Thirty years after its first appearance, Jovica Veljović has produced ITC New Veljovic Pro, a completely revised edition of his first typeface, ITC Veljovic (1984). Prof. Veljović has tapped into all the experience he has garnered over the past decades; by carefully adjusting the proportions of the characters he has provided the new typeface with a more harmonious presence. The serifs have been subtly curtailed and the letters made slightly more condensed. Some new features of ITC New Veljovic are the double-story “g” with its completely closed loop and the more open forms of the “c” and “e”. In the italic variants, the latter is much rounder. Thanks to Veljović’s outstanding work, the optimized ITC New Veljovic can now be used in all contemporary applications. The new Condensed style saves considerable space when it comes to setting longer texts. The Display versions show off the striking, crystal-clear shapes of the design at their best in larger point sizes.

I have named the font “Makonde” after an tribal group in southeast Tanzania and northern Mozambique that is well known for their intricate and semi-realistic wood carvings. The patterns that decorate the Makonde font remind me of the Makonde wood carvings. The Makonde font is a useful resource for anyone creating designs or producing text that has African look. Typified by a stark African angularity the characters reflect the ethos of Africa. Each Makonde font contains the full range of upper and lower case characters, all punctuation and special characters as well as the accented characters used in the major European languages. The Makonde tribal group is of historical interest because FRELIMO, the resistance movement which ended Portugese colonialism in East Africa, originated in the homeland of the Makonde. The character shapes in the Makonde font are very similar to those in a style of Umkhonto called Umkhonto Wide. Using Umkhonto together with Makonde gives the designer enormous flexibility.

Reviving a handwriting style from centuries past is similar to playing antique musical instruments; the pleasure of communing with live music arranged centuries ago by brilliant composers is heightened by the use of authentic or reconstructed artifacts. A new revived" script from the Baroque epoch is the Waza typeface, developed by Polish designer Franciszek Otto. Waza is inspired by a Wilhelm Hondius (Hondt) etching. Hondius was a Dutch court engraver for the Polish king, Ladislaus IV of the Vasa dynasty. The decorative character of the script engraved in the etching is a display of Hondius's calligraphic skill. The tangle of the flourishes in the capital letters, as well as the decorative lengthening of ascenders and descenders in the lowercase, contrast ideally with the rhythmic 30-degree slant of the design. Waza includes a set of alternative capital letters that have been deprived of ornaments; these allow the setting of proper Roman numerals, e.g., Ladislaus IV."

In the year 1791, the 20th of June, the king of France Louis XVI attempted to flight from Paris to the Luxembourg. He was intercepted on the road and taked to Paris again on the 21st. A few month later, in September, the first French democratic constitution was promulgated, transferring the sovereignty from the king to the French people. This font was created inspired from the steady hand of a lawyer writing a farm renting contract a few days after the advent of the new French regime. It is a "Pro" font containing Western (including Celtic) and Northern European, Icelandic, Baltic, Eastern, Central European and Turquish diacritics. The numerous alternates and ligatures allow to made the font looking as closely as possible to a real hand. Using an OTF software, the features allow to vary the characters without anything to do but to select contextual alternates and standard ligatures and/or stylistic alternates options.

The Englishman William Caslon (1672-1766) first cut his typeface Caslon in 1725. His major influences were the Dutch designers Christoffel van Dijcks and Dirck Voskens. The Caslon font was long known as the script of kings, although on the other side of the political spectrum, the Americans used it as well for their Declaration of Independence. The characteristics of the earlier Renaissance typefaces are only barely detectable. The serifs are finer and the axis of the curvature is almost or completely vertical. The overall impression which Caslon makes is serious, elegant and linear. Next to Baskerville, Caslon is known as the embodiment of the English Baroque-Antiqua and has gone through numerous new interpretations, meaning that every Caslon is slightly different. Caslon Classico appeared in 1993 and was designed by Franco Luin, the designer of various interpretations of classic typefaces. Luin kept his design true to the original and Caslon Classico consists of two cuts with corresponding italic and small caps characters.

