Useful links: TT Supermolot Neue PDF Type Specimen TT Supermolot Neue graphic presentation at Behance Looking for a custom version of TT Supermolot Neue? TT Supermolot Neue is a redesigned, extended and greatly enhanced reincarnation of the popular TT Supermolot and TT Supermolot Condensed font families. During its existence, the hammers (‘molot’ in Russian) managed to get into the spotlight in a huge number of projects, for example, in popular video games, films, and branding. Despite its popularity, the limited composition of old families put boundaries their development, which prompted us to release a completely redesigned and greatly extended version. And while the old families could offer designers only a limited number of tools, in the new version you can already find 54 fonts, and each individual font now consists of more than 620 glyphs. First, we have added a completely new subfamily, TT Supermolot Neue Extended. But this is only the tip of the iceberg—in order to achieve visual harmony between the three subfamilies, we completely revised the distribution of widths among them. As a result of this work, the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Basic subfamily became a bit narrower, and the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Condensed subfamily became even narrower than it was in the old version. Secondly, we’ve increased the number of weights. While in the old versions there were only 5 weights, in the new ones there are 9 in each of the subfamilies. In addition, we gave a facelift to the lowercase and uppercase letters. In TT Supermolot Neue, the design of all controversial grapheme forms was soothed and now the family can also be used in the text set. We have completely redrawn italics. It took us half a year to compensate for all the circles, to transform italic strokes, to work out the position of the diacritics, to make right the spacing, and to finish kerning. Following a good tradition, in the TT Supermolot Neue extensive support for useful OpenType features was added, and hinting was also improved. If we talk about visual features, we recommend paying closer attention to two stylistic sets: the first set (ss01) is designed to make the typeface more humanist, and when you turn on the second set (ss02), the typeface becomes even more technological. In addition, the typeface has more than 26 items of standard and discretionary ligatures. We also have not forgotten about the figures and we added a set of old-style figures to the standard version. In addition, the typeface has case, ordn, frac, sups, sinf, numr, dnom, onum, tnum, lnum, pnum, calt, liga, dlig, salt, ss01, ss02.

Roller Poster is named after Alfred Roller. In 1902, Roller created a poster to advertise the 16th exhibit of Austrian Artists and Sculptures Association, representing the Vienna Secession movement. The exhibit was to take place in Vienna during January & February 1903. The location is not mentioned because everyone in Vienna knew it would be held at the exhibit hall in the Secession Building at Friedrichstraþe 12, a few blocks south of the Opernring, near the Naschmarkt. Designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich in 1897, the buiilding has been restored and stands today as one finest of the many fine examples of Art Nouveau architecture in Vienna (see vienna_secession_bldg.jpg). Because of its dome, it is called “the golden cabbage.” The poster itself is unique. The word “secession” is in one type style and takes up two-thirds of the elongated poster. At the bottom of the poster are the details in a different lettering style. It is this second style at the bottom that is the basis for the font Roller Poster. In keeping with our regular naming conventions, we were going to call it Roller Gezeichnete (hand-drawn), but the wonderful play on both words and the shape of the three S’s in secession was too compelling. In November 1965 there was an exhibit of Jugendstil and Expressionist art at the University of California. Alfred Roller’s Secession Poster was part of that exhibit. Wes Wilson was designing promotional material at Contact Printing in San Francisco. Among their clients was a rock promoter named Bill Graham, staging dance-concerts at Fillmore Auditorium. Wilson saw the catalog from the UC exhibit and Roller’s lettering. Wilson adapted Roller’s letter forms to his own fluid style. The result was the poster for the August 12-13, 1966 Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead concert at Fillmore put on by Graham (BG23-1). Wilson continued to use Roller’s letter forms on most of the posters he did for Graham through May 1967, when he stopped working for Graham. The posters were extremely successful and the lettering style along with Roller’s letter forms were picked up by other artists, including Bonnie MacLean, Clifford Charles Seeley, James Gardner, and others. The Secession poster and the Fillmore posters have inspired a number of fonts in addition to ours. Among them are JONAH BLACK (& WHITE) by Rececca Alaccari, LOVE SOLID by Leslie Carbarga and MOJO by Jim Parkinson. Each is different and yet each clearly shows its bloodlines. Our font differs in two ways: 1) the general differences in the interpretation of the letter forms and 2) the modification of the basic letter form to incorporate the diacriticals within the implied frame of the letter, after the manner of the original design by Roller. We borrowed Carbarga’s solution to the slashed O and used it, in a modified form, for other characters as well to accomplish the same purpose. We recommend that you buy ours and at least one of the other three. According to Alaccari, a version called URBAN was released by Franklin Lettering in the 70’s (and is shown on page 51 of The Solotype Catalog). For comparison of our font to original design, see image files roller_poster_2s.jpg of original poster and roller_poster_2sx.jpg showing reconstruction using our font for the lower portion (recontructed area indicated by blue bar). Please note the consistency of character width. In the lower case, 23 of the basic 26 letters are 1/2 EM Square wide. The ‘i’ is an eighth narrower, while the ‘m’& ‘w’ are one quarter wider. All the Upper Case letters are 1/8 EM wider than the lower case. This is to make it easier to fill a geometrical shape like a rectangle, allowing you to capture a little of the flavor of Wes Wilson’s Fillmore West poster using only a word processor. We have also included a number of shapes for use as spacers and endcaps. If you have a drawing program that allows you to edit an ‘envelope’ around the letters to distort their shape, you can really get creative. I used Corel Draw for the gallary images, but there are other programs that can accomplish the same thing. The image file “roller_poster_keys.jpg” shows the complete character set with the keystrokes required for each character (see “HiH_Font_readme.txt” for instruction on inserting the non-keyboard characters). The file “roller_poster_widths.jpg” shows the exact width of each character in EM units (based on 1000 units per EM square). You will notice that the font is set wide for readability. However, most programs will allow you to tighten up on the character spacing after the manner of Roller & Wilson. In MS Word, for example, go to the FORMAT menu > FONT > CHARACTER SPACING. Go to the second Drop-Down Menu, labeled ‘Spacing’ and select "condensed' and then set the amount that you want to condense ‘by’ (key on the little arrows); two points (2.0) is a godd place to start. Let your motto be EXPLORE & EXPERIMENT. Art Nouveau has always been one of my favorite movements in art -- I grew up in a home with a couple of Mucha prints hanging on the living room wall. Perhaps because of that and because I lived through the sixties, I have enjoyed researching and designing this font more than any other I have worked on. Let’s face it (pardon the pun), Roller Poster is a FUN font. You owe it to yourself to have fun using it.

