Mayence is the French name of Mainz, German city where Johannes Gutenberg was born. It's a manuscript font inspired in the author's calligraphy, with an angular structure, marked by a certain impulsiveness. Besides being a continuous-line font, Mayence explores some deviations and imperfections in the calligraphy practice, as accumulations of paint and anomalies in the thickness variation, characteristics which gives it more naturality. Its main difference is the set of over 430 ligatures (Premium version), based on the research and selection of important character sequences, rather frequent in several languages. For this, a study was done about the diphthongs, triphthongs and di-tri-tetra-pentagraphs more common in languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, Croatian, among others. Ligatures with up to 2 characters are enabled by default and with more than 2 characters are enabled by the Discretionary Ligatures option. Mayence also contains several ligatures based on common words in English and Spanish, exclusive ligatures with numbers and another standard, discretionary, historic and Unicode ligatures. It has 9 different ampersands (&), which can be chosen by the user according to the application context. When you enable the Titling Alternates (in OpenType-savvy programs), these 9 ampersand styles are converted to their forms of seal, with different purposes of use. To enrich your graphic applications, Mayence brings the Ornaments Version, for construction of impressive lines, borders, textures and the geometric shapes that you want, according to your creativity! To see the features available in each version, open or download the User Guide pdf, in the Gallery section. All text fonts are available in OpenType PS format and have extended character set to support CE, Baltic, Turkish, as well as Western European languages and additional Celtic characters.

The Catalpa font family is José Scaglione and Veronika Burian’s wood type inspired design for an overwhelming headline presence. It has no regular weights, only four slender and four hulking weights. Catalpa wasn’t made to be normal; it was made to overwhelm, to stand out, to bellow. Catalpa is the first font family within a trilogy that will be released through 2020. Each of the three have a distinct purpose and their own look, but they serve a common goal: to act as a complete family covering an editorial’s wide array of needs. As the first of the three, Catalpa is the bookend font family with a headlining purpose. What requirements are there for a great headline typeface? Distinction, weight, and cohesiveness are a good start. Its distinctiveness must catch attention, it must have a range of weights applicable to its purpose, and its internal consistency and external look must create a cohesive family. Catalpa is a distinct and unified family whose weights are attuned to its single-minded purpose — headlines and large text. Catalpa has only eight styles that are divided into two ranges of weights — four very light weights (Hairline, Thin, Extralight, and Light ) and four very bold ones (Extrabold, Heavy, Black, and Extrablack). The thin and heavy ends of the spectrum also have their own variable fonts, each with one axis of weight so designers can fine-tune their work. The geometric influence of the design is more obvious in the light range, with their line thickness increasing in the classical manner. The bold weights increase more in width and substance to serve well in websites, mobile apps, posters, advertisements, and magazines that aim for impact more than spreading information. As a family, Catalpa gels in big headlines, short sentences, and isolated words. The family has many recognizable features, in the bolder weights especially, like the reversed contrast ‘S, s’ or the angular design of ‘Q, M, W, w, a, f, 2, 3’. Catalpa’s headlining mixture of geometry and quirkiness leaves an impression that is so characteristic of wood type, but designed for substrates and screens.

