Before 1959, in pre-Castro Havana, Cuba, the preeminent nightclub was the Tropicana. During the regime of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba was resplendent with nightclubs and gambling casinos catering to [mostly] the North American tourists; which brought it the title of the Monte Carlo of the Americas. Although Cuba (and the world as a whole) has changed vastly over the decades, the hand-lettered logo of the Tropicana Night Club has survived, and has been reproduced as a complete digital font called Tropicano JNL (a slight twist to the club's name). At first the font seems to be awkward, crude and amateurish, but in taking a second look, there's a playful charm to it. Additionally, this font can double as a "spooky" font for the Halloween season, monster parties and in other similar themes.

Nosegrind is a bit of a departure from our usual more traditional font offerings. It's based on skate-culture graffiti gleaned from various samples of similar style found on walls in Austin and online. The font includes two character sets, one which is plain and one which is enhanced with outlines. In normal usage the characters should nest, with slight overlap from one character to the next as shown in the sample to the right, but the lower case characters in the font are spaced evenly but not pre-nested, leaving the degree of overlap up to the user - nesting is easily adjusted with the tracking option in programs like Photoshop, Quark or InDesign. Ultimately Nosegrind will be added to our Modern Fonts collection, where it ought to fit in nicely.

Although ITC Styleboy has a retro feel, it isn't based on any earlier typeface. As far as inspiration goes," says designer Chester Wajda, "I'd have to say comic strips of the '20s and '30s, and silent-film marquee lettering from the '20s - with a hint of a Chinese brush?" He originally created the typeface for a children's book he was working on. "I wanted it to be fun, but still somewhat formal in its underlying structure," he says. "It's largely based on right and 45-degree angles, with slight tucks inward on the stems and bowls, and a few flourishes here and there." Styleboy's top-heavy look is most noticeable in the caps, but it's exaggerated too in the "8" and the lowercase "g." Styleboy is Wajda's first typeface design."

Designed for global branding and supporting 93 languages, the SST® typefaces blend the organic readability and controlled structure of modern sans serif designs. In combining these attributes, the SST family is understated, versatile – and sure to be a timeless design. The SST Pan-European family has 17 fonts in total, supporting the W1G character set. It spans six weights from ultra light to heavy, each with an italic complement. In addition, three condensed designs and two monospaced (typewriter) typefaces were drawn to further expand the family’s vast range of uses. SST’s subtle design traits provide a quietly handsome and consistently friendly typographic presence that can be used for just about any typographic application. Broad range branding applicability combined with coverage for almost a hundred languages, makes SST one of the most widely accessible and usable typefaces available. Originally designed in partnership with the global consumer brand, Sony, the SST family is one of the most comprehensive type families available. Since extensive multi-lingual support was a critical design goal from the beginning, Akira Kobayashi, Monotype type director and primary designer on the project, turned to a network of local designers around the world for their individual language expertise. As a result, the details – which could be as subtle as stroke curvature and width – are consistent across Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and multiple Asian languages. SST performs equally well in print and on-screen and the designs can be used at very small sizes in packaging and catalogs; while massive print headlines – even complicated wayfinding projects pose no stumbling blocks to the family’s typographic dexterity. While the family is also large enough to manage complicated typographic hierarchy, SST pairs handsomely with typefaces as far reaching as ITC Berkeley Old Style®, Meta®, PMN Caecilia®, Malabar® and Neue Swift®.

Etrusco Now is the revival of a lead typeface originally cast in lead by Italian foundry Nebiolo in the early 1920s. Heavily inspired by the design of the Medium weight of Schelter & Giesecke's Grotesk, Etrusco was, like Cairoli, an early precursor of the modernist grotesque superfamilies: a solid, multi-purpose "work-horse" typeface family that could solve a wide range of design problems with its range of widths and weights. When designing the new incarnation of Nebiolo's Etrusco, the Italiantype team directed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Mario de Libero decided to extend the original weight and width range to keep this "superfamily" approach. Etrusco Now has twenty-one styles widths in three widths of seven weights each, with matching italics; the original weights for the typeface have been collected in the Etrusco Classic subfamily. Etrusco Now new widths allowed the team to include in the design many nods and homages to other vintage classics of Nebiolo. The lighter weights of the normal width have been heavily influenced by the modernist look of Recta, while the heavy condensed and compressed widths refer to the black vertical texture of Aldo Novarese's Metropol. This infuses the typeface with a slightly vintage mood, making Etrusco at the same time warmly familiar and unexpected to eyes accustomed to the formal and cold look of late modernist grotesques like Helvetica. Contemporary but rich in slight historical quirks, Etrusco Now is perfect for any editorial and branding project that aims to be different in a subtle way. Etrusco Now's deviations from the norm are small enough to give it personality without affecting readability, while its wide range of open type features (alternates, stylistic sets, positional numbers) and language coverage make it a problem solver for any situation. Like its cousin Cairoli, Etrusco is born out of love for lost letterforms and stands like its lead ancestor from a century ago, at the crossroads between artsy craftsmanship and industrial needs.

Cinema Macabre: Horror Fonts Torn from the Pages of Giallo A Hand-drawn Display Font for Creating the Most Diabolical Horror Titles This loose and inky brush font takes its inspiration from the classic Giallo film posters of the 1960s to 1980s - a cult cinematic subgenre beloved for its stylish visuals, haunting soundtracks and exploitation led marketing. It's a devilishly drawn design that aims to capture the feeling of vintage horror, preserving analogue details of old print while remaining versatile enough to work across a variety of digital designs. The Cinema Macabre font family boasts six fonts, each containing a unique set of uppercase and lowercase characters, as well as numerals, punctuation and language support. Add to this a host of custom ligatures, underlines and graphic elements and you have an essential toolbox for creating truly hand-made looking title designs. Cinema Macabre if a font that rewards experimentation by mixing all the various upper and lowercase alternatives, with interesting combinations waiting to be found and inspire terror across your own movie posters, book covers, albums and editorials. Few other fonts offer the versatility to create such diabolical designs! A Brief Introduction to Giallo: In popular cinema, Giallo is a genre of mystery fiction and thrillers often containing slasher, psychological horror, exploitation, supernatural and erotic elements. The term giallo (meaning yellow) derives from a series of pulp novels published by Mondadori from 1929 taking the name from its trademark yellow covers. The series consisted of Italian translations of mystery novels by well-known authors such as Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler. The popularity of these cheap paperbacks eventually established the word Giallo as a synonym in Italian for a mystery novel. The cinematic Giallo subgenre developed during the 1960-80s and are noted for their vivid cinematography, memorable soundtracks and inventive gore-filled scenarios. Key examples include Dario Argento's Suspiria, Tenebrae and Deep Red - stylish films that at once influenced the American slasher (see Black Christmas and Friday 13th) up to todays horror in Censor and Last Night In Soho.