The serifed companion to the popular Billy family comes in 3 very different but complimentary weights that when combined create a very strong, playful and persuasive style.

The distressed letterforms hark back to early printing process using hand carved wood cut letters. The typeface is available in 6 weight with both Rough & Solid variations.

Printing Press Extras JNL is another collection of classic printing embellishments and stock cuts from Jeff Levine, with a few new ones thrown in for good measure.

Grunt Grotesk is a modern Ukrainian sans-serif typeface with a number of distinct characteristics, which make it unboring but still great in the massive text blocks.

The term "podunk" usually refers to a small, insignificant town. In this case, Podunk JNL refers to a bold and brash font that resembles cut-paper characters.

VASARELY has famous roots, its name is related to optical arts own Victor Vasarely. Dropping the field of Op-Art, you already know where we have been aiming at. The REGULAR and LIGHT cuts of VASARELY are quite ordinary, rectangular, but legible typefaces, but with the BOLD and EXTRABOLD versions you will be able to build diverse illusive type illustrations and layouts. Being build on a strict grid with same dimensions, the eye-affecting black-and-white contrast should trigger different optical effects. As an extra we build an EXTRUDED version as well. Have fun!

Designed by Francesco Canovaro with help from Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini, Kitsch is a typeface happily living at the crossroads between classical latin and medieval gothic letterforms. But, rather than referencing historical models like the italian Rotunda or the french Bastarda scripts, Kitsch tries to renew both its inspirations, finding a contemporary vibe in the dynamic texture of the calligraphic broad-nib pen applied to the proportions of the classical roman skeleton. The resulting high contrast and spiky details make Kitsch excel in display uses, while a fine-tuned text version manages to keep at small sizes the dynamic expressivity of the design without sacrificing legibility. Both variants are designed in a wide range of weights (from the almost monolinear thin to the dense black), and are fully equipped with a extended character sets covering over two hundred languages that use latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets. Special care has been put in designing Kitsch italic letterforms, with the broad-nib movements referencing classical italian letterforms to add even more shades to your typographic palette. The resulting alternate letter shapes have also been included in the roman weights as Stylistic Alternates - part to the wide range of Open Type features (Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Positional Numerals, Small Caps and Case Sensitive Forms) provided with all the 32 weights of Kitsch. Born for editorial and branding use, Kitsch is fashionable but solid, self-confident enough to look classic while ironic enough to be contemporary.