Arabetics Symphony is a Sans Serif Latin typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. It is designed with a uniform glyph thickness and weight throughout, using a combination of simplified and clear open lines and curves and plenty of spikes and visual hints to compensate for the missing Latin serifs or traditional cursive Arabic calligraphic influence. This type family is suitable for both text and display applications. Additional Latin spacing is added to match an overall open-looking Arabic and is further maintained by a careful implementation of a typical Latin font kerning process. The design of this font family, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize with other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Symphony fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Symphony includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the “tatweel” key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Symphony includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Arabetics Latte is a Latin Serif typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. While its seemingly-idiosyncratic Latin design eliminates the excessive usage of serifs and offsets the visual effects of several geometrically-intense glyphs, its Times Romanesque proportions gives a full nod to the beginnings of Latin types and produces an overall stable look-and-feel of a classical Serif style, making it suitable for both text and display applications. Liberal spacing is maintained throughout to match that of the Arabic text and is further supplemented by a careful implementation of a typical Latin kerning. The overall design of this font, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize well with most other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Latte fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Latte includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the tatweel key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Latte includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Buntypes Bunaero™ combines classical and contemporary characteristics to a unique and distinctive font family with extravagant but also harmonious appearance. The characters are clear, open and sometimes bellied. Especially the caps have a very high waistline. Based on this, four main states with different moods have been composed: The original Bunaero™, the more conservative “Classic”, the elegant and curvy “Up” and the matching ”Italic”. All states offer weights from a considerably thin „Hair“ to a real fat „Heavy“, so the family consist of 34 Styles, all with rather narrow width and very good legibility. The font was manually hinted and contains extensive handcrafted kerning tables to ensure flawless appearance in all media. It supports at least 99 languages incl. Vietnamese and provides ligatures, alternative glyphs, special localized forms and even more enjoyable OpenType® features. This Pro version of Bunaero also includes a lot of features for sophisticated users: Lining figures for headline setting; Intermediate linings and oldstyle figures for text setting; Tabular versions of all figures; Superiors, inferiors, numerators, denominators and automated fractions; Language specialities like a capital Eszett for the german language and extra characters with a polish kreska instead an acute; And many more. Further information: Bunaero™ Pro Specimen PDF Bunaero™ Pro OpenType® Quickguide Feature Summary*: -4 Moods: Normal, Classic, Up and Italic -9 weights: Hair, Light, Thin, SemiLight, Regular, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold and Heavy -Supports at least 99 Languages incl. eastern european and vietnamese languages -Overall width: Narrow or Space-Saving -Advanced f- ligature set including fb -Discretionary s- and c- ligatures -Alternative Characters: a, e, f, g, i, k, l, t, v, w, y, J, K, Q, R, and more -6 sets of figures: -Capital sized figures, oldstyle figures and intermediate figures, each in proportional and carefully adjusted tabular versions -Superiors, inferiors, numerators and denominators -Circled and negative circled figures -Capital German Eszett -Extra characters with Polish Kreska -Catalan Punt Volat -Extra characters with alternate minmalistic Cedille -Arrows -Automated feature for fractions as well as extended fraction character set -More than 1000 characters per font * Some features may only be available in OpenType®-savvy applications

Morris Fuller Benton, the principal designer of the American Type Founders, designed Mariage in 1901. Mariage, which has been sold under a plethora of different names during the last century, is a blackletter typeface belonging to the Old English category. The term blackletter refers to typefaces that stem out of the historical printing traditions of northern Europe. These letters, called gebrochene Schriften, or "broken type" in German, are normally elaborately bent and distorted. Their forms often print large amounts of ink upon the page, creating text that leaves a heavy, black impression. The Old English style is a subset of blackletter type that dates back to 1498, when Wynken de Worde introduced textura style printing to England. Continental printers had been printing with textura style letters since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press fifty years earlier. Italian printers stopped using them around 1470. For northern Europeans, texturas remained the most popular form of typeface design until the invention of the fraktur style in Nuremberg. Mariage is heavily classicized sort of Old English type. During the Victorian era, designers admired the Middle Ages for its chivalric, community-based values and its pre-industrial lifestyle. Yet they also found the basic medieval textura letterform too difficult to read by present standards. They desired to modernize this old style. Today, this sort of update is often referred to not as "modernization" but as classicism. Benton's design for ATF builds upon earlier Victorian classicist interpretations of Old English/textura letters. For an example of what these Victorian designs looked like, check out the popular 1990 revival of the genre, Old English . Old English style types often appear drastically different from other blackletters. For contrast, compare Mariage to a classical German fraktur design, Fette Fraktur , a schwabacher style face, or the popular early 20th Century calligraphic gothic from Linotype, Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch . Especially in the United States, classicist Old English typefaces are thought to espouse tradition and journalistic integrity. These features, together with the inherent, complex beauty of Mariage's forms, make this typeface a perfect choice for certificates, awards, and newsletter mastheads.

