Designed in 1950s Japan by Okanao & Kushiro, the perfect partnership until artistic temperaments drove them apart. The duo spent years crafting the font with the working title “Messenjā”, Okanao bringing technical expertise to craft letterforms, while Kushiro made it his life, obsessively working late into the night to check pages for errors. For him the project was never about making money, it was an artistic endeavor to reprint the great Western works of literature. When he found out Okanao had secretly sold the rights to the font for use as a logo for a major Japanese manufacturer, Kushiro burned all evidence of the designs in a fit of passionate fury. The two reportedly never spoke again. “Messenjā” was thought lost forever until a type specimen was discovered in a vintage typewriter box bought on eBay. Now redrawn and available as 57-nao, a faithful and beautifully crafted monospace characterized by what is considered Okanao’s defining moment, the angular loop on the lowercase ‘a’.

Many decades back, churches, schools and other buildings with a need to display an outdoor message often chose a sign making system utilizing characters silk screened onto metal pieces in a block chamfer style. Each piece had a crimp in the top of the metal which formed a hook to fit over the existing rails of a message panel. This allowed for a finished sign to be displayed within minutes, and a quick change of information was not very time-consuming. A popular version of these signs provided white letters and numbers on black backgrounds. This was the model for Announcement Board JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. There are two different width blank panels on the broken and solid bars for those who wish to kern the letters tight to form a ribbon, however they were designed to have slight spacing in order to emulate the hand assembly of those vintage sign panels.

Right on the heels of the tremendous popularity wave that made Hollandse Mediaeval the most used Dutch typeface during the Great War years, Sjoerd H. de Roos was asked to design a 15 point type for De Zilverdistel, Jean François van Royen’s publishing company. So between 1914 and 1916, de Roos and van Royen collaborated on the typeface eventually known as Zilvertype, and which both parties viewed as an improved version of Hollandse Mediaeveal. Like Hollandse Mediaeval, Zilvertype was based on the Jenson model, but it is simpler, with more traditional metrics, lighter and more classic in color. This Pro digital version of Zilvertype comes expanded in all directions. It contains a roman, a bold and an italic. Each font contains over 685 glyphs, including small caps, eight different sets of figures, plenty of ligatures, some Dutch ornaments, and extended language support covering most Latin languages. Zilvertype Initials is also there to round out this distinctively Dutch text family and make it ideal for immersive text design.