Here’s a warm, casual text font based on an early twentieth century work by lettering artist Elizabeth Colwell, released by American Type Founders in 1923. For this update, all four fonts have been completely redrawn, and many new characters have been added. Both versions of this font contain the complete Latin A Extended character set, as well as extended ligatures and fractions.

The 1905 Barnhart Brothers & Spindler catalog featured an ultrawide face called "French Antique Extended". The letterforms have been faithfully rendered here, but this font’s kerning calls for a lot of overlapping and interlocking that the original cast-metal face wouldn't have been able to duplicate. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

When Patricia Lillie was growing up, she thought the coolest thing in the world would be finding her own name listed in a library catalog. The fantasy came true in 1986 when her first children's book was published. Five more followed. The thrill of seeing her work on library shelves hasn't abated, but today, Lillie is just as likely to see one of her typefaces on the cover of a book. She has created several display faces and image fonts. My first typeface designs were based on lettering I'd done while working for a library, doing graphics work for the children's section," she explains. "I currently do a lot of web design, but type is my favorite thing." The Tickles (ITC Tickle and ITC Tickle Too) are Lillie's first ITC typeface releases. "I was playing around with a Sharpie marker one day and liked the way the letters looked," she recalls. "I started redoing the letters from scratch in Fontographer to see what developed, and liked those letters too." ITC Tickle is a bi-form font (with both cap and lowercase letters of the same size) that clearly breaks a typographic rule or two. ITC Tickle Too has the same basic lettershapes, but they've grown clusters of stipples that give a three-dimensional quality to the design. The result is a friendly, offbeat display family that's guaranteed to add a giggle to your work."

Aristotelica Pro is the 2020 redesign of the rounded geometric sans designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli developing the original philosophy of one of the classic and best-selling Zetafonts typefaces, Arista by Francesco Canovaro. Originally conceived as an exercise in restraint and simplicity, Aristotelica is typographic eulogy to the simple beauty of circular shapes, aptly named after the greek philosopher who pioneered formal logic. It shows its strengths mostly in display uses and logo design, with a palette of moods ranging from the stark elegance of the uppercase hairline weights to the playful softness of the lowercase bold weights. True to its universalist calling, it has however been developed in a variant text version that applies slight corrections to design and metrics to allow for better legibility in long body copy. In Aristotelica Pro both the display and the text subfamilies have been complemented with a condensed version, though especially for mobile screens and other situations where space-saving is a concern. Also the original language coverage (extended latin, greek and cyrillic) has been expanded with the inclusion of arabic language glyphs, bringing the typeface to a total of over 1100 glyphs and 200 languages covered. The family is further enriched by the inclusion of Aristotelica Icons, a set of matching variable-width monoline icons that can be used to faultlessly match the typeface line width. OpenType features includes stylistic alternates, old style and lining figures and small caps.

While DIN Display seems to retain DIN’s basic characteristics, it shines with its sharper corners and contemporary look. Completed in 2002, it was first released and published in Parachute’s award-winning 2003 catalog and immediately was a hit. It has been used successfully in magazines, corporate applications and packaging in fields such as music, fashion, technology, visual arts. The ‘Pro’ series has been enhanced with more weights, multilingual support and opentype features in all different styles. Specifically, this superfamily supports simultaneously Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, while each one of its 15 weights contains 1197 glyphs and 20 opentype features. Additionally, every font in this superfamily has been completed with 270 copyright-free symbols, some of which have been proposed by several international organizations. This is a set of very useful daily symbols for packaging, branding and advertising. Symbols for public areas, environment, transportation, computers, fabric care and urban life.

