In 2007-8, Carolyn Puzzovio developed this OpenType typeface: Lagoon which is based on an Armenian model from the Mechitarist monastery, Venice, 1810. This project was supported by a grant from the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK) and won a first prize in the Granshan 08 type design competition. Oſten, Armenian digital types are designed to match the forms of Latin type characters and ‘Latinized’, by uprighting the forms; truncating ascenders and descenders and raising the x-height – but in this case the Latin characters in the OpenType font have been designed to blend in with the traditional Armenian proportions which are based on cursive forms – also incorporating some of the quirky shapes from the original model. Faithfully following the original created difficulties of ‘clashing’ characters, particularly those with long descenders, so the font contains over 100 alternative characters in the Armenian part, which will normally substitute automatically where necessary. The sloping lower case characters and upright capitals are traditional in Armenian – capitals are used less in the Armenian language. Three new characters for the Armenian unicode range are included: the Armenian dram (currency) symbol; the eternity symbol; and the index number symbol. This font which will be one of the first OpenType fonts to incorporate these newly unicoded characters.

Sonrisa is a design that evolved from my sketches of the skeletal structure of Jakob Erbar’s Koloss, trying to discover its underlying essence without all the contrast and bulkiness of the original design. Sonrisa Thin was the resulting font, from which the other weights of the family were developed. Gentle curves, open counters, generous x-height, and sleekly tapered terminals give Sonrisa a very legible, modern, elegant appearance. When she saw the first draft of this typeface, the smile on my friend Jennifer’s face gave me the idea to call it “Sonrisa” (Spanish for “smile”). Jennifer, a clinical psychologist, described Sonrisa’s personality as: "happy, clean, clear, open, joyful, spacious, playful, calm. I can see it being used for body product lines such as oils and lotions. Can see it being used in home/travel magazines or even Architectural Digest. Yoga magazine, definitely." Sonrisa is what some foundries call a “Pro” typeface family with all the bells and whistles that provide typographic versatility: true small caps, oldstyle numerals, arbitrary fractions, discretionary ligatures, and other powerful OpenType features. All fonts in the family, except Sonrisa Titling, support most European languages, including modern Greek and languages that use the Cyrillic Alphabet. (Cyrillic glyphs designed in consultation with Ukrainian type designer, Sergiy S. Tkachenko.) Sonrisa is available in the original Thin, monoline version as well as six weights (Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Extra Bold, Black), and a Titling font that is essentially a display font construction kit. If you enjoy using Sonrisa even half as much as I enjoyed creating it, then I know you will have a “sonrisa” (smile) on your face!

Vette Letters are thrilled to add maverick designer Dirk Uhlenbrock to the family, with the release of VLNL Bromfiets. Bromfiets (the Dutch word for moped) is a ‘holiday child’, the basic idea coming from a stop at a road junction in the Dutch coastal province of Zeeland. The Dutch signage, the black and white rings of traffic light poles, the symbols for brom- and snorfiets have always appealed to Dirk. While on vacation in Zeeland the first scribbles and digital drafts were created, always in mind that the typeface had to be striking, clear and friendly. The end result is more than that, a strong and instantly recognisable font with a matching dingbat weight full of icons and arrows. Stencil fonts have always interested Dirk, the informal character and the possible universal use as a paint- or spray-stencil on a wide variety of surfaces makes this type of font so interesting for me. The technically necessary dissolution of closed font contours always ensures a special aesthetic: What’HAT and HOW MUCH has to be removed or left, in order to make words easy to read and to avoid a fractal impression. Dirk Uhlenbrock has been working as graphic designer and illustrator in his hometown Essen, Germany for over 30 years. Always interested in typedesign he got in contact with Fontographer in 1996 and started to create and distribute loads of free fonts through his online platforms ‘Eyesaw’ and ‘Fontomas’. A bunch of these type experiments have been extented on request to complete fonts. Still located in Essen in 2009 Dirk started his second owner-based business erste liga büro für gestaltung - ersteliga.de

