Several years ago I was faced with a project that required very small type to be used in a directory. In general, there was a need for a lot of 'fine print'. Faced with this, all of the tests I was making with existing faces were producing too much bleed of the individual glyphs...Cynapse was born. It evolved into this pseduo-techy looking type that standardized and glorified the ink trap (the small, tiny allowances of white space that reduces the amount of ink hitting the page, and in effect, reducing the appearance of bleed). The results was promising. The new OT version contains additional OpenType features that include expanded ligature sets, fractions, 5 sets of numerals as well as small caps and Central European diacritics.

This is the kind of letters I drew in school back in the 1980ies. I would never have guessed that I would do the same thing like 40 years later! I remember making a simple space game for my VIC-20 computer, and I needed some "data letters" (as I called it) - as far as I can remember, this is close to what I made 40-like years ago. Also, I was inspired by the well known series "Stranger Things" - you know, all that 80ies theme stuff took me down memory lane! :) Anyway, all the letters are handdrawn, using a squared paper as guide - at it may look simple, but it took me quite some time to finish this font (hence the name!)

Some time ago, I found myself in a clinic with my wife: at the time she was 20 weeks pregnant and had to do an ultrasound. To pass the time, I leafed through some (ladies') magazines which were lying around. Most of them tackled big issues like which shoes to wear and what type of foundation to plaster on, but one glossy featured a photo shoot. The photographer had found an old building with a beautiful art deco tile mural and had placed his skinny model in front of it. Fortunately for me, the mural featured a lot of text in a beautiful frilly style. I re-created the font I saw and it became "Jubileum" - which just means Jubilee in Dutch.

Some time ago I stumbled upon a little book called 'De Sprookjeshoorn' ('Horn of Fairy Tales') by Anton Eijkens (1920 - 2012). It was published in 1946 and contains several authentic and unique fairy tales - unfortunately unreadable to modern children, as the language used is out of date. What caught my eye was the handwritten font on the cover of the booklet. Closet Skeleton is a fairytale font inspired by the one I found on the cover of De Sprookjeshoorn. It comes with several curly alternates and some end-ligatures as well. I added an 'old fashioned' ampersand and a modern one, so you can choose which one to use. Apart from that, Closet Skeleton comes with a closet choc-a-block full of diacritics.

Attention Space Rangers -- the Race into Space is on again! Science Fiction long ago became Science Fact and scientists are looking Beyond Earth, Beyond the Moon to Mars, Infinity -- and BEYOND! Comicraft’s Ace Rocket Scientist and Secret Weapon, John “Buzz” Roshell has spent years in our Underground Laboratory developing Accelerated Font Technology for the Space Age in which we live. SPACE RACE has curved contours and a sleek fuselage that will ensure our Rangers will be the FIRST WOMEN (and MEN) on planets in this Solar System and those of other stars! Now available for less than the cost of powdered astronaut ice cream. Space Race has been expanded into Hyperspace Race, a forty-weight family with a variable font.

If you are like me, you love to doodle in a sketchbook when traveling abroad to capture the indescribable moments that a camera or video would miss. Years ago, on a trip to Spain, I penned out this fanciful handwritten script and just fell in love with it. I came across that old sketchbook recently, and the love affair was renewed. Gonte brings back all of the magic and charm of that trip, and I hope that it will bring a little magic to whatever flights of fancy you might use it for. Double letter Ligatures, Contextual Swashes to start and finish letterforms, and Stylistic Alternates for the lowercase v and w all lend to keeping the carefree hand-penned style.

The term Old West conjures up memories of vintage movies and TV shows featuring saloons and dancehall girls. Old wanted posters and cowboys. Rowdy prospectors in the Goldrush, mountains and lots of wide open space. Many of the lettering styles of those days are still in use, reflecting the past, present, and probably the future here. Western style fonts appear in the signage of bars, restaurants, casinos and ski areas. It's a style that speaks of the way it once was in a nostalgic way. This family of three fonts pays tribute to the Old West and its colorful history, with a semi-plain style, a decorated style, and a really lively rendition of our gaudy and raucous history from a century or more ago.

