Dulcinea is the title of Ramiro Espinoza’s in-depth look at Spanish Baroque calligraphy’s most extreme tendencies, and especially at some of those produced by the writing masters Pedro Díaz Morante and Juan Claudio Aznar de Polanco. These 17th and 18th centuries alphabets with their plentiful calligraphic flourishes represented a marked break with the harmonic and angular Renaissance Cancellaresca style. It was Morante who first introduced and popularized the use of the pointed quill in Spain, and although his famous text entitled “Arte Nueva de escribir” – first volume published in 1616 – contains alphabets that have much in common with traditional broad nib Cancellaresca calligraphy, most of the examples therein are outgrowths of the new models put forward by the Italian master Gianfrancesco Cresci. The writing’s swashes are complex and intricate, but at the same time they feature a profusion of defects. Many of them sometimes come close to ugliness. However, these pages contain an artistic essence that bears a relationship to the ironic and sometimes somber character of Spanish Baroque. That’s why the name of the font pays homage to “Dulcinea del Toboso”, the fictional beauty from Miguel de Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’, a work that reveals many of the period’s conflicts, such as the contrast between utopian ideals and reality, uncertainty and madness. But Dulcinea is far from being just a revival. Its forms are not careful tracings of the outlines of Morante and Polanco’s letters, nor are they attempts to reproduce them digitally. In fact, the author of the letters says that had the font been created that way it would have been too archaic to serve as acceptable contemporary typography. However, he believes that there are myriad interesting details that can be rescued and preserved, along with the playful spirit of the original. The work of designing Dulcinea consisted of combining original historical elements with the creativity and calligraphy of the font’s author in order to produce a modern typography that isn’t based on the same traditional sources as many recently created scripts fonts. Dulcinea offers attractive options for the setting of texts and headlines: abundant ligatures and swashes along with intricate alternate characters. It sophisticated forms make it an ideal option for women’s magazines, recipe books, lingerie products or perfume packaging.

Carnero™ is a feisty hybrid of precise geometry and calligraphic flair; a design that walks that fine line between being sensible and a standout. In an increasingly monotone typographic landscape – Carnero has a unique pulse that moves the reader along with a new energy. Carnero gives life to simple utility with kinetic letter shapes, open apertures, and generous counters Drawn by Steve Matteson for the Monotype Studio, Carnero’s versatility is its strength. From digital ads and applications to packaging and branding, Carnero is comfortable and contemporary. The lightest and boldest weights create inviting headlines, while the middle weights read well for body copy. Used together, they build a lively brand and a clear hierarchy. Matteson infused Carnero with a modernist exterior resting on a 10th century calligraphic foundation. Delightful flourishes on the capital R and K, and lowercase a, k and l, give the design a distinctive demeanor; while the alternate italic swash caps are a saucy nod to the scribes. The result is a design that is warm, approachable – and a bit lighthearted. Matteson describes Carnero as, “transcending the static posture of the geometric sans genre.” The Carnero family is a compact collection of six distinct weights, ranging from an engaging light to an authoritative black, each with an italic counterpart. Its extended Latin character set ensures worry-free localization for eastern/western European languages. This is a design that will prove its value many times over. Matteson has drawn over 80 distinctive typeface families for major corporations, branding firms and retail sales. His passions for the outdoors and performing music balances an intense focus on work – and subtly finds its way into typefaces like Carnero. Matteson has designed custom fonts for three generations of the Microsoft Xbox® game console, the original core fonts for the Android® mobile-phone platform, in addition to branding typefaces for Toyota®, Rocket Mortgage®, and Google®. He also drew the Kootenay™ family, Monotype’s proprietary branding typeface. Matteson’s retail designs range from the elegant and utilitarian Open Serif™ (a companion to Google’s Open Sans), to a growing series of Frederic Goudy revivals. Carnero Variables are font files which are featuring one axis and have a preset instance from Light to Black.

