Oswald Cooper is best known for his emblematic Cooper Black™ typeface. Although he was responsible for several other fonts of roman design, Cooper never drew a sans serif typeface. But that didn’t stop George Ryan from creating one. Ryan saw a sans serif example of Cooper’s lettering in an old book and decided that it deserved to be made into a typeface. Ryan’s initial plan was to make a single-weight typeface that closely matched the slender and condensed proportions of the original lettering. While the resulting Oz Handicraft™ typeface proved to be very popular, Ryan was not satisfied with the limited offering. So, between other projects – and over many years – Ryan worked on expanding the design’s range. The completed family includes light, semi bold and bold weights to complement the original design, plus a matching suite of four “wide” designs, which are closer to normal proportions. Fonts of Oz Handicraft include a Pan-European character set that supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages.

George Ryan's ITC Migrate is a highly condensed sans serif display face that effectively complements ITC Adderville. Migrate represents what Ryan calls a “more highly evolved version” of a typeface he designed for Bitstream in 1991 called Oz Handicraft. “Both faces,“ says Ryan, “are based on designs of the popular early 20th-century type designer Oswald Cooper.” His inspiration came from drawing samples found in the Book of Oz Cooper, published in 1949 by the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago. “Oz worked extensively with the sans serif form long before it became popular in the States, eschewing a popular belief of the time that sans serifs were only skeletons of letters.” Where Oz Handicraft was informal and quirky, ITC Migrate has a more restrained feel. “The uppercase characters and figures, in particular, have been reworked,” says Ryan, ”resulting in a more formal and traditional, compressed sans serif typeface.”

“I originally drew the primary characters with a felt tip marker, scanned them and then proceeded to noodle on the computer,” says George Ryan of his new typeface, Koorkin. “Over the years, I’ve designed many original typefaces, but Koorkin has become one of my favorites. I’ve worked on hundreds of highly structured text faces. For the most part, the roots of all of them can be found in the handwritten letterforms we learn as children. I enjoy going back to these shapes whenever the opportunity presents itself. ”The happy result of Ryan‘s felt tip marker sketches and his love of simple letterforms is a new family of upright and italic scripts in medium and bold weights.

Reinert is a casual script font inspired by a few words in a magazine ad layout from the mid-1930s hand-lettered by Allen Reinert.

This font was designed to resemble the Indo-Aryan scripts of the Indian subcontinent.