“Byblos” is the name of a town in Lebanon and the name of a famous hotel in St. Tropez. Some time ago I discovered their original logo in an old french magazine, just 5 by 3 centimeters small without any text, address, telephone number not even a picture. They did not need that, that’s how famous the hotel and its old logo was. Well they abandoned their identity when the place was sold to a big chain – I think. But the logotype, just those five letters inspired me to this new font. It evokes times past and has a little Bauhaus in it – as well as a really modern touch, all depends on the way you use it. Your strange typedesigner Gert Wiescher

Years ago, I developed an interest in the Japanese art of dwarfed potted trees, bonsai. I bought some books on the subject from Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In one -- Handbook on Bonsai: Special Techniques (seventh printing, February 1976) -- the type was bad. Old worn lead type, I suspect, spread wide in the tops of characters and disappearing on the bottoms. Two decades later, I came across my Brooklyn Botanic Garden collection and was struck again by this interesting type. Inspired, I made a typeface. Didn't take me long to decide on a name for it, either: a name with a double-meaning, based both on its look and its inspiration. Bonsai, the typeface, has two styles, a roman and a true italic.

Rotulo Variable is a contrasted sans family which combines the Thick & Thin signpainter's style and some 70s feeling in a huge font family with three axis: Width, Weight and Slant. A visit to an exhibition of Spanish movie posters by Jano was the beginning of Rótulo (Spanish for Sign) project. Classic thick & thin signpainter style was featured in many letterings of those posters, as it was a very common style in 60s and 70s Spanish design. Unfortunately, today very few Contrasted Sans are seen, something that was quite common years ago has fallen into disuse in favor of Helvetic monotony. Rótulo recapture all that personality, with an extense range of weights and widths to be used in striking headlines and short texts.

You can hear the wheels of imagination turning within this font - Grit Gothic, from Grit History™ B Series, by Baseline Fonts. Both highly stylized and very legible, the extreme height of this font can give even a goblin vertigo. Extended X heights create lowercase that adventurously reach up through extended shoulders and spines while persistent grunge warns of skinned knees that may result along the climb. It’s easy to envision children’s rallying cries in Grit Gothic, perfect for book titles, film titles, poster headlines, and any other epic that needs a strong font with a dark edge of mystery and wonder. This font is rife with personality, including large and daunting punctuation, whittled wood-look vertical bars that berate and argue with beveled bowls, ascenders that attempt to intimidate one another with their height variances, and tittles that bully one another, as they're a variety of context dependent sizes. Grit Gothic is available in Regular and Bold with full Greek-lettered foreign language support.

Anca typeface started as a comission work for Fest Anca, an international animation festival. They needed something to complement the corporate identity of the festival. Inspiration came from a sketch made by my friend long time ago, which had a tremendous potential. As letters were digitized and the basic alphabet was completed, a very practical and universal typeface resulted. The whole type family has a playful and simple look with rounded stroke endings as well as long ascenders. The construction skeleton uses the minimum number of strokes and as a consequence, some original letter shapes (Q, w, j, &, A, §) were produced. Despite the fact that most letter shapes are based on geometry, some strokes are intentionally irregular, which creates a very natural feeling. Anca is appropriate for setting short paragraphs, headings and big inscriptions.

Raclette grills are an ingenious Swiss invention. This tabletop grill is used to cook raclette cheese, a unique sort of cheese produced by the happy cows of Valais. Swiss designer Michael Parson created a typeface in 2002 that speaks endearingly to his hearty homeland tradition - endearingly enough, he named it Raclette. Raclette most likely started out as a bold, condensed sans serif. But then, just as one pulls little trays off of a raclette grill, Parsons quickly removed many rectilinear bits from the edges of each letter. Text set in Raclette looks like an old brick wall, or perhaps like a raclette party for several hundred people, that ended an hour ago! Raclette is one of ten of Michael Parson's experiments in type design featured in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH."

Years ago, by happenstance, designers Nancy Mazzei and Brian Kelly found an old decrepit typewriter in an abandoned lot with tall grass in Brooklyn. They kept it around their apartment for two years. Then one day they decided that it was time to move and they planned to throw the old typewriter away. But it was so beautiful they wanted to keep at least a part of it. So they decided on keeping the keys. They kept the keys in a brown bag until one fine day the keys were introduced to a camera. It was a match made in heaven that resulted in some beautiful quirky images of typewriter keys. These images were the inspiration for Backspacer. They were scanned, traced and turned into a working typeface by Zuzana Licko.

