Picture this: you’re in the heart of a lush, vibrant rainforest. The leaves rustle in the breeze, and the vibrant colors of the flora and fauna surround you. That’s exactly the feeling you’ll get when you use Rainforest, our small caps display typeface inspired by the Jurassic Park logo. Rainforest is a nod to the classic typefaces of the early 20th century, like Rudolph Koch’s Neuland and Monotype’s Othello. These fonts captured the spirit of the Art & Crafts movement with their woodcut prints, and they were particularly popular in themes depicting jungles and tropical islands. But Rainforest takes that classic style to the next level with its sleek and modern design. The typeface can be used in a variety of ways: plain, outlined, or as a separate thin-line layer. It’s versatile, stylish, and sophisticated—perfect for any project that needs a touch of class. Whether you’re designing a poster for a tropical vacation or creating an eye-catching logo, Rainforest will make your work stand out from the crowd. Its candid, natural style will transport you straight to the heart of the rainforest—all while maintaining an air of elegance and sophistication. Give Rainforest a try today and see the difference for yourself! Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Vietnamese, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Razumec is a carefully crafted display serif typeface with a highly unique personality. Its epic yet warm sentiment is established by a skillful blend of slab and wedge serifs, tapered stems, curves with raised center, and creative weight distribution. Proper pronunciation of these style elements influenced wide proportions and medium-to-high contrast. Besides its main typology, it incorporates subtle allusions to a spectrum of typographic and visual traditions, from calligraphy, ordinary handwriting, blackletter, and medieval uncial script to the neoclassical Didone and industrial typefaces. All of these flavors are combined tastefully and consistently throughout the whole set. With its rich visual identity, Razumec is primarily intended for display usage, as shown in the promo images. It's perfect for branding and packaging. Fantastic for projects focusing on storytelling like fairy tales, epic fantasy books, board and video games with historic or adventurous themes. Superb for theme magazines, quotes, headlines, museum and concert brochures. On the other side, its authentic historical voice works great as a strong counterpart point in ultra-modern contemporary designs for print and screen. Web design, motion graphics, conceptual art, posters, and social media material are just the first few ideas. The laborious production process focused on achieving a high level of classical typographic virtues rather than having an extensive character set. Beautiful stylistically consistent characters with balanced weight and width, high-quality curves, meticulous spacing and kerning, well-articulated diacritics, and punctuation were priorities. Special attention is given to solving problematic letter pairs through contextual alternates, which enable better spacing and smooth joints (hence the recommendation to always keep the Contextual alternates feature on for this font. Learn more about it HERE). Razumec is a small but well-executed and thoroughly tested font. Font family comprises nine weights plus variable font.* * Variable font lets you access all the weights through the single font file. In apps that support it, you will find a slider where you can pick any number from 100 to 900 corresponding to 800 possible font weights. Learn more about variable fonts and their support on the following two links: VF ABOUT and VF SUPPORT.

Elegant and round Having harboured a desire for a rounded font within the Fontsmith library for some time, Phil Garnham recognised that FS Emeric offered the perfect skeleton around which to design it. Most new rounded fonts rely on scripts or other in-app automation to form their characters. For all their warmth and approachability, they too often conjure images of jelly sweets and sausages. Not so FS Aldrin, where every curve and transition has been crafted by hand, giving a distinctive look and elegant feel. Design highlights FS Aldrin enjoys wide-open ‘lunar’ counters and soft, tube-like terminals. These improve legibility, especially on backlit signage and screens. The open proportions and circular strokes are juxtaposed against a more serious technical aspect that exists within each counter shape. The lighter weights feel precise and efficient, perfect for notes on blueprints or technical drawings. The heavy weights are equally crafted but more playful by their rotund nature, and are perfect for strong headlines or packaging projects. UI icons A suite of 268 icons complement the typeface beautifully and extend the design language in all directions. They cover a range of commonly used applications and themes ranging from ecommerce to weather, and also serve as a solid starting point for a bespoke brand icon set or UI. In addition, born of FS Aldrin’s astronomical theme and playful nature is a special collection of space-themed icons, including rockets, shuttles and lunar modules (hint: if you type the word BUZZ with ligatures enabled, an astronaut appears). Earth to Buzz Buzz Aldrin was the pilot of Apollo 11’s lunar module, the one that put man on The Moon for the very first time. Early on in the project’s life, FS Aldrin emerged as the ideal hook on which to hang the font’s space helmet (hardly surprising given Phil’s fascination with space travel and astronomy). An approach was made to Buzz’s management to see if he would sanction the association. Not only was the great man himself happy to see his name on a typeface, he also asked to use it in his upcoming keynote talks, book launches and online projects.

