Grava is Neil Summerour’s injection of warmth within the geometric sans font category. Historically, geometric sans families have been based on primal shapes — triangle, circle, square — and the more closely they held to those rigid rules, the more internal inconsistencies they showed. Angles won’t match up correctly, letters will lean, overshoots complicate clean typesetting, and idealized circles become grotesque and unwieldy in some weights. Because of issues like these, geometric sans fonts have a reputation of being cold, austere, even a bit “off”. Grava was made to hold a T-square and triangle in one hand while giving a welcoming handshake with the other. The Grava font family comes in two styles (a normal and a Display), each with 20 weights (Thin to Ultra) and paired with italics. Its design allowed the three scripts of Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek to emerge seamlessly, ensuring Grava will find its home in multilingual publications. Even better, each character in the three scripts is spaced with every other character for a beautifully matched fit, and it’s a buy-one-get-all-three deal since they are all packaged together. The normal style’s large x-height won’t let you down in paragraphs, headings, and any call-out text. And have you seen the angles on those numerals? Pairing Grava’s numerals on a jersey is sure to catch some eyes, just sayin'. Grava Display is purposefully quirky and sharp, and made for poster sizes, book and album covers, and those websites with a well-defined character — somewhere between playfully self-aware and overtly vintage. Flat edges are abandoned to make way for sharp points and conspicuousness, for geometrical attitude and respectful expressiveness. Corporate reports use Grava Display to take on a professional and current look. The optional ligatures (N–T, L–L, G–A, C–O, almost anywhere an ‘A’ is placed, and more) in both the normal and Display styles invoke a midcentury modernist and high art feel. Now that introductions are done, you can let go of Grava’s hand and put it to work for you.

(pronounced hor-hay) Some years ago my wife and I had our evening meal in a restaurant on what is called the northshore of Massachusetts. Of course, if you check a globe or map you'll see that the pilgrims needed a compass, it should have been called the eastshore as it's on the east end of the rectangle/hook we call the Commonwealth of Mass. In any event, the menu our waitress gave us was hand-lettered with shapes that I used to develop the 4 fonts called Jorge. When I brought the preliminary drawings into the office Steve Zafarana, a designer and cartoonist referred to them as Jorge's new design, the name stuck.

Who haven't heard the phrase that ‘any past time was better’?. Although I sometimes find this phrase a little too pessimistic (because I try to think that the best is yet to come), it may be true regarding my passion, typography. I'm too young (29) unfortunately, and this means I did not have the pleasure of being contemporary with maybe the man who has influenced my work the most (1). The man that showed that letters are more than just letters to be read. Herb Lubalin (1918-1981), also called sometimes as ‘the rule basher’ (2), smashed the taboos and sacred rules of type design and gave it personality. He rejected the functionalist philosophy of europeans in favor of an eclectic and exuberant style. To him, letters were not merely vessels of form, they were objects of meaning. (3). Nowadays, when looking at his portfolio, who dares to deny that the term ‘typography’ and ‘beauty’ may go hand-in-hand without any problem? Ed Benguiat, one of Herb’s partners, still likes making jokes with the phrase “screw legibility, type should be beautiful” and what I understand of this is not to forget the rules, but to know and break them carefully. In an era of pure eclecticism, we, the lovers of flourishes and swashes, can't do nothing but admire all the legacy that Lubalin, this wonderful type-guru, left. My font Lubaline read as “the line of Lubalin” is my humble tribute to him. Those who know his work, may see the influences easily like in his ‘Beards’ (1976) and ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965) posters; the art-deco forms in many of his amazing logos and practically in all his creations where letters seem to be alive just like you and me. I really hope that the future finds me still learning more and more about type-design and letterforms, and like him, always willing to make innovations in my field: Because letters are not just letters to be read. NOTES (1) These are some of my fonts in which some of Lubalin’s influences can be seen (in order of creation): Reina, Aire, Erotica, String, Beatle, Heroe, Selfie, Model, Seventies, and many others that are still in progress. (2) (3) Steven Heller. Herb Lubalin: Rule Basher. U&lc (1998) http://www.printmag.com/imprint/my-favorite-lubalin/