Carnero™ is a feisty hybrid of precise geometry and calligraphic flair; a design that walks that fine line between being sensible and a standout. In an increasingly monotone typographic landscape – Carnero has a unique pulse that moves the reader along with a new energy. Carnero gives life to simple utility with kinetic letter shapes, open apertures, and generous counters. Drawn by Steve Matteson for the Monotype Studio, Carnero’s versatility is its strength. From digital ads and applications to packaging and branding, Carnero is comfortable and contemporary. The lightest and boldest weights create inviting headlines, while the middle weights read well for body copy. Used together, they build a lively brand and a clear hierarchy. Matteson infused Carnero with a modernist exterior resting on a 10th century calligraphic foundation. Delightful flourishes on the capital R and K, and lowercase a, k and l, give the design a distinctive demeanor; while the alternate italic swash caps are a saucy nod to the scribes. The result is a design that is warm, approachable – and a bit lighthearted. Matteson describes Carnero as, “transcending the static posture of the geometric sans genre.” The Carnero family is a compact collection of six distinct weights, ranging from an engaging light to an authoritative black, each with an italic counterpart. Its extended Latin character set ensures worry-free localization for eastern/western European languages. This is a design that will prove its value many times over. Matteson has drawn over 80 distinctive typeface families for major corporations, branding firms and retail sales. His passions for the outdoors and performing music balances an intense focus on work – and subtly finds its way into typefaces like Carnero. Matteson has designed custom fonts for three generations of the Microsoft Xbox® game console, the original core fonts for the Android® mobile-phone platform, in addition to branding typefaces for Toyota®, Rocket Mortgage®, and Google®. He also drew the Kootenay™ family, Monotype’s proprietary branding typeface. Matteson’s retail designs range from the elegant and utilitarian Open Serif™ (a companion to Google’s Open Sans), to a growing series of Frederic Goudy revivals. Carnero Variables are font files which are featuring one axis and have a preset instance from Light to Black.

Andinistas.net presents Makeup Script. Expressive hand-made typography to design sentences with high textured impact; has 4 creative tools. Our priorities are continually updated and we prefer to use the elevator since taking the stairs is a very long process. If you see a long text, you close it and look for something shorter. For quick calligraphy you need to consume hours and hours of learning, discomfort and effort. Think of calligraphic words or phrases to write about a photo no matter how expressive it may be. Try to write quickly with signature style for logos, labels or packaging for clothes, suitcases, shops, malls, department stores, etc. Do you want to be able to calligraphy well? STUDY. Do you want to be a calligrapher? PRACTICE. Want to produce good ideas? PUSH YOURSELF. If you practice for hours every day, those hours will turn into years, but for many, to think in years of study and practice is too long, since most want everything instantaneous and few want to cultivate skills related to calligraphic patience. Makeup was born in the midst of this type of reflections about countless themes about art, beauty and calligraphy. All the ideas that revolve around makeup parade through its insightful and solitary design, lover of instant and fast writing for graphic design related to food, household goods, fashion, etc. CFCG. teamwork by Carolina Suarez & Illustrations by Eder Salas. In that order of ideas Makeup offers the following tools: • Makeup Script (238 glyphs): It is a script with vibrant fleeting strokes that form capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers and character sets and extended punctuation for Central, Eastern and Western Europe. • Makeup Alternates (238 glyphs): Offers new script possibilities, different from uppercase, lowercase, numbers that work at the beginning or end of words, in a way that your design will look more real and calligraphic. • Makeup Swashes (238 glyphs): These are tiny script letters that reinforce the idea of fast binding between handwritten letters that will fill your design or concepts with power and expressiveness through multiple textured contours. • Makeup Extras (80 glyphs): Here you'll find over 70 exciting, hand-crafted decorations that are ideal for underlining your ideas written in Makeup.

