Balboa Plus is a condensed sans serif display family. It was originally conceived as a simple black and white typeface. But it seemed unfinished, begging for something more. I decided to try adding a couple layers of fill and detail to try and make it interesting. The result is this four-layer chromatic font family. The Primary Font is the Main Font. The other fonts ( Fill, Inline, and Gradient) only exist to support the Primary Font. The Fill font should sit behind the Primary font (there is a little color trapping going on). The rest is even easier. There is a free downloadable PDF Balboa User Manual in the Gallery section for this family. It has samples and some backstory. Balboa™ is a trademark of Parkinson Type Design.

ITC Gramophone is a work of Canadian designer Serge Pichii. The distinguishing feature is the large spiral which is part of the form of almost every capital letter as well as many other characters. The capitals can also be used as drop capitals. The forms of ITC Gramophone are perfect for displays and will surely catch the eye of any reader.

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.