The Latin, or Roman, alphabet was originally adapted from the Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century BC to write Latin. Since then it has had many different forms, and been adapted to write many other languages. According to Roman legend, the Cimmerian Sibyl, Carmenta, created the Latin alphabet by adapting the Greek alphabet used in the Greek colony of Cumae in southern Italy. This was introduced to Latium by Evander, her son. 60 years after the Trojan war. There is no historical evidence to support this story, which comes from the Roman author, Gaius Julius Hyginus (64BC - 17AD). The earliest known inscriptions in the Latin alphabet date from the 6th century BC. It was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century BC. The letters Y and Z were taken from the Greek alphabet to write Greek loan words. Other letters were added from time to time as the Latin alphabet was adapted for other languages.

Roos ST is a special version of the Roos family, engineered specifically for science writing. It is equipped with SciType, a combination of additional characters and OpenType programming included in the fonts to help with typesetting science text. For more information about SciType, please consult the SciType FAQ available in the Gallery section of this page. The Roos design is the Dutch classic made by S. H. de Roos during the years of the second World War, and subsequently used for a special edition of the Dutch Constitution on which Juliana took the oath during her inauguration as the Queen of the Netherlands. This design is widely regarded as de Roos's finest, and has one of the most beautiful italics ever drawn. Aside from the SciType additions, all the Roos ST fonts contain OpenType features for ligatures, ordinals, automatic fractions, and seven kinds of figures. For details about the functionality of Roos ST, please consult its Access Chart PDF available in the Gallery section of this page.

Carpathian Basin Rovas The Carpathian Basin Rovas script, or Kárpát-medencei rovás in Hungarian, was used in the Carpathian Basin between about the 7th and 11th centuries. Most of the inscriptions are in Hungarian, but some were in Onogur, As-Alan, Slavic or Eurasian Avar. Carpathian Basin Rovas is thought to be a descendent of the Proto-Rovas script, which was used to the east of the Aral Sea between about the 1st century AD and 567, when the tribes who were using it, the Avars and Ogurs, started to move into the Carpathian Basin. That process took until about 670 AD, after which the Proto-Rovas script became the Carpathian Basin Rovas and the Khazarian Rovas scripts. The Proto-Rovas script was perhaps a descendent of the Aramaic script. Since 2009 efforts have been made to revive the use of this alphabet. Some letters were added to it to represent sounds in modern Hungarian that weren't used historically.

BlackWhite is a titling typeface created by Ferdinay Duman in 1989 styled after the designs of the late 1980s. Like the name says, the figures emphasizes the play between dark and light. To this end, most inner spaces have been deleted. The constructed outlines of the robust figures draw the attention. In some weights, Duman split the figures horizontally, giving them a unique look. The technical and mechanical BlackWhite is perfect for generous headlines on fliers or in trendy magazines.

Poster type faces from the twenties and thirties are enjoying a new wave of popularity. The summary, even rather hard principle of the sign is required for a view from a distance. The information appearing on the poster must be readable even from the opposite pavement. And, as is often the case with monumental type faces, these type faces are legible even in small sizes. The name Bahnhof suggests the hypothetical use of the type face on railway station buildings.

This font gets its inspiration from the typography of the Manuale ad Usum (1721), printed by Jesuit missionaries who worked at the beginning of the XVIII century with communities of "Guarani" native indians from the Northeast region of Argentina. It is a manual of sacraments published by Paulo Restivo and some collaborators among the native population. This manual features the peculiarity of being the first printed piece where there is a record of the place where it was printed: at the Loreto mission.

This typeface was inspired by Gering and Remboldt's work during the late 1490s. Their printing concern, the Soleil d'or in Paris, was one of the printing business to engage in the use of blackletter printing, when the rest of the Parisian printers where using humanist influenced roman typefaces. This peculiar backwards trend was really one of the original examples of "retro", taking advantage of the desires of the more conservative northern Europe that had not yet embraced the newer roman types.

Edward...the star, the hero. Or, the villain?

The old characters of the 8th century are the inspiration for this font. Specifically those used during a remote time of the Basque Country - or waskonia as the Franks would call it - in the old gravestones and doors entryways.

Way back in the 1990s, the fatter the fast food generation got, the more condensed letters became. I figured when the taste in fonts started to mirror the contemporary bodily norm, Hunky Chunk should be there. Here it is.

