Many typefaces are distinctive or attractive at the expense of legibility and versatility. Not so the Optima® family. Simultaneously standing out and fitting in, there are few projects or imaging environments outside of its range. Although Optima is almost always grouped with sans serif typefaces, it should be considered a serifless roman. True to its Roman heritage, Optima has wide, full-bodied characters – especially in the capitals. Only the E, F and L deviate with narrow forms. Consistent with other Zapf designs, the cap S in Optima appears slightly top-heavy with a slight tilt to the right. The M is splayed, and the N, like a serif design, has light vertical strokes. The lowercase a and g in Optima are high-legibility two-storied designs. Optima can be set within a wide choice of line spacing values – from very tight to very open. In fact, there are few limits to the amount of white space that can be added between lines of text. Optima also benefits from a wide range of letter spacing capability. It can be set quite tight, or even slightly open – especially the capitals. If there are any guidelines, Optima should be set more open than tight. It’s not that readability is affected that much when Optima is set on the snug side; it’s just that the unhurried elegance and light gray typographic color created by the face are disrupted when letters are set too tight. Optima is also about as gregarious as a typeface can be. It mixes well with virtually any serif design and a surprisingly large number of sans serif faces. The Optima family is available in six weights, from roman to extra black, each with an italic counterpart. In addition, the family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts, providing for the automatic insertion of small caps, ligatures and alternate characters, in addition to offering an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. When you’re ready to find its perfect pairing, browse these fantastic matches: Monotype Century Old Style™, Dante®, Frutiger® Serif, Joanna® Nova, Malabar™, and Soho®.

Many typefaces are distinctive or attractive at the expense of legibility and versatility. Not so the Optima® family. Simultaneously standing out and fitting in, there are few projects or imaging environments outside of its range. Although Optima is almost always grouped with sans serif typefaces, it should be considered a serifless roman. True to its Roman heritage, Optima has wide, full-bodied characters – especially in the capitals. Only the E, F and L deviate with narrow forms. Consistent with other Zapf designs, the cap S in Optima appears slightly top-heavy with a slight tilt to the right. The M is splayed, and the N, like a serif design, has light vertical strokes. The lowercase a and g in Optima are high-legibility two-storied designs. Optima can be set within a wide choice of line spacing values – from very tight to very open. In fact, there are few limits to the amount of white space that can be added between lines of text. Optima also benefits from a wide range of letter spacing capability. It can be set quite tight, or even slightly open – especially the capitals. If there are any guidelines, Optima should be set more open than tight. It’s not that readability is affected that much when Optima is set on the snug side; it’s just that the unhurried elegance and light gray typographic color created by the face are disrupted when letters are set too tight. Optima is also about as gregarious as a typeface can be. It mixes well with virtually any serif design and a surprisingly large number of sans serif faces. The Optima family is available in six weights, from roman to extra black, each with an italic counterpart. In addition, the family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts, providing for the automatic insertion of small caps, ligatures and alternate characters, in addition to offering an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. When you’re ready to find its perfect pairing, browse these fantastic matches: Monotype Century Old Style™, Dante®, Frutiger® Serif, Joanna® Nova, Malabar™ and Soho®.

Created as a Headline Face Alons Antique works amazingly well as a text face.

Yonkers a classic gothic face a very legible face. Very suitable for various applications.

Graphite/4b pen illustrations from the past resurrected as vector/tattoo-art! The detailed illustrations can be displayed at large sizes/full magazine layout page down to thumbnail size! a-l: The full Zodiac of Chaos m-u: Parts from the Tarot of Chaos v-z: Faces of Chaos A total of 26 unique illustrations. Upper case A-Z hold mirrored versions. Enjoy!

Gaius is a beautiful script face with a nice relationship between the broad-edged pen and the proportions of the letterforms. It is very flexible and gives a personal touch due to its various alternate fonts with swash beginners, ending and ligature letterforms. Like Zapfino from Hermann Zapf, Gaius offers a great variety and makes the text more personal and readable.

Nanquim is a versatile font, available in three sketchy options. At display sizes the line art is very eye-catching. At smaller sizes it turns out like textured faces. Always with a pleasant handmade feel. Nanquim characters were hand drawn with pen and India ink on film, like we use to do when preparing artwork for screenprint. Hope you enjoy!

The 1907 Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type specimen catalog called this unique typeface simply "Umbra". Since that name is already taken, it now has another. Due to the highly ornate nature of this face, the font has a limited character set (all accented characters, but no math operators or fractions). The Opentype version of this font supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages, as well as Unicode 1252 (Latin) languages.

