Rian Hughes’ 15th collection of fonts, “112 Hours”, is entirely dedicated to numbers. Culled from a myriad of sources – clock faces, tickets, watches house numbers – it is an eclectic and wide-ranging set. Each font contains only numerals and related punctuation – no letters. A new book has been designed by Hughes to show the collection, and includes sample settings, complete character sets, source material and an introduction. This is available print-to-order on Blurb in paperback and hardback: http://www.blurb.com/b/5539073-112-hours-hardback http://www.blurb.com/b/5539045-112-hours-paperback From the introduction: The idea for this, the fifteenth Device Fonts collection, began when I came across an online auction site dedicated to antique clocks. I was mesmerized by the inventive and bizarre numerals on their faces. Shorn of the need to extend the internal logic of a typeface through the entire alphabet, the designers of these treasures were free to explore interesting forms and shapes that would otherwise be denied them. Given this horological starting point, I decided to produce 12 fonts, each featuring just the numbers from 1 to 12 and, where appropriate, a small set of supporting characters — in most cases, the international currency symbols, a colon, full stop, hyphen, slash and the number sign. 10, 11 and 12 I opted to place in the capital A, B and C slots. Each font is shown in its entirety here. I soon passed 12, so the next logical finish line was 24. Like a typographic Jack Bauer, I soon passed that too -— the more I researched, the more I came across interesting and unique examples that insisted on digitization, or that inspired me to explore some new design direction. The sources broadened to include tickets, numbering machines, ecclesiastical brass plates and more. Though not derived from clock faces, I opted to keep the 1-12 conceit for consistency, which allowed me to design what are effectively numerical ligatures. I finally concluded one hundred fonts over my original estimate at 112. Even though it’s not strictly divisible by 12, the number has a certain symmetry, I reasoned, and was as good a place as any to round off the project. An overview reveals a broad range that nonetheless fall into several loose categories. There are fairly faithful revivals, only diverging from their source material to even out inconsistencies and regularize weighting or shape to make them more functional in a modern context; designs taken directly from the source material, preserving all the inky grit and character of the original; designs that are loosely based on a couple of numbers from the source material but diverge dramatically for reasons of improved aesthetics or mere whim; and entirely new designs with no historical precedent. As projects like this evolve (and, to be frank, get out of hand), they can take you in directions and to places you didn’t envisage when you first set out. Along the way, I corresponded with experts in railway livery, and now know about the history of cab side and smokebox plates; I travelled to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Nantes, France, to examine their numbering machines; I photographed house numbers in Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam and here in the UK; I delved into my collection of tickets, passes and printed ephemera; I visited the Science Museum in London, the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset, and the Museum of London to source early adding machines, war-time telegraphs and post-war ration books. I photographed watches at Worthing Museum, weighing scales large enough to stand on in a Brick Lane pub, and digital station clocks at Baker Street tube station. I went to the London Under-ground archive at Acton Depot, where you can see all manner of vintage enamel signs and woodblock type; I photographed grocer’s stalls in East End street markets; I dug out old clocks I recalled from childhood at my parents’ place, examined old manual typewriters and cash tills, and crouched down with a torch to look at my electricity meter. I found out that Jane Fonda kicked a policeman, and unusually for someone with a lifelong aversion to sport, picked up some horse-racing jargon. I share some of that research here. In many cases I have not been slavish about staying close to the source material if I didn’t think it warranted it, so a close comparison will reveal differences. These changes could be made for aesthetic reasons, functional reasons (the originals didn’t need to be set in any combination, for example), or just reasons of personal taste. Where reference for the additional characters were not available — which was always the case with fonts derived from clock faces — I have endeavored to design them in a sympathetic style. I may even extend some of these to the full alphabet in the future. If I do, these number-only fonts could be considered as experimental design exercises: forays into form to probe interesting new graphic possibilities.

Sacred letter is a font that follows the rules of calligraphy writing, but the difference is there is a natural emphasis on handwriting. The Thick and thin are not smooth to describe the flow of natural ink. The pure calligraphy tends to the classic style with nuances of the grandeur of the past. This font is more open and appears as-is. The flexibility of the style makes it can survive in the classic style and modern style. Sacred Letter is a flowing and classic handwritten font, described by an elegant touch, perfect for your dearest projects. Fall in love with its incredibly distinct and timeless style and use it to create spectacular designs! This font is PUA encoded which means you can access all of the glyphs and swashes with ease! It features a varying baseline, smooth lines, gorgeous glyphs and stunning alternates.

