Probably as a reaction to the pragmatism of modernist design, the seventies saw an explosion of buoyant, vivacious typography. Psychedelia fueled a return to the melting, lush shapes of Art Nouveau while Pop culture embraced the usage of funky, joyful lettering for advertising, product design and tv titling. New low-cost technologies like photo-lettering and rub-on transfer required new fonts to be expressive rather than legible, pushing designers to produce, bubbly, high-spirited masterpieces, where geometric excess and calligraphic inventions melted joyfully. Freitag is Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini's homage to this era and its typography. His starting point was the design of a heavy sans serif with humanist condensed proportions, flared stems and reverse contrast, that generated both the main family, and a variant display subfamily. The main typeface family slowly builds the tension and design exuberance along the weight axis - a bit like our desire for the weekend increases during the week. In Light and Medium weights the font shows a more controlled, medium-contrast design, tightly spaced for maximum display effect. The Book weight follows the same design but uses a more relaxed letter spacing to allow usage in smaller sizes and short body copy. As weight increases in the Bold weight the style becomes more expressive, with a visible reverse contrast building up and culminating in the Heavy weight with his clearly visible "bell bottoms" feel. In the display sub-family the design is pushed further by introducing variant letterforms that have a stronger connection to calligraphy and lettering. Also, the weight range becomes a optical one, with weights marked as Medium, Large, XLarge, as bringing the contrast and the boldness to the extreme creates smaller counterspaces that require bigger usage sizes. Another important addition of the display sub-family is the connected italics that sport swash capitals and cursive letterforms, developed with logo design and ultra-expressive editorial design in mind. To balance the extreme contrast in the XL weight, contrast of punctuation is reduced, creating a rich, highly-dynamic texture wherever diacritics and marks are used in the text. The full family includes 16 styles + 4 variable fonts, allowing full control of the design over its tree-hugging design space. All 20 fonts share an extended latin charset with open type features including case sensitive forms, single and double story variants and alternate glyphs. According to its creator, "Freitag is the typeface that sounds like an imaginary Woodstock where on the stage with Jimi Hendrix with Novarese, Motter, Excoffon and Benguiat playing onstage with Jimi Hendrix". Jeepers creepers!

By the 1990s, the availability of font creation software opened the door to an explosion of creativity, experimentation and exploration into the world of digital typography by amateur and professional alike. The undisputed king of the freeware fonts was Ray Larabie through his Larabie Fonts website. It seemed at the time that Ray’s output was endless, and he amassed dozens upon dozens of fonts that ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. In fact, Ray was the driving force of encouragement and a behind-the-scenes “mentor” who helped Jeff Levine Fonts get underway in January of 2006. As Larabie’s focus changed to higher-quality commercial type design with the launch of Typodermic, Inc., many of his “less than perfect” font experiments were withdrawn and shelved. Ray eventually turned those lost (and sometimes questionable) typefaces into a bundled zip archive released into the public domain through Creative Commons. One particular design “Boron” (circa 1996) featured computer-oriented lettering as if etched onto a circuit board. Running with this idea, and with Ray's approval, the electronic elements were stripped away, the characters cleaned up and modified, and the font reworked in Retro Checkbook JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

“LAPOYA” (meaning in english “the coolest”) is a large slab serif typeface family, with a certain Italian inverted contrast touch. Specially designed for advertising big shows and commerces, Lapoya has 36 variables and four axes, including a text and decorative versions, where the drawing and width of its counterforms vary. It also has icons that remember the old aesthetics of wood types from the early 20th century, and more than 400 characters with a multitude of signs and ligatures, that make Lapoya ideal for up to 89 languages. It is clearly inspired by the large wood types designed for posters, advertisements and newspapers. Since they were introduced in the 19th century, slab serifs have become extremely popular. In fact, serifs are often enlarged, not so much to look like beautiful or balanced letters, but to be more graphic and visual powerful than others. Furthermore, in the case of this typeface, this idea has been applied not only to capital letters, but also to the lowercase, numbers and signs of all kinds. “That’s why this typeface is LAPOYA!” Designed by Carlos Campos in 2023. cuchi@cuchiquetipo.com OPENTYPE FONT 426 GLYPHS 388 CHARACTERS 4 AXES 36 INSTANCES 9 LAYOUT FEATURES 89 LANGUAGES

