A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul

Almost a half of a millennium after being mistaken for the original 4th century Gothic alphabet and falsely labeled "barbaric" by the European Renaissance, the blackletter alphabet was still flourishing exclusively in early 20th century Germany, not only as an ode to Gutenberg and the country's rich printing history, but also as a continuous evolution, taking on new shapes and textures influenced by almost every other form of alphabet available. Blackletter would continue to go strong in Germany until just before the second World War, when it died a political death at the height of its hybridization. For almost 50 years after the war, blackletter was very rarely used in a prominent manner, but it continued to be seen sparely in a variety of settings, almost as a subliminal reminder of western civilization's first printed letters; on certificates and official documents of all kinds, religious publications, holiday cards and posters, to name a few. In the early 21st century, blackletter type has been appearing sporadically on visible media, but as of late 2005, it is not known how long the renewed interest will last, or even whether or not it will catch on at all. The last few years before World War II were arguably the most fascinating and creative in modern blackletter design. During those years, and as demonstrated with the grid-based Leather font, the geometric sans serif was influencing the blackletter forms, taking them away from their previous Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) hybridizations. Blackhaus is a digitization and elaborate expansion of a typeface called Kursachsen Auszeichnung, designed in 1937 by Peterpaul Weiss for the Schriftguss foundry in Dresden. This is one of very few designs from that time attempting to infuse more Bauhaus than Jugendstil into the Blackletter forms. This is why we used a concatenation of the words blackletter and Bauhaus to name this face. The result of injecting Bauhaus elements into blackletter turned out to be a typeface that is very legible and usable in modern settings, while at the same time harking back to the historical forms of early printing. The original 1937 design was just one typeface of basic letters and numbers. After digitizing and expanding it, we developed a lighter version, then added a few alternates to both weights. The Rough style came as a mechanically-grunged afterthought, due to current user demand for such treatment. Having the flexibility of 2 weights and many alternates of a blackletter typeface is not a very common find in digital fonts. More specifically, having the flexibility of 2 weights and alternates of a 20th century blackletter typeface is almost unheard of in digital fonts. So the Blackhaus family can be quite useful and versatile in an imaginative designer's hands.

Every year, more and more text is read directly on a computer screen in office applications, or from freshly printed sheets from a copier or laser printer. Clear, legible text faces are more imperative to office communication than ever before. Yet every worker desires a small bit of personality in the corporate world. Most office environments are only equipped with a few basic fonts that are truly optimized for use in text, with laser printers, and on screen. The Linotype Office Alliance fonts guarantee data clarity. All of the font weights within the individual family have the same character measurements; individual letters or words may have their styles changed without line wrap being affected! All numbers, mathematical signs, and currency symbols are tabular; they share the same set character width, ensuring that nothing stands in the way of clear graph, chart, and table design. In addition to being extremely open and legible, the characters in this collection's fonts also share the same capital letter height and the same x-height. The production and reading of financial reports is duly streamlined with the Linotype Office Alliance fonts. The Neuzeit Office family is designed after the model of the original sans serif family Neuzeit S, which was produced by D. Stempel AG and the Linotype Design Studio in 1966. Neuzeit S itself was a redesign of D. Stempel AG's DIN Neuzeit, created by Wilhelm Pischner between 1928 and 1939. Intended to represent its own time, DIN Neuzeit must have struck a harmonious chord. DIN Neuzeit is a constructed, geometric sans serif. It was born during the 1920s, a time of design experimentation and standardization, whose ethos has been made famous by the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements in art, architecture, and design. Upon its redesign as Neuzeit S in the 1960s, other developments in sans serif letter design were taken into account. Neuzeit S looks less geometric, and more gothic, or industrial. Separating it from typefaces like Futura, it has a double-storey a, instead of a less legible, single-storey variant. Unlike more popular grotesque sans serifs like Helvetica, Neuzeit S and especially the redesigned Neuzeit Office contain more open, legible letterforms. Neuzeit Office preserves the characteristic number forms that have been associated with its design for years. After four decades, Neuzeit has been retooled once again, and it is more a child of its age than ever before. Akira Kobayashi, Linotype's Type Director, created the revised and updated Neuzeit Office in 2006. His greatest change was to retool the design to make its performance in text far more optimal. Additionally, he created companion oblique to help emphasize text. The other three families in the Office Alliance system include Metro Office, Times Europa Office and Trump Mediaeval Office.Some weights of the Neuzeit Office are availabla as soft rounded versions. "

TT Polls useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options About TT Polls family: TT Polls emerges as a modern modular slab serif inspired by American sports graphics. As we wanted to create a really special and remarkable project, we've decided to broaden the character palette and implement the OT features support, and also to add a traditional handwritten script in several weights to the slab serif. Although TT Polls and TT Polls Script subfamilies are stylistically contrasting each other, they perfectly match thanks to the appropriate proportions both in the thickness of vertical strokes and the general width of characters. TT Polls subfamily consists of 5 weights and 5 italics. In it, we've implemented a ligatures set and broad support of OpenType features: calt, salt, liga, dlig, case, frac, sinf, sups, dnom, numr, tnum. Thanks to stylistic alternates it is possible to significantly change the nature of the font, making it more technological. TT Polls Script subfamily is a handwritten script in 5 weights. Geometric swashes created for all characters of basic Latin and Cyrillic alphabets contribute to its authenticity. A lot of OpenType features (swsh, liga, calt, case, frac, ordn, sinf, sups, dnom, numr, tnum, onum, pnum) are also integrated into the TT Polls Script. Although we've been considering the use of TT Polls in sports-related design—be that inscriptions on baseball players' shirts or numbers on a race car’s side—while creating the font family, we have to admit that the final version of TT Polls is also a great fit to a more casual design and application spheres. TT Polls language support: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian, Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian, Asu, Aymara, Banjar, Basque, Belarusian (cyr), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama, Boholano, Bosnian (cyr), Bosnian (lat), Breton, Bulgarian (cyr), Cebuano, Chamorro, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Corsican, Cree, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Embu, English, Erzya, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician, German, Gusii, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Innu-aimun, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Judaeo-Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish, Kalenjin, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karaim (lat), Karakalpak (lat), Kashubian, Khasi, Khvarshi, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Kumyk, Kurdish (lat), Ladin, Latvian, Laz, Leonese, Lithuanian, Luganda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Macedonian, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malay, Manx, Maori, Mauritian Creole, Minangkabau, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (lat), Mordvin-moksha, Morisyen, Nahuatl, Nauruan, Ndebele, Nias, Nogai, Norwegian, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Palauan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rheto-Romance, Rohingya, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Russian, Rusyn, Rwa, Salar, Samburu, Samoan, Sango, Sangu, Scots, Sena, Serbian (cyr), Serbian (lat), Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Swiss German, Swiss German, Tagalog, Tahitian, Taita, Tatar, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tsonga, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen (lat), Ukrainian, Uyghur, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Vunjo, Xhosa, Zaza, Zulu.