The market for humanistic sans serif type families is saturated, so what can a new release add, and what does it take to stand out from the crowd? Asterisk Sans Pro (named after my favourite glyph to make) aims to be a highly versatile type family; massively useful due to its pan-European language support and bounty of OpenType features which make it the ideal choice for demanding typography. The look is contemporary; details which give the fonts character at large sizes all but disappear when small, making the middle weights suitable for large chunks of text. The family ranges from a hairline ultra light to a pretty weighty black – a must in a new typeface. Asterisk Sans Pro supports Latin, modern Greek and Cyrillic, with localized forms for Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian to boot. This is rare enough, but to have small caps for all these scripts in both upright and italic fonts is a big plus. Your client may not need all this language support right now, but this typeface gives them the option to grow while keeping a consistent look, and at a similar price point to families with a much narrower scope. The ability to customize Asterisk Sans Pro through the use of Stylistic Sets in OpenType savvy layout programs means you are really in control. Want more italic forms in the uprights? Go for it. A more Roman italic? Easy! The spurless m, n, r and u, accessible through SS13 give a graphic, almost bauhaus feel. The Dutch IJ glyph can be changed to a much cooler thing using SS14, and the family even supports ij-acute. Other OpenType features include a wealth of numeral styles (tabular and proportional, lining and oldstyle, plus small cap figures, numerators, denominators, subscript and superscript) and automatic fractions. There are also case-sensitive forms for all caps settings, a bunch of useful arrows, and superscript lower case Latin letters. All in, there are well over 1200 glyphs per font, making Asterisk Sans Pro an invaluable tool in your typeface arsenal, great for everything from corporate identities to editorial work, apps to cookbooks.

Legible, technical, clear—with a hint of retro: Compiler is a no-frills font family straight from the heart of a microprocessor. Inspired by console typefaces, the humanist sans serif typeface combines a large x-height with striking serifs on certain letters such as i and l. Those serifs evoke the aesthetics of monospace typefaces for programming. Even though Compiler is a proportional typeface, this detail improves glyph recognition and helps differentiate between individual letters. Combined with vertical stroke ends, which allow for particularly even spacing, the serifs make for an extremely legible typeface. (Even in small sizes.) Brand recognition guaranteed: Compiler is ideal for applications that require a mechanical flavor without appearing offish. You can use it for websites, apps, branding, corporate design, annual reports, signage, and many other areas with perfect results. Compiler consists of two font families; the second one is Compiler Plain. In Compiler Plain, the signature letters lose their serifs and the forms of "a" and "g" are simplified. This way, the shapes are neutralized. The technical impression recedes into the background. Both families can be combined smoothly: you might use the standard Compiler fonts for display sizes and Compiler Plain styles for body copy. For total design control, you can toggle each of the defining design elements individually from Compiler to Compiler Plain and vice versa. Just use Stylistic Sets to fine-tune your Compiler fonts. Compiler provides you with 8 weights in 4 variations: Upright, Italics, Plain Upright and Plain Italics. That's a total of 32 fonts. Each style contains more than 860 glyphs, including advanced typographic tools such as proportional and tabular figures (both lining and old-style) or small caps—something you'll rarely find in this genre. Other glyphs are optimized for display sizes, such as circled figures and various arrows. There's also a set of glyphs designed for web use: with symbols for shopping carts, hamburger menus or checkboxes, you can implement your web projects elegantly and consistently without relying on third-party tools (like an external icon font). Powered by highly productive OpenType functions, Compiler is an intermedia workhorse straight from cyberspace.