Blackletter typefaces follow certain fixed rules, both in respect to their forms and to the orthography. Possibly, they were a reaction to the half-developed Carolingian minuscule which was soon to end in the Latin script. Narrow, ordered script was to replace the round, hesitant and shattered shapes of letters in order to simplify writing, to unify the meaning of individual letters, and to save some parchment, too. Opposed to the practice common in monasterial scriptoriums where Uncial, Irish and Carolingian inspiration flew freely and as a result, the styles of writing differed in each monastery, the blackletter type was to define one, common standard. It was to express spiritual verticality, in perfect tune with the architecture of the Gothic era. Typography became an integral part of the overall style of the period. The pointed arch and the blackletter type were the vanguard of the spectacular transformation from the Middle Ages towards the modern era, they were a celebration of a time when works of art were not signed by their makers yet. Some unfortunate souls keep linking blackletter solely with Germany and the Third Reich, while the truth is that its direct predecessor, the Gothic minuscule, evolved mostly in France. Even Hitler himself indicated blackletter type obsolete in the age of steel, iron and concrete – thus making a significant contribution to the spreading of the Latin script in Germany. Once we leave our prejudice aside, we find that the shapes of blackletter type have exceptional potential, unheard of in sans-serif letterforms. The lower case letters fit into an imaginary rectangle which is easily extended both upwards and sideways. In its scope and in the name itself, the Moyenage type family project is to celebrate the diversity of the Middle Ages. I begun realizing the urge to design my own blackletter when visiting the beer gardens of Munich and while walking through the villages of rural Austria. The letters from the notice boards of inns are scented with spring air, with the flowers of cudweed, with white sausage and weissbier. The crooked calligraphic hooks and beaks seem to imitate the hearty yodeling of local drinkers and the rustle of the giant skirts of girls who distribute the giant wreaths of beer jugs. Moyenage is, however, a modern replica of blackletter, so it contains some otherwise unacceptable Latin script elements in upper case. I chose these keeping the modern reader in mind, striving for better legibility. The font is drawn as if written with a flat pen or brush, and with the ambition to, perhaps, serve as a calligraphic model. In medium width, the face is surprisingly well legible; it is perfect for menus as well as posters and CD covers for some of the heavier kinds of music. It has five types of numerals and also a set of Cyrillic script, symbolising the lovelorn union of Germans and Russians in the 20th century. Thus, it is well suited for the setting of bilingual texts of the German classic literature, which, according to the ancient rules, must not be set in Latin script.

Used Cars JNL is based on one of the many unique alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times magazine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Special thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media (who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio) for providing the reference material for this design

ITC Kallos is the work of British designer Phill Grimshaw, a text typeface family with traditional calligraphic flair. It is the result of Grimshaw's first experiments with text typeface design. The long ascenders and descenders of the lowercase alphabet lend them a look of sophisticated elegance. The capitals display the unmistakable influence of the pen and the proportions of classic inscriptional forms.

In late 1988 or early 1989 I noticed that the circular form of the sickle and the linear form of the hammer could be used to form all the letters of the alphabet. The result of that realization was RedLetter, a novelty or letterbat font. It is caps-only with the lower-case letters containing smaller versions of upper-case letters.

Compilation Grotesk is a variable font concept that includes 9 sort of adjustable heights inspired principally on Matterhorn Headliners 2. The "height" axis allowes the glyphs expand along the Y-axis upward from the baseline as the values increases from 700 to 1100. Due to it, the system adapts keeping the contrast and the original proportions. Don't stretch it out, just adjust it!

The original version from this display sans-serif typeface was Van Condensed, published during 2004 (Latin, Greek and Cyrillic). Van Condensed Hebrew is the last script update, where the Hebrew characters follow the same design approach from the Latin characters (geometric structure, round corners). The only big difference between the Latin and Hebrew characters is the contrast, Hebrew letterforms contain reverse contrast.

The chamfered block style of lettering has been a workhorse for years. From the early signage of the 1800s to military markings to the techno fonts of the 1980s and beyond, its clean and simple look gets the message across easily and boldly. Industrialist JNL and its oblique partner were modeled from the title on a piece of sheet music from the 1940s.