For nearly 90 years, Paul Renner’s Futura has been as popular as it is versatile—from children’s books to fashion magazines to the plaque on the Moon. Futura is a typographic icon. Futura Now offers designers a chance to see Futura with fresh eyes. It’s more truly Futura-like than any digital version you’ve ever worked with. “It brings some much-needed humanity back to the world of geometric sans serifs,” says Steve Matteson, Monotype’s Creative Type Director who led the design team. “Despite its reputation as the ultimate modern typeface, Futura Now is surprisingly warm,” he explains. “It’s just as at home set next to a leafy tree as it is next to a stainless-steel table, because it skillfully navigates the border between super-clean geometry and humanist warmth.” Futura Now—the definitive Futura—contains 102 styles, including: new Headline and Text weights; new Script and Display weights and styles; and new decorative variants (outlines, inlines, shadows, and fill). Its contemporary alignment of names and weights makes the family easier to understand and use, and its comfortable Text and judicious Headline subfamilies provide instantly refined spacing. With a large Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic character-set, Futura Now serves a wider international creative community. Futura Now is available both as individual OpenType fonts and as a set of Variable fonts, delivering limitless styles in a tidy digital footprint.

Remastered in 2019. Wasabi is the re-imagining of my very first release, Iru. Like Iru, Wasabi was heavily influenced by the monument lettering style, Vermarco. The simple, geometric forms allowed for small lettering sizes to be sandblasted cleanly and has been a monument lettering workhorse for decades… the only issue centered around the lack of a lowercase or any other letters beyond the 26 uppercase glyphs and the numerals. Wasabi solves this with the same simple, efficient line reminiscent of the old Vermarco while bringing it into the 21st century. Visual and optical incongruities of the original uppercase were replaced with new interpretations for the capital letters, a new lowercase and small caps were​ produced and the original single weight alphabet was replaced with six new weights. Wasabi has several ‘lighter’ weights primarily because the thin lines and simple transitions produce very elegant relationships… and I wanted to make sure those relationships could be explored regardless of the scale of letter. Stylistic Alternates show up through the upper, lowercase and small cap glyphs that attempt to simplify these shapes even more when the opportunity arises. Wasabi is as much a utilitarian typeface as it is a headline face. This realization led to the decision to produce a companion Condensed version shortly after the initial regular weights were developed and tested; so, try them all!

Mr Robot is a typeface designed for our next book for children. We wanted to have a colorful, dimensional and edgy looking letters for headlines. There are three ways to use Mr Robot. You can align three text frames with same text but with different colors and font styles (Regular, Shadow 1 or Shadow 3 and Shadow 2) or with ALLinONE font style but select a different OpenType Stylistic Sets (set 1 is like Shadow 1, set 2 like Shadow 2 and set 3 like Shadow 3). This works great but we don’t like to have unnecessary text frames in our layouts so we added a very cool Contextual Alternates OpenType feature. You just need Mr Robot ALLinONE style and only one text frame. First make sure that Contextual Alternates is off. Type every character three times (RRROOOBBBOOOTTT), select colors for each letter (first letter of every three is a side shadow, second is bottom shadow and third is a front of the dimensional letter). When everything is set just turn Contextual Alternates back on. Styles and alignment will be set automatically. Check out the Users Manual for a visual explanation. For web fonts it is better (at least for now) to use the first method (with font styles) as the OpenType features are not supported in older browsers.

For nearly 90 years, Paul Renner’s Futura has been as popular as it is versatile—from children’s books to fashion magazines to the plaque on the Moon. Futura is a typographic icon. Futura Now offers designers a chance to see Futura with fresh eyes. It’s more truly Futura-like than any digital version you’ve ever worked with. “It brings some much-needed humanity back to the world of geometric sans serifs,” says Steve Matteson, Monotype’s Creative Type Director who led the design team. “Despite its reputation as the ultimate modern typeface, Futura Now is surprisingly warm,” he explains. “It’s just as at home set next to a leafy tree as it is next to a stainless-steel table, because it skillfully navigates the border between super-clean geometry and humanist warmth.” Futura Now—the definitive Futura—contains 102 styles, including: new Headline and Text weights; new Script and Display weights and styles; and new decorative variants (outlines, inlines, shadows, and fill). Its contemporary alignment of names and weights makes the family easier to understand and use, and its comfortable Text and judicious Headline subfamilies provide instantly refined spacing. With a large Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic character-set, Futura Now serves a wider international creative community. Futura Now is available both as individual OpenType fonts and as a set of Variable fonts, delivering limitless styles in a tidy digital footprint.

