Solantra is a solidly crafted handwritten script. I’ve long felt that beautiful writing is more pleasing to the eye than the more attention grabbing swashes and flourishes. That being said, both have their role in design and Solantra has a large slice of each. Solantra combines vintage style handwriting with all its quirks and English Roundhand of that same era. The result is a solid setting script filled with charm and personality. With default Adobe Illustrator settings for Ligatures and Contextual Alternates active, the vintage charm is in full display. Want to add more flair? There are loads of more embellished letters inside the full version. Solantro takes into account how scripts are actually written so that connections from letter to letter are more fluid and rhythmic than the average script font. In natural script/handwriting most letters end at the bottom right and move up to connect with the next. Some letters like o, v, and w, however; end at the top right. Rather than force these letters to dip down and go back up they should ideally connect from that upper right point. This is accomplished through a series of alternate letters and ligatures with extensive contextual feature programming. So, for example, you might get one version of a ligature in the middle of a word and a different one at the beginning or end of that word. Solantra also takes into account another often overlooked feature of natural handwriting. When you write you inevitably pick your pen up from the paper at times. This is often just to reposition the hand, but in the days of writing with dip pens this was also needed to attain a fresh supply of ink. Having these occasional breaks in connections makes the writing less static and more rhythmic. While the Basic versions are limited to a standard character set and several ligatures and alternates for better settings of text, the full pro versions contains 1292 glyphs and an abundance of features. Even with numbers there are options like Oldstyle numbers, fractions, and ordinals. Central European language support is included as well as some select ligatures that use accents. To see more on the technical aspects and instructions on using Solantra, please check out the user’s guide in the Gallery section. **Note: The Pro versions of Solantra which do not have the word “Basic” attached to the title, have everything in them. So if you license a Pro version there is no need to get the Basic versions.

Inspired by the type elements of 17th century Dutch mapmaking, Boncaire Titling provides you with a historic yet adventurous look for your library. This addition from insigne found its muse in a map of Curacao by Dutch cartographer Gerard Van Keulen, a member of the prosperous Van Keulen family from Amsterdam, who were engaged in the manufacture of maps for seafaring. Much thanks on this project goes to The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, housed at the Boston Public Library. Through the centers kindness, I was able to view a number of period maps in person and to meet with curators, who explained more about the Van Keulen family and the way maps of the period were created. While I studied the maps, I narrowed in on some of the original types unique idiosyncrasies. For instance, the long, exaggerated serifs, which give the forms a sense of stability, aid in the faces legibility--largely a byproduct of the engraving method that was used to create the metal plates for manufacturing these maps. In creating Boncaire Titling, I decided to capture these unique idiosyncrasies, embracing the character of the engravings rather than removing them entirely through over-refining the forms. The result is an elegant family with far more than seafaring potential. This font has a full range of six weights, from thin to black. It also includes a wide variety of OpenType alternates. All insigne fonts are fully loaded with OpenType features. Boncaire Titling is also equipped for complex professional typography, including alternates, smaller titling caps and plenty of alts, including normalized capitals and lowercase letters. There are over 30 autoreplacing ligatures, and the face includes a number of numeral sets, including fractions, old-style and lining figures with superiors and inferiors. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. You can find these features demonstrated in the .pdf brochure. Boncaire Titling also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages, including Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Boncaire Titling supports over 40 languages that use the extended Latin script, making the new addition a great choice for multi-lingual publications and packaging. Maps are fascinating; they come with the promise of treasure to be uncovered. Examining the map itself, too, you can find great wealth in the details so artfully condensed to that single piece of paper--details carried over into this new insigne font. For your next project, explore the imagination potential in Boncaire Titling.

Probably as a reaction to the pragmatism of modernist design, the seventies saw an explosion of buoyant, vivacious typography. Psychedelia fueled a return to the melting, lush shapes of Art Nouveau while Pop culture embraced the usage of funky, joyful lettering for advertising, product design and tv titling. New low-cost technologies like photo-lettering and rub-on transfer required new fonts to be expressive rather than legible, pushing designers to produce, bubbly, high-spirited masterpieces, where geometric excess and calligraphic inventions melted joyfully. Freitag is Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini's homage to this era and its typography. His starting point was the design of a heavy sans serif with humanist condensed proportions, flared stems and reverse contrast, that generated both the main family, and a variant display subfamily. The main typeface family slowly builds the tension and design exuberance along the weight axis - a bit like our desire for the weekend increases during the week. In Light and Medium weights the font shows a more controlled, medium-contrast design, tightly spaced for maximum display effect. The Book weight follows the same design but uses a more relaxed letter spacing to allow usage in smaller sizes and short body copy. As weight increases in the Bold weight the style becomes more expressive, with a visible reverse contrast building up and culminating in the Heavy weight with his clearly visible "bell bottoms" feel. In the display sub-family the design is pushed further by introducing variant letterforms that have a stronger connection to calligraphy and lettering. Also, the weight range becomes a optical one, with weights marked as Medium, Large, XLarge, as bringing the contrast and the boldness to the extreme creates smaller counterspaces that require bigger usage sizes. Another important addition of the display sub-family is the connected italics that sport swash capitals and cursive letterforms, developed with logo design and ultra-expressive editorial design in mind. To balance the extreme contrast in the XL weight, contrast of punctuation is reduced, creating a rich, highly-dynamic texture wherever diacritics and marks are used in the text. The full family includes 16 styles + 4 variable fonts, allowing full control of the design over its tree-hugging design space. All 20 fonts share an extended latin charset with open type features including case sensitive forms, single and double story variants and alternate glyphs. According to its creator, "Freitag is the typeface that sounds like an imaginary Woodstock where on the stage with Jimi Hendrix with Novarese, Motter, Excoffon and Benguiat playing onstage with Jimi Hendrix". Jeepers creepers!