Plantin is a family of text typefaces created by Monotype in 1913. Their namesake, Christophe Plantin (Christoffel Plantijn in Dutch), was born in France during the year 1520. In 1549, he moved to Antwerp, located in present-day Belgium. There he began printing in 1555. For a brief time, he also worked at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Typefaces used in Christophe Plantin's books inspired future typographic developments. In 1913, the English Monotype Corporation's manager Frank Hinman Pierpont directed the Plantin revival. Based on 16th century specimens from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, specifically a type cut by Robert Granjon and a separate cursive Italic, the Plantin" typeface was conceived. Plantin was drawn for use in mechanical typesetting on the international publishing markets. Plantin, and the historical models that inspired it, are old-style typefaces in the French manner, but with x-height that are larger than those found in Claude Garamond's work. Plantin would go on to influence another Monotype design, Times New Roman. Stanley Morison and Victor Larent used Plantin as a reference during that typeface's cutting. Like Garamond, Plantin is exceptionally legible and makes a classic, elegant impression. Plantin is indeed a remarkably accommodating type face. The firm modelling of the strokes and the serifs in the letters make the mass appearance stronger than usual; the absence of thin elements ensures a good result on coated papers; and the compact structure of the letters, without loss of size makes Plantin one of the economical faces in use. In short, it is essentially an all-purpose face, excellent for periodical or jobbing work, and very effective in many sorts of book and magazine publishing. Plantin's Bold weight was especially optimized to provide ample contrast: bulkiness was avoided by introducing a slight sharpening to the serifs' forms."

Smart, legible and elegant, Gravesend Sans is a based on the unique typeface used for the iconic grass-green signage for the Southern Railway. In existence from 1923 to 1948, when the network was nationalised, the Southern Railway linked London with the Channel ports, South West England, the South coast resorts and Kent. The same design was also used for the ‘hawkeye’ signs on the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, differentiated by black letters on a yellow background. Reference for each letter was taken from vintage ‘target’ station nameplates and other platform signage. The rarest letters were the Q, seen in Queens Road Battersea, the X, seen in East Brixton, and the Z, used in Maze Hill, site of an infamous train crash in 1958. Being hand-made, the letters often differ in width and thickness. There was no lower case. The Bluebell Railway, a heritage steam line, runs over part of the old Southern Railway network and uses a very similar type. The design of the numbers differed considerably, but here have been taken from the Device 112 Hours font Smokebox. As well identifying platforms, they were used on the front of the steam engine’s smokebox, hence the name, and stylistically are more in keeping with the letters than some of the squarer versions that can be seen in old photographs. William Caslon IV is credited with the first Latin sans-serif type, shown in a 1816 Caslon specimen book. ‘Two Lines English Egyptian’, as it was called, was caps-only, and there are several other correlations between that type design and this one. Includes a selection of authentic arrows and manicules, plus abbreviated ligatures such as ‘St.’ (Saint or Street) ‘Rd.’ (Road) and ‘Jn.’ (Junction). The Cameo version includes many graphic banner elements that can be freely combined.

Leroy is a font family of 5 members designed from geometrizing Roman and Gothic skeletons. Its purpose is to provide optimal reading of titles and paragraphs with strong mechanical flavor. Because of this, its variables are designed to sort information in media such as labels, signs and industrial atmosphere packaging related with the Soviet Union’s fonts in 1920. This idea matured white horizontal lines superimposed on alphabets drawn with an ancient architectural team known as “Leroy K & E Controlled Lettering System”. Then that evolved into a family concept unifying its proportion to the same X height for its members, resulting in a versatile type system. Therefore, Regular and Bold variables have low contrast between thick and thin strokes. Its upstream and downstream are extremely short, generating a suitable interline that clogs the vertical area. Its overall width equal to its X height, supports its tight spacing that compacts the horizontal area. Therefore, the variant with black caliber has plenty of contrast between thick and thin strokes. The light variable has a “blind” effect radiating light halos, ideal to propose hierarchies and combinations with orthogonal projection. In that sense, Leroy’s modular character reminds constructivist ideology merged with typographical variants suitable for graphic design with geometric look. To achieve this, I studied the softening of forms and counter blocks into a typographical system specially designed for composing useful information to attract attention. In that sense, the dingbats were obtained through a careful process of research and testings done with drawings that provided full and empty visual strategies that with the passage of time helped to forge the major decisions of a metamorphosis from industrial tools, birds and humans from pictogram mixing various genres.

