Neacademia is a Latin and Cyrillic type family inspired by the types cut by 15th century punchcutter Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. Beyond the letterforms themselves, however, the digital fonts themselves are based on the techniques and methods Griffo employed. The family comprises four distinct variants optimised for specific point sizes, as was traditional in metal type. While the display sizes maintain a visual link to calligraphic roots, text sizes exhibit more typographic qualities, following the hand of the carver. Likewise, Neacademia maintains its even colour on the page by carefully employing alternative letterforms, rather than leaning on a multitude of kerning pairs. A geeky little detail you’ll likely need to point out with a magnifying glass to your type friends, but creating a neat texture that works in readers favour nonetheless. Neacademia’s historically sensitive eye is put to work for modern typographers’ needs. It incorporates Griffo’s italic capitals and harmonizes them with the lowercase and the romans — where the original Aldine italics had no capitals of their own and simply re-used the uprights. It was designed with specific allowances for letterpress photopolymer printing. Printed digitally, it can tolerate – and even benefit from – low resolution, rough paper, and low-grade presswork. In many ways, it feels like using metal type again!

TagBanger WADE1 is the first in a short graffiti font series. This series will showcase the hand-styles of various mature street artists that Okaycat is working with. This first release highlights the style of one such graffiti writer, WADE1, who has an eclectic writing style after many years proliferating street art. Long-term graffiti artists develop their own style over their careers, spending as many endless hours honing their letter-forms as any full-time professional typographical artist. Style, individuality, and originality are everything. These attributes are key to the graffiti artist's tao. A writer who copies, or "bites" loses respect -- their work will be painted over or "crossed out" by all other writers. Okaycat's TagBanger series aims to demonstrate just how widely these individual styles can diverge, likely due, at least in part, to the social pressures of a community that ruthlessly punishes copycats. WADE1's tags were transformed into vector format from a generous sampling of their most recent scrawls. Our TagBanger series may not be composed of the most legible or beautiful fonts, but we imagine there are uses for these whenever highly unusual handwriting is needed. TagBanger WADE1 is extended, containing the full West European diacritics & a full set of ligatures, making it suitable for multilingual environments & publications.

Paperside: Neither Papyrus nor SSI Countryside. Inspired in some ways by the Papyrus form, but untextured and smoother, with the dimensions and proportions more open, like that of Countryside SSi, with its larger easily readable lowercase body, and more consistent, shorter stems. Paperside has an open scripted feel which is pleasing on the eye and easy to read. Paperside can enhance the first letter of most sentences automatically, and changes other letters to suit their position within words, and the letters they appear beside. Now comes in 5 weights plus italic. For best results, use this ‘smart font’ with Contextual Ligatures turned on. Mulitiple Stylistic Alternatives are included. Inspiration for this font came from two other fonts. Papyrus: was designed by Chris Costello and created in 1982, it is a hand-drawn textured typeface, emulating texts written in biblical times. One of the most used (and misused) fonts of all times. Owned by Letraset, and currently published by the Internation Typeface Corporating (ITC). Countryside SSi: The serif font of an unknown designer, is currently licensed by Southern Software Inc. Feel free to preview some of the Dragon Tongue fonts that are yet to be released, at https://www.dragon-tongue.com/fonts

Phiz is a diverse suite of 28 decorative fonts based on Figgins Sans Extra Bold. Classic (10 fonts), Rounded (7 fonts), Rough (4 fonts) and Particles (7 fonts). The Rough and Particles styles emerge as a unique niche—neither imitating distressed printing (e.g. the “rusty” look), nor casual, hand-drawn styles. These type designs are conceived and executed as complex algorithmically-generated graphic procedures, in which repetitive elements have been artfully applied to the Sans capitals, and manually nuanced. As such they also differ substantially from textured glyph shapes that have been cut out from larger pattern fields, for the constituent particles are disposed in relation to the specific shape of each character they define. The caps-with-small-caps format was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, titling display usage is predominantly capitals, and secondly, rather like optical scaling, having the same resolution of texture available in two different “sizes” (upper and lower case) should prove useful in the hierarchy of page layout—not primarily for setting upper and lower case text as caps-with-small-capitals, although this is of course an option. All figures and major symbols (punctuation and currency) are provided in both cap and small cap height.

