The x factor How do you make a font like FS Albert unique, distinctive? “When designing a font I try to question every letter,” says Jason Smith, “but all you need is a few that have an x factor. With FS Albert, they’re the lowercase ‘a’ and ‘g’ and the uppercase ‘I’ and ‘J’. “I remember a friend saying, ‘Why on earth have you designed the ‘a’ like that? Isn’t it too friendly for this kind of font?’ And, in a way, that’s what I wanted – honesty and warmth, because a lot of big brands at the time really needed to show a more human side.” Range of weights and styles FS Albert is a charismatic type: a warm, friendly sans serif face with a big personality. Open, strong and amenable, and available in a wide range of weights and styles, FS Albert suits almost every task you put it to. Fontsmith has crafted five finely-tuned upright Roman weights and four italic weights, as well as a special Narrow version to provide the best coverage and give headlines and text an easy-going character. The chunky kid “FS Albert was inspired by – and named after – my son, who was a bit of a chunky kid,” says Jason Smith. “I designed an extra bold weight because I always felt that the really big font heavy weights had the most personality. “I recently told Albert this story. He laughed, and forgave me for thinking he was a fat baby. He liked the big personality bit, though.” 1000s of glyphs Not content with a character set that covered Europe and the whole of the Western world, the studio decided to go further afield. There are now FS Albert character sets that cover western and eastern European languages, including those of Russia, as well as Cyrillic, Arabic and Greek scripts. In fact, the font now covers more than 100 languages, making it ideal for bringing a consistent typographic style to the communications of global brands.

Some words from the designer, Frantisek Storm... Designed by Josef Tyfa in 1959, digitalized by F. Storm in 1996. This Roman and Italic are well-known perhaps to all Czech graphic artists and typographers ever since their release. Although this type face in some details is under the sway of the period of its rise, its importance is timeless, in contradistinction to other famous types dating from the turn of the sixties which were found, after some time, to be trite. The italics live their own life, only their upper-case letters have the same expression as the basic design. Thin and fragile, they work excellently, emphasizing certain parts in the text by their perfect contrast of expression. When seen from a distance they are a little bit darker than the Roman face. Tyfa Roman was released in 1960 by Grafotechna in Prague for hot setting. Later on, Berthold produced letter matrices - "rulers" for Staromat devices, used for manual photosetting of display alphabets. In the eighties it was available on dry transfers of Transotype and today it is offered also by ITC. The meticulously executed designs of the individual letters in the 288 point size are arranged into a set of signs on a cardboard of about B2 in size. The yellowed paper reveals retouches by white paint on the ink. Blue lines mark the baseline, the capital line, the ascender and descender lines and the central verticals of the letters. With regard to the format of the flat scanner, the designs had to be reduced, with the use of a camera, to the format A4, i.e. to the upper-case letter height of about 30 mm. These were then scanned in 600 dpi resolution and read as a bitmap template to the FontStudio programme. The newly created bold type faces derive from Tyfa's designs of the letters "a", "n", "p", the darkness of which was increased further, approximately by 3%, to enhance their emphasizing function. The text designs have hairstrokes thickened by one third; the contrast between thin and thick strokes has been modified, in order to improve legibility, in sizes under 12 points. We have used electronic interpolation to produce the semi-bold designs. Josef Tyfa himself recommends to choose a somewhat darker design than the basic one for printing of books.

