Over the years, I've used Impact a lot. But, not because I liked it—rather because it was the only font I could find with the bulk I needed for a given title or whatever. I finally decided to make my own. It was originally built off Librum Sans Bold, but I quickly made a mask of Impact for the widths, bumped the x-height way up, made the horizontals much heavier, and on and on. You know how it is when you start designing. The result is a black sans with the bulk of Impact and much more interesting character shapes. I suspect I'll use it a lot. My hope is that you like it as much as I do. Have fun!

Song style typefaces originated in the age of woodblock printing in Song Dynasty. Being an essential Chinese type style for printing and publishing all since Ming Dynasty. Based on the Kaishu calligraphic script, its structure has evolved, regularised and standardised with thick stems (豎), thin horizontal strokes (橫) and triangular finials. Dots (點), hooks (勾) and downstrokes retained some features of calligraphy, hence an appropriate choice for continuous reading. The typeface is equipped with a variety of stroke weights, all highly legible .

Mixed Tape is a brush typefamily inspired by music and based on calligraphy. It has 3 different styles so that you can choose which you need or combine them as you like. Mixed Tape Regular is a casual neutral brush script, Mixed Tape Small is a more elegant variation and Mixed Tape Capitals is an energetic, probably even brutal brush script. You can freely play with the three of them creating your typographic compositions. You can use Mixed Tape for posters, prints, menus, packaging, book covers and headlines, cards and as a starting point for logotypes. Mixed Tape has a lot of alternates and ligatures which are built into the ‘Liga’ feature that is turned on by default. It also has swashes, titles, fractions, ordinals and case sensitive forms. Let’s all enjoy good music and typography!

Show your lovely, unique points of view with this font script. Honest Sky is a script font made from handwriting to show modern, elegant designs to any of your designs. The letters are created in interconnected cursive styles with a lot of curved wipes. The lines’ proportions and thickness are consistent enough. Use Honest Sky for big-sized texts for a legibility reason. Enjoy the available features in this font. Features: Stylistic Sets Ligatures Multilingual Supports PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuations Honest Sky fits for various design projects, such as posters, banners, logos, magazine covers, quotes, headings, printed products, merchandise, social media, etc. Find out more ways to use this font by taking a look at the font preview. Thanks for purchasing our fonts. Hopefully, you have a great experience using our font. Feel free to contact us for further information when you have a problem using the font. Thank you. Happy designing.

Vonique 43 is a stylish display font designed to stop passerby in their tracks. Curvaceous lowercase members define this font along with a consistently thin line weight throughout. Most are elegantly styled after circles featuring very short descenders and matching the cap height of capital letters. Vonique 43, like its predecessors, was not designed for everyday text, but eye catching logos. It's equipped with support for many different languages including Russian and Greek. Use it for a luxury brand, clothing line, or a company logo.

The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

Daub captures the look of old-style graffiti—it's graffiti from the days when vandals used a brush and a pot of white paint. Not an airbrush or aerosol in sight. Use Daub to give headings and posters that rough, hand brushed look. Add real grit and vigor to your work, with that old-style urban hard edge.

Asvet Mono is a playful monospaced stencil that is bold and curvy. This cheerful TrueType Font has over 370 characters and it is legible in fine print.

A Victorian type which, like so many others, was originally offered without a lowercase. As we do so often, we designed a matching lowercase for it. We also added a shaded version of the caps, figures and points of our earlier Vanities font. A nice companion face.

Wood Bonnet Antique No.7 is based on real vintage wood type blocks from Switzerland. The very distressed letters give a warm analogue vintage charm on printing. These kind of wood type letters were very common and often named by generic names like Roman, French or Antique followed by a catalog number. But these letters have some very quirky details hard to find else were. » pdf specimen « The font offers up to five glyph variations of all the Latin base letters, figures and some additional letters. An OpenType glyph-rotator is programmed to emulate the randomness of old school printing on live typing. All dingbats of the specimen file are included in the font data too.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.

Found on the back of some sheet music to promote another song was the hand-lettered title "The Snake Charmer". While not everyone likes snakes, many designers do like the lettering of the Art Deco era, so Charmer JNL is designed from that lettering.

