Evanston Alehouse is the first font in a larger collection of typefaces inspired by years leading up to the American prohibition. For the past two years I was living in Evanston, IL, a suburb of Chicago. After learning it was one of the birthplaces of the prohibition movement, I set out to learn more about it, and decided to develop a type collection that captures the dynamic era in our nation’s history. In the century that prefaced the ratification of the 18th amendment, saloons, taverns and alehouses boomed as the American working class enjoyed beer and discovered whiskey and gin. At the same time, the Temperance League was forming and gaining strength. By the turn of the century, these temperance societies were common in the culture of the country, with individual towns and states already on the move to abolish alcohol consumption. However, it was undeniable that by this time in history, America loved to drink. This font is inspired by the signage seen outside such drinking establishments. Back to the modern era, Evanston Alehouse is a 25 font family that includes 3 weights, 4 widths and 3 heights. It has special features that add depth to the font, with discretionary ligatures and stylistic alternatives. It also includes a complementary set of ornaments, including line breaks, frames, borders, and laurels. Here’s a snapshot of what you get with Evanston Alehouse: 2 Styles/Postions: Sharp (regular) and Round 3 Weights: Light, Medium and Black 4 Widths: 1826 (condensed), 1858 (narrow), 1893 (wide) and 1919 (expanded) 3 Heights: Capitals, lowercase and small caps 2 Alternatives: Discretionary Ligatures and Stylistic Alternatives 1 Ornament font with over 100 graphic extras

A. R. Bosco made Romany for ATF in 1934, when there was much demand for script types in advertising and publishing. It was the high times of Speedball lettering, and a casual script in that fashion was naturally very welcome. It became an instant hit and was used widely for a good part of the 1930s and 1940s. Apricot is not only a revival of Bosco's work, but also a major expansion of it. It contains very effective solutions to the many problems presented by the original metal type, which had to always be tracked too wide because of the forms of some of its letters. Solving these problems was not an easy task. A comprehensive set of alternates was designed to give the user the ability to replace some forms in certain uses, and a large set of two-, three-, and even four-letter ligatures was added to solve the awkwardness of some of the more common letter pairings. The resulting work is quite delightful, especially for those who like to take advantage of OpenType technology. Apricot is the rarest kind of script in digital type these days, the kind that is upright, round, bold, feminine, and distinctly young in appearance. A birthday cake for a teenage girl can certainly benefit from these letters. So can greeting cards, family show posters, diary covers, party invitations, women's shirts, toy packaging, celebration literature, and almost anything that needs that special touch of shiny happy youth. Apricot is available in all common font formats. The Postscript and True Type versions come in 4 fonts, which include one for alternates and two for ligatures alongside the main font. The OpenType version is one font that contains more than 380 glyphs and all the necessary programming for the palettes of OpenType-supporting applications. If you liked Canada Type's hugely popular font Dominique, you will love Apricot.

Conversation Hearts are inspired by the sweethearts and conversation hearts that can be found all over the US and Britain, but not in Germany. A source of endless fun and surprise. As a typographer to me they are also a surprising document of written communication. Most people complain that nowadays the inscriptions are not as sweet as they used to be. While they used to held romantic and promising inscriptions like “Be True” “Sweet Talk”, today they carry “Tweet me” “Ur Hot” and “Party Girl”. So i took this as a motivation to work with conversation sweetheart on a conceptial inspirational and typographical level. The obvious: every letter pressed on the keyboard brings out a conversation heart that starts with the letter - i.e. L = Loverboy, H = Heartless but what to write? Since i didn't want to reproduce the old “Fax me” and “Email me” I had to come up with something new. Something with a personal relation and of course something that I Love - what else could i write in the shape of the heart? So I tried to access my upper subconsciousness and looked for two words for every letter in the alphabet. One for the capital letter pressed and one word for the lowercase letter. Resulting in a Kurt Schwitters worthy assemblage of vocables "Post-office" “Internship” “Zebra” “Answers” etc. It is not easy to read a text set in Conversation Hearts but easier as a text set in Zapf-Dingbats. To sparkle the visual appearance uppercase letters are filled hearts with “carved” inscription, while lowercase letters are an outlined heart with written inscription. Conversations Hearts is a part of the Light Hearted Font Collection that is inspired by a recording of Jean Baudrillard with the title, "Die Macht der Verführung" (The Power of Seduction) from 2006. Further inspiration came from the article, "The shape of the heart: I'm all yours". The heart represents sacred and secular love: a bloodless sacrifice. by British writer Louisa Young printed in EYE magazine (#43) London, 2002.

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.