Offense is an unyielding rectangular slab-serif face designed with consistently balanced letterforms and a refined finish. It’s extremely angular geometric form commands attention in display settings, yet is also legible in short text blocks. Numerous alternate character sets allow room for customization, while the expanded ligatures push letter combinations to the limit. Stylistically, Offense’s almost crude, sharp-cornered construction is balanced by it’s sophisticated finish and attention to detail, often unrealized in similar faces of this genre. The upright weights are complimented by pairings of true italics, completely rebuilt, slightly narrower in width with modified letterforms, increasing their contrast and flow. Features include: Precision kerning Standard Ligatures set including 'f' ligatures (fi, fl, ff, fh, fj, ffl, ffi, ffj) Discretionary Ligatures set including (ft, rt, ae, oe, st, ft, ct, oc, oo, ry, AE, OE, AL, TH, HE, AK, AN, TT, HD, AM, AP, AR, NF, NE, NH, NL, NB, FL, ND, FE, AB, OB, OD, OF, OG, OH, OK, OL, OM, ON, OO, OP, OQ, OR, OU, AH, UE, UF, UB, UD, UH, UK, UL, UM, UN, UP, UR, UU, MP, XY, YX, KY, WY, VY, AF, FF, FI) Alternate characters (O, o, S, s, a, h circumflex, @, ®, ¶, $, &, _, and various ligature alternates) Case forms (shifts various punctuation marks up to a position that works better with all-capital sequences) Capital Spacing (globally adjusts inter-glyph spacing for all-capital text) Slashed zero Full set of numerators/denominators Automatic fraction feature (supports any fraction combination) Extended language support (Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A) *Requires an application with OpenType and/or Unicode support.

“More is better” may have been the motto of Richard Austin of Austin and Son’s Imperial Letter-Foundry on Worship Street at Finsbury Square in London when he designed and cut his Antique typeface. The year it was created is uncertain, but it is known to have appeared in a specimen book produced in 1827. At first glance, the upper case letters of Austin Antique look very much like Figgins Antique. But, upon examination, one will note that the Austin face is much darker. In general, the letters designed and cut by Richard Austin have fatter strokes, larger serifs and smaller counters -- more metal and less daylight. The premise was that the darker the letter, the more attention an ad using the typeface would receive. In old pictures of London and Paris one may see walls crowded with posters and “bills” -- competing for the attention of the passerby. Morris and Updike aside, the early nineteenth century marked the beginning of a commercial as well as industrial revolution. Patterns of commerce were changing. With new methods of marketing came the need for new typefaces to support the new methods. Foundries found the display types were very profitable and competed most energetically and creatively for the trade. There was a lot of trial-and-error. Some ideas faded away. Others, like the Antiques or Egyptians, were refined and developed. From them came the Clarendons that were to prove both popular and long lasting -- because they worked. Their job was to sell goods, not please the aesthetic sensibilities of the critics. They did their job well. Austin Antique has a full Western European character set, plus the following ligatures: ct, st, fi, fl, ff, ffi and ffl. Tabular numbers. Surprisingly readable.

The Garamond family tree has many branches. There are probably more different typefaces bearing the name Garamond than the name of any other type designer. Not only did the punchcutter Claude Garamond set a standard for elegance and excellence in type founding in 16th-century Paris, but a successor, Jean Jannon, some eighty years later, cut typefaces inspired by Garamond that later came to bear Garamond’s name. Revivals of both designs have been popular and various over the course of the last 100 years. When ATF Garamond was designed in 1917, it was one of the first revivals of a truly classic typeface. Based on Jannon’s types, which had been preserved in the French Imprimerie Nationale as the “caractères de l’Université,” ATF Garamond brought distinctive elegance and liveliness to text type for books and display type for advertising. It was both the inspiration and the model for many of the later “Garamond” revivals, notably Linotype’s very popular Garamond No. 3. ATF Garamond was released ca. 1918, first in Roman and Italic, drawn by Morris Fuller Benton, the head of the American Type Founders design department. In 1922, Thomas M. Cleland designed a set of swash italics and ornaments for the typeface. The Bold and Bold Italic were released in 1920 and 1923, respectively. The new digital ATF Garamond expands upon this legacy, while bringing back some of the robustness of metal type and letterpress printing that is sometimes lost in digital adaptations. The graceful, almost lacy form of some of the letters is complemented by a solid, sturdy outline that holds up in text even at small sizes. The 18 fonts comprise three optical sizes (Subhead, Text, Micro) and three weights, including a new Medium weight that did not exist in metal. ATF Garamond also includes unusual alternates and swash characters from the original metal typeface. The character of ATF Garamond is lively, reflecting the spirit of the French Renaissance as interpreted in the 1920s. Its Roman has more verve than later old-style faces like Caslon, and its Italic is outright sprightly, yet remarkably readable.

