Introducing the first typeface by Azure studio, Space 101! Space 101 is a handcrafted chalkboard reminiscent typeface with irregular slender lines and a quirky personality. This typeface is perfect to add character and charm to bodies of text and heading where the slight imperfections tie your whole design together. The inspiration for Space 101 was found in an old signwriting book. The character shapes were updated and improved while still retaining the same charm. The typeface gave me interstellar space travel vibes reminiscent of early books based around space travel, which is why I decided to call it Space 101. I hope you enjoy this typeface and if you have any questions or comments get in touch. I'd love to hear from you. fonts@azurestudio.co.nz

Noctis was originally born as a single weight display typeface, designed by Luca Terzo who took inspiration by the unusual wedge serifs of Aldo Novarese's 1972 typeface for H. Berthold A.G., Primate. The design was developed by the Italian Type team into a full family of five weights from thin, each with its own true italic, and with a complementary set of decorative patterns. The strong Didonesque contrasts make this typeface both impressive at display sizes and easily readable in text size, while the sharp shapes of the triangular serifs and the distinctive letter shapes show their strength in logo design and impressive editorial use. Inspired by the elegant, self conscious and over-the-top aesthetics of Italian fashion scene of the eighties and nineties, Noctis finds its strength in its strong textural nature, that is explored in the Noctis Texturae subfamily, where each letter is used as a tile to produce seamless patterns that can be used to extend the branding capabilities of Noctis. Noctis features an extended latin character set of 481 glyphs covering over 190 languages, and includes advanced open type features like standard and discretionary ligatures, positional numerals, stylistic alternates and case sensitive brackets. Mixing versatility and personality, Noctis is ready to be like a top model on the design catwalk, making your projects looking classic but contemporary, finely tuned but assertive, and elegant as the best Italian luxury fashion.

Designs of characters that are almost forty years old can be already restored like a historical alphabet – by transferring them exactly into the computer with all their details. But, of course, it would not be Josef Tyfa, if he did not redesign the entire alphabet, and to such an extent that all that has remained from the original was practically the name. Tyfa published a sans-serif alphabet under the title Juvenis already in the second half of the past century. The type face had a large x-height of lower-case letters, a rather economizing design and one-sided serifs which were very daring for their time. In 1979 Tyfa returned to the idea of Juvenis, modified the letter “g” into a one-storey form, narrowed the design of the characters even further and added a bold and an inclined variant. This type face also shows the influence of Jaroslav Benda, evident in the open forms of the crotches of the diagonal strokes. Towards the end of 2001 the author presented a pile of tracing paper with dozens of variants of letter forms, but mainly with a new, more contemporary approach: the design is more open, the details softer, the figures and non-alphabetical characters in the entire set are more integral. The original intention to create a type face for printing children’s books thus became even more emphasized. Nevertheless, Juvenis with its new proportions far exceeds its original purpose. In the summer of 2002 we inserted all of this “into the machine” and designed new italics. The final computer form was completed in November 2002. All the twelve designs are divided into six variants of differing boldness with the corresponding italics. The darkness of the individual sizes does not increase linearly, but follows a curve which rises more steeply towards the boldest extreme. The human eye, on the contrary, perceives the darkening as a more fluent process, and the neighbouring designs are better graded. The x-height of lower-case letters is extraordinarily large, so that the printed type face in the size of nine points is perceived rather as “ten points” and at the same time the line spacing is not too dense. A further ingenious optical trick of Josef Tyfa is the figures, which are designed as moderately non-aligning ones. Thus an imaginary third horizontal is created in the proportional scheme of the entire type face family, which supports legibility and suitably supplements the original intention to create a children’s type face with elements of playfulness. The same applies to the overall soft expression of the alphabet. The serifs are varied; their balancing, however, is well-considered: the ascender of the lower-case “d” has no serif and the letter appears poor, while, for example, the letter “y”, or “x”, looks complicated. The only serif to be found in upper-case letters is in “J”, where it is used exclusively for the purpose of balancing the rounded descender. These anomalies, however, fit perfectly into the structure of any smoothly running text and shift Juvenis towards an original, contemporary expression. Tyfa also offers three alternative lower-case letters *. In the case of the letter “g” the designer follows the one-storey form he had contemplated in the eighties, while in “k” he returns to the Benda inspiration and in “u” adds a lower serif as a reminder of the calligraphic principle. It is above all the italics that are faithful to the tradition of handwritten lettering. The fairly complicated “k” is probably the strongest characteristic feature of Juvenis; all the diagonals in “z”, “v”, “w”, “y” are slightly flamboyant, and this also applies to the upper-case letters A, V, W, Y. Juvenis blends excellently with drawn illustrations, for it itself is modelled in a very creative way. Due to its unmistakable optical effect, however, it will find application not only in children’s literature, but also in orientation systems, on posters, in magazines and long short-stories.

Alf R. Becker was a noted sign painter, designer and the creator of hundreds of unique alphabets which were published in the trade magazine Signs of the Times during the 1930s through the 1950s. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media [and who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati], Jeff Levine received some reference material on Becker's work. Becker displayed many of his type styles within decorative panels—a popular trend in the days when signs were hand-lettered. Using the reference material as a guide, Jeff has re-drawn twenty-six sign panels for adaptation to digital print work. While the designs in themselves are not thoroughly unique to Alf Becker, he has left behind some tangible examples of how sign painters embellished their lettering work. With the use of complementary colors and tones, these panels—joined with vintage lettering - classically recreate the warm and attractive advertising of years ago.

