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.

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.

For over 30 years, Tomás Vellvé created beautiful graphics and distinctive typefaces in his native homeland of Spain. First drawn as a phototype display design in 1971, Vellvé’s only typeface in digital form is an uncommon solution to the problem of creating a new sans serif design. The end result, which bears his name, is a design that stands out from the crowd of other sans serif typefaces. The phototype version was only available in a single, light weight. With the release of the digital fonts, however, three additional weights as well as a companion italic for the light weight were created.The typeface designs were originally drawn for Agfa Monotype (now Monotype Imaging) in 1996 as part of the company’s “Creative Alliance” initiative. Through an exclusive licensing arrangement, the Vellvé™ family has now been added to the ITC Typeface Library.ITC Vellvé is a wide design with strong calligraphic overtones. This is no “anonymous” design like so many modern sans. Letters like the `R, `e and `s clearly show the hand of Tomás Vellvé in the design process. Vellvé provides a fresh choice between geometric sans serifs such as Helvetica® and industrial sans serifs like Futura®.

Opa-locka JNL is named for a city in Miami-Dade County, Florida and is based on an Art Nouveau-era bit of hand lettering found on vintage sheet music. Legendary aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss (who successfully developed the city of Miami Springs and the city of Hialeah with James Bright) began the development of Opa-locka around 1925 as a planned community with a "1001 Arabian Nights" theme. Plans for this exclusive community included a country club and a small private airfield, but the hurricane of 1926 derailed Curtiss' original vision of the city. Opa-locka gradually took shape as a residential area for middle-class families, but the closing of a long-established Marine base, changing demographics and a reputation for being a hot-spot for crime, drug abuse and corruption tarnished this once-grand community (which boasts the largest collection of Moorish Revival architecture in the Western hemisphere). Old-time Miamians bristle when the city's name (an abbreviation of a Seminole place name, spelled Opa-tisha-wocka-locka) is mis-spelled as "Opa-Locka", "Opa Locka" or "Opalocka". The correct name is hyphenated, and the second part is in lower case.

Where most typefaces are designed by just one individual, quite a few people have been involved in perfecting Cheltenham over the times. In 1896, the architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue created the initial design for Ingalls Kimball at the Cheltenham Press. Just a few years later, Morris Fuller Benton devised a full family of Cheltenhams for ATF. This is the basis of the design we have today. In 1975, Tony Stan revived this classic typeface and did what was customary at the time: increase the x-height and make the Cheltenham family more regular. SoftMaker updated the design yet again in 2012. The result is Cheltenham Pro, a typeface that is exceptionally readable and holds up even in adverse printing conditions. SoftMaker’s Cheltenham Pro typeface family contains OpenType layout tables for sophisticated typography. It also comes with a huge character set that covers not only Western European languages, but also includes Central European, Baltic, Croatian, Slovene, Romanian, and Turkish characters. Case-sensitive punctuation signs for all-caps titles are included as well as many fractions, an extensive set of ligatures, and separate sets of tabular and proportional digits.

Looking to add a little Arts & Crafts flavor to your next project? Perhaps you just need a distinctive, new sans serif design? And one with a large international character set. In either case, ITC New Rennie Mackintosh™ may be the typeface for you. Its narrow proportions saves space, and the design shines at large sizes. While it can be an excellent typeface for Art Nouveau flavored labels, name tags and chapter call-outs, this is a suite of fonts that you can also turn to for a bevy of print and on screen uses. Games and apps, as well as print headlines and menus all benefit from ITC New Rennie Mackintosh’s vintage vibe. Based on Phill Grimshaw’s original 1996 design, Monotype Studio designers reimagined the iconic family, added lowercase characters, a new weight structure of light, regular and a more robust bold design; each with an italic counterpart. In addition, a large international character set that include support for many Western and Eastern European languages – including Cyrillic and Greek – give the family a deep typographic bench. An added benefit: the new designs can also be combined with Grimshaw’s original ornament and initial character fonts.

In August of 2009, I was commissioned by Zoo York, a New York City based skateboard company, to visit Buenos Aires to study and document street typography. As soon as my taxi driver took the bustling street Entre Ríos, it was clear that the city and I were going to be good friends. Many of the independently owned businesses on Entre Ríos are adorned with handmade signage. These signs are painted in a style called Fileteado which is a century-old Argentinian type of lettering and floral ornamentation. Nowadays, Fileteado is still a prominent part of the city’s landscape, coloring the façades of restaurants, bars and coffee shops. Calaveras and Diablitos are two new typefaces that were inspired by Fileteado. Stylistically, the fonts are a return to a rhythmic and playful sensibility reminiscent of Vitrina and Cuba, two fonts that I designed in 1996. Along with dynamism and dance, these new fonts incorporate a rigor and functionality essential to labelling any font a ‘workhorse.’ The names Calaveras and Diablitos, came from the name of a song by the infamous Buenos Aires rock band, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. —Pablo A. Medina

