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.

Mencap When most of us go about everyday tasks, we take for granted the reading that’s involved, on instructions, labels and so on. For people with learning disabilities, reading is made much harder by certain fonts. FS Me is designed specifically to improve legibility for people with learning disabilities. The font was researched and developed with – and endorsed by – Mencap, the UK’s leading charity and voice for those with learning disabilities. Mencap receive a donation for each font license purchased. Every letter of FS Me was tested for its appeal and readability with a range of learning disability groups across the UK. Inclusive Fontsmith were determined to design a font that was accessible to those with learning disabilities without standing out as such – one that was inclusive of all readers. It should comply with accessibility guidelines and work best at 12pt, but still have a character of its own that was warm and approachable. “So much accessible design is done separately to the main body of brand work,” says Jason Smith. “We wanted to make a typeface that covered both brand tone and neutrality, and that could be used legitimately as a brand font as well as in accessible design.” Me, you, everyone FS Me is about design that doesn’t patronise. People with learning disabilities are often treated as inferior by childlike design. FS Me is designed for adults, not children – a beautifully-designed font for everyone. Its features include very subtle distinguishing elements of each letter to aid the reading and comprehension of texts, and tails, ascenders and descenders that have been extended for extra clarity. What the people said... Here is a sample of comments from the extensive research groups that helped to shape the letterforms of FS Me: “I want something round, clear and friendly.” “We like movement in the letters but don’t want anything childish.” “The ‘b’ and ‘d’ need to be different as they can be confused.” “I prefer the handwriting-style ‘a’.” “It’s important to have an accessible ‘a’ and ‘g’. Teachers sometimes complain that learners cannot read or understand the inaccessible ‘a’ and ‘g’.”

Helvetica is one of the most famous and popular typefaces in the world. It lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. The original typeface was called Neue Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Switzerland. In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of Helvetia", the Latin name for Switzerland). Over the years, the Helvetica family was expanded to include many different weights, but these were not as well coordinated with each other as they might have been. In 1983, D. Stempel AG and Linotype re-designed and digitized Neue Helvetica and updated it into a cohesive font family. At the beginning of the 21st Century, Linotype again released an updated design of Helvetica, the Helvetica World typeface family. This family is much smaller in terms of its number of fonts, but each font makes up for this in terms of language support. Helvetica World supports a number of languages and writing systems from all over the globe. Today, the original Helvetica family consists of 34 different font weights. 20 weights are available in Central European versions, supporting the languages of Central and Eastern Europe. 20 weights are also available in Cyrillic versions, and four are available in Greek versions. Many customers ask us what good non-Latin typefaces can be mixed with Helvetica. Fortunately, Helvetica already has Greek and Cyrillic versions, and Helvetica World includes a specially-designed Hebrew Helvetica in its OpenType character set. Helvetica has also been extende to Georgian and a special "eText" version has been designed with larger xheight and opened counters for the use in small point sizes and on E-reader devices. But Linotype also offers a number of CJK fonts that can be matched with Helvetica. Chinese fonts that pair well with Helvetica: DF Hei (Simplified Chinese) DF Hei (Traditional Chinese) DF Li Hei (Traditional Chinese) DFP Hei (Simplified Chinese) Japanese fonts that pair well with Helvetica: DF Gothic DF Gothic P DFHS Gothic Korean fonts that pair well with Helvetica: DFK Gothic"

The font family Univers? is one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century. The family has the advantage of having a variety of weights and styles, which, even when combined, give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. The clear, objective forms of Univers make this a legible font suitable for almost any typographic need. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry's art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts - quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Piegnot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype. The Deberny & Peignot type library was acquired in 1972 by Haas, and the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) was folded into the D. Stempel AG/Linotype collection in 1985/1989. Adrian Frutiger continues to do design work with Linotype right up to the present day. In 1997, Frutiger and the design staff at Linotype completed a large joint project of completely re-designing and updating the Univers family. The result: Univers Next - available with 59 weights and 4 Linotype Univers Typewriter weights. With its sturdy, clean forms Univers can facilitate an expression of cool elegance and rational competence. Univers has the uncanny ability to combine well with fonts of many different styles and origins: Old style fonts such as: Janson Text, Meridien, Sabon, Wilke. Modern-stressed fonts such as: Linotype Centennial, Walbaum. Slab serif fonts such as Egyptienne F, Serifa. Script and brush fonts such as: Brush Script, Mistral, Ruling Script. Blackletter fonts such as: Duc De Berry, Grace, San Marco. Even fun fonts such as F2F OCRAlexczyk, Linotype Red Babe, Linotype Seven."

‘Krul’ is a typographic interpretation of the lettering style created by Dutch letter painter Jan Willem Joseph Visser at the end of the 1940s, which decorated the traditional brown bars of Amsterdam. In the beginning, these letters were strongly associated with the pubs connected to the Amstel brewery, given that Visser was the company’s official painter. As the years passed, the style became increasingly popular, and various business owners in Amsterdam and other Dutch and Belgian cities also commissioned its use. In the 1970s and 1980s, Leo Beukeboom, another talented letter painter, continued and expanded this lettering tradition while employed under the Heineken brand. Much of his work can still be found in the Jordaan and De Pijp neighborhoods in Amsterdam. The Amsterdamse Krulletter, or Amsterdam’s curly letter, is strongly inspired by the calligraphic works of the 17th century Dutch writing masters, of which Jan van den Velde was a central figure. However, distinct characteristics of this style, for example, its unusual and beautiful ‘g’, originate from a model that was published by Johannes Heuvelman in 1659, which J. W. J. Visser referenced. Typographic circles have somehow overlooked the Amsterdamse Krulletter and its heritage. The Dutch calligraphic hands preceded and influenced the formal English penmanship which has inspired numerous typefaces in the Copperplate style. In contrast, the models from van den Velde, Heuvelman, and Jean de la Chambre, among others, are a missing chapter in Dutch typographic history, and had never been turned into typefaces until now. Conscious of the cultural and identity issues that arise in reviving a unique style, and concerned about the speed with which the lettering style was disappearing, Ramiro Espinoza focused the project of designing ‘Krul’ on digitally recreating the calligraphic complexity of these beautiful letters. Created through several years of research, ‘Krul’ is not a direct digitization of the Amsterdamse Krulletter, but instead, an interpretation that incorporates numerous alternative characters absent in the original model, and improves upon details where necessary, resulting in an optimal performance on the printed page. The typeface is presented in Open Type format, with an abundance of intricate ligatures, fleurons, and swashes, which permit the creation of numerous calligraphic effects. The very high contrast and rhythm of the strokes in this typeface make it especially suited for media applications conveying a sense of elegance and sophistication. Designers of feminine magazines, advertisements, and corporate identities within the fragrance and fashion industries will find in this typeface to be an extremely useful and appropriate resource.The great Amsterdamse Krulletter is finally back, and we are proud to make it available to you.

Imagine being printer in the early nineteenth century, your stock isn’t the finest, your lead characters are worn out: Voilá Kandidat Rough. But wait, Kandidat isn’t the usual scan-an-old-book,-put-the-glyphs-in-a-font-and-you’re-done-font. Kandidat Rough has a variety of whopping 14 alternates for most characters. Our algorithm changes the letters automatically. All you have to do is turn on Contextual Alternates in your layout app. The algorithm is the best we’ve seen so far, and it’s so good that even same words appear in different forms. And should by coincidence words have the same glyphs, just assign a different Style Set to the first letter, and all other letters in the word will change as well (well, it depends a bit on your software). The mechanism isn’t perfect and maybe we stretched OpenType capabilities a bit over the top, but we yet haven’t seen any better routine for switching letters on the fly. Is it worth to mention that Kandidat Rough not only speaks English, but also German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Croatian, Turkish and most likely some other languages? Maybe. To be sure whether your language is supported, this is the typeset of all letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝĆČĐĞ݌ފŸŽ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöøùúûüýÿćčđğıœşšž Apart from that we also included the following punctuation and currency symbols: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;?@[\]_{|}¡©«®°±¶·»¿×–—‘’‚“”„†•…‹›⁄≠☞ €¢$£¥ This sums up to nearly 3000 glyphs per font, and we have three of them: Regular, Italic and Bold. All neatly kerned. All in all a great repertoire for even the most demanding book or advert jobs with a look of old times. And now imagine you are sick of the rugged print experience Kandidat Rough delivers: go for Kandidat. This is our Scotch-ish ancestor the Rough version was made from. A sturdy, friendly, round, warm friend from the beginning of the nineteenth century. A bit dark, maybe. You will like it. Kandidat has the aforementioned type set plus complete Baltics, Eastern Europe and Cyrillic. Plus a couple of gimmicks like fleurons, stars, circled numbers, arrows, and, and, and… Kandidat Regular additionally has small caps for Latin based scripts (not Cyrillic). The spick and span Kandidat font set also consists of Regular, Italic and Bold cuts. The bold cut is on the very bold side and can nicely be used for headings, whereas Italic is a great companion for Regular. It took us some time and trouble to finish this project, but after all we are very proud of our little feat and hope you will enjoy Kandidat as much as we do. Enjoy!

