Based on the classic Sol design by Marty Goldstein and C.B. Smith, published by VGC in 1973, Sol Pro goes above and beyond the call of revival/retooling to include plenty of optical improvements to the original design, more weights, italics, small caps, biform shapes, alternates, and extended language support. This particular design is one of the more prominent forefathers and strong influencers of the soft, streamlined aesthetic that has been going strong in branding and geometric design for more than 40 years now. It cuts all links to melancholy and classic empire shapes, and introduces smooth contrast modulation that communicates sleek, adaptable youth, confidence, knowledge, and modern hi-tech presence. This is not your grandfather's Eurostile. This is your offspring's global hope, optimism, and total awareness. Sol Pro's extended character set and range of weights and widths makes it quite suitable for applications of all sizes, from small collateral to product branding and massive marketing campaigns. The Sol Pro complete family comes in 20 fonts, each containing over 520 characters. Available in single fonts or value-maximizing packages.

British type designer Chris Burke created this sans FontFont between 1994 and 2004. The family has 8 weights, ranging from Regular to Black (including italics) and is ideally suited for book text, editorial and publishing as well as logo, branding and creative industries. FF Celeste Sans provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. This FontFont is a member of the FF Celeste super family, which also includes FF Celeste and FF Celeste Small Text.

Lincoln Electric started its life as an in-house experimental film type Thomas Lincoln drew shortly after concluding his work as part of Herb Lubalin’s famed crew in the late 1960s,. The master alphabet was drawn on illustration boards using pen and ink and press-type lines. The typeface was initially made for use in the branding and promotional material of Lincoln’s new design outfit. This alphabet’s forms are a spin on Bifur, the all-cap deco face designed by Adolphe Mouron (known as Cassandre) in 1929, and published by the Deberny & Peignot foundry in France. Lincoln Electric evolves Cassandre’s idea further by constructing new shapes more in line with minimalist principles rather than art deco geometry — something clearly evident in Lincoln’s minuscules, which exhibit a clear connection to Bauhaus ideas More than 50 years after the typeface’s design, Thomas Lincoln found the original film alphabet tucked away in his archives and brought it over to Canada Type for digital retooling. The result is a modern and thoroughly elaborate set of fonts that belonging prominently in a 21st century designer’s toolbox. The following features are included in Lincoln Electric: • Three fonts for chromatic layering. • More than 1900 glyphs in each font. • Expanded Latin and Cyrillic character sets. • Small caps and Caps-to-small-caps. • Six different sets of stylistic alternates. • Ordinals and case-sensitive forms. For a showing of the stylistic set variations and a sample of demonstration of chromatic layering, please consult this PDF.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.

British type designer Chris Burke created this serif FontFont in 1994. The family has 10 weights, ranging from Regular to Black (including italics) and is ideally suited for book text, editorial and publishing as well as logo, branding and creative industries. FF Celeste provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. As well as Latin-based languages, the typeface family also supports the Cyrillic and Greek writing systems. This FontFont is a member of the FF Celeste super family, which also includes FF Celeste Sans and FF Celeste Small Text.

Reminiscent of circuitry and wrought iron, Anachrony constructs the forms of an Old English Blackletter with the strokes of a Modern Geometric Sans, and lands in the vicinity of Art Deco. For such an unusual chimera, the Anachrony family is legible and versatile. Its glyphs cover pan-European Latin, Greek, and a wealth of symbols including arrows, zodiac, planets, chess, suits, and circled numbers. It is also packed with Opentype features: Small Capitals: Of similar proportions to the default numerals, tall enough to be a suitable choice in place of regular capitals. All Caps Forms: In addition to the four usual types of numerals, there are numerals and currency symbols that match the capitals. Swash: A leading curly swash on capitals, and fancy looped ascenders in the lowercase that are handled by over a hundred standard ligatures where they would collide. Style Set 01: Romanized forms. Especially recommended for all caps. Plainer A/M/T/V/W/Y, J/Q reined in to the baseline, and alternate g. Style Set 02: Masthead forms. Old-fashioned capitals with descenders and that lower left dealy. Also f/x/z/ß in a more traditional fraktur mode. Style Set 03: Mild embellishments. Tall bifurcated ascenders and descenders. Style Set 04: Extravagant swash descenders. Style Set 05: Final swashes for the end of a word. Style Set 06: Converts capital letters into the corresponding connected Roman numerals. Seemed like it could be useful sometime. Easy swooshes: Standard ligatures allow you to type two to seven commas in a row to append an assortment of sweeping or ending swashes. Catchwords: In Anachrony Royale, turn on Discretionary Ligatures for a variety of decorative articles and prepositions.

