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

A Belle Époque humanist serif in two styles: crisp, high-contrast Haut-Monde and soft, low-contrast Demimonde… When you design a lot of display pieces, you’re often in need of tall, slim type. Liaisons provides that, in a distinct fin-de-siècle style inspired by the great posters of the Gilded Age from Sweden, Denmark, France, and Scotland. (The ampersand alone is a bit of a love letter to Charles Rennie Mackintosh!) Both styles use the same slim skeleton, and are named after the stratum of society where one might find… a “dancing partner.” HAUT-MONDE is a high contrast face of the sort that says “High Society.” Elegant and sleek, it speaks to the refinement of the moneyed classes of a bygone era. Great for high-end products, too! DEMIMONDE is soft and low-contrast — more reminiscent of hand-lettering on Art Nouveau/Jugendstil/Wiener Werkstätte advertisements and posters. A comfortably chic display face all around! Both typefaces feature full Western and Eastern Latin character sets, as well as full Cyrillic/Slavic ones. And, perhaps best of all, both typefaces feature capitals with high, middle, and low waists, so you can change up the look as you see fit! Part of The Ampersand Forest's Sondheim Series

Bovary is an elegant, stylized and expressive script font inspired by those beautiful calligraphies of yesteryear, but in a modern point of view. Bovary is full of personality! When I designed it, I started from the Clauques Script. Therefore, Bovary can be perfectly combined with Clauques Sans. Bovary includes almost 900 glyphs with many stylistic variations, swashes, ending and initial forms, catchwords and ligatures for both uppercase and lowercase, assuring almost infinite combination possibilities. In addition, the font includes a set of very useful ornaments to combine and give an ornamental aspect to the calligraphic text. All our fonts are carefully controlled and tested in both aspects: readability and technical aspects. We deal with the kerning pairs, optimization of hinting information to avoid pixel grid, and the precise programming of the OpenType features; as well as drawing smooth curves points and the final touch of each glyph. Remember that to access to all additional characters, you must use software that is truly compatible with OpenType, such as Adobe CS applications, or we recommend using the Glyphs palette.
 This family font is perfect for logos, magazines and book covers, fashion, headlines and short phrases, cards, posters, websites, and packaging. Bovary is the brand new modern script, designed by Carine de Wandeleer and published by Eurotypo.

We named this font Scholz Secession. Fin-de-siecle Vienna, Austria is the source of this Jugendstil design from Schriftgiesserei Eduard Scholz. The original release was under the name Reklameschrift Secession. Most of the curve strokes look like commas to me. The letters are as soft and plump as the comforter on the bed I slept on in a Salzburg B&B many years ago. I was traveling with a college buddy and our next stop was Vienna. There a kind, young student named Hanna and her boyfriend took us under their wing. One of the places Hanna proudly showed us was Otto Wagner’s Majolika Haus, built in 1898, and only about 8 blocks from Secession Hall. Hanna explained to us that the style was called Jugendstil and represented Art Nouveau as interpreted within the framework of their culture. I even took a picture. After all, memories are part of who we are. Figures are old-style for text use. This font would not be my first choice for a spread sheet. Included are German ligatures ch (alt-0123) & ck (125), two period ornaments (135, 175) and lower case o and u with Hungarian long umlaut (215, 247)). A very likeable and easy-to-use font.

Nuit, a delightfully handwritten family font with strong character designed by Carine de Wandeleer. Its slight bounce and intentional irregularity, gives your words a wonderful flow. The fatness and thinness of their strokes give an impressive harmony. This new font family includes Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. It has OpenType features such as Stylistics alternates, Swashes, Ligatures, up to four Stylistic sets by letter, initial and terminal forms in upper and lower, ornaments that allow you to mix and match pairs of letters and a Central European language support to fit your design. This OpenType features may only be accessible via OpenType-aware applications, or the Character Map to view and copy any of the extra characters to paste into your favorite text editor/app. This will help your creativity and make it easier to make expressive and elegant your typographic work. Also with Nuit it is possible to write all in capitals. Nuit looks lovely on wedding invitations, greeting cards, logos, posters, labels, t-shirt design, logos, business-cards and is perfect for using in ink or watercolor based designs, fashion, magazines, food packaging and menus, book covers and whatever your imagination holds! Nuit was made to make your project more beautiful and attractive.

Article to appear on the font family page: According to the Catholic faith, a well known náhuatl story called "Nican Mopohua" (translated as "Here it's narrate") about the Marianas apparitions on the Tepeyac's hill, to the north of the actual Mexico City. After four apparitions, La Virgen de Guadalupe (LVG) told Juan Diego (JD) that he must introduce himself to the first Bishop of Mexico. JD took in his "ayate" some roses (that aren't natives to Mexico's barren territories) and when he dropped them in front of the bishop, the image of LVG appeared in front of him with indigenous features. I’ve worked a lot in this font that appears to came out of nowhere, just like the image of LVG itself, the fact is that I started first sketching some flowers, because I wanted to do something related to this mexican story, so, taking some features from this flowers I started sketching some letters, for example “r” and “i” and the counter forms for some letters like “a” and “o” (that I didn’t use by the way) and the punctuation marks, all inspired by this leaf forms. Lighter weight coming soon! Hope you like it. Any comments: rodrigonabo@gmail.com