Keep Calm is a family of fonts developed from the now famous World War 2 poster that was designed in 1939 but never issued, then rediscovered in 2000. As well as the original Keep Calm font, the medium weight of the poster, new weights are now available – Keep Calm Book (regular weight), Heavy and Light – and each weight comes with a complimentary italic. Version 2.0 (2017) is a comprehensive update which consists of numerous refinements and improvements across all weights. The family now contains a full complement of Latin Extended-A characters, Welsh diacritics and Irish dotted consonants. The four italics have been optically corrected with revised, ‘true italic’ forms of a and f. The crown motif from the top of the Keep Calm poster is located at the plus minus ± and section § keystrokes (Alt 0177 and Alt 0167 on Windows). The lowercase g follows the Gill/Johnston eyeglass model, but also included is an alternative, single-story g at the Alt G keystroke (Alt 0169 on a Windows keyboard), the normal location of the copyright symbol which has been relocated elsewhere in the fonts. An alternative lowercase t, without the curved wedge cutaway, is provided at the Alt T (dagger) keystroke (Alt 0134 on Windows). When I first saw the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, I wrongly assumed the letters to be Gill Sans. Recent research at the National Archive by Dr. Bex Lewis of Manchester Metropolitan University has revealed that the original poster was hand drawn by the illustrator and painter, Ernest Wallcousins. The Gill Sans influence is apparent, in the R particularly, the M’s perfectly pointed vertex is redolent of Johnston’s Underground, and the most anomalous character, the C, resembles the ‘basic lettering’ of engineers that provided the vernacular sources for the Gotham typeface. Developing the Keep Calm typeface has been an exercise in extrapolation; an intriguing challenge to build a whole, high quality font family based on the twelve available capitals of the Keep Calm poster, and on similar lettering from the other two posters in the original series. This has required the creation of new lowercase letters that are believably 1939; that maintain the influence of Gill and Johnston while also hinting at the functional imperative of a wartime drawing office. Wallcousins’s lettering balanced intuitive human qualities and the pure pleasure of drawing elegant contemporary characters, against an underlying geometry of ruled lines, perfect circles, 45° terminals, and a requirement for no-nonsense clarity.

We introduce our Variable Font from the high-complex BD Gitalona font family. Consisting of 3 axes; weight, optical size, and serif, that will give you a different experience extending the family of BD Gitalona. We don't want to mention how many families can be generated from this variable font. During the development process, we got up to more than 50 families and stopped to allow you to continue to play with the slide buttons. And again, BD Gitalona is filled with an explorative and experimental decorative version that we present separately. Figure out the decorative version BD Gitalona Moxa to make the aesthetic appeal of this whole typeface here! Inspiration The world of entertainment moves non-stop. One by one, figures appeared and left. We expect to create something to entertain previous trends with packaging more relevant to the present. More specifically, we admire and are inspired by some of the world's leading and top singers with a segmented nature. We imagine so many figures that can affect every viewer. However, each artist or singer has a segment because almost all of them have characteristics. The Design The basic design of this typeface begins with a transitional serif shape with sharp, shapeless corners. Then in the middle of the invention, there was an opportunity to explore it further from the readability side by adding an optical variable that can adjust the serif thickness when used together between large, medium to paragraph text sizes for editorials. The shift from serif to sans-serif with the contrast initiated by the shift of the serif family form as a different variable also makes this font richer in terms of the features it contains. Parts are expected to add to the user satisfaction with the complexity of this font. The Features BD Gitalona consists of one sub-family intended for body text with nine weights from Thin(100) to Black(900) and four other display sub-families such as Display serif, Flick, Harmony Sans and Contrast Sans. Each consists of four weights Thin(100), Regular Weight(400), Bold(700), and Black(900). And again, there are also retailed separately; the BD Gitalona Variable font, which is designed to accommodate all Subfamily in 1 font file, and BD Gitalona Moxa, an experimental typeface. A total of 700+ glyphs in each style. Advanced OpenType features functionally and aesthetically, such as Case-sensitive forms, small caps, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, numerator, denominator, superscript, subscript, circled number, slashed zero, old-style figure, tabular and lining figure. Supports multi-languages ​​including Western Europe, Central Europe, Southeast Europe, South America, and Oceania.

Useful links: TT Supermolot Neue PDF Type Specimen TT Supermolot Neue graphic presentation at Behance Looking for a custom version of TT Supermolot Neue? TT Supermolot Neue is a redesigned, extended and greatly enhanced reincarnation of the popular TT Supermolot and TT Supermolot Condensed font families. During its existence, the hammers (‘molot’ in Russian) managed to get into the spotlight in a huge number of projects, for example, in popular video games, films, and branding. Despite its popularity, the limited composition of old families put boundaries their development, which prompted us to release a completely redesigned and greatly extended version. And while the old families could offer designers only a limited number of tools, in the new version you can already find 54 fonts, and each individual font now consists of more than 620 glyphs. First, we have added a completely new subfamily, TT Supermolot Neue Extended. But this is only the tip of the iceberg—in order to achieve visual harmony between the three subfamilies, we completely revised the distribution of widths among them. As a result of this work, the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Basic subfamily became a bit narrower, and the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Condensed subfamily became even narrower than it was in the old version. Secondly, we’ve increased the number of weights. While in the old versions there were only 5 weights, in the new ones there are 9 in each of the subfamilies. In addition, we gave a facelift to the lowercase and uppercase letters. In TT Supermolot Neue, the design of all controversial grapheme forms was soothed and now the family can also be used in the text set. We have completely redrawn italics. It took us half a year to compensate for all the circles, to transform italic strokes, to work out the position of the diacritics, to make right the spacing, and to finish kerning. Following a good tradition, in the TT Supermolot Neue extensive support for useful OpenType features was added, and hinting was also improved. If we talk about visual features, we recommend paying closer attention to two stylistic sets: the first set (ss01) is designed to make the typeface more humanist, and when you turn on the second set (ss02), the typeface becomes even more technological. In addition, the typeface has more than 26 items of standard and discretionary ligatures. We also have not forgotten about the figures and we added a set of old-style figures to the standard version. In addition, the typeface has case, ordn, frac, sups, sinf, numr, dnom, onum, tnum, lnum, pnum, calt, liga, dlig, salt, ss01, ss02.