The Scriptuale family, which contains eight styles, is a contemporary upright calligraphic face. Designed by German designer Renate Weise in 2003, this family of typefaces speaks to the present, while at the same time reflecting on a lyrical past. The letterforms of the Scriptuale family are romanticized, they reference German calligraphic styles from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. For instance the design of Scriptuale's uppercase strays from the canon of classical proportion into romantic idealism. While the C and O are drawn according to the ancient quadratic proportions - almost twice as wide, optically, as the E or the L - the letter A is wider than would be expected, and the D narrower. These subtle differences introduce a different rhythm into text set in Scriptuale than Italic styles of calligraphy may offer. Scriptuale's Gs merit special notice: both the upper and lower case G lunge slightly forward, further enhancing the dynamic quality of the text. Also unique in Scriptuale's design is the lowercase width: the letterforms appear slightly condensed; they have large x-heights to compensate for this. In a delightful twist, the number 2's beak has been closed by drawing it full-circle, back into the stem: this references a style of letter design that was practiced, among other places, by artists from the old Klingspor foundry in Offenbach Germany. Typefaces constructed there easily captured the zeitgeist of the romantic period, but are less calligraphic than Scriptuale (e.g., Rudolf Koch's Koch Antiqua). A semi-serif face (like Prof. Hermann Zapf's Optima or Otl Aicher's Rotis Semi), some of Scriptuale's letters have serifs (D), and some do not (A). And although both the B and the E normally have the same "structure" on their left side, Weise has drawn them differently in Scriptuale. These strengthen the calligraphic-like quality of the family. Traces of the pen are easy to see in Scriptuale's design; it is a thoroughly calligraphic face. The eight typefaces in the Scriptuale family include Light, Regular, Semi Bold, and Bold weights. Each weight has a companion italic. Scriptuale is similar to one other contemporary calligraphic family in the Linotype portfolio, Anasdair , from British designer

Chennai’s market-tested type styles have taken new form once again. The geometric forms of Chennai and its derivant Madurai, both successful in web-based applications and logotypes, have now been adapted for the superfamily Madurai Slab, a potent, square slab serif ideal for headlines and posters. Under the surface of Madurai Slab’s straightforward geometric structure, the font’s exaggerated vertical serifs provide the face with an extra chunk that commands the reader’s attention and gives the font more impact in its heavier styles. The extra-fortified forms are anything but monotonous, though. The bolder structure of the slab is instead rational, diligently thought-out, with minimally contrasting strokes, making the sturdier look particularly legible in shorter textual content blocks. This child of Madurai contains a comprehensive range of nine weights--slender to black--and features condensed and extender selections for a complete set of fifty-four fonts. All users of the Madurai Slab collection can access numerous OpenType alternates. Madurai Slab is furnished for experienced typographers, together with alternates, compact caps and many alts like “normalized” capitals and lowercase letters that come with stems. The typeface also contains a range of numeral sets, together with fractions, old-style and lining figures with superiors and inferiors. OpenType-capable programs including Quark or the Adobe suite allow quick changes to ligatures and alternates. Previews of these options can be found in the .pdf brochure. Madurai Slab also features the glyphs to enable all Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Madurai Slab supports around forty languages that utilize the prolonged Latin script, making it an excellent option for multi-lingual publications and packaging. This richness of options makes this the best slab serif family for websites as well as for print, motion graphics, logos, t-shirts and the like. Madurai Slab is a great choice when looking for a Neo-Grotesque slab serif font. In the hands of a learned designer, this new slab offers the potential for beautiful and well-blended layouts. With its widths adjusting to compact and extended content blocks, this typeface is perfect for the headings, captions and other brief, immediate messages that you need to drive your message home.