Meet Arlen, a funky, variable type family in 36 styles. Inspired by 20th century hand-painted signs and the visual culture of the 1980's, Arlen adds a little extra to this already charismatic mix. Arlen is a display sans serif that can be freely used for larger bodies of text. Among its most prominent visual features are high contrast, flaring stems and dynamic letterforms. With 860 characters in each font, Arlen supports most Latin-based languages and offers a large number of extra characters, dingbats, alternate glyphs, ligatures, and punctuation marks. Some of the most useful OpenType features are included too, such as Case-Sensitive Punctuation, Stylistic Alternates, Tabular Figures, Fractions, Localization, and a lot more. Some letters and characters come in two versions: thin and bold, and you can easily alternate between the two using a corresponding stylistic set. Arlen is a cheerful typeface that conveys kindness, good cheer, and only good vibes. It would feel at home both in digital and print mediums; it can be used in advertising, editorial design, social media, web design, packaging, or personal design projects. With versatility at its heart, Arlen would be a perfect typeface for large design systems that require multiple styles for typesetting.

Actium is a contemporary multilingual sans serif typeface developed to help perfect typography automatically. Type Mafia has focussed on words with odd combinations of capital letters and numbers, such as product names and postal codes such as WD40 and H1N5, jump out of the text. They sit awkwardly together as the numerals have been designed to work with the lowercase, not the uppercase letters – affecting readability.To fix this Type Mafia invented Smart Capo™. Smart Capo™ Smart Capo is a feature that automatically activates once you type an uppercase letter together with a number. When a capital letter is sat next to a numeral, Smart Capo converts the letter to a mid-cap — a contemporary alternative to small caps — and the default old-style numeral to a lining numeral. Actium’s mid-caps and lining numerals have been designed with the same height (between cap and x-height) so they sit comfortably next to each other and fit more harmoniously into text. Smart Capo applies equal attention to capitalised words without any numbers, such as NAVO and USA, and are also automatically set into mid-capitals. Working on its own, Smart Capo saves time and money for the typographer — taking the pain out of text formatting — and makes it a more pleasurable experience for the reader. This feature is made possible by the use of ‘contextual alternates’, an OpenType feature used in modern font software, working with a set of characters specially designed at mid-cap height. By default these changes automatically take place so it doesn't need to be switched on, it will just work. Actium Actium’s design has an unusual diagonal contrast — much more common in a serifed face than in a sans serif — giving it more bite. The typeface looks elegant when set in large sizes and remains very legible when shown in small sizes. The family consists of six weights in two styles, making a dozen fonts. Weights range from light to black in roman and true italic. All fonts are fully loaded with functional elements. Actium boasts an extended Latin character set and with Greek. This means a wide range of Western languages are supported: perfect for use in bilingual publications and packaging. For numerals, each font includes old-style and lining figures in both proportional and tabular widths, with superiors and inferiors. These allow you to select the right set of numbers for the right task.

