A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul

Grotesques can answer a really wide variety of design problems and go from small sizes to large without missing a beat. Vinila is Flora de Carvalho's take on the genre. The family’s multi-purpose intention comes from having 4 widths - from compressed to extended, each with 6 weights and obliques. Rhythm and music played an important part in the design of this font, which started off as the lettering for a Brazilian Music album. Its distinctiveness comes from having powerful ink traps that go from elegant and supple in the lighter styles to commanding and impactful in the heavier styles. A distinct rhythm is achieved, making it a strong face for editorial design, branding projects and so much more. Vinila is the ideal companion to expressive display faces, where it serves a supporting role with a marked presence. We use Vinila every day in our own brand identity. We've had some of the best designers use it and test it in many different environments, printed, digital, mobile and more (they really like it!). Also in the package, Vinila Variable is an experimental version of Vinila, where you can have a virtually infinite mix of weights, widths and slant, all from a single font file. Available when you license the complete family. Vinila pairs happily with our cheerful Manteiga , elegantly with our organic didone Tenez and mechanically with our monospaced Odisseia . What other matches can you think of?

Designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini with the help of Francesco Canovaro, Unigeo is an eulogy to the design style of vintage computing, with its obsession for geometric modularity, ultra-tight tracking and striped rainbow overload. It aims at giving a new perspective to the ever-useful geometric sans genre, by adding a vintage flair to selected letters while keeping optical adjustments to the minimum, to prioritize the modular, constructed look aspect of the typeface. Furthermore, like every vintage gaming system, Unigeo has been developed with different "memory versions":32, 64 and 128. The main family, Unigeo 64, is display and logo-design oriented, featuring tight tracking and iconic signature letterforms, and referencing vintage design and typefaces from the photo-lettering era. These letterforms are substituted in the Unigeo 32 variant with more contemporary shapes, resulting in a workhorse geometric sans, highly optimized for text use but still suited for logo design and display use thanks to its wide weight range. Last but not least, the Unigeo 128 subfamily gives the same skeleton a striped treatment reminescent of optical art and modernist computer logos. All Unigeo families are developed in eight weights, ranging from Thin to Extrabold, for a total of 40 styles, each provided with an extended character set covering languages using latin, cyrillic and greek glyphs. Full Open Type Features are provided, including positional numbers, legatures and alternate glyphs, as well as a variable font version for each subfamily.

The story of Serena is a unique one among revivals. Serena was neither a metal face nor a film one. In fact it never went anywhere beyond Stefan Schlesinger’s 1940-41 initial sketches (which he called Saranna). A year later, while working with Dick Dooijes on the Rondo typeface, Schlesinger was sent to a concentration camp where he died, along with any material prospects for the gorgeous letters he'd drawn. The only sketches left of Schlesinger’s Saranna work are found in the archives of the Drukkerij Trio (the owner of which was Schlesinger’s brother-in-law). The sketches were done in pencil and ink over pencil on four sheets of paper. And now Hans van Maanen revives Schlesinger’s spirit as closely as the drawings permit, and elaborately expands the work to cover a multitude of codepages and languages. It took more than 65 years for Schlesinger’s drawings to see the light, so van Maanen made sure to bring them to life stylishly and respectfully. Serena embodies the peace and calm rarely ever found in mainstream calligraphy or other genres of display type. With upright elegance and a slight Eastern touch, this typeface expertly bridges the gracefully casual with the deeply spiritual. The light and soft letter forms add a pleasant, breezy element to anything they touch. When used sparingly in titling or display, Serena is like a sigh of desire, rare but quite memorable and very appreciated.

