Write like the inventor of the diesel engine — it’s possible with the Diesel Rudolf Script (patterned after the original handwriting of Rudolf Diesel)... In 2008 the city of Augsburg and the MAN Group celebrated the 150th birthday of Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine which was named after him. With the help of a few preserved original letters, it was possible to create a convincing digital version of Rudolf Diesel’s personal handwriting. The engineer and inventor Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris in 1858 and also went to school there. In1870 his family moved to England and Rudolf was sent to relatives in Augsburg where he continued going to school. Later, after completing his studies in Munich, he began working as an engineer in the machine factory Linde. Alone this part of his life makes clear why Rudolf Diesel’s handwriting was so ”jerky,“ hesitant and inconsistent. He learned to write according to the French style, that is, Latin cursive — completely different from the very correct and neat German handwriting taught at that time which he had to learn at 13 years of age. These circumstances explain why his handwriting is ”messy“ (especially for those days) with its mixtures of letter forms within a text, even within individual words. Plus, he obviously did not attach much importance to ”pretty writing.“ Sometimes the characters are wide, then narrow, sometimes large and clear and then again crammed and primitive. The individuality is emphasized with characteristics derived from quill and ink. The diversified images of the font Diesel Rudolf Script make more than 80 ligatures and stylistic alternates possible which can be selected with help from the OpenType functions Ligatures and Discretional Ligatures.

Green Fairy is a chromatic font family highly ornamented for display purposes. Green Fairy’s characters have been specifically designed to accommodate its loops and ornaments following a modern typeface structure. Green Fairy has four chromatic weights: 1. Green Fairy Outline 2. Green Fairy Dots 3. Green Fairy Stencil 4. Green Fairy Full The outline weight has been created as the base or structure for the other weights. You can combine these weights as well as add colours to obtain multiple effects and type styles. Green Fairy has also three combined weights (combos) to simplify your work flow, for these occasions when you only want to use one single colour in your font: 5. Green Fairy Dots Combo 6. Green Fairy Stencil Combo 7. Green Fairy Full Combo GREEN FAIRY ORIGINS The origin of this typeface is the lettering I designed in October 2015 as part of my illustrated cocktail artwork called “Absinthe. La Fée Verte (The Green Fairy)”. Originally, this lettering only featured eight letters “AB·SINTHE” vector drawn in Illustrator. Right after creating the full-colour artwork, I designed a fountain-letterpress print version of it, in collaboration with Ladies of Letters, A.K.A. Carla Hackett and Amy Constable from Saint Gertrude Fine Printing. At the beginning of 2016 –and thanks to the project @36daysoftype– I found the motivation, and most importantly the deadline, to draw the rest of the twenty-six letters of the uppercase alphabet using Illustrator. I started 2017 having my first two calligraphy courses sold out, so I took this amazing opportunity to devote myself to Green Fairy for a few months. In February 2017, I purchased the font software Glyphs and I started to re-draw all twenty-six letters of the uppercase alphabet again. PRODUCTION PROCESS Green Fairy started being one weight, but quickly turned into a layered/chromatic font. Things were going more or less fine till I arrived to the Dots weight: 1) I started drawing squares following a grid; 2) Then, the squares turned into diamonds following the same grid; 3) Then, the grid wasn’t working so well on the round letters so I tried randomising the position of the diamonds but it didn’t work; 4) So I went back to the grid, and this time scaled down the size of the diamonds creating a visual half-tone effect. I spent over four weeks working on the Dots weight and I felt like I was in the middle of a very long tunnel and I couldn’t see the light at the end. I encountered many other problems along the way but by June 2017, I felt I was back on track again. I kept working, tweaking, re-drawing and re-adjusting, and then the diacritics came on board… And then more re-drawing, re-tweaking, re-adjusting and then numbers… And then spacing, symbols, and currencies… And then more spacing, kerning, contextual kerning for triplets… In September 2017 I told myself “that’s it, I’m going to finish it now!” But guess what? More re-tweaking, testing, hinting, testing, rendering, testing… For those of you not familiarized with typeface design, it is extremely time consuming and it requires a lot of hard work, focus and determination. This project could not have been possible without the help of these generous professionals: Jose Manuel Urós, typeface designer based in Barcelona and my teacher twice in the past; Jamie Clarke, freelance letterer and typeface designer who has released a couple of chromatic fonts recently; Troy Leinster, Australian full-time typeface designer living and working in New York City; Noe Blanco, full-time typeface designer and hinting specialist based in Catalonia; And Nicole Phillips, typographer currently relocating from Australia to New Zealand. To all of you: THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Update November 2022: ULGA Grid now features an oblique variant. It’s also been expanded into a family of different but related designs with the addition of ULGA Grid Solid and ULGA Grid Rounded typeface families. All variants and new designs are monospaced, sharing the same width as the original ULGA Grid font and matching character sets. The character set has also been enlarged and now supports Western Europe, Vietnamese, Central/Eastern Europe, Baltic, Turkish and Romanian. ULGA Grid is a modular, monospaced typeface reminiscent of the old Letraset LCD & Quartz typefaces from the 1970/80s with lots of alternative characters and ornaments to bring a fresh twist to the genre. The idea’s seed germinated while I was going through a phase of binge watching my favourite 1980/90s sci-fi movies (classics such as Terminator, Total Recall and RoboCop). However, perception and reality don’t always align. Thirty years later, when compared to today’s technology, some visual elements look kind of outdated, almost Retro Futuristic. The initial design process started out in Adobe Illustrator when I constructed letters from a few geometric shapes within a square block. Just playing around with different shapes was so engrossing that it wasn’t long before there were enough characters for a basic typeface. The project grew again as I experimented with designs within the shapes and set paragraphs of text in patterns, resulting in over a hundred alternative characters and ornaments, some of which double up as border designs. This typeface may be square but it’s anything but boring. What it lacks in legibility ULGA Grid makes up for in style and the end result is a surprisingly versatile typeface that you'll have fun using for a wide range of display purposes including CD covers, posters, packaging, advertising, brochures and film titles. Ironically, the fixed grid structure frees the characters to create patterns of text not possible with variable widths.