The BF Rotwang™ Pro is a contemporary new edition and re-design of a formerly design by Guido Schneider. Named after the C.L. Rotwang, the inventor of the Mensch-Maschine from the film Metropolis (1925/1926), BF Rotwang plays with the character traits of high-contrast transitional serif typefaces and Didone-style typefaces. BF Rotwang is a typeface characterized by balanced elegance. It is sensitive, sophisticated and self-confident, but unobtrusive. The heavy weights have the power and dynamic for strong headlines and exciting logotypes, the lighter cuts the elegance and lightness for use in continuous text. All letters and characters are a touch condensed, so the typeface looks compact and works space-saving. BF Rotwang™ Pro supports up to 200 Latin-based languages. The family comes with 7 weights plus matching Italics. Each font contains more than 1.220 glyphs, featuring a wide range of alternate characters, small caps, figure sets, fractions, more than 35 ligatures, many currency symbols, special characters and other useful symbols. The style sets give you the option to individualize and adjust the typeface to the requirement of your design, without changing the general visual feeling.

A clean, smooth rendition of the magnificent B42-type used by Johann Gutenberg in his famous 42-line Bible. In addition to the usual standard characters for typesetting modern texts, the font includes a comprehensive set of special characters, alternates and ligatures, plus Opentype features, that can be used for typesetting (almost) exactly as in Gutenberg’s Bible and later incunabula. Also available as The Oldtype “Gutenberg C” Font in a slightly roughened style simulating irregularities and ink spreads associated with old metal types, papers and parchments. The main historical sources used during the font design process were high-resolution scans from several printings of Gutenberg’s Bible. Other sources were as follows: Kapr, A. (1996), Johann Gutenberg - The Man and his Invention, Aldershot: Scolar Press (ch. 7); De Hamel, C. (2001), The Book - A History of The Bible, London: Phaidon Press (ch. 8); Füssel, S. (2005), Gutenberg and the impact of printing, Burlington: Ashgate (ch. 1); and Man, J. (2009), The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Bantam (ch. 7). Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Oldtype “Gutenberg B” Font Page.

In August of 2009, I was commissioned by Zoo York, a New York City based skateboard company, to visit Buenos Aires to study and document street typography. As soon as my taxi driver took the bustling street Entre Ríos, it was clear that the city and I were going to be good friends. Many of the independently owned businesses on Entre Ríos are adorned with handmade signage. These signs are painted in a style called Fileteado which is a century-old Argentinian type of lettering and floral ornamentation. Nowadays, Fileteado is still a prominent part of the city’s landscape, coloring the façades of restaurants, bars and coffee shops. Calaveras and Diablitos are two new typefaces that were inspired by Fileteado. Stylistically, the fonts are a return to a rhythmic and playful sensibility reminiscent of Vitrina and Cuba, two fonts that I designed in 1996. Along with dynamism and dance, these new fonts incorporate a rigor and functionality essential to labelling any font a ‘workhorse.’ The names Calaveras and Diablitos, came from the name of a song by the infamous Buenos Aires rock band, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. —Pablo A. Medina

The Vondelpark is the famous Amsterdam city park, 47 hectares stretching out from Leidseplein to the Amstelveenseweg. It was founded in 1864 when a group of well-to-do Amsterdam citizens got together and bought land at the (then) edge of the city centre in order to create a park ‘for riding and strolling’. Designed by architect J.D. Zocher, it opened officially in 1865. The park received its name two years later when a statue of Dutch writer Joost van den Vondel was placed in the park. In the 1960s and 1970s the Vondelpark became a symbol and epicenter of the hippie flower power era. The park was declared a state monument in 1996. Donald DBXL was intrigued by the handmade iron nameplate lettering on the park’s entrance gates, and decided to design VLNL Vondelpark in its glory. The somewhat clumsy iron letters were not revived as is but optimized to turn it into a useful typeface. The all-caps serif with a deliberate constructed feel, contains a Positional Open Type feature that places half circles on the vertical stems, at the beginning and end of a word, to enliven the rhythm.

By the 1990s, the availability of font creation software opened the door to an explosion of creativity, experimentation and exploration into the world of digital typography by amateur and professional alike. The undisputed king of the freeware fonts was Ray Larabie through his Larabie Fonts website. It seemed at the time that Ray’s output was endless, and he amassed dozens upon dozens of fonts that ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. In fact, Ray was the driving force of encouragement and a behind-the-scenes “mentor” who helped Jeff Levine Fonts get underway in January of 2006. As Larabie’s focus changed to higher-quality commercial type design with the launch of Typodermic, Inc., many of his “less than perfect” font experiments were withdrawn and shelved. Ray eventually turned those lost (and sometimes questionable) typefaces into a bundled zip archive released into the public domain through Creative Commons. One particular design “Boron” (circa 1996) featured computer-oriented lettering as if etched onto a circuit board. Running with this idea, and with Ray's approval, the electronic elements were stripped away, the characters cleaned up and modified, and the font reworked in Retro Checkbook JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

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.