Father's Day, or June 17 of this year, is in the middle of Argentinian winter. And like people do on wintery Sunday mornings, I was bundled up in bed with too many covers, pillows and comforters. Feeling good and not thinking about anything in particular, Father's Day was nowhere in the vicinity of my mind. My eleven year old son, Matías, came into the room with a handmade present for me. Up to this point, my Father's Day gift history was nothing unusual. Books, socks, hand-painted wooden spoons, the kind of thing any father would expect from his pre-teen son. So you can understand when I say I was bracing myself to fake excitement at my son's present. But this Father's Day was special. I didn't have to fake excitement. I was in fact excited beyond my own belief. Matí's handmade present was a complete alphabet drawn on an A4 paper. Grungy, childish, and sweeter than a ton of honey. He'd spent days making it, three-dimensioning the letters, wiggle-shadowing them. Incredible. A common annoyance for graphic designers is explaining to people, even those close to them, what they do for a living. You have to somehow make it understandable that you are a visual communicator, not an artist. Part of the problem is the fact that "graphic designer" and "visual communicator" are just not in the dictionary of standard professions out there. If you're a plumber, you can wrap all the duties of your job with 3.5 words: I'm a plumber. If you're a graphic designer, no wrapper, 3.5 or 300 words, will ever cover it. I've spent many hours throughout the years explaining to my own family and friends what I do for a living, but most of them still come back and ask what it is exactly that I do for dough. When you're a type designer, that problem magnifies itself considerably. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you start looking for the nearest exit, but none of the ones you can find is any good. All the one-line descriptions are vague, and every single one of them queues a long, one-sided conversation that usually ends with someone getting too drunk listening, or too tired of talking. Now imagine being a type designer, with a curious eleven year old son. The kid is curious as to why daddy keeps writing huge letters on the computer screen. Let's go play some ball, dad. As soon as I finish working, son. He looks over my shoulder and sees a big twirly H on the screen. To him it looks like a game, like I'm not working. And I have to explain it to him again. This Father's Day, my son gave me the one present that tells me he finally understands what I do for a living. Perhaps he is even comfortable with it, or curious enough about that he wants to try it out himself. Either way, it was the happiest Father's Day I've ever had, and I'm prouder of my son than of everything else I've done in my life. This is Matí's font. I hope you find it useful.

DB Frilly Paisley is a collection of paisleys and lace that make a perfect addition to any digital scrapbooking project.

DB Floridity is just plain adorable and the frilly lace theme adds a nice touch to your digital scrapbooking projects.

The sheet music for the 1939 tune "Chico's Love Song (Ma-La-Ja Fa-La Pas-Ka Lah-Ta) [Cuban Double Talk]" may have had an odd title, but the main portion of it was hand lettered in an interesting style. Condensed letters with rounded corners complemented by sharp lines and angles give the characters an almost futuristic look, despite the fact that they were designed during the Art Deco era. This became the basis for Song Composer JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

In few words, Monodia is a small but widely applicable slab serif (nearly monoweight) font family with only two weight and one cut effect version. To those who agree with the fact that less is actually more, three fonts should be sufficient for branding, headlines and other display uses. With that reason regular and bold weights are designed with huge contrast. In order to avoid clogging of certain (especially Cyrillic) letters in the text, some serifs are atypically modified or allowed. Unlike uppercase letters and numbers, lowercase letters don’t have forked serifs. Еnjoy!

