Comenia Sans was designed in the framework of a unique typographic project for all types of schools. It is a complementary face for Comenia Serif, released by our friends at Storm Type Foundry. Comenia Sans has a lot in common with its serif sister: the height of both upper and lower case, the length of ascenders and descenders, and the general weight. This makes the two perfect partners which work well even when set side by side in a single line of text. Comenia Sans does, however, lack all serifs, ornamental elements and stroke stress variation. All these elements freshen up the feel of long texts, but for shorter texts use, they are not necessary. Despite that, Comenia Sans retains the soft, friendly character of its big sister, as well as a few tiny details which lend it its unique character without compromising legibility or utility. Open counters give all letters an airy feel and permit enough variation in construction. This is why the face works well even in multiple-page texts. All its letters are easily distinguished from each other, so the reader's eyes are not strained. Diacritics and punctuation harmonize with both upper and lower case. As usually, all diacritical marks fully respect conventional shapes of accents and they are perfectly suitable for Czech, Slovak, Polish and other Central European languages, where a lot of diacritics abounds. Similarly to the renaissance italics which refers to the cursive forms, Comenia Sans introduces novel shapes of some characters drawing from the hand-written heritage. This is most apparent in the single-bellied a, the simplified g, and the stem of f which crosses the baseline and ends with a distinct terminal. In the text, emphasized words are thus distinguished not only by the slant of letters, but also by the shapes of the letters themselves. All twelve styles contain set of small caps, suitable for the names, in the indexes or the headlines in longer texts. Legibility in small sizes under 10 points was at the center of designers' attention, too. This is why the counters of a, e and g are large enough to prevent ink spread in small sizes, both on-screen and in print. After all, the font was specifically optimized for screen use: its sober, simple forms are perfectly fit to be displayed on the computer screen and in other low-resolution devices. When used in the context of architecture, the smoothness of all contours stands out, permitting to enlarge the letters almost without limit. A standard at the Suitcase Type Foundry, each style of Comenia Sans boasts a number of ligatures, an automatic replacement of small caps and caps punctuation, a collection of mathematical symbols, and several types of numerals which make it easy to set academic and other texts in an organised, well-arranged way. For the same purpose, fractions may come in handy, too. Apart from the standard emphasis styles, the family also contains six condensed cuts (each set has the same number of characters), designated for situations where space is limited or the need for striking, poster-like effect arises. Comenia Sans is the ideal choice for the setting of magazines, picture books, and navigation systems alike. Its excellent legibility and soft, fine details will be appreciated both in micro-typography and in poster sizes. Although it was designed as a member of a compact system, it will work equally well on its own or in combination with other high-quality typefaces.

Blossoms, leaves, buds and tendrils create fragile objects of words and letters. · Weingut Script Flourish is a decorative display font with high contrasts, perfectly hand-drawn to the tiniest details. The font is trimmed to fairly large font sizes and is highly suitable for chapter titles or book jackets as well as Headlines, Invitations and wine labels :), although also impressing with an astounding legibility in small typesettings. Inspired by the handmade Blätterschrift from the 19th century Mettenleiter’s Schriftenmagazin, its basic structure is related to the English Script which makes it a perfect wedding font. The Weingut Family – noticable bouquet, beautiful structure with full fruit and a long finish. · Design with bicoloured capitals: In Weingut Script and Weingut Flourish, leaves and letters are available separately. You can stack them and apply different colours to the foreground and background. · Decoration and patterns: Weingut Swashes and Ornaments offers extra decorative elements in a separate font. Leaves, flourishes and borders available on their own or merged to ornaments. · Please make sure to use an application that supports the layering of text (two-coloured capitals) and OpenType features (contextual alternates). Be aware if you intend to combine Weingut Script Flourish and Weingut Flourish that these two do not go together. The floral outlines differ slightly and inaccurate overlaps will be the end result. · View other fonts from Georg Herold-Wildfellner: Sofa Serif | Sofa Sans | Mila Script Pro | Pinto | Supernett | Mr Moustache | Aeronaut | Ivory | Weingut · Language Report for Weingut Script / 151 languages supported: Abenaki, Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Amis, Anuta, Aragonese, Aranese, Arrernte, Arvanitic, Asturian, Aymara, Basque, Bikol, Bislama, Breton, Cape Verdean, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chickasaw, Cofan, Corsican, Danish, Dawan, Delaware, Dholuo, Drehu, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, Folkspraak, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, Genoese, German, Gooniyandi, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean, Gwichin, Haitian Creole, Han, Hiligaynon, Hopi, Icelandic, Ido, Ilocano, Indonesian, Interglossa, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Javanese, Jerriais, Kala Lagaw Ya, Kapampangan, Kaqchikel, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kiribati, Kirundi, Klingon, Latin, Latino Sine, Lojban, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Makhuwa, Malay, Manx, Marquesan, Meriam Mir, Mohawk, Montagnais, Murrinhpatha, Nagamese Creole, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Ngiyambaa, Norwegian, Novial, Occidental, Occitan, Oshiwambo, Palauan, Papiamento, Piedmontese, Portuguese, Potawatomi, Qeqchi, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romansh, Rotokas, Sami Southern, Samoan, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Seri, Seychellois, Shawnee, Shona, Sicilian, Slovio, Somali, Sotho Northern, Sotho Southern, Spanish, Sranan, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tokelauan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Tzotzil, Uzbek, Venetian, Volapuk, Voro, Walloon, Waraywaray, Warlpiri, Wayuu, Wikmungkan, Wiradjuri, Xhosa, Yapese, Yindjibarndi, Zapotec, Zulu, Zuni

