In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e." Jenson Old Style™ was designed by Freda Sack and Colin Brignall for Letraset in 1982. Because of its darkness, this version is best used for display designs that call for a sense of old-world elegance and solidity."

The Colville fonts began their existence in 2015 as a project-specific typeface, made to be used on a custom-made headstone commemorating Canadian artist Alex Colville (1920-2013) and his wife Rhoda Wright. For that purpose, some initial shapes were modelled after letters Colville himself had used on a Governor General gold medal he designed in the mid-1970s. From there started a year-long project that culminated in a set of four comprehensive fonts ranging in weight from Light to Bold, each containing over 750 glyphs to cover Pan European language support, stylistic alternates, five sets of figures, automatic fractions, and some ornaments rooted in Alex Colville’s art. These fonts exhibit a strong art deco aesthetic that has always been a favourite of architects, metal casters, and sign makers. This is a very humanist geometry alternating from the precisely calculated to the curvy and lithe, subtle contrast, flat stroke stops, and airy proportions that make for a counterspace built for accommodation and comfort. The breadth and timeless humanism of the Colville set makes fit in a variety of applications, from straightforward headlines, titles, and emphasis captions, to branding and packaging.

Introducing "Kukulkan," a font designed by Raúl Plancarte, adorned with accolades, that unravels the structural possibilities nestled within the realms of ancient Roman letters and fantastical styles, infusing them with a contemporary essence. This typeface exudes a conspicuous plasticity and expressiveness, seamlessly harmonizing within its original intended context as a font for continuous text, bolstered by its robust and assured strokes. It stands as the triumphant culmination of a thorough exploration, meticulously considering legibility. Infused with nuanced elements that evoke a pre-Hispanic idealization of Mayan culture, this essence takes center stage in its darker iterations. However, it is adept at adapting to a myriad of ethnic and cultural nuances prevalent in our global village. Noteworthy is the fact that the "Kukulkan" font family is available as a variable font, offering a dynamic range of styles across its 18 fonts, endowing it with a lively, human, and refined demeanor. Additionally, it features a variant known as "Kukulkan Ornaments," a collection of 150 dingbats comprised of icons, symbols, and frames intricately inspired by the iconography of Mayan hieroglyphs. In its natural application, "Kukulkan" thrives in contexts of art, lifestyle, culture, seamlessly bridging tradition and avant-garde. This font excels in the realm of editorial design, evident in its adeptness at crafting robust headlines, and in select cases, it lends itself to creating striking brand identities.

Huai and Huai Thai marks the first professional typeface release by Potch Auacherdkul and represents the culmination of research into the duality of influences between handwritten, vernacular Thai lettering and Latin typefaces. The result is a warm, expressive typeface that doesn’t abandon the human hands and the language that produced them. With Thai script, there are two different terminal styles—the Loop terminal style, associated with the original forms of Thai glyphs; and the Loopless, which has evolved to best coordinate with Latin sans serif typefaces. In recent years, this Thai Loopless style has continued to influence and even change to become ‘more Latin.’ One would go so far as to define these heavily Latin-influenced typefaces as Thai Latinized. This curiosity with shifting influences, turns the idea around and explores what would happen if the vernacular Thai scripts actually influenced their Latin counterparts instead. An Inversion of Thai Latinized is the result. The street signs of Bangkok, local vernacular writing, quick, fluid strokes… these influences form the DNA behind the Huai Thai typeface. Refining and systematizing those natural, handwritten strokes into a Thai typeface and then using those solutions to serve as the pioneer proportions behind the development of its Latin script companion was the product. Huai adopted the essence of these Thai glyphs into the Latin and uniquely embraced the contemporary writing system (and soul) of the Thai people in its letterforms.