Have you ever wanted to print text upside down? There is, or course, software the lets you rotate text, but another way is to use an upside-down font like UpsidedownTOC. Notice that to use it to get upside-down printing, you must type in the words backwards. UpsidedownTOC is derived from the font TiredOfCourier.

Have you ever wanted to print text upside down? There is, or course, software the lets you rotate text, but another way is to use an upside-down font like UpsidedownJJ. Notice that to use it to get upside-down printing, you must type in the words backwards. UpsidedownJJ is derived from the font JetJane.

Bradley Texting: a clear, friendly and easily legible calligraphy font, also suited to electronic devices With Bradley Texting, Richard Bradley has published another calligraphic typeface that recalls the style of Bradley Hand and Bradley Type. In this case, however, Bradley has advanced the style with clearer forms for display on electronic instruments and on other formats. Two other font families paved the way to the newly introduced Bradley Texting. In the mid-1990s, Bradley published Bradley Hand, with its rough contours. Since these coarse forms do not cut a good figure in the larger font sizes, Bradley Type followed, with smooth letters. During the development of Bradley Type, the idea for a further font came about ? one in the style of the two other calligraphic typefaces, but with simpler, easily legible forms and suited to electronic devices like mobile phones or tablets. The letters for Bradley Texting began with a marker on paper. Looking back, Bradley describes one of the biggest challenges as having the calm required to draw the relaxed-looking letters repeatedly while still making them fit the general style.The somewhat narrow and dynamically designed letters have round line ends, like those left by a felt-tipped pen. As a hand-written print font, the individual letters are not connected to one another. Nonetheless, they demonstrate the influence of a written font, such as the extended ends and the flowing transitions. Clear forms with open counters and a large x-height guarantee Bradley Texting good legibility in the smaller font sizes. Bradley Texting is also effective under more challenging conditions, such as on mobile phones, e-book readers or tablets; the fonts friendly and lively character comes through. With Regular, Semibold and Bold, Bradley Texting is adequately equipped for use as a headline or text font in various sizes. The selection of characters covers the Western European languages and German typographers will be happy to note the presence of the upper-case ß. Use the dynamic and clear forms of Bradley Texting anywhere you need a friendly character with a personal accent. Bradley Texting is persuasive in the print realm, in advertisements or on posters, as well as on electronic devices.

This script font was inspired by the type used in Leyden by Jan Seversz to print Breviores elegantioresque epistolae [...], author Francesco Filfelo, circa 1509. The original font contains all lower case characters, except w, eth, thorn, lslash, oslash and so... and almost upper case. In addition, one set of small lombardic initials were also nearly complete. It take place instead of the Bold style (in only one package)offering a real and rare complete historical printing set... The original small "a" hight was 2,8 mm !, the upper case hight no more than nearly 5 mm, the initials hight almost 15 mm, covering nearly two lines. This font includes "long s", naturally, as typically medieval and also a few ligatures, but not any variants. We have entirely recreated some characters, upper, lower and initials, to fill gaps. It is used as variously as web-site titles, posters and fliers design, publishing texts looking like ancient ones, or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, menus, certificates, as a very decorative, elegant and unusual font, besides its historical scrupulous reality... This font supports enlargement as well as small size.

I had a totally different name assigned to this font at first. Then, while drifting off to sleep one night during the creation process, my sleepy brain said, "You know, BLORP would be a great name to go with these letter shapes." Normally when I have those half-asleep ideas and look at them in the morning, they make no sense. But I decided to make a sample image for BLORP, and it turns out I really like it! So ... BLORP it is! This font is extensively edited for super-smooth lines and curves, so it'll cut like butter in your Cricut or Silhouette machine. Though it's also super cute for print projects, logos, branding, or anything else you want to use it for! It has a funky mix of letter sizes and heights, and two sets of uppercase letters, so you can mix everything together JuSt LikE tHIs, and it'll still look great! BLORP includes over 300 extended Latin characters for language support, including, but not limited to: Catalan, Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh, and more!