Bold, rounded and super cool. Those are the attributes of my latest font “Vinyle”, french for vinyl. In this epoque where all fields of Design are giving a lot of importance and attention to Typography and Lettering, I felt it was my duty to contribute with something that could really stand alone and ‘say something else’ that just words to be read. I've found that lately in the world, regarding a finished piece of design, the role of Typography (and of letters in general) went from being secondary, (like a minor player or a supporting actor) to the most important one. People are starting to understand the beauty of a well-done letter: they want their storefronts with unique scripts, they want to drink coffee surrounded by lettered blackboards, they want to buy books with astonishing covers with swashes ‘por doquier’. I'm more than happy to be alive in a present where even the most unimaginable friends of mine, (who couldn't spot differences between comic sans and helvetica before) are now conscious of the importance of a letter, or let’s say: Of the ‘voice’ of Typography. With Vinyle I tried to make a font with power. Following the nowadays trend of, let me say, “the vintage sans renaissance”. This time I put my brushes and nibs aside and experimented with something new. It wasn't easy, if you will pardon, for me to see swashes all over the place withouth the classic calligraphic ‘thick and thins’, but with after some weeks of work I started to love them. Like I already showed you in other creations (1) let me finish with the phrase: GEOMETRY IS SEXY! TIPS Vinyle has a lot of attitude, it shouts “here I am!” it really can ‘design an entire piece’ for you with just a word or two: It was designed with a 10 degree slant on purpose so the user may rotate it (like on the posters) that amount of degrees in order to see better results. Use Vinyle with the ‘fi’ standard ligatures activates for better kerning and ligatures! NOTES (1) See my font Selfie , the ‘little sister’ of Vinyle.

Full of life Hispanic Didot in 2 optical sizes Retiro is a daring interpretation of Spanish typography. Severe, austere and yet, full of life, Retiro is a vernacular version of Castilian and Andalusian in a typical Didot. Named after a lovely park in Madrid, Retiro started life as a a bespoke typeface designed to give a unique voice to the magazine Madriz. In 2006, the founder of Madriz was looking for a Didot for his new magazine. The Didot is the archetypal typeface used in high-end magazines. Retiro is a synthesis of these high contrast styles mixed with an Hispanic mind. Result is then, after 2-3 years of work, a typeface with countless variations to establish typographic shades adapted to different sections and pages of the Madriz. In 2014, it was necessary to further revise the typeface before its launch at Typofonderie. In order to keep its originality, the unique weight was retained, but complemented with optical size variants to set highly contrasted headlines into various sizes, visually balanced. How to use Retiro optical sizes? Each font provided in Retiro family is named according to the scale of body size: 24 pt and 64 pt. Of course, these names are referring to the body sizes used in typographic design. In the “glorious old days,” the letterpress period, it was customary to cut punches directly to the size at which typefaces would be used. The punchcutter had to visually adapt his design to the engraving size. The aim was to optimize the best contrast and general weight, but also to respect both design’s and reader’s needs. In Retiro’s case, intended for large titling sizes, it’s an adaptation of this ancient practice for our contemporary uses. Although each font is named by a typographic point size, do not feel obliged to use this font at this precise size, but why not, in larger or smaller. It’s rather the concept of gradients that must be preserved in layouts, rather than strictly size numbers. It’s up to the designer to select the right font size for his own designs. Granshan Awards 2012 Creative Review Type Annual 2011 Designpreis 2011 Club des directeurs artistiques, 41e palmarès Type Directors Club 2010 Certificate of Type design Excellence