ITC Werkstatt is a result of the combined talents of Alphabet Soup's Paul Crome and Satwinder Sehmi, along with Ilene Strizver and Colin Brignall. It is inspired by the work of Rudolph Koch, the renowned German calligrapher, punchcutter, and type designer of the first third of this century, without being based directly on any of Koch's typefaces. Werkstatt has obvious affinities with the heavy, woodcut look of Koch's popular Neuland, but also with display faces like Wallau and even the light, delicate Koch Antiqua. Brignall began by drawing formal letters with a 55mm cap height, which Sehmi reinterpreted using a pen with a broad-edge nib. “Not an easy process,” says Brignall, “since one of the features of Koch's style is that while it was calligraphic in spirit, most of the time his counter shapes did not bear any resemblance to the external shapes, as they would in normal calligraphy. This meant that Sehmi could not complete a whole character in one go, but had to create the outside and inside shapes separately and then ink in the center of the letters.” The process was repeated, only without entirely filling in the outlines, for the Engraved version. Crome handled the scanning and digitization, maintaining the hand-made feel while creating usable digital outlines. “The collaboration of artisans with particular skills,” says Brignall, “in a modern-day, computer-aided studio environment, seems very much in step with the 'workshop' ethos that Rudolph Koch encouraged and promoted so much.”

Lust Didone’s character set was expanded as well during the redraw and update, the Italics were separated and reimagined anew from the universal italics in the original offering. Lust Didone also includes the new Fine optical size with complementing Italics for each size as well. And, yes, more swashes. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

Lust’s original masters were completely redrawn, expanded, with a new optical size added based on customer requests. Lust now sports 6 fonts, instead of the original 4: Standard, Display, Fine, and complementing Italics. The character set has been expanded as well to include more OpenType features and more swashes. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

Boom. You asked for more, um, well just ‘more’—more swashes, more options, more weights, more of everything. I cannot give you more weights. The design just won’t allow it and anything else would be a compromise or a bastardization of the exemplars just to make money that I am unwilling to do. But, I did give you an overly indulgent, 90% cacao bar and espresso, Lust Script Fine. The ending strokes on these glyphs will literally draw blood. Enjoy it as much as I have. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

Simplo: the ‘Italian Futura’. Simplo is a geometric sans serif typeface, built in sixteen styles. It is a tribute to the 1930s typeface Semplicità, designed by Nebiolo’s Alessandro Butti. Although many details of Simplo differ from Semplicità, it preserves the spirit of the original. Simplo is ideal for use in display sizes. It is also quite legible in text, and is well suited for graphic design and corporate identity design. Simplo has sixteen styles, extensive language support, eight different kinds of figures, sophisticated OpenType features — so it’s ready for advanced typographic projects. The most notable characteristics of this typeface are the ‘t’ and the ‘f’. The ‘t’ is the culmination of simplicity: a vertical line with just a simple right-side crossbar. The ‘f’ also has just a right-side crossbar, and is really tall: it reaches both the highest and lowest vertical position of the typeface. The top of the distinctive ‘s’, is much narrower than its bottom. The ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘g’, ‘p’, ‘q’, and ‘u’ are spurless, and show a family resemblance with Hans Reichel’s 1990s typeface Dax. However, these letters are rounder and more geometric than Dax’s counterparts, because of Dax’s higher x-height and narrower design. In Paul Shaw’s Imprint article about typefaces that have been overlooked and/or underappreciated, “Overlooked Typefaces”, he concluded his discussion of Semplicità as follows: “These idiosyncrasies suggest that Semplicità might find a warm reception today, given the current love affair with Gotham, Neutraface and Proxima—and the resurgence of ITC Avant-Garde Gothic.” Free demo font available. For more information about Simplo, download the PDF Specimen Manual.

