Art into type In 2008, Fontsmith were approached by their friend, Jon Scott, to investigate whether a typeface could assume the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon’s not-for-profit charity, Measure, was organising an event for the artist, Conrad Shawcross, whose giant mechanical installation, entitled Chord, was going on public display in the long-disused Kingsway tram tunnel in Holborn. Chord explores the way we perceive time, as either a line or a cycle. Two enormous machines with dozens of rotating arms and moving in opposite directions, weave rope with almost infinite slowness. An unusual brief Phil Garnham visited Conrad in his Hackney studio to get a feel for his work and ideas. “Conrad is a very clever and philosophical guy. He struggled to see how typeface design had any relevance to him and his art. This was going to be a challenge.” The artist presented the type designer with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and mathematical workings. “This was, in essence, my brief.” Phil developed three concepts, the simplest of which ticked all the boxes. “The idea of the strokes in the letterforms appearing and ending at peaks or points of origin fitted perfectly with Conrad’s idea of time occurring and ending at two ends of the sculpture.” Two versions Phil planned modules for two versions of the typeface: one with five lines in the letterforms and one with seven. He then drew the modules on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is FS Conrad. “This is not a simple headline typeface,” says Phil. “It’s not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, and it’s informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as piece of functioning, harmonious type.”

Baldufa is a charming typeface with strong personality, which looks very comfortable in text. There is a search to obtain complicated curves and detailed features, which give the typeface a touch of beauty and elegance. However, this is also a self-conscious design that claims appreciation for quirkiness and human imperfection through the rounded serifs and irregular vertical stems. The typeface family is also a multi script project, containing Latin and Arabic scripts. The Latin consists of Regular, Bold and Italic styles, including Small Caps and many other typographic features. Whereas Arabic Naskh includes Regular and Bold weights. The whole family has been designed to work harmoniously together to help to produce catalogues and small publications of cultural content. We believe that Baldufa is a tiny but nice contribution to build bridges between cultures and this make us very happy. The letterforms in the Latin are inspired by the slight distortions and idiosyncrasies that came with old printing methods. It has distinct, features such as rounded serifs, irregular vertical streams, ink traps and extremely thin junctions. In the Italic, serifs have been removed to enhance movement and expressivity. These experiments in form have not come at the cost of legibility: The typeface remains suitable for both small and display text. To certain extent, the design of the Arabic gathers the same interest for experimentation than its Latin companion. Baldufa Arabic respects the basic features of Arabic script such as thick stokes in the baseline, multiple vertical axis, genuine stem modulation and good linking between words. However, it steps away from traditional Calligraphic Style. It has rounded top terminals and the traditional contrast between curves and straight stokes has been softened. Letter shapes sometimes slightly differs from tradition in order to obtain more expressivity. Overall, Arabic has been designed to acquire the same elegant and quirky aspect of the Latin.

Throughout time, history’s architects have incorporated some of the finest illustrations of type into their great works--cuneiform on Mesopotamian ziggurats; Greek etched into the temples of the gods; inscriptions marking the monuments of mighty Rome. From these Roman inscriptions specifically, we take our capital letters of today; and while we've lost the need for serifs over time, our current characters maintain the classical foundations, even after being distilled to their simplistic forms. Here’s where we have the basis for Le Havre Titling. This updated face is a carefully optimized version of Le Havre that uses purely capital lettering. Originally inspired by the golden period of the passenger ship and the French port that bid a rich bon voyage to so many famed, luxurious ocean liners of the Roaring Twenties and Thirties, the typeface includes an exciting array of ligatures that brings it into the present day and gives designers a tremendous amount of versatility in their work. With its seven weights, Titling looks equally at home on the side of a building as it does in a finely crafted invitation. With over five hundred glyphs, Le Havre Titling offers a multiplicity of options for your projects. Combine ligatures, play around with two sets of art deco forms, use original caps, and more; every one of these is obtainable with the OpenType functionality. The new design also shares five weights with the original Le Havre, allowing you to maximize your potential through its interchangeability. Titling’s Thin weights are delicate but not too fragile, and its geometric forms give each individual composition you create an exquisite and beautiful sense of emotion. Without a doubt, this fresh, fashionable take on the classical forms offers your reader refined, yet unanticipated approach as he or she travels through your text.