Update November 2022: ULGA Grid now features an oblique variant. It’s also been expanded into a family of different but related designs with the addition of ULGA Grid Solid and ULGA Grid Rounded typeface families. All variants and new designs are monospaced, sharing the same width as the original ULGA Grid font and matching character sets. The character set has also been enlarged and now supports Western Europe, Vietnamese, Central/Eastern Europe, Baltic, Turkish and Romanian. ULGA Grid is a modular, monospaced typeface reminiscent of the old Letraset LCD & Quartz typefaces from the 1970/80s with lots of alternative characters and ornaments to bring a fresh twist to the genre. The idea’s seed germinated while I was going through a phase of binge watching my favourite 1980/90s sci-fi movies (classics such as Terminator, Total Recall and RoboCop). However, perception and reality don’t always align. Thirty years later, when compared to today’s technology, some visual elements look kind of outdated, almost Retro Futuristic. The initial design process started out in Adobe Illustrator when I constructed letters from a few geometric shapes within a square block. Just playing around with different shapes was so engrossing that it wasn’t long before there were enough characters for a basic typeface. The project grew again as I experimented with designs within the shapes and set paragraphs of text in patterns, resulting in over a hundred alternative characters and ornaments, some of which double up as border designs. This typeface may be square but it’s anything but boring. What it lacks in legibility ULGA Grid makes up for in style and the end result is a surprisingly versatile typeface that you'll have fun using for a wide range of display purposes including CD covers, posters, packaging, advertising, brochures and film titles. Ironically, the fixed grid structure frees the characters to create patterns of text not possible with variable widths.

Cute FS Kitty is the type equivalent of Bagpuss: plump, cute, cuddly and not fond of exercise. So don’t go giving it a run-out on body copy; FS Kitty is an all-caps font made for showing off in posters and headlines, and on products, point-of sale and especially sweets. Blubber Kitty had been quietly curled up in Phil Garnham’s sketchbook for a year before he brought it out to be brushed up. “It was in the mix as a basic form when I started thinking about FS Lola. It was a twisted, bubbly beauty – quite squishable and huggable. The working file was called Blubber. “At that time it was a basic construction of strokes. I created the ‘A’ first, purely as a shape to play with, not as type. I flipped it for ‘V’, and copied that for a ‘W’. I flipped the ‘W’ for an ‘M’... I thought, ‘This looks a bit wacky, but I like it,’ and just carried on. The most tricky characters were the ‘B’ ‘P’ and ‘R’. I must have drawn about 20 kinds of B for this, just to get it to fit.” Variety “When the regular weight of Kitty had been designed,” says Jason Smith, “it just felt like a natural progression to go on and explore how far we could go with it: Light, Solid, Headline, Shadow.” Phil Garnham thinks there’s still more to come. “There are some really individual characters in this font that I think have yet to be exploited: the Greek Omega symbol, the strange face in the ampersand. Like Bagpuss, Kitty has kept a low profile so far. “We know people are using Kitty. In fact, it was the first of any of our fonts that we sold on the day it was released. But I still haven’t seen it out there in the wild. It’s going to be a exciting moment.”

Gryffensee is designed to be the Futura of blackletter, combining the time-honored gravity and relentlessness of the Gothic script with the clean, contemporary freshness of the geometric sans. Built from a tightly controlled inventory of lines, arcs, sharp cuts, and OpenType features, Gryffensee was born and raised in the digital age, yet retains the powerful charisma and human warmth of its mediaeval blackletter ancestors. As a result, it excels in a wide range of display settings, logotypes, and short text. Unlike most conventional blackletters, it even handles all-caps usage with grace, and includes an extensive Cyrillic character set (in the Pro version). Apart from a generous range of automatic ligatures and contextual alternates, Gryffensee offers stylistic alternates that allow users to customize its appearance to their tastes. The capital letters |AGHIKZ| come in alternate cuts that trade traditional shapes for increased legibility, while the letter |s| appears in three cuts, each with a unique, distinct flavor. All these options are accessible through OpenType stylistic sets in the main Latin font, Gryffensee Eins. For easy use in applications without OpenType support, we provide two additional Latin fonts (Gryffensee Zwei and Drei) in which these options replace the default cuts. Finally, Gryffensee Pro offers all the functionality of Gryffensee Eins, plus Cyrillic support. My intention to devise a contemporary geometric blackletter was inspired by four hand-painted letters, |ABCD|, in Sasha Prood�s online portfolio. I later found out that he had, in turn, taken those letters from an existing font, Bastard, by Jonathan Barnbrook. Luckily, by that time my project had taken on a life of its own. Gryffensee is an original design that bears only the most superficial resemblance to Bastard. Gryffensee is a mediaeval spelling of the lake Greifensee near which I grew up. It is pronounced [?gri?f?n?se?], or "GRIEF-un-say" in English approximation. This font is dedicated to Simone.