Mantika Book was originally conceived and drawn parallel to the first Agilita drawings. *[images: pencil drawings] It took several years before having a chance looking at these designs again. But then, my first impulse was to turn this alphabet into a new sanserif, which was to become Mantika Sans. This was the starting point to conceive a super family consisting of different design styles and corresponding weights. The initial drawings of Mantika Book were refined and an Italic was developed to go with it. The aim was to create a modern serif typeface which is reminiscent of humanistic Renaissance typefaces, yet without following a particular historic model. Its large x-height for one is far away from original Renaissance models. Mantika Book was designed as a companion serif typeface to Mantika Sans that can be set for lengthy texts as in books, hence its name. It shares the same x-height with Mantika Sans but has longer ascenders and descenders, making for better word shapes in long, continuous reading. The approach of an ›old-style‹ looking typeface with large minuscules makes Mantika Book also a choice for magazine text settings where one often needs smaller point sizes to fit in a multiple columns layout. The unique details of Mantika Book are the asymetric bracketed serifs in the upright font and its higher stroke contrast than usual in a Renaissance style. The stems are slightly curved inwards. Also, the Italics have a low degree of inclination, which makes longer passages of text set in Italic rather pleasing to read. Another feature Mantika Book shares with Mantika Sans is that all four weights take up the same line length. It covers all European languages plus Cyrillic and Greek, is equipped with lots of useful scientific symbols [double square brackets, angle brackets, empty set, arrows] and the regular weight has small caps. There is a kind of an old-style feeling to Mantika Book, yet these citations were turned into a contemporary serif typeface with a soft but sturdy character.

Meet the new TT Trailers! The first version of TT Trailers was conceived as a font suitable for the film industry. The font harmoniously looks in posters, it is ideally suited for setting titles. However, the font has gained wide popularity among designers, and now you can find TT Trailers on the covers of magazines, on restaurant signs and on the main pages of websites. TT Trailers useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options Since 2019 when we released the first version, the TypeType studio team has released dozens of fonts, constantly improving our skills. In 2022, we decided to look at TT Trailers again, improving and expanding the font. In the new TT Trailers, we expanded the character set, corrected the contours, and improved the technical content. We have added extended Latin and Cyrillic characters, new symbols, and additional sets of numbers. The number of glyphs in one style has increased from 1081 to 1242. The inclined styles were long-awaited. The italics in TT Trailers are as eccentric as the upright fonts. The 15-degree tilt looks absolutely harmonious, complementing the character of the font family. We added italics to the variable font, so the new font changes along two axes at once, weight and slant. From the technical point of view, TT Trailers has become more modern and correct, and the number of OpenType features has increased from 29 to 42. We have added new alternative versions of glyphs and created a large number of localized features. The font retained all the qualities thanks to which designers fell in love with it, but became even more convenient. TT Trailers in the new version is suitable for titles and posters, for websites and printed materials. The font will embellish in restaurant and cafe signs and look beautiful in posters. There are 19 styles in TT Trailers: 9 upright, 9 italic and 1 variable font.

