Inspired by a find a coarse but decorative font was created. "Fundstueck" ist the German term for it. Fonts can be so simple. That is what I was thinking as my attention was turned to this rusty piece of metal. Only a few centimeters in size, I couldn’t imagine which purpose it might truly serve. But my eyes also saw an E, even a well-proportioned E: a width to height ratio of approximately 2/3, black and fine strokes with a 1/2 proportion — could I create more characters on this basis? Thought it, did it. The form is based on a 5mm unit. The strikingly thick middle stroke of E suggests that the emphasis is not necessarily placed on the typical stroke, and likewise with the other characters. But if the font is going to be somewhat legible, then you cannot leave out slanted strokes completely. Eventually I found enough varying solutions for all letters of the alphabet and figures. A font designed in this way doesn’t really have to be extremely legible, which is why I forwent creating lower case letters. Nevertheless, Fundstueck still contains some diverse forms in the layout of upper and lower case letters. Thus, the typeface is a bit richer in variety. By the way — the “lower” letters with accents and umlauts stay between the baseline and cap height. And with that, you get wonderful ribbon-type lines.

Linotype Bengali, a revival This project by Neelakash Kshetriymayum and Fiona Ross commissioned by Monotype is at heart a revival of the now ubiquitous original Linotype Bengali typeface designed by Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross (1978-1982) based on Ross’s research for her doctoral studies in Indian Palaeography. The new Linotype Bengali is informed by more recent research by Ross and Kshetrimayum resulting in additional glyphs that serve contemporary needs in a variety of genres – the original had been specifically designed for newspaper composition and in now outdated digital formats. The new design makes use of OpenType features with the employment of contextual vowel signs for Bengali – a feature that Ross and Holloway had first introduced in Indian scripts for the Adobe Devanagari typeface – and has sophisticated contextual mark positioning. Furthermore, whereas the original design had existed in only two typestyles, extensive work has been undertaken to produce this new design in 5 weights: Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black. It has been an important aspect of this project to remain true to the original design concepts, and so to achieve optimal readability for sustained reading at small type-sizes, but the additional weights enable differentiation in document design, and afford users scope to produce textural variety in their outputs. This revival design is intended to widen the hitherto very limited palette of typographic choices in the field of textual communication in Bengali, Assamese and other languages that make use of the Bengali script.

Rinzler AOE is a revival of a LetterGraphics film type called Caren. A modular, mechanical, sans-serif stencil all rolled up into one retro typeface. It's not an all-purpose typeface, it's not an everyday typeface, but it is a cool typeface for the right design projects. Rinzler AOE carries itself with a bold weighted style, and stencil cutouts that don't follow standard stencil formatting. It might be considered more of a techno stencil (if there is such a thing). It reminded me in a vague way of TRON, hence the main poster graphic styling, although it looks NOTHING like the Tron titling typeface. Nevertheless, it's a fun typeface that needed to be preserved and used again. WHAT'S INCLUDED: Extensive language support. Rinzler has accented and special characters that support the following languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan Cornish, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Indonesian, Italian, Kurdish, Leonese, Luxenbourgish, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Walloon, & Welsh. One of my guilty pleasures is in taking the time to recreate historical typefaces as digital fonts, but a lot of incredible historical typestyles created as wood or metal or film type usually have bare bones character sets and have been lost or only exist as limited specimen proofs in old books. These typefaces may have more niché uses than modern typefaces, but I believe it is important nonetheless to preserve these typefaces for future generations. These typefaces, if nothing else, can often inspire new creations.

Nuyork Arabic was designed to emphasize on the individual Arabic letter visual traditional characteristics. Including 5 weights, it was designed with both text and display applications in mind. This font is intended to produce virtually cursive texts without eliminating the clarity or look-and-feel of the individual Arabic letters. Offering glyphs for the full Extended Arabic Unicode Standards 6.1, including the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks, Nuyork Arabic incorporates comprehensive support for Quranic texts and other Arabetic scripts, including African sub-Saharan scripts. Careful design considerations were given to make sure that composed Arabetic text is visually prominent and stands well next to Latin. To insure legibility in all sizes, vertical strokes are emphasized when possible, while utilizing multiple x-heights to give a traditional Arabic feel. The design of this font follows the general guidelines of the Mutamathil type style developed by the designer, a decade ago, to enrich and diversify user typographic options, and to address the Arabetic scripts challenges of literacy, education, economics, and technology. Based on this style, it uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the latest Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter in the traditional Arabic cursive text. Nuyork Arabic includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned, with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel, or Kashidah, is a zero-width glyph. Arabetics Latte includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals. Available in Open Type format, the Nuyork Arabic font family includes regular, light, bold, extra bold, and black.