Ablati is the commercial release of the font designed during the production of our new font design book, “Practical Font Design”. It is a new serif font in my continuing objective of designing book fonts that I can really use. In many ways, Ablati is a very different direction for me. Designed to produce gaphics to use in the font design book, I was forced to really reconsider many of my working methods to make them work for outside readership. Like all designers, my internal design processes can get really sloppy. The book helped me clean up my act. Taking my inspiration from one of my favorite fonts of all time {though I've never really been able to use it much}, Romic, by Colin at Letraset, I decided to design a unilateral serif font. In most ways, this is a normal serif for me in that it has caps, lowercase, small caps with the appropriate figures for each case. This font has all the OpenType features in the new set developed for the book. There are several ligatures for your fun and enjoyment: bb gg ff fi fl ffi ffl ffy fj ft tt ty Wh Th and more. Several alternative forms, a dozen ornaments, and more. Like all of my fonts, there are: caps, lowercase, small caps, proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, & small cap figures, plus numerators, denominators, superiors, inferiors, and a complete set of ordinals 1st through infinity. Enjoy! The Oldstyle and Small Cap fonts are an attempt to have most of the OpenType characters available to people still using Type 1 and TrueType fonts.

ITC Christoph's Quill is just about everything you could want in a typeface: it's distinctive, beautiful, and exceptionally versatile. According to designer Russell Bean, ITC Christoph's Quill is the culmination of experimentation with a graphics tablet that spanned several years. Then one day, as if by magic, it all just fell into place. The design seemed to flow from my pen." Bean was born in Australia and, except for a brief stint with a photo-lettering firm in Southern California, has spent most of his career working down under. "I can recall a deep fascination for the written word," he says. "Even before learning to spell, read or write, I think I recognized that this was a means of visual communication." Bean's first job was in a small ad agency as a trainee in the production department, where he learned art techniques and how to handle print, as well as "the value of visual impressions," he says. His career path meandered from one design job to another, but always in the general direction of fonts and typefaces. Today, his workload consists of logo design commissions, font editing, typography and print production consultation to a select group of loyal clients - still leaving time, notes Bean, "to pursue my type design ambitions." ITC Christoph's Quill began life as a simple, visually striking font of caps, lowercase, punctuation and numerals. To this Bean added a bold weight, for when a little more strength is desirable. Next came a flock of alternate characters. Finally, Bean drew a set of decorative caps, a suite of logos, and a sprinkling of beginning and ending swashes. The net result is a type family that can add a signature flourish to a vast range of projects: from invitations and menus to logos, signage, packaging and more."

Breaking from our catalog of typefaces to create a new handwritten font family, Modern Love was born out of our desire to see what would happen if we took a step back from the norm. We weren’t looking for the perfection of the many calligraphy techniques, but more of a natural way of writing with the same tools. Our escapist experiment into casual lettering culminated into 4 fonts: Modern Love Regular, Grunge, Rough and Caps. Modern Love Regular is a hand-painted script, each glyph individually designed with a pointed brush and walnut ink. The aim was to create an effortless hand-drawn feel while keeping the contrast high density. Playful, yet polished, this font works very well when accentuated with the family’s two distinctive styles: Modern Love Grunge, simulating a washed-out effect, perfect to add a vintage look to your projects; and Modern Love Rough, with its crunchy borders, makes letters visibly rough-around-the edges and gives large letters an unmistakeable pop. All three fonts include a hand-painted set of ornaments, swashes and alternates to limitlessly customize and decorate your texts, accessible through Opentype features. Modern Love Caps is the fourth font, a handwritten Sans Serif that ties the family together with its simplicity and readability. Designed with a pointed nib and Indian ink, this font boasts a different style that perfectly complements Modern Love Regular, Grunge and Rough. The result is a fresh font family perfect to create headlines, posters, DIY hand-lettered artwork, books, holiday cards, wrapping paper, invitations, T-shirts, labels, packaging for cosmetics, fashion supplies, food products, artisanal goods, and an endless array of options for your projects. Modern Love…when brush meets passion. Check out also ‘Modern Love Slanted’ Turquoise Nautica

