Overbold is an unapologetic display typeface inspired by an illustration in Eric Gill's Essay on Typography (p.51), in which he demonstrates �how not to make letters�. In particular, he shows that increasing the weight of the downstroke in a serif �A� without structural adjustments yields an absurd, �overbold� result. I found the letter so charming that I decided to blatantly disregard Gill's wisdom and draw an entire overbold typeface. Here is the result. I'm not sorry.

ITC Black Tulip was designed by Dudley Rees and inspired by the modular simplicity of the Greek fret band, an ancient repeating pattern formed by tracing a line at right angles between two horizontal rules to form an interlocking motif. Rees admired the discipline of the motif, I saw how that simple rigid rectangular network suggested an alphabet that would need little or no kerning," he says. He describes ITC Black Tulip as a "dramatic headline face"."

Explore everyday is authentic display three style font. You can take advantage of these with any program that supports OTF features. These can also be accessed via the glyphs panel in some programs. NOTE: Because the nature of overlapping glyphs alternates must be selected manually in the Outlines version from the Glyphs panel. Kerning is extremely tight and best displayed at larger sizes.Use it for sport, movie, game, racing designs, or nearly anything related to speed and power

Excelsia Pro Script is a beautiful narrow script designed in the tradition of Bodoni and Fournier, it has lots of variations. There are for example seven different versions for the uppercase letters that can be accessed with opentype savy software. different ampersands, @-signs, Th combinations, lots of different lowercase letters and so on. The font can be used in all of Europe, Turkey and the Baltic countries (sorry no Greek and Cyrillic). Yours very versatile Gert Wiescher

Thursday Afternoon is like a typewriter that was out in the rain all night - all wobbly and worn, but with the well-known details of a typewriter, just a bit...well a lot...out of the ordinary! Although being awkward, Thursday Afternoon is surprisingly legible. I'd like that the font should be used for labels, toys for kids, candy or any kind of organic product. It even looks really well with headlines or shoutouts in all-caps!

Sihmitree is a gimmick typeface in which all glyphs have reflective (mirror) or rotational symmetry (or both). Sihmitree has two weights and is caps only, with most of the lower-case letters identical to the upper-case letters. It includes only those accented characters that are symmetrical. The letters of the alphabet are often used to explain symmetry. BCDEK are given as examples of shapes that can easily be formed with symmetry over a horizontal line. AMQTUVWY can easily be formed so that they mirror over a vertical line. Letters HIOX can be formed so they mirror over both horizontal and vertical lines, and as a result they will also have rotational symmetry. Letters NSZ can be formed so that they reproduce themselves with a rotation of 180º. That leaves letters FGJLPR, which are usually considered examples of asymmetry. However, there are script versions of J, L, and R that can be formed with symmetry, and variants of lower-case f and g can be made that are symmetrical. P looks a lot like the thorn character. Some of the numbers also present challenges when trying to form them symmetrically. The symmetrical alphabet is not stylistically harmonious and has limited use other than as an exploration of symmetry.

This is the rounded version of Penta! »Penta« is a new Sans typeface, designed in the American tradition with contrast between the up- and downstrokes. The contrast is hardly visible on the »thin« cut, but the heavier the weights get, the more contrast becomes visible. That makes this font very useful, almost linear in the lighter weights and very distinct rhythm in the heavier ones. »Penta« is extremly versatile, it can be used for bodycopy in the lighter weights and for heavy headlines.

Italian type design master Aldo Novarese was not famous for making calligraphic designs, nor had he any interest in them. He is much better known for his text faces, and quite innovative sans serif and decorative designs which became the definition of what we now know as techno and modern. But in 1968, Novarese surprised everyone with a fantastic flowing deco script entitled Elite. Novarese's formula of simple soft curves and toned-down swashes makes for one of the most unique alphabets ever seen, not to mention one of the best flowing and most legible scripts. This is now its digital incarnation, named Fontella. Fontella's applications are virtually limitless. This is the sort of script that can feel at home pretty much anywhere; a sign, a fridge magnet, a bumper sticker, a greeting card, a movie poster, a book cover, music artwork, magazine ads, newsletter headlines, etc. Digitized from original specimen and expanded with a few built-in alternates and ligatures by Rebecca Alaccari, the font was named after the famed jazz singer Fontella Bass. These letters are just so sweet they had to be called Fontella.

