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  1. Niveau Grotesk by HVD Fonts, $40.00
    Niveau Grotesk—the companion of Niveau Serif —is a type family of six weights plus matching italics and small caps. It was designed by Hannes von Döhren in 2013. Influenced by classical nineteenth-century faces, the fonts are based on geometric forms. Because of its straight architecture, Niveau Grotesk has a “punch” in big sizes but is very legible in smaller sizes and longer texts—in print or on screen. Niveau Grotesk is equipped for complex, professional typography with alternate letters, arrows, fractions and an extended character set to support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European Languages.
  2. Ingleby II by David Engelby Foundry, $25.00
    Ingleby II is a typeface with firm roots in the classic stroke of the pen. The digital design of Ingleby II is legible and distinct in small sizes as well as expressive when used for larger display design. It contains small caps, an innovative range of subtle ligatures, dingbats and adjusted variations of numerals. The glyphs have many detailed designs for better legibility and precise kerning. Also, the italic glyphs are designed with optical accuracy in relation to the skewing of stem width and height. I hope you will welcome the Ingleby II family as a part of your personal font toolbox.
  3. Bahn by Stawix, $45.00
    Bahn is heavily inspired by the sturdiness in the simplicity of the Autobahn together with the German highway typeface DIN 1451. Designed with straight-forward concept, clean and simple, direct and comprehensible. Nevertheless, Bahn still mange to insert the friendliness touch to the character which makes it easy to use and well-suited with other typefaces, letters or in various styles and possibilities of layouts that may occurred in the future. Bahn comes with 9 weights from the thinnest to the heaviest possible, accompanied with Italics for extensive usage. Not satisfied? Bahn also comes with Variables that will sure suited your needs.
  4. Bandaneira Style by Sensatype Studio, $15.00
    A Modern Stylish Duo Font that we created special for elegant branding needs, with unique shape will be ready to add value of your brand. It so nice to leverage designer or product owner that need solutions to make their design look more stylish and modern. And specially for Bandaneira font, We prepared any characters to help you create unlimited variations for your creative needs. Bandaneira Modern Stylish Duo Font ready with: Unique Beauty Characters Bandaneira (Regular and Italic) Preview as a inspirations that you can do with Bandaneira font Ready with Lowercase and Uppercase characters Wish you enjoy our font. :)
  5. Fika by Ryan Keightley, $15.00
    Fika is a warm and fresh semi-script font inspired by the feeling of a friendly local café. Appropriate for restaurants, packaging, web design, and anything in between, Fika will give a human touch to any project with its rounded edges and subtle, calligraphic weight variations. Italic is particularly nice for the swooping arcs and scriptlike flourishes of the capital letters. Fika includes a variety of accents for international languages, a small selection of swashes for a little extra flair, and a unique set of sans-serif smallcaps (in A-Z and 0-9) for supporting copy.
  6. Birdman - Unknown license
  7. Electric Pickle - Unknown license
  8. Fun Zone by Sakha Design, $12.00
    Fun Zone is a fun, fun display font. With its modern and bold character, this typeface will be the right choice for you to use.
  9. regularJoe by JOEBOB graphics, $49.00
    A handwritten but very clean and organized font that's a little bold and a little slanted. Soon to be followed by its evil twin: irregularJoe.
  10. TOMO Ernest by TOMO Fonts, $10.00
    Ernest is a handmade typeface with an unique yet strong personality. Say it bold with this font. Punk & Wave styles. Ideal for type based designs.
  11. Monopoint by Volcano Type, $19.00
    Monopoint is the little brother of Doublepoint. By overlaying the single weights from light to bold you will get a nice outline-in-outline look.
  12. Lygard by Tadiar, $14.00
    LYGARD Bold is modern stylish font good looking as header and text both. Good for Fashion, Games, Sports, Technology etc. Multilingual Latin symbols are included.
  13. Phoenix Squad by Stringlabs Creative Studio, $29.00
    Phoenix Squad is a modern and bold display font. Add this font to your favorite creative ideas and notice how it makes them come alive!
  14. French Semi by Wooden Type Fonts, $20.00
    A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, condensed, bold, flat thick serifs, a very useful design for display.
  15. Geffry by Rezastudio, $9.00
    Geffry is a retro inspired display typeface. It's fun and groovy with a bold personality. Perfect for masthead, logo, or anything your creativity takes you.
  16. Utica JNL by Jeff Levine, $29.00
    Utica JNL takes the basic components of Boat Decals JNL and reworks the characters into a bold, block font with thick-and-thin line variations.