Article to appear on the font family page: According to the Catholic faith, a well known náhuatl story called "Nican Mopohua" (translated as "Here it's narrate") about the Marianas apparitions on the Tepeyac's hill, to the north of the actual Mexico City. After four apparitions, La Virgen de Guadalupe (LVG) told Juan Diego (JD) that he must introduce himself to the first Bishop of Mexico. JD took in his "ayate" some roses (that aren't natives to Mexico's barren territories) and when he dropped them in front of the bishop, the image of LVG appeared in front of him with indigenous features. I’ve worked a lot in this font that appears to came out of nowhere, just like the image of LVG itself, the fact is that I started first sketching some flowers, because I wanted to do something related to this mexican story, so, taking some features from this flowers I started sketching some letters, for example “r” and “i” and the counter forms for some letters like “a” and “o” (that I didn’t use by the way) and the punctuation marks, all inspired by this leaf forms. Lighter weight coming soon! Hope you like it. Any comments: rodrigonabo@gmail.com

Helsa is a slim and eccentric serif for headings and short texts. It’s a modern interpretation of the narrow Elseviers of the early 20th century. The letterforms are based on Dutch samples, and in the details there are references to both American type catalogs and letters from the foundries of Wolf and Herbeck. Due to the compact proportions of characters and the high contrast of strokes, Helsa doesn’t take up much space in the line and allows you to increase the type size freely, drawing the viewer's attention to the text. The typeface is suitable for branding museums and exhibitions, alternative music bands, independent clothing and perfume brands, and for any topic related to design or history. Helsa’s character set has more than 1600 characters. It supports hundreds of languages, including extended Cyrillic, Greek, and Vietnamese, as well as many OpenType features: fractions, ligatures, old style and tabular numerals, titular letter alternates, and more. There are variants of dashes and other punctuation marks specifically for uppercase typing. In addition to letters, the typeface contains arrows, numbers in circles (in fact, in ovals), symbols of various types of plastic, card suits and much more. Helsa typeface was made at Paratype in 2020-2022.

"The Amy Winehouse Script" unveils a unique window into the artistic and personal world of the iconic British singer and songwriter, Amy Winehouse. Renowned for her soulful voice and heartfelt lyrics, Amy's handwriting, a lesser-known facet of her life, offers a captivating story. Amy's script mirrors her artistic and unconventional spirit, marked by artistic flourishes and cursive elegance, echoing her expressive personality. Her cursive style, chosen for its fluidity, mirrors her singing, creating a deep connection between her music and script. Her individualistic script is characterized by varied letter sizes and shapes, reflecting her nonconformist nature and her desire to stand out. It can be messy, much like her turbulent life, representing her emotional journey, marked by highs and lows. Amy's handwriting evolved with her emotional state, sometimes appearing chaotic during difficult times. It's important to note the limited public samples, making it challenging to draw definitive conclusions. "The Amy Winehouse Script" invites you to explore uncharted territories of her life and artistry, offering fresh insights into her unspoken expressions and enduring intrigue. In every line, you can hear the music of her words and the story of her script, reminding us how art transcends boundaries, leaving an indelible mark.

FF Attribute™ Mono is a monospaced design with an industrial strength, minimalist vibe, making it perfect for attention getting, theme-based headlines, posters, banners and navigational links. And, because it is such a robust family, FF Attribute can also be used for branding of blogs, games, web sites and tech products. FF Attribute comes in two families; Mono and Text. The Mono is a fixed width (monospace) design, while the Text is a proportional design. FF Attribute was, in fact, initially designed for the use in code editor software. Its seven roman and italic monospaced weights and extended character set supporting many languages also make it a powerful communications tool. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the monospaced version, where all characters share a fixed width, there is also a proportional, “faux monospaced” version: FF Attribute Text. The Text family keeps the visual character of a monospaced typeface, but wide letters are given more space while narrow characters have been drawn with correct proportions and spacing. FF Attribute Text looks monospaced – but it’s not. Drawn by Viktor Nübel, FF Attribute Mono’s 14 designs, huge character set, including box-drawing characters and user-interface icons, make it the Swiss Army Knife® of monospaced fonts.

