The new OpenType font Shrub feels like a printed, textural typestyle, influenced by the great slab-serif fonts of the 20th century and organic, messy effects of old Xerox copiers. You might call this one a “multi-messter font” because it not only comes grainy and coarse, but also features a special stylistic alphabet set to add extra schmutz as you see fit. Users of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications can access this feature as either “Stylistic Set #1” in InDesign or “Stylistic Alternates” in Illustrator. The extra blotches can be turned on or off as you see fit. Put a little organic texture mixed with old-school legibility to make you flyers and other designs look like they were really printed! Shrub speaks with a compelling, grounded personality in a voice that’s easy to read.

Scrup A basic font with a science fiction influence, good for headlines and where strong text is required.

A Bottle Brush (a.k.a. Callistemon) is an Australian shrub. Its flowers resemble, well, bottle brushes, hence the name. Bottle Brush is also a very messy, yet quite lovely brush font. I made it with a Japanese brush pen. It comes with a bunch of alternate glyphs, some ligatures and a whole lot of diacritics!

Abelia is a rough(ish), cursive, handwritten font. It was made with an almost dried up felt tip pen, so as to create some roughness in the edges. It comes with a generous amount of diacritics. For those who are just dying to know: Abelia is a honeysuckle-like flowering shrub, native to Eastern Asia and Mexico.

Buckthorn is a genus of about 110 species of shrubs and small trees, native to North America and Asia. Its uses are varied: it is used for dye, oil, printing ink and oil. That concludes the botany class for today, on with Buckthorn ‘The Font’. Buckthorn is a handmade typeface with a lot of character. It is severely eroded, giving your designs an authentic look. It comes in 4 styles, including a ‘hollow’ style, plus a dingbat font with very nifty shapes. Buckthorn is quite a pleasing font and comes with a rich harvest of diacritics.

In 1990 I designed the font XLeafMeAlone. In 2006 I decided that it was time to improve it. Instead of adding to it, I created two new fonts containing almost 200 leaves: MapleOaks and More Leaves. Among the leaves you will find in MoreLeaves are elm, cottonwood, tulip tree, ash, hickory, locust, ginko, aspen, sassafras, hawthorn, beech, and birch. There are also a few that come from shrubs and I am not sure what they are, but they looked interesting so I put them in. You will not find oaks, maples, or sycamores--they are in MapleOaks. Why leaves? Because people like them. As a large part of the biological world that is all around us, leaves are fascinating in their shapes and endless variations. In XLeafMeAlone I took about 50 shapes and rotated them 180 degrees to give a typeface with approximately 100 glyphs. In each of these two typefaces, MoreLeaves and MapleOaks, there are almost 100 glyphs. Each of those glyphs is rotated in 90-degree increments to yield two families of four typefaces that should be very useful if one wants to create borders of leaves.