Patricia Gothic is a Midwestern take on the traditional American sans serif style. It has been designed as a legible workhorse typeface family with just the right amount of character to add liveliness to your text. A hybrid of the gothic style and contemporary geometrics, its design has also been influenced by everything from vernacular signage, antique hand-lettered ads, early 20th century posters, and type used on mason jars. Its thinner weights can appear elegant, refined, and modern. Its regular weights set nicely legible text. And the heavier weights, especially the small caps, evoke vintage poster lettering. Download the Patricia Gothic PDF specimen

The place for a family to be entertained by comedians, dancers, acrobats, animal acts, singers and just about any other acts that fit the bill at the time was the vaudeville theater. Prior to radio becoming the major source of entertainment for the American public, popular songs were introduced on the stages of these entertainment venues. One such song from 1916 with a World War I patriotic sentiment was "A Yankee Doodle Boy Is Good Enough for Me". The sheet music featured the title hand lettered in Art Nouveau style. This became the design source for Vaudevillian JNL, available in both regular and oblique versions.

Introducing Motownphilly - Classic Handdrawn Type, created by ikiiko. Motownphilly is a handwritten script typeface inspired by the typography styles of Movie titles and the American Classic Show & Orchestra in 1950s. This typeface is designed to give the appearance of an expressive style. Motownphilly has bold, raw lettering lines, with wild strokes. A style commonly used in print ads, magazine, and sign advertisements of the era. This typeface is perfect for an poster, newspaper, magazine ads, and also good for vintage product, food & beverages, quotes, or simply as a stylish text overlay to any background image. What's included? Uppercase & Lowercase Number & Punctuation Alternates Multilingual Support Works on PC & Mac

Introducing Broadster - Classic Brush Type, created by ikiiko. Broadster is a decorative sans serif typeface, inspired by typography from classic 60s American advertising & automotive visual styles of the time. This typeface is designed to give the appearance of a formal yet expressive style. The Broadster has bold, contrasting strokes. A style commonly used in print, magazine, and sign advertisements of the era. This typeface is perfect for an formal layout, poster, newspaper, magazine ads, and also good for vintage product, food & beverages, quotes, or simply as a stylish text overlay to any background image. What's included? Uppercase & Lowercase Number & Punctuation Multilingual Support Works on PC & Mac

C.H. Griffith was commissioned by the American telephone company, Bell, to design a typeface which would be particularly suited to small, compressed sentences and inferior paper quality. The font was intended for use in the company’s telephone books. Griffith had already had experience with the conception of newsprint fonts and was interested in legibility issues. In 1922 Griffith created the Legibility Group, which contained particularly legible fonts predestined for newspapers. Bell Gothic has all the typical characteristics which optimize a font’s legibility. The modern heir of Bell Gothic is Bell Centennial, designed by Matthew Carter in 1974 in celebration of the Bell Company’s 100th birthday.

If one were to be visiting Dania Beach in South Florida, they would find on the West side of US 1 just North of Sheridan Street a Bar-B-Q joint located smack dab between a McDonald’s and an all-you-can-eat buffet that took over a closed down Pizza Hut. Charlie’s BarBQ JNL is Jeff Levine’s homage to some great Texas Bar-B-Q - cooked by a Cuban immigrant - served in South Florida... A true American success story, but with a sad ending. Charlie's closed because the landlord wanted the property. for his own use. Charlie now resides in Leon, Nicaragua and runs some successful business ventures there.

Pristinia Duo is a powerful fancy and impactful bold mono-lined script font that comes in with a clean all-caps sans serif font that makes a great harmonious pair. The monolined script comes in with a large number of ligatures providing you with several options for your designs. Pristinia Duo is supporting western, southern, southern american and south eastern european. Pristinia Duo is perfect for branding, web headings, logos, quotes, movie titles and more... Promote your next project today with this great duo and set your message apart from others. I am eager and elated to see what you can do with Pristinia Duo!

This script font was inspired by the 1900s Art Nouveau style, in tribute to the well known American dancer Loïe Fuller. This font is specially developed for the OpenType possibilities. The TTF and OTF versions contain, besides all accented Western European Latin characters and ligatures, small caps, contextual alternates, more than seventy titling alternates, and others... It is used as variously as web-site titles, posters and fliers design or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, menus, certificates, letters. This font supports very strong enlargements as well as small sizes. When printed, it remain perfectly legible and elegant from 7 pts even if using an ordinary inkjet printer .