During the spring of 2006, while creating this typeface, I was reading Praying For Gil Hodges, by Tom Oliphant, who grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. I grew up a Los Angeles Dodgers fan. My mother worked as secretary to the president of the old Triple A LA Angels Baseball Team. In 1952 when she was pregnant with me, she left the team. They gave her an autographed baseball and a puppy named Angel. That's the dog I grew up with. Toward the end of the book the author talks about Gil Hodges' favorite ballplayer, a slugger for the LA Angels, Jigger Statz. I thought, could it be? My mother died two years ago and I got the team baseball. Sure enough, the first name after the dedication to my mother was Jigger Statz.

Some years ago I had my first contact with a grotesque typeface, when handling a sample catalog of typographic specimens from the age of phototypesetting. The style eventually settled in my memory waiting for the work of time. Behind its apparent neutrality, there is a complex balance game, that almost leads to the basic principles of design which deliver such power to the grotesque style. Stevie Sans is the answer to the action of time. A bridge that allows the designer to go into the past, while being in the present and looking towards the future. It is what it’s expected from a grotesque designed in the 21st century. With 7 roman styles ranging from thin to black, support to many languages and essential opentype features, Stevie Sans is the ideal choice for your project.

How should an authentic baudelairean type look like? Aesthetically beautiful, that’s for sure. Intellectual, neurotic. Uptight — oh, the conventions of the time. Easily readable — still 20 years to go until the age of art nouveau with its outrage of typefaces. It may have a vibe of a Paris salon - salute to the Parnassiens. Such a modern-class (don’t mix it with the modern-styled) pharmaceutical Antiqua. Contrasts, thin serifs, the integrity of the operating theatre. But Baudelaire is not Heredia. «Une charogne» is not that much a vivid metaphor as a drawing from nature. The baudelairean typeface should have its cavern, flow, dark side. Not to demonstrate the fragile romantic profile of a cursed poet, as Baudelaire was seen 130 years ago, but to express the real pain. A true, unattractive, egoistic, suicidal passion.

My daily challenge is how to get my kids out of bed, feed them breakfast, get them to dress, wash and pack their school bags and drop them off at school before the bell rings. The rest of the day, the challenge is to renovate our house, get my work done, pick up the kids from school (plus all of their friends, who want to come and play) and cook dinner. Of course, the word ‘challenge’ was misused by the internet. Not too long ago, there seemed to be and endless stream of crazy challenges that ended up hurting or even killing a few people. Daily Challenge font is none of the above: it is a clean cut, 100% handmade, all caps font. The only challenge here is how to adapt your design so it fits this font perfectly… ;-)

Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, Baseball and great TYPOGRAPHY are deeply rooted in American culture. American Auto is a Type Family that embodies that culture visually. It joins a robust workhorse sans with a playful script that brings you back to 70+ years ago, while at the same time remaining as contemporary as any new 2019 design. This unique pair work together in harmony to create wonderful designs for a variety of uses. From book covers to posters, web sites to apps, American Auto is an excellent choice to create striking designs that stand out from the crowd! American Auto also features many Opentype Features such as: Alternate Characters, Initial & Final Forms, Contextual Alternates, Old Style Figures, Lining Figures, Numerators & Denominators, Fractions, and more! This typeface has really been designed to meet any challenge that a designer can throw at it!

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar had an exotic name for a historic Texan, but he left his mark beginning in 1836, the year of Texas independence and the first year that pioneers other than mountain men made their way West. Lamar went on to become the young republic’s first elected vice-president (to President Houston) and second president -- and to author a number of interesting letters in his elegant, stylish hand. (Mirabeau B. Lamar grew up a well-to-do southerner from Georgia, and his penmanship shows it.) One of the most interesting aspects of designing old handwriting fonts, to me, is pausing to reflect on the actual moment that the letter-writer is sitting at his or her desk or table, pen in hand, putting thoughts to words -- 150 to 200 years ago. Has a complete character set, and plenty more.

Some time ago, when we were working on our Merrivale family, it occurred to us that an adaptation of the design, incorporating selected Blackletter elements, would be in the best traditions of 19th and 20th century blackletter revivals, which combine all the spirit of the middle ages with modern legibility-think of Goudy Medieval as an example. In the case of Merrivaux (best quality faux-medieval name there!) we've produced a typeface which has the ready legibility of Roman titling, but which gives a subtle blackletter feel. The regular form of Merrivaux is incised with a visible midline, a solid form with identical metrics is also offered. Both forms include a range of opentype features including ligatures, fractions, old style numerals and terminal forms. Merrivaux is ideal for posters, signage and design work, where a touch of that 'Olde-Worlde' feel is needed.

