We are pleased to announce the launch of Vástago Grotesk, a nine-weight sans serif font family, inspired by the traditional grotesque designs of the 20th century. The particular ink traps, result of the G drawing, create it a visual universe that is replicated throughout the system, generating personality and a functional distinctive in multiple contexts. Vástago Grotesk was born out of an interest in exploring the possibilities of Sans Serif font design, a process that is complemented by the advice of excellent typographers throughout the world thanks to the Type Crit Crew initiative. The design was carefully constructed, achieving functionality in different sizes, ranging from a subtle Thin to a Heavy weight that projects grandeur and character. Vástago Grotesk is a challenge come true. We hope you enjoy it.

Cinemas from the early 20th century are called “Lichtspiele” in Germany. “Lichtspiele” transports you back to a time where neon lights and marquee letters decorated cinema façades. Of the five styles, three have two versions of italics — the left-leaning italic evokes looking up from lower-left, the right-leaning italic is as if we are looking from lower-right. Display is the basic style, while Neon is inspired by the old neon letters found outside cinemas. Try placing Neon Outline on top of Display or Neon to add another layer to your artwork. Neon 3D is a extruded version of Neon. The Screen Credits style is based on the notes — producers, cast, crew and so on — on movie posters. Get more out of life, go out to a movie.

Almost every type designer feels the need, from time to time, to interrupt his or her serious work on complex text type systems for something more playful. In Luc(as)'s case this has often meant designing more typefaces. In the early 1990s, while working on Thesis, Luc(as) drew several display faces which were based on the shapes of TheSans but were either de(con)structive versions or experimental variations. Jesus Loves You All is a heretic thorny typeface vaguely based on the outlines of TheSans. Jesus Loves You was given a remarkable three-dimensional treatment in Abbott Miller's Dimensional Type project.

This face was recommended to me by Mark Solsburg, president of FontHaus. At first I was a bit reluctant to revive it, if for no other reason than Frederic Goudy’s admission that he created this design “in a moment of typographic weakness.” However, I put the sample that Mark sent me up on my bulletin board, and over a period of time, it grew on me. It finally got to the point that I had to recreate the face, and from the response that I’ve gotten, I’m glad I did! Uppercase only with numerals and punctuation.

As the basis for this new font artist and designer Lena Schmidt used an old font design by her mother Jutta. At a young age, her mother drew and illustrated a lot with pen and ink. She made beautiful illustrations and many font designs. Schmidt chose one of these drafts - delicately drawn Donovan lyrics - as the basis for this digital handwritten stencil font. What emerged from it is a stencil text and display typeface that relates to Auriol's art nouveau typefaces and the era of impressionism. More weights will be published in soon. Published by Spirit & Bones www.spiritandbonesdesign.com Designed by Lena Schmidt www.lenaschmidt.com

I grew up with the ‘Save The Whales’ slogan: I remember watching the news and seeing little Greenpeace dinghies taking on huge Japanese whalers, and activists clinging on for dear life. I haven’t heard that slogan for a while: maybe because whaling is soooo 1890’s, but also maybe because the world has other problems to address. Out of respect for the ‘Save The Whale’ activists, I named this fattish font Whale Song. Whale Song is a robust comic font. It was especially created for book covers, product packaging and posters and, of course, it comes with a whale of diacritics.

Positronic Toaster is a modern interpretation of the French upright scripts of the nineteenth century. It started off as an attempt to make a stylized script that didn't feel like it belonged on a 1950s chrome appliance. Later on, however, the design grew to embrace the qualities of that style of lettering. The result is something playful and elegant, that is not tied to any particular time period. The distinctive angular loops on the ascenders will join together in words like 'bulb' or 'wallflower' using OpenType contextual alternates. It is suitable for cards, wedding invitations, or any project requiring a fashionable, upscale look.

