The font superfamily Vianova contains each 12 weights of Sans and Slab and 8 weights of the Serif style. The design from Jürgen Adolph dates back into the 1990s, when he studied Communication Design with Werner Schneider as a professor at the Fachhochschule Stuttgart. Adolph started his carrier 1995 at Michael Conrad & Leo Burnett. He was responsible for trade marks as Adidas, BMW, Germanwings and Merz. He has been honored as a member of the Art Directors Club (ADC) with more than 100 awards. On February 26, 2014, Jürgen Adolph wrote the following: “I was already interested in typography, even when I could not yet read. Letterforms, for instance, above storefronts downtown, had an irresistible appeal for me. Therefore, it is probably not a coincidence that, after finishing high school, I began an apprenticeship with a provider of signage and neon-advertising in Saarbrücken, and – in the late 1980s – I placed highest in my field in my state. When I continued my studies in communications design in Wiesbaden, I was introduced to the highest standards in calligraphy and type design. “Typography begins with writing” my revered teacher, Professor Werner Schneider, taught me. Indefatigably, he supported me during the development of my typeface “Vianova” – which began as part of a studies program – and accompanied me on my journey even when its more austere letterforms did not necessarily conform to his own aesthetic ideals. The completely analogue development of the types – designed entirely with ink and opaque white on cardboard – covered several academic semesters. In order to find its appropriate form, writing with a flat nib was used. Once, when I showed some intermediate designs to Günter Gerhard Lange, who occasionally honored our school with a visit, he commented in his own inimitable manner: “Not bad what you are doing there. But if you want to make a living with this, you might as well order your coffin now.” At that time, I was concentrating mainly on the serif version. But things reached a different level of complexity when, during a meeting with Günther Flake which had been arranged by Professor Schneider, he suggested that I enlarge the offering with a sans and slab version of the typeface. So – a few more months went by, but at the same time, Elsner+Flake already began with the digitilization process. In order to avoid the fate predicted by Günter Gerhard Lange, I went into “servitude” in the advertising industry (Michael Conrad & Leo Burnett) and design field (Rempen& Partner, SchömanCorporate, Claus Koch) and worked for several years as the Creative Director at KW43 in Düsseldorf concerned with corporate design development and expansion (among others for A. Lange & Söhne, Deichmann, Germanwings, Langenscheidt, Montblanc.”

Rolphie can be your go-to sans-serif, with 16 easy-to-read weights and 10 versions for each weight, and the subtlety of choice that represents. The versions contained in each weight are: Regular; Condensed; Half-Condensed; Expanded; Small Capitals: and their italic counterparts. (At heavier weights particularly it seemed to be justified to have two Condensed versions). Plus there's 20 funky versions with the letters all shook up (that would make a good title for a song), or jumbled around, plus some Shadow, Doubled-Up, College, and other FX versions. In total there's 180 variations, giving a comprehensive selection of both standard and funky fonts, and that subtle degree of choice of weight. To make things easier, the weights are put in ascending numerical order from 01 to 16, and the FX versions have been stuck in the 80s and 90s, (like two musicians I know). There are grouped packages available for certain weights (which have 10 fonts in them) and the complete family package (180 fonts) which represent better value than the individual fonts, and there's a basic package containing the Normal and Italic versions of all 16 weights (32 fonts). A limit of 5 sub-family packages has been imposed, unfortunately, which precludes a more comprehensive selection. To let you know what's in the font that you might otherwise never know about . . . With Discretionary Ligatures on, you get special characters if you type Mc St. Rd. Bd. Ave. c/o No. (p) (P) - include the full-stop/period. With Stylistic Alternates switched on, you get plenty of extra characters - including a WiFi symbol (type Wifi or WiFi) / bullet numbers instead of ordinary numbers / that different U-dieresis / special characters for c/o No. Mc / an upside down ~ / a huge bullet, and different forms for cent, dollar, percent, per-thousand. As you'd expect, there's all the accented characters for all Western European scripts using Latin letters, and standard ligatures, plus other Open Type features including Class Kerning, Slashed-Zero, Historical Forms, Sub- and Superscript numbers, fractions for halves, thirds and quarters, Ornamental forms giving bullet numbers, etc. There's also the main mathematical operators, symbols like card-suits and male/female signs and so on, and some more obscure stuff like schwa and O-horn, U-horn - and there's lots more if you can Access All Alternates. Much will depend on what your software recognises. The Small Caps versions have (intentionally) lost the ligatures for lower case ff, fi, fj, fl, fr, fu, ffi, ffj, ffl, ffr, ffu. The names for the weights are not absolute - we had to make up some names to make them stretch out to sixteen - so rather - see them as relative to each other, being in ascending numerical order by weight.

