Compendium is a sequel to my Burgues font from 2007. Actually it is more like a prequel to Burgues. Before Louis Madarasz awed the American Southeast with his disciplined corners and wild hairlines, Platt Rogers Spencer, up in Ohio, had laid down a style all his own, a style that would eventually become the groundwork for the veering calligraphic method that was later defined and developed by Madarasz. After I wrote the above paragraph, I was so surprised by it, particularly by the first two sentences, that I stopped and had to think about it for a week. Why a sequel/prequel? Am I subconsciously joining the ranks of typeface-as-brand designers? Are the tools I build finally taking control of me? Am I having to resort to “milking it” now? Not exactly. Even though the current trend of extending older popular typefaces can play tricks with a type designer’s mind, and maybe even send him into strange directions of planning, my purpose is not the extension of something popular. My purpose is presenting a more comprehensive picture as I keep coming to terms with my obsession with 19th century American penmanship. Those who already know my work probably have an idea about how obsessive I can be about presenting a complete and detailed image of the past through today’s eyes. So it is not hard to understand my need to expand on the Burgues concept in order to reach a fuller picture of how American calligraphy evolved in the 19th century. Burgues was really all about Madarasz, so much so that it bypasses the genius of those who came before him. Compendium seeks to put Madarasz’s work in a better chronological perspective, to show the rounds that led to the sharps, so to speak. And it is nearly criminal to ignore Spencer’s work, simply because it had a much wider influence on the scope of calligraphy in general. While Madarasz’s work managed to survive only through a handful of his students, Spencer’s work was disseminated throughout America by his children after he died in 1867. The Spencer sons were taught by their father and were great calligraphers themselves. They would pass the elegant Spencerian method on to thousands of American penmen and sign painters. Though Compendium has a naturally more normalized, Spencerian flow, its elegance, expressiveness, movement and precision are no less adventurous than Burgues. Nearing 700 glyphs, its character set contains plenty of variation in each letter, and many ornaments for letter beginnings, endings, and some that can even serve to envelope entire words with swashy calligraphic wonder. Those who love to explore typefaces in detail will be rewarded, thanks to OpenType. I am so in love with the technology now that it’s becoming harder for me to let go of a typeface and call it finished. You probably have noticed by now that my fascination with old calligraphy has not excluded my being influenced by modern design trends. This booklet is an example of this fusion of influences. I am living 150 years after the Spencers, so different contextualization and usage perspectives are inevitable. Here the photography of Gonzalo Aguilar join the digital branchings of Compendium to form visuals that dance and wave like the arms of humanity have been doing since time eternal. I hope you like Compendium and find it useful. I'm all Spencered out for now, but at one point, for history’s sake, I will make this a trilogy. When the hairline-and-swash bug visits me again, you will be the first to know. The PDF specimen was designed with the wonderful photography of Gonzalo Aguilar from Mexico. Please download it here http://new.myfonts.com/artwork?id=47049&subdir=original

Sydonia Atramentiqua is a strange creation. The inspiration was the first releases of "Malleus Maleficarum" (actually the typography used there). I decided I wanted something strange, so Sydonia came into being. Like a blood of all witches who were being hunted down by Malleus Maleficarum's "fans" for their skills and beliefs. Why Sydonia? Sydonia von Borck was a witch from my area. It was probably the last woman executed for witchcraft. The genesis of the name. Sydonia was THE WITCH, and by the name I added "Atramentiqua". It is a combination of the words "Ink" (polish "ATRAMENT") + "Antiqua". The idea of ​​spilling a font is historical. The former Zecer composition was not perfectly sharp. As it was a "wet job", there were always light exits behind the lines. Who supported me? The GENEALOGIA project has been carried out for several years in cooperation with the Academy of Art in Szczecin and the National Museum in Szczecin. The project's supervisors are prof. Waldemar Wojciechowski and MA Patrycja Makarewicz, who runs the Visual Communication Studio. Some information: Sydonia was like that! This is not an everyday font. It is a stylized font, used to imitate old prints made by Zecer. The first version of Sydonia Atramentiqua was created in 2018 for the purposes of the exhibition at the National Museum in Szczecin. Base inspiration: Malleus Maleficarum & Caslon.