Greetings: We are introducing an advanced version of the Kage font released and received great exposure from users and worldwide font enthusiasts. The massive development puts forward experimentation on the alternate letters. We redesign each shape to make it more functional and comfortable when text size escalation occurs. In addition to rejuvenating the letterform, we also apply an oblique style to provide diverse style choices. Learn more about Kage Pro here: Graphics presentation | Type Specimen | The Inspiration: The radical exploration world of fashion inspires us. It leads our minds to the Neo-classical type style created during the age of enlightenment in the 18th century. It has a reasonably extreme contrast from the previous serif style, making the impression that it is emitted more expensive and classy. Organically, this Neo-Classical typeface is closely related to the fashion world, especially in Europe, and even spread across the globe. Fashion and this typeface reflect each other. After, we boldly observed Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. Famous for radical & deconstructive fashion, which makes the world of fashion more flexible and dynamic. The Design: As well as the typeface that we made, we started it with a cultural foundation of the Didone typeface. We tried to deconstruct the appearance. The decoration that better reflected the dynamic of fashion implemented in the fashionable alternate and calligraphical stylistic set ended with ball terminals. The versatile impression created is like taking off a scarf on the model's hair during a fashion show. The deconstructive image is combined with a legibility structure like the appearance of the Neo-Classical style. Kage Pro is designed to visualize a costly and exclusive image of a thing, product, world clothing brand, famous fashion magazine, etc. The modern transitions of each letterform are softer, so when repositioning and escalating the size of this font, it will remain beautiful without injuring other elements. So, Kage Pro is a bold choice on headlines and more prominent media with a portion of 50% even more. The Feature: Kage Pro has 11 upright and 11 oblique styles from thin to black; all family-style consist of one variable font with 2 axes. The total number of glyphs is 1,665 in each style. She comes with tons of swirly ligatures and stylistic alternates in Advance OpenType features, including: Case-sensitive forms, small caps, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, numerator, denominator, superscript, subscript, circled number, slashed zero, old-style figure, tabular and lining figure. Support multi-language including Western European, Central European, Southeastern European, South American, Oceanian, Vietnamese.

We introduce our high-complex typeface. A wide range of serifs for text and display titles are divided into one prominent sub-family and four display sub-families. Comes shifted from serif to sans serif to fulfilling the completeness of this font family that we named BD Gitalona. In addition to these massive things, this font family is filled with an explorative and experimental decorative version that we present separately. Figure out the decorative version BD Gitalona Moxa to make the aesthetic appeal of this whole typeface! Inspiration The world of entertainment moves non-stop. One by one, figures appeared and left. We expect to create something to entertain previous trends with packaging more relevant to the present. More specifically, we admire and are inspired by some of the world's leading and top singers with a segmented nature. We imagine so many figures that can affect every viewer. However, each artist or singer has a segment because almost all of them have characteristics. The Design The basic design of this typeface begins with a transitional serif shape with sharp, shapeless corners. Then in the middle of the invention, there was an opportunity to explore it further from the readability side by adding an optical variable that can adjust the serif thickness when used together between large, medium to paragraph text sizes for editorials. The shift from serif to sans-serif with the contrast initiated by the shift of the serif family form as a different variable also makes this font richer in terms of the features it contains. Parts are expected to add to the user satisfaction with the complexity of this font. The Features BD Gitalona consists of one sub-family intended for body text with nine weights from Thin(100) to Black(900) and four other display sub-families such as Display serif, Flick, Harmony Sans and Contrast Sans. Each consists of four weights Thin(100), Regular Weight(400), Bold(700), and Black(900). And again, there are also retailed separately; the BD Gitalona Variable font, which is designed to accommodate all Subfamily in 1 font file, and BD Gitalona Moxa, an experimental typeface. A total of 700+ glyphs in each style. Advanced OpenType features functionally and aesthetically, such as Case-sensitive forms, small caps, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, numerator, denominator, superscript, subscript, circled number, slashed zero, old-style figure, tabular and lining figure. Supports multi-languages ​​including Western Europe, Central Europe, Southeast Europe, South America, and Oceania.

Since their first appearance as Italians on the pages of the 1821 William Caslon type specimens, reverse contrast typefaces have been typography's best loved quirky outcasts. Subverting the traditional relationship between thick verticals and thin horizontals made them perfect for eye-catching advertisements. The unexpected contrasts and the thick slabs produced by reverse-contrast serifs became ubiquitous in period posters, and synonymous with wild west and circus iconography. In designing Stinger, the Zetafonts design team composed by Maria Chiara Fantini, Andrea Tartarelli and Francesco Canovaro and orchestrated by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini decided to marry this subversive tradition with the workhorse approach of modernist sans serif typefaces like Univers, developing a super-family with four widths, each in five different weights, from thin to heavy. This gives the designer a full range of options for type setting, with the Normal and Fit widths providing two different text-sized alternatives, the wide width adding display and titling options and the Slim ready to deal with the space-saving necessities of extremely long texts. True italics have been added developed for all weights and variants, bringing the Stinger family to a total of 40 fonts, with a latin extended + Russian Cyrillic character set covering over 200 languages, and open type features including positional numbers, stylistic sets and alternate forms. In the crowded panorama of contemporary grotesque typefaces, all aiming to stark geometric perfection, Stinger stands out with its bold choices and strong personality. From the calligraphy-inspired terminals in the thin weights to the logo-ready sculptural approach in the heavy weights, each variant manages to look striking without forgetting the readability and flexibility lessons of modern reverse-contrast classics like those designed by Excoffon or Novarese. A variable version is included with the full family, allowing maximum flexibility and control for the designer over the wide range of expression capabilities of the Stinger super family.

You wrote on your school notebooks, didn't you. Of course, just about everyone did. And those that didn't are probably in therapy trying to overcome the repression and guilt. Balloon letters are fun, easy to draw and have a light-hearted presence. With little autonomy, what young person can resist the opportunity to make a public, personal statement on their notebook. Guess what! Adults do it too - with our cars, our houses, our toys, our accessories and so on. And how "grown-up" are we really? Anyway, my niece, Cori, made this nice, colorful, hand-drawn birthday card. It was so vibrant and fun - in warm circus colors - that I could not resist making it into a font. Use it for positive, fun stuff, stuff with a light touch - an invitation for an informal party perhaps, but probably not a formal dinner at the White House. This font is not comfortable in a bowtie. But don't be fooled. Casual as Cori is, you can set at least twelve major European languages with it, in addition to English: Albanian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. Cori Valentine adds a decorative Valentine border to the upper case of Cori. By leaving out the bow in the upper center of the border we were able to fit the border around the accented caps. Similarly, we omitted the butterfly for the Ccedilla glyph. Blank versions of the regular border & the bowless border are provided at positions 135 & 137 in case you want to put a border around your signature or something like that. Just for reference, the letterforms for Cori Valentine are 75% the size as the regular Cori font. We would like to assure you that it is permissible to use Cori Valentine to create a romantic card, flyer or note during any month with less the 32 days.

Remora is an extensive new humanist sans serif which comes in 2 style variations, the effervescent Remora Sans and its corporate business partner Remora Corp . Both styles include 5 individual width sets ranging from the condensed W1 to the extra-wide W5. Furthermore, with an impressive 7 weights (Thin to Ultra) and true matching italics in each pack Remora is an ultra versatile super family comprising 140 individual fonts, perfect for any typographic assignment or design brief. Remora was designed by G-Type founder Nick Cooke. Both the Sans and Corp families share the same proportions, with the exception of certain key characters that change the overall appearance. Remora Sans is an exuberant and characterful typeface while Remora Corp, as its name suggests, is a businesslike typeface more suited to corporate typography. Quite early on in the design process Nick decided to give Remora Corp equal billing instead of incorporating these glyphs as alternates or a stylistic set that may get overlooked. “I created two separate families after learning a valuable lesson with one of my earlier typefaces, Houschka”, says Nick. “Houschka contained distinctive rounded A’s W’s and w’s, with ‘straight’ styles as character alternates. Even though style sets and alternates are easy to activate they are rarely used, so after many requests for customised versions of the fonts with the straight characters as defaults it was decided to create the separate ‘Alt’ family. So I cut straight to the chase with the two Remora variants and created two complementary families.” Both sets contain many shared letterforms, but it is the alternate characters that significantly alter the appearance of each font. Remora has been carefully designed for optimum legibility at large and very small sizes. Although fairly monolinear in appearance, especially in the lighter weights, particular attention has been paid to optical correction like the overshoots of the curved characters. Open counters and painstaking attention to detail (e.g. weight contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes, junctions of shoulders and stems etc) all boost readability and make Remora a great choice across all media. Remora Sans and Corp are ‘humanist’ rather than ‘geometric’ in style, meaning they’re not strictly based on rectangles and circles, resulting in a warm and friendlier feel. The slightly ’super-elliptical’ rounded forms create generously attractive curves. Remora has very distinctive italics in that they are only inclined by 8 degrees, but are not just based on slanted uprights. The italic styles are very alluring when used for display at large sizes and the good news is they come bundled free with their respective uprights. Each family also contains many OpenType features including proportional and tabular numbers, small caps, discretionary ligatures, plus five stylistic sets for ultra versatile typography.