In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older typeface, Plantin, as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space (always important concerns for newspapers). As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman," Morison's revision became "Times New Roman." The Times of London debuted the new typeface in October 1932, and after one year the design was released for commercial sale. The Times New Roman World Version is an extension of the original Times New Roman with several other scripts like with the Helvetica World fonts. It is part of the Windows Vista system. The following code pages are supported:1250 Latin 2: Eastern European 1251 Cyrillic 1253 Greek 1254 Turkish 1255 Hebrew 1256 Arabic Note: The Roman and Bold versions include the arabic scripts but they are not part in the corresponding italic versions. 1257 Windows Baltic 1258 Windows Vietnamese

Gradl Highstep is an archetypical Art Nouveau face by the prolific and mysterious Max Joseph Gradl. It epitomizes the visual language of elegance and sophistication. It seems strange that so little information is available today about Max Gradl: He seems to have been well known in his day. In addition to his jewelry design, he did advertising work for customers in Naples, London and New York in addition to customers in cities all over Germany. Gradl Highstep is an all-cap font with a wide range of ligatures: 094=SA, 123=CH, 125=CK, 126=TS, 167=FA, 172=PA, 177=TA, 188=WA and 190=YA. In addtion, 137=Gradl’s dated monogram “MJG 1903,” 175=LLC abbreviation, 181=alternate S. This is a subtle font with thin, variable strokes. It is best used at 28 points and larger to give it the presence it needs to be be appreciated. Gradl Highstep Initials is a companion font, incorporating a deft line drawing of a fashionable woman of the period who is every bit as elegant as the underlying font.

Jackalope is a new original script font from LetterPerfect Fonts. The design is a hybrid of pressure-pen calligraphy infused with whimsy and curlicue terminals. Letterforms are free-spirited and edges are rough, simulating spontaneous writing on rough paper. In addition to the full ANSI western character set, Jackalope includes a full set of small capitals, both lining and old-style numbers, and swash lowercase alternate characters that can be used as terminal letters at the ends of words for additional flourish. The genesis and realization of Jackalope was also a hybrid process. In 1996, LetterPerfect commissioned type designer Kathy Schinhofen to provide pen-written source material based on her commercial handwriting style and specifically on a logo she had designed for its "Viva la Fonts" line of script fonts. This work was digitized by LetterPerfect’s Garrett Boge and later fonticized by former Hallmark Cards type maven Myron McVay who unified the design and contributed additional characters. The design sat unfinished for over 12 years until Garrett Boge revived the project in 2010 filling out the extended character set. Jackalope is released in two versions: Jackalope LP Regular, which is the base font for continuous text setting; and Jackalope LP Expert, which includes swash variants, small capitals, and old-style numerals which can be swapped into text for extra flourish and effect.

Tomi Haaparanta got the idea for the Tyke typeface family after using Cooper Black for a design project. He liked Cooper's chubby design, but longed for a wider range of weights. “I wanted a typeface that was cuddly and friendly,” recalls Haaparanta, “but also one that was readable at text sizes.” He started tinkering with the idea, and Tyke began to emerge. Even though Haaparanta knew his boldest weight would equal the heft of Cooper Black, he began drawing the Tyke family with the medium. His goal was to refine the characteristics of the design at this moderate weight, and then build on it to create the light and bold extremes. Haaparanta got the spark to design type in 1990, when he attended a workshop held by Phil Baines at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. “I've been working and playing with type ever since,” Haaparanta recalls. He released his first commercial font in 1996, while working as an Art Director in Helsinki. After about two dozen more releases, he founded his own type studio, Suomi Type Foundry, early in 2004. At five weights plus corresponding italics, Tyke easily fulfills Haaparanta's goal of creating a wide range of distinctive, completely usable designs. The light through bold weights perform well at both large and small sizes, while the Black is an outstanding alternative to Cooper for display copy.

Conthey™ is a highly customisable unicase sans serif family designed for headlines and display use. Its modern, sharp and friendly character will add a fresh, positive vibe to your projects. Conthey customization options include weight variants from hairline to extra bold, width variants from narrow to normal, as well as style variants - possibility to change the mood of the font - from normal unicase, which is already a little cheerful in character, to even more playful, neo-deco proportioned unicase. Conthey feels at home when used for modern branding, magazine layout, headlines and posters. Variable fonts, broad choice of styles and additional alternative stylistic set give the family a great versatility and uniqueness. Conthey consists of 126 fonts in 3 width variants and 3 style variants - 63 uprights and their corresponding italics. Conthey family contains also 2 variable 3-axis fonts, with axes: weight, width and style (that changes internal proportions of some letters, like A H a e g and more). The family has extended language support as well as broad number of OpenType features, such as alternative stylistic set, discretionary ligatures, titling alternates, contextual alternates, slashed zero, fractions, superscript and subscript, ordinals, currencies and symbols.