Introducing “Let’s Jazz” - a playful typeface which is inspired by iconic mid-century American advertising and lettering. With this project we wanted to homage the dazzling graphics of those booming years and the result is a jazzy typeface that provides a condensed aspect with a bouncy rhythm. As previously said, Let’s Jazz gives the spontaneous vibe of this sensational music genre but it has been also designed with a strong focus to the very distinct look of Saul Bass graphics, which are honestly still fresh and convincing, even nowadays. Let’s Jazz offers two versions, Regular and Stamp. Each version contains more than 450 glyphs and covers several languages based on the Latin alphabet; the jazzy experience is enhanced with OpenType (OTF) support for small caps and includes some neat ligatures and alternates plus the oldstyle bouncy numerals*. This package is a powerful tool in a wide variety of design purposes: headlines, packaging, logotypes, badges, posters and much more. *Let’s Jazz has built-in OpenType features enabled for Adobe® Creative Suite® and any other opentype capable software. All the extra characters has been additionally coded with “PUA Unicode”, which basically means that this font duo is totally accessible without any additional design software. All the extra characters can now be copied straight out the FontBook (Mac) or CharacterMap (Win) and pasted into your favorite text editor. Official mini-tutorials available here: - How to access alternates, ligatures and swashes in Font Book®: https://youtu.be/mGKlvKr0ReI - How to use alternates, ligatures and swashes in Photoshop®: https://youtu.be/46ZtDbHwUAc Specifications: - Multi-language Support (Central, Eastern, Western European languages) - OpenType features (Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Alternates, Small Caps, OldStyle Numerals) - PUA Coded Extra Characters Thanks for viewing, Unio.

A typeface is a tool. Sure, there are frilly fonts that are more art than craft, showy faces that exist merely to call attention to themselves. But, in the end, any functional typeface worth its salt lives to serve one thing first: the text, the content. Everything else—the fashion of the moment, the allure of individual words and letters—is secondary. MVB Solitaire™ epitomizes this universal typographic mandate. As a tempered sans serif somewhere between a humanist and a gothic, MVB Solitaire captures a 21st-century neutrality. But practical doesn’t have to mean banal. MVB Solitaire has a soul. While some “neutral” type is dead the moment the ink hits the page, MVB Solitaire delivers text that feels lively, contemporary, relevant. Readers will not tire of this type. Behind the useful exterior is an arsenal of thoughtful technical features. It’s no surprise that this family’s creator, Mark van Bronkhorst, was first a graphic designer before becoming a type designer. Mark built all the goodies into MVB Solitaire that he would appreciate as a user: case-sensitive punctuation; alternate forms that can be invoked individually or together; oldstyle and lining figures in both tabular and proportional widths; slightly shorter lining figures that don’t stand out in running text, but also cap-height figures for all-cap settings; and the ability to speak nearly any Latin-based language. MVB Solitaire aspires to be the sort of workhorse that a designer keeps installed on their system at all times. It is a family bound to have a permanent spot in the font menu, always at the ready for projects (those most common of all) where the typography mustn’t mask the message. It has that quality that all truly useful typefaces have: the capacity to get the job done without getting in the way.