While helping produce a trade magazine years ago, I admired the hand-lettering of the art director -- a woman named Marydale -- and suggested she let me model a font after her penmanship. She agreed and drew out the alphabet, and I launched an old copy of Fontographer and (to shorten a long story) ended up developing my very first digital typeface. Which has since, astonishingly, become famous worldwide. So now the real Marydale gets the mixed blessing of seeing her handwriting (and name) plastered all over the planet. Full release has regular, bold, and black weights.

Peter started as a sketch in the static sans-serif tradition of Helvetica®. Then slight references to the calligraphic origin of type were added, giving it a more distinct character. This neo-grotesque sans has rational and clear basic letterforms, while in its details it unfolds attributes of humanist type. As a neo-grotesque sans it claims a very modest design, yet being a bit wider than its relatives and offering the warmth of humanist drafts. The early sketch grew to a type family of 18 fonts and now supports 700+ glyphs with pro opentype features.

In the 1990s I drew a text face for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was based on W. A. Dwiggins’ Electra and incorporated many features of the Linotype Legibility Series: More compact, with a taller lowercase X-height, etc. That type was called Electric and it was the Chronicle’s text face for nearly a decade, surviving several redesigns. From that, I made Azuza, a more detailed and sensitive style. Azuza was recognized in the TDC2 type competition in 2001. Then it went into hibernation as a Type 1 font family. Today it is back. Six fonts. Open Type.

PostScript fonts are constructed by connecting dots, dots that have special attributes that control the shape of the connecting lines. In designing Minimalist, I wanted to see how few dots could be used to construct each letter. This is the source of the name--it is (or was) a minimum-point alphabet. I did not expect much from it, and was surprised that it turned out as well as it did. Since I originally drew it, I have added some points to some of the letters to get them to generate proper bitmaps, so it no longer has minimum points.

Trajan The original template for this one-weight, all-caps font was the inscription on Trajan’s Column, carved in AD 113 to celebrate the emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. College student Jason Smith copied the stone lettering from the cast on display in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. In Roman times, the signmaker would paint letters onto stone with a wide brush for the stone mason to chisel out later. The signwriter would end each stroke with a flick of his brush, which the mason would also carve into the stone. Ecce (as they would have said in Rome): the serif was born. Hand-crafted “I first drew this typeface when I was 17,” says Jason. “I drew it with a very sharp 9H pencil on polydraw film. “Then, using a Rotring pen, I inked the letters in and scraped back the serifs so they were perfectly sharp. These letters were then reduced on a PMT camera. I’d designed my first typeface, although it wasn’t digitised till much later.” Digitised Years after Jason had drawn the original typeface, its transfer into digital form made further refinements necessary. The serifs and weights needed thickening slightly, creating a crisp, new version whose delicate elegance is best appreciated in larger sizes. A classically-inspired font, timeless and perfectly-proportioned, to reflect the refinement of premium brands.

Futura is THE prototype of a geometric or constructed linear sans serif and the font most commonly font of its kind used to date. Futura, very much influenced by the Bauhaus movement in Germany, was designed in 1927 by Paul Renner. Although being around for almost 90 years, Futura seems eternally young and fresh which also explains its continuous popularity with designers and typographers. Futura simply means efficiency and functionality documented by both its many usages as corporate type (e.g. Volkswagen, formerly IKEA, Vuitton, Shell, formerly HP, SMA and many more) as well as in various famous film projects (e.g. Kubrick, Anderson etc.). Futura’s iconic status was probably established when it walked on the moon with the Apollo 11 crew in 1969. It was used for the lettering of the plaque that was left up there.

“It looks like it could have been designed last year,” says Toshi Omagari, the lead designer for The Wolpe Collection, about the original Tempest typeface. For Wolpe Tempest™, Omagari drew three weights and additional characters with flourishes that add more energy and movement to the original design. The new designs can take on just about any online or offline project that calls for typography that’s dynamic, flowing and powerful – everything from game branding to billboard sized posters. Available as set of fonts that support most Western European and many Eastern European languages, Wolpe Tempest is also one of the five typeface designs in The Wolpe Collection.

