A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul

"LFT Etica, the moralist type family by Leftloft, began at the end of 2000, but its development is ongoing as it expands to fill the astute designer’s needs. The starting point was the common, cold grotesque sans typefaces — ubiquitous and often badly applied in their everyday visual environment. The challenge was to obtain the same force, versatility, and colour, but with a much warmer feel. LFT Etica resides aesthetically somewhere between a grotesque and a humanist sans serif, resulting from a design of soft strokes with open counters and terminals. LFT Etica successfully combines forcefulness and delicacy, wrapping both with sober charm. Milan-based Leftloft studio teamed up with Octavio Pardo to develop 24 additional styles for the very successful LFT Etica type family. This expansion is a direct response to type users’ requests who found in LFT Etica a de facto choice for web design. The new styles come in two series — 12 condensed widths and 12 compressed ones — and have proven versatile in applications where the ratio between information and space becomes an important challenge. Each letter was scrutinised to ensure durability throughout time and adaptability within circumstance, so LFT Etica meets the challenge of balance head-on. With its wide current range of 40 styles and many OpenType features (four sets of numerals, fractions, arrows, and dingbats, as well as stylistic alternates), LFT Etica is a versatile typeface suitable for corporate or casual use, for printed publications as well as web design. The complete LFT Etica family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses."

The Neuzeit Office family is designed after the model of the original sans serif family Neuzeit S™ , which was produced by D. Stempel AG and the Linotype Design Studio in 1966. Neuzeit S itself was a redesign of D. Stempel AG’s DIN Neuzeit, created by Wilhelm Pischner between 1928 and 1939. Intended to represent its own time, DIN Neuzeit must have struck a harmonious chord. DIN Neuzeit is a constructed, geometric sans serif. It was born during the 1920s, a time of design experimentation and standardization, whose ethos has been made famous by the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements in art, architecture, and design. Upon its redesign as Neuzeit S in the 1960s, other developments in sans serif letter design were taken into account. Neuzeit S looks less geometric, and more gothic, or industrial. Separating it from typefaces like Futura, it has a double-storey a, instead of a less legible, single-storey variant. Unlike more popular grotesque sans serifs like Helvetica, Neuzeit S and especially the redesigned Neuzeit Office contain more open, legible letterforms. Neuzeit Office preserves the characteristic number forms that have been associated with its design for years. After four decades, Neuzeit has been retooled once again, and it is more a child of its age than ever before. Akira Kobayashi, Linotype’s Type Director, created the revised and updated Neuzeit Office in 2006. His greatest change was to retool the design to make its performance in text far more optimal. Additionally, he created companion oblique to help emphasize text.

Bex Script is a riff on traditional French script forms: the Bâtarde, the Ronde, and the Coulée. It has two versions: First, there’s La Belle, a straightforward, lovely interpretation of the script form, suitable for things like invitations, poetry and branding. La Belle’s evil twin is La Bête, a more whimsical (and considerably more hairy) version, great for anything that requires an elegant-but-beastly feel. Bex is surprisingly versatile! With three optional capital forms (Swash, Caps, and Small Caps) all taller than the x-height, Bex has a variety of voices. A full small cap set and a full set of Swash Caps, plus a large complement of alternates, initial forms, terminal forms, and ligatures makes it customizable and… well, FANCY! Additionally, both versions of Bex Script have a set of ten ornament glyphs. La Belle has a combination of fleurons on a culinary theme and symbols of France. La Bête has ten pseudoheraldic beasts that would feel at home at the top center of any whimsical letterhead. NOTE: A few years ago in Paris, I was lucky enough to stop at the Librairie Paul Jammes in St Germain-des-Prés, where I bought a turn-of-the-19th-century signature from a Type Specimen of the printer Joseph Gaspard Gillé. The irregularity of his script types — particularly the ones at smaller sizes, like the Cicéro — was very intriguing. They seemed to blend the Ronde with some elements of the Bâtarde and Coulée. And they, along with the work of French master penman Louis Rossignol, gave Bex Script its initial form.