When Candy Script was officially released and in the hands of a few designers, I was in the middle of a three-week trip in North America. After returning to Buenos Aires, I found a few reactions to the font in my inbox. Alongside the congratulatory notes, flattering samples of the face in use, and the inevitable three or four “How do I use it?” emails, one interesting note asked me to consider an italic counterpart. 

I had experimented with a few different angles during the initial brainstorming of the concept but never really thought of Candy Script as an upright italic character set. A few trials confirmed to me that an italic Candy Script would be a bad idea. However, some of these trials showed conceptual promise of their own, so I decided to pursue them and see where they would go. Initially, it seemed a few changes to the Candy Script forms would work well at angles ranging from 18 to 24 degrees, but as the typeface evolved, I realized all the forms had to be modified considerably for a typeface of this style to work as both a digital font and a true emulation of real hand-lettering. Those were the pre-birth contractions of the idea for this font. I called it Sugar Pie because it has a sweet taste similar to Candy Script, mostly due to its round-to-sharp terminal concept. This in turn echoes the concept of the clean brush scripts found in the different film type processes of late 1960s and early 1970s.
 
While Candy Script’s main visual appeal counts on the loops, swashes, and stroke extensions working within a concept of casual form variation, Sugar Pie is artistically a straightforward packaging typeface. Its many ligatures and alternates are just as visually effective as Candy Script’s but in a subtler and less pronounced fashion. The alternates and ligatures in Sugar Pie offer many nice variations on the main character set. Use them to achieve the right degree of softness you desire for your design. Take a look of the How to use PDF file in our gallery section for inspiration.

Dada Sans Pro is simple in form but elegant font with huge language support and OpenType features such as ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, four variations of numerals and many more... It is suitable for large headlines in applications like magazines or newspapers.

A makeup ad in the December, 1937 issue of Modern Screen magazine inspired Single Line Deco JNL, an Art Deco monoline which is available in both regular and oblique versions. The font is based on the hand lettered headline touting “Modern Eyes”.

Hermaphrodite was developed for the Bastard Project and had its origin in the idea of applying the process of an Antiqua on a Grotesque. In other words, a Grotesque font was drawn calligraphically and then digitized. Some inconvenient corners were simply cut off.

LOGX-10 is a geometric minimalistic all-caps display typeface. Designed for strong headers, original graphic designs, visual identification and for many types of designs. It works not only in headings and subtitles but also in arrangements of various sizes and long text.

CS are the initials of Carsten Strinkau, a young German graphic and type designer who studied in Hamburg. CS Fuzzy Logic combines coincidence and logic. The individual glyphs of Fuzzy Logic are almost dissolved but keep its sharpness and readability in texts.

Common Stencil JNL takes a vintage lettering stencil from the 1980s with imperfectly bent cutting dies [which unintentionally gave the characters a distressed or "grunge" look] and recreates it in a digital form. The design is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Endure is a new hand-painted brush font created to add a high detail and realistic feel to any project. Every glyph in Endure was painted by hand on actual paper and scanned in manually - A lengthy process, but worth the fine detail!

Astrospy JNL is a square-shaped, futuristic techno-style font from Jeff Levine. It is very well suited for short phrases, but caution should be used in setting too many words with it because of legibility issues. Best used in larger point sizes.

The common Slavic word Основа (Osnova) means basis in English and βάση in Greek. This universal but still distinctive typeface can make a good ground for any design project. Special Navigation version separated by Western Latin, Greek and Cyrillic families is here.

Dada Slab Pro is simple in form but an elegant font with huge language support and open-type features like ligatures, stylistic alternates, fractions, four variations of numerals and many more... It is suitable for large headlines in applications like magazines or newspapers.

The Buum typeface evolved from the explosive lettering originally designed as part of a house style for an interactive science centre for kids. Beside its usual application as a strong display font in print and on screen, the bold angular shapes of glyphs are adapted for negative machine- or laser-cutting into structural materials such as iron sheets, plywood, or stone ... and for creating tactile expressive surfaces and 3D objects. This pictogrammic and dazzling font remotely echoes the morphology of the lettering of futurism and constructivism, when avant-garde typography was once an exciting adventure. It is a lettering building kit with a number of stylistic alternatives of glyphs that enable a user to shape the same word differently each time. Buum is recommended by nine out of ten old school futurists, favored by steampunk CNC operators and respected by the majority of infantile anarchists.