Though Zigarre can easily be categorized a brush script, Jim Rimmer actually drew it using a big marker. Jim’s original face, inspired by inter-war German poster lettering, was a rough one, with the marker’s juicy ink roughing it out all over the place. The smooth version, Zigarre Script, was produced as part of a major update and remastering the design underwent in 2012. Both Zigarre Script and Zigarre Rough come with extended Latin language support, as well as a few built-in stylistic alternates. 20% of this font’s revenues will be donated to a GDC scholarship fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

A new font inspired by vintage hand-painted paper grocery store signs. The Doorbuster Collection is based on retro hand-painted paper signs primarily seen in grocery stores from the 1920s through the 1970s. We meticulously hand-drew each font, modeling the spacing and uneven baseline found in vintage sign painting. The purposely organic ascenders and descenders, along with a huge set of ligatures/contextual alternates to avoid the same letters repeating when paired, give it a real hand-lettered look. Doorbuster Script is perfect for both vintage-inspired and contemporary marketing, branding, and packaging designs. Check out a few of the samples included in the thumbnails above.

Floridium grew out of an affection for the old wood types of the 1800s. Painters Roman* was the initial inspiration. It was the source for the �banana� and �snake head� serifs. But the design�released by Adobe as Juniper�was too quirky to be useful. I tried to make it more sophisticated and modern while keeping the original personality of the 19th century types. The name resulted from a trip to Miami while the initial drawings were being made. Not the best way to name a typeface, but while we were in Miami Beach there was this tall blonde in a bright yellow bikini sitting on this bright yellow Porsche and...

American graphic designer William Addison Dwiggins' (W.A.D. for short) first typefaces were the Metro family, designed from 1927 onward. The project grew out of Dwiggins' dissatisfaction with the new European sans serif typefaces of the day, such as Futura, Erbar, and Kabel, a feeling he expressed in his seminal book Layout in Advertising. Urged by Mergenthaler Linotype to create a solution for the problem, Dwiggins began a professional relationship that would span over the next few decades. The first Metro family typeface to be released was Metroblack, brought to market by Linotype in 1929 (Metroblack #2™ the only one of the two versions that Mergenthaler Linotype eventually put into production which is available in digital form). With more of a humanist quality than the geometric styles popular in Europe at the time, Dwiggins drew what he believed to be the ideal sans serif for headlines and advertising copy. Metroblack has a warmer character than the Modernists' achievements, and the type is full of mannered curves and angled terminals (Metroblack also has an astoundingly beautiful Q). The other weights of the Metro family, Metromedium #2™ and Metrolite #2™, were designed by Mergenthaler Linotype's design office under Dwiggins' supervision. Despite having been created more than three-quarters of a century ago, the Metro family types have aged well, and remain a popular sans serif family. Although spec'd less often than other bestsellers, like Futura, Metro continues to find many diverse uses. The typeface has appeared throughout Europe and the North America for decades in newspapers and magazines, and can even help create a great brand image when used in logos and corporate identity. Dwiggins ranks among the most influential graphic designers and typeface designers of the 20th Century. He has several other quality fonts in the Linotype Originals, including the serif text faces Electra™ and New Caledonia™, as well as Caravan™, a font of typographic ornaments."

DUAL is a full width sans-serif typeface with an experimental side. Its straight lines and 90 degree angles give it a very geometric feel without hindering its legibility. It’s now available in 6 weights, ranging from 100 to 600. The idea behind DUAL has been brewing for quite some time, and though there has been many “experimental” released in the past, it does have its unique features. For starters, it is a fully usable and legible font in its original state. Also, its 251 alternate glyphs and 10 stylistic sets are, of course, its main attraction making DUAL a very versatile typeface for any user, from the casual designer to the hardcore artist. Finally, it has extensive additional language support for the Americas and parts of Europe. With its 563 glyphs, It’s actually two fonts in one, and thus the name DUAL. Enjoy!