Stop trekking through the thick, wintery font forest, and step lightly into the fresh life of the Haboro hyperfamily. Though simple in nature, the Haboro hyperfamily provides you with a variety of options. Take, for instance, Haboro Soft, the latest member. Soft features a clean, geometric shape based off Haboro Sans. Unlike Sans, however, Soft’s blunted terminals give your work a more contemporary appearance. It’s a gentle touch for those times you prefer subtilty over pounding your message home. Take Haboro Soft even farther with its OpenType features. The typeface contains specially shaped small caps and old-fashioned figures--just enough to give your work a unique touch. Of course, for more options, use the entire Haboro hyperfamily to expand your abilities. Enjoy the comfort in knowing you’re choosing a font family equipped with tools for most anything: packaging, branding, web pages, iPhone apps and more. Its simplicity lends itself to achieve perfect results. And yes, your work will even thank you.

In 1948, Mergenthaler Linotype released the first weights of Trade Gothic, designed by Jackson Burke. Over the next 12 years Burke, who was the company’s Director of Typographic Development from 1948 through 1963, continued to expand the family. Trade Gothic Next is the 2008 revision of Jackson Burke’s design. Developed over a prolonged period of time, the original Trade Gothic showed many inconsistencies. Under the direction of Linotype’s Type Director Akira Kobayashi, American type designer Tom Grace, a graduate of the MA Typeface Design in Reading, redesigned, revised and expand the Trade Gothic family. Many details were improved, such as the terminals and stroke endings, symbols, and the spacing and kerning. Moreover, there are newly added compressed widths and heavy weights perfect for setting even more powerful headlines. Trade Gothic Next brings more features and better quality for today’s demanding typographers. Trade Gothic Next® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

We always wanted to design a gothic typeface. Our most similar typefaces are Rude and Firme, but Rude has some very delicate curves especially visible in the vertical strokes and Firme introduces a type family with reasonably big ascenders and descenders. On the other hand, Isento has a much more straightforward approach to the particular genre. Loosely inspired by Times Gothic, introduced in the American Type Founders Specimen Book and Catalogue from 1923, soon followed its very own path. Is our first typeface that clearly shows a distinct weight difference between the uppercase and the lowercase and the spacing is very open to provide a much more mechanical feeling. Isento and Isento Slab ranges from Thin to ExtraBold with perfectly matching italics. Immediately seemed very clear that a slab serif companion would follow the sans, therefore Isento Slab is the perfect companion to Isento, with very strong rectangular serifs, ideal to set short passages of text or to become the key actor in a big headline.

Kis Classico™ is named after the Hungarian monk Miklós Kis who traveled to Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century to learn the art of printing. Amsterdam was a center of printing and punchcutting, and Kis cut his own type there in about 1685. For centuries, Kis's type was wrongly attributed to Anton Janson, a Dutch punchcutter who worked in Leipzig in the seventeenth century. Most versions of this type still go by the name Janson. In 1993, the Italian/Swedish type designer Franko Luin completed Kis Classico, his own contemporary interpretation of the Kis types. About the Kis/Janson story, Luin says: If you understand Hungarian I recommend you read the monograph, 'Tótfalusi Kis Miklós' by György Haiman, published in 1972 by Magyar Helikon. It has hundreds of reproductions from his Amsterdam period and from the time when he was an established printer in Kolozsvár (today's Cluj in Romania)." Kis Classico has five weights, and is an admirable version of this classic type.

This family was inspired from the French edition of Hypnerotomachie de Poliphile ("The Strife of Love in a Dream") attributed to Francesco Colonna, 1467 printed in 1546 in Paris by Jacques Kerver. He was using a Garamond set (look at our 1592 GLC Garamond), including two styles: Normal and Italic (Normal carved by Claude Garamond, Italic we don't know; it was an Italic pattern very often in use in Paris at that time). We have modified the slant angle of the Capitals used with Italics because the Normal capitals were used in both styles in the original. The present font includes all of the specific latin abbreviations and ligatures used in this edition (with a few differences between the two styles). Added are the accented characters and a few others not in use in this early period of printing. Decorated letters such as 1512 Initials, 1550 Arabesques, 1565 Venetian, or 1584 Rinceau can be used with this family without anachronism.

This font family is inspired by printed work made by the Elzevir family back in the XVIIth century at Leiden (NL). They worked with material from several type designers, but further investigations sends us to the tracks of one in particular: Robert Granjon. Granjon italics were way ahead of his time, making some really beautiful signs like swashy ampersands and minuscule v letters. This font also contains old style figures in the same fashion as they were printed, like the flipped number 8 and open forms in 6 and 9. This is as much a revival as an original design, because of their weights bold and heavy (both with italics) that were inspired on some titles. In this font you can also find a lot of ligatures, small caps, diacritics and even a fleuron for each weight and variation. Leidener came up from two books: Constantini Imperiatoris (1611) and Exercitationum Mathematicarum (1657), printed by Louis and John Elzevir on their Leiden Workshop, back in the day.