  17. Dynatron by Studio K, $45.00
    Dynatron is a bold condensed retro-style font inspired by the old sci-fi comic covers, an example of which I have mocked up here.
  18. Boheld by Graptail, $21.00
    Boheld comes with 6 different style variations such as Sans, Serif, Bold, Condensed, and Inline. It is inspired by classic labels, tickets, posters, and more.
  19. Engravers Gothic by ParaType, $30.00
    An old extended Grotesque for use in advertising and display typography. Cyrillic version with adding Bold style created for ParaType in 2003 by Isabella Chaeva.
  20. General Merchant JNL by Jeff Levine, $29.00
    General Merchant JNL is a bold, compressed sans design in the 'Grotesk' fashion with varying character widths and flattened tops on the usually rounded characters.
  21. Susa by Hubert Jocham Type, $29.90
    Susa is an elegant and flowing brush script typeface. Ideal for short text in the lighter weights and for headlines in bold and heavy weights.
  22. Boa by Alien, $30.00
    Boa bold is a basic display font made for print. It was created for an Artbook about reptiles. It needed to be round and clear.
  23. Architec by Monotype, $29.99
    This caps only hand lettering could have come from an architect. Speedy written on a 45 degree slope with a bold felt pen or brush.
  24. Rosianne by HandletterYean, $10.00
    Rosianne is a bold and unique handwritten font with a distorted and classic feel. It will effortlessly turn any creative idea into a stand out.
  25. Battom Glory by Sealoung, $10.00
    Battom Glory is a bold and distinct blackletter font. Add this font to your creative ideas and notice how it will make them stand out!
  26. Vanitas by Reserves, $49.00
    Vanitas is an elegant high contrast contemporary sans. It is rooted in the style of a classic didone, excluding the typical serifs and ball terminals as well as being designed with a cleaner, more reductionist appearance. Strict attention was given to the cohesiveness and balance between letterforms as well as the careful refinement of all curves. Stylistically, Vanitas’ alluring, sophisticated sensibility is directly inspired by high fashion. The upright styles are complimented by a pairing of optically adjusted true italics, which were purposefully adapted to retain the sharpness of their counterparts. Abandoning traditionally executed cursive italic letterforms retains Vanitas’ sharp characteristic through each style. Features include: Precision kerning Standard Ligatures set including ‘f’ ligatures (fb, ff, fh, fi, fj, fk, fl ffb, ffh, ffi, ffj, ffk, ffl, ffy, ae, oe, AE, OE) Discretionary Ligatures set including (st, ct, No) Alternate characters (H, A, AE, Q, $, h circumflex, ¶ and numero sign) Case forms (shifts various punctuation marks up to a position that works better with all-capital sequences) Capital Spacing (globally adjusts inter-glyph spacing for all-capital text) Slashed zero Full set of numerators/denominators Tabular Lining, Proportional Lining, Tabular Oldstyle and Proportional Oldstyle Figures Automatic fraction feature (supports any fraction combination) Extended language support (Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A) *Requires an application with OpenType and/or Unicode support.
  27. Deberny by Typorium, $15.00
    The Deberny typeface is an interpretation–carrying a contemporary imprint–of a typographic style which appeared and spread at the end of the 19th century until the begining of the 20th. These typefaces were named Italian, Venetian, Veronese and were classified in the Hellenic category, a spontaneous typographic movement caracterized by triangular and heavy serifs. They found their inspiration among numerous references, from incised to slab serif typefaces and their extreme expressions in wood type letterforms. The Deberny font family is made of 26 styles in 3 complementary sets of style, offering a wide palette of visual resonance: • Deberny Line is ideally suited for editorial, branding, posters and billboards. It has sharp contrast between thick and thin strokes. Heavy horizontal strokes are not frequent in roman letters, but here they fit naturally with the italic letters. • Deberny Open is a stylish outline declination of Deberny Line Medium and Medium Italic. • Deberny Text is an adaptation of Deberny Line made for broader use. Its shapes are less contrasted, which makes it perfectly legible for print or screen reading in small size text. Old style figures and small caps complete Deberny Text in all its 8 styles. The Deberny typeface family supports Latin-based languages and will be available soon in Cyrillic and Greek. Deberny Narrow will be released this year in all its 26 styles.