This best selling series has now been extended to include a new member, Blue Goblet Drawn. Blue Goblet is hand-drawn by the artist, Cory Godbey, and is organic, charming and exuberant. Characters bounce and dance above and below the baseline and x-height, making this a whimsical and fun script. Not only is Blue Goblet Drawn a excellent choice, it also is also a versatile member of a wide family of different fonts. You can use it side by side with the original Blue Goblet fonts, and there are a wide range of ornaments available in the supplemental ornament sets--over 370 illustrations! These illustrations include doodley frames, lovely florals and other text ornaments that can be inserted into your text and resized at will. This makes the Blue Goblet series a great pick when you want a type system for a very unique and consistent look. The Blue Goblet series also continues to expand, making any of these family members a valuable investment for the future. Blue Goblet Drawn comes in three weights and three widths in each weight, with complementary italics for maximum impact for a total of eighteen pro fonts. The compact thin weights are delicate and tall, while the Regular has just enough heft for those situations where subtlety doesn't work. If you don't need the professional features, there are three stripped down fonts that include only the basic character set! Blue Goblet Drawn also includes auto-replacing ligatures that make it appear that the script was drawn by the artistís own hand--just for you! Blue Goblet Drawn also includes a wide variety of alternates that can be accessed in any OpenType enabled application. Blue Goblet includes over 190 additional glyphs and is loaded with features including an even more unique alternate alphabet. Included are swash alternates, style sets, old style figures and small caps. Please see the informative PDF brochure to see these features in action. OpenType enabled applications such as the Adobe suite or Quark can take full advantage of the automatic replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Blue Goblet Drawn is a great choice for friendly display type in children's books, packaging, organic packaging or other unique applications. Use Blue Goblet whenever you want to inject a handmade sense of fun and whimsy to your designs. Give the Blue Goblet series a whirl today!

Mambu Langu font is handwritten style. Nice to application for poster, comic, cover book and tees, diary and poster.

More vintage cartoons, decorations, embellishments and various letterpress dingbats have been re-drawn and collected in Printers Decorations JNL.

Astrology signs that had been designed for newspaper and printers purposed in the hotmetal aera from the Monotype caster.

Trithemius, a 15th century Abbott, and influential counselor to Emperor Maximilian I, was also an author who wrote both histories and the first printed work on cryptography which gained him much adverse notoriety. He has been long regarded as a mystic and some of his works were therefore banned. However, it may have been his intention to cloak his cryptology essays in mystical writing to keep people from easily grasping the subject matter, which it has been recently demonstrated, at heart was really cryptological methodology. This font is based on a printed version of the Polygraphiae a text that included many methods of encryption.

Gerhard is an early 1900’s Victorian style typeface that has been carefully refined for today. It was inspired from delicately hand painted lettering on a century-old vintage piano. This typeface has an bold and elegant natural aesthetic that can work for eye-catching headlines yet work gracefully enough for wedding invitations. Small caps have been designed for sub headings and allow a visual difference. Put it to use on your next branding, signage or publication project. A number of glyphs and diacritics included make this typeface usable for a wide number of languages. Alternate letters and forms have been included to create some versatility with your design.

‘Thwaites’ typeface is fully dedicated to one of my best Canadian friends who I do cherish and value highly. This great and industrious Canadian friend is ‘James Douglas Thwaites’ who lives along with his good-natured family in British Columbia, Canada. For me, James is like a source of inspiration and I do consider him as an ideal in my life. Our strong friendship has started since 1999 and I hope that it will endure just to the last moment of my life. Sometimes I see him as the writer and poet that I learn a lot from, sometimes I see him as a devoted religious minister that I try to understand more about his teachings, and other times I see him as the educator that I strive to imitate verbatim in my life. When I want to talk more about this Canadian friend, I will not be able to give him his due in full. Thus, I will instead mention some excerpts of his biography that he wrote himself saying that: “James D. Thwaites is a self-accomplished man. Having worked in various fields including restaurant management and cleaning, he has achieved his goals of being a full-time teacher, past-time writer, and volunteer religious minister for the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. His personal and academic pursuits have led him to be published in various magazines, newspapers, self-published books, and websites, including his now defunct ‘poetryofthemonth.com’ website. He continues to learn and augment the craft of writing while working primarily in early literacy and delayed literacy learners, teaching reading and literature to a wide age range of students. He views his religious endeavors as an extension of his academic ones. He teaches others both as a public speaker and in one-on-one situations, teaching about the benefits of submission to God and to His teachings. His future goals include expanding his ministry and continuing his writing.” The name ‘Thwaites’ itself comes from Great Britain and originated from the last Viking raids upon England, being an Anglicized version of a Scandinavian term meaning—depending on the source material—either "a place that is difficult to approach" or "a small thicket of trees." Another recitation mentions that ‘Thwaites’ can be described also as an English surname but one of pre 7th century Norse-Viking origins. It may be either topographical or locational, and is derived from the word "thveit", meaning a clearing or farm. As a locational surname it originates from any one of the various places called "Thwaite", found in several parts of Northern England and East Anglia to the south. The various modern spelling forms include Thwaite, Thwaites, Thwaytes, Thoytes, Twaite, Twatt, Twaites, Tweats and Twite. The name, although often appearing unique to outsiders, can often be found within other famous names like Braithwaite, Goldthwaites, or Misslethwaites. With various spellings, some families not including the ‘e’ or the ‘s’ at the end, Thwaites and its derivations—although not exceedingly common—is a name found worldwide. ‘Thwaites’ typeface is simply a sans-serif streamlined, stylish, and versatile font. It is designed using a combination of thick and thin strokes for its +585 characters. Its character set supports nearly most of the Central, Eastern, and Western European languages using Latin scripts including the Irish language. The typeface is appropriate for any type of typographic and graphic designs in web, print, and other media. It is also absolutely preferable to be used in the wide fields related to publication, press, services, and production industries. It can create a very impressive impact when used in headlines, posters, titles, products’ surfaces, logos, medical packages, product and corporate branding, and also signage. It has also both of lining and old-style numerals which makes it more suitable for any printing or designing purposes. ‘Thwaites’ typeface is really the cannot-miss choice for anyone who wants to possess unique artistic and modern designs produced using this streamlined typeface.