Welcome to the old version of Kage. "Old does not mean obsolete" In April 2022, we updated whole letterforms. We redrew all glyphs and refined the nodes, corners, rounded shapes, flowing tails, etc. Of course, you can still use the update of an older version of Kage, although we highly recommend you move to the Pro version for the full benefits. Kage Pro has massive development, puts forward experimentation on alternate letters, and applies an oblique style to provide diverse style choices. Come with tons of swirly ligatures and advanced opentype features include case-sensitive forms, small caps, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, numerator, denominator, superscript, subscript, circled number, slashed zero, old-style figure, tabular and lining figure. Learn more about Kage Pro here: Kage Pro 2.0 | Type Specimen About Kage The Inspiration: The radical exploration world of fashion inspires us. It leads our minds to the Neo-classical type style created during the age of enlightenment in the 18th century. It has a reasonably extreme contrast from the previous serif style, making the impression that it is emitted more expensive and classy. Organically, this Neo-Classical typeface is closely related to the fashion world, especially in Europe, and even spread across the globe. Fashion and this typeface reflect each other. After, we boldly observed Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. Famous for radical & deconstructive fashion, which makes the world of fashion more flexible and dynamic. The Design: As well as the typeface that we made, we started it with a cultural foundation of the Didone typeface. We tried to deconstruct the appearance. The decoration that better reflected the dynamic of fashion implemented in the fashionable alternate and calligraphical stylistic set ended with ball terminals. The versatile impression created is like taking off a scarf on the model's hair during a fashion show. The deconstructive image is combined with a legibility structure like the appearance of the Neo-Classical style. Kage is designed to visualize a costly and exclusive image of a thing, product, world clothing brand, famous fashion magazine, etc. The modern transitions of each letterform are softer, so when repositioning and escalating the size of this font, it will remain beautiful without injuring other elements. So, Kage is a bold choice on headlines and more prominent media with a portion of 50% even more. The Feature: Kage has 11 styles, from thin to black; all family-style consist of one variable font with two axes. The total number of glyphs is 748 in each style. She comes with tons of swirly ligatures and stylistic alternates in Advance OpenType features, including: discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions. Support multi-language including Western European, Central European, Southeastern European, South American, Oceanian, Vietnamese.

Remora is an extensive new humanist sans serif which comes in 2 style variations, the effervescent Remora Sans and its corporate business partner Remora Corp. Both styles include 5 individual width sets ranging from the condensed W1 to the extra-wide W5. Furthermore, with an impressive 7 weights (Thin to Ultra) and true matching italics in each pack Remora is an ultra versatile super family comprising 140 individual fonts, perfect for any typographic assignment or design brief. Remora was designed by G-Type founder Nick Cooke. Both the Sans and Corp families share the same proportions, with the exception of certain key characters that change the overall appearance. Remora Sans is an exuberant and characterful typeface while Remora Corp, as its name suggests, is a businesslike typeface more suited to corporate typography. Quite early on in the design process Nick decided to give Remora Corp equal billing instead of incorporating these glyphs as alternates or a stylistic set that may get overlooked. “I created two separate families after learning a valuable lesson with one of my earlier typefaces, Houschka”, says Nick. “Houschka contained distinctive rounded A’s W’s and w’s, with ‘straight’ styles as character alternates. Even though style sets and alternates are easy to activate they are rarely used, so after many requests for customised versions of the fonts with the straight characters as defaults it was decided to create the separate ‘Alt’ family. So I cut straight to the chase with the two Remora variants and created two complementary families.” Both sets contain many shared letterforms, but it is the alternate characters that significantly alter the appearance of each font. Remora has been carefully designed for optimum legibility at large and very small sizes. Although fairly monolinear in appearance, especially in the lighter weights, particular attention has been paid to optical correction like the overshoots of the curved characters. Open counters and painstaking attention to detail (e.g. weight contrast between horizontal and vertical strokes, junctions of shoulders and stems etc) all boost readability and make Remora a great choice across all media. Remora Sans and Corp are ‘humanist’ rather than ‘geometric’ in style, meaning they’re not strictly based on rectangles and circles, resulting in a warm and friendlier feel. The slightly ’super-elliptical’ rounded forms create generously attractive curves. Remora has very distinctive italics in that they are only inclined by 8 degrees, but are not just based on slanted uprights. The italic styles are very alluring when used for display at large sizes and the good news is they come bundled free with their respective uprights. Each family also contains many OpenType features including proportional and tabular numbers, small caps, discretionary ligatures, plus five stylistic sets for ultra versatile typography.

When I was surfing the internet, with rock n 'roll music. I accidentally found a picture of a hotel sign with a very unique style, namely: Mid-century Modern (MCM). It looks very pretty and charming to me. And inspired me to create Font Family. And I am proud to present the Vallery Hills Font Family. This font is in the Retro style of the 50s to 60s. Okay, here are the specifications. 1. Vallery Hills Schrift There is one unique thing about this font. Usually, script fonts with Retro style always have an angled anatomical shape, but I made this font upright. The goal is to make a difference with other script fonts I've seen. By the way, this font comes in two styles, namely: Regular and Bouncy. Why do I make it like that? Because I want to make this font into two different functions, namely: If you want to make it a Display Font, which is usually used for Headings, then use the Bouncy style. And if you want to use it as Bodytext, then use Regular. 2. Vallery Hills Sherift This second font is a font that is very synonymous with the Mid-century Modern (MCM) era. A very distinctive form of the serif font of that era. Similar to the first font, this font also has 2 styles, namely: Regular and Bouncy. You can combine this font with the other two fonts in Vallery Hills. It could be Title, or Bodytext. And you can also combine two styles, namely: Regular and Bouncy. Try! 3. Vallery Hills Suns Sherift This last font is Sans Serif. Also has 2 styles like his two brothers, namely: Regular and Bouncy. The goal is actually the same. I am sure you are cooler to create a design that uses this font family. Well, there is one advantage of this font from its two siblings, which is that it has a feature, namely: SMALLCAPS. Which will be an option when you are bored with the mediocre shape or style of Lowercase. Try combining the Smallcaps with Uppercase or Lowercase. Must be cool! : D Oops, almost forgot. This font consists of several font formats, namely: OTF, TTF, and Webfonts. And of course everything is MULTILANGUAGE. OK, friends. That's all I can describe about the Vallery Hills Family. Hopefully it will please all of you. Cheers!

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.

QUALITYPE + VARIABLE FONT FAMILY "QualiTYPE" font extends its use by providing weights from "Thin" to "Black". Natural curves, ridges, and curved bodies grow in character as the font gains weight. "Qualitype" is an exciting serif font with contemporary twists. It has a distinctive sound that preserves the simplicity and elegance of classic "serif" fonts with a fresh, stylish rework. Her personality is bold and fills the space without shouting, she looks elegant and confident. The low X-height provides a great amount of visibility at all weights and is optically corrected for better readability. In the process of working on "Qualitype" we wanted to expand the functionality of the typeface a bit more, so after a few tries two different fonts were born: "Old", "Neo" and "italics" versions. "Qualitype" is perfect for use in magazines, in the fashion industry, in the branding of premium goods and services. "Qualitype" is quite versatile and suitable for use both in headings and in text arrays. In addition, we have done manual hinting in the typeface, and now it can be used with a clear conscience in the web and applications. “Quality” typeface consists of 56 styles: 2 style, 2 Shining, 7 weights and italics. Each typeface style consists of 860+ glyphs (except for the decoratives). “Qualitype” supports over 80+ languages. A variant version of the basic styles has been prepared for the most demanding users. Using the variability slider, you can adjust and select the individual thickness regardless of the current weight distribution. An important clarification - not all programs support variable technologies yet, you can check the support status here: https://v-fonts.com/support/. OPENTYPE FEATURES aalt, dnom, onum, pnum, tnum, lnum, numr, frac, zero, sing, sups, subs, case, c2sc, smack, salt, hist, titl, holing, dig, liga, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, kern FEATURE SUMMARY: - 4 Axes: 2 Style: Old and Neo. 7 weights: Thin, Light, Book, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black. 2 Shining: Dark and Lamp. Matching italics (12º) for all weights and style . - Matching small caps for all weights and widths. - Lining and old style figures (proportional and tabular). - Alternate characters (a, d, g, m, n, p, q, r, u, y). - Unlimeted fractions. - 24 Dingbats. - Extended language support. - Extended currency support. You can contact me at buyuksel@hotmail.com, pre-purchase and post-purchase with questions and for technical support. You can enjoy using it.