Inspired by early grotesque typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk and Venus, Werksatz is our contemporary interpretation of this beloved genre. Some things are timeless. These are the things that only get better with use. The aforementioned typefaces certainly belong into this category. Rediscovered by designers from every generation again and again, they are here to stay. However, as tools evolve and technology moves on, even a well-tried design has to adapt to this evolution continuously in order to stand the test of time. Werksatz is such an adaptation, taking the best from the invincible classics and infusing them with the warm blood of today’s tech. With 10 weights from Thin to Black, each with painstakingly fine-tuned obliques, and more than 940 characters per style, this font family is ready for the future. Its Extended Latin support ensures you won’t miss a letter in any of hundreds of languages. Special glyphs like three variations of arrows and additional shapes will make your design work so much easier—for well-structured forms as well as radical editorial layouts. Among a treasure trove of OpenType features, you’ll find essentials such as Capital Spacing, Case-Sensitive Forms, and Ligatures, but also advanced functions like Small Caps, Subscript and Inferior figures and letters, plenty figure sets (Lining Figures, Tabular Figures, Old-Style Figures, circled and squared figures, figures for small caps … you get the idea), Slashed Zero, and more. You’ll discover that Werksatz is less formalistic and rigid than your average neogrotesk typeface. Sure, you can use it for serious business—whether in corporate design, branding, editorial design, publication design, or web design for industries and topics ranging from politics, government, management, or law to technology, entrepreneurship, commerce, or finance. However, Werksatz is much more versatile than that. Its more human appearance also allows for effective use in culture, fashion, art, entertainment, sports, exhibitions, leisure, and luxury. It’s an excellent choice for wayfinding applications, apps, packaging, and all kinds of nonfiction books. Other Grotesks with big names are left behind outdated by their proprietors, but Werksatz is here to stay. The classic industrial warmth of these letterforms will age like fine wine.

A very expanded sans serif font in capital letters inspired by the inscription on a bank note Old bank notes tend to have a very typical typography. Usually they carry decorative and elaborately designed markings. For one thing, they must be practically impossible to forge and for another, they should make a respectable and legitimate impression. And in the days of copper and steel engravings, that meant nothing less than creating ornate, shaded or otherwise complicated scripts. Designing the appropriate script was literally in the hands of the engraver. That’s why I noticed this bank note from 1948. It is the first 20 mark bill in the then newly created currency ”Deutsche Mark.“ All other bank notes of the 1948 series show daintier forms of typography with an obvious tendency toward modern face. The 1949 series which followed shortly thereafter reveals the more complicated script as well. For whatever reason, only this 20 mark bill displays this extremely expanded sans serif variation of the otherwise Roman form applied. This peculiarity led me in the year 2010 to create a complete font from the single word ”Banknote.“ Back to those days in the 40’s, the initial edition of DM bank notes was carried out by a special US-American printer who was under pressure of completing on time and whose engravers not only engraved but also designed. So that’s why the bank notes resemble dollars and don’t even look like European currency. That also explains some of the uniquely designed characters when looked at in detail. Especially the almost serif type form on the letters C, G, S and Z, but also L and T owe their look to the ”American touch.“ The ingoFont Banknote 1948 comprises all characters of the Latin typeface according to ISO 8859 for all European languages including Turkish and Baltic languages. In order to maintain the character of the original, the ”creation“ of lower case letters was waived. This factor doesn’t contribute to legibility, but this kind of type is not intended for long texts anyway; rather, it unfolds its entire attraction when used as a display font, for example on posters. Banknote 1948 is also very suitable for distortion and other alien techniques, without too much harm being done to the characteristic forms. With Banknote 1948 ingoFonts discloses a font like scripts which were used in advertising of the 1940’s and 50’s and were popular around the world. But even today the use of this kind of font can be expedient, especially considering how Banknote 1948, for its time of origin, impresses with amazingly modern detail.