“Nusaibah” is the first name of an early convert woman to Islam, and the first female to fight in defense of the Islamic religion. Her full name is Nusaibah bint Kaíab Al-Maziniyyah and she took part in the Battles of Uhud, Hunain, Yamama and the Treaty of Hudaibiyah with Islam’s prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Nusaibah is best known for her brave and heroic feat during the Battle of Uhud - fought on March 19, 625 - when she entered the battle carrying a sword and a shield to protect the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) from the arrows of the enemy, and she accordingly received several wounds while fighting and these wounds were not healed until the following year. The prophet Muhammad (pbuh) mentioned her distinct courage by saying that in whichever direction he turned in the battlefield, he could see her defending and protecting him. "Nusaibah" is a modern, geometric, and headline Arabic display typeface. The main trait of this typeface is the novel symmetrical design of its letters which renders it as one of the modern stylish typefaces used for headlines and titles. This is can be noticed in its letters such as “Theh”, “Jeem”, “Ain”, “Sheen”, and others. Moreover, “Nusaibah” font has a character set which supports Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Latin letters and numerals with a limited range of specific Arabic and Latin ligatures. This font comes in two weights (i.e., regular and bold) with nearly 643 distinctive glyphs. Due to its geometric and linear design, “Nusaibah” typeface is appropriate for heading and titling in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu magazines, posters, and surfaces of different equipment. It is also elegantly suitable for signs, books’ covers, advertisement light boards, products’ and services’ names, and titles of flyers, pamphlets, novels, and books of children. “Nusaibah” typeface is one of the Arabic typefaces that has a novel and modern-day design which can be used in versatile graphic, typographic, and artistic works in different languages for diverse cultures.

As one of the most popular rock bands of the world, Foreigner has rocked the charts with 10 multi-platinum albums and sixteen top 30 hits in the last 40 years. But one might ask what a band this successful has been missing all these years? No head games here...a consistent typeface based on their logo is the answer. As fans of Foreigner, we've taken the essence of their iconic logotype and expanded it out into a full typeface in regular and bold weights to celebrate their 40th anniversary tour. The Jukebox Hero Family celebrates the typographic stylings of Foreigner, with the soft rounded terminals and an open geometric feel, including the unique stencil flavor of the original logo. It inherited the friendly stylings of the all Capitals logo that inspired it, and goes on to include a full standard character set with expansive international support of latin based languages, and two weights jumping from regular to a beefy bold. This family is ready to rock the charts for your designs towards that of a modern, comfortable appeal. Here's what's included with Jukebox Hero Family bundle: 413 glyphs - including Capitals, Lowercase, Numerals, Punctuation and an extensive character set that covers multilingual support of latin based languages. (see the 3rd graphic for a preview of the characters included) 2 weights: Regular & Bold. Fonts are provided in TTF & OTF formats. The TTF format is the standard go to for most users, although the OTF and TTF function exactly the same. Here's why Jukebox Hero Family bundle is for you: You're a die-hard Foreigner fan, and have a case of "Double Vision" and need both font weights. You're looking for a stylish and sophisticated soft sans-serif stencil typeface family. You've been waiting for fonts like these. You're looking for a Sci-fi vibe typeface that has a look that feels familiar. You just like to collect quality fonts to add to your design arsenal