Fantastic ML is an exuberant Art Nouveau font. It was originally released as “Modern Style” by Fonderie G. Peignot & Fils, Paris, France sometime before 1903. Since “Le style moderne” was the generic French name for Art Nouveau, it is possible that someone decided a less generic name was needed. The typeface became known as Fantastic. Compared to conventional text letters, it is just that. Fantastic has a whimsical, architectural feel. The typeface reminds me of a cross between Hoffmann’s Palais Stoclet in Brussels and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona. The letterforms themselves are similar to those by Ludwig von Zumbusch on the cover of “Jugend” in March, 1896, but with the addition of serifs. Fantastic ML is a decorative, all-cap font intended for display use and functions best at 18 points or larger. There are a total of 306 glyphs. In addition to the standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page with character slots up to decimal position 255, there are glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. However, some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (1252). The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS format and a TTF version which is in Open TT format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

This all started with a love for Minister. This is a font designed by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt in 1929. In the specimen booklet there’s a scan from Linotype’s page many years ago. They no longer carry the font. I’ve gone quite a ways from the original. It was dark and a bit heavy. But I loved the look and the readability. This came to a head when I started my first book on all-digital printing written from 1994-1995, and published early in 1996. I needed fonts to show the typography I was talking about. At that point oldstyle figures, true small caps, and discretionary ligatures were rare. More than that text fonts for book design had lining OR oldstyle figures, lowercase OR small caps—never both. So, I designed the Diaconia family using the Greek word for minister. It was fairly rough. I knew very little. I later redesigned and updated Diaconia into Bergsland Pro—released in 2004. It was still rough (though I impressed myself). Now, with 4-font Biblia Serif family 13 years later, I’ve cleaned up, made the fonts more consistent internally, added more functional OpenType features, and brought the fonts into the 21st century. I used the 2017 set of features: small caps, small cap figures, oldstyle figures, fractions, lining figures, ligatures and discretionary ligatures. These are fonts designed for book production and work well for text or heads. Finally, in 2021, I went over the fonts entirely and remade them in Glyphs.

A revival and major expansion of a 1926 Ludwig Wagner Schriftgiesserei typeface called Titanic, Lexington is the ultimate art deco expression of the high times of signage and theater during the first half of the twentieth century. Big feminine caps and cozy direct minuscules make for a unique combination rarely found in other deco faces. Topped off with the humorous and quite suave tall and pointy ascenders and descenders of the alternates, Lexington makes for a versatile and uniquely eye-catching display face beneficial to poster art, book covers, classy menus, product packaging and music paraphernalia. The original specimen Hans van Maanen worked from showed the majuscules, minuscules, figures, and 4 alternates of some ascending minuscules. This new digital version includes all of the above, plus many more additions: - Plenty more alternates, for some caps as well as for all the ascending and descending lowercase. - Three different size variations for the comma and the period. - Oldstyle figures. - A full complement of accented characters to support more Latin-based languages than ever, including Baltic, Celtic, Turkish, and Central/Eastern European languages. - A Handtooled style variation that covers both the main character set and the alternates. Lexington was named after Manhattan's Lexington Avenue, home of the some of the most famous and polished art deco architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. Lexington and Lexington Handtooled come in all popular font formats. The OpenType versions combine their respective alternates with the main character sets, for ease of use within OpenType-savvy applications.

Arabetics Harfi is a Latin Serif typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. Careful spacing and kerning was used to enhance resulting text legibility both scripts. Arabetics Harfi fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi type style with connected glyphs, but it emphasizes a horizontal look and feel rather than verticalone, utilizing slightly varying x-heights. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph per every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Harfi includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Arabetics Harfi includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. It includes two weights, regular and bold, each of which has normal, right slanted Italic, and left-slanted styles.

ITC Greengate is the result of a time-traveling, intercontinental collaboration--one between 21st century South African designer Richard Every, and early 20th century Scottish artist Jessie Marion King. Jessie Marion King (1875-1949) began her professional career as a book designer and illustrator, but over time her creativity found its outlet in many forms, including posters, jewelry, ceramics, wallpaper, fabrics, murals, interior design and costumes. After eventually settling in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, she founded Green Gate Close, a center for women artists. Although her style is reminiscent of the Art Nouveau artist, Aubrey Beardsley, King's aesthetic was an offshoot of the “Glasgow Style,” a Scottish hybrid of the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau. Often, her illustrations included hand lettering. It was just this kind of lettering that gave Richard Every his inspiration for ITC Greengate. When he saw some children's book illustrations that King created in 1898, he knew on the spot he had to complete the hand lettering as a typographic font. He began working on the typeface in 1996, but it took six years to be released as an ITC typeface. Every simplified and harmonized King's letterforms slightly and, most importantly, added a suite of lowercase characters. The result is a somewhat earthy Art Nouveau design, with a character quite distinct from typical digital revivals. Every's career has been as diverse as King's. He was born in Durban, South Africa and studied graphic design at ML Sultan Technikon in Durban. He's been an art director, freelance designer, the owner and manager of a nightclub and co-manager of a South African band. “Through it all,” he says, “typography has always been one of my passions.”