Gamon is an innovative and daring unicase display font that is a perfect example of modern typography. The absence of traditional lowercase letters and the integration of multiple glyphs in the uppercase letters create a distinct and captivating design. The uniform size of the letters adds to the font’s appealing appearance, making it an ideal choice for large display layouts, branding, posters, and titles. Gamon’s typography is perfect for designers who are looking for a fresh and unusual aesthetic. It can transform any digital or print design stand out from the rest. Gamon’s versatility makes it suitable for a broad range of design applications, including logos, packaging, and marketing materials. Gamon’s boldness and uniqueness make it an excellent choice for designers who want to break free from the conventional design constraints. With Gamon, designers can create designs that are not only visually appealing but also memorable and impactful.

The Scandinavian Cyrillic kids font is stylish and laconic as famous Scandinavian monochrome design. Each letter of the font was carefully cut out of paper with scissors by little childish hands. And now it's turned into a font :) The Scandinavian Cyrillic kids font includes main uppercase, alternative uppercase, and double letters for uppercase and lowercase. It will be perfect for use in all your fun design projects: logos, labels, packaging design, blog headlines. Also, it will look great on mugs, cards, kid's books headlines, or other typographic projects. Multilingual Support for 32 languages: Latin glyphs for Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh, Zulu. And Cyrillic glyphs support for Russian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Kazakh languages. Works perfectly on the Canva platform. For Cricut & Silhouette recommended.

Proudly present Hyper Bleach - Liquid Type, created by ikiiko. Hyper Bleach is a flowing and expressive hand-drawn font that perfectly encapsulates the urban culture and modern style. This font gives a feeling of movement and fluidity. Urban and trendy fashion brands love the distinctive and edgy aesthetic offered by flowing font designs. When placed over the image, the letters stand out as they appear dry dripping in wavy lines. For a fashion-forward company looking to establish a distinctive visual identity, this font style is perfect. Its fluid design adds a dynamic and eye-catching touch to logos, titles, and headlines. This type is very suitable for making a streetwear brand, poster or magazine layout, fashion design, urban style, quotes, or simply as a stylish text overlay to any background image. What's Included? 2 Weight: Regular & Rglossy Uppercase & Lowercase Numbers & Punctuation Multilingual Support Works on PC & Mac Enjoy our font.

What is the right font to beautify your designs? Brighter Sunday is the answer. Brighter Sunday is a duo font mixture of script and serif font from which you can either combine as a set of beauty or separate a part based on their own beautiful style. The curves and strokes resembling a handwriting style on the script expresses elegant, natural vibrations. In addition, the serif style weights will leave strong, modern impressions to all of your designs. Enjoy the interesting features available on this font. Features: Ligatures Stylistic Sets Multilingual Supports PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuations Brighter Sunday fits for any design projects, such as posters, banners, logos, invitations, magazine covers, quotes, headings, printed products, social media, etc. Find out more ways to use this font by taking a look at the font preview. Thanks a lot for purchasing our font. Happy Designing.

Dharma Gothic is an antiqued sans serif designed inspired by 1800s-style wood type. All glyphs had been designed carefully to be retro-looking of the old time and to fill all with nostalgia. There is new rounded verision - Dharma Gothic Rounded Family This condensed font family with 42 styles will be the best solution for posters, titles and anywhere you need impact. To complete your work perfectly, Gothic Extras family is ready for free. They include borders, ornaments and frames designed using vintage catalog of Hamilton in 1800s as a model. Incidentally, g, r and y have alternative glyphs that are available with the OpenType salt feature and tabular figures are available with tnum feature. Be sure to check out the slab serif style of this Dharma series named Dharma Slab and Distress version Dharma Gothic P. When you need more modern gothic, please try our Kaneda Gothic and Fairweather.

Rockglazer is a script font similar to a curve writing which expresses modernity, boldness and strength, unlike the other script fonts. There are swinging curves and wipes on some of the letters to add beauty, and the differences in the line thickness of each letter are so clear that you can use this font for bigger-sized texts for a better legibility. Enjoy the available features here. Features: Stylistic Sets Ligatures Multilingual Supports PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuations Rockglazer fits for various design projects, such as posters, banners, logos, magazine covers, quotes, greeting cards, printed products, merchandise, social media, etc. Find out more ways to use this font by taking a look at the font preview. Hopefully, you have a great experience using our font. Feel free to contact us if you require more information when you are dealing with a problem. Thank you. Happy designing.