The Brass Family has a lineage that extends into English history. About five hundred years ago a devout, but anonymous Englishman gave glory to the God he worshipped by designing the capital letters and decorations of these two fonts. Originally recorded in The History Of Mediaeval Alphabets And Devices by Henry Shaw (London 1853), they are described by Alexander Nesbitt in his Decorative Alphabets And Initials (Mineola, NY 1959) as “Initials and stop ornaments from brasses in Westminster Abbey.” I wish I could say I remember seeing them when I was there, but that was forty-two years ago and all I remember was seeing the tomb of Edward the Confessor. One definition of “stop” as a noun is a point of punctuation. I have heard people from the British Isles speak of a “full stop” when referring to a period. Some may remember a 19th century form of communication called a telegram being read aloud in an old movie, with the use of the word “stop” to indicate the end of a sentence or fragment. A full dozen of these stop ornaments are provided. They occupy positions 060, 062, 094, 123, 125, 126, 135, 137, 167, 172, 177 & 190. The Brass Family consists of two fonts: Brass and Brass Too. Both fonts have an identical upper case and ornaments, but paired with different lower cases. Although the typefaces from which the lower cases were drawn are both of modern design, both are interpretations of the textura style of blackletter in use in England when the upper case and ornaments were fashioned for the Abbey. Brass is paired with Morris Gothic, which matches the color of the upper case quite well. Brass Too is paired with Wedding Regular, which is distinctly lighter than the upper case. I find it very interesting how each connects differently. The resulting fonts are unusual and most useful for evoking an historic atmosphere.

Sublime45-Regular Sublime Revised for 2021. One font in Opentype format as Sublime45. Families and all TT Truetype versions eliminated in this wonderful stand alone. The Spring 1997 original release of Sublime —borne an organic creature of black water soluble ink & digitized by Coniglio Type. Sublime is a fun font to use in commercial layouts. It is soft and fluid as ink. Like the wrinkles of time, it is imperfect. That in itself makes it incredibly attractive, warm and “human factor”. Sublime offers legibility so sorely missed in the current recreational font market. Sublime was inspired by World War II US fighter pilot Donald Alling. He flew missions over Nazi Germany. His squadron also dropped food, medicine and relief supplies over the Netherlands. Known as “the Colonel” to his friends. Don as a civic engineer ruled literally miles of ink letter callout’s with a template device called a LeRoy in peacetime on vellum and mylar across his career as a technical illustrator. You didn't want to screw up inking into a template with wet black permanent ink. You really had to have a steady hand and it was all done by hand. You can say Don worked “unplugged”. And that is cool! He was part of the broad stroke of postwar industrial expansion that helped keep America strong, rendering exploded views on top secret projects. Many of us were not even born yet when all this was going on. Today at over 80 years young Don is like a national treasure, savvy and bright—and the ladies love him! The Colonel remains a dedicated master airbrush man, stand–up man, caricature artist and letterman all without use of a computer! He was lucky enough to retire before a desktop cathode tube was put in his face. Today the Colonel enjoys restoring VW’s, flying and freelance consulting when not being called to supper by his lovely wife Rea.

Cute FS Kitty is the type equivalent of Bagpuss: plump, cute, cuddly and not fond of exercise. So don’t go giving it a run-out on body copy; FS Kitty is an all-caps font made for showing off in posters and headlines, and on products, point-of sale and especially sweets. Blubber Kitty had been quietly curled up in Phil Garnham’s sketchbook for a year before he brought it out to be brushed up. “It was in the mix as a basic form when I started thinking about FS Lola. It was a twisted, bubbly beauty – quite squishable and huggable. The working file was called Blubber. “At that time it was a basic construction of strokes. I created the ‘A’ first, purely as a shape to play with, not as type. I flipped it for ‘V’, and copied that for a ‘W’. I flipped the ‘W’ for an ‘M’... I thought, ‘This looks a bit wacky, but I like it,’ and just carried on. The most tricky characters were the ‘B’ ‘P’ and ‘R’. I must have drawn about 20 kinds of B for this, just to get it to fit.” Variety “When the regular weight of Kitty had been designed,” says Jason Smith, “it just felt like a natural progression to go on and explore how far we could go with it: Light, Solid, Headline, Shadow.” Phil Garnham thinks there’s still more to come. “There are some really individual characters in this font that I think have yet to be exploited: the Greek Omega symbol, the strange face in the ampersand. Like Bagpuss, Kitty has kept a low profile so far. “We know people are using Kitty. In fact, it was the first of any of our fonts that we sold on the day it was released. But I still haven’t seen it out there in the wild. It’s going to be a exciting moment.”