In the October 31, 1920 edition of Wid's Daily (the predecessor to The Film Daily), a block of ad copy from a 1920 film called "Down Home" had the text printed in such a fluent pen-lettered style that a bit of a shortcut was used at the beginning of the design process for this typeface. Normally, font inspirations are redrawn [and not by simply using auto-trace] except under specialized circumstances like this one where that feature is a help, rather than a replacement for the creative process. The entire block of text copy was auto-traced, then the necessary letters were selected from the available wording and cleaned up to remove any sharp points and irregular curves in an effort to make the end results as close to the original and unusual hand-drawn text. From there the missing characters needed to produce a finished type font were created utilizing the standard methods of drawing and font construction. The end results turned out very well. Using the film's title as its namesake, this design is now available digitally as Down Home JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Arabetics Aladdin is a monoshape font family with a fixed single shape per each Arabic Unicode character. Glyphs are designed to incorporate the traditional Arabetic visual characteristics found in all four varying shapes, isolated, initial, medial, and final, for each letter. The overall design also emphasizes the line-like (khat) horizontal look and feel of the Arabetic scripts without sacrificing legibility. This font family supports all Arabetic scripts covered by Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks, including support for Quranic texts. It includes two weights: regular and bold, each of which has normal and left-slanted (Italic) versions. The design of this font family follows the Arabetics Mutamathil style design principles utilizing varying x-heights and no glyph substitutions. The Mutamathil type style was introduced by the designer more than 18 years ago. The Arabetics Aladdin font family includes all required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all soft vowel diacritics (harakat), which are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—to clearly distinguish them from the letters. The Tatweel or Kashida lengthening character is a zero-width glyph.

We are really happy to introduce you to Cinta, a brand new elegant sans serif font designed for text. It has a humanistic skeleton, dressed up with a hand-made mechanical suit, which made it rush, audacious. A dedicated tribute to the breakdown of mestizo music rhythm, bright, dreamy but completely real. Full of a broad variety of weights and versions, it’s able to produce subtle changes in the typographic stain. Perfect to make delicate hierarchy both in web and text and show the world their family background undoubtedly. Prudent and thrifty, condensed forms and with a generous x-height, it almost accidentally saves space and avoids being a spendthrift. Discreet even in the italic, slightly slanted to produce a subtle change of look on web use, will make a delightful for the most exquisite users with the audacity of modernity. Classic but not silly. Generous in abundance, with small caps, old numerals, denominators and numerators, fractions, ligatures, all you need to survive in the new modern life of Opentype with elegance. Polyglot, with support for Latin languages, Central European and Cyrillic. A delicate friend who will delight ladies and gentlemen who are discerning and cosmopolitan.

PF Bague Slab Pro draws its inspiration from early 20th century slabs and was designed as a companion to Bague Sans, a versatile monoline typeface with a distinct and eye-catching personality. Following its predecessor’s design guidelines, it overcomes the monotonous and mechanical rigidity of early geometrics by introducing subtle variations in stroke width and semi-wedge serifs rather than square slabs. These striking serifs, along with a mixture of attractive letterforms, exude a strong, modern and energetic personality at display sizes. On the other hand, at small sizes these distinct characteristics become subtle and the simplistic geometric personality of the typeface comes in place to offer a highly readable text. Bague Slab Pro is a very clean and legible typeface with a warm and well-balanced texture which is ideal for editorial design, branding and corporate identity. This superfamily includes 18 weights from Hairline to Ultra Black with a consistent and well-refined structure. The italics are slightly narrower than the romans with cursive characteristics. Each style consists of 718 glyphs with 13 opentype features and an extended set of characters which supports simultaneously Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. PDF Specimen Bague Slab Pro on Behance

Trigomy is a proportional pixel font designed on a 5 pixel grid. It is intended for either very small text or as huge display font for posters and the like. To get a crisp look this font should be used at 10 pt or multiples of 10 pt. (A tip for Adobe Creative Suite applications is to change the standard anti-aliasing method from “sharp” to “crisp” and to align the text to whole pixels. Also avoid centered text.) To get started with type design I thought it was best to start with a pixel font because you don't have to focus much on the design itself, but rather have to focus on how kerning and spacing works and the various features you can implement with OpenType. And of course I wanted to have a pixel font that had all that I was missing from other pixel fonts. We were learning trigonometry at the time I started designing Trigomy, and most of the time I misspoke it “trigometry”. So, when I had to come up with a name for my first font I thought: "Why not go with Trigomy?"

Guillotine is inspired by an uncredited early 1970s film face called Rhythm Bold. While the original film type had plenty of round forms that were uneven and somewhat badly drawn to fit within the overwhelming pop wave of the time, this digital incarnation disposes of all curves, relies on a much sharper grid, and adheres to specific parameters of stroke widths and angles. Guillotine is a thick poster classic, mechanically constructed yet clearly exhibiting the idiosyncratic traits of hand drawing. Its forms embody the amalgamation of a multitude of influences, such as woodcut letters, punch card forms, and the unique art nouveau concepts that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. The totality of the font is a strong display aesthetic that plays very well anywhere the eye is meant to see a strong but casual, sharp but hand crafted message. This font comes in all popular formats for all common platforms, and includes expanded language support to cover Western, Eastern and Central European Latin languages, as well as Baltic, Celtic/Welsh, Esperanto, Maltese, and Turkish. A few alternate characters are sprinkled throughout the character map.