Keep Calm is a family of fonts developed from the now famous World War 2 poster that was designed in 1939 but never issued, then rediscovered in 2000. As well as the original Keep Calm font, the medium weight of the poster, new weights are now available – Keep Calm Book (regular weight), Heavy and Light – and each weight comes with a complimentary italic. Version 2.0 (2017) is a comprehensive update which consists of numerous refinements and improvements across all weights. The family now contains a full complement of Latin Extended-A characters, Welsh diacritics and Irish dotted consonants. The four italics have been optically corrected with revised, ‘true italic’ forms of a and f. The crown motif from the top of the Keep Calm poster is located at the plus minus ± and section § keystrokes (Alt 0177 and Alt 0167 on Windows). The lowercase g follows the Gill/Johnston eyeglass model, but also included is an alternative, single-story g at the Alt G keystroke (Alt 0169 on a Windows keyboard), the normal location of the copyright symbol which has been relocated elsewhere in the fonts. An alternative lowercase t, without the curved wedge cutaway, is provided at the Alt T (dagger) keystroke (Alt 0134 on Windows). When I first saw the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, I wrongly assumed the letters to be Gill Sans. Recent research at the National Archive by Dr. Bex Lewis of Manchester Metropolitan University has revealed that the original poster was hand drawn by the illustrator and painter, Ernest Wallcousins. The Gill Sans influence is apparent, in the R particularly, the M’s perfectly pointed vertex is redolent of Johnston’s Underground, and the most anomalous character, the C, resembles the ‘basic lettering’ of engineers that provided the vernacular sources for the Gotham typeface. Developing the Keep Calm typeface has been an exercise in extrapolation; an intriguing challenge to build a whole, high quality font family based on the twelve available capitals of the Keep Calm poster, and on similar lettering from the other two posters in the original series. This has required the creation of new lowercase letters that are believably 1939; that maintain the influence of Gill and Johnston while also hinting at the functional imperative of a wartime drawing office. Wallcousins’s lettering balanced intuitive human qualities and the pure pleasure of drawing elegant contemporary characters, against an underlying geometry of ruled lines, perfect circles, 45° terminals, and a requirement for no-nonsense clarity.

Attention all Space Marines! The battle for legibility in the galaxy is over! Introducing Battlemaze—the font that will help you obliterate any enemy with its heavy techno headline design. Inspired by the legendary Japanese industrial logo designs and fused with the futuristic 1980s computer printer fonts, Battlemaze is the ultimate weapon in your typography arsenal. With its tightly folded line treatment, this font is built to withstand the most intense space battles. Whether you’re fighting on a distant planet or defending your ship from alien invaders, Battlemaze will never let you down. And if you’re looking for an added advantage, check out its ligatures—the “B” flips when it comes before a “J” period, or comma. So gear up, Space Marines! It’s time to unleash the power of Battlemaze and conquer the galaxy with its angled “A” and “V” glyphs. Trust us, your enemies won’t know what hit them! Most Latin-based European, and some Cyrillic-based writing systems are supported, including the following languages. A Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Komi-Permyak, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Wardshus Calligraphy is a unique blend of medieval gothic style and modern script, creating a distinctive and eye-catching blackletter font. The heavy, hand-drawn design brings an air of the Middle Ages to your projects, making it perfect for logos, posters, rock or hip-hop music album covers, and other display purposes that require a cool and striking touch. The beautiful cursive elements add a touch of elegance to the font, while the bold strokes and intricate details give it a strong presence. Wardshus Calligraphy is a testament to the rich artistic history of the past, reimagined for contemporary design projects. Use # after any letter to make a crown. Example: Que#en Use underscore _ anywhere to make a swash. Example: Kingdom_Heroes Use multiple underscores to make underlines of different lengths. Example: Knig___hters The Wardshus Calligraphy font family includes nine high-quality styles to suit various design needs: Regular: A well-balanced, classic blackletter script style. Regular Upright: Adds a more controlled, vertical look to the regular style. Regular Italic: Combines the balance of regular with a touch of expressiveness. Bold: A stronger, more assertive version of the script for impactful designs. Bold Upright: Merges the boldness of the bold style with the structure of upright. Bold Italic: A dynamic fusion of the bold style and the energy of italic. Black: The heaviest, most powerful iteration of the blackletter script. Black Upright: Combines the weight of the black style with the upright structure. Black Italic: Adds expressiveness and flair to the intense black style. Built with advanced OpenType functionality, Wardshus Calligraphy ensures top-notch quality and provides you with full control and customizability. It includes stylistic and contextual alternates, ligatures, and other features to make your designs truly unique. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages, from Northern Europe to South Africa, from America to South-East Asia. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

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.