Sherwood is a reproduction of an unusually small wood type font from England, dating from the last years of the 18th century. Somewhat reminiscent of Caslon Old Face. The original wood type is used at Sherwood Letterpress and can be seen on the Sherwood home page.

Herbaceous Border features blocky letters made up of an intricate pattern of leaves and vines. It should definitely be used for headlines to get the most out of the details. All of the letters are capitals but the lowercase characters provide an alternative set of leafy designs.

Hand-crafted by Richard Starkings in the classic style of Will Eisner's The Spirit, this free and easy font made its debut in the pages of...The Spirit! Never let it be said that those awfully nice chaps at Comicraft don't think about what they're doing!

A font perfect for not just one, but many projects! Introducing Oceanwide Pro, a sans that loves to be used in just about any situation! Designed with ultra clean lines and versatility in mind, Oceanwide wants to be your new favorite sans! Oceanwide’s ultra clean letters work anywhere you want to communicate orderliness and competence, and designed to build trust and rapport with your audience. Its wide proportions make it ideal for display and logo use. Oceanwide especially shines for white/bright letters on black/dark backgrounds! That’s because the inside shapes are nearly perfect circles in many weights. Here's a quick video tour of Oceanwide Pro by Dave Lawrence, including all the great things Oceanwide can be used for! We've tested Oceanwide for these industries, with stunning results!: Tech Arts Fashion & Style Business & Branding Corporations Logistics Architecture Food and many more... Oceanwide can be used for: Headers Subheadlines Logos Even body text, if tracked. Print & Screen The styles it can take are also many. It's great for: Modern/minimalist design Flat design Cut out design User Interface (UI) Technical designs In combination with text effects, even for grunge and other situations. And many others... DESIGN FEATURES Simplicity Tall x-height Hand-sloped obliques (italics) Narrow spacing Semi-wide proportions Expert kerning Well proportioned, usable lights & extra lights Large caps Great ALL CAPS MODE Uppercase punctuation Uppercase spacing with California Type Foundry’s Smart Tracking™ Advanced fraction support Proportional lining figures Thick joins Smooth curves Sturdy—great for textures and effects Variable font available Latin Pro character set for Central European languages. That's the writing for over 782 languages and transliterations worldwide! DESIGN STORY—THE FORGOTTEN SANS by Dave Lawrence, Lead Designer, California Type Foundry Adrian Frutiger was the 20th century master of sans, but I didn't realize he had made—not one—but TWO geometric sans! It wasn't until I had purchased the book “Adrian Frutiger: Typefaces”. I had hoped to someday meet Adrian Frutiger, but he passed away that very same year. Here is the story of Frutiger's forgotten sans. Back in 1968, Frutiger was approached by Pentagram to make a design for British Petroleum. They wanted a "new version of Futura". However, they wanted him to make a couple adjustments. First, they felt that Futura was "too fiddly." By this, they meant that it narrowed too much at the joins. (Joins are for example where the round and straight parts of the 'd' meet.) This is something that is necessary for small print text (to prevent ink clogging), but is not necessary at large sizes. Second, they wanted it to be entirely geometric, using the circular shape with minimal optical corrections. Unfortunately this font was not even used very consistently in the BP brand. A haphazard mix of Futura and Frutiger's BP font ensued. It was then replaced by another font design very soon after. My design is different in several ways. First, the commas and quotes are a more modern style. I tried his original commas, but these just didn’t work to 21st century eyes. Second, in his drawings, Frutiger went for a more standard u with a downstroke on the right. However, Oceanwide has a simpler u. Third, I made more optical adjustments. At the direction of his employer, Frutiger reluctantly put no font optical corrections into the letters. So I think my optical adjustments are similar to what Frutiger would have wanted. Fourth, I extended the weight into the light and extra light ranges. Fifth, the rest of the font I created according to the principles of Adrian Frutiger, but with no sources for inspiration. Here is Frutiger’s design philosophy, in his own words: “If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.” The words about the spoon were the ones I kept in my mind as I tried to make the curves ultra smooth, and the shapes ultra simple. Hopefully this font is a worthy successor to the font that inspired it. Released on the 93rd birthday of Adrian Frutiger, to celebrate the life and achievements of this amazing designer. ——————— Simplicity. Versatility. Oceanwide.