Several years ago I was asked to do a sign for a rummage sale. To print the words RUMMAGE SALE, I took letters from some of the ornate fonts I was working on at the time. I liked the results, so made them into a font. Fonts from which the letters come include HippityDippity, Tuskcandy, Letunical, OakPark, WyomingStrudel, NeuAltisch, WyomingMacroni, WyomingPastad, and Rundigsburg. The original typeface had two variants of each letter, one on the upper-case keys and the other on the lower-case keys. The name of the original font, RummageSaleOne, acknowledged that a greater selection of letters was desirable but it was only with the upgrade of 2020 that the greater selection was added. The additional variants were added in two ways: as a separate typeface (RummageSale-Two) and also as OpenType stylistic alternatives.

Goudy Forum is a revival and dramatic expansion by Tom Rickner, type designer at Ascender Corporation, of Frederic W. Goudy’s 20th typeface design, "Forum Title". The Pro font began twenty years ago while Tom Rickner was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Tom printed a type specimen using the Forum Title foundry hot metal types. Then in 1993 Tom began to digitize the font from that specimen while working as an independent type designer. Fifteen years passed before Tom dusted off the digital data and began working in earnest on font with a full Latin 1 character set. Steve Matteson, type director at Ascender, encouraged Tom to take this font further still, and soon the glyph repertoire and feature set blossomed to a robust Pro font with a myriad of advanced typographic OpenType features.

As a family, we love to go camping. We have a big Norwegian tunnel tent (4 season - with room for a wood stove), some really warm down sleeping bags and a primitive field kitchen. Even though our camping trips are usually devoid of luxury, the kids love them! We always choose campsites that are close to nature, like a national park or in the mountains. A couple of years ago, we toured the southern part of England and one of our camping stops was in Exmoor National Park. Minehead is a small coastal town, not far from where we camped, so I named this font after a fond memory! Minehead is a handmade display font. It was loosely based on Haettenschweiler. Use it for your packaging, your tourist information leaflets and your book covers. And do visit Minehead one day!

Hesse Antiqua is the very first typeface designed by Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. It was a pioneering project originally created by her over 70 years ago as a set of brass punches to stamp into leather book covers and spines at the Bauer Type Foundry in Germany. In celebration of her 100th birthday on 2 January 2018, Ferdinand Ulrich and the Monotype Studio team collaborated with her to bring her brass punches to live as a digital font. Hesse Antiqua was developed with careful considerations and decisions to capture the nuance of the beautiful letterforms as they originally appeared in gold and blind stampings. We are pleased to introduce this modern OpenType typeface featuring a proper set of capitals and small capitals, figures, punctuation and some ornaments as well. Hesse Antiqua is best used at 36 points and above, as the designer intended.

Ten years ago, I introduced a package of Ruqah fonts, with the most prominent being Ruqah Light, Ruqah Regular, and Ruqah Bold. Today, I am thrilled to announce the renewal of these 3 fonts, with improved design and more beautiful lettering. My goal is to eventually create a computerized Ruqah font that closely mimics handwriting. I encourage creators and designers to give this package of Ruqah fonts a try, as they offer great artistic potential and versatility in various creative projects. من عشر سنوات مضت، قدمت حزمة من خطوط الرقعة، من بينها الخط الرقعة الثقيل والخط الرقعة الخفيف. اليوم، أعيد تجديد هذه ٣ خطوط وجعل حروفها أجمل للمساعدة في الوصول تدريجيا إلى خط الرقعة الرقمي القريب من الكتابة اليدوية. فليجرب المبدعون هذه الحزمة من خطوط الرقعة، لأن هذا الخط قادر على التكيف الفني في مختلف المشاريع الإبداعية.

Argentinean designer Eduardo Manso created the Bohemia type family in 2003. Bohemia's cunning and elegant essence shows off refined letters that evoke the Transitional style typefaces like Baskerville, though most Baskerville-like designs tend not to be as curvaceous as Manso's! True to form, Bohemia shines in smaller text sizes, like 9 point and above, while still maintaining a unique character and spirit. Bohemia is a great alternative to better-known text faces. The critics have been raving. Bohemia came to Linotype via its fourth International Type Design Contest (ITDC) [Link] in 2003, where it received one of the three top awards. Under the name Argot, this typeface received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club of New York in 2004. Bohemia was also selected for inclusion in the 21st International Biennale of Graphic Design 2004 in Brno, Czech Republic, and was later named one of the most relevant works in the Bienal Letras Latinas 2004 exhibition, which traveled through Buenos Aires, San Paolo, Santiago, and Vera Cruz."