Vette Letters are thrilled to add maverick designer Dirk Uhlenbrock to the family, with the release of VLNL Bromfiets. Bromfiets (the Dutch word for moped) is a ‘holiday child’, the basic idea coming from a stop at a road junction in the Dutch coastal province of Zeeland. The Dutch signage, the black and white rings of traffic light poles, the symbols for brom- and snorfiets have always appealed to Dirk. While on vacation in Zeeland the first scribbles and digital drafts were created, always in mind that the typeface had to be striking, clear and friendly. The end result is more than that, a strong and instantly recognisable font with a matching dingbat weight full of icons and arrows. Stencil fonts have always interested Dirk, the informal character and the possible universal use as a paint- or spray-stencil on a wide variety of surfaces makes this type of font so interesting for me. The technically necessary dissolution of closed font contours always ensures a special aesthetic: What’HAT and HOW MUCH has to be removed or left, in order to make words easy to read and to avoid a fractal impression. Dirk Uhlenbrock has been working as graphic designer and illustrator in his hometown Essen, Germany for over 30 years. Always interested in typedesign he got in contact with Fontographer in 1996 and started to create and distribute loads of free fonts through his online platforms ‘Eyesaw’ and ‘Fontomas’. A bunch of these type experiments have been extented on request to complete fonts. Still located in Essen in 2009 Dirk started his second owner-based business erste liga büro für gestaltung - ersteliga.de

Cotton Club remembers the fonts of the thirties of the last century and the Bodoni, but it does not present graces: it is a sans serif. It has 360 glyphs and is composed of two regular and italic styles. Cotton Club is characterized by a high contrast between thick and thin strokes. The emphasized signs give the font an essential, sharp and elegant look. The Italic style of the Cotton Club refers to handwriting and this is noticeable in the ligatures obtained with kerning. The name of the font, “Cotton Club,” refers to the famous Jazz Club in New York, in Harlem, active in the twenties and thirties, during and after Prohibition. At that time the Bodoni, in its many derivations, was widely used not only in lead composition, but also in neon signs, plaques, posters, as well as in many other applications. Redesigning a new font that brings back to those years wants to be, therefore, a tribute and a reinterpretation of the graphics of that period as well as, it is understood, to the glorious Bodoni. Supported Languages Bulgaro, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maltese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish. Vincenzo Crisafulli font designer Vincenzo Crisafulli graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Palermo and works as a graphic designer. He has been designing fonts since 1996 and has published with T26 (Type-Foundry, digital foundry in Chicago-California USA): Crisafulli, Chocolat, LST, Luminaria, and Stitching; with MyFonts: Rétrospectif, Bella Copy, Jasmin and Noahs Ark.

Kilkenny is a decorative, Victorian-style font based on the metal type named Nymphic that was designed by Hermann Ihlenberg. Ihlenburg was born in Germany in 1843 where he studied art and worked for several German type foundries. He moved to the USA in 1866 and worked for the L. Johnson & Co. foundry, later MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan. American Type Founders acquired this typeface when they took over the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan foundry and Nymphic appears in the ATF catalog of 1896. For this digital version, the character set has been expanded to include accented characters, punctuation, and currency symbols—and most everything you would expect to find in a digital font. The original metal font consisted of swash caps, upper case characters, and a “morticed” lower case, which was raised off the baseline. This mortcied form was designed to nestle inside the ornate swash caps as well as to work with the upper case. The five digital versions contained in this set are basically different configurations of these different alphabet sets, they differ as follows: Kilkenny—the original upper case version with a modified lower case that has been enlarged, shifted to align along the baseline, and given taller ascenders to give it a more “regular” appearance. Kilkenny Eureka—true to the original design with the “morticed” or superior lowercase forms. Kilkenny Swash—original swash caps with the modified lower case. Kilkenny Swash Caps—original swash caps with the original caps as the lower case. Kilkenny Swash Eureka—swash caps that have been adjusted to match the weight of the original lower case forms. The OpenType version contains all of the above, plus additional Central European and Cyrillic characters for a total of almost 1000 glyphs.