A typeface with lightly-worn futurism, Sagittarius is equally at home among the beauty and wellness aisles, or the coils of the warp core. The Sagittarius typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2021. A decorative adaptation of Hoefler’s Peristyle typeface (2017), Sagittarius’s rounded corners and streamlined shapes recall the digital aesthetic of the first alphabets designed for machine reading, a style that survives as a cheeky Space Age invocation of futurism. Sagittarius was created for The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, where it first appeared in 2021. From the desk of the designer: Typeface designers spend a lot of time chasing down strange valences. We try to figure out what’s producing that whiff of Art Deco, or that vaguely militaristic air, or what’s making a once solemn typeface suddenly feel tongue-in-cheek. If we can identify the source of these qualities, we can cultivate them, and change the direction of the design; more often, we just extinguish them without mercy. Sometimes, we get the chance to follow a third path, which is how we arrived at Sagittarius. During the development of Peristyle, our family of compact, high-contrast sans serifs, I often found myself unwittingly humming space-age pop songs. Nothing about Peristyle’s chic and elegant letterforms suggested the deadpan romp of “The Planet Plan” by United Future Organization, let alone “Music To Watch Space Girls By” from the ill-advised (but delicious) Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, but there they were. Something in the fonts was provoking an afterimage of the otherworldly, as if the typeface was sliding in and out of a parallel universe of high-tech spycraft and low-tech brawls with rubber-masked aliens. It might have had something to do with a new eyeglass prescription. But I liked the effect, and started thinking about creating an alternate, space-age version of the typeface, one with a little more funk, and a lot more fun. I wondered if softer edges, a measured dose of seventies retrofuturism, and some proper draftsmanship might produce a typeface not only suitable for sci-fi potboilers, but for more serious projects, too: why not a line of skin care products, a fitness system, a high-end digital camera, or a music festival? I put a pin in the idea, wondering if there’d ever be a project that called for equal parts sobriety and fantasy. And almost immediately, exactly such a project appeared. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Jesse Sheidlower is a lexicographer, a former Editor at Large for the Oxford English Dictionary, and a longtime friend. He’s someone who takes equal pleasure in the words ‘usufructuary’ and ‘megaboss,’ and therefore a welcome collaborator for the typeface designer whose love of the Flemish baroque is matched by a fondness for alphabets made of logs. Jesse was preparing to launch The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a comprehensive online resource dedicated to the terminology of the genre, whose combination of scholarship and joy was a perfect fit for the typeface I imagined. For linguists, there’d be well-researched citations to explain how the hitherto uninvented ‘force field’ and ‘warp speed’ came to enter the lexicon. For science fiction fans, there’d be definitive (and sometimes surprising) histories of the argot of Stars both Trek and Wars. And for everyone, there’d be the pleasure of discovering science fiction’s less enduring contributions, from ‘saucerman’ to ‘braintape,’ each ripe for a comeback. A moderated, crowdsourced project, the dictionary is now online and growing every day. You’ll find it dressed in three font families from H&Co: Whitney ScreenSmart for its text, Decimal for its navigational icons, and Sagittarius for its headlines — with some of the font’s more fantastical alternate characters turned on. The New Typeface Sagittarius is a typeface whose rounded corners and streamlined forms give it a romantically scientific voice. In the interest of versatility, its letterforms make only oblique references to specific technologies, helping the typeface remain open to interpretation. But for projects that need the full-throated voice of science fiction, a few sets of digital accessories are included, which designers can introduce at their own discretion. There are alternate letters with futuristic pedigrees, from the barless A popularized by Danne & Blackburn’s 1975 ‘worm’ logo for NASA, to a disconnected K recalling the 1968 RCA logo by Lippincott & Margulies. A collection of digitally-inspired symbols are included for decorative use, from the evocative MICR symbols of electronic banking, to the obligatory barcodes that forever haunt human–machine interactions. More widely applicable are the font’s arrows and manicules, and the automatic substitutions that resolve thirty-four awkward combinations of letters with streamlined ligatures. About the Name Sagittarius is one of thirteen constellations of the zodiac, and home to some of astronomy’s most inspiring discoveries. In 1977, a powerful radio signal originating in the Sagittarius constellation was considered by many to be the most compelling recorded evidence of extraterrestrial life. Thanks to an astronomer’s enthusiastically penned comment, the 72-second transmission became known as the Wow! signal, and it galvanized support for one of science’s most affecting projects, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). More recently, Sagittarius has been identified as the location of a staggering celestial discovery: a supermassive black hole, some 44 million kilometers in diameter, in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. <

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.

