Vintage sheet music for a song from the 1941 animated feature "Mr. Bug Goes to Town" featured a casual, hand-lettered inline type style on its cover page. Recreated as the digital font Go to Town JNL, this design is presented in all the imperfect glory of pen and ink lettering. Go to Town JNL is available in the regular inline version as well as a solid version. A bit about the cartoon: The project was created by the legendary Fleischer Studios in Miami, Florida (they had relocated from New York City), after they could not obtain the rights to adapt Maurice Maeterlinck's "The Life of the Bee". Beset by the expenses of relocating to Florida, growing production costs on the full-length feature cartoon and other problems; mid-way through the making of "Mr. Bug Goes to Town" the Fleischer brothers were forced to sell their studio to their distributor (Paramount Pictures) in order to continue in operation. It was released on Dec. 5, 1941 - just two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The release [and subsequent re-release by Paramount as "Hoppity Goes to Town"] was a disappointing failure, earning [as late as 1946] only $241,000 of the initial cost of $713,511 it took to make the film.

Clean, crisp, rational, familiar, modern… serifed. Positype Scotch reaches back to history just enough to produce something warm and easy on the eyes. No corners were cut, no quick tricks… this type suite was drawn for specificity: Text, Display, and Deck… ALL in 3 widths that now include Condensed and Compressed. Each unique, each inter-connected, each part of the whole. Scotch Text is offered in 6 weights with matching true italics. Drawn for economy and an easy read, the family is a workhorse for long-passage text settings. 4 sets of numerals, well-proportioned small caps, and a plethora of extras round out each font. Scotch Display is not just a thinner version of Scotch Text wrapped in a higher contrast. Display sports shorter ascenders and descenders, a unique footprint, great contrast, and a more folded, calligraphic italics. Display subtly oozes sophistication and provides an attractive, exhuberant companion to Scotch Text. Scotch Deck rounds out the offering by choosing to be specific to its offering. Deck utlitizes traits and proportions shared between Text and Display, but alters its overall mass to balance out the needs for settings that require subheadlines, callouts and other similar uses. Essentially, something not so high-contrast and not so stress dense that works great for middle-sizes.

For these fonts I have reworked the spacing a bit, and completely redesigned the "N" as they were calligraphically very wrong. Kevin King says: "Petrock is based on letterforms found in a small city Church in Exeter - from a display case about bell ringing. A lovely simple labeling hand, I think I've done it justice... Petrock Light is a lighter form of Petrock - makes both of them more usable." 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.

There is plenty of lyric and literature about looking over one's shoulder in contemplation. What would you have done differently if you knew then what you know now? This is the kind of question that comes out of nowhere. When it does and whether its context is personal or professional make very little difference. It's a question that can cause emotions to rise and passions to run hot. It can trigger priority shifts and identity crises. It's never easy to answer. Three years ago, I published a font called Semilla. My aim with that was to distill the work of Bentele, a lettering artist from early 1950s Germany. Picking such an obscure figure back then was my way of pondering the meaning and efficiency of objectivity in a world where real human events and existences are inevitably filtered through decades of unavoidably subjective written, printed and oral history. And maybe to pat myself on the back for surviving surprises mild and pleasant. Having been fortunate enough to follow my professional whims for quite some time now, I took another, longer look at my idea of distilling Bentele's work again. I suppose the concepts of established history and objectivity can become quite malleable when personal experience is added to the mix. I say that because there I was, three years later, second-guessing myself and opining that Bentele's work can be distilled differently, in a manner more suited to current cultural angles. So I embarked on that mission, and Bowling Script is the result. I realize that it's difficult to reconcile this soft and happy calligraphic outcome with the introspection I've blathered about so far, but it is what is. I guess even self-created first world problems need to be resolved somehow, and the resolution can happen in mysterious ways. Bowling Script is what people who like my work would expect from me. It's yet another script loaded with all kinds of alternation, swashing and over-the-top stuff. All of that is in here. These days I think I just do all that stuff without even blinking. But there are two additional twists. The more noticeable one is ornamental: The stroke endings in the main font are of the typical sharp and curly variety found in sign painting, while the other font complements that with ball endings, sometimes with an added-on-afterwards impression rather than an extension of the actual stroke. In the philosophical terms I was mumbling earlier, this is the equivalent of alternate realities in a world of historical reduxes that by their very nature can never properly translate original fact. The second twist has to do with the disruption of angular rhythm in calligraphic alphabets. Of course, this is the kind of lettering where the very concept of rhythm can be quite flexible, but it still counts for something, and experimenting with angular white space in a project of a very dense footprint was irresistible. After playing for a bit, I decided that it would interesting to include the option of using optically back-slanted forms in the fonts. Most scripts out there, including mine, have a rhythm sonically comparable to four-to-the-floor club beats. So the weirdly angled stuff here is your chance to do the occasional drumroll. Everyone knows we need one of those sometimes. Bowling Script and Bowling Script Balls fonts comes with 1600 characters and features extended Latin-based language support. There are also a basic version of both fonts without all the alternates and extra OpenType features. Bowling family ships in cross-platform OpenType format. We also want to present “Mute”, a visual essay narated by Tomás García and Valentín Muro, about digital life created specially to introduce Bowling Script.

The award-winning Conrad was created by Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi. Its design was based on the fifteenth-century type by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, two German printers active in Rome at that time. They produced a unique, slightly unbalanced yet attractive type. Kobayashi says of his typeface, “I have designed a couple of typefaces inspired from the past, but this time the original print acted merely as a reference. The distinctive lowercase ‘a’ and some other letters were inspired by Sweynheym and Pannartz’s second roman type, but I revived the type in a more informal way. Here I used the historical type as a springboard. The resulting type looks different, taking on a rather temporary and lively look. I assume that the Conrad is the first revival of the Sweynheym and Pannartz type, though it does not closely resemble the original.” Conrad won first prize for the text typeface category in Linotype’s Third International Typeface Design Contest (2000) as well as the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club (2001).

In the early 1980s, at the start of my career, I had the opportunity to work in a print shop with classic lead setting. In those days I would study issues of U&lc magazine from ITC. What really caught my attention were scripts in the Spencerian style. I’ve been fascinated by this American penmanship tradition ever since. A few years ago I developed a font. Boris Bencic used it when he was redesigning L’Officiel magazine in Paris. I took these initial forms and developed them into the font Mommie when I started my own foundry. Although I usually design text typefaces, working on Mommie taught me how complex it can be to create a script headline font. The biggest challenge in this process has been to keep it alive and fresh. The Regular weight is only made for very big headlines. The thin lines with the bold drops are very elegant. For smaller sizes use the Medium and Small weight. It won the TDC 2008 award and was Judges Choice of Christian Schwartz.