  28. Boodle by Ckhans Fonts, $34.00
    • Support for 28 languages: Afrikaans Albanian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Hungarian Icelandic Italian Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portugese Romanian SlovakSlovenian Spanisch Swedish Turkish Zulu Swedish Turkish Zulu • Contains OpenType features with alternates or substitutes • Tabular Figures • Ordinal numbers • 74 icons (It will keep updating.) • 72 graphic patterns for designer (It will keep updating.) • 27 arrows glyphs • 0-20 line circled glyphs • 0-20 solid circled glyphs • A-Z line circled glyphs • A-Z solid circled glyphs Boodle is a modern sans serif with a geometric touch. It comes in 8 weights, 17 uprights and its matching italics, patterns, so you can use them to your heart’s content. Designed with powerful opentype features in mind. Each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures, icons and patterned. Boodle family consists of 17 styles (8 weights, 8 Italics and 1 patterns), in each of which there are more than 744+ glyphs. In the typeface, each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures and more. Perfectly suited for graphic design and any display use. It could easily work for web, signage, corporate as well as for editorial design. documents and folders, mobile interface. Useful links: Gravitica PDF Type Guide and Specimen (You can know how to use icons and arrows, other glyphs.)
  29. Gridink by Ckhans Fonts, $34.00
    Description Features: • Support for 28 languages: Afrikaans Albanian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Hungarian Icelandic Italian Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portugese Romanian SlovakSlovenian Spanisch Swedish Turkish Zulu Swedish Turkish Zulu • Contains OpenType features with alternates or substitutes • Tabular Figures • Ordinal numbers • 74 icons (It will keep updating.) • 72 graphic patterns for designer (It will keep updating.) • 28 brand symbols (It will keep updating.) • 27 arrows glyphs • 0-99 line circled glyphs • 0-99 solid circled glyphs • A-Z line circled glyphs • A-Z solid circled glyphs Gridink is a modern sans serif with a geometric touch. It comes in 9 weights, 18 uprights and its matching italics, patterns, so you can use them to your heart’s content. Designed with powerful opentype features in mind. Each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures, icons and patterned. Gridink family consists of 19 styles (9 weights, 9 Italics and 1 patterns), in each of which there are more than 940+ glyphs. In the typeface, each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures and more. Perfectly suited for graphic design and any display use. It could easily work for web, signage, corporate as well as for editorial design. documents and folders, mobile interface. Useful links: Gravitica PDF Type Guide and Specimen (You can know how to use icons and arrows, other glyphs.)
  30. Linex Sans by Monotype, $29.99
    Linex Sweet was designed by Albert Boton in the late 1990s. It's a smallish family of three weights; the middle weight has an italic companion face. With its soft corners and slightly quirky head-serifs, Linex Sweet is a friendly design that sees much use. Several years later, Boton began sketching a new design, based on the original Linex Sweet but with a little more authority and grace. Linex Sans is the result. A mix of crisp angles and soft shapes, this new addition to the extended Linex family is both inviting and elegant. The subtle calligraphic overtones distinguish the design from more traditional sans serif designs. A three-weight family with a complementary italic for the Regular weight, Linex Sans is a versatile communications tool in both text and display sizes. It offers that mix of sophistication and joie de vivre that characterizes the designs of Albert Boton. Boton began his professional career as a carpenter. Fortunately for designers and typographers, he quickly turned from pounding nails to hammering out graphic design and constructing great letterforms as a profession. In his long career, he has created hundreds of distinctive, highly useful and award-winning designs. And even though he is now retired from active business, Boton continues to create fresh, new typeface designs. Add Linex Sans to the list.
  31. Hierophant by Monotype, $40.00
    Hierophant is a humanist serif type family that has the heritage of classic Old Style and Transitional type while having the crisp lines and functionality of contemporary fonts. Its defining features include a high-contrast combined with diagonal stress, along with pinched stems and horizontals. This gives Hierophant a distinctive hand-drawn feel which also reflects the strong influence of the work of 16th century calligrapher Giovanni Francesco Cresci upon this family. OpenType features include stylistic sets of alternate glyphs – the first of which contains ornate teardrop serifs and ball terminals (ss01). This style dramatically changes the look of your typography and is ideally suited for short runs of text, headlines and branding purposes. Swash alternates for certain glyphs are available via Stylistic Sets 2 and 3. Other useful features include Small Caps at the click of a button, and Old Style Figures are an option to the default proportional figure style. There are 14 fonts altogether over 7 weights in roman and italic, you can also avail of two variable fonts which allow you to fine tune the weight to your exact liking. Hierophant has an extensive character set (1000+ glyphs) that covers every Latin European language. Key features: 7 weights in both roman and italic 112 Alternates Small Caps Variable fonts included with full family Full European character set (Latin only) 1000+ glyphs per font.