To Rafaella, a menina dos cachos. We, designers, have grown accustomed to seeing that lowercase letters—not only in calligraphy but also in typography (1)—may be very playful and decorative. Almost every part of them can become a potential swash, ligature or decorative accolade (2) if the designer has some expertise regarding this matter. However, since we are living in an era that elevates the status of handcrafts, lettering has gained a lot of ground in different kinds of mediums, and with it there’s a sort of overuse of capitals. This may be due to the reason that lettering pieces need a high impact to convey their messages and many times why big capitals are the only solution. With this in mind, I started Rafaella: A font consisting entirely of capitals which go from unadorned to very decorative. Rafaella has ductus and forms vaguely based on the 1970s Bookman-like styled fonts. The presence and behaviour of serifs and ball terminals in this style were the perfect excuse to make really attractive aternates which the user can choose from the glyphs panel. The result is a font full of life. Able to be both very playful and formal due to its roman style which can be combined with (and between) a wide range of other styles of expressive scripts or geometric fonts with nice results (3). Also try Rafaella Shade Solo combined with Rafaella or Rafaella Bold for a layer effect to emphasize any given word or phrase. NOTES (1) See my fonts Erotica from 2013 or Dream from 2014. (2) Accolades is a wonderful word that refers to the ornaments made around the words in the spencerian style of calligraphy (3) Combinations often seen in different pieces of lettering were usually a contrast of style is wanted.

Throughout time, history’s architects have incorporated some of the finest illustrations of type into their great works--cuneiform on Mesopotamian ziggurats; Greek etched into the temples of the gods; inscriptions marking the monuments of mighty Rome. From these Roman inscriptions specifically, we take our capital letters of today; and while we've lost the need for serifs over time, our current characters maintain the classical foundations, even after being distilled to their simplistic forms. Here’s where we have the basis for Le Havre Titling. This updated face is a carefully optimized version of Le Havre that uses purely capital lettering. Originally inspired by the golden period of the passenger ship and the French port that bid a rich bon voyage to so many famed, luxurious ocean liners of the Roaring Twenties and Thirties, the typeface includes an exciting array of ligatures that brings it into the present day and gives designers a tremendous amount of versatility in their work. With its seven weights, Titling looks equally at home on the side of a building as it does in a finely crafted invitation. With over five hundred glyphs, Le Havre Titling offers a multiplicity of options for your projects. Combine ligatures, play around with two sets of art deco forms, use original caps, and more; every one of these is obtainable with the OpenType functionality. The new design also shares five weights with the original Le Havre, allowing you to maximize your potential through its interchangeability. Titling’s Thin weights are delicate but not too fragile, and its geometric forms give each individual composition you create an exquisite and beautiful sense of emotion. Without a doubt, this fresh, fashionable take on the classical forms offers your reader refined, yet unanticipated approach as he or she travels through your text.

A typeface is a tool. Sure, there are frilly fonts that are more art than craft, showy faces that exist merely to call attention to themselves. But, in the end, any functional typeface worth its salt lives to serve one thing first: the text, the content. Everything else—the fashion of the moment, the allure of individual words and letters—is secondary. MVB Solitaire™ epitomizes this universal typographic mandate. As a tempered sans serif somewhere between a humanist and a gothic, MVB Solitaire captures a 21st-century neutrality. But practical doesn’t have to mean banal. MVB Solitaire has a soul. While some “neutral” type is dead the moment the ink hits the page, MVB Solitaire delivers text that feels lively, contemporary, relevant. Readers will not tire of this type. Behind the useful exterior is an arsenal of thoughtful technical features. It’s no surprise that this family’s creator, Mark van Bronkhorst, was first a graphic designer before becoming a type designer. Mark built all the goodies into MVB Solitaire that he would appreciate as a user: case-sensitive punctuation; alternate forms that can be invoked individually or together; oldstyle and lining figures in both tabular and proportional widths; slightly shorter lining figures that don’t stand out in running text, but also cap-height figures for all-cap settings; and the ability to speak nearly any Latin-based language. MVB Solitaire aspires to be the sort of workhorse that a designer keeps installed on their system at all times. It is a family bound to have a permanent spot in the font menu, always at the ready for projects (those most common of all) where the typography mustn’t mask the message. It has that quality that all truly useful typefaces have: the capacity to get the job done without getting in the way.

