ITC Typados is the joint effort of Roselyne and Michel Besnard and is composed of characters in two different senses of the word. First, it is of course made of letters and symbols, clean and legible with generous widths and x-heights. There is a hint of Art Nouveau style in the tapering, brush-like strokes. But the figures of ITC Typados are also made of characters in the theatrical sense: little tear-drop heads on tapering bodies that bend themselves into the shapes of an alphabet while maintaining a life of their own. The typeface is based on a recurring character in Michel's sculpture and painting, Ado. Ado is the first character who sings and repeats itself in all my creations," says Michel. "This adventure brings new forms for my painting and my sculpture: coiffed heads, bodies in the form of a cone, arms in the form of spread wings, etc." "Type" plus a number of "Ados" equals ITC Typados."

The long awaited and much requested revival of Robert Hunter Middleton's very popular classic is finally here. Mayfair Cursive was an instant hit for Middleton in 1932, and it went on being used widely until late into the 1970s, in spite of it never having crossed over to film type technology. Like a few of its contemporary designs, most notably the work of Lucien Bernhard, Mayfair is a formal script that is somewhat based on traditional italic forms with swash uppercase, but also employs subsidiary hairline strokes in some of its lowercase as an emphasis to the script's cursive traits. Why these gorgeous letters never made the leap into photo typesetting is a mystery to us. But here they are now in digital form, almost three quarters of a century since they first saw the light in metal. Mayfair was redrawn from original 48 pt specimen. It also underwent a major expansion of character set. Plenty of swash characters and ligatures were added. An alternate set of lowercase was also made, in order to give the user a choice between connected and disconnected variations of the same elegant script. Mayfair ships in all popular font formats. While the Postscript Type 1 and True Type versions come in two fonts (Mayfair and Mayfair Alt), the OpenType version is a single font containing all the extra characters in conveniently programmed features that are easily accessible by OpenType-supporting software applications. We are quite sure today's graphic designers will be appreciative of having access to the face that all but defined menus, romance covers, wine and liquor labels and chocolate boxes for almost two 20th century generations.