With open palms, place your hands together at the center of your chest, close your eyes and bow the head slightly. Namaste! Welcome to a beautiful spiritual journey. Namaste is a font collection, designed by Coto Mendoza, consisting of two variants: a capital sans and a script font (based on watercolor calligraphy strokes). Each variant comes in 5 weights—Thin, Light, Regular, Bold and Black—and 2 versions: Essential and Pro. The script font, in its Pro version, provides a wide range of OpenType features such as swashes, alternates, ligatures and different stylistic sets. The Namaste family also includes a set of ornaments inspired by Hindu and Buddhist symbols—that Coto Mendoza saw virtually everywhere on her trip to India—like Mandalas and Yantras, and others found in textiles and monuments. Namaste is the perfect choice for wellness, healing and therapy oriented products. Its smooth shape and soft curves allow the user to create beautiful designs for essential oils, bath salts, quartz crystals, mindfoodness, candles, incense and aromatherapy products packaging. The font is well-suited for publishing design (short text); self-help and healing handbooks; tarot and divination cards; and women’s empowerment and spirituality publications. Namaste is an ideal typeface for yoga (and other body disciplines) center branding; holistic centers; and group meditation, womb blessing and circle of women invitations. Namaste is a beautiful journey full of love and inspiration. Namaste: a spiritual journey.

You wrote on your school notebooks, didn't you. Of course, just about everyone did. And those that didn't are probably in therapy trying to overcome the repression and guilt. Balloon letters are fun, easy to draw and have a light-hearted presence. With little autonomy, what young person can resist the opportunity to make a public, personal statement on their notebook. Guess what! Adults do it too - with our cars, our houses, our toys, our accessories and so on. And how "grown-up" are we really? Anyway, my niece, Cori, made this nice, colorful, hand-drawn birthday card. It was so vibrant and fun - in warm circus colors - that I could not resist making it into a font. Use it for positive, fun stuff, stuff with a light touch - an invitation for an informal party perhaps, but probably not a formal dinner at the White House. This font is not comfortable in a bowtie. But don't be fooled. Casual as Cori is, you can set at least twelve major European languages with it, in addition to English: Albanian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. Cori Valentine adds a decorative Valentine border to the upper case of Cori. By leaving out the bow in the upper center of the border we were able to fit the border around the accented caps. Similarly, we omitted the butterfly for the Ccedilla glyph. Blank versions of the regular border & the bowless border are provided at positions 135 & 137 in case you want to put a border around your signature or something like that. Just for reference, the letterforms for Cori Valentine are 75% the size as the regular Cori font. We would like to assure you that it is permissible to use Cori Valentine to create a romantic card, flyer or note during any month with less the 32 days.

Compendium is a sequel to my Burgues font from 2007. Actually it is more like a prequel to Burgues. Before Louis Madarasz awed the American Southeast with his disciplined corners and wild hairlines, Platt Rogers Spencer, up in Ohio, had laid down a style all his own, a style that would eventually become the groundwork for the veering calligraphic method that was later defined and developed by Madarasz. After I wrote the above paragraph, I was so surprised by it, particularly by the first two sentences, that I stopped and had to think about it for a week. Why a sequel/prequel? Am I subconsciously joining the ranks of typeface-as-brand designers? Are the tools I build finally taking control of me? Am I having to resort to “milking it” now? Not exactly. Even though the current trend of extending older popular typefaces can play tricks with a type designer’s mind, and maybe even send him into strange directions of planning, my purpose is not the extension of something popular. My purpose is presenting a more comprehensive picture as I keep coming to terms with my obsession with 19th century American penmanship. Those who already know my work probably have an idea about how obsessive I can be about presenting a complete and detailed image of the past through today’s eyes. So it is not hard to understand my need to expand on the Burgues concept in order to reach a fuller picture of how American calligraphy evolved in the 19th century. Burgues was really all about Madarasz, so much so that it bypasses the genius of those who came before him. Compendium seeks to put Madarasz’s work in a better chronological perspective, to show the rounds that led to the sharps, so to speak. And it is nearly criminal to ignore Spencer’s work, simply because it had a much wider influence on the scope of calligraphy in general. While Madarasz’s work managed to survive only through a handful of his students, Spencer’s work was disseminated throughout America by his children after he died in 1867. The Spencer sons were taught by their father and were great calligraphers themselves. They would pass the elegant Spencerian method on to thousands of American penmen and sign painters. Though Compendium has a naturally more normalized, Spencerian flow, its elegance, expressiveness, movement and precision are no less adventurous than Burgues. Nearing 700 glyphs, its character set contains plenty of variation in each letter, and many ornaments for letter beginnings, endings, and some that can even serve to envelope entire words with swashy calligraphic wonder. Those who love to explore typefaces in detail will be rewarded, thanks to OpenType. I am so in love with the technology now that it’s becoming harder for me to let go of a typeface and call it finished. You probably have noticed by now that my fascination with old calligraphy has not excluded my being influenced by modern design trends. This booklet is an example of this fusion of influences. I am living 150 years after the Spencers, so different contextualization and usage perspectives are inevitable. Here the photography of Gonzalo Aguilar join the digital branchings of Compendium to form visuals that dance and wave like the arms of humanity have been doing since time eternal. I hope you like Compendium and find it useful. I'm all Spencered out for now, but at one point, for history’s sake, I will make this a trilogy. When the hairline-and-swash bug visits me again, you will be the first to know. The PDF specimen was designed with the wonderful photography of Gonzalo Aguilar from Mexico. Please download it here http://new.myfonts.com/artwork?id=47049&subdir=original