very traditional forms strongly slanted italic consistant proportions extraordinary ligatures swashes alternate letters alternate figures lower case l with a hooked “foot” Believe it or not, there are hardly any sans serif fonts in which the lower case letter l also has the hooked form of an l. Instead, we readers have to constantly distinguish whether we are seeing an uppercase I or a lower case l — just take a look at the word “Illinois”... The ingoFont Analogue was developed for exactly this reason. The intent: To create a pretty much »ordinary«, even classical font with its most striking characteristic being the inclusion of the “crooked l.” As a model, I used the »mother of all sans serifs«, Akzidenz Grotesk from Berthold, with its beginnings going back to the 19th century. Analogue is so to say a new interpretation of Akzidenz Grotesk from ingoFonts. All characters — following the model — have been newly designed. And if you want to emphasize the shape of the hooked foot even more, you can also activate the alternate styles for d, h, m, n (Style Set 1). Conversely, the alternate a somewhat softens the “hooked” impression (Style Set 2). The slanted versions — it isn’t truly a real cursive font — are noticeably stronger with 13° than the italics in comparable fonts, and were given a round e with a mind of its own which distinguishes itself considerably compared to the upright characters in the overall appearance of the font. More modern and formal solutions in detail were chosen for some of the characters, for example the M was given lightly slanted sides; the a reflects the curves of the s; the “feet” of a, l and t match; the flared legs of K and R became a “foot”, too. General proportions were carried over almost completely with no changes from Akzidenz Grotesk as well as the slanted trimming on the open forms of a, c, e, s; in comparison, C, G and S were given straight endings. Analogue contains many ligatures, even discretional ligatures, plus proportional, old style as well as tabular figures. All in all, at first sight Analogue brings back memories of the charm of its well-known predecessor; and yet, many small differences give Analogue an unmistakable certain something...

K-Type’s ‘Banks & Miles’ fonts are inspired by the geometric monoline lettering created for the British Post Office in 1970 by London design company Banks & Miles, a project initiated and supervised by partner John Miles, and which included ‘Double Line’ and ‘Single Line’ alphabets. The new digital typeface is a reworking and extension of both alphabets. Banks & Miles Double Line is provided in three weights – Light, Regular and Dark – variations achieved by adjusting the width of the inline. Banks & Miles Single Line develops the less used companion sans into a three weight family – Regular, Medium and Bold – each with an optically corrected oblique. Although the ‘Banks & Miles Double Line’ and ‘Banks & Miles Single Line’ fonts are based on the original Post Office letterforms, glyphs have been drawn from scratch and include numerous adjustments and impertinent alterations, such as narrowing the overly wide Z and shortening the leg of the K. Several disparities exist between the Post Office Double and Single Line styles, and K-Type has attempted to secure greater consistency between the two. For instance, a wide apex on the Double Line’s lowercase w is made pointed to match the uppercase W and the Single Line’s W/w. Also, the gently sloping hook of Single Line’s lowercase j is adopted for both families. The original Single Line’s R and k, which were incongruously simplified, are drawn in their more remarkable Double Line forms, and whilst the new Single Line fonts are modestly condensed where appropriate, rounded letters retain the essentially circular form of the Double Line. Many characters that were not part of the original project, such as @, ß, #, and currency symbols, have been designed afresh, and a full set of Latin Extended-A characters is included. The new fonts are a celebration of distinctive features like the delightful teardrop-shaped bowl of a,b,d,g,p and q, and a general level of elegance not always achieved by inline typefaces. The Post Office Double Line alphabet was used from the early 1970s, in different colours to denote the various parts of the Post Office business which included telecommunications, counter services and the Royal Mail. Even after the Post Office was split into separate businesses in the 1980s, Post Office Counters and Royal Mail continued use of the lettering, and a version can still be seen within the Royal Mail cruciform logo.

A sign of something better When designer Stuart de Rozario surveyed the fonts used in signage on London’s public transport systems, he reached a dead end. They seemed staid, sterile, lacking in personality, and ill-suited to use by modern brands. He was pointed in another direction entirely. ‘The driving force behind my thoughts was to design something more current and fresh without compromising legibility and clarity. A font with both personality and function, that’s versatile and large and small sizes, and effortless to read, but which also says something new.’ Speed reading Late for a meeting and can’t find your way? Trying to catch a flight? Lost in a hospital? Reading signs is a different business to reading a book or a newspaper. Text on signs needs to be deciphered quickly and effortlessly. So the legibility criteria for signage letterforms are different to those for normal reading, too. Throughout FS Millbank’s uppercase and lowercase alphabets, characters have been given features for extra definition, including: wide ink traps on the A, K, M, V, W, X and Y; a serifed i, accentuated spurs on the a, d, l u; and different x-height shapes on the b, g, p and q. Distinctive forms and generous, open internal shapes all help the quick reading of sign text, and wide, open terminals and counters allow similar letter shapes to be distinguished easily when viewed at different angles. Running down a corridor, maybe... Positive/negative Standard type tends to glow on the kind of dark backgrounds often used for signage, and look heavier than its true weight. To correct the imbalance caused by this optical trick, special weights of the typeface have to be drawn for these ‘negative’, light-on-dark applications. These are lighter than their comparable positive weights to overcome the ‘glow’ effect. After extensive tests of the negative weights, at all sizes, we achieved the right optical balance. Glowing, glowing, gone. Icons This wouldn’t be a signage typeface without its own set of icons, or symbols, to help people find what they’re looking for. So, to sit alongside the positive and negative fonts, we’ve created a comprehensive set of 172 icons, covering a wide range of applications from transport and user interface to information and directional. Designed within the typeface capital height, they sit on the baseline and are spaced centrally.

A comprehensive and faithful rendition of one of the finest metal typefaces of the 20th century. Rudolf Koch designed Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift (initially conceived as “Missal Schrift”, and later referred to also as “Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch”) between 1919 and 1925 for the Gebr. Klingspor Type Foundry in Offenbach am Main. It is an impressive textura typeface, being sharp, elegant, spiky, sensitive and noble at the same time. Some of its most notable features have to do with the delicate decorations, the thin but subtly swelling lines that parallel or bridge strokes in the capitals, the hairline endings that terminate each stroke in both the capitals and the lowercase letters, the subtle joining of hairlines to thicker strokes, and the tension of some of the transitional curves. Koch’s original design included two sets of capitals (normal and condensed); alternates for a, d, e, r, s and z, plus long s; short and long flourished finial forms for f and t; thirty-five ligatures; and eighteen decorative pieces (Zierstücke). All of these features, plus several additional ones for modern use (including the usual standard characters for typesetting in modern Western languages, additional alternates and ligatures, plus carefully coded Opentype features), have been thoroughly implemented to the highest and most lively level of detail in the present font, in the hope that the past greatness of Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift will finally step into the modern OpenType realm. The main sources used during the font design process were several pages from a specimen book issued by the Gebr. Klingspor Type Foundry in 1927. Other sources were as follows: Bain, P., and Shaw, P. (Eds.) (1998), Blackletter: Type and National Identity, New York: Princeton Architectural Press (p. 43); Hendlmeier, W. (1994), Kunstwerke der Schrift, Hannover: Bund für Deutsche Schrift und Sprache (pp. 56-7); Kapr, A. (1983), Schriftkunst, Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst (p. 453); Kapr, A. (1993), Fraktur - Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften, Mainz: Verlag Hermann Schmidt (pp. 124-5); and Klingspor, K. (1949), Über Schönheit von Schrift und Druck, Frankfurt am Main: Georg Kurt Schauer (pp. 136-7). Some public and private comments by renowned designer and design historian Paul Shaw have also influenced both the design and the description of the present font. Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Oldtype “Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift” Font Page.