Plywood is based on a long lost American film classic: Franklin Typefounders's Barker Flare from the early 1970s. Plywood is a surprisingly effective mix between the rigid confidence of nineteenth century wood types and the smooth feminine curves of twentieth century art nouveau ideas. With many variations on almost every letter in the alphabet, it's a versatile typeface that can make itself timelessly at home in multiple design environments, with motifs ranging from the strong and western to the crafty and artsy. Plywood's very expanded character set comes in all popular font formats, including a Pro version that takes advantage of OpenType's many character alternating features in supporting programs.

Years before the "Jet Age", and way before computers and satellite television turned us into jaded "armchair travelers", the ocean voyage aboard giant steamships to distant ports of call beckoned many to travel the Seven Seas. Far away lands had a magic and mysticism to them, for few Americans knew anything about those places unless they read about them in books or saw travelogs at their local theaters. Many songs were written with themes of romantic South Seas travel, and one vintage piece in particular entitled "Down Where the Trade Winds Blow" offered up the hand lettering which served as a model for Sea Cruise JNL.

Santa Fe was created by British designer David Quay in 1983. Distinguishing are its script characters and the lower case e, which has the form of a capital E. The letters of this font emphasize the base line. Rounded corners pair with elegant forms to give Santa Fe a flowing, cheerful look. The figures are reminiscent of American advertisements of the 1960s with their light, carefree images. Like with most script fonts, the letters of Santa Fe should be set close enough together that they touch. An added bonus are the various alternative forms with which Quay provided Santa Fe and the many design possibilities which they offer.

Park Avenue Park Avenue was designed by R.E. Smith in 1933 for American Type Founders. Park Avenue is an elegant and light script with freely drawn capitals. Park Avenues pen-drawn quality is particularly evident in the lowercase. The ascenders and descenders of this script font are long; the ascenders are bent-over at the top. Park Avenue has a small 'x' height with tall ascenders, giving the face a refined, elegant appearance. The full elegance and lightness of Park Avenue are only apparent when combining upper and lowercase. It would be worthwhile trying this script in display sizes, for personal messages, invitations, business cards and greetings cards.

Caturrita is a versatile family for use in both long texts, and can be used in titles. The characters have fluidity, contemplating the principle of continuity. It has structural strength of the glyphs to be drawn by considering aspects calligraphy. The name comes from the similarity between the characteristics of the bird well known in southern Brazil: drawing the loose, fluid that resembles a flying bird. Moreover, a clear reminder that some of the glyphs are the serifs beak of the animal. Prize Winner Bornancini - Porto Alegre RS - Academic Category Selected Project Muestra de Estudiantes for the Ibero-American Biennial of Design - Madrid - Spain

Roswell was designed by Jim Parkinson, who acknowledges the 'spacey' ancestry of its name. Yes, Roswell, New Mexico. There was a big anniversary of 'the incident' in the news while I was designing in Roswell. "The incident" is of course the alleged UFO crash in Roswell. "I thought the name was acceptable as a serious font name, while, on another level, having a strangely humorous edge," says Parkinson. Roswell looks great in large sizes on a poster or in a magazine layout. It started out as "a variation on American gothic forms like Railroad Gothic", says the designer, but Roswell is an original design with eccentricities of its own."

Linotype Finerliner is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the contestants of Linotype’s International Digital Type Design Contest. The American artist Gary Munch, from whom we also have Linotype Ergo and Ergo Sketch, designed Linotype Finerliner as a handwriting font with calligraphic influences. The small, regularly formed lower case letters contrast nicely with the generous, sweeping capitals. The font is available in a light and medium weight and displays no stroke contrast. The lighter weight, micro, is best used for shorter texts in point sizes 18 or larger and the medium weight, macro, is mainly intended for headlines in larger point sizes.

When Sputnik launched in 1957, the world was launched into the Space Age, baby! It was rockets and soda shops, souped-up jalopies and Fairlane convertibles with radios blaring. Rock and Roll. American Bandstand and the Race to Space. Astro aims to call back those exciting days with a look that might have graced the sign of your local drive-in or donut shop. The uppercase characters look like they could fly, suggesting spacecraft, UFOs. Use it for Retro future events or business branding. It also seems to work exceptionally well, strangely, with French, Icelandic, Japanese and African names and anything to do with fish.