In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e." In the 1990s, Robert Slimbach designed his contemporary interpretation, Adobe Jenson™. It was first released by Adobe in 1996, and re-released in 2000 as a full-featured OpenType font with extended language support and many typographic refinements. A remarkable tour de force, Adobe Jenson provides flexibility for a complete range of text and display composition; it has huge character sets in specially designed optical sizes for captions, text, subheads, and display. The weight range includes light, regular, semibold, and bold. Jenson did not design an italic type to accompany his roman, so Slimbach used the italic types cut by Ludovico degli Arrighi in 1524-27 as his models for the italics in Adobe Jenson. Use this family for book and magazine composition, or for display work when the design calls for a sense of graciousness and dignity.

FF Good is a straight-sided sans serif in the American Gothic tradition, designed by Warsaw-based Łukasz Dziedzic. Despite having something of an “old-fashioned” heritage, FF Good feels new. Many customers agree: the sturdy, legible forms of FF Good have been put to good use in the Polish-language magazine ‘Komputer Swiat,’ the German and Russian edition of the celebrity tabloid OK!, and the new corporate design for the Associated Press. Although initially released as a family of modest size, the typeface was fully overhauled in 2010, increasing it from nine styles to 30 styles, with an additional 30-style sibling for larger sizes, FF Good Headline. In 2014, the type system underwent additional expansion to become FontFont’s largest family ever with an incredible 196 total styles. This includes seven weights ranging from Light to Ultra, and an astonishing seven widths from Compressed to Extended for both FF Good and FF Good Headline, all with companion italics and small caps in both roman and italic. With its subtle weight and width graduation, it is the perfect companion for interface, editorial, and web designers. This allows the typographer to pick the style best suited to their layout. As a contemporary competitor to classic American Gothic style typefaces—like Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, or Trade Gothic—it was necessary that an expanded FF Good also offers customers both Text and Display versions. The base FF Good fonts are mastered for text use, while FF Good Headline aims for maximum compactness. Its low cap height together with trimmed ascenders and descenders give punch to headlines and larger-sized copy in publications such as newspapers, magazines, and blogs.

This all started with a love for Minister. This is a font designed by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt in 1929. In the specimen booklet there’s a scan from Linotype’s page many years ago. They no longer carry the font. I’ve gone quite a ways from the original. It was dark and a bit heavy. But I loved the look and the readability. This came to a head when I started my first book on all-digital printing written from 1994-1995, and published early in 1996. I needed fonts to show the typography I was talking about. At that point oldstyle figures, true small caps, and discretionary ligatures were rare. More than that text fonts for book design had lining OR oldstyle figures, lowercase OR small caps—never both. So, I designed the Diaconia family (using the Greek word for minister). It was fairly rough. I knew very little. I later redesigned and updated Diaconia into Bergsland Pro —released in 2004. It was still rough (though I impressed myself). In 2006, I found myself needing a readable sans serif. So I went to Bergsland Pro, and eliminated the serifs. I named the font Brinar. I kept a flare in place for the serifs and cupped the ends. I was stunned. People loved it. It’s remained my bestseller until very recently. So, at the end of 2016 I decided that Brinar really needed some help. The flares were basically random. The stem width and modulation variances all needed to be fixed. My old OpenType feature code was quite limited and clumsy. So, I created the 6-font Biblia family. I cleaned up or redesigned all the glyphs. I updated the fonts to the 2017 set of features: small caps, small cap figures, oldstyle figures, fractions, lining figures, ligatures and discretionary ligatures. These are fonts designed for book production and work well for text or heads.

The Englishman William Caslon punchcut many roman, italic, and non-Latin typefaces from 1720 until his death in 1766. At that time most types were being imported to England from Dutch sources, so Caslon was influenced by the characteristics of Dutch types. He did, however, achieve a level of craft that enabled his recognition as the first great English punchcutter. Caslon's roman became so popular that it was known as the script of kings, although on the other side of the political spectrum (and the ocean), the Americans used it for their Declaration of Independence in 1776. The original Caslon specimen sheets and punches have long provided a fertile source for the range of types bearing his name. Identifying characteristics of most Caslons include a cap A with a scooped-out apex; a cap C with two full serifs; and in the italic, a swashed lowercase v and w. Caslon's types have achieved legendary status among printers and typographers, and are considered safe, solid, and dependable. Caslon Antique was designed by Berne Nadall and brought out by the American type foundry Barnhart Bros & Spindler in 1896 to 1898. It doesn't bear any resemblance to Caslon, but has the quaint crudeness of what people imagine type looked like in the eighteenth century. Use Caslon Antique for that old-timey" effect in graphic designs. It looks best in large sizes for titles or initials. Caslon Black was designed by David Farey in the 1990s, and consists of one relatively narrow and very black weight. It is intended exclusively for titles or headlines. Caslon Black has a hint of the original Caslon lurking in the shadows of its shapes, but has taken on its own robust expression. Caslon Graphique was designed by Leslie Usherwood in the 1980s. The basic forms are close to the original Caslon, but this version has wide heavy forms with very high contrast between the hairline thin strokes and the fat main strokes. This precisely drawn and stylized Caslon has verve; it's ideal for headlines or initials in large sizes."