Мир is Mir. The Russian word Мир (Mir) means both World and Peace. The rendezvous of the two terms seems quite unique and utopistic today, but it is comforting to see that it was natural at some time deep down in Russian history. Bits of both meanings were going through my mind while I was designing this typeface. Mir’s character set is multiscript – Latin, Cyrillic and Greek – and extends to many parts of the linguistic world. In fact it covers more than 100 languages. Stylistic consistency between the language systems make typographic border crossings painless even where national borders are still closely guarded. And in regions where mathematics, physics or chemistry are to be expressed, a rich set of OpenType features lets Mir master also these situations. Serious things are best be said in a relaxed, unpretentious way. So Mir doesn’t put on a show. Mir has authority without being authoritarian, it is serious but not stern. It can explain difficult things and stay calm and down to earth at the same time. Mir Medium has another useful feature: It can be freely downloaded and used by anybody anywhere. You can test the Mir Family with free Mir Medium and get more styles when you need them. @juliasys

ITC Tabula is meant to be read. The design grew out of a study to create a font to set film subtitles. According to Julien Janiszewski, the face's Paris-based designer, “I set parameters for the design whereby the letters had to be able to hold up at very small sizes when set on film and yet must be able to be enlarged 2000 times to be read on a theatre screen.” The subtitle font was not completed, but several months later Janiszewski revisited the design and made a discovery. “I realized that the constraints I had established for the subtitling font was not that far from those people could have in creating typographic signage. Many time this calls for a font that can be used easily in very large sizes for headlines on highway billboards and quite small for text copy.” Work proceeded for two more years before Janiszewski was satisfied with the results. The final design is a somewhat squared sans serif family of four weighs with corresponding italics. Janiszewski also wanted to create what he calls a “sensitive sans-one that is not restricted to geometric shapes but has a subtle calligraphic, foundation.” ITC Tabula is not only easy to read, it is also a distinctive and handsome design.

Jantar Sharp is a text family with flared terminals that eludes the catego­ries of serif or sans. Its most recognisable features are taken from both styles to achieve proper design and high legibility standards. Jantar Sharp performs especially well when used for continuous reading including texts on web platforms. Its personality lies in the flared stroke endings and certain details which make its shapes neither sans nor serifs. Rather than following any particular historical model, it picks up elements from various periods to achieve an organically dynamic look which is entirely compatible with the reading process. Jantar Sharp Italic makes a nice contrast, though the pace and proportions are not drastically different from the upright. This allows for effortless reading of longer passages of italicised text. Jantar Sharp – as well as its teammate Jantar Flow – has been designed in seven weights from ExtraLight to Heavy, all with accompanying italics; it has a tabular and proportional set of figures in both old style and lining options are included together with a special set of hybrid figures sitting between x-height and capitals. Superscripts and subscripts are provided together with a vast collection of diacritics covering all European language and a set of case-sensitive characters.

Talking about the numerous types that today bear the name of Giambattista Bodoni are a kind of tribute as much to his reputation as a printer as to his ability as designer and engraver. In fact, all of them tent to be more in the way or style of Bodoni than simply copy of his letterforms. Like many other type designers, we’ve been seduced also to develop our own point of view of his work, nowadays enriched by some features of OpenType format that allows a variety of combinations: standard ligatures, discretional ligatures, stylistic alternates and old styles figures. Whereas the Bodoni serif in the capitals was of the same weight as the thin stroke but joined with a very slight fillet (Bracket) and the lowercase serif were like his French rivals, the Didots, featured straight- edged serifs that were unbracketed. The ascenders and descenders of this new Bodoni are shorter, giving in this way, more space for enlarge x high. Specially designed for editorial design and advertising, can be used in magazines, annual reports and all kind of fine print materials or web pages. The beauty of his letterforms can enrich headlines; this font can also be used as body text for its good legibility and accurate kerning.