The font superfamily Vianova contains each 12 weights of Sans and Slab and 8 weights of the Serif style. The design from Jürgen Adolph dates back into the 90th, when he studied Communication Design with Werner Schneider as a professor at the Fachhochschule Stuttgart. Adolph started his carrier 1995 at Michael Conrad & Leo Burnett. He was responsible for trade marks as Adidas, BMW, Germanwings and Merz. He has been honoured as a member of the Art Director Club (ADC) with more than 100 awards. On February 26, 2014, Jürgen Adolph wrote the following: “I was already interested in typography, even when I could not yet read. Letterforms, for instance, above storefronts downtown, had an irresistible appeal for me. Therefore, it is probably not a coincidence that, after finishing high school, I began an apprenticeship with a provider of signage and neon-advertising in Saarbrücken, and – in the late 1980s – I placed highest in my field in my state. When I continued my studies in communications design in Wiesbaden, I was introduced to the highest standards in calligraphy and type design. “Typography begins with writing” my revered teacher, Professor Werner Schneider, taught me. Indefatigably, he supported me during the development of my typeface “Vianova” – which began as part of a studies program – and accompanied me on my journey even when its more austere letterforms did not necessarily conform to his own aesthetic ideals. The completely analogue development of the types – designed entirely with ink and opaque white on cardboard – covered several academic semesters. In order to find its appropriate form, writing with a flat nib was used. Once, when I showed some intermediate designs to Günter Gerhard Lange, who occasionally honored our school with a visit, he commented in his own inimitable manner: “Not bad what you are doing there. But if you want to make a living with this, you might as well order your coffin now.” At that time, I was concentrating mainly on the serif version. But things reached a different level of complexity when, during a meeting with Günther Flake which had been arranged by Professor Schneider, he suggested that I enlarge the offering with a sans and slab version of the typeface. So – a few more months went by, but at the same time, Elsner+Flake already began with the digitilization process. In order to avoid the fate predicted by Günter Gerhard Lange, I went into “servitude” in the advertising industry (Michael Conrad & Leo Burnett) and design field (Rempen& Partner, SchömanCorporate, Claus Koch) and worked for several years as the Creative Director at KW43 in Düsseldorf concerned with corporate design development and expansion (among others for A. Lange & Söhne, Deichmann, Germanwings, Langenscheidt, Montblanc.”

Eclectic FS Siena is a typeface with history, and not just in the sense of having its origins in classical Roman lettering. Fontsmith founder Jason Smith first committed it to tracing paper while still at college, instinctively redrawing letterforms based on Hermann Zapf’s Optima according to ‘what felt right’. When Krista Radoeva took up the challenge to edit and extend the typeface, she and Jason were determined to preserve its subtly nonconformist and eclectic spirit. Like a great dish, there are individual components throughout the character set that all add flavour, and need to be balanced in order to work together. The smooth connection of the ‘h’ ‘m’ ‘n’ and ‘r’ contrasts with the corners of the ‘b’ and ‘p’. The instantly recognisable double-storey ‘a’ – the starting point of the design – contrasts with the single-storey ‘g’ and the more cursive ‘y’. And only certain characters – ‘k’, ‘w’, ‘v’ and ‘x’ in the lowercase and ‘K’, ‘V’, ‘W’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ in the caps – have curved strokes. Transitional FS Siena is a contrasted sans-serif typeface, blending classical elegance and modern simplicity. Its construction and proportions are descended from classical broad-nib calligraphy and humanist typefaces, with a high contrast between the thick and thin strokes. The angle of the contrast, though, is vertical, more in the character of pointed-nib calligraphy and modernist typefaces. This vertical stress helps to give FS Siena a strong, cultured presence on the page. Idiosyncratic italics The italics for FS Siena were developed by Krista to complement the roman upper and lower-case alphabets first drawn by Jason. Many of the letterforms are built differently to their roman counterparts: there’s a single-tier ‘a’, a looped ‘k’ and connections more towards the middle of stems, such as in the ‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘u’. These distinctions, along with generally much narrower forms than the roman, give the italics extra emphasis within body copy, where the two are side-by-side. In editorial, especially, the combination can be powerful. To cap it all… In his original draft of the typeface, Jason found inspiration in Roman square capitals of the kind most famously found on Trajan’s Column in Rome. In keeping with those ancient inscriptions, he intended the capitals of FS Siena to also work in all-upper-case text, in logotypes for luxury consumer brands and property developments, for example. A little added space between the upper-case letters lets the capitals maintain their poise in a caps-only setting, while still allowing them to work alongside the lower-case letterforms. The caps-only setting also triggers a feature called case punctuation, which adapts hyphens, brackets and other punctuation to complement the all-caps text.

