Here I am, once again digging up 60-year sign lettering and trying to reconcile it with the typography of my own time. The truth is I've had this particular Alf Becker alphabet in my sights for a few years now. But in the typical way chaos shuffles the days, Buffet Script and Whomp won the battle for my attentions way back when, then Storefront beat the odds by a nose a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, revisiting Alf Becker’s work is always a breath of fresh air for me, not to mention the ego boost I get from confirming that I can still hack my way through the challenges, which is something I think people ask themselves about more often as they get older. You can never tell what may influence your work, or in this case remind you to dig it out of dust drawers and finally mould it into one of your own experiences. On my recent visits to the States and Canada, I noticed that quite a few high-end steak houses try their best to recreate an urban American 1930s atmosphere. This is quite evident in their menus, wall art, lighting, music, and so on. The ambience says your money is well spent here, because your food was originally choice-cut by a butcher who wears a suit, cooked by a chef who may be your neighbour 20 minutes from downtown, and delivered by a waitress who can do the Charleston when the lights dim and who just wouldn't mind laughing with you over drinks at the bar later. So Steak is just that, a face for menus and wall art in those places that see themselves in the kind of jazzy, noirish world where one-liners rule and exclamation points are part of a foreign language. As is usual with my lettering-inspired faces, there is very little left of the original Alf Becker alphabet. Of course, the challenges present in bringing typographic functionality to what is essentially pure hand lettering gives the spirit of the original art a hell of a rollercoaster ride. But I think that spirit survived the adventure, and may in fact be even somewhat magnified here. This font is over 850 glyphs. It’s loaded with ligatures, swashes, ending forms, alternates, ascender and descender variations, and extended Latin language support. Steak comes in 3 versions. According to your taste you can choose Barbecue, Braised or Smoked. It’s up to you!

This is a large group of typefaces inspired by those borders and patterns you see going across documents from the Middle Ages and Medieval times, eventually becoming this collection of fonts where you can scroll various repeating patterns across a page, for example. You can get a repeating pattern that scrolls seamlessly by repeating the same letter. The default text displaying on the web-page is bbbbbbbb, for example. There's over 2 dozen basic styles, and each style has 52 designs within it, using the characters Upper Case A - Z and lower case a - z, with the lower case being the negative/reverse colour of the Upper Case version, it will be the corresponding design just reverse coloured and with an edging strip. There's also a space - but nothing else. The styles in these fonts usually have groups of six characters (A to F, G to L, M to R, S to X), and where the second group is a variation on the first - usually thicker lines - and the third grouping is another variation on that, usually thicker lines again, making the first 24 letters. (Sometimes there's three groups of eight characters). The pattern within a group normally starts off plain then gets busier as it progresses - such as there'd be a more complex pattern of circles and diamonds as you go through the letters. Then the letters Y & Z are somewhat different to the rest. There's four versions starting with Z, and they're a little bit different, and they're grouped in fives - getting bolder as you progress through the letters, but with similar patterns within each group of 5, and that makes the first 25 characters. The letter Z character is extra busy. Again, lower case is the reverse colour of the Upper Case. Mostly you can get patterns and borders that combine seamlessly by using letters within the same group of 6 or 8 (like maybe abdcedcb). There are a few occasions when that doesn't work out, because there may be circles or diamonds at the sides of the letters that don't match up with another letter that has a different pattern at the side. But you can create a pattern with the exact level of complexity you want perfectly easily. You can see examples of this in the poster images. Neighbouring letters without embellishments at the sides of the letters will usually fit together. Have fun with it, that's what it's there for. aah yes fonts

The original Gelato Script has been updated and improved, not once, but twice. This version is kept here for legacy and compatibility issues, but I would encourage new users to check out Gelato Luxe or Gelato Fresco instead. Gelato Script is a smooth-flowing typeface with an air of familiarity. Influenced by both formal scripts and mid-Twentieth Century hand lettering. The power of OpenType is used with precision in the Contextual Alternate feature to make sure letters connect seamlessly, t’s cross where they can and swashes don't crash into neighboring glyphs. 781 glyphs make up this font, which is capable of speaking in many different languages. Alternate forms are grouped into stylistic sets to make it easy to change the mood of the text. For example, ss01 makes droopable letters drop below the baseline to break it up a little if required. I recommend using it sparingly, one glyph at a time, but if you do enable it for a whole chunk of text, the clever OpenType programming ensures that it doesn't go overboard. Sets 2, 3 and 4 bring about alternate forms of S, s, B and Q. Set 5 changes AE and OE to some perhaps controversial Upper/lowercase ligatures. Engage ss06 for the underline feature. After a word, simply type two or more underscores and a line extends backwards under the word you just typed. Don't worry if you have to break for a descender, the OpenType programming will take care of making sure it connects properly to the preceding character. Sets 7 and 8 are for alternate ampersands, and ss09 swaps the script r for a regular shaped r. There are swash capitals available for most uppercase letters, and the OpenType programming makes sure there is room for them under or over the following letters. There’s also a good amount of ligatures thrown in. The localised forms feature can be set for Polish, where acutes get steeper and lslash takes on its script form; Dutch, where IJ and ij digraphs become cool ligatured combinations; and Romanian and Moldovan, where cedillas are subsituted for comma accents. The stylistic alternates feature groups together a few of the stylistic sets for users that can't get to them directly. Gelato Script is a highly usable, powerful typeface. Perfect for everything from food packaging to wedding invitations, sports team logos to magazine headings. Use it however you see fit. Just one thing - it’s not designed for all-caps settings, so avoid that at all costs!