The classic modernist FS Alvar grew out of a library of pure modular shapes gathered by Fontsmith’s master of the abstract starting point, Mr Phil Garnham. “It was a collection that just had to be explored and brought to life in a typographic voice. “We debated long and hard about this. It was big decision to make a shift away from the typefaces that people knew us for. And we didn’t want to compromise our reputation of well crafted typographic quality”. Modular forms A headline font that’s both graphic and functional, in the modernist tradition, FS Alvar focused Fontsmith’s eyes on the bigger issue of what makes a font show its age. “Looking at those fonts from the 1980s that were supposed to represent the ‘future’,” says Phil, “they looked so dated now. With Alvar, we weren’t concerned with creating future-thinking typography but with exploring form for form’s sake, and how that can evolve to create letterforms. Modular forms with a typographic eye.” Stencilled The concept for Alvar first materialised back in 2001 with some sketches Phil made while still at Middlesex University. Eight years later, something made him dig them out again. “There was something really nice about the proportions of that first design. Working on it again, I thought about it properly, but it still needed something to give it that edge. “Jason stood up in the studio and supplied the missing link: ‘Why don’t we make it stencilled?’ He didn’t mean in an obvious way, but by building a kind of architectural stencil into the form. It worked and the idea of using an architect’s name (Alvar Aalto) to describe the font felt perfect.” Featured in... The three weights of FS Alvar are made for standout headlines in advertising campaigns and magazines. Alvar has had a starring role in campaigns for brands from Nike to Amnesty International, as well as on CD covers, record labels and packaging.

Every single glyph of Helvetica has been redrawn and redesigned for this expansive new edition – which preserves the typeface's Swiss mantra of clarity, simplicity and neutrality, while updating it for the demands of contemporary design and branding. Helvetica Now comprises 96 fonts, consisting of three distinct optical sizes: Micro, Text and Display, all in two widths. Each one has been carefully tailored to the demands of its size. The larger Display versions are drawn to show off the subtlety of Helvetica and spaced with headlines in mind, while the Text sizes focus on legibility, using robust strokes and comfortably loose spaces. The Micro sizes address an issue Helvetica has long faced – that of being 'micro type challenged'. In the past, the typeface struggled to be legible at tiny sizes because of its compactness and closed apertures. Helvetica Now's Micro designs are simplified and exaggerated to maintain the impression of Helvetica in tiny type, and their spacing is loose, providing remarkable legibility at microscopic sizes and in low-res environments. There's also an extensive set of alternates, which allow designers the opportunity to experiment with and adapt Helvetica's tone of voice. This includes a hooked version of the lowercase l (addressing a common complaint that the capital I and lowercase l are indistinguishable) as well as a rounded G, and a straight-legged R, a single storey a and a lowercase u without a trailing serif. In the past, designers had to nudge, trim and contort the design to create stylish display-type lockups with Helvetica. Helvetica Now Display was designed and spaced with those modifications in mind—saving effort and providing more consistent (and more stylish) results. “Helvetica is the gold standard,' says Monotype Type Director Charles Nix. “To use it is to claim that you are the ultimate expression of whatever your brand aspires to be. Its blankness is its power.” Helvetica Now User Guide PDF. Featured in: Best Fonts for Resumes, Best Fonts for Websites, Best Fonts for PowerPoints