Morris Sans is a newly revised and extended version of a small geometric family of typefaces originally produced by Morris Fuller Benton in 1930 for ATF. His initial design consisted of an alphabet of squared capital letters with a unique twist that characterized its appearance: corners with rounded exteriors and right-angle interiors. The types were intended for use in the fine print found on business cards, banking or financial forms, and contracts. But over the ensuing decades, this design became a popular element in all sorts of design environments, and several foundries revived the typeface in digital form. Since digital fonts are bicameral, with slots for both upper and lowercase letters, new cuts of the type opted filled the lowercase slots with small caps. In 2006, Linotype commissioned its own version of the typeface-an extension for 21st century use. Under the advisement of Linotype's type director Akira Kobayashi, Dan Reynolds redrew the uppercase and added an original lowercase for the first time. Additionally, a number of extras were brought into the fonts, including six figure styles (tabular and proportional lining figures, tabular and proportional oldstyle figures, and special tabular and proportional small cap" figures). Small caps, which have become an iconic element over time, are accessible in each font as an OpenType feature. To differentiate this version from the original, Linotype's new family is named Morris Sans, in honor of Morris Fuller Benton. All fonts in the Morris Sans family are OpenType Com fonts; they include a character set capable of setting 48 European languages that employ the Roman alphabet, including all Central and Eastern Europe languages, those from the Baltics, and Turkish. This glyph coverage extends to the small caps as well. Morris Sans is a wide typeface, especially in its regular widths; the condensed faces set a more conventional line of text. The new lowercase letters are less geometric than the uppercase, except for those that share the same basic forms (e.g., c, o, and s). Instead of following this geometric trend, the new lowercase tends to strengthen the humanist elements that were present in several characters from the original type, including the uppercase D and the figures 5, 6, and 9. Morris Sans also sports a number of glyphic flares, like the stroke found on the original uppercase Q. Morris Sans is a clean, modern design best suited for headlines, advertising, posters, expressive signage (especially on storefronts), and corporate identity work."

After doing this for so many years, one would think my fascination with the old history of writing would have mellowed out by now. The truth is that alongside being a calligraphy history buff, I'm a pop technology freak. Maybe even keener on the tech thing, since I just can't seem to get enough new gadgets. And after working with type technologies for so many years, I'm starting to think that writing and design technologies as we now know them, being about 2.5 post-computer generations, keep becoming more and more detached from what the very old humanity arts/tasks they essentially want to facilitate. In a world where command-z is a frequently used key combination, it’s difficult to justify expecting a Morris-made book or a Zaner-drawn sentence, but accidental artistic “mutations” become welcome, marketable features. When fluid pens were introduced, their liquid saturation influenced type design to a great extent almost overnight an influence professional designers tend to play down. Now round stroke endings are a common sight, and the saturation is so clean and measured, unlike any liquid-paper relationship possible in reality. Some designers even illustrate their work by overlaying perfect circles at stroke ends, in order to illustrate how “geometric” their work was. Because if it’s measured with precise geometry, it’s got to be meaningful design. And once in a while, by a total freak accident, the now-cherished mutations prove to have existed long before the technology that caused them. Rolling Pen was cued by just such a thing: A rounded, circular, roll-flowing calligraphy from the late nineteenth century seemingly one of those experimental takes on what inspired Business Penmanship, another font of mine. Looking at it now it certainly seems to be friendlier, more legible, and maybe even more practical and easier to execute than the standard business penmanship of those days, but I guess friendliness and simplicity were at odds with the stiff manner business liked to present itself back then, so that kind of thing remained buried in the professional penman’s oddities drawer. It would be quite a few years before all this curviness and rounding were thought of as symbolic of graceful movement, which brought such a flow closer to the idea of fine art. Even though in this case the accidental mutation just happens to not be a mutation after all, the whole technology-transforms-application argument still applies here. I'm almost sure “business” will be the last thing on people’s minds when they use this font today. One extreme example of that level of disconnect between origin and current application is shown here, with the so-called business penmanship strutting around in gloss and neon. Rolling Pen is another cup of mine that runneth over with alternates, swashes, ligatures, and other techy perks. To explore its full potential, please use it in a program that supports OpenType features for advanced typography. Enjoy the new Rolling Pen designed by Ale Paul with Neon’s visual poetry by Tomás García.

Antwerp On a visit to Belgium and the Netherlands while still an MA student at Reading University, Eleni Beveratou made some important discoveries. First, there was the letter ‘g’ from the Didot family seen at Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, which seemed “almost like a mistake”. Then there were strange details such as the serifs on the “l”, “h”, “k”, “b” 
and “d” in Egmont Cursive and other typefaces by Sjoerk Hendrik de Roos, found in volumes of poetry she picked up from a chaotic bookshop in Amsterdam. These were characters that stood out from the text but seemed to blend harmoniously with the rest 
of the letters. “And there it was, the spark. 
I decided to design a typeface that would capture the details of the process of writing.” A guiding hand Eleni shared her initial thoughts with Phil Garnham and Jason Smith. They liked what they saw in her tentative first sketches, and gave her the chance to develop her ideas further. Phil, in particular, provided valuable input as FS Olivia took shape. Eleni’s main influence – the handwritten – would give the font its character. “When creating a typeface,” says Eleni, “it’s fair to say that it reflects some of the designer’s personality. And that’s certainly the case with 
FS Olivia. “Although technology is part of my everyday life. I am a great admirer of traditional graphic design where you can touch and feel paper and ink.” Irregular “What I particularly like,” says Eleni, “is that a printed item can develop its own personality sometimes as a result of imperfections in the print. “FS Olivia has some of 
these characteristics as it’s inspired by handwriting, 
and yet it also includes some 
very modern features.” Feminine and fascinating, FS Olivia captures the expressive twists and turns of (the poet’s?) pen on paper, with low junctions, 
deep top serifs and semi-rounded edges. Round outstrokes contrast with 
the rough corners of the instroke, while strong diagonals and inclined serifs create a richly textured pattern. Polytonic It’s only fitting that there should be a version of this poetic font for one of the birthplaces of poetry and song. Eleni, who hails from Athens, developed an extensive range of glyphs that could be used for the Greek language, in both modern and ancient texts. For the latter, there is a version of Olivia for displaying polytonic Greek (a system that utilises a range of accents and “breathings”), which brings the 21st century technology of OpenType to the presentation of poetic texts from Ancient Greece. Just think what Homer could have done with that.