Adelphi is a geometric sans, redefined for the northern side of the English Channel. Typographic modernism was a late arrival in Britain — due partly to the Second World War and to the strong local type tradition. This delay provided for fruitful divergence, thus modernism was not adored in quite the same way as it had been in Germany and central Europe. It was instead rethought and repurposed against the backdrop of the bleak British weather and postwar social reform – a continental fashion statement reshaped into a more humanist variant. Likewise, when crafting Adelphi, Nick Job reimagined the constraints that defined the geometric sans as a genre. Whereas other typefaces seem overly bound by the rules, Adelphi feels relaxed and approachable. Elementary square and circular shapes are merely implied. A keen observer may notice that the uncomplicated letterforms occasionally reveal a subtle naïveté associated with early Grotesques. Brunel’s bridges and Harry Beck’s tube map spring to mind alongside the Bauhaus and Futura. But Adelphi is by no means nostalgic! It is a contemporary, comprehensive, and durable system with a pragmatic set of features. These include a wide array of weights, ‘uniwidth italics’, and variable extenders that go from tall and flat in Adelphi Text to short and sharp in Adelphi Display, with default Adelphi standing midway between these two extremes. You can set the extenders to your preference in the all-inclusive variable font or use one of the three static fonts that come packed together, priced as a single font. The pan-European support for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts already makes for a vast character set, but Adelphi takes things a step further by including alternate glyphs to satisfy the DIN1450 legibility norm, a range of ordinals that can be used to create specialist compositions in all three scripts and two kinds of fractions and arrows. Play with the alternates or use it as-is. Either way, this understated beauty will carry you through.

Introducing Vectipede—a typeface that is bold, sharp, and confident. Its slab-serif style exudes an air of stability and dependability, making it perfect for any design that requires a sense of groundedness. But don’t let its strikingness fool you—Vectipede is also pragmatic. Its simple clarity of letterforms makes it easy to read, while its crisp angles and lines lend a touch of sophistication to any project. And if you’re looking for versatility, Vectipede has got you covered. With seven weights and italics, you can use it for anything from headlines to body text. Plus, it offers numeric ordinals and old-style numerals that can be accessed through OpenType features, making it the perfect choice for projects that require a touch of elegance. So whether you’re designing a poster, a brochure, or a website, Vectipede is the typeface you can count on. Simple, clear, and stylish—it’s the perfect choice for any design project that needs a touch of sophistication. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

PB Capitalis Rustica IVc is a font face designed for imitate latin writing style found in manuscripts from 1st to 9th century. All characters are handwritten by use ink and reed pen (calamus), scanned, digitized and optimized for best quality without lost its handwritten visual appearance. Character set support codepages: 1250 Central (Eastern) European, 1252 Western (ANSI), 1254 Turkish, 1257 Baltic. Include also additional characters for Cornish, Danish, Dutch and Welsh language, spaces (M/1, M/2, M/3, M/4, M/6, thin, hair, zero width space etc.) and historical characters (overlined Roman numerals, I-longa, historical ligatures for "nomina sacra" and "notae communes"). OpenType TrueType TTF (.ttf) font file include installed OpenType features: Access All Alternates, Localized Forms, Fractions, Ordinals, Superscript, Tabular Figures, Proportional Figures, Stylistic Alternates, Stylistic Set 1, Historical Forms, Historical Ligatures. Include also kerning as single 'kern' table for maximum possible backwards compatibility with older software. Historical ligatures for "nomina sacra" and "notae communes" are mapped to Private Use Area codepoints. Use of OpenType features to get historical characters: ïTo get "I-longa" use Stylistic Alternates for: "I"(U+0049), "i"(U+0069), "dotless i"(U+0131). ïTo get "nomina sacra" use Historical Ligatures and write uppercase letters: DS for: "Deus", DMS or DNS for: "Dominus" EPS for: "Episcopus", IHS for: "Iesus", PBR for: "Presbiter", SCS for: "Sanctus", SPS for: "Spiritus", XPS for: "Christus". ïTo get "notae communes" use Historical Ligatures and write: B(U+0042) + "middle dot"(U+00B7) for: "-BUS", Q(U+0051) + "middle dot"(U+00B7) for: "-QUE". ïTo get "scriptio continua" (writing without words separation) use Historical Forms (regular spaces are replaced by zero width spaces between words). ïTo get "middle dot" for separate words use Stylistic Set 1 (regular spaces are replaced by middle dot between words).