The font Speech Bubbles offers a convenient way to integrate text and image. While the font can be used to design comics, it also gives the typographer a tool to make text speak – to give words conversational dynamics and to emphasize visually the sound of the message. The font includes a total of seventy outlines and seventy bubble backgrounds selected from a survey of historic forms. What follows is a discussion of my process researching and developing the font, as well as a few user suggestions. My work on the Speech Bubbles font began with historic research. My first resource was a close friend who is a successful German comic artist. I had previously worked with him to transform his lettering art into an OpenType font. This allowed his publishing house to easily translate cartoons from German to other languages without the need to use another font, like Helvetica rounded. My friend showed me the most exciting, outstanding and graphically appealing speech bubbles from his library. I looked at early strips from Schulz (Peanuts), Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobes), Hergé (TinTin), Franquin, as well as Walt Disney. The most inspiring was the early Krazy Kat and Ignatz (around 1915) from George Herriman. I also studied 1980’s classics Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s Ronin and Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vandetta. Contemporary work was also a part of my research—like Liniers from Macanudo and work of Ralf König. With this overview in mind I began to work from scratch. I tried to distill the typical essence of each author’s or era’s speech bubbles style into my font. In the end I limited my work down to the seventy strongest images. An important aspect of the design process was examining each artist’s speech bubble outlines. In some cases they are carefully inked, as in most of the 80’s work. In others, such as with Herriman, they are fast drawn with a rough impetus. The form can be dynamic and round (Schultz) with a variable stroke width, or straight inked with no form contrast (Hergé). Since most outlines also carry the character of the tool that they are made with, I chose to separate the outline from the speech bubble fill-in or background. 
This technical decision offers interesting creative possibilities. For example, the font user can apply a slight offset from fill-in to outline, as it is typical to early comic strips, in which there are often print misalignments. Also, rather than work in the classic white background with black outline, one can work with colors. Many tonal outcomes are possible by contrasting the fill-in and outline color. The Speech Bubbles font offers a dynamic and quick way to flavor information while conveying a message. How is something said? Loudly? With a tint of shyness? Does a rather small message take up a lot of space? The font’s extensive survey of historic comic designs in an assembly that is useful for both pure comic purposes or more complex typographic projects. Use Speech Bubbles to give your message the right impact in your poster, ad or composition.

Iza W and Intellecta Design are proud to announce Invitation Script, a modern and clean revival of the classic work of the Portuguese master penman Manuel de Andrade de Figueiredo, whose work can be seen in “Nova Escola para aprender a ler, escrever, e contar (...)'' (1722). Invitation Script is the third script superfamily published by Intellecta Design, after Penabico and Van den Velde Script. Invitation Script has original letters designed by Iza W. Creative direction and core programming were provided by Paulo W. Chyrllene K assisted with some work on unusual and archaic styles, resulting in a special font - Invitation Script Archaic (soon available). Invitation started out from Andrade’s script style and evolved into a voluptuous script font family. The result is a typeface ideal for beautiful headings, signatures, art work typography, titles and short pieces of hand-lettered text. Invitation family includes two multi-table Opentype fonts, three supplementary fonts for ornaments and fleurons, and the Archaic font with some of the Andrade’s original characters. Embedded in the regular fonts are additional sets of letters. Over 40 variations are available for certain letters via the Special Sets Opentype table. The two regular versions of Invitation Script contains the following: (i) An extensive set of ligatures providing letterform variations that make eye-popping designs or simulate real handwriting. These are accessible via contextual alternates and other open-type features. (ii) Many stylistic alternates for each letter (upper and lowercase, accessed via the glyph palette, encoded in the ranges of the Special Set Opentype feature). Since there are over 1100 glyphs in each font, we suggest using the glyph palette. (iii) A set of ornaments and fleurons accessed with the glyph palette or using the Ornaments feature. Additional ornaments can be found in the two Invitation Script Ornaments fonts. (iv) Initial and final letters with artistic variations accessible using the initial and final form open-type features. (v) Major kerning work: over 6000 kerning pairs, hand-set to avoid collisions and to create intricate combinations of letters, using swashes and other resources. These powerful features are all accessible in InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXpress and similar software. We recommend exploring the magic of this font using the glyph palette. Our sample illustrations and PDF brochures showcase the power and pizzazz of this calligraphic script. Let your imagination go wild and use Invitation Script in ways that Andrade could not have foreseen. In non-OpenType-savvy applications, Invitation Script is still an exceptionally beautiful calligraphic typeface that stands up to the competition. The regular fonts contains the complete Latin alphabet, including Central European, Vietnamese, Baltic and Turkish, with a full set of diacritics and punctuation marks. --- 1 FIGUEIREDO, Manuel de Andrade de, 1670-1735 Nova Escola para aprender a ler, escrever, e contar. Offerecida á Augusta Magestade do Senhor Dom Joaõ V. Rey de Portugal. Primeira parte / por Manoel de Andrade de Figueiredo, Mestre desta Arte nas cidades de Lisboa Occidental, e Oriental. - Lisboa Occidental: na Officina de Bernardo da Costa de Carvalho, Impressor do Serenissimo Senhor Infante, 1722. - [18], 156 p., 44 f. grav. a buril : il., ; 2º (31 cm)Engraved royal coat of arms supported by angels over the city of Lisbon, engraved portrait of the author (both of the foregoing by Bernard Picart), (12)ff., 156pp., engraved calligraphic section title, 44 engraved plates. Wood-engraved culs-de-lampe and lettrines. Sm. folio. “Andrade de Figueiredo was born in Espirito Santo, where his father was Governor of the ‘Capitania.’ The fine portrait is dated 1721 and is showing Figueiredo at the age of 48. He was an eminent calligrapher and a creator of the Portuguese handwriting until the reign of Don José I (ca. 1755). His work follows the style of the great Italian masters in its use of clubbed ascenders and descenders, and of Diaz Morante, the famous Spanish writing master, in its very elaborate show of command of hand. By his contemporaries, he was known as the ‘Morante portugues’” (Ekström). “Ce livre est un manuel, composé de quatre parties, destiné à apprendre à lire, à écrire, à conter ainsi que l’orthographe. Les planches comportent des examples d’écritures, d’alphabets et de textes ornés de remarquables traits de plume exécutés d’une main sûre et enjouée” (Jammes).