  32. Rubiesque by Nootype, $45.00
    Rubiesque is the sans serif version of Rubis, these two families share the same skeleton and weights. Rubiesque is a sans combining humanist and grotesk references which give this typeface an interesting & unique personnality. The regular and medium weights are perfect for text while the italic give an interesting texture to the text. The range of style give a good flexibility to this family. It’s a perfect family for editorial use. Rubiesque consists in a 10 styles family, from Light to Black with their corresponding italics. Each font includes OpenType Features such as Small Caps, Proportional Figure, Tabular Figures, Numerators, Superscript, Denominators, Scientific Inferiors, Subscript, Ordinals, Fractions and ligatures. Rubiesque family supports Latin and Cyrillic, all these languages are covered: Latin language support: Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Asturian, Azeri, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cornish, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, Flemish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gaelic, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kurdish, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Moldavian, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Provençal, Romanian, Romansch, Saami, Samoan, Scots, Scottish, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Walloon, Welsh, Wolof Cyrillic language support: Adyghe, Avar, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Buryat, Chechen, Erzya, Ingush, Kabardian, Kalmyk, Karachay-Balkar, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Komi, Kyrgyz, Lak, Macedonian, Moldovan, Mongol, Permyak, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Tatar, Tofa, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Uzbek
  33. Archeron Pro by Mostardesign, $25.00
    Archeron Pro is a modern serif font family with 18 fonts ranging from light to Heavy with the corresponding italics. This new font family revisits the neo-classical style of highly contrasted serifs and brings a resolutely contemporary touch to graphic or editorial projects. Archeron Pro has also been designed with high-contrast character ratios and a high x-height to give sentences more rhythm and legibility to long texts for on-screen display or printed materials. The italic styles of this family of characters are voluntarily removed from the calligraphic style to bring modernity to the italicized style, thus giving more of a typographic style. With these features, Archeron Pro is an elegant and contemporary serif specially adapted for modern communication as well as complex typographic projects. Archeron Pro also has a complete set of real small capitals with a little more tension than uppercase and generous proportions to give more emphasis to the texts you want to highlight. In terms of features, Archeron Pro is equipped with professional features such as case sensitivity, alternative glyphs, F-ligatures, circled numbers, localized letters, ordinals, or “Pro Kerning” with more than 5,000 pairs of glyphs which brings more clarity when reading long paragraphs. Archeron Pro also has a complete set of proportional and tabular numbers, fractions, and circled numbers for complex realizations such as tables or numerical lists.
  34. Gravitica Rounded by Ckhans Fonts, $34.00
    Features: • Support for 28 languages: Afrikaans Albanian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Hungarian Icelandic Italian Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portugese Romanian SlovakSlovenian Spanisch Swedish Turkish Zulu Swedish Turkish Zulu • Contains OpenType features with alternates or substitutes • Tabular Figures • Ordinal numbers • 74 icons (It will keep updating.) • 28 brand symbols (It will keep updating.) • 27 arrows glyphs • 0-99 line circled glyphs • 0-99 solid circled glyphs • A-Z line circled glyphs • A-Z solid circled glyphs Gravitica is a modern sans serif with a geometric touch. It comes in 6 weights, 13 uprights and its matching rounded, italics, patterned, so you can use them to your heart’s content. Designed with powerful opentype features in mind. Each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures, icons and patterned. Gravitica family consists of 13 styles (6 weights, 6 Italics, 1 patterned), in each of which there are more than 940+ glyphs. In the typeface, each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures and more. Perfectly suited for graphic design and any display use. It could easily work for web, signage, corporate as well as for editorial design. documents and folders, mobile interface. Useful links: Gravitica PDF Type Guide and Specimen (You can know how to use icons and arrows, other glyphs.)
  35. Antikor by Taner Ardali, $35.00
    Antikor is "mono geometric sans" family consist of 3 styles, 55 fonts with real italics... All fonts of family contains 800+ glyphs, and equipped with many typographic features. (Styles: Mono, Text and Display) Antikor Text is designed for those who prefer to use monospaced fonts not only in coding but in many different media of graphic design. The idea came from creating a typeface with monospaced aesthetic without disturbing aspects of monospaced typefaces . Antikor text has proportional spacing and precise kerning to avoid poor rhythm and track in reading text. It also provides wide range of useful features with extended glyph sets and opentype features. Antikor Mono is geometric sans monospaced typeface with all typographic features except spacing and kerning. As other styles it has many opentype features and extended character set including SmallCaps, Stylistic Alternatives, Scientific Numbers, Fractions, Oldstyle Numbers, Case Sensitive Forms, Arrows, Circled numbers and etc... It is designed to meet all the needs of the monospaced text medias... As Antikor is a versatile family, Antikor Display is a very alternative typeface with playful calligraphic curves. It is designed with the idea of creating a contrast and eye catching touch in display use of typography. It creates tasty contrast against the serious and solid monospace look. Each style has 11 weights ranging from Hairline to ExtraBold + real italics, consist of 22 fonts.