Prepare to be enchanted by the artistry of "Crispo," a font meticulously crafted through the delicate strokes of pointed pen calligraphy. In the world of typography, each character becomes a masterpiece, resonating with the eloquence of a brushstroke. Experience the Dynamic Elegance of Pointed Pen Mastery: Elegance with "Crispo" transcends mere quality; it embodies the essence of pointed pen calligraphy as a true masterpiece. The flowing lines and timeless grace of every character reflect the precision and artistry embedded in this refined craft. In the realm of fonts, "Crispo" emerges as a distinctive personality, each character meticulously handcrafted with a pointed pen. These letters aren't mere symbols; they roar with the passion and personality of a master calligrapher's ink, leaving an indelible mark on your creative endeavors. "Crispo" is more than a font; it's a genuine work of art inspired by the rich traditions of calligraphy. It serves as the embodiment of the pointed pen's craftsmanship, where each curve and ligature is shaped with meticulous care, inviting you to delve into the world of true artistic expression. The elegance within "Crispo" extends beyond appearances; it resides in the essence of each stroke. Every character, ligature, and swash is a testament to the beauty of pointed pen calligraphy, culminating in a font that stands unparalleled in its grace and sophistication. Whether you're crafting wedding invitations, establishing brand identities, or embarking on any project that craves distinction, "Crispo" unlocks the door to limitless creative expression. Courtesy of pointed pen calligraphy's mastery, this font becomes your brush, painting a story of elegance and distinction. "Crispo" is not just a font; it's a journey through the soul of pointed pen calligraphy. It encapsulates the brushstroke of a skilled hand, the dance of ink on paper, and the unwavering passion behind every character. Step into the enchanting world of "Crispo" and infuse your designs with the dynamic elegance and strong personality of pointed pen calligraphy.

Lust Sans is the penultimate exploration of producing a high-contrast sans wholly influenced by its bracketed ancestor. The aspect of this endeavor I enjoyed the most was finding sneaky ways to infuse warmth and whimsy into the letterforms when you least expect it. The result, however, is subtle and uniquely balances against Lust and Lust Didone without becoming cold and overbearing. To accomplish this, Lust Sans has 6 weights. What I found during development was, based on any setting where Lust or Lust Didone were in the same layout, the amount of contrast shown with Lust Sans needed to be adjusted. Expanding the weight offering, produces opportunities for Lust Sans to modulate the rhythm of the layout comfortably while keeping contrast—this is even more obvious with the Italics. I love those. You will too. If you don’t, you do not have a soul. Not sorry. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

P22 ST.G Shrift is a font series based on the type designs of Stefan George with an italic version designed by Colin Kahn. Stefan George (1868-1933) was a German poet who led the revolt against realism in German literature. All of his works were privately published and the typefaces that were used reflected his neo-classic and anti-industrial (progessive) aesthetics; oftentimes consisting of his own hand lettering designs. The original font was cast in 1907 by a small foundry in Germany and was used primarily for the works of George as well as other books including a monumental edition of Dante's Divine Comedy. The ST.G Shrift Fonts contained in this set are derived from 3 known variations of the original roman typeface, St.G., found in various books published in Berlin in the early 20th century. ST.G Shrift One contains the most idiosyncratic characters, while ST.G Shrift Two uses more familiar characters as well as a redesign of characters including the t and the k to be more in keeping with modern san-serif designs. The OpenType version of the roman contains both one and two and expands on them by including central European characters, small caps, and small caps titling figures. The Small Caps titling figures are derived from the first version of the typeface. Below is a features list (accessible through the type palette in Adobe programs) and their functions: ST.G Shrift Opentype Features: Small Caps: Changes Lowercase to Small Caps Titling Figures: Changes Uppercase to Titling Caps, and Small Caps to Small Caps Titling Figures Contextual Alternates: Changes Character Set to match ST.G One and changes Small Caps to Titling Small Caps Ornaments: Changes < > and ? (greater, less and bullet) to ornaments ST.G Shrift Italic is an art nouveau version of the roman. The OpenType version includes central European characters, small caps, titling caps, titling small caps and ornaments.

