The great enigma There are hidden depths to FS Silas Sans. First impressions are of a functional, multi-purpose typeface with a cool, edgy, angular character. Gaze into its eyes a little longer, though, and you'll detect a more nuanced, colourful personality, with full, open, satisfyingly squarish forms balancing the abruptness of the sharply-angled terminals and ascenders. Authoritative, official and stern on the outside; amiable and welcoming on the inside. You’re so Dane The designers, led by Phil Garnham, were trying to capture something straight-talking, authentic, and a little... Scandinavian. ‘We were thinking about some of the characters in Danish dramas that were on in the early stages of the font’s development, like The Killing and The Bridge,’ says Phil. ‘The police officers, that is, not the psychopathic killers. Smart and a bit cool, but with a warm heart.’ For a good Danish name, we settled on Silas. It was that or Hans-Christian. The finer points Silas Sans rewards close inspection. Study, if you will, its amply squarish forms, the roomy ‘o’ and ‘e’, in particular. Observe the angular ascenders and terminals of, for example, the ‘L’, ‘I’, ‘d’ and ‘i’, inferring the movement and lift of a pen. Consider the cuts to the ‘A’ and ‘v’ that create harmony with adjacent letters. And scrutinise the subtle ink traps set within the ‘A’ and ‘Y’ for reproduction at small sizes. A fine subject, we think you’ll agree, and available in a versatile range of weights to make (with FS Silas Slab) a typographic system with a comprehensive hierarchy.

The Arabetic Sans Serif type family follows the guidelines of the Mutamathil type style but also illustrates the effects of adding and removing Latin-like serifs on Arabetic scripts legibility. It has only one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter as defined in Unicode Standards version 5.1. Arabetic Sans Serif employs variable x-height values. It includes all required Lam-Alif ligatures and uses ligature substitutions and selected marks positioning but it does not use any other glyph substitutions or forming. Text strings composed using types of this family are non-cursive with stand-alone isolated glyphs. Tatweel (or Kashida) glyph is a zero width space. Keying it before any glyph will display that glyph’s isolated form. Keying it before Alif Lam Lam Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetic Sans Serif family includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals; all required diacritic marks, Allah ligature, in addition to all standard English keyboard punctuations and major currency symbols. Fonts are available in regular, italic, bold, and bold italic styles.