Melina Plain and Melina Fancy are characterized by graceful lines, strong contrast and nostalgic overtones. These typefaces are patterned after two members of a type family named Greco, released by Fundición Tipográfica Richard Gans of Madrid, Spain, in the 1920s. Melina Plain is a refined version of Greco Bold, and Melina Fancy is based on Greco Adornado, with the notable addition of a lowercase, which was not a part of the original design. Melina is based on two typefaces (ca. 1920) from the Fundición Tipográfica Richard Gans in Madrid, Spain. Nick Curtis first found Greco Adornado in a type specimen at the Library of Congress. It was a cap only design. He made a cut of the original (Melina Fancy) and created his own lowercase, and many other characters to support contemporary character sets. Later he came across Greco Bold, which had a lowercase, but he chose not to use it and instead, adapted his Melina Fancy to create Melina Plain.

Futuristic and spacey, Tannarin is a modular, cap-only typeface. Many letters are constructed of repeated components with the added twist of the round characters being shorter than the square characters.

The boss of extended typefaces, Brian Bonislawsky, has belted out this ultra wide design, EuroMachina, that looks like an odd meld of OCR-A, Microgramma and Bank Gothic. And if that wasn't enough, Brian then felt the need to distort it in various ways, creating Broken, Eroded and OverGreased. A little something for everyone.

Bitstream Cooper was designed at Bitstream in 1986 by means of adding light, medium, and bold styles, with the corresponding italics, to the existing black ones. Based on Cooper Black, 1919, by Oswald Bruce Cooper, which was firstly released as a hand composition font in 1922 by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler of Chicago and later spread by ATF. Cooper Black is an extra bold face based on Cooper Old Style. Bitstream Cooper is an old style face with rounded serifs and tilted back ovals. For use both in text (normal weights) and in advertising and display typography (heavy weights). Cyrillic version was developed for ParaType in 2000 by Manvel Shmavonyan and based on TM Oswald face of TypeMarket, 1996, by Victoria Grigorenko.

Ingram BT might be described as Deco, or Arts & Crafts, in style. Created by Alex Marshall, it is a very condensed design with high-waisted uppercase glyphs that feature dots rather than straight lines for the middle hairlines. There are two sets of alternate glyphs accessible via stylistic and contextual OpenType features. The contextual alternates offer the most interesting glyph substitutions. There are also oldstyle and tabular figures, superiors and inferiors, as well as unlimited fractions. Ingram is a very handsome, casual typeface, with a slightly rough finish. The compact lowercase remains very readable at text sizes and it is a pleasure to turn on the earth tone colors and typeset left and right justified paragraphs! The extended character set supports Baltic and Central European languages.

Ronna Penner's Sketchley is a 2001 winner of ATypI's bukva:raz! design competition, held recently in Moscow. Inspired by handwriting samples and unable to find a typeface to satisfy her needs, Ms. Penner decided to create her own. The result is this warm, casual script. The compliment of characters demanded the creation of two fonts. Sketchley is considered the base font and should be used for basic layouts. Sketchley Swash has numerous initial, medial and final swash characters that, when used thoughtfully with Sketchley, can recreate the look of hand drawn calligraphy.

Perhaps one of the more difficult typeface styles to space convincingly, Irakly, a serif-sans by Russian designer Oleg Karpinsky imparts an unfamiliar elegance. The odd mixture of superficial details such as the half serifs and the protruding horizontal strokes confuse your visual senses, yet the simple geometric roots of the letterforms are apparent and ultimately reassuring. Irakly Light and Bold make a great addition to any library. The OpenType versions have alternates that are more conservative in design and broaden the usefulness of the typefaces

Chianti was designed at Bitstream by senior designer Dennis Pasternak in 1991 and initially released in 1995. The intent behind the design was to provide a humanist sanserif of high readability at a wide range of sizes and weights. Humanist sanserifs (others that fall into this category are Linotype’s Frutiger and Optima, and Monotype’s Gill Sans) are an attempt to improve the readability of sanserifs by applying classical roman structure to the letterforms. To enhance its versatility, Mr. Pasternak designed a wide variety of alternate characters, rare ligatures, ornaments and swashes. Chianti is a friendly sanserif useful for a broad range of typographic needs.

The hand-hewn Islander looks like it could have been liberated from granite blocks.These demonstrative letter forms leave no doubt when it comes to conveying your message, yet they remain playful.

Introducing VeraCruz BT, a fanciful display typeface by Ray Cruz. A tasteful, flair serif design, VeraCruz BT is available as an OpenType font. By selecting the Contextual Alternates feature in OT savvy applications, many of the cap and lowercase characters will change automatically as you type to give the text an informal, animated look. There are also tabular and proportional figure sets, and the extended glyph set supports Central Europe.

Ecliptica is an extended family of five very condensed typefaces in a single bold weight. The creation of Australian designer Robert Bell. Ecliptica has a Sans, a Semi-Serif, a Serif and a single Cursive that can be used with any of the other three styles. As an added bonus, Robert also designed a modern Blackletter companion. The Ecliptica family is an unusual layout of styles and all work equally well with one another. The OpenType versions of the Ecliptica fonts support an extended Latin character set that includes a full array of fractions as well as additional ligatures. The Sans and Cursive fonts contain some cap and lowercase alternates.

A meeting of Byzantine and Art Deco forms, Aphasia began as a series of handwritten captions to accompany drawings in the early 1990s. The drawings were abandoned to allow the lettering to become the real composition. Playfully set in blocks of verse with each line shaped through free-association, the only visual rule was that all the lines of capitals be of equal length. The challenge of the game required extensive abbreviations, ligatures, small caps, and superiors. With the advent of Letraset’s FontStudio program, the project moved into the typographic realm.