Clear Sans™ is a… wait for it… rational geometric sans serif. It is intended to fill a niche… to provide an alternative to the somewhat based-on-vernacular signage, somewhat geometric sans. I hear the word vernacular thrown around too much and too loosely. If a typeface is based in the vernacular, based on hand-painted or hand-crafted signage, then it should be based on the movements of the hand, retain that warmth and not on a pretty geometric model. For me, clean, geometric and precise doesn't have to be cold and expressionless. The original skeleton was hand-painted in 2008 to help determine and inform my decisions going forward. The typeface was completed shortly afterwards at the behest of an old friend for their identity. As usual, I expanded it, but considered retiring it since there were so many things similar out there. Years later, I had a chance to rediscover it and came to the conclusion that it could be improved, expanded in a logical and useful way, and introduced. I would be lying if I didn't admit that the rise of webfonts and embedded type in applications influenced many of the decisions I made about reworking Clear Sans™. Completely new Text and Screen fonts were developed that utitlize larger x-heights, space-saving widths, logical (and simplified) weight offerings… to name a few alterations. Even the pricing of each variant was considered to produce a more reasonable and simple solution for the developer, designer, professional and novice. Clear Sans™ is a departure from my previous sans serifs, but the influences of Aaux Next, Akagi Pro and Halogen are evident. Enjoy a light-hearted mini-site devoted to Clear Sans™

Clear Sans™ is a… wait for it… rational geometric sans serif. It is intended to fill a niche… to provide an alternative to the somewhat based-on-vernacular signage, somewhat geometric sans. I hear the word vernacular thrown around too much and too loosely. If a typeface is based in the vernacular, based on hand-painted or hand-crafted signage, then it should be based on the movements of the hand, retain that warmth and not on a pretty geometric model. For me, clean, geometric and precise doesn't have to be cold and expressionless. The original skeleton was hand-painted in 2008 to help determine and inform my decisions going forward. The typeface was completed shortly afterwards at the behest of an old friend for their identity. As usual, I expanded it, but considered retiring it since there were so many things similar out there. Years later, I had a chance to rediscover it and came to the conclusion that it could be improved, expanded in a logical and useful way, and introduced. I would be lying if I didn't admit that the rise of webfonts and embedded type in applications influenced many of the decisions I made about reworking Clear Sans™. Completely new Text and Screen fonts were developed that utitlize larger x-heights, space-saving widths, logical (and simplified) weight offerings… to name a few alterations. Even the pricing of each variant was considered to produce a more reasonable and simple solution for the developer, designer, professional and novice. Clear Sans™ is a departure from my previous sans serifs, but the influences of Aaux Next, Akagi Pro and Halogen are evident. Enjoy a light-hearted mini-site devoted to Clear Sans™

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.

Clear Sans™ is a… wait for it… rational geometric sans serif. It is intended to fill a niche… to provide an alternative to the somewhat based-on-vernacular signage, somewhat geometric sans. I hear the word vernacular thrown around too much and too loosely. If a typeface is based in the vernacular, based on hand-painted or hand-crafted signage, then it should be based on the movements of the hand, retain that warmth and not on a pretty geometric model. For me, clean, geometric and precise doesn't have to be cold and expressionless. The original skeleton was hand-painted in 2008 to help determine and inform my decisions going forward. The typeface was completed shortly afterwards at the behest of an old friend for their identity. As usual, I expanded it, but considered retiring it since there were so many things similar out there. Years later, I had a chance to rediscover it and came to the conclusion that it could be improved, expanded in a logical and useful way, and introduced. I would be lying if I didn't admit that the rise of webfonts and embedded type in applications influenced many of the decisions I made about reworking Clear Sans™. Completely new Text and Screen fonts were developed that utitlize larger x-heights, space-saving widths, logical (and simplified) weight offerings… to name a few alterations. Even the pricing of each variant was considered to produce a more reasonable and simple solution for the developer, designer, professional and novice. Clear Sans™ is a departure from my previous sans serifs, but the influences of Aaux Next, Akagi Pro and Halogen are evident. Enjoy a light-hearted mini-site devoted to Clear Sans™