Aeris™ typeface is a contemporary book face created by the American designer Tom Grace. It combines the proportions and rhythm of a sans serif font with the high contrasts and flexed strokes of script faces, while the open counters also ensure optimal legibility. Tom Grace focuses on providing subtle differentiations in his cuts and, as a consequence, this font family has its own individual structure: there are A and B variants of the basic forms regular, italic, bold and bold italic, and a display version for use in titles that also comes in A and B variants. It is advisable to use the A variant for larger font sizes, while the slightly more emphasized B variant can be recommended for smaller font sizes. Where the basic forms are to be mixed together in a work, it is important to use the corresponding A/B variants throughout as their designs have been carefully coordinated. Aeris is available in the OpenType Pro format and thus includes a wide range of different glyphs. The font family can be used in various environments, such as books, magazines, advertisements and promotional materials, but it is also the perfect choice for printed corporate documentation.

Sharplion is a typeface family designed by Zeki Michael and Leyla Melis Aslan. It’s a simple, but sharp display typeface with a clear yet powerful personality, created to not only optimize space, but also build contrast on the printed page and on the screen. Sharplion, coming in two weights and a matching slanted version, is designed to give that neo-vintage industrial feel in 'titles and hierarchic subheadings, logotypes and cases of short and simple copywriting for the artisan, hand-made and small batch look.’ The first 4 letters for what is now Sharplion, were designed in 2018 by Zeki Michael to be used as a logotype for Depo Coffee Roasting’s branding project. In early 2019 after Zeki designed all the letters, numbers and glyphs, he teamed up with talented designer, Leyla Melis Aslan to add strength to the project. The full Sharplion type system includes Regular, Black and Slanted styles – providing a simple but sharp contrast type solution for digital and print design work.

VLNL Boulangerie was originally an incomplete set of early 20th century wood type letters, that Donald Roos found in a dust covered carton box stashed away somewhere at the Royal Academy in The Hague. Charmed by the letter forms Donald decided to print them on paper with a printing press. Next he digitised the prints as they came out, including small imperfections and damages. The missing characters were composed and added digitally to complete the alphabet. (See if you can spot those!?) We think VLNL Boulangerie is a little French in appearance (hence the name), it's joyful, warm, a little crunchy and round-ish. It defenitely has that ‘je-ne-sais-quoi’ that seperates it from most wood type grotesques. It can be perfect for lettering on a storefront window of – let's say a bread shop or a lunchroom. Or a logo for a downtown hipster café. VLNL Boulangerie hardly has any limitations actually.

Manicuore is a hand-drawn typeface inspired by Italian movie posters by the prolific movie poster artist Symeoni (a.k.a. Sandro Simeoni). Being a talented and skilled painter, portraitist and illustrator, Symeoni enjoyed a long and fruitful career and was remarkably productive during the sixties and seventies. He counts over 3,000 works to his credit, which truly fed the imagination of several generations. This all-caps font brings different lettershapes on upper and lower case slots, which work as alternates, providing handy options to spice up your compositions. When using it in OpenType savvy applications just turn on contextual alternates feature to instantly cycle lettershapes – a one click way for adding spontaneity while also preventing neighbor double letters from using the same glyph. To put the icing on the cake, Manicuore brings a cool set of graphic elements that match the typeface look and feel. An inspiring toolbox for creative lettering designs. Now... Lights! Camera! Action!