Harald Geisler wants to make you as brilliant as Albert Einstein. Or at least let you write like him. Or at least write in his handwriting. — The Wall Street Journal Imagine you could write like Albert Einstein. The Albert Einstein font enables you to do exactly that. In an joined effort, creators Harald Geisler and Elizabeth Waterhouse, spend over 7 years on finalising the project. It was made possible with the help of the Albert Einstein Archive, the Albert Einstein Estate, and funding by a successful Kickstarter Campaign of 2, 334 backers. The outcome was worth the effort: a font unprecedented in aesthetic technique and a benchmark for handwriting fonts. To create a result that is true to the original, Harald Geisler developed a method to analyse the movement of the famous writer. Letter by letter, every glyph was digitally re-written to create a seamlessly working font. It is the only font that holds 5 variations for each lowercase and uppercase-letter, number, and punctuation sign. Each based on meticulous detail to the original samples of Albert Einstein’s handwriting. The OpenType contextual alternates feature dynamically arranges the letters automatically as you type to ensure that no repeated letter forms are placed next to each other. Stylistic variants can also be accessed through stylistic sets. The font has 10 fine-tuned weights ranging from extra-light to fine and extra bold to heavy. The result is a vivid handwritten text true to the original. A PDF documentation, showing step by step how the font was made and comparing numerous original samples, is included with the font and can be downloaded here. The work has been recognised internationally, by press, Einstein fans, and designers. Some quotes used in images: “The font is beautiful“ — Washington Post “If you could write like Einstein, would it help you to think like Einstein?” — The Times (London) “Finally, if your colleagues aren’t taking you seriously, then perhaps you could start sending e-mails in a new font that mimics the handwriting of Albert Einstein.” — Physics World “Geisler and Waterhouse are really asking deeper questions about the diminishing (or evolving) role of our flawed, variable penmanship as a conduit of thought in today’s pixel-perfect landscape.” — QUARTZ “Your writing will look imaginative — which is exactly what Einstein would've wanted." — Huffington Post Arts & Culture "Forget Myriad Pro, Helvetica or Futura. The only font you’ll ever need" — Gizmodo “Capture a piece of Einstein's genius in your own writing." — Mashable

