Around the turn of the 20th Century, the Inland Type Foundry produced a display face named Studley. It was a variation on a design by another foundry called Florentine. A condensed face with a bold, clean look, the design resembled the warmth and feel of a classic wood type. Best applied to headlines and titles, the font reads amazingly well at even 18 point renderings. Jeff Levine had added his own personal touch to his digital version of this old favorite and renamed it Bayview JNL.

In 1980, Peter Malutzki, Heidi Hübner-Prochotta and Manfred Prochotta founded the FlugBlatt-Presse and began producing broadsheets, which they called FlugBlätter and which also gave their press its name. They were mostly woodcuts or linocuts, combined with hand-set typography. When they finished the series in 1984 there were 67 FlugBlätter. During a Frankfurt Book Fair in the 1980s the collector Rob Saunders acquired FlugBlatt No. 37 along with other prints. Later they became part Letterform Archive, a non-profit museum and special collection library in San Francisco, which Rob Saunders founded in 2014. In 2021, Letterform Archive posted the FlugBlatt No. 37 on social media, where type designer Lena Schmidt saw it, immediately fell in love with it, and developed the plan to bring it into the digital world. After contacting Peter Malutzki – who is still working as a book artist today – and in close consultation with him, Schmidt translated the letterforms into a font series, Malutzki Initials. The three fonts can be used for black (single-color) text using the Regular style, or for multicolor text by applying different colors to the Letter Layer and Figure Layer styles.

Buddy is the new companion sans for Contenu, the book font family designed for my book on font design design. Originally, I called it Compagnon, but that seemed to pompous. Then I called it Aide, but that was too formal and dry. It's a loose, free, easy to read sans, so when my wife suggested Buddy, it clicked. This is the 4-font Buddy family of Regular, Italic, Bold, & Bold Italic. I made a new, more limited feature set for these fonts due to their designed usage, but there are still small caps, small cap figures, oldstyle figures, numerators, and denominators. The bold is closer to a black, and the italics are only slightly slanted obliques. If you need a strong black in caps, use the small caps of the bold.

Nosegrind is a bit of a departure from our usual more traditional font offerings. It's based on skate-culture graffiti gleaned from various samples of similar style found on walls in Austin and online. The font includes two character sets, one which is plain and one which is enhanced with outlines. In normal usage the characters should nest, with slight overlap from one character to the next as shown in the sample to the right, but the lower case characters in the font are spaced evenly but not pre-nested, leaving the degree of overlap up to the user - nesting is easily adjusted with the tracking option in programs like Photoshop, Quark or InDesign. Ultimately Nosegrind will be added to our Modern Fonts collection, where it ought to fit in nicely.