Essay is an elegant serif typeface intended for setting books, with many stylistic alternates and other typographic goodies, designed by Stefan Ellmer. It is a highly legible text face with a natural flow of reading. This is enhanced by a slight slant of the roman, the combination of open and closed apertures and the amalgamation of organic strokes and counters with a static, fully straight baseline. Essay Text Regular looks back to the spirit of the french Renaissance, when the roman typographic letterforms came to full emancipation. Departing from that historical reference, Essay Text gets rid of all sentimental antiquity and becomes a contemporary interpretation of the “archetypes” of that period. Essay Text Italic refers to that more vaguely, resulting in a formalised look with fairly upright and open shapes and little cursiveness. As in the Renaissance, before the mating of roman and italic, Essay Text Italic works as a separate text face and a perfect secondary type. The name Essay derives from the literary meaning of the word, attempt or trial. Therefore, the typeface Essay can be seen as an attempt to express an opinion about reading, the omnipresence of history, the importance of calligraphy and the importance to deviate from that calligraphic source; as well as an attempt to crystallise lettershapes in balance between convention and the designer’s personal idiom.

Etelka was designed for purposes of corporate identities, branding, product package design and outside lettering. It works anywhere an extremely legible typeface is needed. Package and label design often requires a wide choice of weights and widths: light and narrowed fonts to fit huge amount of mandatory informations onto a small box, or to squeeze text lines around a bottle, fat and wide styles to emphasize information on a poster or vehicle. The regular styles will serve well for business card, small texts and for your website. Etelka’s design idea is wide, open rounded square. Some details are extremely minimized: lower-case “a, n” or “u” lack their typical spur. The typeface has a distinctive industrial expression with all diagonals slightly softened, and her overall strict mono-linear principle is exceptionally broken only for fine optical adjustments in joints. Cyrillic and Greek scripts are present for international business, as well as rich latin diacritics. Etelka is actually very well suited for all kinds of visual communication, especially orientation systems in modern architecture. The first drawing of the font, which was later named “Etelka”, was submitted in 2004 for the Czech Television identity competition and was rejected by the jury. We later concluded that the design was worth extending to the current superfamily of 42 fonts. It is a reliable typeface for corporate identities and websites.

Pershal is something of an oddball, and that's the point. Dynamic and fast, Pershal attracts interest. Its architecture evokes growth and progress. Inspired by the futuristic styles of the 1990s, Pershal started on an aircraft ride as a sketch on a napkin. I set the concept aside for almost a decade before I went back to play with the typeface. Pershal is planned to complement applications in consumer finance, technology firms or biotechnology. As such, it has a complete set of both tabular and proportional figures. For the lowercase, Pershal features a distinctive shape that emphasizes its x-height. Its horizontal movement is highlighted by some of its other features, such as its crossbars. To emphasize growth, acceleration and inventiveness, crossbars and other elements are cut at a dynamic angle. It's a sans serif without a lot of contrast. Another unique feature of this typeface is the vast number of OpenType alternates. If you prefer a more conventional appearance to your sans, with stylistic alternates, you have that option. Altogether, there are more than seven separate sets of stylistic alternates and about 250 alternates for characters. This enables you to mix-and-match and create your own personal typeface. For branding, this makes it very useful. For your next project that requires a dynamic and technological appearance, give Pershal a shot.

Trajan The original template for this one-weight, all-caps font was the inscription on Trajan’s Column, carved in AD 113 to celebrate the emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. College student Jason Smith copied the stone lettering from the cast on display in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. In Roman times, the signmaker would paint letters onto stone with a wide brush for the stone mason to chisel out later. The signwriter would end each stroke with a flick of his brush, which the mason would also carve into the stone. Ecce (as they would have said in Rome): the serif was born. Hand-crafted “I first drew this typeface when I was 17,” says Jason. “I drew it with a very sharp 9H pencil on polydraw film. “Then, using a Rotring pen, I inked the letters in and scraped back the serifs so they were perfectly sharp. These letters were then reduced on a PMT camera. I’d designed my first typeface, although it wasn’t digitised till much later.” Digitised Years after Jason had drawn the original typeface, its transfer into digital form made further refinements necessary. The serifs and weights needed thickening slightly, creating a crisp, new version whose delicate elegance is best appreciated in larger sizes. A classically-inspired font, timeless and perfectly-proportioned, to reflect the refinement of premium brands.