New York to London via Europe The hardworking FS Koopman is a crossbred workhorse which draws inspiration from Swiss and Germanic grotesks, American gothics and early British grotesques, but refuses to fit neatly into any of these categories. Its neither one nor the other, but all of the above. Fontsmith designers Andy Lethbridge and Stuart de Rozario decided to take the characteristics they admired from each category and distill them down into one functional family. Neo meets Neue FS Koopman aims to swim against the tide of Helvetica-ish derivatives by bringing some personality and soul to a genre that all too often ends up feeling bland and sterile. FS Koopman subtly embraces the quirkiness and charm often seen in early twentieth century designs but pairs this with the functionality of later pioneers of the genre. It’s a grotesque isn’t it? The term grotesque surfaced around the early 1800s and refers to the early sans serif designs that many initially believed were strange or ‘grotesque’ due to their lack of elegant serifs. Later variations became known as neo-grotesques and this moniker stuck around even after they gained mass popularity. Some American variants became known as gothics. FS Koopman takes cues from all three categories and blends them into one cohesive design.

In June of 2004, Canada Type released Crucifix, a condensed three-tiers typeface that tried to bridge the gap between traditional blackletter forms and the traditional European gothics. The main goal of Crucifix was to have as many as 4 different variations on each letter form, so the original release consisted of three fonts: a main font with a standard character set, a small caps set, and a unicase variation. Now Canada Type presents the next generation of this typeface: Crucifix 2.0 and Crucifix Pro. This new version takes advantage of both Unicode and OpenType technologies to make Crucifix as versatile as ever. The PostScript Type 1 and the True Type version boast extended Latin character set support, including Western, Eastern and Central European, Turkish and Baltic, as well as two non-Latin scripts: Cryillic and Greek. The OpenType version, Crucifix Pro, goes even further by including all of above in one font, along with proper automation to accommodate on-the-fly ligatures, small caps, numerators, denominators, some fractions and a ton of stylistic and contextual alternates - all programmed to work with the latest OpenType-enabled programs. Unique, stark, and with more than 900 characters, Crucifix has that clinical sharpness and special dramatic wonder to make it perfect for mystery, gothic, and horror design settings.

A classic “American” sans serif with a kink Desphalia belongs to the kind of sans serif fonts that were created in the 19th century. You could also name it “American Gothic”, a sans serif in the style of fonts like Franklin Gothic, News Gothic and similar. Above all, the high x-height characterizes this typeface style, as do the identical heights of uppercase and ascenders. However, I allowed myself a few peculiarities ;-) On the one hand, there is the gently sloping horizontal middle line on letters such as H, E, F, A and e. The M also got gently slanted sides. Some of the lower-case letters have an up- or down-stroke: a d m n p u. This "kink" on the shaft also serves to better distinguish the small l from the capital I — as can be seen clearly with the term »Illinois«. In keeping with the tradition of American typefaces, Desphalia does not have a true italic. Rather, the letters of the “Italic” have the same character forms as the normal upright variant, but in oblique — and so it is not called “Italic” but “Oblique”. Style Set 01: Another American peculiarity is the capital I with dashes above and below. It is included in the Desphalia as an alternate character form. An alternative small l with the “kink” in the ascender is also included — as is a y with the “kink” in the descender. Style Set 02: The corresponding “straight” forms a d l m n p u without the break are included as alternatives in a separate style set. Small caps are uppercase letters that are optically the same size as lowercase letters. They offer a very classy way of emphasis. Desphalia is available in the widths Condensed, Normal and Expanded, the weights include Thin, Light, Book, Bold, Black. Using the variable font, all intermediate levels can be freely selected. The figures are optionally available as tabular figures, proportional lining figures or old style figures.

