Parsi Font family is designed by Naghi Naghashian. This Font is developed on the basis of specific research and analysis on Arabic characters and definition of their structure. This innovation is a contribution to modernization of Arabic typography, gives the font design of Arabic letters real typographic arrangement and provides more typographic flexibility. This step was necessary after more than two hundred years of relative stagnation in Arabic font design. Parsi supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. Parsi Font is available in Light, Regular and Bold. Parsi design fulfills the following needs: A Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. Parsi is not based on any pre-digital typefaces. It is not a revival. Rather, its forms were created with today’s technology in mind. B Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Parsi's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D An attractive typographic image. Parsi was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. E The highest degree of geometric clarity and the necessary amount of calligraphic references. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the contemporary sans serif aesthetic now common in Latin typography.

Bengala is a font based on Calligraphy & Geometry designed by Carlos Fabián Camargo. Its purpose is to be an innovative typographic system combining Script letters with geometric and hard Caps letters. The contradictory styles are ideal for designing covers, posters, branding and packaging. Its smooth calligraphic look meticulously incorporates characters to design logos and phrases that communicate dynamism and strategy. Bengala Script was inspired by Mistral by R. Excoffon. Bengala Script provides violent and unstable lines with generous spacing between the letters and tight horizontal proportions, producing showy upper and lower case italics inspired by French Gothic calligraphy late fifteenth century. For this reason, Bengala Script retains some uninterrupted calligraphic logic, up and down sometimes higher or shorter than the height of the lowercase, creating dynamism through a variable amount of contrast between thick and thin strokes. Bengala Dingbats has 62 drawings designed to accompany the designs. Script and Caps Bengala have different gender and the similar X height produces more visual appeal. This way Bengala Caps - inspired by the Porshe logo, due to its geometric uppercase Roman construction, extended horizontal proportions, light caliber, rounded strokes terminations and generous spacing between letters. Special thanks to John Moore and Manuel Corradine for their help with Open Type.

Meet Bjorn. A super usable, digital-device ready type design, refreshingly unburdened by today’s pre-conceived notions of ‘digital neutrality’. This is a typeface driven by the notion that today’s ‘digital’ shouldn’t automatically mean the devolution of typographic personality, Bjorn brings a softer-side to the idea of pixel perfect brand comms. Solid digital typography can also convey a warm tone of voice, radiate a softness, a human emotive charm whilst still maintaining all of the functional on-screen requirements of crisp easy reading fonts across viewports. Bjorn is a distinctive type design that combines a unique blend of flattened round stems (to take the edge-off), levelled inner terminals (pixel friendly) and pointed ears and feet (creating an distinct rhythm and dynamic with bowled letters). Bjorn is not a typeface following a tried and tested pattern, it’s a typeface designed to make digital brands feel special, enabling speech in a voice that brings viewers closer to their words. Bjorn is warm, yet clinical, flat and curved, elliptical and pointy. The font’s strong sense of ‘straightness’, the letter proportions and features build up its versatility across digital environments, not too wide, not too narrow, not too pointy, not too round — just right. Bjorn is available in 4 Roman styles — Light, Regular, Medium and Bold.

Eight designers present a set of icons that indicate the fun and fantastic world of signage. Each collaborator's solution represents a completely different interpretations on signage vernacular. Akira Kobayashi's "Subsumption", obscured by foliage, offers a perspective that signs on Japanese roads can be vague and beautiful. M.A.D.'s "People Signs" is a graphical association of people signage with a variety of well known situation symbols. Cynthia Jacquette's "Honest Arrows" are a series of arrows that attempts to honestly tell you how to get from point A to Point B in a big, confusing city. Mike Kohnke's "Road Kill" and the "Bump & Bruise" highlight how signs make for perfect targets when unloading a round of buckshot, and the licking a contruction barrier often endures. Joachim Muller-Lance's "Traffic Blends" places faces on things! Hey, didn't you give your first car a nickname? Cars are alive, you know - they guzzle and smoke all day. Jean-Benoît Lévy's "Inner-State" was inspired while reading the California driver handbook to pass a driver's test. Kevin Roberson's "Tail Lighting" reminds us to drive carefully and not to forget to signal. Diana Stoen's "Drivers Out There" shows us "driver personality archetypes", including the lil'ol lady that everyone tries to avoid.

I spend a lot of time following two obsessions: packaging and hand lettering. Alongside a few other minor obsessions, those two have been my major ones for so many years now, I've finally reached the point where I can actually claim them as “obsessions” without getting a dramatic reaction from the little voice in the back of my head. When you spend so much time researching and studying a subject, you become very focused, directionally and objectively. But of course some of the research material you run into turns out to be tangential to whatever your focus happens to be at the time, so you absorb what you can from it, then shelf it — like the celebrity bobblehead that amused you for a while, but is now an almost invisible ornament eating dust and feathers somewhere in your environment. And just like the bobblehead may fall off the shelf one day to remind you of its existence, some of my lettering research material unveiled itself in my head one day for no particular reason. Hand lettering is now mostly perceived as an American art. Someone with my historical knowledge about lettering may be snooty enough to go as far as pointing out the British origins of almost everything American, including lettering — but for the most part, the contemporary perspective associates great lettering with America. The same perspective also associates blackletter, gothics and sans serifs with Germany. So you can imagine my simultaneous surprise and impatience when, in my research for one of my American lettering-based fonts, I ran into a German lettering book from 1953, by an artist called Bentele. It was no use for me because it didn't propel my focus at that particular time, but a few months ago I was marveling at what we take for granted — the sky is blue, blackletter is German, lettering is American — and found myself flipping through the pages of that book again. The lettering in that book is upbeat and casual sign making stuff, but it has a slightly strange and youthful experimentation at its heart. I suppose I find it strange because it deviates a lot from the American stuff I'm used to working with for so long now. To make a long story short, what’s inside that German book served as the semilla, which is Spanish for seed, for the typeface you see all over these pages. With Semilla, my normal routine went out the window. My life for a while was all Bezier all the time. No special analog or digital brushes or pens were used in drawing these forms. They're the product of a true Bezier process, all starting with a point creating a curve to another point, which draws a curve to another point, and so on. It’s a very time-consuming process, but at the end I am satisfied that it can get to pretty much the same results easier and more traditional methods accomplish. And as usual with my fonts, the OpenType is plenty and a lot of fun. Experimenting with substitution and automation is still a great pleasure for me. It is the OpenType that always saves me from the seemingly endless work hours every type designer must inevitably have to face at one point in his career. The artful photos used in this booklet are by French photographer and designer Stéphane Giner. He is very deserving of your patronage, so please keep an eye out for his marvelous work. I hope you like Semilla and enjoy using it. I have a feeling that it marks a transition to a more curious and flexible period in my career, but only time will tell.

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.