In designing the Calvino typeface family Andrea Tartarelli set himself the challenge to follow the principles expressed by the Italian writer Italo Calvino in his masterpiece Six memos for the next millenium. Exactitude and visibility are translated typographically through the reference to sixteen century garalde typography and its controlled, highly legible letterforms. To balance this formal rigour, lightness and quickness were added by letting the design be inspired by the calligraphic hand, following the lesson of Gudrun Zapf. The idea of multiplicity was kept central, developing Calvino in a range of weights encompassing both display and text use cases, and then expanding the design space with the inclusion of a display sub-family, Calvino Grande, to provide users with a full typographic palette to cover all editorial needs. Sharing the same formal structure, Calvino Grande sports condensed proportions, sharper details and tighter metrics. Both Calvino and Calvino Grande are complemented with a set of italic letterforms, with differences in design and slant to better work at different point size. All the 34 weights of the Calvino family come with a extended Latin and Cyrillic charset, covering over two hundred languages, and all equipped with a wide range of open type features including positional numerals, alternate forms, and stylistic sets. Four variable typefaces are also included in the full package, for any need of fine-tuning the typeface grade of weight. Special thanks go to Laurène Girbal for the help in developing the regular weight. • Suggested uses: Calvino aims to provide users with a full typography palette to cover all editorial needs. Perfect for contemporary branding and logo design, dynamic packaging and countless other projects. • 38 styles: 9 weights + 9 italics, 2 different styles + 4 variable fonts. • 779 glyphs in each weight. • Useful OpenType features: Access All Alternates, Contextual Alternates, Case-Sensitive Forms, Glyph Composition / Decomposition, Discretionary Ligatures, Denominators, Fractions, Kerning, Standard Ligatures, Lining Figures, Localized Forms, Mark Positioning, Mark to Mark Positioning, Alternate Annotation Forms, Numerators, Oldstyle Figures, Ordinals, Proportional Figures, Stylistic Alternates, Scientific Inferiors, Stylistic Set 1, Stylistic Set 2, Stylistic Set 3, Stylistic Set 4, Subscript, Superscript, Tabular Figures, Slashed Zero • 203 Languages supported (extended Latin and Cyrillic alphabets): English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Javanese (Latin), Turkish, Italian, Polish, Afaan Oromo, Tagalog, Sundanese (Latin), Filipino, Moldovan, Romanian, Indonesian, Dutch, Cebuano, Malay, Uzbek (Latin), Kurdish (Latin), Swahili, Hungarian, Czech, Haitian Creole, Hiligaynon, Afrikaans, Somali, Zulu, Serbian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Shona, Quechua, Albanian, Catalan, Ilocano, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Neapolitan, Xhosa, Tshiluba, Slovak, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Sicilian, Sotho (Southern), Kirundi, Tswana, Sotho (Northern), Belarusian (Latin), Turkmen (Latin), Lombard, Lithuanian, Tsonga, Jamaican, Dholuo, Galician, Low Saxon, Waray-Waray, Makhuwa, Bikol, Kapampangan (Latin), Aymara, Ndebele, Slovenian, Tumbuka, Venetian, Genoese, Piedmontese, Swazi, Zazaki, Latvian, Nahuatl, Silesian, Bashkir (Latin), Sardinian, Estonian, Afar, Cape Verdean Creole, Occitan, Tetum, Oshiwambo, Basque, Welsh, Chavacano, Dawan, Montenegrin, Walloon, Asturian, Kaqchikel, Ossetian (Latin), Zapotec, Frisian, Guadeloupean Creole, Q’eqchi’, Karakalpak (Latin), Crimean Tatar (Latin), Sango, Luxembourgish, Samoan, Maltese, Tzotzil, Fijian, Friulian, Icelandic, Sranan, Wayuu, Papiamento, Aromanian, Corsican, Breton, Amis, Gagauz (Latin), Māori, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Alsatian, Kiribati, Seychellois Creole, Võro, Tahitian, Scottish Gaelic, Chamorro, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), Kashubian, Faroese, Rarotongan, Sorbian (Upper Sorbian), Karelian (Latin), Romansh, Chickasaw, Arvanitic (Latin), Nagamese Creole, Saramaccan, Ladin, Kaingang, Palauan, Sorbian (Lower Sorbian), Drehu, Wallisian, Aragonese, Mirandese, Tuvaluan, Xavante, Zuni, Montagnais, Hawaiian, Marquesan, Niuean, Yapese, Vepsian, Bislama, Hopi, Megleno-Romanian, Creek, Aranese, Rotokas, Tokelauan, Mohawk, Warlpiri, Cimbrian, Sami (Lule Sami), Jèrriais, Arrernte, Murrinh-Patha, Kala Lagaw Ya, Cofán, Gwich’in, Seri, Sami (Southern Sami), Istro-Romanian, Wik-Mungkan, Anuta, Cornish, Yindjibarndi, Noongar, Hotcąk (Latin), Meriam Mir, Manx, Shawnee, Gooniyandi, Ido, Wiradjuri, Hän, Ngiyambaa, Delaware, Potawatomi, Abenaki, Esperanto, Folkspraak, Interglossa, Interlingua, Latin, Latino sine Flexione, Lojban, Novial, Occidental, Old Norse, Slovio (Latin), Volapük.

Allegroost is a handwritten font that uses a large brush in a horizontal position, so that the brush strokes vertically make the size large, opposite the horizontal strokes the size becomes small. To add to the natural impression, we complete many ligatures that adjust handwriting such as: ob, oc, od, og, oh, oi, oj, ok, ol, om, on, oo, op, oq, or, os, ot, ou , ov, ow, ox, oy, oz, bo, bd, bg, bi, br, bu, by, ee, ii, ll, tt, th, tl, lt, it, ti, iti, ld, ts, st , mm, nn This unique handwriting is perfect for logos, quotes, posters, fun letters, for clothing, or any design project. Equipped with 28 language support makes your brand can appear in various parts of the world

Rangen was inspired by Retro style in combination with hand lettering. Rangen has many alternative swashes and ligatures characters and has OpenType features such as alternative styles, ties and swashes so you can mix and match as you wish. Rangen is perfect for logos, posters, badges, book covers, t-shirt designs, handwritten quotes, product packaging, headers, posters, merchandise, social media & greeting cards. Rangen is coded with Unicode PUA, which allows full access to all additional characters without having special design software. Mac users can use the Font Book, and Windows users can use the Character Map to view and copy any of the additional characters to paste into your favorite text editor / application. Let me know if you have any questions.