Adi Stern’s Noam Text shows that typographic progress is often in the small things — in the perfecting of familiar traditions and in staying loyal to the spirit of what came before. It can’t really be called progress unless it honours its history. In this way, TypeTogether is happy to introduce Noam Text: A Hebrew and Latin serif font that builds on its heritage with the twin tools of honour and progress. Since 1908, the Frank-Rühl fonts have dominated the Hebrew book and newspaper market. Noam Text’s design goal was to create a coherent family with both Latin and Hebrew serif text typefaces, each authentic to its own script, and which would serve as an alternative to last century’s predecessor. In short order, users will recognise Noam Text as a source of progress in its bilingual abilities. Hebrew and Latin have opposite reading directions, creating many issues: opposing directionality of the open counters; vertical stress in Latin, but horizontal in Hebrew; fewer extenders in Hebrew; and no Hebrew capital letters. All these have been taken into account in Noam Text’s modern design. Of unique importance — all punctuation marks have a Hebrew version, which makes each script complete and uncompromising. Among other technologically advanced details, Noam Text was programmed for all expected scenarios of mixing Hebrew, Latin, figures, and punctuation. Noam Text is intended mostly for setting long texts, so it strives to achieve maximum legibility in minimum space with its large x-height, short and fairly condensed Latin capitals, large and open counters, and low contrast. Originally derived from the Hebrew, the shallow horizontal curves and strong baseline serifs provide dynamism and enhance the reading flow. Noam Text Latin’s italic is rounded and reading friendly, is condensed to generate a lighter texture than the roman, and has a flowing stance. These virtues help it endure harsh printing conditions and subpar inks and paper. Noam Text’s three total weights provide a proper solution for integrating texts in both scripts, as well as a contemporary alternative for use in books, newspapers, and magazine design. Aligned with TypeTogether’s commitment to produce high-quality type for the global market, the complete Noam Text family displays an impressive amount of discretion, applying to wide use-cases by not edging too close to religious motifs or imbibing in secular indulgence. This means Noam Text can be the go-to family across the board and capitalise on the desire for clear typographic progress in this modern age.

Levato, the first font designed by Felix Bonge, is an Antiqua that is full of character and is refined but by no means sterile. This typeface provides for a wide range of options for creating individual designs. It was not really Felix Bonge's intention to create a whole font family when, as a second year student, he began several exercises in contrast and proportion as part of the typeface design course of Professor Veljovi? at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. However, these initial studies developed into a project that Bonge persisted with over the following years while working towards his degree. He continually had new insights and ideas that he was able to exploit for his font. Of particular importance, he claims, was a calligraphy seminar, which prompted him to completely rework his concept. It took him several years before his extensive font Levato™ was ready. Although the forms of Levato are ultimately derived from Renaissance Antiqua, Bonge has slightly increased the relative contrast in his version. This gives the font a graceful appearance that is further emphasized by the reduced x-height and the associated prominence of the ascenders. And, in addition, the relatively fine serifs, which are almost linear at their ends, infuse Levato with a hint of classical Antiqua á la Bodoni. At the same time, Bonge cleverly compensates for the sterilising tendency of this font form. Soft and rounded serif attachments and rounded line apexes offset the severe nature of the font and provide it with an aura of vivacity. This effect is promoted by the calligraphic-like foot of the lowercase h, n and m and the not quite horizontal bars of the uppercase E and F. Overall, Bonge has succeeded in creating a refined and yet very dynamic typeface. Levato is available in five weights; Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black, in each case with the corresponding italic versions. Bonge treats Levato Italic as a genuine cursive typeface. Its letters are thus slightly narrower than the analogous upright letters and their forms are considerably more curvilinear. All the versions of Levato boast an enormous range of characters to meet all possible requirements. In addition to four sets of minuscule and majuscule numerals for tabular and proportional typesetting, there are also small caps, numerous ligatures, ornamental characters and even swash variants of letters. With their generous, sweeping curves, the swash variants (available as OpenType versions) can be used for striking titling effects or as initials.

Greetings: We are introducing an advanced version of the Kage font released and received great exposure from users and worldwide font enthusiasts. The massive development puts forward experimentation on the alternate letters. We redesign each shape to make it more functional and comfortable when text size escalation occurs. In addition to rejuvenating the letterform, we also apply an oblique style to provide diverse style choices. Learn more about Kage Pro here: Graphics presentation | Type Specimen | The Inspiration: The radical exploration world of fashion inspires us. It leads our minds to the Neo-classical type style created during the age of enlightenment in the 18th century. It has a reasonably extreme contrast from the previous serif style, making the impression that it is emitted more expensive and classy. Organically, this Neo-Classical typeface is closely related to the fashion world, especially in Europe, and even spread across the globe. Fashion and this typeface reflect each other. After, we boldly observed Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. Famous for radical & deconstructive fashion, which makes the world of fashion more flexible and dynamic. The Design: As well as the typeface that we made, we started it with a cultural foundation of the Didone typeface. We tried to deconstruct the appearance. The decoration that better reflected the dynamic of fashion implemented in the fashionable alternate and calligraphical stylistic set ended with ball terminals. The versatile impression created is like taking off a scarf on the model's hair during a fashion show. The deconstructive image is combined with a legibility structure like the appearance of the Neo-Classical style. Kage Pro is designed to visualize a costly and exclusive image of a thing, product, world clothing brand, famous fashion magazine, etc. The modern transitions of each letterform are softer, so when repositioning and escalating the size of this font, it will remain beautiful without injuring other elements. So, Kage Pro is a bold choice on headlines and more prominent media with a portion of 50% even more. The Feature: Kage Pro has 11 upright and 11 oblique styles from thin to black; all family-style consist of one variable font with 2 axes. The total number of glyphs is 1,665 in each style. She comes with tons of swirly ligatures and stylistic alternates in Advance OpenType features, including: Case-sensitive forms, small caps, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, numerator, denominator, superscript, subscript, circled number, slashed zero, old-style figure, tabular and lining figure. Support multi-language including Western European, Central European, Southeastern European, South American, Oceanian, Vietnamese.