Minnak, as a whole geometric display type is our take on Square Kufic (Makili) style Latin script fonts, comes in eleven weights with linear progression. It is an Uniwidth typeface at the core. From Hairline to Black, all multiplexed weights take up the same space in width and can be used interchangeably. Supports wide range of Open Type features, with many stylistic alternates in 12 context. Minnak is also have a close relation with pixel fonts, because in spite of its based on Makili forms, it all started as a pixel font in the drawing stage before further steps came into play. The key difference between Minnak and Makili style is that the latter must have the exact square counters with no diagonal strokes, and any other components of a letterform must conform to be proportional. Such style-specific requirements determine the overall dimensions of the glyphs and therefore, there can be only minor differences between the typefaces. In Minnak, counters are rectangular because of its narrow and condensed proportions, but the Makili form influence is still manifest. This impression is best confirmed with Medium weight where negative spaces and stem thickness are equal. Contrast and virtually no optical correction were presented, as characteristic of its genre had to have equal horizontal and vertical line thicknesses. As per the minimal and authentic look of the type, all glyphs are drawn as straight or only as 45-degree diagonal strokes. The representation of the ‘diagonalless’ approach is preserved by stylistic alternatives, making its similarity in visual aesthetics clearly visible. Marks and punctuation is another feature that doesn’t follow the strict rules of the origin style. Although not a pixel font, all building parts of the glyphs in Minnak share the same unit precision as they are designed with pixel equivalents in mind. Even space characters are designed to match glyph widths, meeting the demands of certain typesetting or multi-line lettering compositions. With its Pseudo Ancient and Runic alternates, extention parts and ornaments included in all weights, Minnak is suitable for branding, logo and monogram designs, the screen titles and headlines, packaging, posters, book covers and more, where it shines at big sizes. Its pixel font-like appearance makes it a significant choice for the modern compositions. Thanks to mostly uniform width design, it is possible to use Minnak also as a system for lettering. This feature can be used as vertical fitting of the letters between the lines. As a casual expression in Turkish, “Minnak” is one of the seven typeface designs in Esintype's ancient scripts of Anatolia project, Tituli Anatolian series — representing Seljuk period in the medieval Anatolia and their tradition of architectural stone ornamentation.

Gordita is a minimal sans serif typeface with a geometric foundation that has been built upon with modern details that result in an optically balanced, friendly typeface. When designing Gordita referring to features in Futura were influential as were the structural and harmonious strokes of Gotham. Forms have been optically compensated to appear natural and purely geometric. Joints are slightly tapered and ink traps feature in heavier weights with the purpose of achieving maximum legibility. Gordita has been tested in print and on screen in a wide range of point/pixel sizes. The family is equipped with OpenType features including alternate glyphs, fractions, case sensitive forms, small figures, arrows and symbols as well as old style and tabular figures. Now delivered in 7 weights with matching italics that slant at 15°. The italics are slightly lighter and narrower than the upright versions. The horizontal weighting in the italics have been reduced to compensate for the loss of vertical stroke thickness. With support for over two hundred languages with an extended Latin and Cyrillic character set, Gordita is ready to be put to work. Designed by Thomas Gillett, metrics and engineering by iKern (Igino Marini). The family has been recently updated to include two additional weights (Thin & Ultra + their matching italics) as well as slightly opened apertures for better legibility in the heavier weights, new glyphs and more opentype features.