Touch Me is a Script hand-drawn style typeface—designed by Coto Mendoza—resulting from polyrhythmic exploration, sign deconstruction and altered calligraphic contrast plays with watercolour brush. Coto has been using these experimental calligraphy techniques when creating the catchwords for Macarons, the Boho Family, Bikini Season Script and Matcha Script and so forth. Touch Me was inspired by a character in a story written by Coto while attending a literary workshop with Ina Groovie in Santiago de Chile. The character is a tribal girl who lives on an island in the Caribbean. She is heir of ancestral knowledge and possesses wild beauty, very passionate and sensual: intense, strong and free. These features are reflected in the polyrhythm of the typeface's curves: an irregular baseline, variable x-height, different lengths of initial and terminal strokes (that sometimes expand and sometimes shrink) and amount of brush pressure that generates changes in contrast within the characters. This way, when composing, signs with stroke contrast randomly alternate with monolinear ones and with signs of altered contrast, thanks to the typeface's OpenType programming. The family, with more than 3,000 glyphs, provides a number of alternative characters, swashes, ligatures, initial and terminal forms, in short, a vast ocean of choices! Touch Me is a spontaneous typeface with a fresh and unique personality. It is the perfect choice for short text in both print and digital formats. The family comes with a Script Regular version and a seductive Script Drop that you will enjoy a lot! The Extras set includes some catchwords, dingbats and ornaments that allows for endless composition options. The family also comes with a Caps version —designed by Luciano Vergara—in 2 styles: a funny and big-headed condensed Sans Grotesk display of inverted vertical proportion plus a Grotesk, neutral and slightly expressive Petite. Both versions, available in 6 weights, have been especially designed to create hierarchies when composing. This allows for balance between strokes of different weight when it comes to the Sans and Script fonts. Come and dare yourself! Touch Me! Thanks Alisa for sharing your amazing and beautiful picture with us.

Technology is making it so that we’re all connected without the need for the physical-presence kind of being connected. That is strange, fascinating, and has a certain magnetism that is very difficult to resist. What’s at stake is no less than the transformation of centuries of human behaviour, and that’s part of the fascination. But while our existence morphs and we rush headlong into our socially minimalist future, we use our present culture to helplessly signal our nostalgia about our past. We know what our future will be missing, and we’re already full of nostalgia about it, but we know that what little we can do about isn’t going to affect the outcome that much. So, almost in full hindsight now, the DIY implosion of the past few years must have really been a reaction to our technological dis/connection. In typography, the minimalist future is already here, with something as austere as the sans serif having become the preferred expression of progress and fortune, both part of the connected isolation we are undergoing. But when physical interaction must take place, like coffee shops and gin joints, our organic alphabets ride high and mighty. That sense of human heritage — elegance and exuberance in our writing, the use of flaws to charmingly brand our own individualism — keeps turning up in all kinds of places, most unexpected of which is the digital world. The overall message seems to be that we’re still creative, imaginative, and unique. In the digital world, on blogs where we write about our puny music and fashion preferences, we’re just articulating this individualism of ours, this third domain of existence our future seems eager to dismiss. These were the thoughts behind Blog Script, the second collaboration between Carolina Marando and Alejandro Paul, after their successful stint with the Distillery set of fonts. This typeface comes in two weights, alternates for most letters, and a strong aesthetic rooted in individuality and freedom of spirit. Use it to be alone together, to tell the world that we’re still human, for now.

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.

ATTENTION CUSTOMERS :) There's a new Selfie available, have a look here; Selfie Neue is better done and more complete in every aspect. However, you can stay here if you still prefer the classic version. -But first, let me take a Selfie!- said that girl of the song and almost all of you at least once this year. While some terms and actions get trendy, some font styles do it too. It wouldn't be crazy to combine these worlds, in fact it happens often. Selfie is a connected sans serif based in vintage signage scripts seen in Galerías of Buenos Aires. These places are, in general, very small shopping centres which pedestrians sometimes use as shortcuts to get to other parts of the city. Their dark corridors take you back in time, and all of a sudden you are surrounded by cassettes, piercings, and old fashioned cloth. For some reason, all these shops use monolined geometric scripts. Surely, neon strings are easier to manipulate when letterforms have simple shapes. My very first aim with Selfie was to make a font that would serve as a company to those self-shot pictures that have become so popular nowadays. However, the font turned into something more interesting: I realised it had enough potential to stand-alone. Selfie proves that geometry itself can be really attractive. In this font, elegance is not achieved with the already-known contrast between thicks and thins of calligraphy, but with the purity of form. Its curves were based in perfectly shaped circles which made the font easy to be used at different angles (some posters show it at a 24.7º angle) without having problems/deformities. In addition to its nice performance when used over photographs, the font can be a good option for packaging and wedding invitations. TIPS Adding some lights/shadows between letters will for sure catch the eye of the viewer: Words will look as if they were made with tape/strings; so trendy nowadays. Try using Selfie at a 24.7º angle so that the slanted strokes become perfectly vertical. Having the decorative ligatures feature (dlig) activated is a good option to see letters dance. TECHNICAL It is absolutely recommended to use this font with the standard ligatures feature (liga) activated. It makes letters ligate perfectly and also improves the space between words.