A modern Sans Serif — prosaic, designed geometrically, beautiful in large sizes All the dimensions of the font are based on Factor 10. The general principle of construction leads to slim forms and nearly equally wide characters. So the font appears very solid but is actually difficult to decipher in longer texts. Along with the ”normal“ Guhly Regular there are also the two versions Guhly Light and Guhly Bold, whereas in each only the vertical strokes [Guhly Light] or horizontal [Guhly Bold] have been changed in strength. The result is a very individual decorative effect which slightly reflects old circus and western scripts. The lower case characters in the version Guhly Book are, therefore, optimized to be suitable for longer texts in smaller font sizes — because after all, sometimes you should read a bit more than just the headline… The design of a shampoo bottle stands behind the creation of this sans serif display font. Prominent, clearly constructed forms with circular arcs define its appearance. This is a font primarily designed for use with capital letters — for all sorts of advertising purposes, headlines and titles. But lower case letters also belong to a good functional font; so, of course, Guhly includes them and ligatures for the more ”critical“ letter combinations as well as stylistic alternates for the letters K (or k), V (v) and o. As a decorative “encore”, the Guhly family also contains the “normal” weight in two variants: on the one hand the Guhly Cutout – these are letters without counter, as if the letters were cut out and the internal surfaces fell out; and on the other hand the Guhly stencil – as the name suggests, a stencil font with the typical bars that give a stencil the necessary cohesion.

Plantin is a family of text typefaces created by Monotype in 1913. Their namesake, Christophe Plantin (Christoffel Plantijn in Dutch), was born in France during the year 1520. In 1549, he moved to Antwerp, located in present-day Belgium. There he began printing in 1555. For a brief time, he also worked at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Typefaces used in Christophe Plantin's books inspired future typographic developments. In 1913, the English Monotype Corporation's manager Frank Hinman Pierpont directed the Plantin revival. Based on 16th century specimens from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, specifically a type cut by Robert Granjon and a separate cursive Italic, the Plantin" typeface was conceived. Plantin was drawn for use in mechanical typesetting on the international publishing markets. Plantin, and the historical models that inspired it, are old-style typefaces in the French manner, but with x-height that are larger than those found in Claude Garamond's work. Plantin would go on to influence another Monotype design, Times New Roman. Stanley Morison and Victor Larent used Plantin as a reference during that typeface's cutting. Like Garamond, Plantin is exceptionally legible and makes a classic, elegant impression. Plantin is indeed a remarkably accommodating type face. The firm modelling of the strokes and the serifs in the letters make the mass appearance stronger than usual; the absence of thin elements ensures a good result on coated papers; and the compact structure of the letters, without loss of size makes Plantin one of the economical faces in use. In short, it is essentially an all-purpose face, excellent for periodical or jobbing work, and very effective in many sorts of book and magazine publishing. Plantin's Bold weight was especially optimized to provide ample contrast: bulkiness was avoided by introducing a slight sharpening to the serifs' forms."

It's been said that creativity requires ten parts to perspiration to one part inspiration. But not always. According to its creator, Mira Vucko, ITC Needlescript was designed in one breath." An accomplished lettering artist, Vucko was sketching letters one afternoon. "I was using a calligraphy nib and was drawing the alphabet without much thought," she recalls. "When I allowed the down strokes of a couple of letters to fall below the baseline, I realized that I had created the impression of movement. I kept drawing letters in this fashion and did the same with horizontal lines. I added a firm ending to the descenders. Instead of dots above the 'i' and 'j,' I placed strokes in the opposite direction." In this way, the first characters that were to become ITC Needlescript emerged. The finished design is a lively, distinctive alphabet that produces a striking texture on the page. Letters intertwine and overlap to create a sense of movement and graphic intensity, especially when reversed out of a dark background. Vucko lives, works and was educated in Zagreb, Croatia. She lived in France and Sweden while in her twenties, but then returned to Croatia to work as a graphic designer for the country's largest newspaper. It was here that her passion for type and typography was born. Vucko has since gone on to become one of Croatia's leading graphic designers, and has won many awards for her advertising and packaging design. Vucko recommends that ITC Needlescript be used for "titling, lively but 'thorny' content, and anywhere that a little typographic drama is called for.""

What comes to your mind if I say Architype, Geometric, Gaelic, and Uncial? An impossible combination of features? An unrealistic setup of tastes as weird as your music list? Or some part of a joke told by your favourite comedian? Just chill and stick to the idea that is possible. Gallos combines the conceptual historical elegance of the Uncials with the practical rationalism of the Geometric style. Moreover, this typeface is composed by two sub families: Gallos Uncial and Gallos Architype. The letters “M”, “N”, “W”, “a”, “m”, “n”, “r”, and “w” differ between these two models. The first one is related to both: The Uncial script aspect displaying the leaned “a” with a closed bowl, and the classical geometric style depicting more conventional uppercase and lowercase letters “m” and “n”. The Architype one is inspired by Paul Renner’s Architype model, thus the leaned “a” has an open counter, the “r” is composed by a stem and a dot, and the rest of the mentioned letters were built using square rational features. Both models are connected by classical Uncial features such as the curved stroke “e” and curved shaft “t”, and with Gaelic vibes which can be seen in uppercase and lowercase letters “K” and “X”. Also, the curved descender “g” and “y”, alongside the curved stem “z” connect really well with the rest of the system and provide more uniqueness to the Gallos type family. Without further ado, we say to you: let’s make Uncials popular again!