New York to London via Europe The hardworking FS Koopman is a crossbred workhorse which draws inspiration from Swiss and Germanic grotesks, American gothics and early British grotesques, but refuses to fit neatly into any of these categories. Its neither one nor the other, but all of the above. Fontsmith designers Andy Lethbridge and Stuart de Rozario decided to take the characteristics they admired from each category and distill them down into one functional family. Neo meets Neue FS Koopman aims to swim against the tide of Helvetica-ish derivatives by bringing some personality and soul to a genre that all too often ends up feeling bland and sterile. FS Koopman subtly embraces the quirkiness and charm often seen in early twentieth century designs but pairs this with the functionality of later pioneers of the genre. It’s a grotesque isn’t it? The term grotesque surfaced around the early 1800s and refers to the early sans serif designs that many initially believed were strange or ‘grotesque’ due to their lack of elegant serifs. Later variations became known as neo-grotesques and this moniker stuck around even after they gained mass popularity. Some American variants became known as gothics. FS Koopman takes cues from all three categories and blends them into one cohesive design.

The origins of Bembo go back to one of the most famous printers of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius. In 1496, he used a new roman typeface to print the book de Aetna, a travelogue by the popular writer Pietro Bembo. This type was designed by Francesco Griffo, a prolific punchcutter who was one of the first to depart from the heavier pen-drawn look of humanist calligraphy to develop the more stylized look we associate with roman types today. In 1929, Stanley Morison and the design staff at the Monotype Corporation used Griffo's roman as the model for a revival type design named Bembo. They made a number of changes to the fifteenth-century letters to make the font more adaptable to machine composition. The italic is based on letters cut by the Renaissance scribe Giovanni Tagliente. Because of their quiet presence and graceful stability, the lighter weights of Bembo are popular for book typography. The heavier weights impart a look of conservative dependability to advertising and packaging projects. With 31 weights, including small caps, Old style figures, expert characters, and an alternate cap R, Bembo makes an excellent all-purpose font family. Bembo® Book font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

A complete figurative alphabet was published by one Peter Flotner (ca. 1485-1546) in 1534. In Flotner’s alphabet, naked or nearly-naked figures are posed singly or disposed in pairs to form the various letters. Unlike de Grassi’s alphabet, we find only human figures here, no other animals. And unlike Tory’s illustrations, these letters seem an end in themselves, rather than the means of demonstrating a design strategy. Flotner’s alphabet was imitated by other engravers. The letters G and N are reproduced from an alphabet published by one Martin Weygel in Bavaria in 1560. Peter Flötner , c.1485-1546, German medalist and artisan, possibly Swiss by birth. He was active in decorative sculpture, wood carving, and other crafts, making medals and plaques and furnishing designs of classical motifs for silversmiths. He was in Nuremberg by 1522 and did most of his work there, although he made two trips to Italy. Flötner is now regarded as a pioneer of the German Renaissance. His Kunstbuch was published in 1549. In the Metropolitan Museum are five of his bronze plaques illustrating biblical episodes. A stylistical tip : Use this caps with SchneiderBuchDeutsch, as shown in the banners above, to create a perfect historiated layout.

Galia is a new font with a vintage character designed by Carine de Wandeleer, inspired by the beautiful look of Victorian calligraphy, capturing all the elegance of its flourishes. Galia has a variety of ornamental swash letters; hundreds of ornamental and descending ascenders allow a beautiful interaction of strokes and combinations, avoiding overlaps or conflicts. Galia has a total of 947 characters, in OpenType format, such as Stylistics and Contextual Alternatives, Swashes, Ligatures, up to twenty stylistic games by lowercase and three in the uppercase, which allow you to mix and match pairs of letters, in addition to a wide set of ornaments perfect for interacting with the text. To this, we add a support of central European language to adjust your design. This will help your creativity and make it easier to do the impressive and elegant typographic work. All OpenType features can be accessed through OpenType compatible applications or the character map to view and copy any of the additional characters you want to paste into your favorite text editor / application. With virtually endless ways to personalize its use, Galia helps you to design invitations, greeting cards, logos, business cards, fashion magazines, food, packaging and menus, book covers and whatever your imagination!

Condell Bio Poster is part of the bigger Condell family: a project that involves series of typographies that started to be conceived and developed since 2006. It also includes a bigger legibility version and a sans serif. Condell Bio is very versatile and can be used in the agroindustrial production. Thanks to its strongness and its charm, it can be used in different projects where a short and powerful message is required. For instance in a brand marketing campaign. The Condell project follows in terms of time the design of Comalle (a font also designed by Juan Pablo de Gregorio in 2006), but if we compare them, Condell seems to look for a major range of uses rather than a mere stylistic inspiration. And even if it keeps in its shape some organic forms, Condell seems to be much more similar to a sans serif traditional typography. Condell's fat and soft forms and its nice endings, inspired through spontaneous brush strokes, give it a very peculiar pleasant connotation. Its Italic (10 degrees inclination) have been produced singularly, not automatically calculated by the software. Condell Bio Poster is composed of 2 styles: the regular and the italic. Each one of them have 599 characters and is composed of 206 languages.