Think smart. Think regal. Think SteamCourt, a new font designed specifically for the card game SteamCourt. A bit of background if you will: In early 2014, some friends from my college days banded together to form their own game company. Their first launch? A current Kickstarter they named SteamCourt. I love Kickstarter. It’s a fantastic platform, a great way for individuals to introduce the public to their visions. I've started a couple of them myself--both including fonts designed specifically for the projects. The first is Chatype, a font created exclusively for the city of Chattanooga. The second: Cabrito, a font developed as part of the children’s typeface book, The Clothes Letters Wear. It’s wonderful to work with so many others who come alongside to help you vision become reality. Naturally, hearing of my friends' project, I contacted them about adding a new face to their venture as well. I gave them carte blanche. They wanted steampunk. It was a great challenge, the result of which is now SteamCourt, an unforgettable display typeface that draws from the mix of Victorian regals, metallic and brass engineering, cogs, clocks and blackletter typography. It evokes a time of skillfully forged metalwork and an era of intrigue and excitement, filled with audacious feats of engineering and innovation and the perilous journeys of the airship. While influenced by the era of blackletter, SteamCourt is an unmistakable departure from the style of two centuries past, yet it still shines in its given display roles with a distinct regal twist. The serifs are asymmetrical, yet the characters are all specially and delicately balanced. It’s an eye-catching alternative to blackletter with modern steampunk touches. The game’s signature typeface has sizeable language support on top of 90 alternate characters as well. In addition to a generous number contextual alternates, SteamCourt features stylistic alternates that allow for buyers to customize its visual appearance for their preferences, helping to make it a superior option for packaging, branding and enormous typesetting logotypes as well as shorter textual content. Check out the game, but grab the font, too, to be a part of that crib created as a companion for the new game in court. It'll be the ace up your sleeve for many rounds of design ahead.

Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) was called the King of Printers; he was a prolific type designer, a masterful engraver of punches and the most widely admired printer of his time. His books and typefaces were created during the 45 years he was the director of the fine press and publishing house of the Duke of Parma in Italy. He produced the best of what are known as modern" style types, basing them on the finest writing of his time. Modern types represented the ultimate typographic development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They have characteristics quite different from the types that preceded them; such as extreme vertical stress, fine hairlines contrasted by bold main strokes, and very subtle, almost non-existent bracketing of sharply defined hairline serifs. Bodoni saw this style as beautiful and harmonious-the natural result of writing done with a well-cut pen, and the look was fashionable and admired. Other punchcutters, such as the Didot family (1689-1853) in France, and J. E. Walbaum (1768-1839) in Germany made their own versions of the modern faces. Even though some nineteenth century critics turned up their noses and called such types shattering and chilly, today the Bodoni moderns are seen in much the same light as they were in his own time. When used with care, the Bodoni types are both romantic and elegant, with a presence that adds tasteful sparkle to headlines and advertising. ITC Bodoni™ was designed by a team of four Americans, after studying Bodoni's steel punches at the Museo Bodoniana in Parma, Italy. They also referred to specimens from the "Manuale Tipografico," a monumental collection of Bodoni's work published by his widow in 1818. The designers sought to do a revival that reflected the subtleties of Bodoni's actual work. They produced three size-specific versions; ITC Bodoni Six for captions and footnotes, ITC Bodoni Twelve for text settings, and ITC Bodoni Seventytwo - a display design modeled on Bodoni's 72-point Papale design. ITC Bodoni includes regular, bold, italics, Old style Figures, small caps, and italic swash fonts. Sumner Stone created the ornaments based on those found in the "Manuale Tipografico." These lovely dingbats can be used as Bodoni did, to separate sections of text or simply accent a page layout or graphic design."

This best selling series has now been extended to include a new member, Blue Goblet Drawn. Blue Goblet is hand-drawn by the artist, Cory Godbey, and is organic, charming and exuberant. Characters bounce and dance above and below the baseline and x-height, making this a whimsical and fun script. Not only is Blue Goblet Drawn a excellent choice, it also is also a versatile member of a wide family of different fonts. You can use it side by side with the original Blue Goblet fonts, and there are a wide range of ornaments available in the supplemental ornament sets--over 370 illustrations! These illustrations include doodley frames, lovely florals and other text ornaments that can be inserted into your text and resized at will. This makes the Blue Goblet series a great pick when you want a type system for a very unique and consistent look. The Blue Goblet series also continues to expand, making any of these family members a valuable investment for the future. Blue Goblet Drawn comes in three weights and three widths in each weight, with complementary italics for maximum impact for a total of eighteen pro fonts. The compact thin weights are delicate and tall, while the Regular has just enough heft for those situations where subtlety doesn't work. If you don't need the professional features, there are three stripped down fonts that include only the basic character set! Blue Goblet Drawn also includes auto-replacing ligatures that make it appear that the script was drawn by the artistís own hand--just for you! Blue Goblet Drawn also includes a wide variety of alternates that can be accessed in any OpenType enabled application. Blue Goblet includes over 190 additional glyphs and is loaded with features including an even more unique alternate alphabet. Included are swash alternates, style sets, old style figures and small caps. Please see the informative PDF brochure to see these features in action. OpenType enabled applications such as the Adobe suite or Quark can take full advantage of the automatic replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Blue Goblet Drawn is a great choice for friendly display type in children's books, packaging, organic packaging or other unique applications. Use Blue Goblet whenever you want to inject a handmade sense of fun and whimsy to your designs. Give the Blue Goblet series a whirl today!

Nothing is hidden in the simplistic forms and overt aesthetic of Anya Danilova’s Rezak font family. Rezak is not a type family directly from the digital world, but was inspired by the stout presence of cutting letters out of tangible material: paper, stone, and wood. With only a few cuts, the shapes remain dark and simple. With more cuts, the shapes become lighter and more defined, resulting in a dynamic type family not stuck within one specific category. The Black and medium weights began as one approach before separating into display and text categories. The four text weights were created through pendulum swings in design direction that experimented with contrast, angles, tangent redirections, and the amount of anomalies allowed. The text weights are vocal when set larger than ten points and subtle at smaller sizes. The tech-heavy Incised display style came last, employing a surprising range of trigonometric functions to make it behave exactly as desired. Its look can result in something distinctive and emotional or completely over-the-top. Most normal typefaces change only in thickness; Rezak changes in intention, highlighting the relationship between dark and light, presence and absence, what’s removed and what remains. Rezak’s Black and Incised display styles are like a shaft of light in reverse and are perfect in situations of impact: websites, headlines and large text, gaming, call-outs, posters, and packaging. The tone works for something from youthful or craft-oriented to organic and natural products. Try these two in logotypes, complex print layering, branding, and words-as-pattern for greater experimentation. The text styles are bold, energetic, well informed, and round out the family with four weights (Regular, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold) and matching italics for a family grand total of ten. These jaunty styles work well in children’s books, call-outs, movie titles, and subheads for myriad subjects such as architecture, coffee, nature, cooking, and other rough-and-tumble purposes. Rezak’s crunchy letters are meant to expose rough, daring, or dramatic text. A further benefit is that this family is not sequestered within one specific genre or script, so it can be easily interpreted for other scripts, such as its current Latin and extended Cyrillic which supports such neglected languages as Abkhaz, Itelmen, and Koryak. Rezak’s push toward creativity and innovation, with an eye on typography’s rich history, reinforces our foundry’s mission to publish invigorating forms at the highest function and widest applicability.

The Bunken Tech Sans superfamily: A reminiscence of constructed fonts of the modern age designed with considerably cleaner forms. •See other members of the Superfamily: Bunken Tech Sans •For further details, view the Specimen PDF. Bunken Tech Sans Wide follows in the best tradition of the straight-lined and somewhat angular structures of its predecessors while offering a much more open and mild design. The shapes of the letters are therefore reduced to the most essential elements: The spurs on a, b, n and other lower case letters occur just as little as decorative or style details, the lightly rounded inside edges are more pleasing to the eye than certain historic role models and make for a harmonic, flowing style. Use In particular Bunken Tech Sans Wide stands out as an easy, distinctive headline font with its straight-lined, technical design. Open counters and large x-height make it equally suited for use in shorter texts. It is also perfectly complemented by Bunken Sans or Bunken Slab in longer texts (available soon). Features Available in 16 styles with widths ranging from Light to Heavy with associated Italics. All of the styles are very extensive: Support for at least 58 languages, Small Capitals, 9 number sets (e.g. Lining, Oldstyle, Tabular and Small Cap Figures), ligatures, alternate characters, numerous Opentype functions, and lots of other small features that make it more pleasant to work with the font on a daily basis as well as fulfilling typographic desires. Each style contains more than 870 characters! Each style is available in a professional (Pro) standard (Std) and Small Caps (SC) edition with a different range of functions. (Language support, OpenType features and number of glyphs). Details can be found on the respective pages. Bunken Tech Sans Wide is part of the Bunken Tech superfamily and is available in Condensed, Normal and Wide. Also of interest: The slab serif variation Bunken Tech Slab Features in Detail: 16 Weights: -Light -Book -Medium -SemiBold -Bold -ExtraBold -UltraBold -Heavy and corresponding Italics 3 Widths: -Condensed -Normal -Wide Alternate Characters: A, E, F, L, S, e, f, t, s, y, etc. Small Capitals 5 Sets of Figures: -Lining Figures -Old Style Figures -Tabfigures -Old Style Tabfigures -Small Cap Figures Automatic Ordinals Automatic Fractions Extended Language Support and more...

A sign of something better When designer Stuart de Rozario surveyed the fonts used in signage on London’s public transport systems, he reached a dead end. They seemed staid, sterile, lacking in personality, and ill-suited to use by modern brands. He was pointed in another direction entirely. ‘The driving force behind my thoughts was to design something more current and fresh without compromising legibility and clarity. A font with both personality and function, that’s versatile and large and small sizes, and effortless to read, but which also says something new.’ Speed reading Late for a meeting and can’t find your way? Trying to catch a flight? Lost in a hospital? Reading signs is a different business to reading a book or a newspaper. Text on signs needs to be deciphered quickly and effortlessly. So the legibility criteria for signage letterforms are different to those for normal reading, too. Throughout FS Millbank’s uppercase and lowercase alphabets, characters have been given features for extra definition, including: wide ink traps on the A, K, M, V, W, X and Y; a serifed i, accentuated spurs on the a, d, l u; and different x-height shapes on the b, g, p and q. Distinctive forms and generous, open internal shapes all help the quick reading of sign text, and wide, open terminals and counters allow similar letter shapes to be distinguished easily when viewed at different angles. Running down a corridor, maybe... Positive/negative Standard type tends to glow on the kind of dark backgrounds often used for signage, and look heavier than its true weight. To correct the imbalance caused by this optical trick, special weights of the typeface have to be drawn for these ‘negative’, light-on-dark applications. These are lighter than their comparable positive weights to overcome the ‘glow’ effect. After extensive tests of the negative weights, at all sizes, we achieved the right optical balance. Glowing, glowing, gone. Icons This wouldn’t be a signage typeface without its own set of icons, or symbols, to help people find what they’re looking for. So, to sit alongside the positive and negative fonts, we’ve created a comprehensive set of 172 icons, covering a wide range of applications from transport and user interface to information and directional. Designed within the typeface capital height, they sit on the baseline and are spaced centrally.

A comprehensive and faithful rendition of one of the finest metal typefaces of the 20th century. Rudolf Koch designed Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift (initially conceived as “Missal Schrift”, and later referred to also as “Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch”) between 1919 and 1925 for the Gebr. Klingspor Type Foundry in Offenbach am Main. It is an impressive textura typeface, being sharp, elegant, spiky, sensitive and noble at the same time. Some of its most notable features have to do with the delicate decorations, the thin but subtly swelling lines that parallel or bridge strokes in the capitals, the hairline endings that terminate each stroke in both the capitals and the lowercase letters, the subtle joining of hairlines to thicker strokes, and the tension of some of the transitional curves. Koch’s original design included two sets of capitals (normal and condensed); alternates for a, d, e, r, s and z, plus long s; short and long flourished finial forms for f and t; thirty-five ligatures; and eighteen decorative pieces (Zierstücke). All of these features, plus several additional ones for modern use (including the usual standard characters for typesetting in modern Western languages, additional alternates and ligatures, plus carefully coded Opentype features), have been thoroughly implemented to the highest and most lively level of detail in the present font, in the hope that the past greatness of Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift will finally step into the modern OpenType realm. The main sources used during the font design process were several pages from a specimen book issued by the Gebr. Klingspor Type Foundry in 1927. Other sources were as follows: Bain, P., and Shaw, P. (Eds.) (1998), Blackletter: Type and National Identity, New York: Princeton Architectural Press (p. 43); Hendlmeier, W. (1994), Kunstwerke der Schrift, Hannover: Bund für Deutsche Schrift und Sprache (pp. 56-7); Kapr, A. (1983), Schriftkunst, Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst (p. 453); Kapr, A. (1993), Fraktur - Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften, Mainz: Verlag Hermann Schmidt (pp. 124-5); and Klingspor, K. (1949), Über Schönheit von Schrift und Druck, Frankfurt am Main: Georg Kurt Schauer (pp. 136-7). Some public and private comments by renowned designer and design historian Paul Shaw have also influenced both the design and the description of the present font. Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Oldtype “Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift” Font Page.

Introducing Meloriac, the unicase display typeface that combines a pseudo-retro feel with a minimalist design, creating a strong and modern-looking font that has become a reliable staple in the toolbox of today’s graphic designer. Inspired by the classic Futura Extra Bold and Avant Garde Gothic Bold, Meloriac is an extra-heavy tribute that is perfect for tight headlines and logos. Its minimalist design and strong strokes make it stand out and demand attention. The font is versatile, able to convey a variety of messages while maintaining its bold and modern aesthetic. Meloriac is more than just a pretty face; it’s also highly functional. For improved clarity, we recommend tracking it wider (adding more space) on subheadings. The result is a cleaner, more legible display that will make your message pop. Additionally, the font’s OpenType stylistic alternates feature allows access to filled letter variations and an alternative ampersand, giving you even more creative control over your designs. Whether you’re designing a poster, a book cover, or a website, Meloriac’s minimalist design and bold aesthetic make it the perfect font to convey your message with impact. Try it out today and see for yourself why it’s a favorite among today’s graphic designers. Most Latin-based European, Vietnamese, Greek, and most Cyrillic-based writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dungan, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaingang, Khalkha, Kalmyk, Kanuri, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kazakh, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Komi-Permyak, Kurdish, Kurdish (Latin), Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Nahuatl, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Rusyn, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tajik, Tatar, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Uzbek (Latin), Venda, Venetian, Vepsian, Vietnamese, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec, Zarma, Zazaki, Zulu and Zuni.

The word ‘Ghibli’ per se refers to a Saharan hot and dry wind commonly known as the Sirocco. In Arabic language, ‘Ghibli’ is known as ‘Qibli or Kibli’, meaning ‘Southern’ for those Arabic nations who live in the North of Africa. The ‘Ghibli’ wind is most common during spring and autumn, and can blow at almost 60mph; it is this wind which is responsible for the dry, dusty conditions on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. ‘Ghibli’ can last for days making life miserable and is therefore feared by the desert dwellers in that region. It can also have profound effect on the landscape by moving vast quantities of sand and dunes. Inspired by the Studio Ghibli’s unique and magical characters, the ‘Ghibli’ typeface is designed as a Latin free and literary serif typeface. It strongly expresses transition, imagination, sharpness, characterization, and modernization. It is a literary type that can capture the eyesight of readers and other observers with its acute and stylistic letterforms, dots, and numerals. It has transitional serifs and it is generally based upon the Latin printing style of the 18th and 19th centuries, with a pronounced vertical contrast in stroke emphasis (i.e., vertical strokes being heavier than the horizontal strokes). It has more regular forms in which serifs are bracketed and more symmetrical. The main characteristic of ‘Ghibli’ typeface is in its new designed serif letters. Special letters that can be described as having modern designs include small ‘g’, ‘p’ (with their open ends), ‘x’, and capital ‘B’, ‘P’, ‘Q’, and ‘R’ (with their open ends). ‘Ghibli’ typeface has also both of lining and old-style numerals which makes it more suitable for any literary and printing purposes. This gratuitous font comes in only two weights (i.e., Ghibli Regular and Ghibli Bold). It is absolutely preferable to be used in the wide fields related to literature and publication industry. This includes typing titles of diverse literary and academic books, readable texts of novels, novellas, short stories, prose, poetry, textbooks, newspapers, and magazines. It is also notable if chosen for designs that include movies’ titles, logos of academic institutions such as colleges and universities, organizations and associations’ names, medical packages such as those dedicated for tablets and syrups, and also other different educational and social materials. ‘Ghibli’ is simply a free literary typeface dedicated for all who want to write and read using a modern and stylish serif font. Enjoy it.

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.