Inspired by Edward M. Catich’s seminal thesis on the origins of the Roman inscriptional style, such as that found on Trajan’s column, Richard Lipton’s Canto traces the path from an expressive, preparatory Brush (with Brush Open to preserve gestural details at smaller sizes), through informal Pen, to the formal Roman. Classical capitals are accompanied by Lipton’s own calligraphic lowercase, small caps, and swashes.

Harri –“stone” in Basque language– is a display font based on the peculiar letter forms used in signs and fascias all over the Basque Country. This idiosyncratic lettering style, very often used as an identity signifier, evolved from ancient inscriptions carved on gravestones which can still be found in the French part of the Basque Country (Behe Nafarroa, Lapurdi and Zuberoa).Harri takes some of its more significant features from those engraved letter forms, but also from the current overemphasized shapes derived from them, while keeping in sight their antecessors: the Romanesque inscriptions and ultimately the Roman Capitals. Gerard Unger once said “the black version of a font is a caricature of the regular”. This may explain how the odd heavy shapes in use in the Basque Country today might have evolved from their engraved roots, which are already an interpretation of Romanesque and Roman letter forms. This evolution is echoed in Harri through its weights, from the clean formal Roman-inspired light to the extreme expressive Basque-style extra bold.

Stenblak is a rough, stencil blackletter design created by Terrance Weinzierl. There is just the right amount of grunge and texture to make Stenblak stand out from other formal blackletter designs. Stenblak would be great for any printed Halloween materials as well as posters, flyers and greeting cards. Stenblak is available in OpenType and TrueType font formats and is best used in medium to large headline sizes.

This beautiful font explores 3 very individual styles of one typeface. Each style pays homage to classic sans serif typefaces while adding contemporary flair to its characteristics. With both formal and informal styles, Aestetico explores how the shapes and curves of letters change their perception and focus. The informal letters are rounder and more quirky while the formal style utilizes more traditional sans serif letterforms. The whole set (54 styles) consists of 3 sister families, each in 9 weights with matching italics. The 3 variants ensure every design project is covered by Aestetico; its versatile nature is perfect for a huge variety of applications from editorial design to branding, advertising, publications and digital. As you would expect from Latinotype, this font comes with a standard character set (395 glyphs) and supports over 200 languages.

Mattiface is a modern handwritten font, perfect for both formal and non-formal designs. This versatility will appeal to a wide range of crafty ideas, from letterheads and titles, to stationery.

Based on Roman lapidary writing from 2nd century BC.

This is a font from the 10th century and is still pretty. This is a classic format.

From the standpoint of calligraphy, a font family of capitals and uncials makes perfect sense. The Roman square capitals, the quadrata, are matched by round capitals of older Greek origin; the word "uncus" means hook-shaped like a beak or talon. Interrelated and often interchangeable, these capital letters served as book hands for both the Latin West and the Greek-speaking East before they evolved into minuscule alphabets. The Testament family is based on the few formal capital manuscripts of the Bible, Virgil and Homer that have survived from the ancient world. Throughout the Middle Ages both uncials and square capitals were used, often together, for headings and initial characters. By their nature the Roman capitals are the voice of Caesar and hold the place of authority, while the uncials speak for the Church in a balanced relationship. In ancient times church and state were not as separate as they are now, and the alphabets were not as different as typographic tradition has made them. In this calligraphic rendering it is clear that they are of the same substance and can be written in the same style, conveying even to the modern eye the eternal and classical quality of epic and scripture. Testament comes in all popular font formats, and includes support for a vaster-than-usual range of Latin-based languages.

“Miau” is a display typeface designed by “Cuchi, ¡qué Tipo”! (Hey, what a type!”). Its name comes from the onomatopoeia of "Meow" in Spanish, and it is only to be used for letters or single words. It is built from the basic skeleton of cursive script letters, and its origin and main concept is based on experimenting with shapes that play the limit of readability. Being a variable format typeface, we have from the thinnest and lightest version ("Hiss"), to the thickest, dense and compact ("Purr"), passing through the average ("meow"). The final result of this experimentation is defined into a very contemporary typeface with a geometric, modular and “no-terrestrial” flavour. It aims to be a representation of the times we live about typographic design, a whole explosion of implausible experiments and formals researches.

Named in homage of Toronto writer and spoken word performer Monica S. Kuebler, Koobler is an interesting interpretation of the classic roman font.

This is a revival font from an Image of a plate made from Eleventh Century initial letters. The "numerals" are Roman numbers done as ligatures.

Arsis Regular Font was designed by Gerry Powell in 1937. It is a Serif (Antiqua) Modern Style font. Arsis Regular font attributes include roman serif, Didone, elegant, formal, modern style, feminine.

Maeva is a non-joining wide formal 60s script, directly designed and carefully finished by hand on screen, trying to keep the script alive – preventing it from looking mechanical – by drawing each letter from scratch.