TT Tsars useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options The TT Tsars font family is a collection of serif display titling fonts that are stylized to resemble the fonts of the beginning, the middle and the end of the XVIII century. The project is based on title fonts, that is, the fonts that were used to design book title pages. The idea for the project TT Tsars was born after a small study of the historical development of the Cyrillic type and is also based on Abram Shchitsgal’s book "Russian Civil Type". At the very beginning of the project, we had developed a basic universal skeleton for the forms of all characters in all subfamilies of the family, and later on, we added styles, visual features, artifacts and other nuances typical of the given period onto the skeleton. Yes, from the historical accuracy point of view it might be that such an approach is not always justified, but we have achieved our goal and as a result, we have created perfectly combinable serifs that can be used to style an inscription for a certain time period. The TT Tsars font family consists of 20 fonts: 5 separate subfamilies, each of which consists of 4 fonts. Each font contains 580 glyphs, except for the TT Tsars E subfamily, in which each font consists of 464 characters. Instead of lowercase characters in the typeface, small capitals are used, which also suggests that the typeface is rather a display than text one. In TT Tsars you can find a large number of ligatures (for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets), arrows and many useful OpenType features, such as: frac, ordn, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, case, onum, tnum, pnum, lnum, salt (ss01), dlig. Time-related characteristics of the subfamilies are distributed as follows: • TT Tsars A—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars B—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars C—the middle of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars D—the end of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars E—conditionally the beginning of the 18th century (only Latin) TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B families (both the beginning of the 18th century) have different starting points: for TT Tsars A it is Latin, for TT Tsars B it is Cyrillic. The development of the TT Tsars A family began in Latin, the font is based on the royal serif Romain du Roi. The Cyrillic alphabet is harmoniously matched to the Latin. The development of the TT Tsars B family began in Cyrillic, which is based on a Russian civil type. Characteristic elements are the curved one-sided serifs of triangular characters (A, X, Y), drops appear in the letter ?, the middle strokes ? and P are adjacent to the main stroke. Latin was drawn to pair with Cyrillic. It is still based on the royal serif, but somewhat changed: the letters B and P are closed and the upper bar of the letter A rose. This was done for the visual combination of Cyrillic and Latin and at the same time to make a distinction between TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B. TT Tsars C is now the middle of the 18th century. Cyrillic alphabet itself did not stand still and evolved, and by the middle of the 18th century, its forms have changed and become to look the way they are shown in this font family. Latin forms are following the Cyrillic. The figures are also slightly modified and adapted to the type design. In TT Tsars C, Cyrillic and Latin characters are created in parallel. A distinctive feature of the Cyrillic alphabet in TT Tsars C is the residual influence of the flat pen. This is noticeable in such signs as ?, ?, K. The shape of the letters ?, ?, ?, ? is very characteristic of the period. In the Latin alphabet, a characteristic leg appears at the letter R. For both languages, there is a typical C characterized by an upper serif and the appearance of large, even somewhat bolding serifs on horizontals (T, E, ?, L). TT Tsars D is already the end of the 18th century when with the development of printing, the forms of some Cyrillic characters had changed and turned into new skeletons of letters that we transposed into Latin. The figures were also stylized. In this font, both Cyrillic and Latin are stylistically executed with different serifs and are thus logically separated. The end of the century is characterized by the reduction of decorative elements. Straight, blueprint-like legs of the letters ?, R, K, ?. Serifs are very pronounced and triangular. E and ? are one-sided on the middle horizontal line. A very characteristic C with two serifs appears in the Latin alphabet. TT Tsars E is a steampunk fantasy typeface, its theme is a Latinized Russian ?ivil type (also referred to as Grazhdansky type which emerged after Peter the Great’s language reform), which includes only the Latin alphabet. There is no historical analog to this typeface, it is exclusively our reflections on the topic of what would have happened if the civil font had developed further and received a Latin counterpart. We imagined such a situation in which the civil type was exported to Europe and began to live its own life.

Once, Blackletter was a calligraphy style. Full of ligatures, with letters bumping into each other to create an unapologetic picket-fence pattern. Some even claimed that the regularity improved legibility! But then Blackletter was cast into metal, and only a handful of established ligatures survived, while most interletter connections were disentangled. Everyone since followed suit, and hundreds of years later, digital Blackletter fonts were modelled mostly on the metal fonts that prevailed rather than the original handwriting. Up until now! AJ Quadrata is an authentic revival of the textura quadrata hand, and its major inspiration is a 15th-century Latin manuscript of the Bible from Zwolle, the Netherlands. The typeface is delivered in two flavors. The default cut is a modern take on textura quadrata that can be useful for today and tomorrow. The standard ligatures feature employs nearly all letters. The tittle of i retains its original, hasty squiggle form (except for the Turkish localization). Discretionary ligatures include medieval ligatures da, de, do, pa, pe, po (and their mixed-case counterparts!). Stylistic sets allow to use historic letter variants such as long s and rotunda r, closed-counter a, and alternate capitals. AJ Quadrata Medieval is perfect for setting Latin. Default forms of capital F, H and O are swapped with the alternates. The squiggles above i only appear for disamibiguation nearby m, n or u, as in original manuscripts. Discretionary ligatures and historic variants are promoted to the standard ligatures feature to make room in the discretionary ligatures feature for a variety of scribal abbreviations. Dedicated stylistic sets include medieval punctuation and justification alternates — glyphs with elongated terminals used for lengthening lines that end up too short. The Rubrum styles can be layered and colored to create the illuminated effect on the capital letters. Besides a faithful rendition of extended Latin including Vietnamese, numerous synthetic additions are included: polytonic Greek, Armenian, and Cyrillic (with Bulgarian and Serbian/Macedonian localizations). Both flavors of the typeface can be considered a starting point that can be further customized using OpenType features, including Stylistic Sets (some features differ between AJ Quadrata and AJ Quadrata Medieval): ss01 Alt E ss02 Descending F / Roman F ss03 Uncial H / Roman H ss04 Angular O / Round O ss05 Contextual closed-counter a ss06 Diamond-dot i j / Always dotted i, j ss07 Contextual rotunda r / No r rotunda ss08 Contextual long s / No long s ss09 Dotless y ss10 Serbian Cyrillic ss11 Alt Cyrillic de ss12 Alt Cyrillic zhe ss13 Alt Cyrillic sha ss14-ss17 [reserved for future use] ss18 Scribal punctuation ss19 Alt linking hyphen ss20 Justification alternates