Ultra legible forceful sanserif in 32 fonts Parisine was born as official parisian métro signage typeface. This family of typefaces has become over years one of the symbols of Paris the Johnston for the London Underground or the Helvetica for the New York Subway. The Parisine was created to accompany travelers in their daily use: ultra-readable, friendly, human while the context is a priori hostile. Meanwhile, Parisine is now a workhorse and economical sanserif font family, highly legible, who can be considered as a more human alternative to the industrial-mechanical Din typeface family. More human, but not fancy: No strange “swashy” f, or cursive v, w etc. on the italics, to keep certain expected regularity, important for information design, signages, and any subjects where legibility, sobriety came first. Born as signage typeface family, the various widths and weights permit a wider range of applications. In editorial projects, the Compress version will enhances your headlines, banners, allowing ultra large settings on pages. The Narrow version will be useful as direct compagnon mixed to standard width version when the space is limited. The various Parisine typeface subfamilies Parisine is organised in various widths and subsets, from the original family Parisine, Parisine Gris featuring lighter versions of the usual weights and italics, Parisine Clair featuring extra light styles, to Parisine Sombre with his darker and extremly black weights as we can seen in Frutiger Black or Antique Olive Nord. Many years of adjustments were necessary to refine this complex family. Initially, Parisine was designed by Jean François Porchez in 1996 for Ratp to solely fulfil the unique needs of signage legibility. Parisine remain the official corporate typeface of the public transport in Paris, the worldwide capital for tourism, and now integral part of the French touch. Directly related, Parisine Office was initially created for Ratp’s internal and external communication, Parisine Office is available at Typofonderie too. Not connected with Ratp and public transports, Parisine Plus was created as an informal version of Parisine. Parisine: Introducing narrow and compressed families About Parisine Parisine helps Parisians catch the right bus Observateur du design star of 2007

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which can be translated in English as “Dreaming Love Fighting of Poliphilus”, is a romance about a mysterious arcane allegory in which the main protagonist, Poliphilo, pursues his love, Polia, through a dreamlike landscape. In the end, he is reconciled with her by the “Fountain of Venus”. The author of the book is anonymous, however, an acrostic formed by the first, elaborately decorated letter in each chapter in the original Italian reads “POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCVS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT”, which means “Brother Francesco Colonna has dearly loved Polia”. Despite this clue, the book has also been attributed to many other authors. The identity of the illustrator is less certain than that of the author. It was first published in Venice, in December 1499, by Aldo Manutio. This first edition presents an elegant and unique page layout, with refined woodcut illustrations in an Early Renaissance style and a refined Roman font, cut by Francesco da Bologna, which is a revised version of the type used in 1496 for the De Aetna of Pietro Bembo. The print quality is very high for the time, but nevertheless it presents many inconsistencies and imperfections due to the non-ideal inking and adherence of the matrix to the paper. For that reason numerous samples of the original have been used to create every single glyph which will result in an appropriate reconstruction and not a mere and humble reproduction. Some letters like \J, \U and \W were extrapolated, because they are not part of the original alphabet of the period. Some letters like \Q, \X, \Y, \Z and \h have been updated to more modern variants, but the original shape is accessible by Stylistic Alternates Opentype Feature, which also changes the shape of the \V and the \v. The original numerals \zero, \one, \tree, \four and \six have been accompanied by reconstructions of the missing numbers and extended by modern figures. Finally, swashed lower cases and original scribal abbreviations were also included. The font has joined by a matching Italic variant, closely inspired from Aldo Manuzio's 1501 "Vergilius", the first book printed entirely in Italic type by Francesco da Bologna.

Arabetics Symphony is a Sans Serif Latin typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. It is designed with a uniform glyph thickness and weight throughout, using a combination of simplified and clear open lines and curves and plenty of spikes and visual hints to compensate for the missing Latin serifs or traditional cursive Arabic calligraphic influence. This type family is suitable for both text and display applications. Additional Latin spacing is added to match an overall open-looking Arabic and is further maintained by a careful implementation of a typical Latin font kerning process. The design of this font family, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize with other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Symphony fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Symphony includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the “tatweel” key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Symphony includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Arabetics Latte is a Latin Serif typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. While its seemingly-idiosyncratic Latin design eliminates the excessive usage of serifs and offsets the visual effects of several geometrically-intense glyphs, its Times Romanesque proportions gives a full nod to the beginnings of Latin types and produces an overall stable look-and-feel of a classical Serif style, making it suitable for both text and display applications. Liberal spacing is maintained throughout to match that of the Arabic text and is further supplemented by a careful implementation of a typical Latin kerning. The overall design of this font, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize well with most other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Latte fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Latte includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the tatweel key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Latte includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