Specialized for the "speed typeface" and "adrenaline seeker" soul, we got you packed up. A nitro boost for your visual needs. Please welcome, STRAIDER. The racing typeface. Inspired by the mid era of vintage and modern automotive visual branding. We build the bold and strong font with total aim to the speed, cars, vehicles, and automotive vibes. Will be a perfect match for the automotive events, branding, logo, cars and motorcycle posters, advertising, anytime you want some more "speed" in your visual project. FEATURES : Uppercase & Lowercase letters Numbers & Punctuation Ligatures Multilanguage Support Thank you.

Yazan is a New Arabic display typeface for desktop applications, inspired by oriental kufi and Qairawani kufi . Designed and developed by Sultan M. Saeed, Yazan has updated proportions and details, and is distinguished by its traditional serenity, modern aesthetics, This makes it suitable for large display sizes, especially in the area of advertising, while still functioning well as a text face.

Hollenbeck JNL is the Art Deco, all-caps cousin of Jeff Levine's Hallandale JNL typeface. This version utilizes the thick-and-thin stroke weights so popular during the Art Deco era, while retaining the look of hand-lettered copy. Best suited at larger point sizes, this font is a nice alternative to the over-used display faces reminiscent of that time period.

In the 1934 edition of the American Type Foundry’s “Book of American Type” is a selection of letterpress fonts which emulate typewriter faces. One design named “Bulletin Typewriter” served at the model for Cub Reporter JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions. The font has been monospaced in order to add a more traditional typewriter look to any project.

Night Clown - Quirky Clown Font. With its quirky, decorative, and playful design, this font captures the essence of clowns, parties, and April Fools' festivities. Offering a delightful range of seven variations - regular, clown hat, mask, surprise, laughter, decorative, and funny face - Night Clown is a perfect fit for children-oriented projects, kids' events, posters, greeting cards, birthday invitations, and even logos.

Louisiana originated from the lovely handwriting style of Melanie Snedeker. Lettering Artist Charles Borges de Oliveira then refined the letter forms to produce this one of a kind handwriting script. When you need a legible handwriting font, Louisiana is the perfect choice. Louisiana Grab Bag is a fun little add-on to Louisiana. Chockfull of arrows, smiley faces and other little goodies.

Cirkulus is an experimental display face, constructed using combinations of hairline circles and straight lines. The typeface was designed by Michael Neugebauer in 1970. The letters exude a constructivist aura, reminiscent of both the revolutionary 1920s, and the digital experiments of the 1990s. Cirkulus is a unicase alphabet, with a very lightweight appearance, and should be used solely in large display sizes.

BonaVia is an adaptation of Greater Albion's Bonning and Bonnington families. Its purpose made to enable the construction of banners and mastheads in the style of traditional streetsigns, and offered in Regular and 'Blanc' faces. A selection of decorative ends and fleurons are included. BonaVia is splendid on posters, signage, book and CD covers and labels with a period feel.

Eccentric was designed in 1881 by Gustav F. Schroeder. It is an all-capital, narrow-bodied, monoline display face that could be described as high waisted. With cross-bars and main junctures more than halfway up the letterforms, every letter - except the W - has a long-legged appearance. Eccentric has a wide range of display uses, from playbills to fashion advertisements.

A revival of “Gras Vibert”, a French fat face originally cast by the Didot typefoundry in Paris. It was cut in 1840 by Vibert, an engraver employed by the foundry. The capitals are heavier than the lowercase letters, and the characters g, k, y and & are rather peculiarly shaped, exaggerating the vertical stress. The font is designed for large sizes.

This unusual sans typeface was inspired by a serif face called Faust, designed by Albert Kapr for the Institut für Buchgestaltung in 1959. Its mix of medieval, Jugenstil and Bauhaus influences makes it an intriguing choice for your next project. Both versions of this font include the Unicode Latin 1252 and 1250 Central European character sets, with localization for Moldovan and Romanian.