Jugendstil Initials were designed by Heinrich Vogeler around 1905, based on the German blackletter tradition. A similar set of initials by Vogeler, but based on roman letters was released by Rudhardsche Geisserei of Offenbach at about this time. I believe the originals were woodcuts. The backgrounds to the letterforms may be seen as examples of Heimatkunst, an art movement within Germany that drew deliberate inspiration from the rural countryside. Like the Arts and Crafts Movement in England a little earlier, Heimatkunst may be seen, in part, as a romantic rejection of urban industrialization, while at the same time representing a back-to-roots nationalism. Like any river, it was fed by many streams. Jugendstil Initials is an experiment with which I am most pleased. It is far and away the most complex font HiH has produced and I was uncertain whether or not it could be done successfully. To oversimplify, a font is produced by creating outlines of each character, using points along the outline to define the contour. A simple sans-serif letter A with crossbar can be created using as few as 10 points. We decided to make a comparison of the number of points we used to define the uppercase A in various fonts. Cori, Gaiety Girl and Page No 508 all use 12 points. Patent Reclame uses 39 and Publicity Headline uses 43. All the rest of the A’s, except the decorative initials, fall somewhere in between. The initial letters run from 48 points for Schnorr Initials to 255 for Morris Initials Two, with 150 being about average. Then there is a jump to 418 points for Morris Initials One and, finally, to 1626 points for Jugendstil Initials. And this was only after we selectively simplified the designs so our font creation software (Fontographer) could render them. The average was 1678, not including X and Y. There was no X and Y in the original design and we have provided simple stand-ins to fill out the alphabet, without trying to imitate the style of the orginal design. We did a lot of looking to find a compatible lower case. We decided that Morris Gothic from the same period was the best match in color, design and historical context. We felt so strongly about the choice that we decided to produce our Morris Gothic font for the purpose of providing a lower case for Jugendstil Initials. The long s, as well as the ligatures ch and ck are provided. at 181, 123 (leftbrace) and 125 (rightbrace) respectively. This font was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it. I hope you agree.

Blackletter typefaces follow certain fixed rules, both in respect to their forms and to the orthography. Possibly, they were a reaction to the half-developed Carolingian minuscule which was soon to end in the Latin script. Narrow, ordered script was to replace the round, hesitant and shattered shapes of letters in order to simplify writing, to unify the meaning of individual letters, and to save some parchment, too. Opposed to the practice common in monasterial scriptoriums where Uncial, Irish and Carolingian inspiration flew freely and as a result, the styles of writing differed in each monastery, the blackletter type was to define one, common standard. It was to express spiritual verticality, in perfect tune with the architecture of the Gothic era. Typography became an integral part of the overall style of the period. The pointed arch and the blackletter type were the vanguard of the spectacular transformation from the Middle Ages towards the modern era, they were a celebration of a time when works of art were not signed by their makers yet. Some unfortunate souls keep linking blackletter solely with Germany and the Third Reich, while the truth is that its direct predecessor, the Gothic minuscule, evolved mostly in France. Even Hitler himself indicated blackletter type obsolete in the age of steel, iron and concrete – thus making a significant contribution to the spreading of the Latin script in Germany. Once we leave our prejudice aside, we find that the shapes of blackletter type have exceptional potential, unheard of in sans-serif letterforms. The lower case letters fit into an imaginary rectangle which is easily extended both upwards and sideways. In its scope and in the name itself, the Moyenage type family project is to celebrate the diversity of the Middle Ages. I begun realizing the urge to design my own blackletter when visiting the beer gardens of Munich and while walking through the villages of rural Austria. The letters from the notice boards of inns are scented with spring air, with the flowers of cudweed, with white sausage and weissbier. The crooked calligraphic hooks and beaks seem to imitate the hearty yodeling of local drinkers and the rustle of the giant skirts of girls who distribute the giant wreaths of beer jugs. Moyenage is, however, a modern replica of blackletter, so it contains some otherwise unacceptable Latin script elements in upper case. I chose these keeping the modern reader in mind, striving for better legibility. The font is drawn as if written with a flat pen or brush, and with the ambition to, perhaps, serve as a calligraphic model. In medium width, the face is surprisingly well legible; it is perfect for menus as well as posters and CD covers for some of the heavier kinds of music. It has five types of numerals and also a set of Cyrillic script, symbolising the lovelorn union of Germans and Russians in the 20th century. Thus, it is well suited for the setting of bilingual texts of the German classic literature, which, according to the ancient rules, must not be set in Latin script.