Arthur Baker's display script Sassafras, designed in 1995, is based on the natural inline effect created when writing with a split-metal nibbed pen. Black and white are nicely balanced, giving this calligraphic face a remarkably smooth appearance. The regular and italic versions of Sassafras include two alternate faces: one with long, tall ascenders and regular-length descenders, and one with shortened ascenders and descenders that allow it to fit where its companion might not. In both, the ascenders increase in width as they move upward, while the descenders taper to a fine point. This variety of form makes Sassafras a very flexible choice for display work.

Friendly. Open. Self-confident. Generous and inclusive. Intellect and libido guided by the measured tension and release patterns of a well-validated ego. So might a graphologist characterize the handwriting reflected in this useful script typeface. Designed for penning short notes and other informal correspondence, this attractive design could easily become one's most-used font, regardless of how large a library is available.

Fusione is a handwritten, informal, sketch-like typeface drawn by hand using ink and a sharp nib pen on smooth paper. It is useful for display, poster, books titling, advertising, and magazine work. Best used in Open Type apps, it has automatically exchanging alternates for better simulate true handlettering. Character set support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European languages.

Inspired by Edward M. Catich’s seminal thesis on the origins of the Roman inscriptional style, such as that found on Trajan’s column, Richard Lipton’s Canto traces the path from an expressive, preparatory Brush (with Brush Open to preserve gestural details at smaller sizes), through informal Pen, to the formal Roman. Classical capitals are accompanied by Lipton’s own calligraphic lowercase, small caps, and swashes.

The wind howled, the night grew long, and British type designer and lettering artist Tim Donaldson created the typeface Banshee. This dramatic display face is modeled after one of Donaldson�s handwritten lettering styles. Banshee began as letters rapidly written by Donaldson with one of his homemade ruling" pens. The letterforms are firmly rooted in the tradition of classical chancery italics. With its ragged lines and counters, Banshee realistically captures the irregularity of pen and ink on paper, lending an immediacy to packaging, advertisements, posters, and invitations that few digital typefaces can match."

Inspired by New Transitional and Egyptian fonts, Tanger Serif has elements of a sturdy work-horse text face and finely detailed headline font. A wide variety of widths and weights support many text sizes. Typically Narrow is used in headlines, Medium in body and Wide in smaller print. Nothing is predefined, though. By combining the right widths with the right weights this traditional approach can easily be challenged. Let’s take an oversized (over 10 pt) body copy for instance. In conjunction with using a bigger size to enhance readability, a narrow and slightly lighter weight will save space and brighten text color. Tanger Serif Narrow is a slim normal rather than a condensed face. As an Open Type “Pro” font each weight includes an expanded character set, small caps, old style figures, tabular figures, ligatures, fractions etc. All these are easily accessible through OpenType features.

The term Old West conjures up memories of vintage movies and TV shows featuring saloons and dancehall girls. Old wanted posters and cowboys. Rowdy prospectors in the Goldrush, mountains and lots of wide open space. Many of the lettering styles of those days are still in use, reflecting the past, present, and probably the future here. Western style fonts appear in the signage of bars, restaurants, casinos and ski areas. It's a style that speaks of the way it once was in a nostalgic way. This family of three fonts pays tribute to the Old West and its colorful history, with a semi-plain style, a decorated style, and a really lively rendition of our gaudy and raucous history from a century or more ago.

Luscombe is a boisterous and lively display face, recalling the shaded and outlined faced much beloved of 1920s poster and advertising artists, while offering a regularity of outline that those faces often did not achieve. Itís ideal for poster and display work, or for signage with a subtle period feel. Mix the two faces to add emphasis where it's needed.

The powerful Eknaton comes with slanted slabserifs, a new way to add some spring to the old Egyptian slabs. Eknaton echoes the tradition that started with Napoleon's Egyptian campaign 1798, and the simultaneous looting of Egyptian art. The imports led to new ladies fashion in Europe, new architecture and new typefaces like Antique (Figgins, 1815) and Egyptian (Caslon, 1816). The Egyptian faces were also the origin of the famous Clarendon (1845) and Ionic No.5 (1925) as well as the rest of "the legibility types". In the 20th century the slabserifs became popular again with Bauhaus incarnations like Memphis (Wolf, 1929) and Beton (Jost, 1931). The Bauhaus movement, otherwise anti-serif, liked the architectural influence in Egyptian slabserifs. The Bo Berndal design of Eknaton puts some speed into the old Sphinx - the cat is back, in better form than ever! Bo Berndal, born 1924, has been designing typefaces for 56 years, for Monotype, Linotype and other foundries. Eknaton comes in five different widths, from Tight to Expanded, and is an OpenType typeface for both PC and Mac. Swedish type foundry T4 premiere new fonts every month. Eknaton is our eleventh introduction.