Kevin King says: "When I started this font it was called Pestle... It didn't run - it didn't even walk. At some point I thought, Hmm! Looks a bit like Liquorice! And now... Voila! I remember being able to buy about a yard of Liquorice rolled round a central comfit - how fab! Tuppence worth of sticky afternoon! You could also buy bundles of Liquorice root - which looked like black twigs with bright yellow wood - they left my teeth full of black twiggy bits... The past is a strange Lady - Bless her! This was almost Kingthings Leechy... just another one of my bulbous shiny things - I have always liked letter-shapes with 'bottom', probably a 70's thing, as many a seventies thing did indeed possess it - including the fabulous Chaka Kahn... Oooh, Diva!" ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

Ten years or so after his unique treatment of Garalde design with Trump Mediaeval, Georg Trump took on the transitional genre with Mauritius, which was to be his last typeface. He started working on it in 1965. The Stuttgart-based Weber foundry published a pamphlet previewing it under the name Barock-Antiqua in 1967, then announced the availability of the metal types (a roman, a bold and an italic) a year later. The global printing industry was already in third gear with cold type technology, so there weren't that many takers, and Weber closed its doors after more than 140 years in business. Subsequently, Trump’s swan song was unfairly overlooked by typography historians and practitioners. It never made it to film technology or scalable fonts. Thus, one of the most original text faces ever made, done by one of the most influential German type designers of the 20th century, was buried under decades of multiple technology shifts and fading records. The metal cuts of Mauritius seem to have been rushed in Weber’s desperation to stay afloat. So the only impressions left of the metal type, the sole records remaining of this design, show substantial problems. Some can be attributed to technological limitations, but some issues in colour, precision and fitting are also quite apparent, particularly in Mauritius Kursiv, the italic metal cut. This digital version is the result of obsessing over a great designer’s final type design effort, and trying to understand the reasons behind its vanishing from typography’s collective mind. While that understanding remains for the most part elusive, the creative and technical work done on these fonts produced very concrete results. All the apparent issues in the metal types were resolved, the design was expanded into a larger family of three weights and two widths, and plenty of 21st century bells and whistles were added. For the full background story, design analysis, details, features, specimens and print tests, consult the PDF available in the Gallery section of this page.

In 1459, while visiting his dying mother, Italian painter Piero della Francesca spent seven days creating a fresco of a pregnant madonna in a small country church in the hilltown of Monterchi (Italy). Hailed today as one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance, the fresco was given a new branding in 2019 by Art Director Riccardo Falcinelli who asked the Zetafonts team to develop a custom font for the project. The resulting typeface system, designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini together with Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini as a rework of Francesco Canovaro original Beatrix Antiqua, is a 50-weights ode to the beauty of classical roman letterforms, that pairs elegant alternates and quirky ligatures with an array of design options for clear and effective editorial, signage, logo and wayfinding design. The base display family, Monterchi, allows endless design expressions with a range of six weights from the slender thin to the strong extrabold, all with matching italics and an array of over one hundred discretionary ligatures. A fine-tuned companion Monterchi Text has been developed to excel in body use, with a larger x-height and wider spacing - clear and legible even at small sizes. The use range of the family is enriched by Monterchi Serif and Monterchi Sans that feature different contemporary interpretations of the same classical geometric skeleton, allowing for layered editorial design and variation. All the fifty fonts in the Monterchi Type System feature an extended character set of over 1100 glyphs covering over 200 languages using the Latin alphabet, as well as Greek and Russian Cyrillic. Open Type features include small caps, positional figures, alternate letterforms, stylistic sets and discretionary ligatures. With his elegant, historical aesthetic, Monterchi embodies the spirit of early Renaissance and the humanist obsession with constructed and geometric beauty - still managing to function as a workhorse family, ready to help any designer in need of a timeless classic look, or looking for the right ligature to transform a simple word into a striking wordmark.