Made up of sixteen individual weights and spread over three different optical sizes, Essonnes is designed to bring utility back to the Didot genre. It’s a common belief among designers that Didones don’t work for text. This wasn’t true in 1819 and it isn’t true today. Like its forbearers, Essonnes is a truly optical family—not just a study in adjusting contrast. The text and display weights have been designed from the ground up for their intended roles. This means that everything from the height of the uppercase & lowercase letters have been specifically tuned for their intended purpose. Like many typefaces, Essonnes started after falling in love with a piece of history. In this case, it was the eccentric forms of Pierre Didot’s Type and the evolution of the High contrast Didone throughout the 19th century. It was out of curiosity and love for these forms that led to the first draft of what would become Essonnes back in 2011. These unique situations—screens, modern printing methods, the previous 200 years of typographic innovation since the original design, my own life experiences—have led to a typeface that, while based on history, is not stuck in it.

Wardruna Arabic is a method of writing Arabic with a Runic-like alphabet devised by Devin Lester. He imagined that if some vikings had settled in the Middle East, they might have started speaking Arabic and writing it with a version of the Runic alphabet. This particular alphabet is based on Tolkien's Cirth Runes. A band of vikings went to Baghdad after raiding in Europe. The markets in Constantinople were closed as the Turks had just sacked the city. These men had heard of the great market in Baghdad and went there to sell their wares, seeing that this land was warm and fertile they decided to stay. They ended up settling the land and taking Arab wives and having children, because of thier Northern European accent their Arabic evolved into a part-Arabic dialect of Iraqi arabic. This is why today you see a few Arabs with green eyes and dark blonde or red hair. The Arabic alphabet was too fluid for them and vikings disdained the use of paper as a persons writings could be burned, so the evolved their runes to fit Arabic.

Benchmark Pro is a carefully structured geometric typeface which works amazingly well in body text due to its simplistic nature and large x-height. The design of Benchmark Pro started out as an attempt to convert the minimalistic structure of a technical and purely geometric design into a readable modern and friendly sans serif. This was achieved by selectively changing and turning the straight lines of the initial drawings into curves and applying legibility techniques to the transformed letterforms. These letterforms have a distinct personality which is bolstered by its angular curves and open counter terminals. The result is a contemporary text typeface that looks quite fashionable. Benchmark Pro gets away from the ultra modern and mechanical structure but keeps its display nature, it gets away from the classical but still remains legible. This robust san serif type family offers an extended character set which supports simultaneously Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. All Benchmark Pro font variants have a companion italic, rounding the total family members at 14 fonts. Each font includes more than 750 glyphs and is powered with 17 opentype features. PDF Specimen Benchmark on Behance

Carve is an African font that was inspired by fonts such as Othello and Neuland designed in the mid-1920s. Rather than attempting to re-create these fonts in a digital form as so many others have done, I have tried to capture the “spirit” of the period and emphasize the “woodcarving” style of the font, while simultaneously giving it a contemporary feel. As a result the characters differ markedly any of the original styles and have much less of an “Art Deco” look to them. To further modernize Carve, I have included all the characters required for a full character set (lower case, as well as all punctuation, numerals, diacritics, special characters etc). The result is a thoroughly modern re-interpretation. The numbers (0 to 9) bear no relation to any originals but, I believe, are fully in keeping with the upper and lower alphabetic characters of my font. Carve comes in two styles: --Regular: contemporary, angular African style --Incised: exaggerating the chunky, hand-carved "woodcut" effect. The "in-line" effect has been hand-crafted to avoid the mechanical effect of computer-generated inline effects.

Daddy’s Hand is based on the actual handwriting of my dad. He always prided himself on his fine penmanship, and to see him write was kind of like watching a ballroom dance--his pen would smoothly and elegantly waltz across the paper as he wrote, gliding effortlessly. I know if he were alive today he would be quite honored that his handwriting is now a font. This font can be used for all sorts of elegant occasions or advertising, and has ligatures & alternate letters. Digitized by John Bomparte.

Fini. Done. You've just discovered an infinitely useful font that polishes things with youthful and stylish vigor. Fini provides playfulness with double letter ligatures with a twist of friendly sophistication. Fini Things, also designed by illustrator and font designer, Amy Dietrich, is a decorative collection of 26 loopy, spotty repeating border designs and kid oriented icons (like a pea coat, owl hat, hoodie, rubber duckie etc, plus a coffee cup - for mom and dad). Fini Things coordinates with Fini font, and in fact, works very nicely with Merci, and other Atlantic Fonts.

Big Jim Roberts was my dad. A dedicated family man who taught us about faith, values and love is missed by our family. Jim just about did it all. He was a military man, a police officer, a power company engineer and a photographer. This typeface (which is comprised of a bold lower-case alphabet) has a 70s retro feel. Jim might have like it. The net profits from my font sales help defer medical expenses for my siblings, who both suffer with Cystic Fibrosis and diabetes. Thank you.