In 1905 Berthold released an engraved blackletter font called Prinzess Kupferstichschrift. Based on an old printed remnant, I revived this beautiful open-face fraktur and enriched it with several OpenType features. As usual in my blackletter fonts, the round ‘s’ lies on the number sign key, and a traditional number sign can be accessed via the Discretionary Ligature feature and typing 'N-r-period'. In this font you have also the possibility to turn I, V, X, L, C, D, and M into Roman numerals by activating the Stylistic Alternates feature. And last but not least, various useful ligatures polish up this font.

Vikive is a family of Sans Serif fonts, better known in its origins as "Gothic" in America or "Grotesque" in Europe. Some authors divide them into three categories: Grotesque, Geometric and Humanistic. Probably, it can be defined that Vikive has some characteristics of the first two: Grotesque and Geometric, high x-height, slight squareness of the curves, wide set, open tail, simple construction. The family concept provides several weights and widths for one face and its matching italics, therefore this family of types is more suitable for text settings, enriched with strong contrast fonts (condensed thin or expanded black) for headlines.

Marconi was created by Hermann Zapf in 1973. According to Gerard Unger, it was the world's first digital typeface. Zapf’s design was developed as a text face for books and magazines. The round forms of the Marconi follow the principle of the superellipse. The lowercase letters are enlarged as the result of reading tests, while the capital letters are slightly reduced. The 8-point size — normally used for newspapers — looks more like 9 1/2 points. Marconi is a legible typeface with its large and open lowercase letters. It is ideal for long text blocks in newspaper, book, and magazine production.

Country Western Script is a new font based on the classic William Page font known as Clarendon Ornamented originally designed in 1859 and again in 1877 by Vanderburgh & Wells. This version includes Greek, Cyrillic, Central and Eastern European characters sets. Keeping with the original theme from 1859, Fill fonts are available for the Ornamented and Open faced versions of this font. Greek, Cyrillic, Central and Eastern European characters sets are supported in the Windows TrueType and OpenType formats. The Windows and Mac Type1 versions of this font do not support Greek, Cryillic, Central and Eastern European characters sets.

Beeching is a family of six typefaces designed to combine extreme legibility with a hint of retrospective character. It is inspired by the lettering used in the Leslie Green designed stations of the London Underground and is as up to date today as it was the day those stations opened. The Beeching faces (Regular, Bold, Small Capitals, Small Capitals Bold, Shadowed and Small Capitals Shadowed) are ideal for use in large scale signage that needs to be seen over long distances. We feel the family provides a clear demonstration that traditional details, such as serifs and ligatures serve to enhance legibility.

Really No. 2 is a redesign and update of Linotype Really, a typeface that Gary Munch first designed in 1999. The new Really No. 2 offers seven weights (Light to Extra Bold), each with an Italic companion. Additionally, Really No. 2 offers significantly expanded language support possibilities. Customers may choose the Really No. 2 W1G fonts, which support a character set that will cover Greek and Cyrillic in addition to virtually all European languages. These are true pan-European fonts, capable of setting texts that will travel between Ireland and Russia, and from Norway to Turkey. Customers who do not require this level of language support may choose from the Really No. 2 Pro fonts (just the Latin script), the Really No. 2 Greek Pro fonts (which include both Latin and Greek), or the Really No. 2 Cyrillic Pro fonts (Latin and Cyrillic). Each weight in the Really No. 2 family includes small capitals and optional oldstyle figures, as well as several other OpenType features. Really No. 2's vertical measurements are slightly different than the old Linotype Really's; customers should not mix fonts from the two families together. As to the design of Really No. 2's letters, like Linotype Really, the characters' moderate-to-strong contrast of its strokes recalls the Transitional and Modern styles of Baskerville and Bodoni. A subtly oblique axis recalls the old-style faces of Caslon. Finally, sturdy serifs complete the typeface's realist sensibility: a clear, readable, no-nonsense text face, whose clean details offer the designer a high-impact selection.

