Malden Sans is a mischievous grotesque sans serif with charming details that gives designers a solid typographic voice. It was created by Michele Patanè with regular and condensed widths, as a utilitarian typeface family for print and digital environments. It was originally designed as part of a type system for cinema magazines, and embodies the devil-may care attitude of the silver screen. Designer Michele Patanè looked back to an earlier era of typography to create the typeface, embracing unusual details, rather than ironing them out. “There is a very naive way of using typography in the 30s and 40s, something not as clean as how it’s used in the late 50s and 60s when everything passed through a rationalisation of the typographic palette,” he explains. “In film magazines you can still see a bit of roughness, and I like that.” This is a design that’s desperate to be used in editorial environments, and has been created to stand up to lower quality paper. It would be equally at home on posters, packaging, and even in digital environments where designers are looking for something more expressive than another geometric sans serif. Malden Sans includes a Normal and Condensed range, with 7 weights in the normal and 6 in the Condensed, both including italics.

Novel Pro is the humanist Antiqua typeface family within the largely extended award winning Novel Collection, also containing Novel Sans Pro, Novel Sans Hair, Novel Sans Condensed Pro, Novel Display, Novel Display Condensed, Novel Display Extra Condensed, Novel Display Compressed, Novel Display Extra Compressed, Novel Mono Pro, Novel Sans Rounded Pro and Novel Sans Office Pro. Classic proportions of a Renaissance Antiqua combined with modern details let Novel appear as a friendly and elegant but functional typeface. The almost upright letters of the narrow Italics create a vital contrast to the generous construction of the roman. All typeface families of the Novel Collection have a carefully attuned character design and a well balanced weight contrast. The fine gradation of 12 weights enable designers to create fine legible typography and combine the design with other members of the Novel Collection to reach highest quality in typography. Novel Pro [914 glyphs] comes in 12 styles and contains small caps, an extra set of alternate glyphs, many ligatures, lining figures [proportionally spaced and monospaced], hanging figures [proportionally spaced and monospaced], small caps figures [proportionally spaced and monospaced], positive and negative circled figures for upper and lower case, superior and inferior figures, fractions, extensive language support, arrows for uppercase and lowercase and many more OpenType™ features.

Simplo: the ‘Italian Futura’. Simplo is a geometric sans serif typeface, built in sixteen styles. It is a tribute to the 1930s typeface Semplicità, designed by Nebiolo’s Alessandro Butti. Although many details of Simplo differ from Semplicità, it preserves the spirit of the original. Simplo is ideal for use in display sizes. It is also quite legible in text, and is well suited for graphic design and corporate identity design. Simplo has sixteen styles, extensive language support, eight different kinds of figures, sophisticated OpenType features — so it’s ready for advanced typographic projects. The most notable characteristics of this typeface are the ‘t’ and the ‘f’. The ‘t’ is the culmination of simplicity: a vertical line with just a simple right-side crossbar. The ‘f’ also has just a right-side crossbar, and is really tall: it reaches both the highest and lowest vertical position of the typeface. The top of the distinctive ‘s’, is much narrower than its bottom. The ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘g’, ‘p’, ‘q’, and ‘u’ are spurless, and show a family resemblance with Hans Reichel’s 1990s typeface Dax. However, these letters are rounder and more geometric than Dax’s counterparts, because of Dax’s higher x-height and narrower design. In Paul Shaw’s Imprint article about typefaces that have been overlooked and/or underappreciated, “Overlooked Typefaces”, he concluded his discussion of Semplicità as follows: “These idiosyncrasies suggest that Semplicità might find a warm reception today, given the current love affair with Gotham, Neutraface and Proxima—and the resurgence of ITC Avant-Garde Gothic.” Free demo font available. For more information about Simplo, download the PDF Specimen Manual.

This font was created in honor of my husband for our 12th wedding anniversary. 14 years ago, I met this tall, skinny guy from Indiana in the lobby of a hotel in Hong Kong. We talked. The next day, we had lunch together. And that night we had dinner together. And the next day. And the next. We met just before my 19th birthday, and on my birthday he took me to the top of Victoria Peak, where we looked out over the city of Hong Kong- such a beautiful place to begin a lifetime of love! We spent 4 months together in Hong Kong, falling in love with each other and with the beautiful city we were privileged to call home for that short time. We married the next year. We've lived in Indiana, Texas, China, Kentucky, and Florida over those 12 years of marriage and have welcomed 2 daughters into our lives. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he completes my life in a way I didn't know was possible. And I know that I'm blessed beyond words to have a supportive, wonderful, encouraging husband who is also a loving, involved, caring dad to our daughters. This font is for you, Keith!

Schelter & Giesecke's highly esteemed font family, cut by Herbert Thannhaeuser, freshly redesigned for present-day use.

Cover Art JNL was inspired by the hand-lettered sans serif title of an Art Deco era Portuguese magazine called Ilustraçáo. The mix of conventional and non-conventional letter forms made it a perfect candidate to turn into a digital font.