Hispania Script is a distinctive and distinctly nineteenth century script. It was released by Schelter & Giesecke of Leipzig, Germany around 1890. Particularly noteworthy are the sharply-pointed legs of the upper case ‘K’ & ‘R’ that seem to be characteristic of the period. Similar strokes, often with a slight curve, may be seen in typefaces like Alt-Romanish and Tinteretto by Schelter & Giesecke, Artistic and Lateinsch by Bauer and Berthold and the poster lettering of Edward Penfield. The angle of this script (approximately 24 degrees) and the sharp delicate points must have made the manufacture of this face in metal type a challenge. The resulting type was probably quite fragile and subject to accidental damage. Additionally, the sharp points would be subject to wear. With digital type, these concerns are eliminated. As far as I know, no one has ever dropped a digital letter on the floor. Nonetheless, creating a digital outline for a typeface like Hispania Script, with many crossing strokes, can be quite time-consuming. Even with an accurate scan of a good quality original, it is usually necessary to construct each crossing stroke separately and then remove the overlap in order to obtain a sharp and convincing intersection. Steep internal angles are often defined with two points, rather than one, to minimize ink or toner fill that can muddy the rendering in smaller sizes. Like all formal scripts, Hispania Script is always useful for announcements and invitations. However, the distinctiveness of of this design strongly suggests that there are other applications that may benefit from its use. Step outside the box and try it in some unexpected places. It is the unexpected that often draws a person’s eye.

The engraver’s sans serif—strikingly similar to drafting alphabets of the early 1900s—has been one of the most widely used stationer’s lettering styles since about 1900. Its open, simple forms offer legibility at very small sizes. While there are digital fonts based on this style (such as Burin Sans™ and Sackers Gothic™, among others), few offer the range of styles and weights possible, with the versatility designers perhaps expect from digital type families. Sweet Sans fills that void. The family is based on antique engraver’s lettering templates called “masterplates.” Professional stationers use a pantograph to manually transfer letters from these masterplates to a piece of copper or steel that is then etched to serve as a plate or die. This demanding technique is rare today given that most engravers now use a photographic process to make plates, where just about any font will do. But the lettering styles engravers popularized during the first half of the twentieth century—especially the engraver’s sans—are still quite familiar and appealing. Referencing various masterplates—which typically offer the alphabet, figures, an ampersand, and little else—Mark van Bronkhorst has drawn a comprehensive toolkit of nine weights, each offering upper- and lowercase forms, small caps, true italics, arbitrary fractions, and various figure sets designed to harmonize with text, small caps, and all-caps. The fonts are available as basic, Standard character sets, and as Pro character sets offering a variety of typographic features and full support for Western and Central European languages. Though rich in history, Sweet Sans is made for contemporary use. It is a handsome and functional tribute to the spirit of unsung craftsmanship. Burin Sans and Sackers Gothic are trademarks of Monotype Imaging.

Classica Pro by Bernd Möllenstädt A real alternative for letterpress printing A masterpiece It was only after many years, shortly before the end of his life, Bernd Möllenstädt brought out these early drafts of his Classica Light and Light Italic from his drawer, and asked me to produce for him on the computer a Bold and Bold Italic, from which we later wanted to interpolate further cuts like Regular and so on. The boldening of letters with an oblique axis and with hairlines which should not grow to the same extent as the general line widths, is hard to cope with perfectly, even for the smartest computer program, and even more so, when it concerns an as complicated set of data as those conceived by Bernd. The automatically generated result could therefore only be a first step that had to be improved manually later. This was about the stage that we had reached when Bernd died in March 2013, leaving me behind with comprehensive corrections on proofs of this automatically generated Bold. Although I was aware that it would mean a lot of work to complete the project, I did not want to leave it unfinished and decided to finalize and publish the Classica, also in Bernd‘s honor. In the course of the two years that I worked on this font family it somewhat naturally became also my own. New details were added and some of the existing changed. A book typeface requires the supreme and forgives rarely, it represents a true masterpiece. My intention and my ambition were to create a real alternative for letterpress printing, with a font family that contains all the typographic options for an excellent typesetting, and is better readable and has a better appearance than other existing typefaces. Whether this was achieved, the reader may decide. Volker Schnebel, Hamburg, december 2014