Road Art derives from painted lettering found on roads in the UK. Each character has been created from original photography.

See also other font families inspired by Gans' original typefaces: Gans Tipo Adorno , Gans Lath Modern and Gans Titular Adornada .

TASCI SERIF typeface has been derived from TASCI typeface, it is especially designed to use for logotype and display designs.

The history of Able’s connection with the Harry Potter phenomenon is really up in the air. It’s a catch-22 in this business - you either promote your own work and negotiate expensive exclusive licenses, or you work with a promoter and sell your designs to anyone and everyone. It could have been an in-house designer at Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, or a freelancer who proposed Able for the headings and such. The responsible party licensed it from T26, and JK Rowling’s storytelling made it a star. (I suppose it’s ironic that there’s a whole lot of unwritten history in the typography business.) Able’s rise to fame really is a classic love story between reading and type design. If the books weren’t so popular, Able might still be waiting for some Mexican fast food chain to pick it up for packaging design. The movie deal certainly made the font all the more recognizable, what with its merchandising campaign. Popularity can also cripple a great decorative face. It’s always being recognized as “The Harry Potter Font.” It might just have to wait a few decades for the Potter phenomenon to subside to be freed from the “Chamber of Pigeonholed Fonts.” In the meantime, I’m sure that a lot of fledgling graphic design apprentices are reading their new Potter books, being charmed by the idea of type design when they’re not turning the pages too fast to notice.

The Jantze font is a project undertaken by Dan Bailey of Fontosaurus and Michael Jantze, creator of the nationally-syndicated comic strip, The Norm. All their royalties from the font will go to The Lance Armstrong Foundation. For those that have been living under a rock for the last five years, Lance is a professional bike racer that overcame advanced testicular cancer to not only come back to his sport, but to dominate its premiere event, the Tour de France. In climbing to the top of his sport, he has become a legend among cyclists and a beacon of hope for those battling cancer and their families. His foundation provides financial grants to researchers working to improve our odds against the disease, individuals stricken with cancer, and survivors of the disease that are advocates for survivorship issues in their communities. Michael Jantze and Dan Bailey would like you to consider the quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that brought us to this project: "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. We hope that you will help us help Lance Armstrong's legacy be more than that of just sports legend. We hope that you will help those that may someday help you as much as we hope that you will never have to suffer the ravages of cancer. We hope.

Mi negra is a funny and hilarious typography designed especially for children, thought and created by Isabel de Gregorio. It could be described as an original combination between a semi-handwright and semi sans-serif font. Thanks to its structure and nice endings "Mi Negra" is recommended for composing short texts (logotypes, packing, posters, etc.). It may similarly be used for illustrations and comics, as well as in printing press works for children from 6 to 13 years old for instance. Mi Negra has been conceived to be a useful support in all kinds of illustrations works (please note that Isabel, the type designer, considers herself primarily an illustrator). The font designer of Mi Negra tells that every time she needed to provide some text data (i.e. in children infographies) and needed to make them more understandable and suitable for children, she used this typography. The former idea was than to create a font who could be a second option to comic sans, but as the project started to reveal its forms, it was clear that it was revealing another connotation and its own character. In this way, Mi Negra went on modifying its forms and the more it developed, the more it was showing its new characteristics and concepts. The family is composed of three weighs: Light, regular and black. It provides also interesting functional ligatures. It also includes a dingbat with nice doggies. It has 434 characters and can work with 208 languages.