Milan-based Leftloft studio developed LFT Iro Sans, an expansive family that solves the significant, wide-ranging challenges of branding, wayfinding, pictographic language, and complex editorial use. LFT Iro Sans began as the clear and welcoming wayfinding project of San Siro stadium in Milan. Over time many other styles and weights have been added. LFT Iro Sans never finds itself outmatched by the task at hand. The primary aim was to design a technical typeface that was readable in any low visibility condition, for instance in a poorly lit area with awkward wall shapes and overhangs. This worked well for stadium and large lettering use, but other problems also needed to be addressed, such as complementary iconography. A location developer was left mixing — clashing, really — one type family with a different family of icons, resulting in a cobbled-together look which diluted the brand and the experience. They set out to radically simplify and clarify each shape and its meaning, accepting uniqueness as part of the final visual language. LFT Iro Sans pictograms answers the need for having a consistent and large group of icons, perfectly suited to the text typeface. As it concerns public spaces, this didn’t exist before. LFT Iro Sans incorporated a branding project too, so they decided to let LFT Iro Sans go out on a limb and created a unicase style that demands attention. Each unicase letter is a combination of the lowercase and capital form, quite noticeable in the ‘i’, ‘m’, ‘t’, and unique ‘d’ and ‘b’, balanced by more restrained forms of ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘c’, and ‘e’. LFT Iro Sans is not only a technical typeface, but, thanks to letters’ proportions, can also be used for editorial purposes. Assertive and economical in stature, the text weights are clear and assured. And a display version for headlines in Ultralight and Heavy (with italics) was developed for stunning headlines. For enthusiasts of every stripe, LFT Iro Sans can be a brand’s rallying cry with its arresting unicase, be a developer’s go-to pictogram choice, or set the most demanding editorial text in digital or print. With its many OpenType features, simplified pictogram commands (even available in Apple’s Pages and Microsoft Word), and a total of 30 targeted family members, LFT Iro Sans is a brilliant, easy choice. As with the rest of the TypeTogether catalogue, the complete LFT Iro Sans family, designed by Lefloft and developed by Octavio Pardo, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Antwerp On a visit to Belgium and the Netherlands while still an MA student at Reading University, Eleni Beveratou made some important discoveries. First, there was the letter ‘g’ from the Didot family seen at Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, which seemed “almost like a mistake”. Then there were strange details such as the serifs on the “l”, “h”, “k”, “b” 
and “d” in Egmont Cursive and other typefaces by Sjoerk Hendrik de Roos, found in volumes of poetry she picked up from a chaotic bookshop in Amsterdam. These were characters that stood out from the text but seemed to blend harmoniously with the rest 
of the letters. “And there it was, the spark. 
I decided to design a typeface that would capture the details of the process of writing.” A guiding hand Eleni shared her initial thoughts with Phil Garnham and Jason Smith. They liked what they saw in her tentative first sketches, and gave her the chance to develop her ideas further. Phil, in particular, provided valuable input as FS Olivia took shape. Eleni’s main influence – the handwritten – would give the font its character. “When creating a typeface,” says Eleni, “it’s fair to say that it reflects some of the designer’s personality. And that’s certainly the case with 
FS Olivia. “Although technology is part of my everyday life. I am a great admirer of traditional graphic design where you can touch and feel paper and ink.” Irregular “What I particularly like,” says Eleni, “is that a printed item can develop its own personality sometimes as a result of imperfections in the print. “FS Olivia has some of 
these characteristics as it’s inspired by handwriting, 
and yet it also includes some 
very modern features.” Feminine and fascinating, FS Olivia captures the expressive twists and turns of (the poet’s?) pen on paper, with low junctions, 
deep top serifs and semi-rounded edges. Round outstrokes contrast with 
the rough corners of the instroke, while strong diagonals and inclined serifs create a richly textured pattern. Polytonic It’s only fitting that there should be a version of this poetic font for one of the birthplaces of poetry and song. Eleni, who hails from Athens, developed an extensive range of glyphs that could be used for the Greek language, in both modern and ancient texts. For the latter, there is a version of Olivia for displaying polytonic Greek (a system that utilises a range of accents and “breathings”), which brings the 21st century technology of OpenType to the presentation of poetic texts from Ancient Greece. Just think what Homer could have done with that.

Oxford Street is a signage font that began as a redrawing of the capital letters used for street nameplates in the borough of Westminster in Central London. The nameplates were designed in 1967 by the Design Research Unit using custom lettering based on Adrian Frutiger’s Univers typeface, a curious combination of Univers 69 Bold Ultra Condensed, a weight that doesn’t seem to exist but which would flatten the long curves of glyphs such as O, C and D, and Universe 67 Bold Condensed with its more rounded lobes on glyphs like B, P and R. Letters were then remodelled to improve their use on street signs. Thin strokes like the inner diagonals of M and N were thickened to create a more monolinear alphabet; the high interior apexes were lowered and the wide joins thinned. The crossbar of the A was lowered, the K was made double junction, and the tail of the Q was given a baseline curve. K-Type Oxford Street continues the process of impertinent improvement and includes myriad minor adjustments and several more conspicuous amendments. The stroke junctions of M and N are further narrowed and their interior apexes modified. The middle apex of the W is narrowed and the glyph is a little more condensed. The C and S are drawn more open, terminals slightly shortened. The K-Type font adds a new lowercase which is also made more monolinear so better suited to signage, loosely based on Univers but also taking inspiration from the Transport typeface both in a taller x-height and character formation. The lowercase L has a curled foot, the k is double junctioned to match the uppercase, and terminals of a, c, e, g and s are drawn shorter for openness and clarity. A full repertoire of Latin Extended-A characters features low-rise diacritics that keep congestion to a minimum in multiple lines of text. The font tips the hat to signage history by including stylistic alternates for M, W and w that have the pointed middles of the earlier MOT street sign typeface. Incidentally, Alistair Hall (‘London Street Signs’, Batsford, 2020) notes that when the manufacturer of signs was changed in 2007, Helvetica Bold Condensed was substituted in place of the custom design, “an unfortunate case of an off-the-peg suit replacing a tailored one” and a blunder that has happily since been rectified, though offending nameplates can still be spotted by discerning font fans.

The Joanna® Nova design, by Monotype Studio designer Ben Jones, is an extensive update to Eric Gill’s original Joanna typefaces and brings this much admired – but underused – slab serif typeface into the 21st century. Joanna Nova features 18 fonts – more than twice as many as the original Joanna – with a wide range of weights including thin and ultra black, which were not available in the original design. Every glyph has been redrawn using a variety of reference sources, including Gill’s original sketches and the copper patterns used in Joanna’s initial production. When Jones set out to design Joanna Nova, he saw that the ‘real Joanna’ was not immediately evident. “Some of Gill’s original drawings have a sloped ‘M’; there is also a ‘K’ and ‘R’ with a curled leg and a letter ‘d’ without the flat bottom,” he explained. “Is this Joanna? Or is it the version used to print Gill’s Essay on Typography? Or is it the digital version with which most people are surely more familiar than any other version? Ultimately, I think, none of these and all of these were ‘Joanna’ because, as with any typeface, it is more the idea or concept behind the typeface that makes it what it is. My approach was to create a version of Joanna that appears in your mind when you think of Joanna.” Jones noted that one of the most distinguishing aspects of Joanna is the italics; and that, for reasons unknown, many of the characters in the current versions are much more condensed than those in the hand-set fonts of metal type., The newer designs being almost unusable at small sizes. The italics in Joanna Nova have been reworked to be more legible and closer to their original widths. Joanna Nova expands the original Joanna in several ways that open up new typographic possibilities, These additions include several new weights, support for Greek and Cyrillic scripts, small caps for all scripts in both upright and italic styles, several numeral options and a host of context-sensitive ligatures. The Joanna Nova typeface family is part of the new Eric Gill Series, drawing on Monotype's heritage to remaster and expand and revitalize Eric Gill’s body of work, with more weights, more characters and more languages to meet a wide range of design requirements. The series also brings to life new elements inspired by some of Gill’s unreleased work, discovered in Monotype’s archive of original typeface drawings and materials of the last century.