Matthew Carter has been refining his design for Alisal for so long, he says, that when he was asked to complete the design for the Monotype Library, it was almost as if he were doing a historical revival of his own typeface. The illusion even extended to changes in his work process: although he now does all his preliminary and final drawing on screen, the first trial renderings of Alisal were done as pencil renderings. Alisal is best classified as an Italian old style design. Originally created between the late 15th and mid-16th centuries in northern Italy, the true Italian old styles were some of the first roman types. They tend to be the most calligraphic of serifed faces, with the axis of their curved strokes inclined to the left, as if drawn with a flat-tipped pen or brush. These designs offer sturdy, free-flowing and heavily bracketed serifs, short descenders, and a modest contrast in stroke weight. Alisal has nearly all the classic Italian old style character traits, plus a few quirks of its own. It is calligraphic in nature, with more of a pen-drawn quality than faces like Palatino or Goudy Old Style. It is more rough-hewn than either Goudy's Kennerley or Benton's Cloister, and is generally heavier in weight than most of the other Italian old style designs. One place where Alisal makes a clean break with traditional old style designs is in the serifs. While sturdy and clearly reflecting pen-drawn strokes, Alisal's serifs have no bracketing and appear to be straight strokes crossing the main vertical. Like Caslon or Trajanus, Alisal is a handsome design when viewed as a block of copy. Ascenders are tall and elegant, and serve as a counterpoint to the robust strength of the rest of the design. Alisal is available as a small family of roman and bold with a complementary italic for the basic roman weight, providing all that is needed for the majority of text typography. Alisal is not as well-known as some of Carter's other typefaces, but this lovely and long-incubated design was certainly worth the wait.

English description Karela is a humanist slab serif family. Karela is also the Basque word for gunwale, this is, the widened edge at the top of the side of a boat, where the edge is reinforced with wood or other material and to which the thwarts are attached. Gunwales resemble the way slab serifs reinforce vertical stems giving a more robust appearance to the letters. The sturdy, solid and often mechanical structure that is customary in slab serif or mechanistic typefaces is softened in Karela applying subtle tweaks as: humanist proportions, slightly curved endings in ascenders, and curved edges in serifs. The influence of calligraphy is noticeable all over the character set, especially in counters and letters with instrokes like “m”, “n” and “r”, and it becomes explicit in the italics. On the other hand, its low contrast, generous x-height and the constant width of characters across weights makes it very convenient for editorial uses when low resolution is a concern. Karela pursues to give a human touch to a strong and highly functional structure. It seeks for the ideal combination of strength, precision and warmth of the wooden parts painstackingly handcrafted by ancient boat builders. Besides its 12 standard styles, Karela offers also four additional fonts called "grades". Grades are subtle changes in stroke weight in order to compensate for differences in printing media or display conditions of text layouts. To minimize these subtle changes without a reflow of the text they have to be designed with the same character width of the base style. Karela offers 4 grades for its Regular weight: Grade Minus 5, Grade Minus 5 Italic, Grade Plus 5 and Grade Plus 5 Italic. This makes possible to counteract the effect of changes in paper, temperature, paper, background color… In addition, Karela takes this no‑reflowing idea from grades and extends it to the whole range of styles, allowing to play with any of its weights without undesirable text reflows. Enjoy the layout stability while you experiment and play with variations! Karela presents also a wide range of Opentype features for a professional text layout.

FF Infra™ is a fresh take on the robust sans serif typefaces of the early 20th century. Drawn by Gabriel Richter, it’s a friendly, inviting – and multi-talented family. Whether long blocks of editorial text, or snackable copy in web pages and blog posts, FF Infra’s 20 typefaces are easy on the eyes in both print and digital environments. The design also performs as well at petite sizes, as it does at supersized display settings. Pair FF Infra with an old style or Didone serif design and you’ll have powerful and distinctive typographic pages! FF Infra is available in 10 weights, ranging from a delicate light to a commanding black, each with an italic companion. OpenType® Pro fonts of FF infra have an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages, in addition to providing for the automatic insertion of ligatures and fractions. Each font also contains four sets of figures and a bevy of arrows that are ideal for wayfinding and similar info-graphic projects. A generous lowercase x-height, open counters and subtle graduations between family weights, make for a family that is at home in a wide range of sizes, and comfortable in everything from large signage, content for mobile apps, product manuals and full-scale branding projects. In addition, to provide design diversity, Richter drew alternate designs for the a, G and ß. Richter first became interested in fonts and the art of creating typefaces while studying communication design at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. His first designs were experimental, but these lead a position at FontShop International in 2013, where he developed his typeface design skills. A strong background in font production, hinting and font marketing were also part of his FontShop experience. Richter worked as freelance graphic and type designer until he founded übertype in 2017. He also invests back into the type community through the type design courses he teaches at his alma mater. FF Infra is Richter’s first commercial design for Monotype. We’re sure that you’ll find it as versatile and powerful as we do.