In 1956, Schriftgeißerei Genzsch & Heyse released the pattern for this typeface, designed by Werner Rebhuhn, under the name "Hobby". Despite its Eisenhower-era origins, the face retains its casual charm, spontaneity and freshness even after half a century. Both versions of the font contain the complete Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

An offering from Barnhart Brothers & Spindler’s Catalog No. 9 from 1907, with the rather prosaic name of "Lining Gothic No. 71", inspired this non-nonsense and surprisingly ageless face. As versatile as it is simple, this typeface is a stylish choice for heads and subheads. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Madeleine is an open script face with influence from early 50s scripts. The stroke doesn't have much variation, and the characters are wide and flowing. The script also features OpenType end swashes and discretionary ligatures to extend the twirling and fluid nature of the script. This mischievous script is useful for informal invitations, scrap booking or whenever you need a retro look.

This engaging antique text face is based on Paragon Light, from the 1905 specimen book from Barnhart Brothers & Spindler. Although it is spaced and kerned for text work, it also is suited for headlines if you tighten the tracking. Both versions of this font contain complete Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Gaius is a beautiful script face with a nice relationship between the broad-edged pen and the proportions of the letterforms. It is very flexible and gives a personal touch due to its various alternate fonts with swash beginners, ending and ligature letterforms. Like Zapfino from Hermann Zapf, Gaius offers a great variety and makes the text more personal and readable.

Frusta is an earnest family of slab-serifs softened by tapered serifs and slightly squared curves that give it a warmth often absent in other slabs. Monoline and with a geometric foundation, this three-weight family includes true italics that can be their own headline face. The airy, yet sturdy construction makes this perfect for small text, infographics, and headlines of all sizes.

This elegant stencil face is based on an alphabet found in one of the innumerable Dover Books volumes edited by Dan X. Solo. Intended for headline use, it can also be employed effectively for short blocks of body copy. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

The Occidental family is a geometric, sans-serif text face marked by its angular construction. Occidental is suitable and economical enough to set large blocks of copy, but at display sizes Occidental's inherent character takes over making it useful for headline setting as well. The family includes four weights, each with corresponding italics (excepting Display) for a total of seven fonts.

Goudy Ornate (also known as Ornate Title) was designed in 1931 by Frederic Goudy. He states "It is a simple, decorative face that has been used by some good presses for use on title-pages where size is more important than blackness of line." The new Lanston version includes a lower case and full character set designed in the style of Frederic Goudy.

DF Capitol features two faces, DF Capitol Skyline and DF Capitol Capitals (a multi-weight all-caps compliment) that epitomise Streamline Moderne. Strong geometry and large, open counters with heavily condensed verticals and a succession of contextual alternates and discretionary ligatures. DF Capitol presents a nice companion in two weights. Both contain full support for Eastern and Central European languages.

This distinctive poster face is based on the work of Dard Hunter, one of the pioneers of typographic design within the Arts & Crafts movement. Use it to create distinctive headlines, or to add some architectural interest to your designs. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

f-line is a special handwriting monoline font face, with one constant line from glyph to glyph and variable width. It was drawn for the designer’s thesis in 2010 and expanded until 2021 with a lot of open type features. It’s built up with three glyph sets to let the glyphs rotate automatically, and amongst other type features initial forms are available.

DF Capitol features two faces, DF Capitol Skyline and DF Capitol Capitals (a multi-weight all-caps compliment) that epitomise Streamline Moderne. Strong geometry and large, open counters with heavily condensed verticals and a succession of contextual alternates and discretionary ligatures. DF Capitol Skyline presents a nice companion in two weights. Both contain full support for Eastern and Central European languages.

Nobody knows what God looks like but we know that the Devil has a thousand different faces. Samuel Casal sees the demon everywhere. In the streets, the movies, rock music, books, gambling, other things and even in Hell. Devilishly, he captures it all with his magical design. Purchase the font Inferno Dingbats now and take control of the forces of Evil.

Lobster Hand is a great hand painted face. Inspired by found signage this true type font has a vintage hand painted feel and is effortlessly original. Featuring two options for every letter you can create a huge combination of typographic alternates. Lobster Hand would be great for signage, drop caps, numerals, titles, logos, packaging, menus, etc. Available in Italic and Regular.