“For those who regret what keyboards and touch screens have done to their penmanship, typographer Harald Geisler has an answer: Sigmund Freud.” — The Wall Street Journal Sigmund Freud was a neurologist who lived from 1856 to 1939. His research and studies led to the foundation of ‘Psychoanalysis’. When I first saw Freud’s century old letters, I was fascinated by the beauty of these historic manuscripts. It made me smile to imagine a person writing his or her shrink a letter set in Freud’s handwriting. I started to plan creating a font based on his manuscripts. I contacted the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna and Freud Museum London. To start the creation I selected eight handwritten documents from the archive in Vienna – This selection of specimen was my orientation during the design process. The Samples were created between 1883 to 1938 and are of various character such as handwritten scientific papers, personal letters, notes and a telegram. A successful Kickstarter Campaign "The Sigmund Freud Typeface - A Letter to your Shrink" with over 1400 Backers enabled me to visit the archive in Vienna and study the original manuscripts of Sigmund Freud. After a year of preparation and design work, I finished four alphabets based on Freud’s handwriting. What are the different Versions PRO, Kurrent, #1, #2, #3 and #4 about? “This project gives people the convenience afforded by the computer while maintaining the romantic nostalgia, beauty, and character of letter writing with real handwriting.” — Daniel Vahab, The Huffington Post When you write with your hand, every letter looks a little different. When you write a text on your computer every letter looks exactly the same. In order to make type look like handwriting, I chose four different variations of each letter from Freud’s manuscripts, drew and stored them in the font. The font is then programmed to exchange letters while you are typing. This makes the rendered result on your screen or print look like unique handwriting. PRO While you are typing… the PRO Version actively combines all four alphabets and exchanges them automatically. Through this mechanism never the same two o’s will stand next to each other. With every touch a unique look is generated. This works in certain applications i.e. Word 2010(or newer), Pages, TextEdit, Editor(Pre-installed on Windows 7 or newer), InDesign, Illustrator… →Here you can see an animation of what this effect looks like in action. (Please Note: some applications like LibreOffice, OpenOffice do currently not support this feature. Date: December 2013) #1 #2 #3 and #4 The Sigmund Freud Typeface #1, #2, #3 and #4 each hold one individual lowercase alphabet based on Freud’s handwriting. Kurrent Most of Freud’s correspondence was written in German. Until the 1950′s a different handwriting was taught throughout German speaking countries (Switzerland, Austria, Germany). This style is called Kurrent. The name Kurrent and Cursive derive from the Latin word currere - to run, hurry - both styles were designed to write fast. As you can see in the samples above, Freud practiced both Kurrent and when writing english Cursive (Latin script or Joined-up). Kurrent has three significantly different letters (s,h,e). Use Kurrent to render the authentic look of an historic Sigmund Freud letter in German. Bundle On the Top of this page you can get all six fonts of the Sigmund Freud Typeface Family in a bundle. International Typeface All styles of the Sigmund Freud Typeface feature a wide range of accented letters so you can write to all your friends in Sweden (Bjørn) France (Chloé & Zoë), Ireland (Dáirine), Poland (Łucja), Germany (Jörg) and almost everywhere around the globe (Find a complete list in the tech specs). Usage recommendations I hope that this design will be valuable to you and most of all that you have fun with this typeface! 1. Point Size — To reproduce the size of Sigmund Freud’s handwriting adjust the type size between 18-24 point in your word processor. If you are using an imaging software like Photoshop set the resolution to 300dpi and adjust the point size between 18-24. 2. Line Spacing — Narrow the line hight until swashes of capital letters touch the baseline above. This also happens when you write a letter and gives the document a unique handwritten look. 3. Right Aligned — Freud had the habit to write towards the right edge of the page and start loosely on the left. Set your text alignment to ‘right’ to incorporate this dramatic expression also to your documents. What do other People say about the Sigmund Freud Typeface? “Wouldn’t you love to write a letter to your shrink using the Sigmund Freud typeface?” — Dorothy Tan, Design TAXI ''“JUST DON’T WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR MOTHER WITH IT… …until the reader looks a bit closer, and they see 70+ years of modern science weighing in on turn-of-the-century pop psychology."'' — Mark Willson, Fast Company “Doctor, what does it mean if you dream of creating a font of Freud’s handwriting?” — Ayun Halliday, Open Culture “…geekily romantic, at once artistic and scientific” — Edie Jarolim, Freud’s Butcher “…sympathisch” — Jürgen Siebert, Fontblog !WOW! Thank you for reading the complete font description! You are awesome! If you still have a question please contact me through MyFonts or my website haraldgeisler.com. Credits This project was made possible by the help of 1481 Backers on Kickstarter and the kind support of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna and the Freud Museum London. Thank you. All of Freud’s Manuscripts shown are © Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Poster Image: IN17 - Sigmund Freud, Germany 1932. © Freud Museum London. Flag Image: IN19 - Sigmund Freud 1930’s. © Freud Museum London.