The origins of Bookman Old Style lie in the typeface called Oldstyle Antique, designed by A C Phemister circa 1858 for the Miller and Richard foundry in Edinburgh, Scotland. Many American foundries made versions of this type which eventually became known as Bookman. Monotype Bookman Old Style roman is based on earlier Lanston Monotype and ATF models. The italic has been re drawn following the style of the Oldstyle Antique italics of Miller and Richard. Although called “Old Style,” the near vertical stress of the face puts it into the transitional category. The Bookman Old Style font family is a legible and robust text face.

I came across an old book called ‘Studio Handbook Letter And Design For Artists And Advertisers’ by Samuel Welo. Samuel Welo was an American advertising calligrapher, typographer and lettering artist, who was most active during the roaring twenties. Lenox Avenue is my version of a set of letters in that book. It was handmade (just like Welo had done). I only had an ABC/abc to work with, so I designed all the remaining glyphs myself. I changed some of the original (and quite quirky) letters to a more contemporary form. The font is named Lenox Avenue, once home of the famous Savoy Ballroom. Comes with all the bells & whistles.

Android is an experimental 3D shadow outline font developed by the American type designer Alex Kaczun. The unique lighting created by the beveled edge in combination with an outline font was particularly difficult to create. But the result was worth the effort. Android makes for a powerful headline display that virtually pops off the page. There is a true three dimensional quality to this innovative new typeface. Use the regular Android when setting tight leading for smaller point sizes, and use Android Tall which has taller capitals for larger headlines. By experimenting with Type Effects in Illustrator or PhotoShop you can achieve some spectacular additional 3D effects.

Emil Bertell's Bayamo is a contemporary, digital take on the brush script tradition. It echoes the loose forms and energetic personality of sign painted letters, tapping into the current nostalgia for hand-drawn type. “I think most script fonts nowadays are either some kind of modern calligraphy, or synthetic/mechanical scripts,” says Bertell. “This one leans more towards a classic American sign painting tradition.” Contextual alternates ensure that lowercase characters change depending what's next to them, mimicking the more varied word shapes created by sign writers. Well suited for branding projects, packaging and headlines, Bayamo also pairs well with strong sans serif, and other typefaces with angular forms.

Inspired by a workshop with iconic American sign painter Mike Meyer, Ulrike of LiebeFonts set out to create a versatile, lovely typeface for sign painting that looks not at all like a font but rather like the letters on a unique, hand-painted storefront sign. LiebeDoris combines the best of two worlds: the beauty of all-American sign painting and the meticulous craft of German engineering. Each and every letter in each of the four different styles in LiebeDoris was hand-painted on large sheets of paper with a brush and ink, then carefully transferred for digital typesetting. So rather than being one typeface with different weights, think of LiebeDoris as a package of four individual designs that go together very well. Advanced OpenType features enable this font to really shine: every letter in this all-caps font comes in four variations, so that two of the same letters typed in a row won’t look the same, giving a truly handmade charm. (This feature requires layout software or a word processor with OpenType support.) And if you do have a storefront or a restaurant menu to prettify with LiebeDoris, you will love the integrated collection of store-themed catch words like “FREE”, “NEW”, and “SALE”. If you fall in love with LiebeDoris, you may also like our other best-selling fonts, LiebeErika and LiebeGerda, or our whimsical pictogram fonts such as LiebeMenu.

Baseball is a bold and sturdy script with its roots deep in the 1940s and 1950s Americana. Baseball is great for for sports team or bar logos, beer labels or anything where you need a bulky script with a lot of character. Baseball is equipped with several OpenType features: Standard Ligatures and Contextual Alternates for smooth connections. Try Swash, Stylistic or Titling Alternates when working with customized headlines. and combine with the Baseball Swoosh to complete your designs.

A font by Christian Acker (2003), based upon the practice of the Americana folk art tradition of tattoo design. Throughout the late 19th and 20th Centuries sailors would popularize and spread motifs, designs and styles by carrying this art around the world on their sleeves. A family of four fonts representing traditional styles is now available as a digital font. An accompanying collection of over 60 eps illustrations of tattoo "flash" are also available at cubanica.com.