One menorah that I have long found particularly appealing was named The Tree of Life Menorah, a replica of which I gave as a gift one holiday to a kindly old couple who were neighbors and became friends. It had a simple, organic elegance that I see in the best of Art Nouveau sculpture. To me personally, Judeism is a celebration of life, like the triumph of the flower that blossoms in the crack of the city sidewalk. Just as Hanukkah celebrates the rededication of the temple and the miracle of the oil, it celebrates the victorious quest for freedom of the Hebrew people led by Judah Maccabee. Hanukkah represents determination and courage and faith — and it represents the presence of God in the lives of His people. It is interesting to note that the founding of the Albanian nation in the early twentieth century grew out of the resistance of the Albanian people to the imposition of Greek language and culture in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The typeface, HADASSAH, designed by Henri Friedlander (1904-1996), is my favorite Hebrew typeface. Thirty years in the crafting, I believe it is unsurpassed for its shear beauty, combining a subtle modulation of stroke with a simplicity and clarity of form. No doubt, that is why it has become so popular. For me, the Sîyn/Shîyn characters are especially satisfying. For a Hanukkah message in Hebrew, I would choose HADASSAH LIGHT for a headline and print it as large as I could. If, however, you are looking for a friendly, warm face for a seasonal message in a roman-letter based language, may I suggest BETHLEHEM EPHRATH. It will be as comfortable as a bulky, hand-knit sweater on a frosty afternoon and reflects the solid, encompassing, family orientation of this holiday. It was on the way to Ephrath that Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel gave birth to Benjamin and then died from her labor. It was to Ephrath that Naomi and Ruth returned and in Ephrath that we have the wonderful, heart-warming story of the marriage between Ruth and her Redeemer-Kinsman, Boaz. And it was to Ephrath that prophet, Samuel, went to find a new king and there in Ephrath that the prophet annointed a small shepherd boy named David. The Proverbs tell us to seek wisdom. Never underestimate the impact you have on others. Words of kindness can change people’s lives. The Talmud says that the highest form of wisdom is kindness. Be wise this holiday season. The font BETHLEHEM EPHRATH is based on the typeface Accent with the permission of URW++ of Hamburg, Germany. Like most display fonts, it is most effective at 18 points and larger. Like most script fonts, it is most effective when set with both upper and lower case. Although this font is readable in all caps (many scripts are not), that does not make it a good idea. Do so only with caution.

Designs of characters that are almost forty years old can be already restored like a historical alphabet – by transferring them exactly into the computer with all their details. But, of course, it would not be Josef Tyfa, if he did not redesign the entire alphabet, and to such an extent that all that has remained from the original was practically the name. Tyfa published a sans-serif alphabet under the title Juvenis already in the second half of the past century. The type face had a large x-height of lower-case letters, a rather economizing design and one-sided serifs which were very daring for their time. In 1979 Tyfa returned to the idea of Juvenis, modified the letter “g” into a one-storey form, narrowed the design of the characters even further and added a bold and an inclined variant. This type face also shows the influence of Jaroslav Benda, evident in the open forms of the crotches of the diagonal strokes. Towards the end of 2001 the author presented a pile of tracing paper with dozens of variants of letter forms, but mainly with a new, more contemporary approach: the design is more open, the details softer, the figures and non-alphabetical characters in the entire set are more integral. The original intention to create a type face for printing children’s books thus became even more emphasized. Nevertheless, Juvenis with its new proportions far exceeds its original purpose. In the summer of 2002 we inserted all of this “into the machine” and designed new italics. The final computer form was completed in November 2002. All the twelve designs are divided into six variants of differing boldness with the corresponding italics. The darkness of the individual sizes does not increase linearly, but follows a curve which rises more steeply towards the boldest extreme. The human eye, on the contrary, perceives the darkening as a more fluent process, and the neighbouring designs are better graded. The x-height of lower-case letters is extraordinarily large, so that the printed type face in the size of nine points is perceived rather as “ten points” and at the same time the line spacing is not too dense. A further ingenious optical trick of Josef Tyfa is the figures, which are designed as moderately non-aligning ones. Thus an imaginary third horizontal is created in the proportional scheme of the entire type face family, which supports legibility and suitably supplements the original intention to create a children’s type face with elements of playfulness. The same applies to the overall soft expression of the alphabet. The serifs are varied; their balancing, however, is well-considered: the ascender of the lower-case “d” has no serif and the letter appears poor, while, for example, the letter “y”, or “x”, looks complicated. The only serif to be found in upper-case letters is in “J”, where it is used exclusively for the purpose of balancing the rounded descender. These anomalies, however, fit perfectly into the structure of any smoothly running text and shift Juvenis towards an original, contemporary expression. Tyfa also offers three alternative lower-case letters *. In the case of the letter “g” the designer follows the one-storey form he had contemplated in the eighties, while in “k” he returns to the Benda inspiration and in “u” adds a lower serif as a reminder of the calligraphic principle. It is above all the italics that are faithful to the tradition of handwritten lettering. The fairly complicated “k” is probably the strongest characteristic feature of Juvenis; all the diagonals in “z”, “v”, “w”, “y” are slightly flamboyant, and this also applies to the upper-case letters A, V, W, Y. Juvenis blends excellently with drawn illustrations, for it itself is modelled in a very creative way. Due to its unmistakable optical effect, however, it will find application not only in children’s literature, but also in orientation systems, on posters, in magazines and long short-stories.