“I originally drew the primary characters with a felt tip marker, scanned them and then proceeded to noodle on the computer,” says George Ryan of his new typeface, Koorkin. “Over the years, I’ve designed many original typefaces, but Koorkin has become one of my favorites. I’ve worked on hundreds of highly structured text faces. For the most part, the roots of all of them can be found in the handwritten letterforms we learn as children. I enjoy going back to these shapes whenever the opportunity presents itself. ”The happy result of Ryan‘s felt tip marker sketches and his love of simple letterforms is a new family of upright and italic scripts in medium and bold weights.

The tale of Pumpkinseed began with a bit of hand-printing I noticed on the dinner menu at a local restaurant. I took a menu home for future reference. Several months later, some similar hand-lettering on another dinner menu caught my eye. I became a sort of connoisseur of hand-done menu lettering. After tweaking and adjusting a few of these menu-inspired (uppercase) characters, I placed them -- along with some other designs -- in an online Type in Progress survey. They won. So I finished the caps, drew out the lower case from scratch, created three weights and oblique styles. The result: Pumpkinseed, a full-featured casual hand-lettering face. Comes in Light, Medium, and Heavy.

Sardines is a project by Jacques Le Bailly aka Baron von Fonthausen. It first saw the light as a student project for a monospaced font and eventually grew into Vette Letters’ largest font family. We saw its potential and expect it to be a million seller, just like our other typefaces. VLNL Sardines comes in 42 different variations, like rough and clean cuts, regular and condensed widths (condensed is the exactly half of the regular width). Sardines is an eclectic mash of classic curves and mathematical measurements, leaving a very distinct typographic flavor. While most of our type is market-fresh, this one comes out of the can, but it’s delicious nonetheless. And it’s great for adventurous BBQ-ing!

I admit: I had a bit of a crazy week when I thought up an drew this font. I broke my arm during kickboxing training on monday, leaving me in a cast - unable to do most everyday things, like getting a good night's sleep (try sleeping with a humongous cast on your arm). Thank goodness, it is my left arm, so I can still draw letters and use my laptop. So… this font has been made entirely using one arm! It is a bit of a horror font - it sort of sums up my mood right now. Glyphs have very little spacing, adding to the evil look of Plague Master. Comes with a lethal amount of diacritics.

Valet is deco moderne the way it was meant to be: Big, bold, classy, flashy, and clean at the seams. Its message is rich, strong, confident and reliable. Valet tells you that it’s used to thorns being part of every rose, that it can handle sharp objects just fine, and that it'd much prefer buying the tuxedo rather than renting it. This font grew out of an uncredited early 1970s all-cap film type called Expression. An appropriate deco lowercase was added, along with small caps, zippy titling caps, and Pan-European language support. With over 9250 glyphs, we bow our heads with the admission that we kind of got carried away with it.

This font was inspired by the paint brushed letters in use in the 60 - 70s for protest slogans tagged on the cities walls. In those days, we didn't commonly use aerosols like today, so we used paint brushes, with paint or tar cans, drew the letters, and ran away quickly ! Capitals and lower case have the same size, and a lot of alternates characters or ligatures allows the user to vary each letter (until tree alternates for single letters) in each word of a text . Likewise, the words may be easily underscored or intersected by a few stains looking like paint spots, substituted to the following standards characters: [greater], [less], [dagger], [backslash], [bullet], and [underscore].

Do you suffer from OCD? Then this font is perfect for you. Or maybe not. Sometimes I like confusion, chaos, imperfect things, because I can often see beauty in them. In this font I drew the letters with a pen and or with just the index finger on a tablet, completely free, without improvement. The chaos ensuing. As if I was rushing notes just for me. Then, without changing the design any further, but to make the chaos minimally legible, I decided - look at this madness! - to organize the chaos. In other words, I aligned metrics and kerning, and the end result was this. I hope you like it and that it is very useful for you. Cheers.

Fortuita is a versatile sans fit for text or display. The name carries some of its history as it was born from logo sketches that fortuitously grew into a type family over eight years. It comes with a tall x-height, rendering it readable at smaller sizes. It has sixteen weights, eight regular ones, and their italics, each with small caps, something you may not see very often with sans serifs. It counts with old-style numbers that can switch to its lining, small caps, or tabular versions through open-type features. The family carries a distinct personality in its design that will lend itself to its subject, all the while without becoming distracting or detracting from it.

