Toscography is inspired by vernacular and naive hand-painted walls and signs from Brazil. It feels organic, spontaneous and fresh and it has a light texture on its characters that makes it feel like it is starting to decay.

Just as its eponymous ancestors graced vast Western vistas, Buffalo fills broad horizontal typographic topography with distinctive dignity. Buffalo’s migration across a visual landscape that straddles two millennia saw it survive the threat of extinction similar to its mammalian ancestors and emerge with rotund relevance. Now fortified with modern character sets and digital flexibility, nothing espouses an artisanal post-western industrial craft renaissance quite like Buffalo. Legendary lettering artist and type designer Ed Benguiat created the original film version of Buffalo for Photo-Lettering Inc. Working under the direction of the current Photo-Lettering partners, Dutch type designer Donald Roos digitized and expanded Buffalo while expertly maintaining the organic nuances found in the original version. Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

How can Teutonia be called “Art Nouveau” with all those straight lines? It seems like a contradiction. In fact, however, Art Nouveau embraces a rather wide variety of stylistic approaches. Five well-known examples in the field of architecture serve to illustrate the range of diversity in Art Nouveau: Saarinen’s Helsinki Railroad Station, Hoffman’s Palais Stocklet in Brussels, Lechner’s Museum of Applied Arts on Budapest, Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Only the last fits comfortably within the common perception of Art Nouveau. Whereas Gaudi would avoid the straight line as much as possible, Macintosh seemed to employ it as much as possible. The uniting factor is that they all represent “new art” -- an attempt to look things differently than the previous generation. Even when they draw on the past -- e.g. Lechner in the use of traditional Hungarian folk art -- the totality of the expression in new. Teutonia clearly shows its blackletter roots in the ‘D’ and the ‘M.’ Roos & Junge of Offenbach am Main in Germany produced Teutonia in a "back-to-basics" effort that has seen many quite similar attempts in the field of topography. In 1883, Baltimore Type Foundry released its Geometric series. In 1910, Geza Farago in Budapest used a similar letter design on a Tungsram light bulb poster. In 1919 Theo van Doesburg, a founder with Mondrian and others of the De Stijl movement, designed an alphabet using rectangles only -- no diagonals. In 1923 Joost Schmidt at Bauhaus in Weimer took the same approach for a Constructivist exhibit poster. The 1996 Agfatype Collection catalog lists a Geometric in light, bold and italic that is very close to the old Baltimore version. Even though none of these designs took the world by storm, they all made a contribution to our understanding of letterforms and how we use them. Teutonia is compact and surprisingly readable at 12 points in print, but does not do as well on the screen. Extra leading is suggested. Four ligatures are supplied: ch, ck, sch and tz. The numerals are tabular.