Really No. 2 is a redesign and update of Linotype Really, a typeface that Gary Munch first designed in 1999. The new Really No. 2 offers seven weights (Light to Extra Bold), each with an Italic companion. Additionally, Really No. 2 offers significantly expanded language support possibilities. Customers may choose the Really No. 2 W1G fonts, which support a character set that will cover Greek and Cyrillic in addition to virtually all European languages. These are true pan-European fonts, capable of setting texts that will travel between Ireland and Russia, and from Norway to Turkey. Customers who do not require this level of language support may choose from the Really No. 2 Pro fonts (just the Latin script), the Really No. 2 Greek Pro fonts (which include both Latin and Greek), or the Really No. 2 Cyrillic Pro fonts (Latin and Cyrillic). Each weight in the Really No. 2 family includes small capitals and optional oldstyle figures, as well as several other OpenType features. Really No. 2's vertical measurements are slightly different than the old Linotype Really's; customers should not mix fonts from the two families together. As to the design of Really No. 2's letters, like Linotype Really, the characters' moderate-to-strong contrast of its strokes recalls the Transitional and Modern styles of Baskerville and Bodoni. A subtly oblique axis recalls the old-style faces of Caslon. Finally, sturdy serifs complete the typeface's realist sensibility: a clear, readable, no-nonsense text face, whose clean details offer the designer a high-impact selection.

Really No. 2 is a redesign and update of Linotype Really, a typeface that Gary Munch first designed in 1999. The new Really No. 2 offers seven weights (Light to Extra Bold), each with an Italic companion. Additionally, Really No. 2 offers significantly expanded language support possibilities. Customers may choose the Really No. 2 W1G fonts, which support a character set that will cover Greek and Cyrillic in addition to virtually all European languages. These are true pan-European fonts, capable of setting texts that will travel between Ireland and Russia, and from Norway to Turkey. Customers who do not require this level of language support may choose from the Really No. 2 Pro fonts (just the Latin script), the Really No. 2 Greek Pro fonts (which include both Latin and Greek), or the Really No. 2 Cyrillic Pro fonts (Latin and Cyrillic). Each weight in the Really No. 2 family includes small capitals and optional oldstyle figures, as well as several other OpenType features. Really No. 2's vertical measurements are slightly different than the old Linotype Really's; customers should not mix fonts from the two families together. As to the design of Really No. 2's letters, like Linotype Really, the characters' moderate-to-strong contrast of its strokes recalls the Transitional and Modern styles of Baskerville and Bodoni. A subtly oblique axis recalls the old-style faces of Caslon. Finally, sturdy serifs complete the typeface's realist sensibility: a clear, readable, no-nonsense text face, whose clean details offer the designer a high-impact selection.

Drawn by Tony Stan, ITC Garamond was first released in 1975 in Book and Ultra weights only. These were intended as display faces to complement existing text designs from other foundries. (In fact, many of ITC’s interpretations of traditional typefaces began as display counterparts for existing text designs.) These first weights of ITC Garamond became so popular, however, that ITC released the Light and Bold weights and a suite of condensed faces in 1977. Now, the complete ITC Garamond family features sixteen members: four weights of roman and italic in normal width and four weights of roman and italic in companion condensed versions. The family resemblance is there, but ITC Garamond’s unique provenance gives it an unmistakable, one-of-a-kind appeal.

New Millennium is one of three font families that share a common name, a common design philosophy, a common x-height, and basic character shapes. (The others are New Millennium Sans and New Millennium Linear; all three work well together.) New Millennium is a serif face of what some might describe as a "modern style." But although it has flat serifs, it differs markedly from, say, Bodoni or Didot -- especially in the italic, which is a radical departure from tradition. (The bold styles are in fact sans-serif, identical to those of New Millennium Sans.) There's also a nice, dark Headline style for display text. New Millennium is a distinctive, legible, accessible text face that might be well suited to, say, scientific documentation.

Essay is an elegant serif typeface intended for setting books, with many stylistic alternates and other typographic goodies, designed by Stefan Ellmer. It is a highly legible text face with a natural flow of reading. This is enhanced by a slight slant of the roman, the combination of open and closed apertures and the amalgamation of organic strokes and counters with a static, fully straight baseline. Essay Text Regular looks back to the spirit of the french Renaissance, when the roman typographic letterforms came to full emancipation. Departing from that historical reference, Essay Text gets rid of all sentimental antiquity and becomes a contemporary interpretation of the “archetypes” of that period. Essay Text Italic refers to that more vaguely, resulting in a formalised look with fairly upright and open shapes and little cursiveness. As in the Renaissance, before the mating of roman and italic, Essay Text Italic works as a separate text face and a perfect secondary type. The name Essay derives from the literary meaning of the word, attempt or trial. Therefore, the typeface Essay can be seen as an attempt to express an opinion about reading, the omnipresence of history, the importance of calligraphy and the importance to deviate from that calligraphic source; as well as an attempt to crystallise lettershapes in balance between convention and the designer’s personal idiom.