DIN Serif: Specimen Manual PDF The DIN Type System: A Comparison Table This is the first ever release of a true serif companion for the popular DIN typeface. DIN Serif originated in a custom project for a watchmaking journal which required a modern serif to work in unison and match the inherent simplicity of DIN. As a result, a solid, confident and well-balanced typeface was developed which is simple and neutral enough when set at small sizes, but sturdy and powerful when set at heavier weights and bigger sizes. It utilizes the skeleton of the original DIN and retains its basic proportions such as x-height, caps height and descenders, whereas ascenders were slightly increased. DIN Serif makes no attempt to impress with ephemeral nifty details on individual letters, but instead it concentrates on a few modern, functional and everlasting novelties which express an overall distinct quality on the page and set it apart from most classic romans. This is a low contrast typeface with vertical axis and squarish form which brings out a balance between simplicity and legibility. Its narrow proportions offer economy of space which is critical for newspaper body text and headlines. At small sizes the text has an even texture, it is comfortable and highly readable. The serifs are narrow at heavy weights and when tight typesetting is applied at large sizes, the heavier weights become ideal for headlines. DIN Serif was inspired by late 19th century Egyptian and earlier transitional roman faces. Bracketed serifs were placed on the upper part of the letterforms (this is where we mostly concentrate our attention when we read) whereas small clean square serifs were placed on and under the baseline to simplify the letterforms. In order to reduce visual tension at the joins and make reading smooth and comfortable, a slight hint of bracketed serif was added at the joins in the form of a subtle angular tapered serif, which softens the harsh angularity. These angular tapered serifs tend to disappear at smaller sizes (or smooth out the joins) but stand out at bigger sizes exuding a strong, modern and energetic personality. What started out as a custom 2 weight family, it has developed into a full scale superfamily with 10 styles from Regular to ExtraBlack along with their italics. Additional features were added such as small caps, alternate letters and numbers as well as numerous symbols for branding, signage and publishing. All weights were meticulously hinted for excellent display performance on the web. Finally, DIN Serif supports more that 100 languages such as those based on the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabet.

We've upgraded TT Hoves Pro with 20 new fonts and Vietnamese! TT Hoves Pro useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options Please note! If you need OTF versions of the fonts, just email us at commercial@typetype.org TT Hoves Pro is the studio's bestseller, one of the top three universal sans serifs along with TT Norms® Pro and TT Commons™️ Pro. TT Hoves Pro has a neutral yet recognizable character suitable for use in any modern project. The font has a large character set, including extended Cyrillic and Latin, as well as a large number of styles. TT Hoves Pro was already perfect, but we made it even more functional! Updated TT Hoves Pro: supports more than 200 languages, including Vietnamese; contains 4 widths: Compact, Normal, Condensed, Expanded; consists of 83 styles, 20 of which are new Compact fonts; includes upright and italic Outline fonts, each with 672 characters; contains an improved variable font that varies in weight, width and slope; includes 1573 characters in each style, except for Outline versions; contains 41 OpenType features, including many ligatures and stylistic alternatives. The geometry of the TT Hoves Pro has remained unchanged. The font lacks pronounced contrast, all terminals are on the same level, and there are wide horizontal strokes in triangular characters. TT Hoves Pro is ideal for web design and use in applications. Perfect for branding, packaging design and printing. TT Hoves Pro OpenType features list: aalt, ccmp, locl, subs, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, frac, ordn, tnum, onum, lnum, pnum, c2sc, smcp, dlig, liga, salt, calt, case, zero, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, ss11, ss12, ss13, ss14, ss15, ss16, ss17, ss18, ss19 TT Hoves Pro language support: English, Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (lat), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian (lat), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German, Valencian, Azerbaijani, Kazakh (lat), Turkish, Acehnese, Banjar, Betawi, Bislama, Boholano, Cebuano, Chamorro, Fijian, Filipino, Hiri