With its well-defined characters that are readily legible even in the small font sizes, Mantika Sans by Jürgen Weltin is ideal for typesetting. The elaborately designed and highly individual set of italics enhances the attractiveness of the font.Jürgen Weltin developed the Mantika™ Sans sans serif font using older designs for an serif font as his inspiration. Nothing more than the merest suggestion of the original serifs has survived. Bevelled line endings and the slight variation in thickness of verticals, in particular, provide Mantika Sans with a very dynamic character that evokes manuscript. Short ascenders and descenders give the font a compact appearance that is also underscored by its condensed proportions. Weltin has achieved his aim of producing a typeface with excellent legibility even in small sizes not just by means of the x-height, which is tall in comparison with the capital letters, but also by using clearly defined and well differentiated designs for critical letters, such as i", "I" and "l". Lower case "i", for example, has a serif while the "l" has a curved base.In addition to uppercase numerals, Mantika Sans also has lowercase or old style numerals that have been designed so that they can be used in both tabular and proportional settings. The uppercase numerals are slightly shorter than the uppercase letters, ensuring that the latter can be sympathetically incorporated within continuous text.The Mantika Sans italics are very unusual. They are inclined at only 4.5° (the usual angle for italics is 10 - 12°) and so appear to be almost upright. In addition, they also have quite distinctive forms. The overall effect calls attention to their curvilinear, manuscript character, enhances contrasts and further emphasizes the terminals. Weltin explains: "Within the variety of forms of the italics there are many contrasting terminal elements that create dynamism. The result is a diversity of interaction between the rounded and angular forms". Mantika Sans Italic thus has all the features of a display typeface, but can also be happily used on its own to set longer text passages. Mantika Sans is available in two weights; Regular and Bold, both of which have corresponding italics sets. Mantika Sans has been designed so that the widths of the four related cuts are identical, meaning that a change of font within a single layout will have no effect on justification. In addition, the members of the Mantika Informal font family, designed by Jürgen Weltin in 2010, also have the same thickness. Other font families having weights with equal thickness can be found in the "Linotype Office Alliance series".The Mantika Sans character sets are paneuropean. There are characters for setting texts in Eastern European languages, Greek and Cyrillic. There is also a range of special symbols, including right-angled brackets, subscript and superscript lower case letters, together with numerals, arrows and many different bullet points.As a vibrant and highly legible text font, Mantika Sans has a broad spectrum of potential applications. Its unusual italics are not just perfect for use in display text. The fact that it has only four cuts means that Mantika Sans is particularly suitable for office use or for the setting of business reports. Its excellent legibility even in the small font sizes also makes it ideal as a text for electronic reading devices; this also applies to Mantika Informal.At the 3rd International Eastern Type Design Competition Granshan 2010, Mantika Sans was awarded in the category Greek text typefaces."

Style and elegance in 14 styles PS Fournier, created by Stéphane Elbaz, is designed in tribute to Pierre Simon Fournier. Fournier was the prolific Parisian type designer whose work is best known for its iconic representation of French transitional style. PS Fournier elegantly represents the transition to the modern era of typography. Featuring three optical sizes, PS Fournier is designed to perform in any context. The Pierre Simon Fournier heritage Pierre Simon Fournier (1712—1768) was a leading innovative type designer of the mid-18th century. Early in his career, the young Pierre Simon developed a strong aesthetic that he cultivated throughout his life. His art is representative of the pre-revolutionary “Age of Enlightenment” (Siècle des Lumières). Precursor of the Modern style, Fournier’s body of work deeply influenced his times, and created the fertile ground from which the Didot family and Giambattista Bodoni developed their own styles. During the historical period of the 18th century, Fournier exemplified the intellectual pursuits of the times with his own research on type, documenting in detail the typefounding process. He also offered a unique vision: he is the first to clearly comprehend the concept of “type family,” sorting a set of similarly styled alphabets by sizes, width, and by x-heights. In addition, Fournier is one of the earliest advocates of the point system to organize the practice of typography, the point system that contemporary typographers continue to use to this day. The refined and discreet elegance of PS Fournier With a close look at the family, one finds you’ll find that the difference between the optical sizes (Petit, standard and Grand) is more than a contrast variation between the thin and the thick; the eye can also denote a palette of distinct tones: More streamlined and robust in the smaller sizes (Petit), more refined and detailed in the larger sizes (Grand). The PS Fournier standard family is designed to adapt to any situation with its intermediate optical size, from body copy to headlines. With a bit of tracking, PS Fournier Petit will make the smallest captions perfectly readable. However, Petit family is not limited to body and captions — its “slabby robustness” will make a relevant headline choice as well. PS Fournier Grand presents a higher contrast adapted to large text sizes, displays or banners. Its refined elegance makes it a perfect choice for Design, Fashion or Luxury publications. As a “modern” type PS Fournier Grand features a larger x-height than the preexistent old style typefaces such as Garamond or Jenson. These proportions provide any basic text set in PS Fournier Grand a strong typographic texture. As a result, the PS Fournier global family is a versatile alternative to the Modern typefaces commonly used in the publishing industry. The optical sizes, the large range of weights, and the design variations make this family adaptable to captions, paragraphs, and pages, as well as to large texts and displays. A leading-edge typography in the 18th century In the spirit of modernity, Pierre Simon Fournier did not find any use for the conventional swashes still produced by peers such as Caslon or Baskerville. Nevertheless the French designer created many inventive elements to decorate the page and set delightful variations in the text itself. To this regard PS Fournier includes a large set of glyphs variations, ligatures and more than one hundred glyphs for borders, rules and ornaments or — as called in French — “vignettes.” PS Fournier: A tribute to the French modern typography era by Stéphane Elbaz