Superb is a new typeface based on real brush pen script and also influenced by lettering shapes from the sixties and seventies. The font includes various swashes with volume and curls.. Superb’s letters got high contrast and some psychedelic curves. This font includes negative figures and a full alphabet set with cut out shapes. Take a look at the Superb Video https://vimeo.com/94062611 It’s designed with high contrast and enhanced legibility regardless its artistic look. Superb’s original letterforms are a beautiful piece of art and elegance no matter you observe them as separate symbols or as words, text paragraphs etc. Their appropriate use could be found therefore in many different aspects – from decorative greeting card, fresh packaging or expressive headline, to artistic t-shirt design, poster or distinguished brand name. Superb has a lot more to show when you access its OpenType features.

Dharma Gothic Rounded is an antiqued sans serif designed inspired by 1800s-style wood type. All glyphs had been designed carefully to be retro-looking of the old time and to fill all with nostalgia. There is Dharma Gothic Family that is not rounded. This condensed font family with 42 styles will be the best solution for posters, titles and anywhere you need impact. To complete your work perfectly, Gothic Extras Family is ready for free. They include borders, ornaments and frames designed using vintage catalog of Hamilton in 1800s as a model. g, r and y have alternative glyphs that are available with the OpenType salt feature and tabular figures are available with tnum feature. Be sure to check out the slab serif style of this Dharma series named Dharma Slab and Distress version Dharma Gothic P. When you need more modern gothic, please try our Kaneda Gothic and Fairweather.

Alias Vertical is a sans serif typeface with a vertical cut-off point for letter endings. The vertical cut-offs bend round characters (b, c, o, etc) into a squarish, high-shouldered shape, suggesting Roger Excoffon’s Antique Olive. In mid-weights, the typeface mixes Antique Olive with typefaces such as Gill or Johnston, for example the shape of the t, the l borrowing Johnston’s flick. Vertical has the same minimal difference in weight between verticals and horizontals as Gill and Johnston, and the same sharp connection point where curves meet straight lines. Like Antique Olive, Vertical has a narrow connection point here, adding contrast and definition. The overall effect feels austere at lighter weights and strident and graphic at bolder weights, and sharp and incised throughout. In the Bold and Black weights, the squarish and top heavy shape of Antique Olive is most noticeable. For example the wide uppercase, with the B having almost-even width between top and bottom curves, and the almost-overhang of the top curve of the G. But Vertical does not have as extreme an aesthetic or square shape as Antique Olive. As well as its wide design, the upper case is given extra authority by being a slightly heavier weight than the lower case. This is a device borrowed from Gill, and other ‘old’ typefaces, where the upper case is presented as a titling design. Modern sensibilities are more focussed on an even colour between upper and lower case. Vertical was originally intended as a sister typeface to Ano, like AnoAngular or AnoStencil. Vertical developed into a similar but separate design. Ano was designed for use in Another Man — in its modular, circle-base design, and the way there aren’t the amendments usually made in bolder weights to ensure letter clarity. This is for layouts where different weights are used together in different sizes so that the overall letter weight is the same, a feature of the magazine. Where Ano is simple and graphic, Vertical has nuance and texture. It is a pragmatic, utility design. In the balance between graphic and typographic, its focus is the latter.

The Bacchus font is a great choice when you want to effortlessly make your designs stand out.

The Smart family started out as an idea for a smart design and kids magazine, games, etc.

ITC Coventry is the work of American designer Brian Sooy. ITC Coventry is what type would look like if you left a gothic font out in the rain. IF you look close, you'll see the roots of a handsome sans serif font buried under a layer of grime and rust, basically." The low-budget student flyers that Sooy saw in the Coventry section of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, inspired him to design this font and the result is a typeface which looks as though it has been faxed or photocopied many times. "While it looks very irregular in text, it's very carefully spaced to give that effect," says Sooy. ITC Coventry was designed to work just as well in text as in headlines or even on billboards."

Since Mommie, I gradually got more into swirly ornaments. The massive contrast in the neoclassic style is perfect for thin swirly extentions to the characters. Even in an upright typeface. Narziss is very elegant in big headlinesizes. Use it only very big. What was the inspiration for designing the font? spencerian calligraphies and neoclassic contrast What are its main characteristics and features? Narziss is very elegant in very big sizes. The Regular version is without any ornament. The Drops version has some character like the e and the k that are more unique. The Swirls version has got carefully added swirls, that come out of the basic stroke and flow into other characters. Usage recommendations: Big headlines in magazines, brochures and invitations

Although designer Michael Gills was influenced by 18th century French type designer Pierre-Simon Fournier, Charlotte is best described as a modern roman typeface. Its clean cut style, accentuated by a strong vertical stress and unbracketed serifs, exudes an authoritative tone, guaranteeing its effectiveness for almost all text setting applications, but especially where a formal unmannered appearance is desired.