In 1955 the Czech State Department of Culture, which was then in charge of all the publishing houses, organised a competition amongst printing houses and generally all book businesses for the design of a newspaper typeface. The motivation for this contest was obvious: the situation in the printing presses was appalling, with very little quality fonts existing and financial resources being too scarce to permit the purchase of type abroad. The conditions to be met by the typeface were strictly defined, and far more constrained than the ones applied to regular typefaces designed for books. A number of parameters needed to be considered, including the pressure of the printing presses and the quality of the thin newspaper ink that would have smothered any delicate strokes. Rough drafts of type designs for the competition were submitted by Vratislav Hejzl, Stanislav Marso, Frantisek Novak, Frantisek Panek, Jiri Petr, Jindrich Posekany, and the team of Stanislav Duda, Karel Misek and Josef Tyfa. The committee published its comments and corrections of the designs, and asked the designers to draw the final drafts. The winner was unambiguous — the members of the committee unanimously agreed to award Stanislav Marso’s design the first prize. His typeface was cast by Grafotechna (a state-owned enterprise) for setting with line-composing machines and also in larger sizes for hand-setting. Regular, bold, and bold condensed cuts were produced, and the face was named Public. In 2003 we decided to digitise the typeface. Drawings of the regular and italic cuts at the size of approximatively 3,5 cicero (43 pt) were used as templates for scanning. Those originals covered the complete set of caps except for the U, the lowercase, numerals, and sloped ampersand. The bold and condensed bold cuts were found in an original specimen book of the Rude Pravo newspaper printing press. These specimens included a dot, acute, colon, semicolon, hyphens, exclamation and question marks, asterisk, parentheses, square brackets, cross, section sign, and ampersand. After the regular cut was drafted, we began to modify it. All the uppercase letters were fine-tuned, the crossbar of the A was raised, E, F, and H were narrowed, L and R were significantly broadened, and the angle of the leg and arm of the K were adjusted. The vertex of the M now rests on the baseline, making the glyph broader. The apex of the N is narrower, resulting in a more regular glyph. The tail of Q was made more decorative; the uppercase S lost its implied serifs. The lowercase ascenders and descenders were slightly extended. Corrections on the lower case a were more significant, its waist being lowered in order to improve its colour and light. The top of the f was redrawn, the loop of lowercase g now has a squarer character. The diagonals of the lowercase k were harmonised with the uppercase K. The t has a more open and longer terminal, and the tail of the y matches its overall construction. Numerals are generally better proportioned. Italics have been thoroughly redrawn, and in general their slope is lessened by approximatively 2–3 degrees. The italic upper case is more consistent with the regular cut. Unlike the original, the tail of the K is not curved, and the Z is not calligraphic. The italic lower case is even further removed from the original. This concerns specifically the bottom finials of the c and e, the top of the f, the descender of the j, the serif of the k, a heavier ear on the r, a more open t, a broader v and w, a different x, and, again, a non-calligraphic z. Originally the bold cut conformed even more to the superellipse shape than the regular one, since all the glyphs had to be fitted to the same width. We have redrawn the bold cut to provide a better match with the regular. This means its shapes have become generally broader, also noticeably darker. Medium and Semibold weights were also interpolated, with a colour similar to the original bold cut. The condensed variants’ width is 85 percent of the original. The design of the Bold Condensed weights was optimised for the setting of headlines, while the lighter ones are suited for normal condensed settings. All the OpenType fonts include small caps, numerals, fractions, ligatures, and expert glyphs, conforming to the Suitcase Standard set. Over half a century of consistent quality ensures perfect legibility even in adverse printing conditions and on poor quality paper. RePublic is an exquisite newspaper and magazine type, which is equally well suited as a contemporary book face.