Continuo is a fascinating, all-uppercase display typeface wherein the contour of each letterform is described with a single, continuous line. The challenges presented by that simple idea are similar to constructing letterforms with neon tubing. For example, when the strokes of a letterform need to be heavier than the width of the neon tube, two tubes are employed to create the outer contours, effectively leaving an unfilled void inside the stroke. Also, since neon tubes cannot be broken apart as they trace the contours, they must follow a path that, for reasons of economy and to avoid optical massing (or bright spots in neon), the tubes are not crossed. So too, the construction of Continuo follows. The newly updated Continuo now has alternate forms of letters A-Z available in the lowercase a-z and by extension those alternates are also present in the lowercase diacritics. The new Latin Plus glyph repertoire of Continuo contains almost 900 glyphs, supporting 224 languages, including Vietnamese and multiple African languages. A handy set of arrows and additional international currency symbols were added as well. The name is derived from the musical term “Basso Continuo” meaning an almost constant bass line, an integral part of most musical melodies. As an in-line display type, Continuo is ideal for headlines and most oversized applications and its unique appearance commands attention from viewers.

Meteora is a font designed for headlines by Carlos Fabian Camargo Guerrero. Its purpose is to be useful tool for solving decorative problems in graphic design which require broken letters without ascending and descending strokes. Due to its vertical and horizontal proportions these letters are compact, appealing and special to compose headlines and featured with worn look in covers, magazines, posters and advertising material. The first Meteora sketches were made by hand, photocopying and deforming letters of an old Letraset catalog, specifically from slab serif typefaces from the Nineteenth Century. Hence, uppers cases and lower cases were merged in the same height x, obtaining a narrow width, endings with some serifs and stencil cuts here and there. The amount of low contrast between thick and thin strokes brings strength and consistency with the contours apparently brokens. Thus, developed features slab serif and sans-serif proposing empty and full shapes connoting decomposition and noise; and from a rigorous process of scanning letters I set up damaged letters, but drawn with the greatest possible thoroughness and high definition in 438 glyphs per font. Finally, in regular and bold variables I included opentype features with some discretionary ligatures and a few titling alternates. In Meteora bold all glyphs are framed simulating the effect of letters cut out of paper.

While I was in Boston in 2014, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts and to my good fortune there was an exhibit of etchings by Rembrandt, one of my favorite artists. As to be expected, many were simply gorgeous, but one especially caught my eye. It was an etching of a priest (Jan Cornelis Sylvius, Preacher) with an extensive amount of writing in Latin. While I'm not certain that it was Rembrandt's own hand, the script was beautiful and I was fascinated by it because it had to be written on the etching plate in reverse. I snapped a few photos using my phone and later found other editions on line. I was so taken by the script that it begged me to create a modern typeface from it. The result is Saskya, named after Rembrandt's wife Saskia. There were many ligatures and glyph variants in the print, of which I captured many of them and made them accessible via OpenType features. The complete alphabet was not present in the sample, however, I discovered some other source material to sensitively fill in those gaps, with a remaining last few that I created myself. A truly romantic hand, Saskya will work well for invitations of many sorts, and when you're looking for that 'old thyme' scripty feeling in your graphics.

For several years I have been thinking about the design of a type family that explores, on the one hand, the modernist aesthetic that we know, from the Alphabet "a.r." designed by Władysław Strzemiński, and on the other, to the multiscript pre-war Warsaw. This is how the idea of creating the Polin Sans typeface was born. After researching on geometric variants of the Cyrillic alphabet, I was inspired by the text "Towards an open layout: A letter to Volodya Yefimov". I was intrigued by the fact that circular forms, which we are mostly familiar with in the Bulgarian Cyrillic, can be implemented in the classical version, without disrupting the reading process. At the same time, while working on typoteka.pl, I was fascinated by the Hebrew typeface jaffa, published by the Idźkowski & Sk-a foundry, which at some points looks like the Hebrew equivalent of the Alphabet "a.r.". Ben Nathan from Israel joined the project and was responsible for creating his native script. The idea of creating a multiscript family expanded to include Greek and Vietnamese. As a result, Polin Sans is a historical journey through the nooks and crannies of Polish modernism, which was created by people with diverse cultural backgrounds. The Polin Sans family was designed by Mateusz Machalski and Ben Nathan with the support of Michał Gorczyca and Małgorzata Bartosik.