With the Josef K *, Julia Sysmäläinen continues her artistic debate on Franz Kafka’s writing style. This time the designer of FF Mister K is not drawn to Kafka’s literary works created at night but to those the writer produced at daytime as a high-ranking, confident bureaucrat – Dr Franz Kafka. The typefaces Josef K “Paneuropean” and “Strong European” echoe Kafka’s prestigious status at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their ductus, originating from a broad-nibbed ink pen combines a clear, self-confident stroke with the calligraphic features so typical for Franz Kafka’s handwriting. While both typefaces are more straightforward and bolder than the wonderfully erratic fonts of the FF Mister K family Josef K Paneuropean is best characterized as a semibold handwriting textface. Josef K Strong European, Sysmäläinen’s latest “K”-accomplishment, provides an ideal complement to it as a distinctly bold display face – great for headlines, product names and branding. It combines perfectly not only with Josef K Paneuropean but also with all the FF Mister K textfaces. Both Josef K Paneuropean and Josef K Strong European have Western, Central European and Extended Cyrillic character sets. With more than 2500 glyphs they support over 100 languages. *Kafka’s persona Josef K is a leading bank officer – reminiscent of the author himself – in the novel The Trial.

Online auctions continue to be a surprising wealth of font design inspiration. In this instance, a number of silk embroidered Art Deco initials inside inverted triangles inspired Deco Pennant Initials JNL. The uppercase version is white lettering on a black background – similar to the originals. On the lowercase keys is a set of initials that are black on white with a black border. Since the inverted triangles resemble pennants, there’s a solid black blank on the left parenthesis key and a outlined blank one on the right parenthesis key. In this way, the initials could be used for monograms or interspersed with the blanks to form short banner messages.

ITC Digital Woodcuts font is the work of Timothy Donaldson. Although made on a computer, each character has the look of a block of wood with a character cut into it. The forms are made entirely of lines, typical of how the result would be if they were truly cut into wood. ITC Digital Woodcuts is a capital letter alphabet including both white letters on a black background and black letters on a whitish background which looks as though the bark of the piece of wood was chiseled away for the effect. Donaldson suggests alternating the black version with the white to create a three dimensional effect.

Sprig is a dynamic font that combines in-your-face chutzpah with contemporary brushstrokes. The character shapes are contained, yet give a feeling of casual, off the cuff ease. In some, subtle ways it pays its respects to the sign painters of the 30s and 40s The font comes in three styles: - Display, with extravagant upper case characters and some opentype features - Text, with more contained upper case characters (suitable for "all caps" use) and some opentype features - Professional, where OpenType features include alternative upper case characters (both the TEXT the DISPLAY caps), as well as a number of ligatures. (For use in applications that access OpenType features.) What this means is that Sprig Pro combines all the characters of Sprig Text and Sprig Display in one font and it also has additional ligatures. Sprig Pro contains over 283 characters, while all styles of Sprig contain a full upper and lower case character set, punctuation, numerals, symbols and accented characters for both all characters that they contain. It has all the accented characters used in the major European languages. The Sprig User Guide provides you with more information on how to use Sprig Pro.

Arturo is a brand new font family drawn from the original inspiration of an old alphabet in one of Dan Solo 's Dover Clip Art books. It has moved far away from those raw roots, however. Every character has been redrawn. For example, I had a light version that I never could get working. Arturo is based on that light style and called Arturo Book. The name comes from a good friend of mine in El Paso. He was the guinea pig upon whom I foisted off the beginnings of this style so many years ago. I did several marketing pieces for him using the raw drawings. I figured that he deserved to have the family named after him, at the very least. This is a normal font family for me in that it has caps, lowercase, small caps with the appropriate figures for each case. This font has all the OpenType features in the set for 2009. There are several ligatures for your fun and enjoyment: bb gg ff fi fl ffi ffl ffy fj ft tt ty Wh Th and more. Like all of my fonts, there are: caps, lowercase, small caps, proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, & small cap figures, plus numerators, denominators, superiors, inferiors, and a complete set of ordinals 1st through infinity. Enjoy!