An uppercase font that has versatile character. Got a story to tell? Cowgirl can help you tell it. Includes western-themed vector illustrations handmade by Meg Burk. I grew up spending almost every family vacation as a road trip across the southwestern US. In these adventures, I fell in love with learning about the nature around us; deserts, mountains, plains, piñon trees, rainbow trout, black bears, eagles, and more. I fell into freezing cold white water rapids, explored long-abandoned cliff dwellings, camped under the Milky Way, saw old cave markings, stone markings, preserved art, and read many a many old map legends. These memories are visceral and the inspiration that I get from them permeates my every day. Take a piece of these stories with you and use them in your designs, too. Handmade, meant to last a lifetime and inspire others for decades to come.

How many times have you seen lettering on a book cover, poster, or card and wanted to make something similar? Decorata’s eight intertwining weights finally make that possible in an intelligent way. The first major collaboration of its kind, Decorata pairs the talents of supreme lettering artist Martina Flor and masterful type designer Neil Summerour. Lettering was traditionally understood as using words in an artistic way, while type design created written language for easy reading, the one overlapping the other in several ways. For this unique project, Martina created several versions of the alphabet and its decorative layers in her eye-catching style. Neil then took those designs and created an enormous eight-style font family that respects the designer’s need for control and capitalizes on the artist’s expressiveness. Each style can work separately but, on top of the foundational styles, try placing the Lace, then Filigree in contrasting colors. Use any OpenType-capable program to turn headlines from blasé to wowza, make posters with some pow, and design your own cards with that just-right level of detail. Whatever idea you can imagine with the Decorata family, it promises to be a playful and precise wordsmith where the words themselves are the art. Decorata’s glyphs are bifurcated, have medium contrast to showcase their intricate interactions, and include Shadow, Regular, Outline, Filigree, Lace, Fancy, Intricate, and Dingbat styles — eight in all. The Regular style sets the word or phrase to begin the design, Shadow ensures it lifts off the background, and Outline attempts to restrain its ornate flair. Think of those as the foundation and use the rest of the styles for flamboyance. The Intricate and Filigree styles vary only in the thickness of the glyphs, with Filigree being thinner. Lace removes the external curls around each letter but keeps the internal negative space from those decorative lines. The Fancy style is a solid lettershape that includes its attendant elements, and the Dingbats are exactly as expected: borders, manicules, patterns, frames, and many stylized items to bring designs to life.

Based on the lettering used on Alan Turing’s famous code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park, the “Bombe”, and the subsequent British answer to the German Enigma machine, the Typex. Research done at Bletchley Park on their restored and antique machines provided the inspiration. The unusual shapes for the capitals have all been retained - the square O, the monospaced characters and other eccentricities that make it unique. This reference material was then extended to the numerals (which did not exist in the original) and a full international character complement. The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. It was based on a device that had been designed in 1938 in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the "cryptologic bomb" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna). The Bombe was used to break the German Enigma code on a daily basis, and was a vital part of the Allied war effort. The British “Typex" (alternatively, Type X or TypeX) machines were an adaptation of the commercial German Enigma with a number of enhancements that greatly increased its security. It was used from 1937 until the mid-1950s, when other more modern military encryption systems came into use.

The design of Futura seems to be timeless. This typeface family which had been developed in 1926 by Paul Renner for the Bauer Type Foundry in the style of constructivism and as part of the Bauhaus movement, experienced, however, in the course of the past 90 years, repeated time-appropriate revivals which guaranteed its on-going popularity. The version of the Futura EF Pro contains the original character constructions which Dennis Megaw described as the “first designs of Futura” in 1938 in “20th century sans serif types, Typography no. 7” (See: Dr. Christopher Burke: Paul Renner, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1998). What makes it exceptional is the extension into three weights: “Text”, “Headline” and “Index” which came about as part of a degree dissertation at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg. In this context, the accompanying documentation “Die Kritik der reinen Futura” (“The Critique of the Pure Futura”) by Katharina Strauer was published by the Materialverlag, Hamburg, in 2003. Some copies are still available at Elsner+Flake.

The design of Futura seems to be timeless. This typeface family which had been developed in 1926 by Paul Renner for the Bauer Type Foundry in the style of constructivism and as part of the Bauhaus movement, experienced, however, in the course of the past 90 years, repeated time-appropriate revivals which guaranteed its on-going popularity. The version of the Futura EF Pro contains the original character constructions which Dennis Megaw described as the “first designs of Futura” in 1938 in “20th century sans serif types, Typography no. 7” (See: Dr. Christopher Burke: Paul Renner, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1998). What makes it exceptional is the extension into three weights: “Text”, “Headline” and “Index” which came about as part of a degree dissertation at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg. In this context, the accompanying documentation “Die Kritik der reinen Futura” (“The Critique of the Pure Futura”) by Katharina Strauer was published by the Materialverlag, Hamburg, in 2003. Some copies are still available at Elsner+Flake.

