Font family designed for screen texts with eight variants and a variant of dingbats.

Franciszek Otto of Poland designed Linotype Notec in 1999. Linotype Notec is a low-tech" (or even "no tech!") typeface. By embracing handwriting's spontaneity, it has gotten as far away from technology as it can. Classified as an "inky"-style script face, for lack of a better term, Linotype Notec's informal design seems immediately artful and full of expression. Its irregularity and unexpectedness enlivens any composition, similar to how jazz or modern dance animate a room. Quite full of "ink," Linotype Notec's "strokes" are written in a sort of short-note-handwriting-style, which a slow-writing, thoughtful humanist might theoretically scribble to himself late at night. Yet Linotype Notec's character still maintains a jolt of energy; try Linotype Notec in small applications, in any size from 12-point on up."

The font is inspired by the history of the native land - a city that blossoms on a high mountain, surrounded by the blue ribbon of the Unava River. The swift rapidity of the river, the important slow flow of its reservoirs, golden beaches and steep banks of which remember the glorious times of Cossack glory. Times when bright flags flew over the Cossack army, which swiftly swept the green meadows with lightning cavalry, and dusty paths under the scorching sun. To go out to defend their homes, to cross the cold steel of ringing sabers with the enemy, and, bravely going into battle, to fight back the invaders. The font combines the straight lines of sharp steel sweeps, the broken lines of jousting blows, and the refinement of the accent of undulating flag lines.

Before 1959, in pre-Castro Havana, Cuba, the preeminent nightclub was the Tropicana. During the regime of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba was resplendent with nightclubs and gambling casinos catering to [mostly] the North American tourists; which brought it the title of the Monte Carlo of the Americas. Although Cuba (and the world as a whole) has changed vastly over the decades, the hand-lettered logo of the Tropicana Night Club has survived, and has been reproduced as a complete digital font called Tropicano JNL (a slight twist to the club's name). At first the font seems to be awkward, crude and amateurish, but in taking a second look, there's a playful charm to it. Additionally, this font can double as a "spooky" font for the Halloween season, monster parties and in other similar themes.

Nosegrind is a bit of a departure from our usual more traditional font offerings. It's based on skate-culture graffiti gleaned from various samples of similar style found on walls in Austin and online. The font includes two character sets, one which is plain and one which is enhanced with outlines. In normal usage the characters should nest, with slight overlap from one character to the next as shown in the sample to the right, but the lower case characters in the font are spaced evenly but not pre-nested, leaving the degree of overlap up to the user - nesting is easily adjusted with the tracking option in programs like Photoshop, Quark or InDesign. Ultimately Nosegrind will be added to our Modern Fonts collection, where it ought to fit in nicely.

The market for humanistic sans serif type families is saturated, so what can a new release add, and what does it take to stand out from the crowd? Asterisk Sans Pro (named after my favourite glyph to make) aims to be a highly versatile type family; massively useful due to its pan-European language support and bounty of OpenType features which make it the ideal choice for demanding typography. The look is contemporary; details which give the fonts character at large sizes all but disappear when small, making the middle weights suitable for large chunks of text. The family ranges from a hairline ultra light to a pretty weighty black – a must in a new typeface. Asterisk Sans Pro supports Latin, modern Greek and Cyrillic, with localized forms for Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian to boot. This is rare enough, but to have small caps for all these scripts in both upright and italic fonts is a big plus. Your client may not need all this language support right now, but this typeface gives them the option to grow while keeping a consistent look, and at a similar price point to families with a much narrower scope. The ability to customize Asterisk Sans Pro through the use of Stylistic Sets in OpenType savvy layout programs means you are really in control. Want more italic forms in the uprights? Go for it. A more Roman italic? Easy! The spurless m, n, r and u, accessible through SS13 give a graphic, almost bauhaus feel. The Dutch IJ glyph can be changed to a much cooler thing using SS14, and the family even supports ij-acute. Other OpenType features include a wealth of numeral styles (tabular and proportional, lining and oldstyle, plus small cap figures, numerators, denominators, subscript and superscript) and automatic fractions. There are also case-sensitive forms for all caps settings, a bunch of useful arrows, and superscript lower case Latin letters. All in, there are well over 1200 glyphs per font, making Asterisk Sans Pro an invaluable tool in your typeface arsenal, great for everything from corporate identities to editorial work, apps to cookbooks.