TT Tsars useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options The TT Tsars font family is a collection of serif display titling fonts that are stylized to resemble the fonts of the beginning, the middle and the end of the XVIII century. The project is based on title fonts, that is, the fonts that were used to design book title pages. The idea for the project TT Tsars was born after a small study of the historical development of the Cyrillic type and is also based on Abram Shchitsgal’s book "Russian Civil Type". At the very beginning of the project, we had developed a basic universal skeleton for the forms of all characters in all subfamilies of the family, and later on, we added styles, visual features, artifacts and other nuances typical of the given period onto the skeleton. Yes, from the historical accuracy point of view it might be that such an approach is not always justified, but we have achieved our goal and as a result, we have created perfectly combinable serifs that can be used to style an inscription for a certain time period. The TT Tsars font family consists of 20 fonts: 5 separate subfamilies, each of which consists of 4 fonts. Each font contains 580 glyphs, except for the TT Tsars E subfamily, in which each font consists of 464 characters. Instead of lowercase characters in the typeface, small capitals are used, which also suggests that the typeface is rather a display than text one. In TT Tsars you can find a large number of ligatures (for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets), arrows and many useful OpenType features, such as: frac, ordn, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, case, onum, tnum, pnum, lnum, salt (ss01), dlig. Time-related characteristics of the subfamilies are distributed as follows: • TT Tsars A—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars B—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars C—the middle of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars D—the end of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars E—conditionally the beginning of the 18th century (only Latin) TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B families (both the beginning of the 18th century) have different starting points: for TT Tsars A it is Latin, for TT Tsars B it is Cyrillic. The development of the TT Tsars A family began in Latin, the font is based on the royal serif Romain du Roi. The Cyrillic alphabet is harmoniously matched to the Latin. The development of the TT Tsars B family began in Cyrillic, which is based on a Russian civil type. Characteristic elements are the curved one-sided serifs of triangular characters (A, X, Y), drops appear in the letter ?, the middle strokes ? and P are adjacent to the main stroke. Latin was drawn to pair with Cyrillic. It is still based on the royal serif, but somewhat changed: the letters B and P are closed and the upper bar of the letter A rose. This was done for the visual combination of Cyrillic and Latin and at the same time to make a distinction between TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B. TT Tsars C is now the middle of the 18th century. Cyrillic alphabet itself did not stand still and evolved, and by the middle of the 18th century, its forms have changed and become to look the way they are shown in this font family. Latin forms are following the Cyrillic. The figures are also slightly modified and adapted to the type design. In TT Tsars C, Cyrillic and Latin characters are created in parallel. A distinctive feature of the Cyrillic alphabet in TT Tsars C is the residual influence of the flat pen. This is noticeable in such signs as ?, ?, K. The shape of the letters ?, ?, ?, ? is very characteristic of the period. In the Latin alphabet, a characteristic leg appears at the letter R. For both languages, there is a typical C characterized by an upper serif and the appearance of large, even somewhat bolding serifs on horizontals (T, E, ?, L). TT Tsars D is already the end of the 18th century when with the development of printing, the forms of some Cyrillic characters had changed and turned into new skeletons of letters that we transposed into Latin. The figures were also stylized. In this font, both Cyrillic and Latin are stylistically executed with different serifs and are thus logically separated. The end of the century is characterized by the reduction of decorative elements. Straight, blueprint-like legs of the letters ?, R, K, ?. Serifs are very pronounced and triangular. E and ? are one-sided on the middle horizontal line. A very characteristic C with two serifs appears in the Latin alphabet. TT Tsars E is a steampunk fantasy typeface, its theme is a Latinized Russian ?ivil type (also referred to as Grazhdansky type which emerged after Peter the Great’s language reform), which includes only the Latin alphabet. There is no historical analog to this typeface, it is exclusively our reflections on the topic of what would have happened if the civil font had developed further and received a Latin counterpart. We imagined such a situation in which the civil type was exported to Europe and began to live its own life.

The name of this font brings back memories of an old fried chicken restaurant in Willow Springs Illinois circa 1960’s and 1970’s, my family would all get in the car and take a long drive down to an old country road Illionis Rt 171 through a forest preserve where we’d come upon the old Willowbrook motel with a bar and restaurant next door. The restaurant was called Kegal’s, when you entered the building you had to walk through the smoky bar first to get to the restaurant, I can still see the hard wood floors with all the finish worn off from decades of foot traffic. Up until the mid 1960’s Kegal’s used to raise their own chickens behind the restaurant, back then fried chicken in the Midwest was either coated in flour or bread crumbs, Kegal’s was covered in a beautiful layer of golden bread crumbs. Before your meal arrived they’d bring a basket of dinner rolls along with crackers, bread sticks and country butter, on the side they’d serve coleslaw with a vinegar sauce, which is very common in the Midwest, the first time you try it your face puckers up like you just sucked on a lemon but you get used it over time. After waiting for what seemed like forever to a child the waitress comes out of the kitchen with a huge tray of that golden deliciousness and your mouth begins to water, in her other hand was another tray filled to overflowing with crinkle cut french fries all made by hand, I’d eat a hole handful of those french fries first then take a bite of that tender juicy farm raised chicken. Today a fine Italian restaurant occupies the old Kegal’s building and the motel is long gone, only my fond memories remain. Fast forward to 2020 and FontMesa has just made some Fried Chicken as an eight weight type font family with alternates. With the Fried Chicken slab serif font family we’ve broken some rules by removing a few of the slabs on certain letters for a unique homemade look. Fried Chicken is perfect for your next product label, t-shirt design, logo, headline or cookbook cover. Treat yourself to some good ol’ Fried Chicken today.

In the late 1930s, old Egyptiennes (or Italiennes) returned to the collective consciousness of European printers and type houses — perhaps because political news were front a centre, especially in France where Le Figaro newspaper was seeing record circulation numbers. In 1939 both Monotype and Lettergieterij Amsterdam thought of the same idea: Make a new typeface similar to the reverse stress slab shapes that make up the titles of newspapers like Le Figaro and Le Frondeur. Both foundries intended to call their new type Figaro. Monotype finished theirs first, so they ended up with the name, and their type was already published when Stefan Schlesinger finished his take for the Amsterdam foundry. Schlesinger’s type was renamed Hidalgo (Spanish for a lower nobleman, ‘son of something’) and published in 1940 as ‘a very happy variation on an old motif’. Although it wasn’t a commercial success at the time, it was well received and considered subtler and more refined than the similar types available, Figaro and Playbill. In the Second World War, the Germans banned the use of the type, and Hidalgo never really recovered. Upon closer inspection, Schlesinger’s work on Hidalgo was much more Euro-sophisticated and ahead of its time than the too-wooden cut of Figaro and the thick tightness of Playbill. It has a modern high contrast, a squarer skeleton, contour cuts that work similarly outside and inside, and airy and minimal solutions to the more complicated shapes like G, K, M, N, Q and W. It is also much more aware of, and more accommodating to, the picket-fence effect the thick top slabs create in setting. Basilio (named after the signing teacher in Mozart’s Figaro) is the digital revival and major expansion of Hidalgo. With nearly 600 glyphs, it boasts Pan-European language support (most Latin languages, as well as Cyrillic and Greek), and a few OpenType tricks that gel it all together to make a very useful design tool. Stefan Schlesigner was born in Vienna in 1896. He moved to the Netherlands in 1925, where he worked for Van Houten’s chocolate, Metz department store, printing firm Trio and many other clients. He died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944. Digital revivals and expansions of two of his other designs, Minuet and Serena, have also been published by Canada Type.

Divina Proportione is based from the original studies from Luca Pacioli. Luca Pacioli was born in 1446 or 1447 in Sansepolcro (Tuscany) where he received an abbaco education. Luca Pacioli was born in 1446 or 1447 in Sansepolcro (Tuscany) where he received an abbaco education. [This was education in the vernacular (i.e. the local tongue) rather than Latin and focused on the knowledge required of merchants.] He moved to Venice around 1464 where he continued his own education while working as a tutor to the three sons of a merchant. It was during this period that he wrote his first book -- a treatise on arithmetic for the three boys he was tutoring. Between 1472 and 1475, he became a Franciscan friar. In 1475, he started teaching in Perugia and wrote a comprehensive abbaco textbook in the vernacular for his students during 1477 and 1478. It is thought that he then started teaching university mathematics (rather than abbaco) and he did so in a number of Italian universities, including Perugia, holding the first chair in mathematics in two of them. He also continued to work as a private abbaco tutor of mathematics and was, in fact, instructed to stop teaching at this level in Sansepolcro in 1491. In 1494, his first book to be printed, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita, was published in Venice. In 1497, he accepted an invitation from Lodovico Sforza ("Il Moro") to work in Milan. There he met, collaborated with, lived with, and taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci. In 1499, Pacioli and Leonardo were forced to flee Milan when Louis XII of France seized the city and drove their patron out. Their paths appear to have finally separated around 1506. Pacioli died aged 70 in 1517, most likely in Sansepolcro where it is thought he had spent much of his final years. De divina proportione (written in Milan in 1496–98, published in Venice in 1509). Two versions of the original manuscript are extant, one in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the other in the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire in Geneva. The subject was mathematical and artistic proportion, especially the mathematics of the golden ratio and its application in architecture. Leonardo da Vinci drew the illustrations of the regular solids in De divina proportione while he lived with and took mathematics lessons from Pacioli. Leonardo's drawings are probably the first illustrations of skeletonic solids, an easy distinction between front and back. The work also discusses the use of perspective by painters such as Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forlì, and Marco Palmezzano. As a side note, the "M" logo used by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is taken from De divina proportione. “ The Ancients, having taken into consideration the rigorous construction of the human body, elaborated all their works, as especially their holy temples, according to these proportions; for they found here the two principal figures without which no project is possible: the perfection of the circle, the principle of all regular bodies, and the equilateral square. ” —De divina proportione

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.