Yakout is an Arabic text face that was developed by Linotype & Machinery in 1956 for hot-metal typesetting. Similar to the typewriter fonts created during this period, it utilises a limited range of letterforms to represent a full Arabic characer set, thus forming a style of type design known as Simplified Arabic. The skilful reshaping of letterforms demanded by the constraints of the original restrictive technology has given Yakout a very dynamic effect, and has helped to produce a design whose overall pattern works particularly well in newspaper setting. Digital technology has enhanced the original design by permitting the introduction of wide characters and some additional letterforms, and by improving the joining of the strong, slightly curved baseline. Yakout is available in two OpenType weights: Yakout Light and Yakout Bold. Both of the fonts include Latin glyphs (from Times Europa Roman and Times Europa Bold, respectively) inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. Yakout incorporate the Basic Latin character set and support all languages that use the Arabic script. They include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals and a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.

A range of retro initials mimicking the keys of an old style typewriter. Expanded from just a basic ASCII character set to our usual large CheapProFonts selection of glyphs. (I'm not sure all of them appears in the beginning of words, though. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

The original sketch of Joker was drawn by Viktor Kharyk in 1978 as experiment on creation type by a method of subtraction. In 2000 the font was digitized, modified and Hebrew, Greek, Georgian, Armenian and Arabi? alphabets and outline style were added. As a display face, Joker allows the creation of decorative compositions, easily combining a vertical and horizontal arrangement of words. Its characters are easy for filling with images. In line the face creates ornamental effect very appropriate for logotype design. The font is good to set small expressive advertising texts also. Joker type family received the third prize at TypeArt 2001 Cyrillic type design competition in Moscow.

Brosqua is a clean geometric display typeface with two weights and two styles: Includes ligatures, special alternative glyphs, old style figures and case sensitive glyphs. Brosqua is ideal for headlines, headers, logos, labels, packaging, magazines, invitations, etc. FEATURES - Basic latin alphabet A-Z - 15 Ligatures & Alternates - 56 Accented characters - Numbers, Punctuation, Currency, Symbols, Math symbols & Diacritics - Old style figures - Case sensitive glyphs LANGUAGE SUPPORT Latin 1 + Latin 2 Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. Latin-written Slavic and Central European languages: Czech, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovene. Enjoy Brosqua!

In the early years of the 20th Century, singer-dancer-actor-composer-playwright George M. Cohan was known as "The Man Who Owned Broadway". In 1904, Cohan was enjoying success with his latest creation, "Little Johnny Jones". Cohan gave America what would become a number of iconic songs, and both he and his compositions were immortalized in the 1942 biographical film "Yankee Doodle Dandy" starring James Cagney. The Art Nouveau-influenced hand lettering of the title on the cover of the sheet music for "The Yankee Doodle Boy" was the model for its namesake digital typeface design and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Mapuche means ‘man of the land’ and it is also the name of a group of indigenous inhabitants in South America. During the southern Winter solstice, between June 21 and June 24, the We Tripantu, the Mapuche New Year fest, takes place with a magical rite in the middle of the nature. Indigena is a dingbat font that remakes the artistic expression of the Mapuche people in Chile, recovering the handmade stroke they used in textiles and ceramics, but with a fresh look. This dingbat is based on pre-Columbian iconographic drawings shown in the book Dibujos Indígenas de Chile (1929) by chilean art teacher Abel Gutiérrez.

Lucida Grande is a humanist sans serif font with a large x-height, clear letterforms, and space-saving economy. Its easy reading qualities make it legible for printing and screen displays even down to small sizes. Lucida Grande is part of the Lucida superfamily of fonts from Bigelow & Holmes. Lucida is highly regarded for legibility and its extensive range of type styles. The Lucida Grande family has eight fonts with weights from Thin to Black with matching italics. Each font has 674 glyphs and supports the W1G character set. This includes Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets to support many languages in Europe, the Americas, and worldwide.

The project aims to represent icons through the city of São Paulo. The image selection method prioritized elements of history culture and daily life. The claim is that the set of graphic symbols help disseminate one of the most important cities of Brazil and the southern hemisphere. See the sights of São Paulo: Edifício Copan, Avenida Paulista, Bairro da Liberdade, Mercado Municipal, Catedral da Sé, Estádio do Pacaembu, Sala São Paulo, Pátio do Colégio, Vale do Anhangabaú, Estação da Luz, Memorial da América Latina, Museu do Ipiranga, Teatro Municipal, Masp, Edifício Banespa, Monumento às Bandeiras, Obelisco do Ibirapuera, Auditório do Ibirapuera, Pinacoteca, Oca – Ibirapuera and Monumento Ayrton Senna.

