, but the shapes it took were totally refreshing. Antique Olive is probably the most striking Sans Serif since Futura and Gill, and more refined than either. It is perfect for posters and display material as it works well in larger sizes.

Despeinada, which means "uncombed" in Spanish, is a loose script, perfect for when you want to convey informality. It'll look good in a long text, or when a few rough and spontaneous word are needed... Being a packaging designer, my faces are mostly oriented toward that sector, although they won't look in any way out of place in the editorial world or in advertising, for example. This face was generated in the University of Barcelona Master of Typography, in 2010, where I dictated the “Practicum” It's a very versatile design that can be used in small sizes or enlarged as needed. It won't deceive you! I think that this particular face is halfway between Mistral and Zapfino: rough but clean at the same time. None of its glyphs follow any order, nor do their weights... In short, if you start writing with Despeinada you won't want to stop.

Kamui is a font designed by Carlos Fabian Camargo G. and used to write headlines. Its strategy makes it ideal for covers and advertisements with Japanese-style manga comics requiring latin style. Precisely its purpose was inspired by typographical classics such as Mistral by R. Excoffon and Zapfino by H. Zapf that then were diluted by separate strokes as blackletter calligraphy. However, high doses of miscegenation and lettering untimely torn between 50% esthetic and 50% legibility. That way his radical expression is highly profitable for composing and designing words and phrases with Eastern look. And more importantly, the writing seems drawn quickly with thin-tipped brush staining over a rough surface, from that process comes the idea of corroded outlines and changes in contrast. In conclusion, some diagonal strokes, horizontal, curved and vertical stand or hide from their simulation of scarcity or abundance of ink clots. That way each stroke seems inconsistent, footprint of the 423 brush drawing glyphs in Regular Kamuy. In that sense, the OpenType features included are: Standard Ligatures, Contextual Alternates, discretionary ligatures, swash, stylistic alternates, alternatives for titles, ordinals, fractions. And to end the Variable “Kamuy Dingbats” has is 52 fictitious drawings and zamurais.

Bengala is a font based on Calligraphy & Geometry designed by Carlos Fabián Camargo. Its purpose is to be an innovative typographic system combining Script letters with geometric and hard Caps letters. The contradictory styles are ideal for designing covers, posters, branding and packaging. Its smooth calligraphic look meticulously incorporates characters to design logos and phrases that communicate dynamism and strategy. Bengala Script was inspired by Mistral by R. Excoffon. Bengala Script provides violent and unstable lines with generous spacing between the letters and tight horizontal proportions, producing showy upper and lower case italics inspired by French Gothic calligraphy late fifteenth century. For this reason, Bengala Script retains some uninterrupted calligraphic logic, up and down sometimes higher or shorter than the height of the lowercase, creating dynamism through a variable amount of contrast between thick and thin strokes. Bengala Dingbats has 62 drawings designed to accompany the designs. Script and Caps Bengala have different gender and the similar X height produces more visual appeal. This way Bengala Caps - inspired by the Porshe logo, due to its geometric uppercase Roman construction, extended horizontal proportions, light caliber, rounded strokes terminations and generous spacing between letters. Special thanks to John Moore and Manuel Corradine for their help with Open Type.

The font family Univers? is one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century. The family has the advantage of having a variety of weights and styles, which, even when combined, give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. The clear, objective forms of Univers make this a legible font suitable for almost any typographic need. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry's art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts - quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Piegnot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype. The Deberny & Peignot type library was acquired in 1972 by Haas, and the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) was folded into the D. Stempel AG/Linotype collection in 1985/1989. Adrian Frutiger continues to do design work with Linotype right up to the present day. In 1997, Frutiger and the design staff at Linotype completed a large joint project of completely re-designing and updating the Univers family. The result: Univers Next - available with 59 weights and 4 Linotype Univers Typewriter weights. With its sturdy, clean forms Univers can facilitate an expression of cool elegance and rational competence. Univers has the uncanny ability to combine well with fonts of many different styles and origins: Old style fonts such as: Janson Text, Meridien, Sabon, Wilke. Modern-stressed fonts such as: Linotype Centennial, Walbaum. Slab serif fonts such as Egyptienne F, Serifa. Script and brush fonts such as: Brush Script, Mistral, Ruling Script. Blackletter fonts such as: Duc De Berry, Grace, San Marco. Even fun fonts such as F2F OCRAlexczyk, Linotype Red Babe, Linotype Seven."

Maestrale is a paradigm-breaking new take on calligraphy, built around a compact, serif-style core and outrageously long, flamboyant extenders. At large sizes, its confident, charismatic lettershapes are ideally suited for branding and decorative uses, whereas longer texts at smaller sizes naturally weave themselves into a flowing texture. The font comprises 1299 glyphs, including many stylistic alternates, ligatures, small capitals, and initial, terminal, and linking forms, and offers extensive OpenType programming to support them. The calligraphic form of Maestrale is complemented by a matching text font (Maestrale Text) with short extenders, available in three cuts (a serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic). Maestrale is all about the lowercase; its capitals are deliberately understated so as not to steal the limelight. In fact, the font works very well when set exclusively in lowercase. Maestrale�s small capitals are fitted into the core space of the lowercase, allowing them to be freely interspersed with lowercase characters. Alternately, an OpenType feature is available to replace a and e in small-caps text with their lowercase equivalents for a fresh unicase look. Since alternates and ligatures play such an important role, Maestrale offers three different modes of use. The most straightforward approach is simply to start typing using Maestrale Pro � the extensive OpenType programming will ensure that collisions between extenders are avoided and attractive ligatures are substituted for common glyph combinations. A more interactive approach is provided by the font Maestrale Manual, which allows the user to manually select alternate forms and ligatures even in typographically unsavvy applications, such as PowerPoint (as long as standard ligatures are supported). Stylistic alternates are simply represented as ligatures of their base forms with one or more instances of the rarely-used by easily-accessed characters "~" (ASCII tilde) and "`" (spacing grave accent); linking forms are built with �_� (underscore), multi-character ligatures with "|" (pipe), and initial and terminal forms with the �less than� and �greater than� characters. For instance, the Maestrale wordmark in the posters above was simply typeset with the string (`ma`est|r_a```l```e)| in Maestrale Manual (The parentheses represent �less than� and �greater than� characters here.) Feel free to type this string into the test line below and see what happens! Make sure Standard Ligatures are enabled. An instruction sheet listing all alternate forms and their accessibility is available from the Gallery tab on this page. The third mode of usage is aimed at professional designers, who make use of sophisticated software with extensive OpenType support. These power users are advised to use the font Maestrale Pro again, where all glyphs are accessible as stylistic alternates. Maestrale Text is a less extravagant but more versatile variation on the design of Maestrale, replacing Maestrale�s swashes with efficiently compact extenders. It is intended to serve as a perfectly matching text companion to Maestrale calligraphy, but constitutes a full-fledged typeface in its own right. It is equally at home at display sizes as it is in pull quotes, titles, and high-impact blocks of text. Maestrale Text comes in three complementary faces: A serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic. Maestrale is the Italian word for �masterful�. It is also the traditional Italian name for the northwesterly mediterranean wind, better known by its French name, Mistral. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the helpful souls on the Typophile forums for extensive feedback and encouragement on Maestrale, and to the TypeDrawers forum for feedback on Maestrale Text. This font is dedicated to Simone.