Shelflife is a display typeface with some extras under the lid. It features all the Standard Open-Type features you'd expect, like Class Kerning and Ligatures, plus some other useful additions and of course accented characters for most European languages and others. In essence it's an easy-to-read headline font with clean lines and a bit of character. There's an outline version that can be layered with the standard version to give the shadow effect seen in the accompanying graphics, simplicity itself to do. There's boxed headlines for SALE, SPECIAL, DISCOUNT (20 in total) all ready-made, plus some which can be tilted at an angle, and done automatically - just easily typed in; easy-to-do bullet numbers; a choice of square or rounded dots on j,ffi, and so on in Stylistic Alternatives; and shorter alternatives for U and N with accents. Details are included in the zip files. The zip file will contain both the OTF and TTF versions of the font. Install only one version, either the OTF or TTF, but not both - otherwise you will get all sorts of incompatibility issues and problems.

Frutiger Capitalis Regular and Outline belong to the group of typefaces for the Linotype’s Type Before Gutenberg project. However, they are not based on direct historical sources. At first glance, they may seem related to the roman type Capitalis Monumentalis, but upon closer examination, the fonts reveal a vitality unknown to the characters the Romans etched in stone. Frutiger confesses that creating Capitalis was “a liberation”. After working on so many sophisticated and meticulously designed typefaces, Frutiger Capitalis was a breath of fresh air. Stylistically, Frutiger Capitalis Outline forms a bridge to Frutiger Capitalis Signs, a whole universe of its own. Frutiger Capitalis Signs is a personal cosmos of symbols, many are immediately “legible”, others leave room for interpretation. Some of the symbols are the product of Frutiger’s imagination, such as his “Life Signs” — soft, hand drawn figures whose lines have no apparent beginning or end, creating both interior and exterior spaces, new forms emerging at each glance. These contoured drawings have accompanied Frutiger throughout his professional life, a fantasy garden which has provided an important balance to his many years of disciplined typeface design. Yet he does not consider himself an artist. Frutiger says he simply “wants to tell stories, to draw thin lines, create contours of signs; that is my style”.

Ellisea (pronounced L-S-E) blends traditional letter shapes with straight lines to project a strong, unique image perfect for display purposes or medium-length text blocks. Ellisea is best used in printed material but is attractive in small sizes on screen as well.

Cybero is modern display font and is suitable for your any project like branding, clothing prints ad more. This font is PUA encoded and includes multi-lingual support.

Macha shares the same DNA as its sibling Anago, but is a completely different species than the former or any of my other sans serifs (Aaux Next, Air, Akagi Pro or Wasabi). It's no-nonsense construction bears many influences from Gill Sans and Frutiger while stubbornly blending my own humanist touch. The focus on developing Macha was just to get to the point with each letterform and discard the rest. Macha takes a little but gives a lot. A fully-loaded character set includes: Small Caps, Proportional Lining and Oldstyle Numerals, Tabular Lining and Oldstyle Numerals, Fractions, Ordinals, Inferiors, Superiors, Stylistic Alternates, Ligatures, Case-sensitive, and more.

Sanelma is a brush script inspired by Hot Rod lettering and sign painting. Sanelma is a very versatile script: It includes two different styles of end swashes, swash caps, small caps, lots of alternate characters and underline option. All in all it has over 1,200 glyphs. Sanelma is bouncy and smooth and has a very organic feel. You have a lot of options to customize it and that makes it perfect for logos, packages and titles.

Quant is a contrasted typeface with a fresh and well-reasoned appearance. It owes allegiance to classical structure but is a free design and does not refer to any historical model. Although it has strong qualities as a reading type, its distinct and powerful ductus makes it superb for headlines and in display sizes. Quant is well-equipped for ambitious typography. The Quant family consists of 8 styles, comes in OpenType format with extended language support for more than 40 languages. All weights contain small caps, proportional lining figures, tabular lining figures, proportional old style figures, lining old style figures, matching currency symbols, fraction and scientific numerals.

Mindful that Hiragino Sans (Kaku Gothic) would be used in conjunction with Hiragino Serif (Mincho), SCREEN developed a font that anticipated today’s world where most people do their reading on displays and yet still has an orthodox letterform that does not blur when printed on paper. In short, our goal with this font was to create a new concept that responds to the demands of today’s times. This font offers weight variations from W0 to W9 and is extremely versatile. This makes it well-suited to all visual expression media including paper, metallic textures, resins, cloth, television, movies, broadcasting, websites, and electronic displays. One of the design’s strongpoints is that it elides serif on the right side of each stroke, thus delivering more spacious counters and a comfortable appearance. Thanks to this, the typeface not only delivers a contemporary, lively impression same as Latin sans serif typefaces, but also heightens the natural continuity and readability of text whether it is set vertically or horizontally. As a result, it makes it possible to bring a strong appealing power to text. Without a doubt, this is typeface that above else embodies the role of Sans Serif.