A very glitzy Blitz! I always wanted to design a typeface that was top heavy, but I never knew how not to make it look like Antique Olive, until recently -- I had an idea. My new family is very readable despite it beeing top heavy, thin on the low end and thick on the upper end. The font gets a special shine because of this effect. And it stays readable despite its special design. Your designer of surprising typefaces, Gert Wiescher

Geometric/Technical style logotypes have been developed for car chrome labels since the early 1980’s, but automobile companies don't monopolize the style by any means. During the 80’s and 90’s, a lot of these logos leaned towards the geometric sans styles and the swiss styling of fonts like Handel Gothic, while playing with varying degrees of squared rounds and varying expanded widths per logotype. Mercurial has this flavor, but it wasn’t derived from logotypes. Instead, it began as a digitization of a film typeface from LetterGraphics in the early 70's known as "Sam". It visual ties to this genre of automotive logotypes and fonts like Handel Gothic lend a familiarity to it, yet it has an identity all its own. As with so many automotive logotypes, this singular style film typeface, lacked an expansive family which shows off all potential the logotypes have and what they "could" be and do. And that's where we come in. What originally began as this family’s Regular Width - Bold Style has been expanded into a collection of 3 Width Families, each containing 5 Weights. Here’s what’s included with the Mercurial Complete bundle: 396 glyphs per style - including Capitals, Lowercase, Numerals, Punctuation and an extensive character set that covers multilingual support of latin based languages. (see the final poster graphics for a preview of the characters included) 3 widths in the collection: Narrow, Regular, & Wide 5 weights in each width family: Light, Book, Regular, Medium & Bold. Here’s why the Mercurial Family is for you: - You’re in need of stylish sans font family with a range of widths and weights. - You’re love those 80’s automotive logos, but want more range of use. - You’re looking for an alternative to Handel Gothic. - You’re looking for a clean techno typeface for your rave poster designs. - You just like to collect quality fonts to add to your design arsenal.

Introducing Meritocracy, a full-featured handwritten font with tons of alternate characters and OpenType features. My goal with this font was to make you a typeface that will look as much like hand lettering as possible. Using the built-in OpenType pseudo-random contextual alternates and over 300 individually drawn ligatures, you can infuse your typography with personality and variety.** OpenType Features Meritocracy comes with more than 900 glyphs! Specific OpenType features include contextual alternates, stylistic alternates, a second stylistic set for variety, multiple alternate glyphs for many letters (accessed through the glyphs panel), multilingual support (including multiple currency symbols), standard numbers, and seven ampersand styles. It also includes 325+ standard and discretionary ligatures, all of them individually hand-drawn to be different from all other glyphs in the font. These ligatures allow you to give a super-realistic hand-lettered look to your typography. You can write the same word in so many different ways if you combine the default set, stylistic set 01, and standard and discretionary ligatures in different ways. SPECIAL OPENTYPE FEATURE: If you are using OpenType-capable software like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, or CorelDraw and you have contextual alternates turned on, you can see the letters randomize themselves as you type, mixing from the default character set and stylistic set 01. (You can always turn on contextual alternates after you have already typed your passage and it will randomize all at once, or you can choose to turn off contextual alternates and substitute specific glyphs yourself - I find that if I'm typing a word or two, I prefer to control the individual glyphs myself; if I'm typing a paragraph, I like to use the built-in randomness of the contextual alternates feature). Note that this pseudo-randomization (aka contextual alternate feature) is ON by default in Apple's Pages app and OFF by default in Microsoft Word, but it can be turned on. The OpenType features can be very easily accessed by using OpenType-savvy programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign. (To access most of these awesome features in Microsoft Word, you'll need to get comfortable with the advanced tab of Word's font menu. If you have questions about this, ask me!) Files included: Meritocracy-Regular.otf Please note: there is only one file for this font. That's the magic of OpenType - all of the alternates, ligatures, etc. are built right into the .otf file! Mail support : julie@upupcreative.com --- Find inspiration (and sneak peeks at my next font-in-progress) on - Instagram: http://instagram.com/julieatupupcreative - Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/upupcreative - Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/upupcreative - My website: http://upupcreative.com --- **PLEASE ENJOY! I can't wait to see what you make with Meritocracy! Feel free to use the #upupcreative and #meritocracyfont tags to show me what you've been up to!**