Out of a lifelong inner struggle, Philip Bouwsma unleashes a masterpiece that reconciles classic calligraphy with type in a way never before attempted. Maestro takes its cue from the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century. By this time type ruled the publishing world, but official court documents were still presented in calligraphy, in a new formal style of the high Renaissance that was integrated with Roman letters and matched the refined order of type. The copybooks of Arrighi and others, printed from engraved wood blocks, spread the Italian cancellaresca across Europe, but the medium was too clumsy and the size too small to show what was really happening in the stroke. Arrighi and others also made metal fonts that pushed type in the direction of calligraphy, but again the medium did not support the superb artistry of these masters or sustain the vitality in their work. As the elegant sensitive moving stroke of the broad pen was reduced to a static outline, the human quality, the variety and the excitement of a living act were lost. Because the high level of skill could not be reproduced, the broad pen was largely replaced by the pointed tool. The modern italic handwriting revival is based on a simplified model and does not approach the level of this formal calligraphy with its relationship to the Roman forms. Maestro is the font that Arrighi and his colleagues would have made if they had had digital technology. Like the calligraphic system of the papal chancery on which it is modelled, it was not drawn as a single finished alphabet, but evolved from a confluence of script and Roman; the script is formalized by the Roman to stand proudly in a world of type. Maestro came together on screen over the course of several years, through many versions ranging widely in style, formality, width, slant, weight and other parameters. On one end of the spectrum, looking back to tradition it embodies the formal harmony of the Roman capitals and the minuscule which became the lower case. On the other it is a flowing script letter drawing on the spirit of later pointed pen and engravers scripts. As its original designers intended, it works with simple Roman capitals and serifs or swash capitals and baroque flourishes. The broad pen supplies weight and substance to the stroke which carries energy through tension in balanced s-curves. Above all it is meant to convey the life and motion of formal calligraphy as a worthy counterbalance to the stolid gravity of metal type. The Maestro family consists of forty fonts distributed over two weights. The OpenType version compresses the family considerably down to two fonts, regular and bold, each containing the entire character set of twenty fonts, for a total of more than 3350 characters per font. These include a wide variety of stylistic alternates, ligatures, beginning and ending letters, flourishes, borders, rules, and other extras. The Pro version also includes extended linguistic support for Latin-based scripts (Western, Central and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Welsh/Celtic, Maltese) as well as Greek. For more thoughts on Maestro, its background and character sets, please read the PDF accompanying the family.

Formalized from some hand lettering by the multifaceted Jugendstil designer Bruno Mauder, perhaps better known for his work in glass and ceramics.

The concept of Biscotti rised from a personal research into a system of styles that we commonly consider “vintage”. One above all, the Victorian typography that has been rediscovered and widely re-studied during the 70s. Today, thanks to the technology innovation in digital typography fields, Biscotti is certainly an interesting subject which expresses an appassionate and nostalgic homage to a vintage font, seen from the perspective of a technical inspiration. Biscotti is composed of two styles: the “default” and the alternative one. The first is of course more conservative and formal, while the alternative formally chooses a change of the diagonal lines into curves, so it creates a much more friendlier reading. Biscotti consists of 4 styles that can be combined by layers in order to form different ways of reading. This renewed effect increases exponentially the potential use range of this typography. Biscotti has 517 characters; and are composed for 220 latin languages.

ITC Mudville was Christopher Wolff's entry in the 1998 U&lc Type Design Competition, for which he won an Honorable Mention (Display). Mudville evolved from variations on hand-lettering that Wolff had done on a variety of projects over the years. The underlying shapes of the letters are formal roman letterforms, but the actual strokes retain the look of letters sketched casually on a layout. Mudville straddles the line between inline and outline type designs. It recalls some of the styles of popular lettering used in display advertising in the '20s.

In 1899, Robert Wiebking (who worked for a number of foundries in his time) designed an all-caps typeface named Engravers Roman (see Engravers #2). American Type Founders, Inc. (ATF) released a heavier variant in 1902, Engravers Bold, designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Engravers Bold was also released by the Barnhart Brothes & Spinder foundry. Today, Linotype's Engravers brings turn-of-the-century elegance directly to your keyboard. Use the Engravers typeface on any formal piece -- from table cards, to menus, invitations, or advertising work. Engravers is similar to Copperplate Gothic, Sackers Gothic and Nicolas Cochin.

Churchward Ta Tiki is a new font release by BluHead Studio, LLC from the exciting and unique typefaces of New Zealand designer Joseph Churchward. We will be releasing fonts from his extensive library in OpenType format on a regular basis.

Pesaro is a new text typeface with a strikingly robust but charming appearance. Inspired by early prints from Venice like Jensen and Manutius, it follows its own formal concept of a contemporary design – a stable typeface with strong text qualities and graphic appeal. The Pesaro family comprised 12 styles and is well suited for ambitious typography. It comes in OpenType format with extended language support. All weights contain ligatures, proportional lining figures, tabular lining figures, proportional old style figures, lining old style figures, matching currency symbols, fraction- and scientific numerals and elegant swash captitals for all italic styles.

Picturama Founder is a beautiful script font that elegantly bridges the gap between time-honored formality and contemporary innovation. Every curve and connection in this formal calligraphy type speaks of finesse, flowing with an unmatched grace reminiscent of vintage labels or classic vinyl covers. Yet, there's a modern twist that sets it apart: its bold stance and innovative touches redefine what we expect from formal script.