Antique Tuscan No.9 was one of the earlier wood-type designs by William Hamilton Page. It was first shown among the specimens produced in 1859, shortly after Page entered into a new partnership with Samuel Mowry, owner of the Mowry Axle Company. The new company was named Page and Company and was located at the Mowry facility in the Greenville section of Norwich, Connecticut. Antique Tuscan No.9 is an extra-condensed version of the tuscan style that had been released in moveable type by Vincent Figgins of London in 1817 and had become so popular for advertising in the intervening years. Because of the extreme compression in the design, we might be tempted to describe it as "Triple-X," but that might be misleading. The analogy would, of course, be to clothing sizes, not movie ratings. Because of the compression, this typeface reads best when set extra-extra-extra large. For printing, we recommend 36 points or larger. For the screen, we suggest at least 72 points. An unusual and distinctive design, it is best used with discretion. If I were doing a term paper for school or submitting an article to a magazine for publication, I might use it for the title page, to grab someone’s attention. I would certainly not use it for the main body of text - not if I expected anyone to read what I wrote. If you wonder why we make this recommendation, take the Ten-Point challenge. Print this paragraph using Antique Tuscan No.9 and set the font size at 10 points. If you are young and blessed with good eyesight, you will probably be able to read it - with effort. So, here is the challenge: hand it to your Grandmother and ask HER to read it.

Five years into the 21st century and the promise of nanotechnology, high-end popular culture design seems to thrive on combining opposites and drawing a fine line between traditionally contradictory ideas. This is seen in modern society's usual cultural frontrunners - like consumer electronics, fashion items, music packaging and publications, where it is evident that traditionally complex marketing statements of fashionability and lifestyle are attempted with simple minimalism. But at the typographic end of this realm, the creative majority still uses old faces that help the modern statement only in passing. Some of the more adventurous creative professionals actively seek new elements to emphasize contemporary impact in their modern design. To those adventurous types (pun intended), Canada Type presents this new face called Go. It is very much a child of the new millennium, inspired by the unmistakable minimalist style of modern 21st century corporate logos, recent design shifts in electronic music and club-marketing collateral, and disc jockeys who have enthusiasm, energy, precision and total control of each and every vibration traveling from mixer to speakers. Go is an original modern techno-lounge face that offers the eyes pleasing collages of friendly minimal forms that give the words an impression of simplicity and depth at once. This is a font that prides itself on its precise grouping of elements and just enough original creativity in combining those elements. The precision builds the sharp edge sought for modern statements, while the creativity keeps the message rejuvenated, clear and interesting. Go's character set consists of a versatile and unexpected, yet mild mix of the uppercase and lowercase forms, with multiple variations on the majority of the letters. The e being a vertical mirror of G is only the first of the pleasant surprises. More than 30 alternates are inside the font. All the accented characters in Go have been meticulously (perhaps obsessively) drawn to be unusual for logos and short statements. Take a look at the character map and be ready for a space-age surprise. To borrow a Star Trek cliché, this font can Go where no font has gone before.