Yes, finally. This one took the most time and the most restarting. Years went into imagining what Lust Text should look like and how it should structurally behave in order to truly improve upon a setting that includes any of the Lust typefaces. I approached it as much from the side of the type designer, as I did a potential user. The flow, the warmth, the personality needed to be there, but all of the excess had to be removed responsibly. In the process, and in need of inspiration, I looked backward to historical artifacts and precedent. In each early Lust Text approach, the solution was lackluster and/or vanilla and not actually a ‘Lust’ typeface. The exercise was not in vain though. By exploring past examples, I found my footing drawing for media now and how it might be used later—all the while, producing seamless, elegant curves and restrained indulgence (that sounds almost silly to say, but I like it). The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

Teo Tuominen’s Trevor took its first breath as a revival of an 18th century antiqua, but culminated in an entirely new and good-natured family. Trevor is an affable slab serif in nature: both heavy and kind. Known for their familiarity and their dark colour, the terminals of slab serifs put additional weight along the line to maintain an inky presence. Their clunky forms reveal slight immaturity and arouse the reader’s sympathy for the subject at hand. Trevor connects with others by consciously riding the line between being personal and commanding. One goal with Trevor was to pair the robust nature of a low contrast slab serif with more sophisticated elements, such as the ball terminals. So wherever one looks in Trevor, rounded corners rule the day, softening the overall appearance by mimicking ink spread made by old metal type. The easygoing look is tempered by very few inktraps and sharp corners, mostly to the inside of characters and in acute angles. Whatever Trevor is paired with, it has an altruistic outlook in that it sees the best in others. It’s the neighbourly type family
 — the neighbour you actually want. Trevor’s almost monolinear weight and high x-height give it a typewriter look in the extralight and light weights, but the whole family was made to work with many other font styles, design work, and information structures. It certainly finds its home in packaging and advertising, its sturdy verticality and narrowness fit the needs of headlines and intro text, and its seven weights are primed for plays and involved text needing many layers of distinction. The black weight is treated like a separate display style with altered ball terminals and serifs to capitalise on the added heft. Trevor’s seven roman weights cover the Latin A Extended glyph set to bring its kindly and commanding outlook to your projects. Along with alternate version of the ‘R’ in the black weight, its OpenType features include both tabular and proportional lining and oldstyle figures, ligatures, and fractions. The complete Trevor family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Type designer Xavier Dupré’s Garalda is a charming 21st century family that renews a legacy of finesse. As paragraphs on a page, Garalda’s overall impression is of a workaday personality, committed to the main purpose of the job: easy long-form reading. But setting it in display sizes proves something different: This reinvented Garamond is anything but basic. The Garalda story begins with the serendipitous finding of a book typeset in a rare Garalde, called Tory-Garamond, with which Dupré was not immediately familiar. This Garamond was used in bibliophile books in the decades surrounding 1920, but after that it became déclassé for an unknown reason. Dupré found the italic styles especially charming and discovered the family was probably the mythical Ollière Garamond cut from 1914. He obtained low resolution scans of the typeface and used them, rather than high resolution scans, as the basis for his new type family. This allowed Dupré the mental freedom to experiment and remix as he saw fit, culminating in a contemporary family with heritage. As seen in the simplistic rectangular serifs, Garalda is a humanist slab serif, but with a mix of angles and curves to give the classic shapes a fresh, unorthodox feeling. While almost invisible in paragraph text, these produce a graphic effect in display work. The set of ligatures in the roman and italics lend themselves to unique display use, such as creating lovely logotypes. In the italics, some swashes inspired by different historic Garamonds are included, sometimes breaking their curves to be more captivating. Just look at how the italic ‘*-s’ ligatures create ‘s’ with a cursive formation rather than merely a flowing slant. And how the roman ‘g’ link swings as wide as a trainer’s whip. These are all balanced by squared serifs in the roman to keep an overall mechanised regularity. The Garalda family comes in eight styles, includes some of the original arrows and ornaments, and speaks multiple languages for all typesetting needs, from pamphlets to fine book printing. The complete Garalda family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

When you hear that name, you likely ask yourself, ‘why?!’ I did too, but the number of requests could not be ignored. Once I finally decided to move forward with it, the only way to solve the offering would be to adhere to the same theme of indulgence, I planned for the same number of optical weights AND Italics. Yeah, italic stencils… ok, why not? It’s not a new concept. One thing to note and a creative liberty I assumed during the design. Lust Stencil would not be just a redaction or removal of stress to produce a quick stencil. To do that, would just be a cheap solution. Strokes had to resolve themselves correctly and/or uniquely to the concept of the stencil format. And, it had to be heftier. For it it to look correctly, it needed about 8% additional mass to the strokes for it to retain the effervescent flow of the curves and the resolute scalloped lachrymals. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine. It would have taken even longer if not for font engineer and designer, Potch Auacherdkul. Thanks Potch.