Chord Symbols is a font for musicians. With this font, you can quickly write beautiful chords, using only simple keyboard characters as input. Musicians tend to write chords with regular characters. They use # instead of a genuine sharp, b instead of a genuine flat, dim instead of a small circle, etc. With Chord Symbols, your chords will be better looking, more easily readable and more efficiently notated. Chord Symbols helps you to write the chords the way you like it. Whether you prefer ‘maj7’ or ‘m7’ or a small triangle for a major seventh, whether you want ‘m’, ‘mi’, ‘min’ or a horizontal line for a minor chord, this font will suit you. Chord Symbols is originally created out of the need to write chords above pop song lyrics. It is designed to also work smoothly in music notation software, like Sibelius, Finale and Encore.

'Snatched' is a spontaneous handwriting. This name is taken from the slang term in the 2022 era to describe someone or something in a positive manner. This font consists of the same uppercase and lowercase, often referred to as 'all capital letterform', complete with numerals and punctuation. Composed in tends to widen form which is more like the typical handwriting of architects. This font looks like it was written with a marker or technical pen, very bold stylish and legible. For designers this is an interesting thing, the design looks very natural and rhythmic to beautify presentations and blue prints. Can be installed for CAD programs, Sekthup and other applications. This font is very suitable for various media related to handmade, craft businesses, logos, quotes, prints, social media posts, indie business, outdoor sports and other applications to strengthen the impression of handwriting and demand attention.

Packing more copy in a narrow space is the main reason for using a condensed type. Characters with a more ovular shape tend to be less wide than their circular counterparts and will allow for more letters per line. In narrow columns for example, this typeface can provide up to 25% more copy than the regular typeface in the same space. Another reason is when a larger type size is called for — used sparingly it is useful for headings or headlines. For emphasis, narrower letters can provide a stark contrast in the flow of reading, creating impact while retaining typographic character. Condensed types can specially useful in tables and charts because typically both use few words in each block. If space now allows, you may think about the luxury of a larger point size. This optimizes space while keeping your typography more easily legible.

Sunshine is the unlikely alphabet collision of Gobbler and Liquorstore. Chank's napkin scrawl smashed into the letters commonly found on signage at the neighborhood liquor store. Gobbler's blotchy textures fragmented Liquorstore's uniform stroke. It began as a hideous lumpy thing with random vector points everywhere. Chank came to the rescue with his Alphabetician's first aid kit. He smoothed the blunt corners with a few hammer blows. He wrapped the font in extra strokes, in a sans serif Roman style, to increase its contrast. His industrial influence helped stabilize Gobbler's gloppy qualities and his grunge aesthetic softened Liquor store's checkerboard rigidity. The end result is a font with a solid structure and a painterly wiggle that creates a dirty display or a slightly clumsy text face. Because of its many detailed strokes, it tends to look a little better in print than on the web. All organic. Earthy.