A literary font FS Neruda takes its name from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, described as “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language”. As such, it’s a font that references the very best literary typeface traditions. Smart, sharp and classical, FS Neruda bridges the gap between the classical and the offbeat. This font started life in the world of newspapers and books and is the perfect storytelling typeface for savvy, inquiring readers whether in printed journals, hard news, short online missives or poetry. Idiosyncratic precision FS Neruda is clear and legible in body text, while also being a space-saver fitting in more characters on each line than the typefaces that inspired it. In larger sizes it becomes a different beast – livelier, quirkier, but no less sharp. This is a truly classic typeface designed with long text setting in mind, thanks to its large x-heights, and short ascenders and descenders. FS Neruda mixes suave, sharp confidence with a sense of fragility and quirkiness. It’s knowledgeable, informative and idiosyncratic; one for readers and enquiring minds. Subtle weight modifications The construction and details of the letterforms differ across each of the five weights, with each cut separately to evoke different flavours: Thin is typewriter-like, Light is classy, Regular is canonical, Bold is robust, Black is magazine-esque. FS Neruda also boasts a radiant italic companion, a wide set of small caps, lower and uppercase ligatures, case punctuation and spacing, four sets of figures, and some ageless typographic symbols such as manicules, fleurons and teardrop crosses. Suggestive simplicity “The key to success in the current type design landscape is to design a typeface which looks conventional at text sizes but has a few small, suggestive touches visible at bigger sizes that make it distinct,” says designer Pedro Arilla. “Another thing we wanted to achieve with this typeface is simplicity.” FS Neruda is available in ten carefully crafted styles: it’s designed to work perfectly at text sizes, but still glows as a display typeface.

Right now! FS Emeric reconciles a pair of seemingly opposing approaches: the systematic but chilly functionalism of early modernist typography, trapped in time, and a warmer, more emotional, more optimistic spirit. What Fontsmith created was something that marries precision with expression, geometry with movement, functionality with humanity. FS Emeric has a sharp, kinetic edge that cuts across design disciplines – graphic, fashion, product, automotive. It’s about what’s happening right now. Contemporary, optimistic, distinctive – a classic working sans serif. Appetite Discussions with some of Fontsmith’s design studio clients had revealed an appetite for a new kind of typeface that could express mid-century modernist principles in a fresh, contemporary voice. As he crafted the letterforms that would form FS Emeric, Phil Garnham was guided by two central ideas. First, there was Jan Tschichold’s contention that a good letter is “one that expresses itself, speaking with the utmost distinctiveness and clarity”. Second was a belief that a font can be personally expressive without compromising its functionality. These provided the fuel that drove the project to its conclusion. Posters To mark the launch of FS Emeric, Fontsmith asked 11 eminent design studios from around the world – the likes of Pentagram, Studio Dumbar, Bibliotheque, Non-Format and Build – to create a limited edition A1 poster. Each poster celebrated a different weight of FS Emeric, and just 50 of each were screen-printed by Dan Mather onto 175gsm Colorplan stock. “We gave away a randomly selected poster every time two or more weights of the FS Emeric were purchased,” says Phil Garnham. “They’ve now become somewhat of a collector’s item in their own right.” Superfamily In the spirit of Univers, the original font superfamily, FS Emeric now comprises 22 Roman and italic typefaces overall, making it one of the most versatile and functional modern fonts across all kinds of media, as well as one of the most distinctive.

Based on a specimen of an obscure and uncredited old face called Kitterland, Hamlet is one of those curiosities hardly ever noticed in the world of modern fonts, the kind that infuses a variety of historic Blackletter and calligraphy traits in an otherwise Roman alphabet. Such typefaces, what few of them exist, are almost always classified by typophiles as traditional decorative Roman alphabets. We beg to differ. We think such hybrids are fascinating enough to deserve a classification of their own. And we think today's aspiring letterers and type designers would benefit from paying special attention to this kind of hybrid alphabet, not only because it has much more hand than machine in it, but also because it is a prime example of how to succeed in mixing different lettering techniques into one self-contained and distinctly functional alphabet. As in any efficient mixture of lettering methods, Hamlet ended up with characters that are uniquely its own, such as the cupped A, M, V, W and Y, the very luscious and inviting curves on the arms of E, F, L and T, both single- and double-story forms of the a, and the humblest, friendliest g and y ever. A dozen alternate characters are sprinkled throughout the character set, so check out the map for a few pleasant surprises. We also made the Handtooled and Headstone styles because we thought these friendly forms were just crying out for such treatments. The Handtooled version turned out quite lovely, if we may say so ourselves, perhaps even better than the main font. The Headstone version is available as a free bonus to those who purchase the complete Hamlet package. All Hamlet styles come with lining figures as well as old style ones. Hamlet comes in all popular font formats. The OpenType fonts contain push-button swapping alternates and figures, which come in handy in software programs that support this kind of thing.