Stamen is the answer to a big question: What would happen if one tried to create a typeface that was ‘out of time’? If a type designer was to turn off the internet and put away the type specimens and just try to explore limbic, phantom history, what might that look like? No slavish explorations of the past. No gropings toward the future. No exhaustive core sample of the contemporary. Instead, using what one remembers of history and our collective vision of the future (usually a future imagined from the past) and channeling that into something that is, hopefully, new… The Bentons meet Frutiger for a Manhattan on a space station while Matthew Carter sways to the sweet sounds of the chorale that occasionally played through the halls of Stephenson Blake. This smear of implicit history expressed without explicit reference—this is Stamen: a family of 12 typefaces with a ton of alternate characters. The bold weight was designed for the LP “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” ( http://ittfwbc.com/ ) by the band YACHT in response to their request for a typeface that was ‘lost in time’, and refers to neither strict historical models nor purely futuristic forms. I built a small family out from there. It works well in text, but just as well for display setting. I think you’ll enjoy using it.

The problem with scripts in general, and brush scripts in particular, is that the majority of them cannot be set in all-caps words or sentences. So as a rule of thumb most designers try to avoid brush scripts when they know they will be entering an all-cap zone. But here comes Bruschetta, so you won’t need to reduce your design options. Bruschetta is a great flowing brush script that can be attractively used in upper-lower, lower-lower, or upper-upper settings. Bruschetta also has so much variety in its design features – original, funny, natural, friendly, legible, and even somewhat psychedelic – it just may be the most versatile brush script ever made. Bruschetta also has an historical value as the revival of the Helmut Matheis’ Contact design from 1963. Why it hasn’t been digitized until this point is beyond us! So we digitized it from original specimen, expanded the character set to completion, and even added a few built-in alternates. Bruschetta’s versatility allows it to be used in a variety of applications. It is great for signage, posters, product labels, menus, book covers, and pretty much anywhere where a friendly bold brush type is needed. Get yourself a copy and show your friends and clients why the overused Choc and Cooper aren’t the last word in cool!

A friend once jokingly told me that what I really do is mine extinct arts for parts to use in modern things, like going to the scrapyard to pick up bumpers, quarter-panels and dashboards off of Datsuns and Ponies to build a shiny new Ferrari. I still kind of grin at that, but I certainly do spend a lot of time looking at old things and imagining ways they would work today. This shiny new Ferrari here is called Bibliophile, and it contains scrap heap parts from various pages by Louis Prang, the Prussian-American printer and publisher who inspired my Prangs fonts. This is my second engagement with the late 19th century man, and it’s quite a bit more intricate than just an italic Didone with a connected lowercase. Bibliophile marries Round Hand calligraphy with Italian capitals, two styles not often relayed in the same alphabet, but work together beautifully when combined well. When you combine them well with a few long-practised tricks of the trade, then mix in a few trusted features from my previous work over the years, you get my usual crazy exuberance, like 17 different shapes for the d, 21 different forms for the y, endings, beginnings, swashes, ornaments, and so on. It’s no secret that I can get carried away when I’m so consumed by an idea. — Bibliophile comes in 2 weights, each of them with over 900 glyphs covering all the latin languages. Bibliophile also comes with a bold weight, something I’m always reluctant to do with something as adventurous and complex as the structure of this historical mashup. But I couldn’t chase away the idea of increasing the contrast while maintaining the hairlines in a lowercase this narrow. Part of it was the curiosity about the outcome, and part was the sheer challenge of it. I think it turned out OK. Words set in either weight will show delicateness and elegance, and the more time you spend inside the font and micro-manage the setting, the more ways you will find to magnify either. Bibliophile can be as muted or luxurious as you want it to be. This is the kind of alphabet that fits well in fashion marketing and high-end packaging, from the very subdued to the super-exquisite. Enjoy the gleaming new vehicle made with freshly polished old parts.