A few days ago, my good friend David from Hanoded.com visited me for a few days. We drank a lot of coffee and walked the streets of Copenhagen - we even took a trip up in Rundetårn! :) Well, on one of our walk (of course looking for inspiration for new fonts) we spotted this handmade sign. We agreed to make a font of the 7 letters available, using our own imagination and style! I called my font Mundbind DK and David named his Mundbind NL - of course it is the landcodes of Denmark and Holland. As you can tell, the font is uneven and somewhat unpredictable - following only the "rules" of the person who handprinted that sign ... and not many of the rules of the good old and respected painter who make beautiful signs ... however, this sign had it's beauty in a natural and innocent way.

LTC Athena brings a somewhat “lost” hot-metal typeface back from obscurity into digital Opentype format. In fall 2012, printing historian Rich Hopkins contacted P22 type foundry regarding some inked type drawings he had just uncovered from his acquisition of the Baltimore-based “Baltotype” company some 20 years ago. It is a rare face whose original matrices were destroyed and thought fully lost. The drawings included a full upper and lower case set, numerals, basic punctuation, and alternate forms of some letters. The design is a narrow deco-flavored design from the 1950s with a curious avoidance of straight lines in the stems and main strokes. The face has been expanded to over 340 characters by Miranda Roth and includes ligatures as well as a full Pan-European character set. It is released through the Lanston division of P22 in consideration of its earlier incarnation as a metal typeface.

Today's digital font technology has allowed renowned font designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf to realize a dream he first had more than fifty years ago: to create a typeface that would come very close to the freedom and liveliness of beautiful handwriting. The basic Zapfino font family, released in 1998, consists of four alphabets with many additional stylistic alternates that can be freely mixed together to emulate the variations in handwritten text. In 2003, Zapf completed Zapfino Extra, a large expansion of the Zapfino family. Designed in collaboration with Akira Kobayashi, Zapfino Extra has a cornucopia of new characters. It includes exuberant hyper-flourishes, elegant small caps, dozens of ornaments, more alternates and ligatures, index characters, and a very useful "forte" (bold) version. Use Zapfino to produce unusual and graceful advertisements, packaging, and invitations. Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos, Best Fonts for Tattoos

Boy, they're everywhere. One of your neighbors is probably one of them, Freaking super-heroes (TM, ©, ®, SM blah blah blah) are more ubiquitous in cities these days than Simon Cowell is on talent shows. Notice how that guy on the subway -- the one with the boy scout haircut? -- see how he keeps his shirt buttoned all the way up? He's not sweating either... that's 'cause he's probably from some dead planet that exploded twenty years ago. His REAL parents wrapped him in blankets and, when he turned 18, his Ma on Earth turned those same blankets into Long Underwear for her foster son. He's probably wearing his long underwear right now. That's why he's smiling at you through his horn rimmed glasses. He thinks you don't know. Thinks he's special. Thinks he's a super-hero (TM, ©, ®, SM blah blah blah). Ain't that Super?

The year 2022 went and 2023 came. I can honestly say that last year was a horrible year and I am happy it ended a couple of days ago. The first week after New Year’s Eve always fills my head with the U2 song ‘New Year’s Day’ - so I named this font after a line from the lyrics. I also happened to watch a fantastic movie called ‘Im Westen Nights Neues’, directed by Edward Berger, but based on a book by Erich Maria Remarque, which, in English, was published as ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’. So there you have it: naming a font in 2 easy steps! ;-) All Is Quiet is a lovely brush font, which I created using my father in law’s Chinese pencil and ink. I can suggest some uses here, but I am convinced you can come up with that yourself.