Alt-Gotisch Verzierte is a typeface of decorative initials that is Victorian in style and bears a close family resemblance to the many ornamental tuscans cut throughout the nineteenth century by British foundries. Instead of the bifurcated terminals of the archetypical tuscan (see Figgins Tuscan by HiH or Stereopticon by Dan X. Solo), these letters display what Nicolete Gray might call a “wedge and bite” design -- as if they started with the wedge serif of a latin form and someone came along and took a perfectly round bite out of the wedge. We need not dwell on the lack of teeth marks. The calligraphic curls and flourishes are often graceful, sometimes a bit contrived, but always complex. There is a busyness that marks the style of the period. If you ever see an old photograph of a well-appointed Victorian parlor, you will recognize that same quality of busyness. Overdone is a word that frequently comes to mind. Alt-Gotisch Verzierte means “adorned or decorated old gothic.” The typeface is attributed by Alexander Nesbitt to an unidentified German foundry of the nineteenth century (Decorative Alphabets and Initials, Dover, New York 1987, plate 92). The designer is unknown. Our font is supplied with a lower case that is similar to the upper case, but is 15% shorter and is simplified by the omission of the decorative vines. For the lower case, alternate letters A, E, & T; and ligatures LE, OT & LY have been supplied. In addition, a few small decorative vines were planted here and there for optional use. An accented upper case is not part of the original design and is not here supplied. This design is also seen under the name “Sentinel” -- as always, it is worthwhile to compare the completeness of the character set and the faithfulness of the rendering. We believe you will agree that we provide a balance of quality and value that is unmatched in the contemporary marketplace. Alt-Gotisch Einfach is a simplified version of Alt-Gotisch Verzierte. The vine-less lower case of the Verzierte font is the upper case in Einfach. For a lower case for Einfach, the letters were further simplified by stripping away the three-dimensional outline, down to the bare bones and bites, as it were. Einfach, in fact, means “simple” or “plain.” It is interesting to note that this bare bones & bite lower case bears (I have a special license to use two homonyms in the same sentence) a striking resemblance to the 15th & 16th century ornamental letters from Westminster Abbey shown in Plate 47 of Alexander Nesbitt’s Decorative Alphabets and Initials (Dover, New York 1987).

Early in the 19th century, foundries began releasing a variety of decorated ornamental letters based on the Tuscan letterform. Fancy Tuscan letters quickly became so popular, they eventually came to represent the cluttered extremes of Victorian design. Foundries competed with each other to produce most extravagantly decorated letterforms. As often happens, success turned to excess. What is often overlooked is the long history of the Tuscan style. Early examples have been traced back to ancient Rome. Indeed, the characteristic bifurcation may have represented a fishtail to the early Christians, thus sharing in the roll of symbolic identification played by the simple drawing of a fish as a whole. Later. trifurcation was developed as an alternate termination, followed by loops, full fishtails, curls, hooks and other fancy variations. Nicolete Gray provides an extensive history in her Appendix One of NINETEENTH CENTURY ORNAMENTED TYPEFACES. According to Gray, the first metal typeface based on the Tuscan form was the Ornamented of 1817 by Vincent Figgins of London. Thorowgood followed suit in 1821, Fry in 1824 and Caslon in 1830. Each was to re-visit the form many times during the Victorian era. Here we present our interpretation of what Figgins might have produced in a basic, plain Tuscan form - free of the decorative additions. We are pretty safe here because Figgins was very creative. He explored many of the terminal variations listed above and combined them with different decorative devices to produce a constant stream of new faces to meet the demands of the marketplace. Figgins Tuscan 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. There are also a few glyphs for Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic and Old Gaelic. Total of 355 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: aalt, ornm and liga ˜ with total 34 lookups. 3. Added 351 kerning pairs. 4. Redesigned several glyphs: the comma, quotes, brackets, braces, acute accent, and grave accent. 5. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 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.