Motu, Ilocano, Indonesian, Javanese, Khasi, Malay, Marshallese, Minangkabau, Nauruan, Nias, Palauan, Rohingya, Salar, Samoan, Sasak, Sundanese, Tagalog, Tahi- tian, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Uyghur, Afar, Afrikaans, Asu, Aymara, Bemba, Bena, Chichewa, Chiga, Embu, Gusii, Jola-Fonyi, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Luba-Kasai, Luganda, Luo, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Ma- konde, Malagasy, Mauritian Creole, Morisyen, Ndebele, Nyankole, Oromo, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Sena, Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Soga, Somali, Sotho, Swahili, Swazi, Taita, Teso, Tsonga, Tswana, Vunjo, Wolof, Xhosa, Zulu, Ganda, Maori, Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian, Belarusian (lat), Bosnian (lat), Breton, Colognian, Cornish, Corsi- can, Esperanto, Faroese, Frisian, Friulian, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician, Interlingua, Judaeo-Spanish, Karaim (lat), Kashubian, Ladin, Leonese, Manx, Occitan, Rheto-Romance, Romansh, Scots, Silesian, Sorbian, Vastese, Volapük, Võro, Walloon, Welsh, Karakalpak (lat), Kurdish (lat), Talysh (lat), Tsakhur (Azerbaijan), Turkmen (lat), Zaza, Aleut (lat), Cree, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Innu-aimun, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karelian, Livvi-Karelian, Ludic, Tatar, Vepsian, Nahuatl, Quechua,, Russian, Belarusian (cyr), Bosnian (cyr), Bulgarian (cyr), Macedonian, Serbian (cyr), Ukrainian, Gagauz (cyr), Moldavian (cyr), Kazakh (cyr), Kirghiz, Tadzhik, Turkmen (cyr), Uzbek (cyr), Azerbaijan, Lezgian, Abazin, Agul, Archi, Avar, Dargwa, Ingush, Kabardian, Kab- ardino-Cherkess, Karachay-Balkar (cyr), Khvarshi, Kumyk, Lak, Nogai, Rutul, Tabasaran, Tsakhur, Altai, Buryat, Dolgan, Enets, Evenki, Ket, Khakass, Khanty, Komi-Permyak, Komi-Yazva, Komi-Zyrian, Manci, Shor, Siberian Tatar, Tofalar, Touva, Aleut (cyr), Alyutor, Even, Koryak, Nanai, Negidal’skij, Nivkh, Udege, Ulch, Bashkir, Chechen (cyr), Chukchi, Chuvash, Erzya, Eskimo, Kryashen Tatar, Mari-high, Mari-low, Mordvin-moksha, Nenets, Nganasan, Saami Kildin, Selkup, Tatar Volgaic, Udmurt, Yakut, Uighur, Rusyn, Karaim (cyr), Montenegrin (cyr), Romani (cyr), Dungan, Karakalpak (cyr), Shughni, Mongolian, Adyghe, Kalmyk, Talysh (cyr), Russian Old, Vietnamese

Compendium is a sequel to my Burgues font from 2007. Actually it is more like a prequel to Burgues. Before Louis Madarasz awed the American Southeast with his disciplined corners and wild hairlines, Platt Rogers Spencer, up in Ohio, had laid down a style all his own, a style that would eventually become the groundwork for the veering calligraphic method that was later defined and developed by Madarasz. After I wrote the above paragraph, I was so surprised by it, particularly by the first two sentences, that I stopped and had to think about it for a week. Why a sequel/prequel? Am I subconsciously joining the ranks of typeface-as-brand designers? Are the tools I build finally taking control of me? Am I having to resort to “milking it” now? Not exactly. Even though the current trend of extending older popular typefaces can play tricks with a type designer’s mind, and maybe even send him into strange directions of planning, my purpose is not the extension of something popular. My purpose is presenting a more comprehensive picture as I keep coming to terms with my obsession with 19th century American penmanship. Those who already know my work probably have an idea about how obsessive I can be about presenting a complete and detailed image of the past through today’s eyes. So it is not hard to understand my need to expand on the Burgues concept in order to reach a fuller picture of how American calligraphy evolved in the 19th century. Burgues was really all about Madarasz, so much so that it bypasses the genius of those who came before him. Compendium seeks to put Madarasz’s work in a better chronological perspective, to show the rounds that led to the sharps, so to speak. And it is nearly criminal to ignore Spencer’s work, simply because it had a much wider influence on the scope of calligraphy in general. While Madarasz’s work managed to survive only through a handful of his students, Spencer’s work was disseminated throughout America by his children after he died in 1867. The Spencer sons were taught by their father and were great calligraphers themselves. They would pass the elegant Spencerian method on to thousands of American penmen and sign painters. Though Compendium has a naturally more normalized, Spencerian flow, its elegance, expressiveness, movement and precision are no less adventurous than Burgues. Nearing 700 