Rian Hughes’ 15th collection of fonts, “112 Hours”, is entirely dedicated to numbers. Culled from a myriad of sources – clock faces, tickets, watches house numbers – it is an eclectic and wide-ranging set. Each font contains only numerals and related punctuation – no letters. A new book has been designed by Hughes to show the collection, and includes sample settings, complete character sets, source material and an introduction. This is available print-to-order on Blurb in paperback and hardback: http://www.blurb.com/b/5539073-112-hours-hardback http://www.blurb.com/b/5539045-112-hours-paperback From the introduction: The idea for this, the fifteenth Device Fonts collection, began when I came across an online auction site dedicated to antique clocks. I was mesmerized by the inventive and bizarre numerals on their faces. Shorn of the need to extend the internal logic of a typeface through the entire alphabet, the designers of these treasures were free to explore interesting forms and shapes that would otherwise be denied them. Given this horological starting point, I decided to produce 12 fonts, each featuring just the numbers from 1 to 12 and, where appropriate, a small set of supporting characters — in most cases, the international currency symbols, a colon, full stop, hyphen, slash and the number sign. 10, 11 and 12 I opted to place in the capital A, B and C slots. Each font is shown in its entirety here. I soon passed 12, so the next logical finish line was 24. Like a typographic Jack Bauer, I soon passed that too -— the more I researched, the more I came across interesting and unique examples that insisted on digitization, or that inspired me to explore some new design direction. The sources broadened to include tickets, numbering machines, ecclesiastical brass plates and more. Though not derived from clock faces, I opted to keep the 1-12 conceit for consistency, which allowed me to design what are effectively numerical ligatures. I finally concluded one hundred fonts over my original estimate at 112. Even though it’s not strictly divisible by 12, the number has a certain symmetry, I reasoned, and was as good a place as any to round off the project. An overview reveals a broad range that nonetheless fall into several loose categories. There are fairly faithful revivals, only diverging from their source material to even out inconsistencies and regularize weighting or shape to make them more functional in a modern context; designs taken directly from the source material, preserving all the inky grit and character of the original; designs that are loosely based on a couple of numbers from the source material but diverge dramatically for reasons of improved aesthetics or mere whim; and entirely new designs with no historical precedent. As projects like this evolve (and, to be frank, get out of hand), they can take you in directions and to places you didn’t envisage when you first set out. Along the way, I corresponded with experts in railway livery, and now know about the history of cab side and smokebox plates; I travelled to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Nantes, France, to examine their numbering machines; I photographed house numbers in Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam and here in the UK; I delved into my collection of tickets, passes and printed ephemera; I visited the Science Museum in London, the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset, and the Museum of London to source early adding machines, war-time telegraphs and post-war ration books. I photographed watches at Worthing Museum, weighing scales large enough to stand on in a Brick Lane pub, and digital station clocks at Baker Street tube station. I went to the London Under-ground archive at Acton Depot, where you can see all manner of vintage enamel signs and woodblock type; I photographed grocer’s stalls in East End street markets; I dug out old clocks I recalled from childhood at my parents’ place, examined old manual typewriters and cash tills, and crouched down with a torch to look at my electricity meter. I found out that Jane Fonda kicked a policeman, and unusually for someone with a lifelong aversion to sport, picked up some horse-racing jargon. I share some of that research here. In many cases I have not been slavish about staying close to the source material if I didn’t think it warranted it, so a close comparison will reveal differences. These changes could be made for aesthetic reasons, functional reasons (the originals didn’t need to be set in any combination, for example), or just reasons of personal taste. Where reference for the additional characters were not available — which was always the case with fonts derived from clock faces — I have endeavored to design them in a sympathetic style. I may even extend some of these to the full alphabet in the future. If I do, these number-only fonts could be considered as experimental design exercises: forays into form to probe interesting new graphic possibilities.

Taca is a typeface built around a shape that Portuguese designer Rúben R Dias calls a “squircle” — neither square nor circle. We usually associate the rounded, convex box with the television screens of the 1960s and Aldo Novarese’s classic typeface, Eurostile. But whereas Eurostile is cold and machined, Taca is warm and rugged, as if it was molded from clay or carved from stone. Taca’s organic nature is also derived from another unique feature: rounded crotches at the right angles where perpendicular strokes meet. This subtle finish, along with blunt stroke endings, softens the otherwise rigid skeleton. With such a strong conceptual vision, Taca could be relegated to the bin of experimental designs, severely limited in their application. But that fate is usually born of a less experienced maker. As a teacher, designer, and letterpress printer, Dias is a type user, keenly aware of the functional requirements of good type. Taca is therefore not a slave to its concept, but a working font family, effective in various sizes and environments. Its lettershapes break away from the base shape whenever it makes sense for legibility, while still maintaining the flavor of the design as a whole. That said, a set of squircle-shaped alternates give the user the flexibility to get more stylized if the situation calls for it. Fitting to its functional aims, Taca has many of the features one expects of a proper text font: upper and lowercase figures, case-sensitive punctuation, and Extended Latin language support. The simplicity, openness, and squareness of Taca’s forms also make it an ideal design for the pixel grid of screen displays.