Bunyan Pro is the synthesis of Bunyan, the last face Eric Gill designed for hand setting in 1934 and Pilgrim, the machine face based on it, issued by British Linotype in the early 1950s — the most popular Gill text face in Britain from its release until well into the 1980s. Gill’s last face doesn't date itself anywhere near as obviously as Gill’s other serif faces, which were all really products of their time, heavily influenced by the richly ornamental and constantly changing aesthetic trends of the interwar period. When compared to Gill’s previous work, Bunyan seems like a revolution in the way he thought and drew. It’s as if he was shrugging off all heavy burden of what was popular, and going back to the basics of older standards. Bunyan had no bells and whistles, doesn't risk functionality with contrasts that are too high or too low, and didn't venture far outside the comfortable oldstyle rhythm Gill grew up with. By interbellum standards, this was utter austerity, a veritable denial of deco excess. Surprisingly, even without all the cloying trivialities, Bunyan still stood indisputably as an aesthetically pleasing, space saving design that could have been made only by Eric Gill. Bunyan Pro comes in three weights and their italics. The main font is intended for use between 8 and 14 points. The medium and the bold are great for emphasis but also have good merit in larger sizes, so can make effective display types as well. All six fonts include small caps, ligatures, alternates, six sets of figures, and three original Gill manicules. We tried to keep the best features of the handset (Bunyan) and machine (Pilgrim) versions while building a text face that can function in today’s immersive reading media. Deciding on which useful letterpress features to preserve for aesthetic importance was hell on our eyeballs — which lead to complex and painstaking ways of ironing out irregularities and inconsistencies related to metal technologies, in order to provide something with authenticity. The result is a unique typeface based on a Gill design that, to a much greater extent than any of his other faces, works well as a text face that can be used for entire books and magazines. For more information on Bunyan Pro’s character set, features, development process and some print tests, please consult the PDF in the gallery section of this page.

Palatino® Nova is Prof. Hermann Zapf's redesign of his own masterpiece, Palatino. The original Palatino was cut in metal by August Rosenberger at D. Stempel AG typefoundry in Frankfurt, and released in 1950. Palatino was later adapted for mechanical composition on the Linotype machine, and became one of the most-used typefaces of the 20th Century. Palatino was designed for legibility, and has open counters and carefully weighted strokes. The type was named after Giambattista Palatino, a master of calligraphy from the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Palatino is a typeface based on classical Italian Renaissance forms. A modern classic in its own right, Palatino is popular among professional graphic designers and amateurs alike, working well for both text and display typography. Hermann Zapf and Akira Kobayashi redeveloped Palatino for the 21st Century, creating Palatino Nova. Released by Linotype in 2005, the Palatino Nova family is part of Linotype's Platinum Collection. Palatino Nova includes several weights (Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold), each with companion italics. Four styles (Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic) have Greek and Cyrillic glyphs built into their character sets. The Palatino Nova family also includes revised versions of Aldus (now called Aldus Nova), as well as two titling weights. The first titling weight, Palatino Nova Titling, is based on Hermann Zapf's metal typeface Michelangelo, including Greek glyphs from Phidias Greek. The heavier titling weight, Palatino Nova Imperial, is based on Sistina. The fonts in the Palatino Nova family support all 48 Western, Central, and Eastern European languages. Additional features: ligatures and historical ligatures, Small Caps, ornaments, and a range of numerals (proportional & tabular width lining and Old style Figures, fractions, inferiors, and superiors)."

