From today's point of view Katarine has a rather unusual origin. Initially an all-caps display face, what was to become the Medium weight of the family was augmented with a lower case, then the character set was completed by adding all the missing glyphs. The next step was the creation of the Light and the Bold weights with matching Italics. This working method compromised the relationships between the characters across the different weights After some consideration the decision was made to start over and draw the complete family from scratch. This time the "conventional" process was followed — first the Light and Bold weights were designed. Those extremes were used to interpolate the Regular, Medium and Semibold weights. When compared to the original, the glyphs of the new fonts are slightly wider. The construction of the letters is sturdy, with an x-height that varies from the heaviest to the lightest weights. The relationship of the stem weight between the horizontal and vertical strokes is carefully balanced. Characters are open and firm; the italics have room to breathe. The original fonts included two sets of small caps — Small Caps and Petite Caps. However neither set were suited for emphasis, with the Small Caps being too tall and the Petite Caps too short. We decided to replace them both with one set of traditional small caps, slightly taller than the x-height, perfectly suited for emphasis in text usage. The original version of Katarine was partly incorporated into the new OpenType versions. Thus most of the original arrows, frames and boxes can be found in the new Katarine. Each individual weight now contains 830 glyphs, nine sets of numerals, small caps, numerous ligatures and fractions. An additional font named Numbers contains numerals in circles and squares, and is now augmented with accented caps and a number of terminal alternatives, which can easily be accessed through stylistic sets. We also added two extra variants, Experts Regular and Experts Black (in inverted form). Katarine Std preserves the solid construction and excellent legibility of the original family, but has now become a fully featured OpenType typeface. Katarine is suited for a broad range of applications, from simple layouts to intricate corporate systems. It is the typeface of choice where the cold, austere character of modern sans serifs are inappropriate, yet simple shapes and good legibility are required.

Developed over several years by the late Otl Aicher and first released in the late 1980s, the Rotis® typeface has become a timeless classic. ROTIS II SANS HISTORY Aicher was a renowned German designer and corporate image consultant. He created the four basic designs of Rotis – sans serif, semi sans, semi seif and serif – within an extended typeface family concept, wherein all designs share a common cap height, lowercase x-height, basic stem weight and general proportions. While each version is part of the large, integrated family, each was also designed to function on its own as a distinctive typestyle. The result is that all members of the Rotis family combine smoothly with each other. Aicher, however, did not design the Rotis family with the weights and proportions normal for more contemporary releases. Rotis Sans Serif, for example, was drawn with just six weights and only two italics. Starting in 2010, Robin Nicholas, senior designer for Monotype Imaging in the UK, and freelance designer Alice Savoie collaborated to bring Rotis Sans Serif up to current standards. The result is Rotis II Sans, a completely new addition to the Rotis family. “We devised our approach together,” recalls Savoie, “deciding which weights to start with, what kind of alterations to make to the original Rotis, etc. I went to work on the typefaces, regularly submitting proofs to Robin. We would then decide in tandem on the next steps to take.” Nicholas elaborates, “We revisited the range of weights and added matching italics so that the new additions to the family offer increased versatility. We optimized the outlines, corrected the weight of several letters and re-examined overall spacing and kerning. In addition to a new set of numerals, with a height similar to the capitals, we also drew case-sensitive punctuation.” ROTIS II SANS USAGE The new Rotis II Sans suite comprises 14 typefaces: seven weights, ranging from extra light to black, each with a companion italic. The designs are available as OpenType® Pro fonts, allowing for automatic insertion of ligatures and fractions. Pro fonts also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. Aicher’s original Rotis designs were widely used for branding and advertising. With the addition of Rotis II Sans, the family is again poised to become a powerful communicator.