glyphs, its character set contains plenty of variation in each letter, and many ornaments for letter beginnings, endings, and some that can even serve to envelope entire words with swashy calligraphic wonder. Those who love to explore typefaces in detail will be rewarded, thanks to OpenType. I am so in love with the technology now that it’s becoming harder for me to let go of a typeface and call it finished. You probably have noticed by now that my fascination with old calligraphy has not excluded my being influenced by modern design trends. This booklet is an example of this fusion of influences. I am living 150 years after the Spencers, so different contextualization and usage perspectives are inevitable. Here the photography of Gonzalo Aguilar join the digital branchings of Compendium to form visuals that dance and wave like the arms of humanity have been doing since time eternal. I hope you like Compendium and find it useful. I'm all Spencered out for now, but at one point, for history’s sake, I will make this a trilogy. When the hairline-and-swash bug visits me again, you will be the first to know. The PDF specimen was designed with the wonderful photography of Gonzalo Aguilar from Mexico. Please download it here http://new.myfonts.com/artwork?id=47049&subdir=original

I spend a lot of time following two obsessions: packaging and hand lettering. Alongside a few other minor obsessions, those two have been my major ones for so many years now, I've finally reached the point where I can actually claim them as “obsessions” without getting a dramatic reaction from the little voice in the back of my head. When you spend so much time researching and studying a subject, you become very focused, directionally and objectively. But of course some of the research material you run into turns out to be tangential to whatever your focus happens to be at the time, so you absorb what you can from it, then shelf it — like the celebrity bobblehead that amused you for a while, but is now an almost invisible ornament eating dust and feathers somewhere in your environment. And just like the bobblehead may fall off the shelf one day to remind you of its existence, some of my lettering research material unveiled itself in my head one day for no particular reason. Hand lettering is now mostly perceived as an American art. Someone with my historical knowledge about lettering may be snooty enough to go as far as pointing out the British origins of almost everything American, including lettering — but for the most part, the contemporary perspective associates great lettering with America. The same perspective also associates blackletter, gothics and sans serifs with Germany. So you can imagine my simultaneous surprise and impatience when, in my research for one of my American lettering-based fonts, I ran into a German lettering book from 1953, by an artist called Bentele. It was no use for me because it didn't propel my focus at that particular time, but a few months ago I was marveling at what we take for granted — the sky is blue, blackletter is German, lettering is American — and found myself flipping through the pages of that book again. The lettering in that book is upbeat and casual sign making stuff, but it has a slightly strange and youthful experimentation at its heart. I suppose I find it strange because it deviates a lot from the American stuff I'm used to working with for so long now. To make a long story short, what’s inside that German book served as the semilla, which is Spanish for seed, for the typeface you see all over these pages. With Semilla, my normal routine went out the window. My life for a while was all Bezier all the time. No special analog or digital brushes or pens were used in drawing these forms. They're the product of a true Bezier process, all starting with a point creating a curve to another point, which draws a curve to another point, and so on. It’s a very time-consuming process, but at the end I am satisfied that it can get to pretty much the same results easier and more traditional methods accomplish. And as usual with my fonts, the OpenType is plenty and a lot of fun. Experimenting with substitution and automation is still a great pleasure for me. It is the OpenType that always saves me from the seemingly endless work hours every type designer must inevitably have to face at one point in his career. The artful photos used in this booklet are by French photographer and designer Stéphane Giner. He is very deserving of your patronage, so please keep an eye out for his marvelous work. I hope you like Semilla and enjoy using it. I have a feeling that it marks a transition to a more curious and flexible period in my career, but only time will tell.