a gothic bold typeface

Diorite is modern face built on classical letterforms -- but left with a bit of residual roughness. Some might call Diorite forthright, others brutal. (It reminded the designer of the dark, hard igneous rock of the same name, treasured by the ancient Egyptians for statuary.) The typeface has a relatively chunky, four-style family; the italics are true cancellaresca corsiva, also writ heavy. "The cancellaresca is of course a Gothic design," notes the designer. "Just use a broader pen, and you'll see!" Has four styles: regular, bold, cursive, and cursive bold.

Bluenote is a font based on Franklin Gothic condensed. In the 60s and 70s the record label Blue Note published all those classic jazz records of my youth. Someone at their arts department cut letters to ribbons and designed wonderful record covers with those fragmented glyphs. I recently had a look at my music collection and rediscovered these letters. Being a hard-working type designer I couldn't resist the challenge, here is the result from your dilligent designer Gert Wiescher

In the 1889 Franklin Type Foundry specimen book is a type face called “Armenian”. With lighter weight horizontal slab serifs than more traditional Western fonts, it could be pictured as being used as copy on wanted posters or town notices. This is now available as TV Western JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

The Federal Music Project was part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's WPA (Works Progress Administration), putting many people back to work in the Depression years of the 1930s. A hand-lettered poster advertising an "American Music Festival" featuring the Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra offered up the extra bold Art Deco inspiration which became Music Festival JNL

Kirshaw is not your grandfather's sans serif from the 1950s and 1960s. All those old classics like Helvetica, Futura, Franklin Gothic, and Univers are showing their age like an old Elvis Presley song. Kirshaw is a clean, rounded design with sharp contrasting edges. Like those classics, Kirshaw is easy to read in small body copy and captions, plus it's delightfully modern and stylish for headlines and logos. I designed Kirshaw and Kirkly while undergoing cancer treatment at Stanford Medical Center. Font design was always in the back of my mind and now I had extra time. Kirshaw is a distinctive, modern, easy-to-read sans serif family consists of 14 weights (including italics). It’s an Adobe Latin 3 Character Set containing 350 glyphs per style (including special characters).

A set of old die-cut cardboard letters and numbers used by teachers directly on bulletin boards or for tracing was the inspiration for Classroom JNL. In turn, these letters take their cue from typefaces such as Franklin and earlier wood type designs.

The typeface was designed after seeing a photocopy of some News Gothic text where the ink had faded on the bottom of each character. As character recognition is generally based on the top half of a character, readability was never compromised. Rather like Antique Olive the characters have a top heavy look when viewed straight on, however, as most type is read at an angle with the top further away than the bottom this top heavy look is diminished.

Heavy as hell, awkward, asymmetric, sort-of-gothic… Four alternates for every letter, carefully kerned together and nicely shuffled for you by OpenType apps… Blunt has the sharp corners ever so slightly rounded off for a softer look at large sizes. Wired chops everything up for an origami angle…