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.

Arabetics Symphony is a Sans Serif Latin typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. It is designed with a uniform glyph thickness and weight throughout, using a combination of simplified and clear open lines and curves and plenty of spikes and visual hints to compensate for the missing Latin serifs or traditional cursive Arabic calligraphic influence. This type family is suitable for both text and display applications. Additional Latin spacing is added to match an overall open-looking Arabic and is further maintained by a careful implementation of a typical Latin font kerning process. The design of this font family, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize with other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Symphony fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Symphony includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the “tatweel” key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Symphony includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

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.

Czech designer Oldrich Menhart (1897-1962) devoted his life to making letters. He was a calligrapher, lettering artist, and typeface designer with over twenty faces to his credit. The Monotype typeface, Menhart, was the second of his designs. Menhart began work on the design in the early 1930s and turned over his final artwork to the Monotype Drawing Office in 1934. The first size cut was 14 Didot (Didot points are the traditional European system of type measure, and are roughly equivalent to the point system commonly used by today's digital fonts). The 14D font was followed by 18D and 24D, indicating that the design was considered most suitable for display work. However, a 10D size was later cut from the same master drawings at the request of a Monotype customer. Menhart's design was light and open, with an even color and a slight squareness" to its round shapes. Because the Czech alphabet has 15 accented letters, Menhart included these diacritics as an integral part of his design, not as an afterthought. As a result, accented copy set in Menhart has a cohesive quality rarely seen in other typefaces. Monotype's new digital release of Menhart is the first revival since the hot metal fonts were cut. Menhart Display is based on the original Monotype drawings, while a slightly heavier, re-spaced version has been created for text sizes. Both versions offer the full capabilities of the OpenType format, such as the automatic insertion of old style figures, ligatures and small caps. In addition to English, the extended character set supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages. One of Menhart's lifelong goals was to share the richness of his Czech culture by drawing typefaces that uniquely served Czechoslovakia literature. In his words: "I believe that a Czech style of type comes above all from the spirit in which it was designed, which gives it its 'signature,' and not so much from decorative composition, and even less from the geographic location of its creation." The typeface Menhart is a tribute to his values. Now, Menhart Pro and Menhart Display Pro capture the unique personality of this timeless design while greatly extending its range of use. "