Absalon has square letter shapes. It has some characteristics semi-sharp and semi-rounded corners and it has a relatively tall x-height for legible text. To create the perfect typesetting the spaces between individual letter forms has been precisely adjusted. The Absalon font family is perfect for the web as well as for print, for display as well as longer text, for motion graphics, on the side of a van, t-shirts, logotypes and so on. The font family consist of 5 weights or 10 styles and it has 410 glyphs. A total of more than 4000 glyphs. The styles are: Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Extra Bold & Extra Bold Italic. It has OpenType features such as automatic fractions, subscript, superscript, numerators, denomerators, ordinals and the “f” ligature set. Absalon has extended language support (most Latin-based scripts are supported). The name of the font family is Absalon and it is a reference to a Danish bishop in the middle ages. He was a key figure in the founding of Copenhagen, the Capital of Denmark.

Empresario Stephen F. Austin (1793-1836) is considered by many the “Father of Texas” for leading the first Anglo-American colony into the then-Mexican territory back in the 1820s. A few years later, while on a diplomatic mission to Mexico City, Austin was arrested on suspicion of plotting Texas independence and imprisoned for virtually all of 1834. During this time he kept a secret diary of his thoughts and musings—much of it written in Spanish. Austin Pen is my interpretation of Austin’s scribblings in this miniature prison journal (now in the collection of the wonderful Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, in the Texas city that bears his name). The little leather-bound book is filled with notes in ink and pencil—some of the faded penciled pages traced in ink years later by Austin’s nephew Moses Bryan. A genuine replication of 19th century cursive, Austin Pen has two styles: a fine regular weight, along with a bold style that replicates passages written with an over-inked pen. Each is legible and evocative of commonplace American penmanship of two centuries ago.

Recta was one of Aldo Novarese’s earliest contributions to the massive surge of the European sans serif genre that was booming in the middle of the 20th century. Initially published just one year after Neue Haas Grotesk came out of Switzerland and Univers out of France, and at a time when Akzidenz Grotesk and DIN were riding high in Germany and Gill Sans was making waves in Great Britain, it was intended to compete with all of those foundry faces, and later came to be known as the “Italian Helvetica”. It maintains traditional simplicity as its high point of functionality, while showing minimal infusion of humanistic traits. It shows that the construct of the grotesk does not have to be rigid, and can indeed have a touch of Italian flair. While the original Recta family lacked a proper suite of weights and widths, this digital version comes in five weights, corresponding italics, four condensed fonts, and small caps in four weights. It also includes a wide-ranging character set for extended Latin language support.

Jet is an assertive italic sans that anticipates the return of the simpler, optimistic times when progress was considered positive and forward seemed to be the only way to go. It may have felt right at home in the mid-1970s, the time of Sc-Fi, synthetics and disco, yet it unmistakably belongs to the present. Its dynamic sturdy forms and angular tapering of some horizontal forms convey movement and edgy impatience for change, with a few re-imagined details, like the reversed slant on top of the lowercase t and the atypical round counter of the lowercase a, showing a new hope for the bygone optimism. Available in five weights in Latin and Cyrillic, supporting many languages, with stylistic alternates and two sets of figures. Designed by Gayaneh Bagdasaryan and Vyacheslav Kirilenko, 2020