Y’all ready for this? Now starting for Insigne: the new serif Mirantz. This rookie all-star plays a precise game every game, cutting at all the right angles to leave your reader impressed and ready to see more. You can always count on Mirantz to lead with solid mechanics and a clean style, but don’t be surprised when the face keeps it real with a little individual flare and creativity. This personal touch is nothing short of elegance in every appearance. So what makes us love this rookie above the other great players in the field? Contrast, for one. Mirantz brings more contrast to the game than most serifs out there. The serifs on this face have a crisp, sharp wedge that naturally draws the reader’s eye. You can’t help but fall in love with its clean, natural style. Mirantz also features a tall x-height and regular proportions that can play a number of positions on the page and still stay strong through the last half of the copy or even the final period. Mirantz is a solid powerhouse player, containing a complete set of small capitals and nine weights from thin to bold. It can play well both down low and up top with its subscripts and superscripts and can move your reader’s eye easily across the copy with its titling capitals, condensed and extended variants, and open style figures. With its options covering more than 72 Latin-based languages, look for this newcomer to have international success in the near future. It you haven’t set your draft picks for this next round of projects, think hard before passing up Mirantz. A capable serif like this one is a guaranteed asset to any team of fonts. Production assistance from Lucas Azevedo.

Introducing Mixolydian, the scientific sans-serif typeface that’s anything but pretty. But don’t let its lack of aesthetics fool you; it packs a punch with its industrial and analytical tone. Unlike those fancy, European technical fonts, Mixolydian was made with an American flair in mind. Some of its graphic elements were even derived from the Federal Highway Administration Standard alphabet and architectural drafting templates. And let’s talk about those letters. Mixolydian’s intentionally off-kilter rhythm gives it a utilitarian, scientific vibe that’s perfect for any data-driven project. No need for frills or fuss here; Mixolydian is all about getting the job done. But that’s not all—the Mixolydian family comes in six weights and six highly inclined obliques, making it versatile enough for any design project you can dream up. So if you’re looking for a typeface that’s deliberately unattractive but highly effective, Mixolydian is your answer. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

The engraver’s sans serif—strikingly similar to drafting alphabets of the early 1900s—has been one of the most widely used stationer’s lettering styles since about 1900. Its open, simple forms offer legibility at very small sizes. While there are digital fonts based on this style (such as Burin Sans™ and Sackers Gothic™, among others), few offer the range of styles and weights possible, with the versatility designers perhaps expect from digital type families. Sweet Sans fills that void. The family is based on antique engraver’s lettering templates called “masterplates.” Professional stationers use a pantograph to manually transfer letters from these masterplates to a piece of copper or steel that is then etched to serve as a plate or die. This demanding technique is rare today given that most engravers now use a photographic process to make plates, where just about any font will do. But the lettering styles engravers popularized during the first half of the twentieth century—especially the engraver’s sans—are still quite familiar and appealing. Referencing various masterplates—which typically offer the alphabet, figures, an ampersand, and little else—Mark van Bronkhorst has drawn a comprehensive toolkit of nine weights, each offering upper- and lowercase forms, small caps, true italics, arbitrary fractions, and various figure sets designed to harmonize with text, small caps, and all-caps. The fonts are available as basic, Standard character sets, and as Pro character sets offering a variety of typographic features and full support for Western and Central European languages. Though rich in history, Sweet Sans is made for contemporary use. It is a handsome and functional tribute to the spirit of unsung craftsmanship. Burin Sans and Sackers Gothic are trademarks of Monotype Imaging.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.