Medium Slab

Slab serif display, medium weight

A revival Johnston Underground.

Medium Roman is an engravers, all-capitals font for invitations and stationery. Particular characteristics of the Medium Roman font are the tail on Q and the spurs on J and U.

Since the release of these fonts most typefaces in the Scangraphic Type Collection appear in two versions. One is designed specifically for headline typesetting (SH: Scangraphic Headline Types) and one specifically for text typesetting (SB Scangraphic Bodytypes). The most obvious differentiation can be found in the spacing. That of the Bodytypes is adjusted for readability. That of the Headline Types is decidedly more narrow in order to do justice to the requirements of headline typesetting. The kerning tables, as well, have been individualized for each of these type varieties. In addition to the adjustment of spacing, there are also adjustments in the design. For the Bodytypes, fine spaces were created which prevented the smear effect on acute angles in small typesizes. For a number of Bodytypes, hairlines and serifs were thickened or the whole typeface was adjusted to meet the optical requirements for setting type in small sizes. For the German lower-case diacritical marks, all Headline Types complements contain alternative integrated accents which allow the compact setting of lower-case headlines.

Bank of England is loosely based on the blackletter lettering from Series F English twenty pound banknotes introduced in 2007. The font takes inspiration from German Kanzlei (Chancery) typefaces and the English calligraphers John Ayres and George Bickham. For designers using OpenType-aware applications, Bank of England includes Swash versions of all uppercase letters and ampersand, Alternates for nine lowercase letters and capital Z, and sixteen ornamental flourishes. Western European accented characters are included, and also a simplified St. Edward’s Crown (Elizabeth II’s coronation crown) at the Section (§) and PlusMinus (±) keystrokes (Windows Alt-0167 and Alt-0177).

A typeface made from vintage typewriter samples and meticulously compiled into a complete character set.

With its extended complement, this comprehensive redesign of Bank Gothic by Elsner+Flake offers a wide spectrum for usage. After 80 years, the typeface Bank Gothic, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1930, is still as desirable for all areas of graphic design as it has ever been. Its usage spans the design of headlines to exterior design. Game manufacturers adopt this spry typeface, so reminiscent of the Bauhaus and its geometric forms, as often as do architects and web designers. The creative path of the Bank Gothic from hot metal type via phototypesetting to digital variations created by desktop designers has by now taken on great breadth. The number of cuts has increased. The original Roman weight has been augmented by Oblique and Italic variants. The original versions came with just a complement of Small Caps. Now, they are, however, enlarged by often quite individualized lower case letters. In order to do justice to the form changes and in order to differentiate between the various versions, the Bank Gothic, since 2007 a US trademark of the Grosse Pointe Group (Trademark FontHaus, USA), is nowadays available under a variety of different names. Some of these variations remain close to the original concept, others strive for greater individualism in their designs. The typeface family which was cut by the American typefoundry ATF (American Type Founders) in the early 1930’s consisted of a normal and a narrow type family, each one in the weights Light, Medium and Bold. In addition to its basic ornamental structure which has its origin in square or rectangular geometric forms, there is another unique feature of the Bank Gothic: the normally round upper case letters such as B, C, G, O, P, Q, R and U are also rectangular. The one exception is the upper case letter D, which remains round, most likely for legibility reasons (there is the danger of mistaking it for the letter O.) Because of the huge success of this type design, which follows the design principles of the more square and the more contemporary adaption of the already existing Copperplate, it was soon adopted by all of the major type and typesetting manufacturers. Thus, the Bank Gothic appeared at Linotype; as Commerce Gothic it was brought out by Ludlow; and as Deluxe Gothic on Intertype typesetters. Among others, it was also available from Monotype and sold under the name Stationer’s Gothic. In 1936, Linotype introduced 6pt and 12pt weights of the condensed version as Card Gothic. Lateron, Linotype came out with Bank Gothic Medium Condensed in larger sizes and a more narrow set width and named it Poster Gothic. With the advent of photoypesetters and CRT technologies, the Bank Gothic experienced an even wider acceptance. The first digital versions, designed according to present computing technologies, was created by Bitstream whose PostScript fonts in Regular and Medium weights have been available through FontShop since 1991. These were followed by digital redesigns by FontHaus, USA, and, in 1996, by Elsner+Flake who were also the first company to add cursive cuts. In 2009, they extended the family to 16 weights in both Roman and Oblique designs. In addition, they created the long-awaited Cyrillic complement. In 2010, Elsner+Flake completed the set with lowercase letters and small caps. Since its redesign the type family has been available from Elsner+Flake under the name Bank Sans®. The character set of the Bank Sans® Caps and the Bank Sans® covers almost all latin-based languages (Europe Plus) as well as the Cyrillic character set MAC OS Cyrillic and MS Windows 1251. Both families are available in Normal, Condensed and Compressed weights in 4 stroke widths each (Light, Regular, Medium and Bold). The basic stroke widths of the different weights have been kept even which allows the mixing of, for instance, normal upper case letters and the more narrow small caps. This gives the family an even wider and more interactive range of use. There are, furthermore, extensive sets of numerals which can be accessed via OpenType-Features. The Bank Sans® type family, as opposed to the Bank Sans® Caps family, contains, instead of the optically reduced upper case letters, newly designed lower case letters and the matching small caps. Bank Sans® fonts are available in the formats OpenType and TrueType.