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!

AwanZaman has a three-phase story, beginning with Dr Mamoun Sakkal’s two Arabic styles and culminating with Juliet Shen’s Latin extension. AwanZaman started as simply Awan, a commission for a modern, clean, monoline typeface for writing headlines and story titles in a forward-thinking Kuwaiti newspaper. Awan was based on the geometric forms of Kufic script, while in phase two, a second typeface (Zaman) was designed to add enough calligraphic Naskh details to make it easy to read in demanding newspaper settings. Together these two phases give the typeface a warm, familiar, and progressive look, as well as an explanatory two-part name — AwanZaman. Since most editorials use typical Naskh headline fonts with an exaggerated baseline, Awan’s rational forms immediately distinguish it as a modern and progressive voice in the crowded field of Arabic editorial typefaces. As the companion Arabic typeface, Zaman has the same basic proportions and forms as Awan, but with many cursive, energetic, and playful details. And since modern monoline fonts are increasingly being used to set extended texts, more features were borrowed from Naskh calligraphy to expand the typeface’s use from headlines into text setting. When using the AwanZaman Arabic family, Awan (geometric Kufic forms) is the starting point. To add the sweeping, energetic personality of Zaman (calligraphic Naskh forms), simply activate an alternate character through the option of 20 stylistic sets available in any OpenType-savvy software. The two typefaces function as one file — the AwanZaman Arabic family — allowing users to combine features from both designs to transform the appearance of text from geometric and formal to playful and informal. The third phase of AwanZaman’s development introduced a companion Latin typeface designed by Juliet Shen to fulfil the persistent need in the Arabic fonts market for modern and geometric bilingual type families. Due to the Arabic’s monolinear strokes, AwanZaman Latin was destined to be a sans serif with a tall x-height, larger counters, and corresponding stem thickness to harmonise with the Arabic’s overall text colour and page presence. But it needed much more. One of AwanZaman’s chief assets is making the two languages look on a par when typeset side by side. Arabic and English readers will have a different sense of what that entails, but this type family defers to the Arabic — graceful and artistic with a good mix of straight stems and curved forms. Latin in general doesn’t aesthetically flow the way Arabic does, yet the tone of the Latin needed to mirror both the Arabic’s more squarish curves and formal personality of Awan and the undulating and more playful shapes of Zaman without looking outlandish. That need was met by creating some novel Latin characters, which are accessed through four stylistic sets the same way as AwanZaman Arabic. The alternates are not just clever in the way they look and how they echo the Arabic aesthetic, but also in harmonising the disparate languages and serving designers well when needing a balanced, bilingual text face with a warm and lively voice. AwanZaman is a clever, seven-weight powerhouse that makes extensive use of OpenType’s stylistic sets (20 in the Arabic and four in the Latin) so writers and designers can make the most of everything from a single glyph in display sizes down to dense text in paragraphs. As AwanZaman Arabic has no italic, neither does the Latin; contextual distinction normally handled by italics is achieved by exploiting the family’s seven weights. AwanZaman’s intricate OpenType programming supports Persian and Urdu, with features such as the returning tail of Barri Yeh treated properly. From its inception in geometry to its melding of two worlds with novel forms, AwanZaman is a personal labor by designers Dr Mamoun Sakkal and Juliet Shen, and embodies the TypeTogether ideals of serving the global community with innovative and stylish typeface solutions. The complete AwanZaman Arabic and Latin families, along with our entire catalogue, have been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.