@andinistas presents Rapsodia, an uncommon roman caps font with serif and high contrast, designed by #carlosfabiancg. Rapsodia was inspired by Stunt Roman, Speedball Textbook for Pen & Brush Lettering by Ross F. George. Rapsodia has a high and sweetened amount of contrast between thin and thick with drop-shaped finishes, reminiscent of Didot, Baskerville and Bodoni. Its artistic accent translates into Tuscan letters drawn with a flexible tip pen. In that order, Rapsodia combines the visual theatricality of an art nouveau corset, with creative historical classics such as Liza Minnelli, Gene Simmons and Freddie Mercury. Its calligraphic curlers full of Mannerist virtuosity are unnatural in Roman caps typefaces with serif. That is why its internal vein in ascending and descending flourishes protrudes with Chicano circus details like triangular diamonds located in vertical strokes. Rapsodia serves to design words and phrases in fine publications, for this reason most of its upper and lower case letters communicate feelings with classic and luxurious sensation through substitutes, ligatures and alternatives for beginning, middle or end of word, functioning as initials and terminals.

Duktus is a script typeface with a 1940’s flavour. It is a delicate script with letters not quite connected, having large, flourished capitals and small lowercase with long ascenders and descenders. It has a crisp, precise appearance, but is not rigidly formal. The design was inspired by the typeface Donatello by Wagner & Schmidt in 1935 and published by Società Nebiolo, Torino. Some other Influences: 1927 Trobadour by Wagner & Schmidt 1927 Liberty Script by Willard T. Sniffin 1933 Trafton Script by Howard Allen Trafton, 1937 Coronet designed by Robert Hunter Middleton Duktus fonts come with plenty of alternates small caps, old style numerals, ornaments and swashes. They include also CE language support.

Robert Hunter Middleton drew the original design of Stellar for the Ludlow Typograph Company in Chicago. Work began in the late 1920s, when Middleton was asked to create a sans serif type family to compete with European imports of Futura and Kabel. Stellar was Middleton's attempt to raise the ante. Where Futura and Kabel were geometric in design and monotone in weight, Stellar was based on roman character proportions and stroke weighs were stressed. In the late 1990s, Dave Farey took on the task of reviving the Stellar design. While Ludlow cut Stellar in a full range of point sizes, the family was limited to just a roman and bold design. Farey's revival is twice as large a family. It ranges from a very light called Stellar Nova to a very bold called Zeta In between are Lyra and Epsilon.

Mimeograph Lettering JNL is based on one of the numerous plastic lettering templates once manufactured by the A.B. Dick Company of Chicago and is available in both regular and oblique versions. The mimeograph utilized a porous drum which inked the backside of a waxed stencil sheet. Unlike traditional stencils which have cut out areas that are directly inked or painted, a mimeo stencil has the area to be printed scratched away by removing the wax coating with a stylus. The resulting image allows the ink from the drum to seep through the sheet and transfer to the blank paper. As with a companion font (Mimeograph Template JNL), the character shapes follow the routed letters of the template, complete with rounded terminals. A previous font release [designed with flat terminals and some alternate characters] is available as Interoffice Memo JNL.

It is 1984 and Ridley Scott’s commercial for Apple tells us, “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.” The first Mac comes on the market. The Mac interface includes a font for use in small sizes called Chicago. The first version was designed by Susan Kare. The font’s modern grid-like character was also used for the first iPod screens, which is why this font is also associated with music. Today’s font upgrade, Little Micro Sans, is suited for small-point texts, product labels, lists of ingredients, and small captions in books, magazines, websites or applications. For online use, a variable format is particularly handy as it offers all font styles in a single file, has a faster display time and takes up less memory. Little Micro Sans is a revolution for small sizes. Specimen: http://carontwice.com/files/specimen_Little_Micro_Sans.pdf