Looking back on my production to date, neither so little nor so large, it does not come as a surprise to find myself now introducing Lady René. A brief review of my career would read as follows: graphic designer graduated from Buenos Aires University, a 10-year professorship in Typography in the same institution, an illustrator in the making. For almost 15 years now my work has focused on the design of editorial pieces, predominantly books and CD sleeves. Typography proper has always been central to my research projects. All my obsessions eventually embodied as much the search for a perfect, spotless text as for a daring and provoking one. In my view, "how-to-say-something" ranks highest amongst a graphic designer’s responsibilities. It was in this vein that I called in the written word to illustrate, to draw, to narrate. Why not reverse the saying and proclaim that “a word is worth a thousand images”? If so, one single word could trigger endless meanings, associations, ideas, and memories in every reader’s mind. Language, we know, has a strong power and is a living expression of a culture. In my illustrations, letters and drawings reunite in one synergy said and unsaid, the finiteness of the message and the freedom of the free reading. And this is how and when, Lady René, my first born type font sees the light of day conceived out of a love of illustration and a reverence for the written word, recalling the whimsicality of the handmade drawing and reflecting its sensitive, warmth and spontaneity. Enabled by the characteristics of Open Type and the hard, outstanding work of designer Ale Paul, Lady René succeeds in composing texts in a simple, organic way by means of its contextual and stylistic alternates, swash characters, ligatures and connecting words. A bundle of decorative miscellanea completes the set of signs, enabling the user considerable freedom to create new typographic landscapes. Lady René is then prepared, very much like a character in a short story, to come to life in the reader’s mind. I expect you will enjoy her as much as I did creating her. Laura Varsky

It all started with a simple idea back in 1998: do a digital version of a "lost" 70's typeface, and make up the missing letters that were not present in the only available example Jeff Levine had to work with. Jeff wasn't yet doing his own digital font creation, so he hooked up with Brad Nelson who owns a small foundry called Brain Eaters Fonts. Together, they collaborated on "Action Is"- a freeware font named after the source of the type example. This was a title page for a commemorative photo album of images from the 60's TV music show "Where the Action Is", formerly hosted by Jeff's employer at the time, singer-writer-producer Steve Alaimo. The free font took off like a rocket, being released just at the peak of the 60’s/70’s retro craze in the late 1990’s, and it was EVERYWHERE! It showed up on TV shows, packaging and web design -- and was even spotted on signage used on the side of a major amusement resort’s retro-themed hotel. From that point on, Jeff kept getting requests for a version with a lower case. Although they shared the copyright in the freeware version, Brad Nelson gave Jeff his blessing to re-work and take Action Is into the realm of commercial type. Newly improved and re-released as Groovy Happening JNL, it became one of Jeff's better selling type designs. A simplified, yet similar font was issued called Groovy Summer JNL. Now, after about a decade, Jeff had decided to clean up the 3-D (drop shadow) version that was originally freeware with many minute design flaws and re-release it commercially. Groovy 3D Caps JNL is an all-caps, limited character set font which ties in well with the previous releases, yet retains itís 1960s-1970s era charm. The font flag art is courtesy of Barbara D. Berney and is used by permission.

Once, Blackletter was a calligraphy style. Full of ligatures, with letters bumping into each other to create an unapologetic picket-fence pattern. Some even claimed that the regularity improved legibility! But then Blackletter was cast into metal, and only a handful of established ligatures survived, while most interletter connections were disentangled. Everyone since followed suit, and hundreds of years later, digital Blackletter fonts were modelled mostly on the metal fonts that prevailed rather than the original handwriting. Up until now! AJ Quadrata is an authentic revival of the textura quadrata hand, and its major inspiration is a 15th-century Latin manuscript of the Bible from Zwolle, the Netherlands. The typeface is delivered in two flavors. The default cut is a modern take on textura quadrata that can be useful for today and tomorrow. The standard ligatures feature employs nearly all letters. The tittle of i retains its original, hasty squiggle form (except for the Turkish localization). Discretionary ligatures include medieval ligatures da, de, do, pa, pe, po (and their mixed-case counterparts!). Stylistic sets allow to use historic letter variants such as long s and rotunda r, closed-counter a, and alternate capitals. AJ Quadrata Medieval is perfect for setting Latin. Default forms of capital F, H and O are swapped with the alternates. The squiggles above i only appear for disamibiguation nearby m, n or u, as in original manuscripts. Discretionary ligatures and historic variants are promoted to the standard ligatures feature to make room in the discretionary ligatures feature for a variety of scribal abbreviations. Dedicated stylistic sets include medieval punctuation and justification alternates — glyphs with elongated terminals used for lengthening lines that end up too short. The Rubrum styles can be layered and colored to create the illuminated effect on the capital letters. Besides a faithful rendition of extended Latin including Vietnamese, numerous synthetic additions are included: polytonic Greek, Armenian, and Cyrillic (with Bulgarian and Serbian/Macedonian localizations). Both flavors of the typeface can be considered a starting point that can be further customized using OpenType features, including Stylistic Sets (some features differ between AJ Quadrata and AJ Quadrata Medieval): ss01 Alt E ss02 Descending F / Roman F ss03 Uncial H / Roman H ss04 Angular O / Round O ss05 Contextual closed-counter a ss06 Diamond-dot i j / Always dotted i, j ss07 Contextual rotunda r / No r rotunda ss08 Contextual long s / No long s ss09 Dotless y ss10 Serbian Cyrillic ss11 Alt Cyrillic de ss12 Alt Cyrillic zhe ss13 Alt Cyrillic sha ss14-ss17 [reserved for future use] ss18 Scribal punctuation ss19 Alt linking hyphen ss20 Justification alternates