To design a text typeface "at the top with, at the bottom without" serifs was an idea which crossed my mind at the end of the sixties. I started from the fact that what one reads in the Latin alphabet is mainly the upper half of the letters, where good distinguishableness of the individual signs, and therefore, also good legibility, is aided by serifs. The first tests of the design, by which I checked up whether the basic principle could be used also for the then current technology of setting - for double-sign matrices -, were carried out in 1970. During the first half of the seventies I created first the basic design, then also the slanted Roman and the medium types. These drawings were not very successful. My greatest concern during this initial phase was the upper case A. I had to design it in such a way that the basic principle should be adhered to and the new alphabet, at the same time, should not look too complicated. The necessary prerequisite for a design of a new alphabet for double-sign matrices, i.e. to draw each letter of all the three fonts to the same width, did not agree with this typeface. What came to the greatest harm were the two styles used for emphasis: the italics even more than the medium type. That is why I fundamentally remodelled the basic design in 1980. In the course of this work I tried to forget about the previous technological limitations and to respect only the requirements then placed on typefaces intended for photosetting. As a matter of fact, this was not very difficult; this typeface was from the very beginning conceived in such a way as to have a large x-height of lower-case letters and upper serifs that could be joined without any problems in condensed setting. I gave much more thought to the proportional relations of the individual letters, the continuity of their outer and inner silhouettes, than to the requirements of their production. The greatest number of problems arose in the colour balancing of the individual signs, as it was necessary to achieve that the upper half of each letter should have a visual counterbalance in its lower, simpler half. Specifically, this meant to find the correct shape and degree of thickening of the lower parts of the letters. These had to counterbalance the upper parts of the letters emphasized by serifs, yet they should not look too romantic or decorative, for otherwise the typeface might lose its sober character. Also the shape, length and thickness of the upper serifs had to be resolved differently than in the previous design. In the seventies and at the beginning of the eighties a typeface conceived in this way, let alone one intended for setting of common texts in magazines and books, was to all intents and purposes an experiment with an uncertain end. At this time, before typographic postmodernism, it was not the custom to abandon in such typefaces the clear-cut formal categories, let alone to attempt to combine the serif and sans serif principles in a single design. I had already designed the basic, starting, alphabets of lower case and upper case letters with the intention to derive further styles from them, differing in colour and proportions. These fonts were not to serve merely for emphasis in the context of the basic design, but were to function, especially the bold versions, also as independent display alphabets. At this stage of my work it was, for a change, the upper case L that presented the greatest problem. Its lower left part had to counterbalance the symmetrical two-sided serif in the upper half of the letter. The ITC Company submitted this design to text tests, which, in their view, were successful. The director of this company Aaron Burns then invited me to add further styles, in order to create an entire, extensive typeface family. At that time, without the possibility to use a computer and given my other considerable workload, this was a task I could not manage. I tried to come back to this, by then already very large project, several times, but every time some other, at the moment very urgent, work diverted me from it. At the beginning of the nineties several alphabets appeared which were based on the same principle. It seemed to me that to continue working on my semi-finished designs was pointless. They were, therefore, abandoned until the spring of 2005, when František Štorm digitalized the basic design. František gave the typeface the working title Areplos and this name stuck. Then he made me add small capitals and the entire bold type, inducing me at the same time to consider what to do with the italics in order that they might be at least a little italic in character, and not merely slanted Roman alphabets, as was my original intention. In the course of the subsequent summer holidays, when the weather was bad, we met in his little cottage in South Bohemia, between two ponds, and resuscitated this more than twenty-five-years-old typeface. It was like this: We were drinking good tea, František worked on the computer, added accents and some remaining signs, inclined and interpolated, while I was looking over his shoulder. There is hardly any typeface that originated in a more harmonious setting. Solpera, summer 2005 I first encountered this typeface at the exhibition of Contemporary Czech Type Design in 1982. It was there, in the Portheim Summer Palace in Prague, that I, at the age of sixteen, decided to become a typographer. Having no knowledge about the technologies, the rules of construction of an alphabet or about cultural connections, I perceived Jan Solpera's typeface as the acme of excellence. Now, many years after, replete with experience of revitalization of typefaces of both living and deceased Czech type designers, I am able to compare their differing approaches. Jan Solpera put up a fight against the digital technology and exerted creative pressure to counteract my rather loose approach. Jan prepared dozens of fresh pencil drawings on thin sketching paper in which he elaborated in detail all the style-creating elements of the alphabet. I can say with full responsibility that I have never worked on anything as meticulous as the design of the Areplos typeface. I did not invent this name; it is the name of Jan Solpera's miniature publishing house, in which he issued for example an enchanting series of memoirs of a certain shopkeeper of Jindrichuv Hradec. The idea that the publishing house and the typeface might have the same name crossed my mind instinctively as a symbol of the original designation of Areplos - to serve for text setting. What you can see here originated in Trebon and in a cottage outside the village of Domanín - I even wanted to rename my firm to The Trebon Type Foundry. When mists enfold the pond and gloom pervades one's soul, the so-called typographic weather sets in - the time to sit, peer at the monitor and click the mouse, as also our students who were present would attest. Areplos is reminiscent of the essential inspirational period of a whole generation of Czech type designers - of the seventies and eighties, which were, however, at the same time the incubation period of my generation. I believe that this typeface will be received favourably, for it represents the better aspect of the eighties. Today, at the time when the infection by ITC typefaces has not been quite cured yet, it does absolutely no harm to remind ourselves of the high quality and timeless typefaces designed then in this country.In technical terms, this family consists of two times four OpenType designs, with five types of figures, ligatures and small capitals as well as an extensive assortment of both eastern and western diacritics. I can see as a basic text typeface of smaller periodicals and informative job-prints, a typeface usable for posters and programmes of various events, but also for corporate identity. Štorm, summer 2005