A disc jockey-only promotional sleeve for a 1964 [45 rpm] release of “Close to Me” and “Let Them Talk” by Dan Penn featured the song titles printed in a stencil typeface on the record sleeve. Closely resembling a stencil version of Franklin Gothic but with its own unique characteristics, this design has been reinterpreted as Turntable Stencil JNL and is available in both regular and oblique versions. For trivia buffs, Dan Penn is a singer-songwriter-record producer, often collaborating with Dewey Lindon “Spooner” Oldham; both closely associated with the late Rick Hall’s Fame recording studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In 1964, Hall started the Fame record label, and for a time it was distributed by Vee-Jay Records of Chicago, the first major Black-owned record label in the United States. Penn’s release was only the second for the new label; Fame 6402.

George Ryan's ITC Migrate is a highly condensed sans serif display face that effectively complements ITC Adderville. Migrate represents what Ryan calls a “more highly evolved version” of a typeface he designed for Bitstream in 1991 called Oz Handicraft. “Both faces,“ says Ryan, “are based on designs of the popular early 20th-century type designer Oswald Cooper.” His inspiration came from drawing samples found in the Book of Oz Cooper, published in 1949 by the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago. “Oz worked extensively with the sans serif form long before it became popular in the States, eschewing a popular belief of the time that sans serifs were only skeletons of letters.” Where Oz Handicraft was informal and quirky, ITC Migrate has a more restrained feel. “The uppercase characters and figures, in particular, have been reworked,” says Ryan, ”resulting in a more formal and traditional, compressed sans serif typeface.”

The Superior Marking Equipment Company was originally located in Chicago, Illinois and over the years produced a line of both commercial and toy rubber stamp printing sets which were used for making signs, posters, tickets and other printed items. Rough Print JNL reproduces the scanned images printed from one of the toy rubber stamp sets. The sample characters were smaller than one half inch in height and were further reduced during scanning. This gives the end result of a typeface which looks like rubber stamp imprints at small sizes, and very angular, distorted, somewhat grunge type when printed at larger sizes. There is a limited character set consisting of alphabet, numerals, some punctuation and currency symbols. No kerning was added to keep the hand-made appeal. Rough Print JNL is an all caps font with the letters and numbers jogged randomly on both the caps and lower case keystrokes. For a similar design with lower case, Amateur Printer JNL is recommended.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Alexander Branczyk and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Branczyk and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! The three fonts in the F2F Czykago family, F2F Czykago Light, F2F Czykago Semi Serif, and F2F Czykago Trans, were all inspired by the Apple system font Chicago. The F2F Czykago family, along with 38 other Face2Face fonts, is included in the TakeType 5 collection from Linotype. Branczyk designed 16 of these himself."

Before ink jet and laser printers; before copy machines, the main way to make multiples of anything not provided by printing press was by a mimeograph machine or spirit duplicator. The mimeograph utilized a porous drum which inked the backside of a waxed stencil sheet. Unlike traditional stencils which have cut out areas that are directly inked or painted, a mimeo stencil has the area to be printed scratched away by removing the wax coating with a stylus. The resulting image allows the ink from the drum to seep through the sheet and transfer to the blank paper. Based on a plastic lettering guide once manufactured by the A.B. Dick Company of Chicago, Mimeograph Template JNL is available in regular and oblique versions. Albert Blake Dick, the company’s founder, coined the term ‘mimeography’. The font’s character shapes follow the routed letters of the template, complete with rounded terminals. An earlier font release [designed with flat terminals and some alternate characters] is available as Interoffice Memo JNL.

This font was inspired by the old form of the so called "Kurrentschrift" German handwriting, based on late medieval cursive. It is also known as "Alte Deutsche schrift" ("Old German script"). It was taught in German schools until 1941, when Adolf Hitler decided to forbid it. As it is a little hard to read, we are proposing here two versions: the "pure" Kurrentschrift, and an adapted "Easy" one, with simplified difficult characters.