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.

The long awaited and much requested revival of Robert Hunter Middleton's very popular classic is finally here. Mayfair Cursive was an instant hit for Middleton in 1932, and it went on being used widely until late into the 1970s, in spite of it never having crossed over to film type technology. Like a few of its contemporary designs, most notably the work of Lucien Bernhard, Mayfair is a formal script that is somewhat based on traditional italic forms with swash uppercase, but also employs subsidiary hairline strokes in some of its lowercase as an emphasis to the script's cursive traits. Why these gorgeous letters never made the leap into photo typesetting is a mystery to us. But here they are now in digital form, almost three quarters of a century since they first saw the light in metal. Mayfair was redrawn from original 48 pt specimen. It also underwent a major expansion of character set. Plenty of swash characters and ligatures were added. An alternate set of lowercase was also made, in order to give the user a choice between connected and disconnected variations of the same elegant script. Mayfair ships in all popular font formats. While the Postscript Type 1 and True Type versions come in two fonts (Mayfair and Mayfair Alt), the OpenType version is a single font containing all the extra characters in conveniently programmed features that are easily accessible by OpenType-supporting software applications. We are quite sure today's graphic designers will be appreciative of having access to the face that all but defined menus, romance covers, wine and liquor labels and chocolate boxes for almost two 20th century generations.

☞ Bona Nova is a collective revival project of Bona typeface designed in 1971 by the author of polish banknotes Andrzej Heidrich. Besides giving the project a digital font form the aim was to expand the base character set: preparation of small caps, designing the alternative glyphs and multiple opentype features. Working together with the author we designed two new text versions: regular and bold – to give the family a form of a classic script triad. ☞ It is accompanied by three title versions and three contour styles under the name of Bona Sforza. All styles contains over 1200 glyphs. ☞ Bona Nova is an unprecedented typographic adventure for our team. We hope that our work will allow the cultural heritage of Bona and the work of Andrzeja Heidricha to gain new followers and fans. This project connected three generations of graphic designers who graduated the same school – the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. ☞ Bona Nova isn’t only a typeface. We have also prepared a book about the project (including an interview with Andrzej Heidrich, my text about the digitalisation and a font specimen). The Bona Nova release party was a big exhibition (over 1000 guests). I’ve invited 26 graphic designers to prepare their own initials of Bona Nova – they were presented as posters on exhibition too. LINKS Bona Nova WEB Bona Nova FP Bona-Nova-(FREE-FONT) Bona Nova Book BONA NOVA IN THE MEDIA Typeroom Typography Guru Slanted Designalley Stgu Typografie Info Wikipedia Bona Nova is a non-profit project, all founds that we raise we reinvest to develop the Bona Nova project (new styles, Cyrillic & Greek, extend character set).

Ablati is the commercial release of the font designed during the production of our new font design book, “Practical Font Design”. It is a new serif font in my continuing objective of designing book fonts that I can really use. In many ways, Ablati is a very different direction for me. Designed to produce gaphics to use in the font design book, I was forced to really reconsider many of my working methods to make them work for outside readership. Like all designers, my internal design processes can get really sloppy. The book helped me clean up my act. Taking my inspiration from one of my favorite fonts of all time {though I've never really been able to use it much}, Romic, by Colin at Letraset, I decided to design a unilateral serif font. In most ways, this is a normal serif 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 new set developed for the book. 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. Several alternative forms, a dozen ornaments, 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! The Oldstyle and Small Cap fonts are an attempt to have most of the OpenType characters available to people still using Type 1 and TrueType fonts.