With its well-defined characters that are readily legible even in the small font sizes, Mantika Sans by Jürgen Weltin is ideal for typesetting. The elaborately designed and highly individual set of italics enhances the attractiveness of the font.Jürgen Weltin developed the Mantika™ Sans sans serif font using older designs for an serif font as his inspiration. Nothing more than the merest suggestion of the original serifs has survived. Bevelled line endings and the slight variation in thickness of verticals, in particular, provide Mantika Sans with a very dynamic character that evokes manuscript. Short ascenders and descenders give the font a compact appearance that is also underscored by its condensed proportions. Weltin has achieved his aim of producing a typeface with excellent legibility even in small sizes not just by means of the x-height, which is tall in comparison with the capital letters, but also by using clearly defined and well differentiated designs for critical letters, such as i", "I" and "l". Lower case "i", for example, has a serif while the "l" has a curved base.In addition to uppercase numerals, Mantika Sans also has lowercase or old style numerals that have been designed so that they can be used in both tabular and proportional settings. The uppercase numerals are slightly shorter than the uppercase letters, ensuring that the latter can be sympathetically incorporated within continuous text.The Mantika Sans italics are very unusual. They are inclined at only 4.5° (the usual angle for italics is 10 - 12°) and so appear to be almost upright. In addition, they also have quite distinctive forms. The overall effect calls attention to their curvilinear, manuscript character, enhances contrasts and further emphasizes the terminals. Weltin explains: "Within the variety of forms of the italics there are many contrasting terminal elements that create dynamism. The result is a diversity of interaction between the rounded and angular forms". Mantika Sans Italic thus has all the features of a display typeface, but can also be happily used on its own to set longer text passages. Mantika Sans is available in two weights; Regular and Bold, both of which have corresponding italics sets. Mantika Sans has been designed so that the widths of the four related cuts are identical, meaning that a change of font within a single layout will have no effect on justification. In addition, the members of the Mantika Informal font family, designed by Jürgen Weltin in 2010, also have the same thickness. Other font families having weights with equal thickness can be found in the "Linotype Office Alliance series".The Mantika Sans character sets are paneuropean. There are characters for setting texts in Eastern European languages, Greek and Cyrillic. There is also a range of special symbols, including right-angled brackets, subscript and superscript lower case letters, together with numerals, arrows and many different bullet points.As a vibrant and highly legible text font, Mantika Sans has a broad spectrum of potential applications. Its unusual italics are not just perfect for use in display text. The fact that it has only four cuts means that Mantika Sans is particularly suitable for office use or for the setting of business reports. Its excellent legibility even in the small font sizes also makes it ideal as a text for electronic reading devices; this also applies to Mantika Informal.At the 3rd International Eastern Type Design Competition Granshan 2010, Mantika Sans was awarded in the category Greek text typefaces."

Over the past couple of years I received quite a number of unusual and surprising requests to modify my type designs to suit projects of personal nature, but none top the ones that asked me to typeset and modify tattoos using Burgues Script or Adios. At first the whole idea was amusing to me, kind of like an inside joke. I had worked in corporate branding for a few years before becoming a type designer, and suddenly I was being asked to get involved in personal branding, as literally “personal” and “branding” as the expression can get. After a few such requests I began pondering the whole thing from a professional perspective. It was typography, after all, no matter how unusual the method or medium. A very personal kind of typography, too. The messages being typeset were commemorating friends, family, births, deaths, loves, principles, and things that influenced people in a deep and direct way, so much so that they chose to etch that influence on their bodies and wear it forever. And when you decide to wear something forever, style is of the essence. After digging into the tattooing scene, I have a whole new respect for tattoo artists. Wielding that machine is not easy, and driving pigment into people’s skin is an enormous responsibility. Not to mention that they're some of the very few who still use a crafty, hands-on process that is all but obsolete in other ornamentation methods. Some artists go the extra mile and take the time to develop their own lettering for tattooing purposes, and some are inventive enough to create letters based on the tattoo’s concept. But they are not the norm. Generally speaking, most tattoo artists use generic type designs to typeset words. Even the popular blackletter designs have become quite generic over the past few decades. I still cringe when I see something like Bank Script embedded into people’s skin, turning them into breathing, walking shareholder invitations or government bonds. There’s been quite a few attempts at making fonts out of whatever original tattoo designer typefaces can be found out there - wavy pseudo-comical letters, or rough thick brush scripts, but as far as I could tell a stylish skin script was never attempted in the digital age. And that’s why I decided to design Piel Script. Piel is Spanish for skin. In a way, Piel Script is a removed cousin of Burgues Script. Although the initial sketches were infused with some 1930s showcard lettering ideas (particularly those of B. Boley, whose amazing work was shown in Sign of the Times magazine), most of the important decisions about letter shapes and connectivity were reached by observing whatever strengths and weaknesses can be seen in tattoos using Burgues. Tattoos using Adios also provided some minor input. In retrospect, I suppose Affair exercised some influence as well, albeit in a minor way. I guess what I'm trying to say is there is as much of me in Piel Script as there is in any of the other major scripts I designed, even though the driving vision for it is entirely different from anything else I have ever done. I hope you like Piel Script. If you decide it to use it on your skin, I'll be very flattered. If you decide to use it on your skateboard or book cover, I'll be just as happy. Scripts can't get any more personal than this. Piel Script received the Letter2 award, where they selected the best 53 typefaces of the last decade, organised by ATypI.