Imagine a font that is easier to read the smaller it is – or the further away the text is. There are already many line screen fonts, I wanted to take it to the extreme and use as few lines as possible, while keeping the grid of the fonts metrics. The result is a typeface that lives up to its name. Each individual line makes no sense on its own; individual letters are only recognisable in the context of all associated lines, individual letters are most likely to be recognised in the context of whole words. Attached to a building wall, text would be readable from a great distance and become increasingly difficult to decipher the closer you get to the building. Placed on the ground or on a large flat roof, text would only be readable from an aeroplane or - depending on the size - in Google Earth. Kontext has old style figures, superscript numerals, case-sensitive questiondown and exclamdown and an alternative ampersand, 390 glyphs at all. Use the same value for font size and line spacing to keep the lines in the grid, or change the line spacing in 10% steps. Change the spacing in 100-unit or 25-percent increments increments to keep the grid. The »H« in the font name stands for horizontal (lines). The numbers in the font name refer to the brightness of the background and letters themselves, with the first number describing the background and the second the letters. Starting with »00« (white) to »200« (dark) See also my Family Kontext Dot

Burford is a font family that I sketched while traveling through Europe. I was mesmerized by all the unique typography that was showcased throughout the five countries I visited. Inspired by all that I had seen, I found myself spending 4-5 hours per day in Amsterdam’s Vondel Park drawing characters. Once back in the states I digitalized Burford, deciding it would make for a beautiful layer-based font. Burford Pro package comes with all 18 layering fonts including 5 base layers, 3 top layers, 5 bottom layers and 2 sets of graphic elements. They are strategically made to build on top of each other, creating a cohesive and easy to use layer-based family. Each font also comes with a set of Stylistic Alternatives for letters A C E F G H P Q R. Burford Basic package is created for users who don’t have access to premiere design programs (such as Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, etc) and are unable to use the layering effect. Burford can still be a powerful tool as each font can also be used on its own. It includes every font file not needed for the layering effect. (Include 13 fonts - Burford Basic, Dots, DropShadow, Extras Set A, Extras Set B, Extrude B, Extrude C, Inline, Line, Marquee, Outline, Stripes A and Stripes B). The Burford Extras set uses all basic keyboard characters - around 100 total elements per set. They are designed to go specifically with Burford and complement its varying styles perfectly. The set includes: banners, borders, corners, arrows, line breaks, catchwords, anchors and many more!

Imagine a font that is easier to read the smaller it is – or the further away the text is. There are already many line screen fonts, I wanted to take it to the extreme and use as few lines as possible, while keeping the grid of the fonts metrics. The result is a typeface that lives up to its name. Each individual line makes no sense on its own; individual letters are only recognisable in the context of all associated lines, individual letters are most likely to be recognised in the context of whole words. Attached to a building wall, text would be readable from a great distance and become increasingly difficult to decipher the closer you get to the building. Placed on the ground or on a large flat roof, text would only be readable from an aeroplane or - depending on the size - in Google Earth. Kontext has old style figures, superscript numerals, case-sensitive questiondown and exclamdown and an alternative ampersand, 390 glyphs at all. Use the same value for font size and line spacing to keep the lines in the grid, or change the line spacing in 10% steps. Change the spacing in 50-unit or 25-percent increments to keep the grid. The »V« in the font name stands for vertical (lines). The numbers in the font name refer to the brightness of the background and letters themselves, with the first number describing the background and the second the letters. Starting with »00« (white) to »200« (dark) See also my family Kontext Dot

This family was inspired by a Type Battle over at Typophile: How would you design a font metrically compatible with Helvetica, but better than Arial? Working with preset letter widths was an interesting constraint, both a relief and a limitation at the same time. I have done all the 4 basic weights, and the skewed obliques (done to a slightly less steep 10 degrees angle as opposed to the originals 12) has been optically adjusted. The letters have been designed quite close to the german/swiss grotesk tradition, but by using super-elliptical rounds, rounded dots and slightly curved outer diagonals the end result is a friendly looking font family that still looks... familiar. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.