ATTENTION COSTUMERS! A new version of this font was released in 2019. Take a look: Breathe Neue Reaching a total of more than 1000 glyphs, Breathe Pro is Maximiliano R. Sproviero’s gift of the year. The aim of the designer was once more to give the user the chance to play and travel from very formal and conservative letterforms to the amazing world of swashes and flourishes. Possibilities of alternating and ligating characters in this font are absolutely fantastic. After his last creation, Parfait Script, Lián wanted to make a more universal font. Delighted by typographic works of Didot and his followers of the beginnings of 1800, Maximiliano R. Sproviero started what became another obsessive project, which is now named Breathe, “cuando las letras respiran...” what could be translated as “when letters breathe”, due to the feeling that you are reading letters that are alive. Breathe comes in two styles which have a significant difference as regards to the quantity of glyphs available inside. If you want to get the most complete style, with over 1000 glyphs, (including contextual alternates, stylistic alternates, swashes, terminal forms, titling alternates, historical forms, stylistic sets, standard ligatures, stylistic ligatures, decorative ligatures and frames) then your choice should be Breathe Pro. On the other hand, if you are interested in having a less decorative font with the nice touch of Lián’s style, then your choice should be Breathe Standard, a more limited version of Breathe, including terminal forms (leaves) and frames. With Breathe Pro you will surely have fun at the same time you are designing and that is not an unimportant thing. The world of type-designers is growing each year, and the features of Open-Type are letting them think their creations as if they were truly pieces of art. At least, Breathe Pro is inspired in the Art of our predecessors, those who with a pen loaded of ink would decorate each letter, each page in such a lovely way. Yes, -lovely- is the word. We would not have the amazing lettering artists, calligraphers, typographers of nowadays if that -love for letters- had not traveled from generation to generation. Breathe Pro is an example of this love. An example of what Maximiliano R. Sproviero feels about typography and letters. Pssst... Look for more images and the User’s Guide at the gallery section to see it in use! http://origin.myfonts.com/s/aw/original/89/0/46067.pdf

Why do we need another typeface? This is a prickly question often asked of typeface designers. Depending on who you ask, the answer in simplified form is usually one of two: 1. As the basis of written communication, type design carries social responsibility, so we must continue to improve legibility. 2. Type design is a form of artistic expression. Without art, life is not worth living. The best work, of course, accomplishes both. Xavier Dupré, the designer of the Malaga typeface family, has at least one leg securely planted in the latter notion. He believes, like others, that within typeface design most legibility needs have been worked out and that today we are satisfying aesthetic desires. We design typefaces to differentiate our communications. Type design is primarily a formal exercise reflecting our personal quirks, technological obsessions, and cultural heritage. In case of Dupré’s work, issues of cultural heritage and personal quirks are of particular consequence. An incessant traveler, he visited the following countries during the development of the Malaga type family: Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, France, Belgium, and finally, Spain, where his choice for the name Malaga originates (Malaga is a port city in southern Spain). Dupré’s home is where his laptop is. He travels with a 12- or 15 inch PowerBook, without a printer, and with sporadic access to his reference books and other historical documents. All he needs is a table and chair. He even learned to design without a mouse since hotel and cafe tables are often too small to also fit a mousepad. Dupré is the new global designer who can take disparate influences and fluidly process the information into a coherent whole. Malaga is a case in point. It is inspired by ideas ranging from blackletter to Latin fonts, and from the Quattrocento’s first Venetian antiquas to brush stroke types. This makes Malaga a richly animated font saturated with unorthodox detail. Its black and bold weights are particularly suited for headlines and short texts, while the subtle modulation and moderate contrast in the regular and medium weights makes it perfectly readable in extended text settings. While Malaga doesn’t claim to resolve any particular legibility issues, it is nonetheless perfectly readable and will impart any design with a healthy dose of visual character.

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul