It is 1984 and Ridley Scott’s commercial for Apple tells us, “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.” The first Mac comes on the market. The Mac interface includes a font for use in small sizes called Chicago. The first version was designed by Susan Kare. The font’s modern grid-like character was also used for the first iPod screens, which is why this font is also associated with music. Today’s font upgrade, Little Micro Sans, is suited for small-point texts, product labels, lists of ingredients, and small captions in books, magazines, websites or applications. For online use, a variable format is particularly handy as it offers all font styles in a single file, has a faster display time and takes up less memory. Little Micro Sans is a revolution for small sizes. Specimen: http://carontwice.com/files/specimen_Little_Micro_Sans.pdf

Sporty and brawly, Magnesit Stencil creates impact everywhere it lands. Impressive headlines are its specialty, but it feels right at home used in packaging, branding and poster design. With a very tall x-height, wide language support and minimalistic yet playful appearance, it can take on any serious typographic job. Four distinct styles expand the possibilites even further: the straight to the point Regular, the friendly Soft and the determined Hard styles share metrics across related Magnesit and Magnesit Dark families, so you can mix and match to achieve exactly the effect you need. The SuperSoft style unique to the Magnesit Stencil family carries the concept to the extreme, mixing soft organic curves with rigid modularity inherent to stencil signage. Magnesit Stencil works great with illustrations, the generous shapes can be easily filled with strong imagery to great effect. Based on the best-selling Grim, Magnesit is a vast improvement of the concept with long awaited addition of lowercase, reworked proportions, spacing and kerning, expanded language support and useful icons to satisfy even the most demanding typographers’ needs.

Guillotine is inspired by an uncredited early 1970s film face called Rhythm Bold. While the original film type had plenty of round forms that were uneven and somewhat badly drawn to fit within the overwhelming pop wave of the time, this digital incarnation disposes of all curves, relies on a much sharper grid, and adheres to specific parameters of stroke widths and angles. Guillotine is a thick poster classic, mechanically constructed yet clearly exhibiting the idiosyncratic traits of hand drawing. Its forms embody the amalgamation of a multitude of influences, such as woodcut letters, punch card forms, and the unique art nouveau concepts that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. The totality of the font is a strong display aesthetic that plays very well anywhere the eye is meant to see a strong but casual, sharp but hand crafted message. This font comes in all popular formats for all common platforms, and includes expanded language support to cover Western, Eastern and Central European Latin languages, as well as Baltic, Celtic/Welsh, Esperanto, Maltese, and Turkish. A few alternate characters are sprinkled throughout the character map.

LFT Etica, the-moralist-typefamily-project, was born at the end of 2000, but its development is ongoing, overcoming many hurdles and diversions. The starting point for the designers at Leftloft were the common "cold" grotesk sans serifs, ubiquitous and often badly applied in their everyday visual environment. The challenge was to obtain the same force, versatility and color, but with a much warmer feel. The resulting design has soft strokes, open counters and terminals; aesthetically resting somewhere between a grotesque and humanist sans serif. It successfully combines masculine force with female delicacy. LFT Etica’s wide range of styles, together with a large character set and OpenType features, such as 4 sets of numerals, fractions, several stylistic alternates and a set of arrows and dingbats, allows for a vast variety of applications, be they editorial or corporate.