The Tecn@ Dark&Light Triangle Background Nomenclature Font family is differentiated by the direction of the triangle tip in the 4 cardinal points. The family were designed to head, enumerate, indicate or highlight writings or design plans, for this reason, the characters are available only in capital letters and some signs or symbols that can serve such purposes. A triangle or empty character is included so that the user can use it overlaying any character of his choice or to be used alone. What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Why do we use it? It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like). Where does it come from? Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32. The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham. Where can I get some? There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.

ITC Johnston is the result of the combined talents of Dave Farey and Richard Dawson, based on the work of Edward Johnston. In developing ITC Johnston, says London type designer Dave Farey, he did “lots of research on not only the face but the man.” Edward Johnston was something of an eccentric, “famous for sitting in a deck chair and carrying toast in his pockets.” (The deck chair was his preferred furniture in his own living room; the toast was so that he’d always have sustenance near at hand.) Johnston was also almost single-handedly responsible, early in this century, for the revival in Britain of the Renaissance calligraphic tradition of the chancery italic. His book Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering (with its peculiar extraneous comma in the title) is a classic on its subject, and his influence on his contemporaries was tremendous. He is perhaps best remembered, however, for the alphabet that he designed in 1916 for the London Underground Railway (now London Transport), which was based on his original “block letter” model. Johnston’s letters were constructed very carefully, based on his study of historical writing techniques at the British Museum. His capital letters took their form from the best classical Roman inscriptions. “He had serious rules for his sans serif style,” says Farey, “particularly the height-to-weight ratio of 1:7 for the construction of line weight, and therefore horizontals and verticals were to be the same thickness. Johnston’s O’s and C’s and G’s and even his S’s were constructions of perfect circles. This was a bit of a problem as far as text sizes were concerned, or in reality sizes smaller than half an inch. It also precluded any other weight but medium ‘ any weight lighter or heavier than his 1:7 relationship.” Johnston was famously slow at any project he undertook, says Farey. “He did eventually, under protest, create a bolder weight, in capitals only ‘ which took twenty years to complete.” Farey and his colleague Richard Dawson have based ITC Johnston on Edward Johnston’s original block letters, expanding them into a three-weight type family. Johnston himself never called his Underground lettering a typeface, according to Farey. It was an alphabet meant for signage and other display purposes, designed to be legible at a glance rather than readable in passages of text. Farey and Dawson’s adaptation retains the sparkling starkness of Johnston’s letters while combining comfortably into text. Johnston’s block letter bears an obvious resemblance to Gill Sans, the highly successful type family developed by Monotype in the 1920s. The young Eric Gill had studied under Johnston at the London College of Printing, worked on the Underground project with him, and followed many of the same principles in developing his own sans serif typeface. The Johnston letters gave a characteristic look to London’s transport system after the First World War, but it was Gill Sans that became the emblematic letter form of British graphic design for decades. (Johnston’s sans serif continued in use in the Underground until the early ‘80s, when a revised and modernized version, with a tighter fit and a larger x-height, was designed by the London design firm Banks and Miles.) Farey and Dawson, working from their studio in London’s Clerkenwell, wanted to create a type family that was neither a museum piece nor a bastardization, and that would “provide an alternative of the same school” to the omnipresent Gill Sans. “These alphabets,” says Farey, referring to the Johnston letters, “have never been developed as contemporary styles.” He and Dawson not only devised three weights of ITC Johnston but gave it a full set of small capitals in each weight ‘ something that neither the original Johnston face nor the Gill faces have ‘ as well as old-style figures and several alternate characters.