How can Teutonia be called “Art Nouveau” with all those straight lines? It seems like a contradiction. In fact, however, Art Nouveau embraces a rather wide variety of stylistic approaches. Five well-known examples in the field of architecture serve to illustrate the range of diversity in Art Nouveau: Saarinen’s Helsinki Railroad Station, Hoffman’s Palais Stocklet in Brussels, Lechner’s Museum of Applied Arts on Budapest, Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Only the last fits comfortably within the common perception of Art Nouveau. Whereas Gaudi would avoid the straight line as much as possible, Macintosh seemed to employ it as much as possible. The uniting factor is that they all represent “new art” -- an attempt to look things differently than the previous generation. Even when they draw on the past -- e.g. Lechner in the use of traditional Hungarian folk art -- the totality of the expression in new. Teutonia clearly shows its blackletter roots in the ‘D’ and the ‘M.’ Roos & Junge of Offenbach am Main in Germany produced Teutonia in a "back-to-basics" effort that has seen many quite similar attempts in the field of topography. In 1883, Baltimore Type Foundry released its Geometric series. In 1910, Geza Farago in Budapest used a similar letter design on a Tungsram light bulb poster. In 1919 Theo van Doesburg, a founder with Mondrian and others of the De Stijl movement, designed an alphabet using rectangles only -- no diagonals. In 1923 Joost Schmidt at Bauhaus in Weimer took the same approach for a Constructivist exhibit poster. The 1996 Agfatype Collection catalog lists a Geometric in light, bold and italic that is very close to the old Baltimore version. Even though none of these designs took the world by storm, they all made a contribution to our understanding of letterforms and how we use them. Teutonia is compact and surprisingly readable at 12 points in print, but does not do as well on the screen. Extra leading is suggested. Four ligatures are supplied: ch, ck, sch and tz. The numerals are tabular.

Evans was named after Walker Evans, an american photojournalist whose photographs often featured unassuming subjects – ordinary people, roadside scenes, and the subtle details of the American landscape. His ability to find beauty in simplicity and appreciate the mundane inspired Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli to create this typographic family that aims to convey the ideals of journalistic storytelling: simplicity, clarity, and unpretentious honesty. Looking for a soothing, relaxed visual flow in body text, Evans was designed by gently narrowing classical proportions to answer the designers' need of maximizing the arrangement of lengthy text within confined spaces. Combining the vintage appeal of a semi-condensed old-style structure with a very slight transitional slanted axis resulted in text-oriented typeface with visual charm on both printed and digital pages. Subtly reducing the size of majuscules allowed the effect of an increased x-height, balancing space saving with increased readability at same point size. Using soft, semi-calligraphic shapes and keeping a generous letter spacing, the designers embraced a minimalist approach, aiming at a smooth reading experience. For maximum versatility, Evans provides two distinct variations tailored to different purposes: the Regular and the Narrow subfamilies. While both are fine-tuned for body text applications , the second is suited also for display-oriented contexts, where attention-grabbing headlines take center stage. Each subfamily is developed in a range of 8 weights from Extralight to Heavy, and includes over 700 glyphs with full coverage of language using extened latin glyphs. True italics are designed for all weights, providing additional typographic control through the design of Swash Alternates, available through Open Type features that also include Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Positional Numerals, Case Sensitive Forms and Stylistic Alternates. The family is complemented also by a rich set of Ornaments, available both as special glyphs or in a separate font. With its retro-inspired design and unwavering commitment to form and function, Evans effortlessly extends its versatility from editorial design to digital interfaces and logo creation, inviting users to appreciate the beauty in simplicity, find joy in the ordinary, and embrace a relaxed and unhurried mindset.