Inspired by 1920's Art Deco, Artisual Deco is a 2020's celebration dedicated to the hundred-year-old history of geometric design. This retro typeface will be the perfect fit for your logo designs or graphic project. Drawn, created and published in 2021, the typeface has vintage letterforms with a classy personality. Artisual Deco contains ten high-quality styles: Thin, Light, Regular, Bold and Black with each weight provided as Upright and Italic. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages, from North Europa to South Africa, from America to South-East Asia. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

This is the elaborate digital version of Edel Grotesque Bold Condensed (also known as Lessing, Reichgrotesk, and Wotan Bold Condensed) a 1914 typeface by Johannes Wagner, which was later adopted by pretty much every European type foundry, exported into the Americas, and used on war propaganda posters on either side of the Atlantic. Bold, condensed, yet clear and legible, Wagner Grotesk is good for cramming information into tight spaces. Extended language support includes Western, Central and Eastern European character sets, as well as Greek, Cyrillic, Baltic, Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish, and Celtic/Welsh languages. Biform letters and small caps make Wagner Grotesk a most versatile and functional headline face.

Museum is the Wundes foundry's first font revival. These letter forms are scanned from the engravings of Freeman Delamotte who in 1879 published a spectacular set of ancient and mediaeval ornamental alphabets. The original forms for this font were created in 1490, a few years before Columbus discovered America. There was not much information on the origin of this font, save that it came from a British museum, hence the name. The original character set was missing the letters J,P,V and W so I've constructed these letters in the same style to complete the alphabet. Other than those 4 additions, the engravings are true to their original forms.

American graphic designer William Addison Dwiggins' (W.A.D. for short) first typefaces were the Metro family, designed from 1927 onward. The project grew out of Dwiggins' dissatisfaction with the new European sans serif typefaces of the day, such as Futura, Erbar, and Kabel, a feeling he expressed in his seminal book Layout in Advertising. Urged by Mergenthaler Linotype to create a solution for the problem, Dwiggins began a professional relationship that would span over the next few decades. The first Metro family typeface to be released was Metroblack, brought to market by Linotype in 1929 (Metroblack #2™ the only one of the two versions that Mergenthaler Linotype eventually put into production which is available in digital form). With more of a humanist quality than the geometric styles popular in Europe at the time, Dwiggins drew what he believed to be the ideal sans serif for headlines and advertising copy. Metroblack has a warmer character than the Modernists' achievements, and the type is full of mannered curves and angled terminals (Metroblack also has an astoundingly beautiful Q). The other weights of the Metro family, Metromedium #2™ and Metrolite #2™, were designed by Mergenthaler Linotype's design office under Dwiggins' supervision. Despite having been created more than three-quarters of a century ago, the Metro family types have aged well, and remain a popular sans serif family. Although spec'd less often than other bestsellers, like Futura, Metro continues to find many diverse uses. The typeface has appeared throughout Europe and the North America for decades in newspapers and magazines, and can even help create a great brand image when used in logos and corporate identity. Dwiggins ranks among the most influential graphic designers and typeface designers of the 20th Century. He has several other quality fonts in the Linotype Originals, including the serif text faces Electra™ and New Caledonia™, as well as Caravan™, a font of typographic ornaments."

Distinctively Americana with a touch of Arts & Crafts, Amberosa is a typographic gem from the late nineteenth century, this undulating and organic typeface is a versatile and refreshing alternative to many of the font designs on the market today. Recapture the elegance of traditional flourished sign writing and make and provide ideal lettering for period inspired design work such as posters, signage, labels and book covers. You’ll find ligatures, 400+ stylistic alternates in keeping with the spirit of this pretty, old-fashioned typeface.

FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style from between 1998 and 1908, but with much more warmth and improved legibility as well as a hint towards the warmer American grotesques. Later on, not just slanted styles, but a “proper” italic version was added inspired by the way Roman and Italic are distinguished in traditional serif faces. NEW: a specially created set of obliques were added in 2018 to give designers more design flexibility, for those looking for a less calligraphic look. In 2020 the family was extended with matching condensed weights. FF Real was originally conceived by Erik Spiekermann as one text weight and one headline weight to be used as the only faces in his biography ‘Hello I am Erik’, edited by Johannes Erler, published in 2014. While Spiekermann drew the alphabets, he passed on the font data to Ralph du Carrois and Anja Meiners who cleaned it up and completed it. In the meantime, FF Real has been extended to a family of two styles and 65 weights each. The design of FF Real is rooted in early static grotesques from the turn of the century. Several German type foundries – among them the Berlin-based foundries Theinhardt and H. Berthold AG – released such designs between 1898 and 1908. The semi-bold weight of a poster-size typeface that was lighter than most of the according semi-bolds in metal type at the time, gave the impetus to FF Real’s regular weight. In the words of Spiekermann, the historical example is “the real, non-fake version, as it were, the royal sans serif face“, thus giving his new typeface the name “Real” (which is also in keeping with his four-letter names, i.e. FF Meta, FF Unit). FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style, but with much more warmth and improved legibility. With a hint towards the warmer American grotesques, Spiekermann added those typical Anglo-American features such as a three-story ‘g’ and an ‘8’ with a more defined loop. To better distinguish characters in small text sizes, FF Real Text comes in old style figures, ‘f’ and ‘t’ are wider, the capital ‘I’ is equipped with serifs, as is the lowercase ‘l’. What’s more, i-dots and all punctuation are round.

FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style from between 1998 and 1908, but with much more warmth and improved legibility as well as a hint towards the warmer American grotesques. Later on, not just slanted styles, but a “proper” italic version was added inspired by the way Roman and Italic are distinguished in traditional serif faces. NEW: a specially created set of obliques were added in 2018 to give designers more design flexibility, for those looking for a less calligraphic look. In 2020 the family was extended with matching condensed weights. FF Real was originally conceived by Erik Spiekermann as one text weight and one headline weight to be used as the only faces in his biography ‘Hello I am Erik’, edited by Johannes Erler, published in 2014. While Spiekermann drew the alphabets, he passed on the font data to Ralph du Carrois and Anja Meiners who cleaned it up and completed it. In the meantime, FF Real has been extended to a family of two styles and 65 weights each. The design of FF Real is rooted in early static grotesques from the turn of the century. Several German type foundries – among them the Berlin-based foundries Theinhardt and H. Berthold AG – released such designs between 1898 and 1908. The semi-bold weight of a poster-size typeface that was lighter than most of the according semi-bolds in metal type at the time, gave the impetus to FF Real’s regular weight. In the words of Spiekermann, the historical example is “the real, non-fake version, as it were, the royal sans serif face“, thus giving his new typeface the name “Real” (which is also in keeping with his four-letter names, i.e. FF Meta, FF Unit). FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style, but with much more warmth and improved legibility. With a hint towards the warmer American grotesques, Spiekermann added those typical Anglo-American features such as a three-story ‘g’ and an ‘8’ with a more defined loop. To better distinguish characters in small text sizes, FF Real Text comes in old style figures, ‘f’ and ‘t’ are wider, the capital ‘I’ is equipped with serifs, as is the lowercase ‘l’. What’s more, i-dots and all punctuation are round.

Aspen is a refreshing and resilient typeface for text of any kind. Functional but not faceless, Aspen derives a very distinctive character from an unusual pedigree. It is loosely influenced by early American and European grotesques, but with more warmth and improved legibility. And where these historical models were rigid and bulky, Aspen’s curves have a gentle sway that makes for very comfortable reading. Relatively generous ascenders and descenders allow the typeface to feel spacious even when set with tight leading. These amiable qualities are matched with a lively italic based on cursive writing. The family consists of nine weights, and is intended for both text and display usage. Visit this minisite to see Aspen in action.

Ellida is a very elaborate and elegant script in the tradition of the 18th-century English calligrapher George Bickham and the 19th-century American calligrapher Platt Rogers Spencer. I really enjoyed designing this script and maybe one day I will add starting and ending letters. Doing this script was extremely time- and brain-consuming, it is a huge challenge to make calligraphic letters work on computers so that they join perfectly. That's also the reason that this has become my most expensive font so far, but I think the price is fair for the incredible amount of work I put into the script. I really need a break from scripts now! Yours very exhausted Gert Wiescher.