What do you imagine the ideal casual invitation font would look like? It has to be cheerful, inviting, legible, creative, and loads of fun. But first and foremost, it has to look like real handwriting. Fonts seeming like real handwriting are always a major task, and although Canada Type already has plenty of fonts that solve the “looks like handwriting” issue in a variety of ways, we're once again raising the bar a little higher with this one. Birthday is a massive package that crosses the traditional font/handwriting solution of 2-letter ligatures and waltzes into the land of 3-letter combinations. Plenty of them, too! The complete Postscript and True Type versions of Birthday ship with no less than five separate fonts full of nothing but ligatures. And for even more realism, an alternates font is also included in the package, for a total of seven fonts of happy handwriting that can be used anywhere and everywhere personalization is of importance to a layout. For layout artists with advanced typography tools that take advantage of the power of OpenType, Birthday Pro is a wunderkind. All the individual letter alternates are accessible through the Stylistic Alternates feature, the 2-letter ligatures through the standard Ligatures feature, and the 3-letter ligatures via the Discretionary Ligatures feature (for the technically inclined: this includes a nice liga-to-dlig crossover, where the maximum number of possible ligated letters is automatically chosen at the push of a button). If you enjoy using OpenType, Birthday Pro is definitely for you. If on the other hand you like your fonts in Postsript or True Type, it is advisable to keep a character map handy while using Birthday. You will need it to take advantage of the many, many alternates and ligatures distributed over the fonts. The next time someone asks you for the perfect casual invitation font is, look no further. And as usually is with Canada Type, quality fonts are more affordable than ever.

In the sketches that formed the basis for his typeface Biome, Crossgrove experimented with inner and outer shapes in different styles, adapted letters to the form of the super-ellipse, and added curves only to remove these again. His challenge was to find a harmonious and coherent approach that provided sufficient contrast with existing fonts. Biome is essentially in the sans serif tradition and the letters exhibit only minor variations in terms of line thickness. There is still a suggestion of the super-ellipse at many points, but this never becomes the predominant design factor. While most of the terminals of the vertical strokes are only slightly rounded, the horizontals and diagonals have pronounced arches and it is these that basically determine the round and soft character of the typeface. The more unconventionally shaped letters, such as the lowercase 'g' with its two semi-open counters and the 'k' and 'x' with their crossbars, provide Biome with an individual personality. And this effect is emphasized by the generously rounded links in the 'v' and 'w' and the uppercase 'M' and 'N'. Biome has been designed as a typeface super-family. From the near hairline Extra Light to the amply proportioned Ultra, there are seven clearly differentiated weights and three tracking widths. There are oblique italic versions of all variants. The range includes small caps and numeral sets containing lowercase and uppercase digits. With its available range of characters, Biome can be used to set texts in all Eastern European languages. Although the remarkable individuality of Biome is most clearly apparent in the larger point sizes, this typeface is not just suitable for producing headlines and logos. Biome's elegant visual effects mean that it is equally comfortable in short texts while its large x-height and generous counters make it readily legible even in the small font sizes. Biome is a contemporary typeface that employs mid-20th century futurist elements which ironically give it a retro feel.

Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed. Elegant but with that distance that well-defined forms seem to impose. Her voice, however, was sweeter, closer, and when she spoke her name, like a slow whisper, one felt like what she had come to say could be read in her image. Rufina's story can only be told through a detour because her origin does not coincide with her birth. Rufina was born on a Sunday afternoon while her father was drawing black letters on a white background, and her mother was trying to join those same letters to form words that could tell a story. But her origin goes much further back, and that is why she is pierced by a story that precedes her, even though it is not her own. Maybe her origin can be traced back to that autumn night in which that tall man with that distant demeanor ran into that woman with that sweet smile and elegant aspect. He looked at her in such a way that he was trapped by that gaze, even though they found no words to say to each other, and they stayed in silence. Somehow, some words leaked into that gaze because since that moment they were never apart again. Later, after they started talking, projects started coming up and then coexistence and arguments, routines and mismatches. But in that chaos of crossed words in their life together, something was stable through the silence of the gazes. In those gazes, the silent words sustained that indescribable love that they didn't even try to understand. And in one of those silences, Rufina appeared, when that man told that woman that he needed a text to try out his new font, and she saw him look at her with that same fascination of the first time, and she started to write something with those forms that he was giving her as a gift. Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed, wrote her mother when Rufina was born.