John Sigvard ‘Ole’ Olsen and Harold Ogden ‘Chic’ Johnson were musicians-turned-comedians who rose to fame in the zany 1938 Broadway musical review “Hellzapoppin'”. They reprised their roles in the 1941 film adaptation of the show, and the opening title card of the film has “Hellzapoppin'” hand lettered in a tall, condensed sans serif design with an inline. This is now available as Wild Comedy JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Stencil Machine JNL replicates the lettering of a stencil cutting machine. The stencils produced on such machines were primarily used for carton identification and shipping.

A practical yet unique display face designed to offer attention-getting headlines and an alternative to the normal wild west faces.

In 1994, Apple® Computer, Inc., asked David Berlow for “a future gothic” to replace Chicago®, their system font. Now called Charcoal®, the design was released with Mac® OS 8 in 1996. Through operating system bundles it found its way into every form of design. Released from constraint, Berlow designed Truth FB, a radical series with a spectrum of seven weights. Like its forbear, Truth FB opens new design avenues; FB 2005

Franko Luin, Marco Polo's designer, on this typeface: Marco Polo is a 'massacrated' oldstyle typeface that can be used in the same way as, e.g., Caslon Antique. I designed it - if the word design is appropriate in this case - to give the users an alternative so that they are not always directed to the same choice. For the same reason I made Marco Polo rounder. The name comes from the famous Venetian globetrotter, who has nothing at all to do with the typeface, since printing and punchcutting were still an invention of the future.

The four weight semi-condensed Bartholemé family came into existence as a family expansion based on the designer's earlier concept, Bartholemé Open. This hybrid family was inspired by and loosely based on a number of contemporary mid-twentieth century type concepts having Old Face or Modern influence. Those inspirational type designs were primarily designed for various proprietary photolettering technologies of the time. The award-winning* Bartholemé Open and its companion design Bartholemé small capital open were inspired by various Shaded, Inline and Handtooled type models from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of those inspirational type designs were designed as titling fonts with all capital sets only. To set it apart from the earlier models, Bartholemé Open is semi-condensed intentionally designed with a lowercase. Design qualities include a large x- height, tightly curved ample counters, crisp serifs and tight bracketing. The overall plan of the family was originally intended for display usage in titling and short passages of text. At higher output resolutions all fonts read well at smaller point sizes. The Bartholemé family works well on its own, but also is compatible with type styles possessing qualities that complement or enhance its own. The Bartholemé family consists of a Regular weight complementing a Bold weight, along with Medium complementing an Extra Bold weight. The companion true-drawn italics are based on the Bartholemé roman design. * Award for Design Excellence bukva: raz! Type Design Competition of the Association Typographique Internationale, 2001

Venetian 301 is the Bitstream version of the Centaur type family. Centaur was designed by the American book designer Bruce Rogers on the basis of Venetian typefaces of 1470 of Nicolas Jenson. Beautiful Italic based on a face by Ludovico degli Arrighi was developed by Frederic Warde who was an American calligrapher and typography researcher was added as Italic to Centaur. Adapted for mechanical composition by English Monotype in 1929. Its lettershapes owe much to pen-drawn letters of Italian humanist minuscule and cursive. This elegant humanist face is useful for the finest typography both for book text and display matter. Cyrillic version included small caps was developed for ParaType in 2003 by Dmitry Kirsanov.

After the Second World War, the Ionic style replaced Modern Face as the favored typeface for newsprint. A couple decades later, it was in turn replaced by the next generation of newspaper fonts, a mix of Old Face, Transitional and Modern Face forms. Olympian itself tends toward the Old Face style but is nevertheless an example of this new generation, a result of a time of change and experimentation.

Although originally conceived as a magazine face – with strong serifs and open character shapes for good legibility in small sizes, and compact letter forms optimized for narrow columns and tight headlines – Marat evolved into a comprehensive family for general use. This specific construction and the round forms of the letters create an elegant, soft and friendly appearance. The typeface suits a wide range of typography, e.g. editorial, brochures, packaging and corporate design. In particular, in bold weights it works surprisingly well, which is not always the case with serif faces. Marat includes oldstyle and lining figures (both proportional and tabular), a wide range of language support and various OpenType features (e.g. ligatures, case-sensitive forms, fractions, superiors and inferiors). It is the perfect companion for Marat Sans, a clean and lively sans serif typeface. Marat has been selected by the Type Directors Club of New York to receive the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design 2008.