In the history of 20th century graphic arts, the evolution of the informal sans serif has been a uniquely American phenomenon. The ongoing saga of this (still as popular as ever) sub-genre dates back to the maturity of the Industrial Age and early Hollywood film titling, runs through the prosperous times of interwar print publications, sees mass flourishing during the various media propagations of the film type era, and solidifies itself as arguably the most common design element in the latter years of the century. Fun, bouncy, playful, and highly exciting, the casual sans serif is now all over game packaging, film and animation titles, book covers, food boxes, concert posters, and pretty much everywhere design aims to induce excitement about a product or an event. The casual sans is the natural high pill of typesetting. We figured it was high time for the casual sans to adapt to 21st century technology, gain more versatility, and become as much fun to use as the emotions it triggers. So we’re quite excited to issue Bananas, a fun sans serif family in 6 weights and 3 widths that can be used anywhere your designer’s imagination can take you. Rather than being based on a single design, Bananas was sourced from multiple American film era faces, all from 1950s and 1960s, when the casual sans genre was at its popular peak. Headliners’ Catalina and its very similar cousin, Letter Graphics’ Carmel, served as initial study points. Then a few Dave West designs informed the design development and weighting process, before narrow and wide takes were sketched out and included in the family. The entire development process happened in a highly precise interpolative environment. All Bananas fonts come with a full glyph complement supporting the majority of Latin languages, as well as five sets of figures, automatic fractions, quite a few ligatures, biform/unicase shapes and other stylistic alternates.

The talented designer of the well-known Formata typeface, Bernd Möllenstädt was born on February 22, 1943 in Germany. He has lived in Westfalia, Berlin and Munich, Germany, and now permanently resides in Munich. From his earliest years he was interested in typography, first studying as a typesetter (1961-64) and then a student of graphic design (1964-1967). In 1967 Möllenstädt joined the Berthold typefoundry and his career as one of the leading type personalities began. One year after joining Berthold, he became the head of the type design department. For 22 years he worked as the head of that department, under the leadership of Günter Gerhard Lange. Upon Lange’s retirement in 1990, Möllenstädt ascended to the type directorship of Berthold where he was responsible for type design and font mastering. Möllenstädt designed two typeface for the Berthold Exklusiv Collection, Formata (1988) and Signata (1994). Under license from Berthold, Adobe marketed Formata as part of the Adobe Type Library. Formata is now one of the most successful sans serifs in the world, used both in American and European magazines, as well as newsletters in the Far East (Gulf New Kuwait). Formata also was chosen as the corporate typeface of Postbank, Allianz, VW Skoda, Infratest Burke, etc. In addition to his work for Berthold, Möllenstädt has lectured at local Munich schools on typography and graphic design, and designed corporate type identities and diverse logos for major corporations, including Allianz, Commerzbank, Mauser Officer and Hoepfner. Möllenstädt continues his association with Berthold as a designer. He most recently completed small caps and fractions for Formata. He also has substantially contributed to Berthold's Euro symbol program (e.g. adding the Euro symbol design-specific to the most popular families). Möllenstädt currently is working on a new Berthold Exklusiv design.

The ITC Franklin™ typeface design marks the next phase in the evolution of one of the most important American gothic typefaces. Morris Fuller Benton drew the original design in 1902 for American Type Founders (ATF); it was the first significant modernization of a nineteenth-century grotesque. Named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, the design not only became a best seller, it also served as a model for several other sans serif typefaces that followed it. Originally issued in just one weight, the ATF Franklin Gothic family was expanded over several years to include an italic, a condensed, a condensed shaded, an extra condensed and, finally, a wide. No light or intermediate weights were ever created for the metal type family. In 1980, under license from American Type Founders, ITC commissioned Victor Caruso to create four new weights in roman and italic - book, medium, demi and heavy - while preserving the characteristics of the original ATF design. This series was followed in 1991 by a suite of twelve condensed and compressed designs drawn by David Berlow. ITC Franklin Gothic was originally released as two designs: one for display type and one for text. However, in early digital interpretations, a combined text and display solution meant the same fonts were used to set type in any size, from tiny six-point text to billboard-size letters. The problem was that the typeface design was almost always compromised and this hampered its performance at any size. David Berlow, president of Font Bureau, approached ITC with a proposal to solve this problem that would be mutually beneficial. Font Bureau would rework the ITC Franklin Gothic family, enlarge and separate it into distinct text and display designs, then offer it as part of its library as well. ITC saw the obvious value in the collaboration, and work began in early 2004. The project was supposed to end with the release of new text and display designs the following year. But, like so many design projects, the ITC Franklin venture became more extensive, more complicated and more time consuming than originally intended. The 22-font ITC Franklin Gothic family has now grown to 48 designs and is called simply ITC Franklin. The new designs range from the very willowy Thin to the robust Ultra -- with Light, Medium, Bold and Black weights in between. Each weight is also available in Narrow, Condensed and Compressed variants, and each design has a complementary Italic. In addition to a suite of new biform characters (lowercase characters drawn with the height and weight of capitals), the new ITC Franklin Pro fonts also offer an extended character set that supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages. ITC Franklin Text is currently under development.