With the printing of the Futurist poem “Zang Tumb Tuuum” in 1914, modern art had taken a typographic twist: “words in freedom” (parole in libertà) were now a major part of the art world. The avant garde followed suit. Niedermann Grotesk is based on the everyday type that appeared in early modernist collages, journals and manifestos. It is a peculiar style of lettering—which was originally inspired by the Sachplakat (object poster) work of Lucian Bernhard—and adapted for hot metal in 1908 by Heinz Hoffmann. 100 years ago, the style became a workhorse of the German printing industry. Niedermann Grotesk is an updated variant, referencing the original poster art, each letter carefully drawn with an old brush. Bumpy, bold and blunt—with a suite of alternate characters and a few dingbats—Niedermann Grotesk is perfect for advertising, packaging, poetry, art, protests and retro homage.

Before the original sketches, I had imagined and dreamed this font was used for side characters of retro robot animations such as Gundam and Ideon. But the sketches were put in a PENDING folder. It was a few years ago. In the begining of 2011, I restarted working with the sketches to complete as a font file. Detail and some shape were improved retaining the original concept and they were completed, then named ‘Space Colony’. Just as the name implies, this wide and geometric font family consisting of six weights was designed targeting at use for futuristic product of game, movie, logo and so on. Not only that but the rounded shape makes a lovely, cute and soft impressions so this font is also suited for cartoons, animations and character merchandise too. We released 4 big Sci-Fi families in 2013. Check it out! Clonoid Controller Geom Graphic Space Colony

When the right late seventies / early eighties message is needed, Toisy comes to the rescue. Founded on a mix of references from letterforms of the time, this new original nods to a style that defined an era. A sexy theme font that conveys a clear image of what was truly chic thirty years ago, this alphabet is deeply rooted in sultry memories of soft, endless nights. Exaggerate contrast between strokes and angular lines combine with rounded corners to provide a unique character and a look that sharply differs when set in all caps or lower case, thanks to an uncommon treatment of density and proportions. Set it real tight, as was typographically in fashion circa 1981. Toisy and Toisy Greek include a set of 13 matching images inspired in leisure stuff and the clothing of the last days of disco. They are different from the set included with Toisy Alt.

Fans of Comicraft have made a lot of noise (HELP!) about the availability of ready-to-wear, factory surplus sound effects, not unlike those made available over a decade ago in our extremely popular and raucous ZAP PACK. It may sound impossible (WHA--?!), but Comicraft's Sonic Specialist, John JG Roshell, locked himself away (CLIK) in our top-secret SFX lab forming Onomatopoeia at high speeds (FWOOSH) and extreme temperatures (BBRRR), and sounded out over One Hundred (GASP) of the loudest (BTOOM), most intense (UNNGHH), squawkiest (KRAKK), discordant (SPLANGG), dissonant (SQUTCH) -- as well as dulcet and restrained (THWIPP) -- sound effects ever conceived (WOO HOO!) Helpfully arranged in alphabetical order (YIPPEE!), this Library of Onomatopeia -- the ONOMATOPEDIA, if you will (DING) -- is now available for use by the general public. WARNING: Comicraft Sound Effects may explode on contact with skin (AAAH!); please use protective clothing and eyewear when handling the Onomatopedia.

The Kennedy family is a completely original design, inspired by lettering discovered by George during his exploration of 16th century cartography, some years ago. The charm exhibited by these beautiful artifacts is as much reflected in the letterforms they employ as in the drawing style or content they present. After familiarizing himself with the offerings of the various printing centers of that period, George began work on a design which he called Marconova. This design continued to evolve until it began to take on the look of Dutch Oldstyle typefaces of a later period. At this point George re-christened his work-in-progress Kennedy, and added the Book, Book Italic and Small Cap companion typefaces. Only a small trace of its design ancestry is evident in the resulting typeface family. There is enough, however, to make them a unique entry in the collection of distinguished contemporary designs.

Some time ago, I started to think about the idea of combining my passionate hobby cooking with my profession as a graphic designer. While browsing through cooking books, cooking magazines and graphic publications I noticed that there were no symbols and drawings easily recognizable for interested cooks (hobby or professional). So I decided to create symbols for all the classical cooking paraphernalia still found in grand mother’s kitchen cabinet. René Menue Symbol contains 99 kitchen symbols of classical design and quality. To complement the symbols typographically, there is René Menue, a fitting linear Sans Serif typeface with plenty of extra characters such as ligatures, figures etc. René Menue is a modern, slightly condensed and economic design with round shapes, very modern but classical at the same time. These features make it perfectly usable in many different publications, not necessarily restricted to cooking… A successful cooking and enjoy your meal!

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.