Palatino® Nova is Prof. Hermann Zapf's redesign of his own masterpiece, Palatino. The original Palatino was cut in metal by August Rosenberger at D. Stempel AG typefoundry in Frankfurt, and released in 1950. Palatino was later adapted for mechanical composition on the Linotype machine, and became one of the most-used typefaces of the 20th Century. Palatino was designed for legibility, and has open counters and carefully weighted strokes. The type was named after Giambattista Palatino, a master of calligraphy from the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Palatino is a typeface based on classical Italian Renaissance forms. A modern classic in its own right, Palatino is popular among professional graphic designers and amateurs alike, working well for both text and display typography. Hermann Zapf and Akira Kobayashi redeveloped Palatino for the 21st Century, creating Palatino Nova. Released by Linotype in 2005, the Palatino Nova family is part of Linotype's Platinum Collection. Palatino Nova includes several weights (Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold), each with companion italics. Four styles (Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic) have Greek and Cyrillic glyphs built into their character sets. The Palatino Nova family also includes revised versions of Aldus (now called Aldus Nova), as well as two titling weights. The first titling weight, Palatino Nova Titling, is based on Hermann Zapf's metal typeface Michelangelo, including Greek glyphs from Phidias Greek. The heavier titling weight, Palatino Nova Imperial, is based on Sistina. The fonts in the Palatino Nova family support all 48 Western, Central, and Eastern European languages. Additional features: ligatures and historical ligatures, Small Caps, ornaments, and a range of numerals (proportional & tabular width lining and Old style Figures, fractions, inferiors, and superiors)."

Simplo: the ‘Italian Futura’. Simplo is a geometric sans serif typeface, built in sixteen styles. It is a tribute to the 1930s typeface Semplicità, designed by Nebiolo’s Alessandro Butti. Although many details of Simplo differ from Semplicità, it preserves the spirit of the original. Simplo is ideal for use in display sizes. It is also quite legible in text, and is well suited for graphic design and corporate identity design. Simplo has sixteen styles, extensive language support, eight different kinds of figures, sophisticated OpenType features — so it’s ready for advanced typographic projects. The most notable characteristics of this typeface are the ‘t’ and the ‘f’. The ‘t’ is the culmination of simplicity: a vertical line with just a simple right-side crossbar. The ‘f’ also has just a right-side crossbar, and is really tall: it reaches both the highest and lowest vertical position of the typeface. The top of the distinctive ‘s’, is much narrower than its bottom. The ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘g’, ‘p’, ‘q’, and ‘u’ are spurless, and show a family resemblance with Hans Reichel’s 1990s typeface Dax. However, these letters are rounder and more geometric than Dax’s counterparts, because of Dax’s higher x-height and narrower design. In Paul Shaw’s Imprint article about typefaces that have been overlooked and/or underappreciated, “Overlooked Typefaces”, he concluded his discussion of Semplicità as follows: “These idiosyncrasies suggest that Semplicità might find a warm reception today, given the current love affair with Gotham, Neutraface and Proxima—and the resurgence of ITC Avant-Garde Gothic.” Free demo font available. For more information about Simplo, download the PDF Specimen Manual.

My first font for 2009 was Aerle. It is a new dark sans serif font in my continuing objective of designing book fonts that I can really use. It made a little ripple in the industry, but more than that I found that I loved it with Aramus and Artimas — my latest book font family with the same proportions. In many ways, Aerle is a very different direction for me built on what I have learned on Aramus and other recent developments in my style. The concept came to me while using Bitstream's Mister Earl on a site online—though there is no direct reference. I wanted a more playful heavy sans with a much smaller x-height than I have been using lately, plus taller ascenders. As I was using Aerle, I constantly needed a light and bold version. The new direction I am taking is a result of a decision that my fonts, though I loved the character shapes, produced an even type color that is too dark or a little dense. Aerle was an attempt to get away from that look even though the letterspacing is quite tight. For Aerle Thin I pushed a little further in that direction and increased the letterspacing. The hand-drawn shapes vary a lot, many pushing the boundaries of the normal character. This gives a little looseness and helps the lightness in feel I am looking for. It will be interesting to see where this all goes. Most new type around the world is far too perfect for my taste. While the shapes are exquisite, the feel is not human but digital mechanical. I find myself wanting to draw fonts that feel human — as if a person crafted them. In most ways this is a normal font for me in that it has caps, lowercase, small caps with the appropriate figures for each case. These small caps were very small (x-height as is proper). So Aerle's small caps are a little oversize because they plugged up too bad at x-height size. The bold is halfway between. These size variations seem important and work well in the text. This font has all the OpenType features in the set for 2009. There are several ligatures for your fun and enjoyment: bb gg sh sp st ch ck ff fi fl ffi ffl ffy fj ft tt ty Wh Th and more. Like all of my fonts, there are: caps, lowercase, & small caps; proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, & small cap figures; plus numerators, denominators, superiors, inferiors, and a complete set of ordinals 1st through infinity. Enjoy!