PF Champion Script Pro is perhaps the most advanced and powerful calligraphic family ever made. It received an award for Excellence in Type Design from the International Type Design Competition ‘Modern Cyrillic 2009’ which was held in Moscow. Most recently, it received another award from the 3rd International Eastern Type Design Competition - Granshan Awards 2010. This typeface was first presented in June 2007 at the 3rd International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication (ICTVC) and was met with rave reviews. It is based mainly on the manuscripts of the 18th century English calligrapher Joseph Champion. Developed over a period of two and a half years, each one of the 2 weights is loaded with 4300 glyphs(!), offering simultaneous support for all European languages based on the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. Furthermore, a wide selection of alternate forms and ligatures is included for all languages, in order to accommodate diverse design aesthetics. These alternates are either applied automatically through an advanced programming scheme, or manually through several OpenType features. An attempt was made to design a contemporary script typeface with classic roots, by following certain guidelines, i.e. lowercase characters were designed so they are less inclined, have a higher x-height and are less condensed than the original. Several characters were stripped-off their connecting lines in order to enhance legibility. Four sets of alternate swashed capitals as well as a plethora of ornaments and frames (117) was included. Small caps and their alternate forms were designed to replace the capitals which disrupt the flow of text within a sentence with their extravagant swashes. All characters were carefully designed with the proper weight in order to sustain harsh printing conditions (on special papers), a situation which affects mainly the light connecting parts of calligraphic typefaces. Finally, it was programmed in such a way as to preserve handwriting qualities, by designing an extensive array of ligatures and alternate glyphs in all languages, never before released or incorporated within the same font.

Malabar is a type family for extensive text. Its design was developed with a nod toward newspapers. Malabar's characters are seriffed and of the Old Style genre. A strong diagonal axis is apparent within the curves. Sturdy serifs help strengthen the line of text in small point sizes, as well as define the overall feeling of the face. Malabar's x-height is very high, a deliberate choice that makes the most important parts of lowercase letters visibly larger in tiny settings. The height of the capital letters is also rather diminutive, allowing for better character fit, as well as eliminating a bit of clumsiness in German, which often includes quite a few uppercase letters. Diacritical marks and additional alphabetic forms required by many Western, Central, and Eastern European languages are naturally a part of the character set, including those needed in the Baltic states, for Romanian, and for Turkish. Malabar's accents are bold and direct, sitting well with their base glyphs. The family includes three weights, each with a companion Italic. Malabar Regular is equipped with small caps, and both it and Malabar Italic include oldstyle figures. All members of the family have both proportional and tabular-width lining figures, as well as special variants of certain punctuation marks vertically adjusted for all-caps text setting. Malabar is informed both by contemporary ideas of typeface design (sheared terminals, the wider-drawn s) as well as by 16th-century masters. Malabar Heavy and Heavy Italic are very loud; their blackness almost shouts out from the page. The Regular's wedge serifs become more slab-ish in nature as the letters' weight increases. Malabar Heavy and Heavy Italic are best relegated to headline use only. Malabar Bold and Bold Italic may be used for text emphasis, a job for which the Heavy is to dark. Malabar received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design at the Type Directors Club of New York TDC2 competition in 2009.

Gryffensee is designed to be the Futura of blackletter, combining the time-honored gravity and relentlessness of the Gothic script with the clean, contemporary freshness of the geometric sans. Built from a tightly controlled inventory of lines, arcs, sharp cuts, and OpenType features, Gryffensee was born and raised in the digital age, yet retains the powerful charisma and human warmth of its mediaeval blackletter ancestors. As a result, it excels in a wide range of display settings, logotypes, and short text. Unlike most conventional blackletters, it even handles all-caps usage with grace, and includes an extensive Cyrillic character set (in the Pro version). Apart from a generous range of automatic ligatures and contextual alternates, Gryffensee offers stylistic alternates that allow users to customize its appearance to their tastes. The capital letters |AGHIKZ| come in alternate cuts that trade traditional shapes for increased legibility, while the letter |s| appears in three cuts, each with a unique, distinct flavor. All these options are accessible through OpenType stylistic sets in the main Latin font, Gryffensee Eins. For easy use in applications without OpenType support, we provide two additional Latin fonts (Gryffensee Zwei and Drei) in which these options replace the default cuts. Finally, Gryffensee Pro offers all the functionality of Gryffensee Eins, plus Cyrillic support. My intention to devise a contemporary geometric blackletter was inspired by four hand-painted letters, |ABCD|, in Sasha Prood�s online portfolio. I later found out that he had, in turn, taken those letters from an existing font, Bastard, by Jonathan Barnbrook. Luckily, by that time my project had taken on a life of its own. Gryffensee is an original design that bears only the most superficial resemblance to Bastard. Gryffensee is a mediaeval spelling of the lake Greifensee near which I grew up. It is pronounced [?gri?f?n?se?], or "GRIEF-un-say" in English approximation. This font is dedicated to Simone.