The Linotype Technical Pi font includes a variety of characters for technical areas, especially for the field of electrical engineering. Among other symbols are those for AC and DC, certifications, and a number of others which illustrate technical terms, warnings and information. Technical Pi also includes the modern symbols which have become a part of everyday life, like environmental and recycling characters. General characters like fax and telephone symbols complete the symbol palette of Linotype Technical Pi.

This font consists of thin lines, we get very delicate impression.The straight lines are regularly arranged, at the same time, this font has very beautiful curved lines. So its overall atmosphere is intelligent and sophisticated. Holiday Type Project offers retro hand drawing scripts. Inspired by retro script on shopfront lettering, wall paint advertisements in Italy around 1950s. Check out the script fonts from Holiday Type!

Jessie's Letter is based on an old typed letter by Kerrie's great step grandmother. This letter was undated, but we think it must have been from the 1920s or so. Jessie wasn't much for punctuation, so there aren't any of those pesky question marks and exclamation points. But, she did make mistakes in her typing, so we've included cross outs and strange resulting characters to make up for the lack of everyday punctuation. Maybe Jessie wanted to visit Paris, or maybe she secretly made paintings in her back yard, or maybe she dreamed of painting her house bright pink. Well, maybe not, but it's fun to dream...

Everland Script is a hand painted bold script font inspired by old signage and sign painting. This font is great for your next creative project such as Logotype, printed quotes, invitations, cards, product packaging, headers, Letterhead, Poster, Apparel Design, Label, and etc. Everland Script comes with uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuations and so many variations on each character include OpenType alternates, and common ligatures to let you customize your designs.

Inspired by the decayed lettering on the signs at Siesta Key beach painted on weather-worn old wood in Florida, these letters are made to look like peeling paint.

RensGazet is a decorative blackletter typeface with elaborate upper-case letters and condensed lower-case characters. It was inspired by the masthead of a short-lived weekly newspaper, The Rensselaer Gazette, which was published from 1857 until 1860. I could not find any existing digitized fonts that replicated this old typeface, so I decided to create an interpretation of it. I had samples of few letters in large point sizes and a number of others at a small point size, though these were blurry and not sharply defined. As a result, this typeface is undoubtedly considerably different from the original. Also, my spacing is much tighter than that in the source samples.

If you’re looking and imagining for a modern font to interest your audiences or customers then we’ve got the font for you! Introducing Starstone - A Display Font This typeface with modern style looks very interesting for loads of different projects and promotions. It is perfect to be used on any projects likes website, for your social media branding, pinterest banners, printed products, and more, especially that needs outers space touch. Features: Multilingual Support PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuation

What would a typeface look like that used a gothic arch, a feature of medieval architecture, as its motif? I decided to find out and the result was not beautiful but frightful. GothicHorror uses a pointed arch almost everywhere that it can be used and is unlike anything else. It is ugly, but for some uses that ugliness is a virtue.

Stradivarius, sometimes known as Symphonie was designed by Hungarian born Imre Reiner (1900-1987). Reiner was not only a type designer, he was a fine artist. He enjoyed sculpture, painting, graphic and industrial design. In 1921, F. H. Ernst Schneidler, (Schneidler Initials) introduced Reiner to type design. Stradivarius was designed and first released by the Bauer Type Foundry in 1938.

Hello, friends. I keep experimenting with handwritten fonts, shapes and lines. I want the font to set the tone, the atmosphere, and look like an inscription made in a hurry, but it is well read. Blushed combines all these qualities. Simple and clear, looks at ease. It is perfect for signatures or design, where you do not need a strict style. Test it out below to see how it could look for your next project! Includes: Uppercase and lowercase Numbers and punctuation Foreign language support Ligatures Check out my blog: https://www.instagram.com/zloillev pinterest.com/dmitriychirkov7 Enjoy

The famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.