In designing an advertising poster to show off the unconventional Safefont typeface, Steve drew what appeared as relatively traditional letterforms for the expository text. When these characters were as well received as the typeface which was the subject of the poster, Steve decided to expand them into a full-fledged graffiti style typeface of their own. While exploring where this new design might lead, Steve worked to elaborate the poster segment which had inspired it. He soon found himself staring at a drawing of a weapons-wielding Bonnie and Clyde. The desperate duo resonated with the graphic elements of the drawn letters; thus leading to the effortless fleshing out of the design, and to its name, Big Clyde.

The theme in these illustrations is the pleasure of books and reading wherever you are, at any time. This series collects illustrations of people enjoying the pleasure of reading in the most diverse places and situations, some of them frankly absurd and funny, ranging from children reading tales to a witch with her magic brewing manual. A fraction of the contained images comes from other Whimbats, but most of them are exclusive. We hope you will feel like reading and start reading a good book! These illustrations are ready to use at any size and in any application (their vectorial format ensures they can be scaled to any size with no loss of sharpness). They can be used out of the box, or easily customized in any graphics program, adding colour or texture, resizing, combining... the variety of suggested uses is huge, from small spot illustrations to full-page layouts. Use them to great effect in magazine spreads, advertisements, stationery, packaging, bulletins or poster creative designs.

Futura is THE prototype of a geometric or constructed linear sans serif and the font most commonly font of its kind used to date. Futura, very much influenced by the Bauhaus movement in Germany, was designed in 1927 by Paul Renner. Although being around for almost 90 years, Futura seems eternally young and fresh which also explains its continuous popularity with designers and typographers. Futura simply means efficiency and functionality documented by both its many usages as corporate type (e.g. Volkswagen, formerly IKEA, Vuitton, Shell, formerly HP, SMA and many more) as well as in various famous film projects (e.g. Kubrick, Anderson etc.). Futura’s iconic status was probably established when it walked on the moon with the Apollo 11 crew in 1969. It was used for the lettering of the plaque that was left up there. Now, URW has expanded its range of Futura styles by Futura Round with 14 additional styles.

In 1932, Xanti Schawinsky (1904?1979) designed an alphabet that combines two styles: a neo-classic stroke contrast paired with characteristics of stencil lettering. This mix is a child of its time and seems to reflect the Swiss and Italian biography of Schawinski. Luca Pellegrini took on the modern look and re-drew the letterforms, interrupted by subtle spaces where thick and thin strokes meet. Although Schawinsky had already designed a complete alphabet and figures in the early 1930s, Pellegrini took the character set to another level, adding currency signs, mathematical symbols and all kinds of punctuation ? anything needed to set more than just headlines. Xants is a blend of Swiss elegance and exclusiveness with Italian charm and imperfection, a combination that never gets old.

A new font inspired by vintage hand-painted paper signs. The Doorbuster Collection is based on retro hand-painted paper signs primarily seen in grocery stores from the 1920s through the 1970s. We meticulously hand-drew each font, modeling the spacing and uneven baseline found in vintage sign painting. The purposely organic ascenders and descenders, along with a huge set of ligatures/contextual alternates to avoid the same letters repeating when paired, give it a real hand-lettered look. Doorbuster Plug is perfect for both vintage-inspired and contemporary marketing, branding, and packaging designs. It's a classic workhorse font from the 1950s thru 1970s. Check out a few of the samples included in the thumbnails to see what can be done with it.

This is the kind of letters I drew in school back in the 1980ies. I would never have guessed that I would do the same thing like 40 years later! I remember making a simple space game for my VIC-20 computer, and I needed some "data letters" (as I called it) - as far as I can remember, this is close to what I made 40-like years ago. Also, I was inspired by the well known series "Stranger Things" - you know, all that 80ies theme stuff took me down memory lane! :) Anyway, all the letters are handdrawn, using a squared paper as guide - at it may look simple, but it took me quite some time to finish this font (hence the name!)