The silent film »The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari« (1920) is undoubtedly one of the breathtaking milestones within the German Expressionist Movement, a time of extraordinarily creative works of art as a reaction to a world in rapid change. The original intertitles of Caligari were worked out by the set designers (and painters) Walter Reimann, Walter Röhrig, and Hermann Warm, using a unique expressionistic language of form for dramatic and iconic lettering. When in 2010 KOMA AMOK’s Joerg Ewald Meißner and Gerd Sebastian Jakob were commissioned by the Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt and publisher Hatje Cantz to design the catalog for the exhibition »The Total Artwork in Expressionism«—showing works of art, architecture, film, literature, theater, and dance—it was soon perfectly clear that a new typeface, inspired by the Caligari intertitles, should speak for all the expressionistic arts. An intense process of research and analysis began. The original letters of the Caligari intertitles were individuals on their own. Furthermore, each of the three title designers had added his specific approach to the basic Caligari type style. From hundreds of different As to Zs a choice had to be made, which should be THE characteristic Caligari letter for a digital typesetting font. Finally the chosen letters were cut and drawn again, missing letters were added according to the formal priniciples, all-in-all 1000 glyphs were digitised to complete a usefull OpenType font ready for use. When in the autumn of 2010 the exhibition started successfully with great media interest, the posters all over Darmstadt announced »You must become Caligari!« – set in the brandnew typeface. The font Caligari Pro offers alternative forms for every letter and a whole bunch of ligatures, thus creating an expressive, individual image of headlines and text. By using included Stylistic Alternates the image will get even more vivid. Caligari comes with a complete set of expressionist ornaments and true old style figures—thus the heyday of the Expressionist Movement and the era of the silent films can be revived typographically by the means of today: »Express Yourself!«.

Paralucent is versatile all-purpose modern sans. Available in seven weights, from Thin to Heavy, and in two widths each with corresponding italics, it avoids some of the more eccentric calligraphic quirks of Akzidenz or Helvetica or the cool precision of Univers for an elegant, functional, yet warm design. There are two additions to the core 28-weight family: a three-weight stencil set, and a four weight text family. The text weights have been adjusted for use at small point sizes, and feature more open character shapes, looser inter-letter spacing for improved readability, and lining numerals for use in listings and tables. Several core ideas inform Paralucent’s design. Prime attention has given to the negative space between characters, giving a more even “colour”, especially in text. For example, the J, L and T have shorter arms than comparable sans typefaces, while the M and W are wider. The A has a lower bar, opening up the interior counter. An unusually high lower-case x-height again helps to give a more even colour and improve legibility. Care has been taken to rationalise repeated elements like the tails on lower-case letters, or the Q and the “ear” of the g. Typographic design solutions that are consistent across all these features add more stylistic cohesion. ‘Ink traps’ are exaggerated incisions used to open up a letter's narrower internal angles, which can become clogged with ink, especially in small point sizes. Now largely redundant due to the high quality of modern print, they are still sometimes used as a stylistic quirk or design feature. Now that digital fonts are often reversed or outlined, or enlarged to enormous sizes, these can also lead to unexpected or obtrusive results. Paralucent takes these inevitable digital manipulations into account, and adds optical corrections without resort to ink traps. The family has been picked up by many UK and US publishers, featuring heavily in magazines like Loaded, Heat and TV Quick, as well as high-end coffee-table photography books and gallery websites. A perennial Device bestseller.

I've always been in love with fat didones. That’s the reason of Posh. In search of something unique, I started this family back in 2013 with the aim of creating the fattest yet readable bodonian typeface in the market: It was a challenge, because roman fonts need generous counters (or what some call white spaces) and taking them to the extreme of inexistence attempted against the construction of many glyphs. Ears, dots, terminals and serifs always need some extra space so I had to find the exact point of boldness to make characters which have those attributes work well in the middle of those which haven't. (1) After a while, I felt I was again ‘in my element’: Big contrasted letters, sexy and elegant curves, and that Lubalinesque feeling that characterise my fonts. (2) Words written with Posh are a explosion of elegance and sensuality due to the fact that its didone attributes were exaggerated. Since it’s full of alternate glyphs, one can change and choose them until a nice block of ‘‘black’’ is achieved. (3) To accompany the regular style, I designed Posh Inline, a font with the same quantity of glyphs than the regular one; an all caps style called Posh Capitals, and also a really playful Italic version. I hope you find this one delicious like I do! This font is dedicated to all who understand letters are not just meant to be read, but also to be appreciated in group and individually. Enjoy it. NOTES (1) In example, it can be easy to design a fat letter ‘n’ with almost no counter, but really tough to make a satisfactory letter ‘s’ with serifs to match that ‘n’. (2) Also, it wasn't my first attempt in fat didones. Take a look at my font Reina, made in 2012. (3) Posters above show many words with ball terminals that seem to dance above and below the words in order to fill those “undesired” blank spaces.