A typeface with lightly-worn futurism, Sagittarius is equally at home among the beauty and wellness aisles, or the coils of the warp core. The Sagittarius typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2021. A decorative adaptation of Hoefler’s Peristyle typeface (2017), Sagittarius’s rounded corners and streamlined shapes recall the digital aesthetic of the first alphabets designed for machine reading, a style that survives as a cheeky Space Age invocation of futurism. Sagittarius was created for The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, where it first appeared in 2021. From the desk of the designer: Typeface designers spend a lot of time chasing down strange valences. We try to figure out what’s producing that whiff of Art Deco, or that vaguely militaristic air, or what’s making a once solemn typeface suddenly feel tongue-in-cheek. If we can identify the source of these qualities, we can cultivate them, and change the direction of the design; more often, we just extinguish them without mercy. Sometimes, we get the chance to follow a third path, which is how we arrived at Sagittarius. During the development of Peristyle, our family of compact, high-contrast sans serifs, I often found myself unwittingly humming space-age pop songs. Nothing about Peristyle’s chic and elegant letterforms suggested the deadpan romp of “The Planet Plan” by United Future Organization, let alone “Music To Watch Space Girls By” from the ill-advised (but delicious) Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, but there they were. Something in the fonts was provoking an afterimage of the otherworldly, as if the typeface was sliding in and out of a parallel universe of high-tech spycraft and low-tech brawls with rubber-masked aliens. It might have had something to do with a new eyeglass prescription. But I liked the effect, and started thinking about creating an alternate, space-age version of the typeface, one with a little more funk, and a lot more fun. I wondered if softer edges, a measured dose of seventies retrofuturism, and some proper draftsmanship might produce a typeface not only suitable for sci-fi potboilers, but for more serious projects, too: why not a line of skin care products, a fitness system, a high-end digital camera, or a music festival? I put a pin in the idea, wondering if there’d ever be a project that called for equal parts sobriety and fantasy. And almost immediately, exactly such a project appeared. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Jesse Sheidlower is a lexicographer, a former Editor at Large for the Oxford English Dictionary, and a longtime friend. He’s someone who takes equal pleasure in the words ‘usufructuary’ and ‘megaboss,’ and therefore a welcome collaborator for the typeface designer whose love of the Flemish baroque is matched by a fondness for alphabets made of logs. Jesse was preparing to launch The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a comprehensive online resource dedicated to the terminology of the genre, whose combination of scholarship and joy was a perfect fit for the typeface I imagined. For linguists, there’d be well-researched citations to explain how the hitherto uninvented ‘force field’ and ‘warp speed’ came to enter the lexicon. For science fiction fans, there’d be definitive (and sometimes surprising) histories of the argot of Stars both Trek and Wars. And for everyone, there’d be the pleasure of discovering science fiction’s less enduring contributions, from ‘saucerman’ to ‘braintape,’ each ripe for a comeback. A moderated, crowdsourced project, the dictionary is now online and growing every day. You’ll find it dressed in three font families from H&Co: Whitney ScreenSmart for its text, Decimal for its navigational icons, and Sagittarius for its headlines — with some of the font’s more fantastical alternate characters turned on. The New Typeface Sagittarius is a typeface whose rounded corners and streamlined forms give it a romantically scientific voice. In the interest of versatility, its letterforms make only oblique references to specific technologies, helping the typeface remain open to interpretation. But for projects that need the full-throated voice of science fiction, a few sets of digital accessories are included, which designers can introduce at their own discretion. There are alternate letters with futuristic pedigrees, from the barless A popularized by Danne & Blackburn’s 1975 ‘worm’ logo for NASA, to a disconnected K recalling the 1968 RCA logo by Lippincott & Margulies. A collection of digitally-inspired symbols are included for decorative use, from the evocative MICR symbols of electronic banking, to the obligatory barcodes that forever haunt human–machine interactions. More widely applicable are the font’s arrows and manicules, and the automatic substitutions that resolve thirty-four awkward combinations of letters with streamlined ligatures. About the Name Sagittarius is one of thirteen constellations of the zodiac, and home to some of astronomy’s most inspiring discoveries. In 1977, a powerful radio signal originating in the Sagittarius constellation was considered by many to be the most compelling recorded evidence of extraterrestrial life. Thanks to an astronomer’s enthusiastically penned comment, the 72-second transmission became known as the Wow! signal, and it galvanized support for one of science’s most affecting projects, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). More recently, Sagittarius has been identified as the location of a staggering celestial discovery: a supermassive black hole, some 44 million kilometers in diameter, in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. <