Perva is a suite of three eye-catching fonts inspired by display types from the 19th century. This unconventional family has three different font styles that can be used individually or combined to build a playfulness multi-typeface design system. It is suitable for titling, posters headlines, book covers, packaging, social media, and branding. Perva brings together a Slab serif font, a.k.a Antique or Egyptian; a Reverse-contrast or Italian; and an Old English Blackletter. The design is inspired by the display types listed as “Typographic monstrosities” in Thomas C. Hansard’s book Typographia (1825). What he found absurd was understood here as interesting and enjoyable to introduce a contemporary approach of the types widely sold by foundries such as Bruce’s New York Type-Foundry and Caslon Foundry. Each of the three fonts holds around 400 glyphs, covering the languages of Northern, Western, Central, and Southern Europe. Opentype features include case-sensitive forms and a couple of alternates for the Blackletter style.

Font breeding is much like animal breeding, where stallion and mare, or bull and cow, or boar and sow are carefully matched in hopes of yielding a robust and useful offspring. When typefaces RoundUp with fat, rounded serifs and WyomingSpaghetti with fat, squarish serifs were chosen to be parents, it was clear that their offspring would inherit large serifs. But to discover exactly what the offspring would look like, the pairing needed to be consummated, which was done with the “Blend Fonts” commend in Fontographer. The two styles of RoundWhy are the result.

Approach Mono is the fixed width version of Approach. A utilitarian low contrast font, a bit mechanical but plenty of character. This version shares its main features with the original one, but it has a more prominent and visible punctuation. The more obvious use of a mono would be in tables, programming code or “in progress texts”, but not just that. Approach Mono can be used in the modern communication, bringing an aseptic voice to brochures, advertising, identities and any other piece of communication. For more details see the PDF.

Congress from Adrian Williams was shown for the first time at the Association Typographique International Congress, which proved to be so popular in 1980 at Kiel; designed to present a style equally appealling in European languages. Many characters are more condensed than is usual, while others have had certain elements exagerated, bringing notice to new elements of certain letters. The concept being to bring an equality of importance to the whole, producing a collection of International characters working together in harmony on the page -- a common aim that Europeans wish of any Congress.

Afiche Script is an engaging vintage-flavored script font that features excellent legibility and versatility. It's equally suited for large logo and headline applications as it is for longer text passages, being very readable even at small sizes. The appealing curves and rounded finials give it a casual and fun vibe, and the subtle reverse stroke contrast makes it a standout choice to catch the eye as being something new and different. The capitals dip below the baseline, providing a lively bounce to each line of upper and lowercase type.

Chunkie is a simple serif experiment going for minimal width and maximum height. I made it into my display version of OpenType Pro, but mainly it was a vehicle for me to try out some more extreme serif ideas and glyph shapes. The solutions for the lowercase a and e are unique, for example. The double g ligature is a fun solution. I like the solution for the @, but I’m not sure how it will be received. That being said, it turned into a useful dark display face with a small x-height.

Words in a blurry world want to be more firmly anchored in the line - this is the task of the Slab-serif, characterized by solid heels. They can be used in extreme sizes – under 6 points – as well as on huge tarpaulins covering trucks, boats and house facades. Carot serves its robust clarity. The eye takes a while to become accustomed to various character simplifications, but then comes a refreshing reading perception, familiar texts get actual sound. The whole Carot system of 64 members offers a modern alternative for all types of design work.

Muliya Tat Is a hand calligraphy, smooth, modern and clasik, calligraphy wavy, which was created to meet the needs of your next design project, hopefully you like it. Muliya tat Calligraphy, Can used for various purposes. such as the title, signature, logo, correspondence, wedding invitations, letterhead, signage, labels, newsletters, posters, badges, etc. Muliya tat Calligraphy features 406 glyphs and has given PUA unicode (specially coded fonts), can be accessed easily with the character map, can be accessed in full by the lovers of letters or artisans to increase career in the design world.

When designing a font, I often imagine how I think it should be used or where I'd be likely to see it out in the real world. With Barataria I envisioned it on decorative, antique-looking signs hanging outside shops in the French Quarter of New Orleans - hence the name. Barataria is based on samples of 1920s period poster lettering. It's a bold, heavy roman font with strong, rounded character forms. Barataria also has some unique alternative character forms, like the super-looped 'g' shown in the sample.