Rolphie can be your go-to sans-serif, with 16 easy-to-read weights and 10 versions for each weight, and the subtlety of choice that represents. The versions contained in each weight are: Regular; Condensed; Half-Condensed; Expanded; Small Capitals: and their italic counterparts. (At heavier weights particularly it seemed to be justified to have two Condensed versions). Plus there's 20 funky versions with the letters all shook up (that would make a good title for a song), or jumbled around, plus some Shadow, Doubled-Up, College, and other FX versions. In total there's 180 variations, giving a comprehensive selection of both standard and funky fonts, and that subtle degree of choice of weight. To make things easier, the weights are put in ascending numerical order from 01 to 16, and the FX versions have been stuck in the 80s and 90s, (like two musicians I know). There are grouped packages available for certain weights (which have 10 fonts in them) and the complete family package (180 fonts) which represent better value than the individual fonts, and there's a basic package containing the Normal and Italic versions of all 16 weights (32 fonts). A limit of 5 sub-family packages has been imposed, unfortunately, which precludes a more comprehensive selection. To let you know what's in the font that you might otherwise never know about . . . With Discretionary Ligatures on, you get special characters if you type Mc St. Rd. Bd. Ave. c/o No. (p) (P) - include the full-stop/period. With Stylistic Alternates switched on, you get plenty of extra characters - including a WiFi symbol (type Wifi or WiFi) / bullet numbers instead of ordinary numbers / that different U-dieresis / special characters for c/o No. Mc / an upside down ~ / a huge bullet, and different forms for cent, dollar, percent, per-thousand. As you'd expect, there's all the accented characters for all Western European scripts using Latin letters, and standard ligatures, plus other Open Type features including Class Kerning, Slashed-Zero, Historical Forms, Sub- and Superscript numbers, fractions for halves, thirds and quarters, Ornamental forms giving bullet numbers, etc. There's also the main mathematical operators, symbols like card-suits and male/female signs and so on, and some more obscure stuff like schwa and O-horn, U-horn - and there's lots more if you can Access All Alternates. Much will depend on what your software recognises. The Small Caps versions have (intentionally) lost the ligatures for lower case ff, fi, fj, fl, fr, fu, ffi, ffj, ffl, ffr, ffu. The names for the weights are not absolute - we had to make up some names to make them stretch out to sixteen - so rather - see them as relative to each other, being in ascending numerical order by weight.

MVB Aunt Mildred has a vintage charm that evokes hand-lettered postcards or advertising. Akemi Aoki drew the letterforms with a fine-tip felt pen and named it after her great aunt. Since its release in 1995, Aunt Mildred has been a popular choice for children’s books. Italics and bold weights have been added, making it even more useful for publications, packaging, and greetings of all sorts.

Original released in 2006 Depot has now been updated to Depot New. While staying true to its original robust charm Depot New has been reexamined from the ground up with improved outlines, spacing, kerning and opentype features. Depot New also boasts two new weights with Thin and Thin Italic added to its arsenal, making it the perfect choice for the most demanding of jobs.

Based on the typeface Lunda originally made by Karl Erik Forsberg , (1914–1998) in 1941. The name Lunda was a tribute to Berlingska Stilgjuteriet in Lund, a Swedish type foundry (1837–1980) which supported him from the start. The design is close to the original but some significant details have been changed. Several signs are designed from scratch. An additional bold weight has been added.

Tektype has been designed as a one weight display don't font which makes it simple and easy to use, it has been specifically created for the designer to do very little customisation. Tektype has additional alternates which makes it versatile in use. Create Logos and unique identities, aimed at the tech industry this font can create a slick look and feel to any branding.

What are your super powers? Space Toaster was created by Chank Diesel in 1995 as a custom font for the Cartoon Network's "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" web site. This font represents the printed voice of talk show host Space Ghost, the greatest super hero ever. Since it’s original release in 1995 Space Toaster's character set has been bulked up and the kerning has been vastly improved.

The Chromium Yellow family is based, very loosely, on Electro-type Serif, designed by John Wu of Hong Kong’s Archetype foundry. The rather quirky serifs have been removed and a few odd letter treatment have been amended to produce a smooth, techno-friendly family of faces. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

LordRat is a rugged unicase typestyle built for childish and off kilter purposes. A mix of heavy and light with quickcut appearance makes this typestyle offbeat and even festive. Put some dignified childish offbeat flavor into your designs today with LordRat. If you've been looking for a playful yet bold typestyle with papercut looks, LordRat is what you've been looking for. Get it today!

The famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.