Geometric/Technical style logotypes have been developed for car chrome labels since the early 1980’s, but automobile companies don't monopolize the style by any means. During the 80’s and 90’s, a lot of these logos leaned towards the geometric sans styles and the swiss styling of fonts like Handel Gothic, while playing with varying degrees of squared rounds and varying expanded widths per logotype. Mercurial has this flavor, but it wasn’t derived from logotypes. Instead, it began as a digitization of a film typeface from LetterGraphics in the early 70's known as "Sam". It visual ties to this genre of automotive logotypes and fonts like Handel Gothic lend a familiarity to it, yet it has an identity all its own. As with so many automotive logotypes, this singular style film typeface, lacked an expansive family which shows off all potential the logotypes have and what they "could" be and do. And that's where we come in. What originally began as this family’s Regular Width - Bold Style has been expanded into a collection of 3 Width Families, each containing 5 Weights. Here’s what’s included with the Mercurial Complete bundle: 396 glyphs per style - including Capitals, Lowercase, Numerals, Punctuation and an extensive character set that covers multilingual support of latin based languages. (see the final poster graphics for a preview of the characters included) 3 widths in the collection: Narrow, Regular, & Wide 5 weights in each width family: Light, Book, Regular, Medium & Bold. Here’s why the Mercurial Family is for you: - You’re in need of stylish sans font family with a range of widths and weights. - You’re love those 80’s automotive logos, but want more range of use. - You’re looking for an alternative to Handel Gothic. - You’re looking for a clean techno typeface for your rave poster designs. - You just like to collect quality fonts to add to your design arsenal.

Opa-locka JNL is named for a city in Miami-Dade County, Florida and is based on an Art Nouveau-era bit of hand lettering found on vintage sheet music. Legendary aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss (who successfully developed the city of Miami Springs and the city of Hialeah with James Bright) began the development of Opa-locka around 1925 as a planned community with a "1001 Arabian Nights" theme. Plans for this exclusive community included a country club and a small private airfield, but the hurricane of 1926 derailed Curtiss' original vision of the city. Opa-locka gradually took shape as a residential area for middle-class families, but the closing of a long-established Marine base, changing demographics and a reputation for being a hot-spot for crime, drug abuse and corruption tarnished this once-grand community (which boasts the largest collection of Moorish Revival architecture in the Western hemisphere). Old-time Miamians bristle when the city's name (an abbreviation of a Seminole place name, spelled Opa-tisha-wocka-locka) is mis-spelled as "Opa-Locka", "Opa Locka" or "Opalocka". The correct name is hyphenated, and the second part is in lower case.

Daisy is an ultra-fat serif typeface with very fine counters.

Ahmed is a modern Arabic headline face, first produced by Linotype-Hell Ltd. in the early 1980s. Originally developed as a simplified face, its design recalls the inscriptional and decorative tile work lettering of the medieval period. The strong treatment of the tails of certain characters departs from the more traditional style of tapering these finials, introducing a modern feel to the design. The contrasting proportions of the tall vertical strokes and the rather elongated counters lend a monumental look to Ahmed, allowing its effective use in titling. During the later 1980s Ahmed was developed into a traditional typeface, with the introduction of medial forms to improve character spacing and balance. Recently, Ahmed has been converted into the OpenType font format, ensuring its continued popularity as a heading face for newspaper typesetting. The Ahmed typeface contains two weights, Ahmed and Ahmed Outline. Both of the OpenType fonts include Latin glyphs from Clearface Gothic Roman inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. The two Ahmed fonts include the Basic Latin character set and the Arabic character set, which supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. They include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals, as well as a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.

WIP Macho Man depicts the handwriting of man with a strong need for independence combined with spontaneity and high potential. The (lower case) characters are joined as it is usual in German speaking countries. Originally designed in 1995 the font has been extended by a lot of new characters such as accented characters, punctuation, symbols and currency symbols.

WIP FirstLady depicts the handwriting of a young woman with a consequent stroke representing ambition, open mindedness and talent. The (lower case) characters are joined as it is usual in German speaking countries. Originally designed in 1995 the font has been extended by a lot of new characters such as accented characters, punctuation, symbols and currency symbols.

WIPEU The President depicts the handwriting of a versatile and energetic man of vision at the highest stage. The (lower case) characters are joined as it is usual in German speaking countries. Originally designed in 1995 the font has been extended by a lot of new characters such as accented characters, punctuation, symbols and currency symbols.

WIP Grand Ma depicts the handwriting of an old woman, representing the kindness and reliability that we appreciate of our grandma. The (lower case) characters are joined as it is usual in German speaking countries. Originally designed in 1995 the font has been extended by a lot of new characters such as accented characters, punctuation, symbols and currency symbols.