Autobats is a set of over 100 different car and truck icons, minimal silhouettes that can be adapted to whatever context your design flings at them. The mystery of why this font has been so popular was solved when one of our customers said, “I always use this thing, because the name starts with A, so it’s one of the first fonts I see in my slap-a-logo collection”. To see all the icons available, a glyph palette would be come in handy while using the font. Honk if you like convenience. Beep beep!

ITC Binary was designed by Mauricio Reyes in 1997 as a semiserif font with a pronounced stroke contrast. A distinguishing characteristic of this font is that many of the lower case letters seem to be missing a small piece of their forms, either at the base line or x-height. Setting the letters together makes an impression of waviness which draws the attention of the reader. Binary is a reserved, elegant font which should be used in point sizes of 10 or larger and only in headlines and short to middle length texts.

When letterpress started with the Gutenberg Bible, the typeface was like a texture. Before humanism, type did not really need to be legible. The letters were rather drawn in an ornamental way. It filled a space. My idea for Matrona was to create a similar structure. I wanted it to be very bold and still as legible as possible. The result was a headline typeface that can fill spaces. You can even fill it with a picture. Or you create an ornament with contents. There are 3 weights to extend the usage to different sizes.

Goldana is a display layered font inspired by art deco. The base layer is regular; add an extrude and extrude shadow to create a dimensional look. Several of the styles can be mixed and matched together to create different style details. There are several fonts with a stand-alone style and script. The Script fonts are also equipped with OpenType features. (The shadow, drop shadow, drop stripe and stencil styles are not meant to be layered.) Play with the extras collection to create badges with a vintage feel and an art deco style.

When I was a kid, I loved the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I thought it was pretty stupid of the boy to trick the villagers into believing wolves are attacking his flock of sheep. But I also thought it was a bit sad that the sheep are eaten by a wolf in the end. I didn’t really feel sorry for the boy (he really was stupid), nor the wolf (he just does what he is supposed to do in life), but I did feel sorry for those poor sheep. I guess this is what disinformation leads to in the end. Cry Wolf is a bit of a scary font: it was made with a really old and battered brush, using Chinese ink and some quality French paper. It has a slight tilt to the right and I added some inky splatter for dramatic effect. Use Cry Wolf for your book covers, product packaging and headlines; use if to spice up you invitations and your halloween posters. Comes in a slightly tilted Regular style and an outright Italic style.

The original version of Salloon was what has become Salloon-Wide. It was designed a year or two before 1990. The narrower version, which is now the regular version of the face, was constructed a few years later. There never has been a true lower-case set of letters for these fonts, but the narrower version introduced a second set of caps by removing the side bumps from the letters. Although Salloon may look like an old font, no historic font closely resembles it. Fonts with bold, thick stems such as Salloon invite interior decoration. The five striped versions and the shattered version of the font were produced a year or two after the construction of the narrower Salloon when the arrival of a font distortion program made it easy to cracked and stripe fonts. In 2019 an outline style and two highlighter styles were added to be used in layers with the Salloon-Regular and one highlighter style was added to be used with Salloon-Wide.

Behrens Initialen is based on the type graphics of the German architect and type designer Peter Behrens (1868-1940). The drawing of the original typeface is in tune with the Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) style in which Behrens worked. This is a light, delicate, somewhat theatrical typeface, the forms of which bear at the same time a certain shade of Gothic and modernity, and can be used, in particular, when there is a need to make a reference to medieval graphics while maintaining the modern style of composition. In the proposed version, the original initial graphics are used not only for uppercase letters, but also for Arabic figures, while for lowercase letters and for the base of other characters are used the letters themselves - without decorative framing. This feature can be useful for obtaining various effects when using both lower and upper cases in parallel, including when they are overlaid. The font includes the Latin, Cyrillic and Armenian ranges. Created by Ruben Tarumian in 2020.