The Postea font family is Veronika Burian and José Scaglione’s take on German geometric typefaces, reshaped with the right attributes for setting paragraphs and headings, and perfect for branding and text use. Some typefaces are a rough tool, like a pumice rock: abrasive to the senses, unforgiving, and unhelpful for most reading situations. Postea is an obsidian: smooth and classy, with attractive nuances in any light. The classic curves and purposeful details keep its individuality intact while allowing it to fit an incredible range of geometric font needs. Because of these qualities, Postea makes normal reading in paragraphs a cinch and your branding memorable. Compared to midcentury attributes of restraint and a sparse appearance, Postea’s deliberate play between character widths injects life and distinctiveness into its personality. The default ‘t, f’ have lyrical doses akin to a robust evening drink and are rounded out with a serpentine ‘s’ and rotund ‘o, g, b’. Another nice surprise awaits: spacing for the Hairline weight is tighter for optimal use in large headings and titles, while the regular weights have the expected, slightly looser spacing for text. Setting the test word ‘bogarts’ brings all this together nicely, invoking a balance between a constructed and human feel while brushing away the dust from a century of derivatives. Postea is opinionated and its modern stylistic sets allow it to be accommodating with softer, specially-designed alternative characters. SS01 replaces ‘b, f, M, m, t’, while SS02 changes only the lowercase ‘a’ to the round style, and SS03 swaps out the angled ‘y’ for a straight version. The fourth and sixth stylistic sets are packed with wallpaper-worthy geometric patterns, ornaments, arrows, and symbols aplenty. Postea’s 14 styles (seven upright and italic) and two variable fonts are accompanied by an all-new family of icons in three weights, which we developed a new, easy way to activate. Simply bookend the desired icon name with colons (:arrowUp: :chargingStation: :aid: :firstAid:), making sure to capitalise each word after the first word, then highlight and activate SS05. Icons include wayfinding, social interface, sanitary precautions like face masks, thermometers, and hand washing, and much more. Postea is resilient in the number of ways the family can be used, and its recognisable characters make it a prime selection for branding, signage, corporate typefaces, and magazines. Beginning with midcentury virtues, Postea is the rational response for text — a lyrical take on geometric sans serifs.

Savigny began as an offshoot of Le Havre. Le Havre met my design objective of a geometric sans serif with a strong art deco touch. Le Havre’s primary inspiration came from the art deco titling of the 1930’s, and the lower case was just icing. The art of the 1930’s is of particular interest to me, and I love the art deco era and its art, and the simplicity of geometric shapes. I am mostly interested in designing display typefaces. In many ways Le Havre was the exact opposite of another popular insigne offering, Aviano Sans. Le Havre has very high ascenders, a lower case and is very condensed. Aviano Sans has no lowercase and extremely extended capitals. With the rise of webfonts I began to see Le Havre being used frequently online. It’s short x-height and very tall ascenders made it difficult to read in on screen text settings as it was intended as display type. With this observation, I felt that there is more room for a geometric sans in the insigne catalog. So I set about to design a new geometric sans using the successful skeleton of the Le Havre family. Although I planned to extend the Le Havre line, the new family is so drastically different I decided on a new name: Savigny. The face evolved and began to take on a few humanist touches. Designed from the very beginning as a webfont, the design is open and pleasing to the eye, with a tall x-height. To optimize it for onscreen settings, the spacing is generous. In addition, it includes extended and condensed members, making it insigne’s first superfamily. The family includes over 100 OpenType alternate characters. These include several style sets. Some are stemless, others are purely geometric, and in a nod to Savigny’s origins, Art Deco titling alternates. Please see the informative .pdf brochure to see these features in action. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Savigny is a great choice for a professional designer who wants a well rounded typeface family that is ready for the web.

Morris Sans is a newly revised and extended version of a small geometric family of typefaces originally produced by Morris Fuller Benton in 1930 for ATF. His initial design consisted of an alphabet of squared capital letters with a unique twist that characterized its appearance: corners with rounded exteriors and right-angle interiors. The types were intended for use in the fine print found on business cards, banking or financial forms, and contracts. But over the ensuing decades, this design became a popular element in all sorts of design environments, and several foundries revived the typeface in digital form. Since digital fonts are bicameral, with slots for both upper and lowercase letters, new cuts of the type opted filled the lowercase slots with small caps. In 2006, Linotype commissioned its own version of the typeface-an extension for 21st century use. Under the advisement of Linotype's type director Akira Kobayashi, Dan Reynolds redrew the uppercase and added an original lowercase for the first time. Additionally, a number of extras were brought into the fonts, including six figure styles (tabular and proportional lining figures, tabular and proportional oldstyle figures, and special tabular and proportional small cap" figures). Small caps, which have become an iconic element over time, are accessible in each font as an OpenType feature. To differentiate this version from the original, Linotype's new family is named Morris Sans, in honor of Morris Fuller Benton. All fonts in the Morris Sans family are OpenType Com fonts; they include a character set capable of setting 48 European languages that employ the Roman alphabet, including all Central and Eastern Europe languages, those from the Baltics, and Turkish. This glyph coverage extends to the small caps as well. Morris Sans is a wide typeface, especially in its regular widths; the condensed faces set a more conventional line of text. The new lowercase letters are less geometric than the uppercase, except for those that share the same basic forms (e.g., c, o, and s). Instead of following this geometric trend, the new lowercase tends to strengthen the humanist elements that were present in several characters from the original type, including the uppercase D and the figures 5, 6, and 9. Morris Sans also sports a number of glyphic flares, like the stroke found on the original uppercase Q. Morris Sans is a clean, modern design best suited for headlines, advertising, posters, expressive signage (especially on storefronts), and corporate identity work."

Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.