Step into the world of vintage charm and timeless grace with our "Bali Bliss" font! "Bali Bliss" is a script font that effortlessly channels the retro vibe, oozing with an irresistible charm that takes you back to a bygone era. Its retro-inspired design taps into the collective memory, making your designs not just beautiful but also deeply relatable.

Cloudia is a versatile, modern font with an attention-grabbing angularity. It has a thoroughly mechanical, science fiction look; but with slightly unconventional vowel shapes to give it a dynamic edge. Its precisely cut letters need to be displayed as large as possible for maximum impact. Perfect for book titles, magazines, band logos, movie titles, stencils and video games.

Although designer Michael Gills was influenced by 18th century French type designer Pierre-Simon Fournier, Charlotte is best described as a modern roman typeface. Its clean cut style, accentuated by a strong vertical stress and unbracketed serifs, exudes an authoritative tone, guaranteeing its effectiveness for almost all text setting applications, but especially where a formal unmannered appearance is desired.

In a world full of conventional typefaces, Tussilago stands out with its sturdy and extended sans-serif design that defies standard geometric models. This mid-twentieth-century typeface exudes a distinct personality that speaks volumes through its wide letterforms and unique details. Tussilago’s robust letterforms offer a cool-headed but unabashed voice of power that can elevate any message. Whether you’re designing a poster, a logo, or a website, Tussilago’s seven weights and italics will provide you with the perfect blend of sophistication and modernity. But that’s not all. Tussilago’s versatility is evident in its offering of two numeral options—lowercase (old-style) or lining—for each weight and style. This feature makes Tussilago an excellent choice for any project where numbers play a crucial role. With Tussilago, you’re not just choosing a typeface; you’re choosing a design that speaks to your audience with an erudite voice. So, whether you want to make a bold statement or convey a subtle message, Tussilago is the perfect choice for designers who want to stand out from the crowd. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Before Bodoni, there was Didot. With the publication by Francois Ambroise Didot of Paris in 1784 of his prospectus for Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata, the rococo typographical style of Fournier de Jeune was replaced with a spartan, neo-classical style that John Baskerville pioneered. The typeface Didot used for this work was of Didot’s own creation and is considered by both G. Dowding and P. Meggs to be the first modern face. Three years later, Bodoni of Parma is using a very similar face. Just as Bodoni’s typeface evolved over time, so did that of the Didot family. The eldest son of Francois Ambroise Didot, Pierre, ran the printing office; and Firmin ran the typefoundry. Pierre used the flattened, wove paper, again pioneered by Baskerville, to permit a more accurate impression and allow the use of more delicate letterforms. Firmin took full advantage of the improved paper by further refining the typeface introduced by his father. The printing of Racine’s Oeuvres in 1801 (seen in our gallery image #2) shows the symbiotic results of their efforts, especially in the marked increase in the sharpness of the serifs when compared to their owns works of only six years earlier. It has been suggested that one reason Bodoni achieved greater popularity than Didot is the thinner hairlines of Didot were more fragile when cast in metal type and thus more expensive for printers to use than Bodoni. This ceased to be a problem with the advent of phototypesetting, opening the door for a renewed interest in the work of the Didot family and especially that of Firmin Didot. Although further refinements in the Didot typeface were to come (notably the lower case ‘g’ shown in 1819), we have chosen 1801 as the nominal basis for our presentation of HiH Firmin Didot. We like the thick-thin circumflex that replaced the evenly-stroked version of 1795, possible only with the flatter wove paper. We like the unusual coat-hanger cedilla. We like the organic, leaf-like tail of the ‘Q.’ We like the strange, little number ‘2’ and the wonderfully assertive ‘4.’ And we like the distinctive and delightful awkwardness of the double-v (w). Please note that we have provided alternative versions of the upper and lower case w that are slightly more conventional than the original designs. Personally, I find the moderns (often called Didones) hard on the eyes in extended blocks of text. That does not stop me from enjoying their cold, crisp clarity. They represent the Age of Reason and the power of man’s intellect, while reflecting also its limitations. In the title pages set by Bodoni, Bulmer and Didot, I see the spare beauty of a winter landscape. That appeals to a New Englander like myself. Another aspect that appeals to me is setting a page in HiH Firmin Didot and watching people try to figure out what typeface it is. It looks a lot like Bodoni, but it isn't!