The drawings, for what is now Triplex Italic, were done in Iowa City in 1985 by John Downer. The italic was originally conceived as a companion for another typeface being drawn at the same time called Arcatext, which (like Triplex) could be described as a "humanist sans-serif" having simplified character shapes constructed mostly of geometric parts. At one stage, a certain customer was interested in Arcatext but wanted a different italic drawn for it, so the plan for the italic took another direction and the idea for this one was dropped. Five years later, Emigre decided to commission the abandoned italic as a digital typeface in three weights as companions to the Triplex Sans and Serif families designed by Zuzana Licko in early 1990. The ascenders and descenders have been shortened to match those of Triplex and the new capitals embody more of the features that distinguish the lower case, but otherwise the digital version closely follows the original drawings. See also Triplex OT.

Abeille means bee in French. I am a little worried about the world's bee populations, as whole colonies collapse due to monoculture and pesticides. I have planted many bee-attracting plants in my garden and even put up a 'bee hotel' (which is full of tenants right now). Abeille is a hand drawn didone-ish font, kind of cute and happy, very legible and full of character. Abeille comes with a swarm of diacritics.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.

Create your own world with the Picture Yourself collection! Picture Yourself is a graphic image collection, which functions a font family instead of hundreds of EPS files. The family is made up of 24 different symbol typefaces. Designed by the collaborative effort of Karin and Peter Huschka, both living in Germany, Picture Yourself was a winner in the 2003 International Type Design Contest, sponsored by Linotype GmbH. The symbol library found in Picture Yourself offers an astounding array of high-contrast, simple forms, which may be used happily either separately or together in your layouts. Just as the fonts themselves stem from two designers working in collaboration, the imagery of the collection itself stems from two different influences. In large part, the font family was inspired by work displayed in the Frankfurt-based German Architecture Museum's 2003 Oscar Niemeyer exhibition. The photographs and sketches that were displays there inspired the first ideas for the Picture Yourself world of images. More of the typeface's design, as well as its name, were inspired by the underlying philosophy of the Beatles' music, especially the classic song from Lennon and McCartney, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." In comparison with other large pictographic type collections, all of the characters in Picture Yourself fonts share the same horizon. The glyphs themselves are also drawn so that many of them can be combined with one another, creating tall or wide decorative compositions. Additionally, the proportions of the forms of the pictographs are aligned with various industry standards, in order to harmonize workflow. Picture Yourself Portraits (3:4), Landscapes (6:4), Cinema (9:4), and Panorama (12:4) each adhere to one of several photo or video formats. The Picture Yourself family of fonts can best be used with graphics applications like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, where different characters may be assigned to different layers, each with their own color.

Queulat is a hybrid typeface that combines two different styles, reflecting charm, freshness and, especially, a strong personality. The font is inspired by Modern and Grotesk styles. The former is shown in some characteristic features such as teardrop terminals, which give the typeface an attractive unique look, making it an ideal choice for logotypes and labelling. The latter, with its rationality, makes Queulat a stable and strong face for headings and subheadings. The combination of styles can be clearly seen by comparing the regular with the alt version. The regular version is more simple than the alt one. Differently, the alternative version possesses more features of the Modern style, like teardrop terminals in ‘k’ and ‘v’. Queulat also comes with a Unicase version, in which a higher number of shapes can be found, resulting in a unique colourful display.

Acton is a deceptively simple, grid-based design. Though derived from a 2 by 3 arrangement of blocks, it uses white spaces to allow for more complex shapes – for example as the R – where the underlying 3 by 5 arrangement is apparent. It also departs from this strict grid-based logic for characters such as the the T, L, f and r, whose cross-bars are shorter than they would otherwise be in order to promote optical evenness. No elegant solution could be found for the V, which in geometric fonts can appear very similar to the U, lacking as it does the cross-bar that can differentiate a square A from the capital form of the n. However, the resultant diagonal retroactively proved useful on the lower-case e and a, characters that otherwise would have more uninteresting design solutions.

Tabac Big Glam probably stretches the Tabac super-family’s boundaries the furthest. While it’s based on the serif version, it achieves an especially surgical cleanliness and extremely sharp typesetting by completely letting the serifs go. Despite this, the text isn’t boring for a moment — the angled cut of the stems on b, d, h, k, l, the open loop on g or the rounded variant of the italic y, which can be called by turning on the stylistic set, reliably banishes any suspicions of the letters’ monotony.