Shout is a “Hey, Look at ME” font. It is an attention-getting font for posters, flyers and ads. Its lineage includes the Haas Type Foundry’s 19th century advertising font, Kompakte Grotesk, which Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) dryly described as “extended sans serif” and which graphic designer Roland Holst (1868-1938) would have disapprovingly referred to as a “shout,” as opposed to the quiet presentation of information that he believed was the proper function of advertising. In 1963 Letraset released what appears to be an updated variation in multiple weights designed by Frederick Lambert called Compacta. Shout draws heavily on Compacta, as well as other similar fonts of the 50s and 60s like Eurostile Bold Condensed and Permanent Headline. In weight, it falls about halfway between Compacta Bold and Compacta Black, but with a relatively heavier lower case that is not so easily pushed around by the upper case. After all, one can shout while sitting down. Shout is the first font released with our new encoding, as noted in the All_customer_readme.txt. The Euro symbol has been moved to position 128 and the Zcaron/zcaron have been added at positions 142/158 respectively. Otherwise, Shout has our usual idiosyncratic glyph selection, with the German ch/ck instead of braces, a long s instead of the Greek mu and our usual Hand-in-Hand symbol. There are also left and right glyphs of a big mouth ]ing (135/137) and left and right glyphs of an angry man shouting (172/177). Please use Shout with discretion. Folks get tired of being yelled out. After awhile, they stop listening. Shout ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Add glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 355 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, ornm, liga, hist & salt. 3. Added 266 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Revised hyphen, dashes & math operators. 6. Minor refinements to various glyph outlines. 7. Inclusion of both tabular & proportional numbers. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Morris is a four-font family produced by HiH Retrofonts and based on the work of the very English William Morris. William Morris wanted a gothic type drawn from the 14th century blackletter tradition that he admired both stylistically and philosophically. He drew from several sources. His principal inspiration for his lower case was the 1462 Bible by Peter Schoeffer of Mainz; particularly notable for the first appearance of the ‘ear’ on the g. The upper case was Morris’s amalgam of the Italian cursive closed caps popular throughout the 12th through 15th centuries, a modern example of which is Goudy’s Lombardic Capitals. The gothic that Morris designed was first used by his Kelmscott Press for the publication of the Historyes Of Troye in 1892. It was called “Troy Type” and was cut at 18 points by Edward Prince. It was also used for The Tale of Beowulf. The typeface was re-cut in at 12 points and called “Chaucer Type” for use in The Order of Chivalry and The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Morris' objective is designing his gothic was not only to preserve the color and presence of his sources, but to create letters that were more readable to the English eye. ATF copied Troy and called it Satanick. Not only was the ATF version popular in the United States; but, interestingly, sold very well in Germany. There was great interest in that country in finding a middle ground between blackletter and roman styles -- one that was comfortable for a wider readership. The Morris design was considered one of the more successful solutions. Our interpretation, which we call Morris Gothic, substantially follows the Petzendorfer model used by other versions we have seen, with the following exceptions: 1) a larger fillet radius on the upper arm of the H, 2) a more typically broadpen stroke in place of the foxtail on the Q, which I do not like, 3) inclusion of the aforementioned ear on the g and 4) a slightly shorter descender on the y. We have included five ornaments, at positions 0135, 0137, 0167, 0172 and 0177. The German ligatures ‘ch’ & ‘ck’ can be accessed using the left and right brace keys (0123 & 0125). Morris Initials One and Morris Initials Two are two of several different styles of decorative initial letters that Morris designed for use with his type. He drew from a variety of 15th century sources, among which were Peter Schoeffer’s 1462 Mainz Bible and the lily-of-the-valley alphabet by Gunther Zainer of Augsburg. Each of the two initial fonts is paired with the Morris Gothic lower case. Morris Ornaments is a collection of both text ornaments and forms from the surrounding page-border decorations.

After my son was born, I found myself reading him a lot of books. A LOT of books. Some were good, some were great, but I found myself wanting to develop something using my skills and interests to make something that only I could make. In short, I realized my son needed to be indoctrinated—I mean, introduced into the wonderfully wild world of fonts. So, I set about to make a board book to teach about typography, called “The Clothes Letters Wear.” You can learn more about the book here. I’ve made the captivating illustrations bright and colorful, and the use of different letter forms makes for a fascinating read to delight ages young and young at heart. And, as an added bonus, this children’s book has a custom designed font. I’m always looking for an excuse to design a new font, and this book created the perfect alibi. Drum roll, please. I now give you … Cabrito (“little goat” en Español). This new serif typeface incorporates the latest research on typographic legibility for children, features to make it—well, extra legible. A little background: studies show that Bookman Old Style is one of the most readable typefaces, and as a consequence or perhaps the reason why, it is used thoroughly for children’s books. This font became my initial inspiration for the typeface. Then, I found more legibility research saying that (brace yourselves) Comic Sans is also very legible for beginning readers, much due to the large x-height and softer, easily recognizable forms. In addition, forms that are closer to handwriting also seem to be more legible. Once I threw all that into my cauldron and stewed it a bit, the result was a pleasantly rounded typeface that includes not-so-strictly geometric, handwriting-inspired forms for the b, d, p, and q. Es guapo! Cabrito’s slender weights are simple and fun, with extras that turn any “bah humbug” into a smile. Add lighter touches to your project with the typeface’s included sparkles or rainbows (not included). Splash a little more color on the page with the firmer look of the thicker weights. Cabrito’s upright variations across all weights are matched by optically altered italics, too, giving you even more variety with the font family. This modern typeface’s bundle of alternates can be accessed in any OpenType-enabled software. The fashionable options involve a significant team of alternates, swashes, and meticulously refined aspects with ball terminals and alternate titling caps to decorate the font. Also bundled are swash alternates, old style figures, and small caps. Peruse the PDF brochure to check out these options in motion. OpenType-enabled applications like the Adobe suite or Quark allows comprehensive control of ligatures and alternates. This font family also provides the glyphs to aid a variety of languages. Cabrito is a welcoming, everyday font family by Jeremy Dooley. Use it to convey warmth and friendliness on anything from candy and food packages to children’s toys, company IDs or run-of-the-mill promotional material. Cabrito’s unique appearance and high legibility make it equally at home in print as it is on a screen.

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

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.

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