The great value of something crafted thoroughly by hand has been observed for years by Guille Vizzari throughout a wide spectrum of clients and projects developed at «Yani & Guille» —the studio he runs cheek by jowl with Yani Arabena—, and they both noticed that recently it has been taking on a new meaning. From barbers at their shops, to a barista that passionately prepares coffee every morning, or a bartender that deeply enjoys diving towards unknown ingredients, and even Guille’s admiration for sign painters worldwide that keep spreading their passion for the perfectly constructed letter. This wide trades universe, where craftsmanship represents a huge difference, is where «Proprietor» lives, and it’s the reason why it exists. «Proprietor» was born in a Moleskine notebook —just pencil, paper and ink— as a tribute to those crafts, and to regain the art behind Type Design that involves the fusion between tools, materials and the action of the hand. Fed by these principles, every single glyph within the whole «Proprietor» Family has been fully designed and illustrated by hand by its author (including all the ornaments, frames and crafts icons that can be seen along this specimen), showcasing Vizzari’s solid formation in the drawing field. Proprietor can be described as a compact type family system illustrated by hand, intended and designed to be able to create solid —but beautifully ornamented— paragraphs, and elaborate compositions. For this purpose, Proprietor Roman and Open displays a notorious x-height which goes perfectly with plenty of ornaments that unfold along the ascenders and descenders, but always containing its swashes inside the text line. The icing on the cake, Proprietor Script, a copperplate-based font unbelievably flooded with ornamented capitals, flourishes and endings to break through the coarse feeling of the Proprietor non-script sets, with a huge load of delicate and warm letterforms. Proprietor Wide and Wide Open hand a complete font set to complement the family for composing extended words in uppercase, matching in style and adding a striking personality. And as being part of Sudtipos’ catalogue «Proprietor» comes packed with full Open Type support —thanks to Ale Paul, fearless to tame this hand–drawn beast, supported by his vast knowledge in programming and optimization—. 7 imperfectly elegant and completely handmade fonts join the «Proprietor» system, bringing life to designs that are meant to represent the spirit of the genuine and skilled craftsmen, showing respect for their trade, and at the same time being part of it.

This typeface is extrapolated from the ‘We the People’ calligraphy of the handwritten US Constitution Preamble which employed a style based on German Text and Square Text exemplars from George Bickham’s penmanship copy-books, the most celebrated being The Universal Penman published in 1743. The original Constitution document was transcribed onto parchment by Jacob Shallus, a Pennsylvania Assistant Clerk, over a weekend in 1787. Shallus’s biographer, Arthur Plotnik (The Man Behind the Quill, 1987), notes that he was paid $30, a modest monthly wage at the time. He also suggests that the calligraphic headings, ‘We the People’ and ‘Article’, may have been inserted by Shallus’s 14 year old trainee son, Francis, “The manner in which the ‘Article’ headings are squeezed into the space Shallus allowed for them suggests a second hand—and perhaps not a very experienced one.” The unconventional backslant of the headings would seem to support this contention, and at the end of the document there is perhaps a novice’s inconsistency in the structure of the letter n between that used for ‘done’ and those used for ‘In Witness’. However, one has to admire the elegant swagger of the wavy t, h and l which the K-Type font extends to the b, f and k. Also, the simpler, Schwabacher-style W, an enlarged version of the lowercase w, is a little less flamboyant than the capital W from the German and Square texts in Bickham’s manuals. For designers using OpenType-aware applications, the typeface includes some Alternates, including a Bickham-style W, the letters t, h and n with added flourishes, two simpler forms of the A, and a few roman numerals for numbering articles. Also some ornamental flourishes and a round middle dot/decimal point. Punctuation marks are drawn in square, calligraphic style, but an alternative round period/full stop, for use with currency and numerals, is available at the period centered position (though placed on the baseline), accessed by Shift Option 9 on a Mac, or Alt 0183 on Windows. The full phrase, ‘We the People’, has been placed at the trademark keystroke and can be accessed by Option 2 (or Shift Option 2) on a Mac, or Alt 0153 on Windows. For designers who find the backslant awkward or unpleasant, the licensed typeface also includes two additional fonts which have a vertical aspect that may be more conducive to graphic design layouts. ‘We The People Upright’ and ‘We The People Upright Bold’ both retain the distinctive style, and the heavier weight is only slightly emboldened, just enough to add some punch.