How can Teutonia be called “Art Nouveau” with all those straight lines? It seems like a contradiction. In fact, however, Art Nouveau embraces a rather wide variety of stylistic approaches. Five well-known examples in the field of architecture serve to illustrate the range of diversity in Art Nouveau: Saarinen’s Helsinki Railroad Station, Hoffman’s Palais Stocklet in Brussels, Lechner’s Museum of Applied Arts on Budapest, Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Only the last fits comfortably within the common perception of Art Nouveau. Whereas Gaudi would avoid the straight line as much as possible, Macintosh seemed to employ it as much as possible. The uniting factor is that they all represent “new art” -- an attempt to look things differently than the previous generation. Even when they draw on the past -- e.g. Lechner in the use of traditional Hungarian folk art -- the totality of the expression in new. Teutonia clearly shows its blackletter roots in the ‘D’ and the ‘M.’ Roos & Junge of Offenbach am Main in Germany produced Teutonia in a "back-to-basics" effort that has seen many quite similar attempts in the field of topography. In 1883, Baltimore Type Foundry released its Geometric series. In 1910, Geza Farago in Budapest used a similar letter design on a Tungsram light bulb poster. In 1919 Theo van Doesburg, a founder with Mondrian and others of the De Stijl movement, designed an alphabet using rectangles only -- no diagonals. In 1923 Joost Schmidt at Bauhaus in Weimer took the same approach for a Constructivist exhibit poster. The 1996 Agfatype Collection catalog lists a Geometric in light, bold and italic that is very close to the old Baltimore version. Even though none of these designs took the world by storm, they all made a contribution to our understanding of letterforms and how we use them. Teutonia is compact and surprisingly readable at 12 points in print, but does not do as well on the screen. Extra leading is suggested. Four ligatures are supplied: ch, ck, sch and tz. The numerals are tabular.

The Brass Family has a lineage that extends into English history. About five hundred years ago a devout, but anonymous Englishman gave glory to the God he worshipped by designing the capital letters and decorations of these two fonts. Originally recorded in The History Of Mediaeval Alphabets And Devices by Henry Shaw (London 1853), they are described by Alexander Nesbitt in his Decorative Alphabets And Initials (Mineola, NY 1959) as “Initials and stop ornaments from brasses in Westminster Abbey.” I wish I could say I remember seeing them when I was there, but that was forty-two years ago and all I remember was seeing the tomb of Edward the Confessor. One definition of “stop” as a noun is a point of punctuation. I have heard people from the British Isles speak of a “full stop” when referring to a period. Some may remember a 19th century form of communication called a telegram being read aloud in an old movie, with the use of the word “stop” to indicate the end of a sentence or fragment. A full dozen of these stop ornaments are provided. They occupy positions 060, 062, 094, 123, 125, 126, 135, 137, 167, 172, 177 & 190. The Brass Family consists of two fonts: Brass and Brass Too. Both fonts have an identical upper case and ornaments, but paired with different lower cases. Although the typefaces from which the lower cases were drawn are both of modern design, both are interpretations of the textura style of blackletter in use in England when the upper case and ornaments were fashioned for the Abbey. Brass is paired with Morris Gothic, which matches the color of the upper case quite well. Brass Too is paired with Wedding Regular, which is distinctly lighter than the upper case. I find it very interesting how each connects differently. The resulting fonts are unusual and most useful for evoking an historic atmosphere.

FF Good is a straight-sided sans serif in the American Gothic tradition, designed by Warsaw-based Łukasz Dziedzic. Despite having something of an “old-fashioned” heritage, FF Good feels new. Many customers agree: the sturdy, legible forms of FF Good have been put to good use in the Polish-language magazine ‘Komputer Swiat,’ the German and Russian edition of the celebrity tabloid OK!, and the new corporate design for the Associated Press. Although initially released as a family of modest size, the typeface was fully overhauled in 2010, increasing it from nine styles to 30 styles, with an additional 30-style sibling for larger sizes, FF Good Headline. In 2014, the type system underwent additional expansion to become FontFont’s largest family ever with an incredible 196 total styles. This includes seven weights ranging from Light to Ultra, and an astonishing seven widths from Compressed to Extended for both FF Good and FF Good Headline, all with companion italics and small caps in both roman and italic. With its subtle weight and width graduation, it is the perfect companion for interface, editorial, and web designers. This allows the typographer to pick the style best suited to their layout. As a contemporary competitor to classic American Gothic style typefaces—like Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, or Trade Gothic—it was necessary that an expanded FF Good also offers customers both Text and Display versions. The base FF Good fonts are mastered for text use, while FF Good Headline aims for maximum compactness. Its low cap height together with trimmed ascenders and descenders give punch to headlines and larger-sized copy in publications such as newspapers, magazines, and blogs. There is even more good news about FF Good: it has something of a serif companion. Łukasz Dziedzic built FF Good to work together with FF More, creating in a powerhouse superfamily that is versatile in both its function and aesthetic.