High-contrast? High impact? Have Courage? Eye-catching and (extra, extra) bold, Courage balances ultra-high stroke weight, delicate details, and unique letterforms with a self-indulgent passion that will make you feel a little guilty using it. Honestly, use it large and don’t try to force it into a small space, because these fearless letterforms need room to move. Flavored with both upright and italic styles, each font includes an indulgent level of alternates, swashes and titling options, visual elements and more. A backstory with a different name Years ago, I was commissioned to take my Lust typeface and produce something unique to use for large format graphics for an event…cool. It needed to be hyper-contrast with a lot of over-the-top details. With a tight turnaround, I looked for primers within my development catalogue to help me, and settled on some early work on a typeface I had drawn called Hedonist. I used those sketches and its conventions to retrofit and build out Lust Hedonist (only to see the project go bust on the client’s end). I intended to go back shortly after the Lust Hedonist release to finalize a retail version of the OG Hedonist, but I never could settle on the look of the 'g' or the numerals, got distracted with other projects, and never picked it back up… until last year. After randomly doodling a fat, flat ‘g’ with an extremely tilted counter axis, I knew immediately how it could be used and that (re)set things in motion. Only problem was, in the process of refining the letterforms I began truly dissecting the pieces, rediscovering all of the recklessness within Hedonist, and decided on fundamentally rewriting the approach to the typeface… literally flaying it to the bone. I’m much, much happier with this finished typeface now, but the name no longer fit the moniker given to the first, adolescent approach—there’s far more audacity and cleverness in these letterforms, tenacious in their resolution now. As a result, the name Courage fit the mettle of this typeface so much more, so I kept it.

Because you demanded it, the Aviano series is back with a variable version of the futuristic sans serif Aviano Future. Aviano Future’s strong letterforms will make you look like a rock star. Aviano Future Variable is a medium-contrast sans serif titling face that has a bold and futuristic look. It has a bowed square shape which gives it an interesting appearance that is both unique and eye-catching. Given that it has a variable axis any weight can be selected with no loss of clarity or legibility. Aviano Future's expanded forms give the letterforms heft and intensity. Aviano Future is a powerful yet adaptable title face that builds on the award-winning traits of Aviano and elevates them. Aviano Future Variable contains a ton of OpenType capabilities and comes in ten different defined weight instances with "fast" italic forms for emphasis. Want to use more traditional rounded forms? Need swash forms? Art Deco alternates? Aviano Future includes 400 alternate characters. Twelve style sets are available, two sets of art deco inspired alternates, small forms, tough swash, constructivist titling and traditional stylistic alternates. Aviano Future also includes 40 discretionary ligatures for artistic typographic compositions. Additionally, there are glyphs in this family to accommodate a variety of languages, and Cyrillic support was added in 2022. An extensive selection of sans serif typographic systems can be found in the Aviano family. The typefaces can be used alone or in combination to suit the needs of any project. The family's fonts have all been meticulously designed to assist ensure maximum impact and usability at any size. Aviano, Aviano Serif, Aviano Sans, Aviano Didone, Aviano Flare, Aviano Copper, and Aviano Slab are presently part of the Aviano collection. A skilled designer who wishes to create a technological, futuristic, or epic design should consider Aviano Future. Aviano Future Variable will make your design stand out from the competition, regardless of whether you are designing a logo, poster, flyer, website header, or banner ad. Why wait? With the exciting and versatile Aviano Future Variable at your disposal, reach new heights and create a brand that stands out from the rest.