  36. Serapion by Storm Type Foundry, $39.00
    Another variation on the Renaissance-Baroque Roman face, it extends the selection of text type faces. In comparison with Jannon, the contrast within the letters has been enhanced. The dynamic elements of the Renaissance Roman face have been strengthened in a way which is illustrated best in the letters "a", "b" and "s". These letters contain, in condensed form, the principle of this type face - in round shapes the dark stroke invariably has a round finial at one end and a sharp one at the other. Another typical feature is the lower-case "g"; the upper part of this letter consists of two geometrically exact circles, the inner of which, a negative one, is immersed down on the right, upright to the direction of the lower loop and the upright knob. The vertical strokes slightly splay out upwards. Some details of the upper-case letters may seem to be too daring, but they are less apparent in the text sizes. It has to be admitted that typographers tend to draw letters in exaggerated sizes, as a result of which they stick to details. Serapion Italic are italics inspired partly by the Renaissance Cancelleresca. This is obvious from the drop-shaped finials of its lower-case descenders. The type face is suitable for illustrated books, art posters and short texts. It has a rather ugly name - after St. Serapion.
  37. Gravitica Slab by Ckhans Fonts, $34.00
    Features: • Support for 28 languages: Afrikaans Albanian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Hungarian Icelandic Italian Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Polish Portugese Romanian SlovakSlovenian Spanisch Swedish Turkish Zulu Swedish Turkish Zulu • Contains OpenType features with alternates or substitutes • Tabular Figures • Ordinal numbers • 74 icons (It will keep updating.) • 72 graphic patterns for designer (It will keep updating.) • 28 brand symbols (It will keep updating.) • 27 arrows glyphs • 0-99 line circled glyphs • 0-99 solid circled glyphs • A-Z line circled glyphs • A-Z solid circled glyphs Gravitica Slab is a modern serif with a geometric touch. It comes in 6 weights, 12 uprights and its matching italics, so you can use them to your heart’s content. Designed with powerful opentype features in mind. Each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures, icons and patterned. Gravitica Slab family consists of 12 styles (12 weights, 12 Italics), in each of which there are more than 940+ glyphs. In the typeface, each weight includes extended language support, fractions, tabular figures, arrows, ligatures and more. Perfectly suited for graphic design and any display use. It could easily work for web, signage, corporate as well as for editorial design. documents and folders, mobile interface. Useful links: Gravitica PDF Type Guide and Specimen (You can know how to use icons and arrows, other glyphs.)
  38. Range Sans by Eclectotype, $36.00
    This is Range Sans, the sans-serif counterpart to Range Serif . It can be categorized as a grotesque, with the idiosyncratic angular details from the serif family making themselves known in the arches and bowls of the lower case. The range of weights is larger than Range Serif, with two more weights at the lighter end of the spectrum. The weights from light to black correspond to their seriffed sisters, so can be interchanged with them freely while maintaining a similar text color and vertical metrics. This is useful for adding emphasis; Range Sans is deliberately lacking an italic, but the italics from Range Serif work better than you might expect in running text, particularly for the light and regular weights. Range Sans has a contemporary, somewhat geometric look that lends itself to uses such as corporate identities, minimalist graphic design, and logos. The middle weights do work well in running text, however, with the angled details being less noticeable at small sizes. Designed for demanding typography, supporting most Latin-based languages, Range Sans is equipped with true small caps for all weights, an array of numeral styles (proportional- and tabular- lining and oldstyle figures, small cap figures, numerators, denominators, superscripts and subscripts/scientific inferiors), automatic fractions, a set of useful arrows, case-sensitive forms, and a range of currency symbols including recent additions: Turkish Lira, Indian Rupee and Russian Ruble.
  39. Thicker by Zetafonts, $39.00
    Thicker is a type-family designed for Zetafonts by Francesco Canovaro with Andrea Tartarelli. A geometric sans typeface on steroids, it was first designed in the muscular Extrablack weight with the aesthetics of high-power dynamic typefaces used in sports communication, and then developed in the lighter weights where the shapes show some vintage-inspired proportions and the slightly squared look that nods to Novarese famous Eurostile, eponymous with retro-futurism. With these diverse influences the typeface allows for both impressive display use and effective logo design as well as more fine-tuned editorial use in body text - with a natural inclination for effective and powerful advertising. Sports typography usually uses italics to add dynamism and impact, and Thicker complies with this by offering a choice of three alternate italic forms with different slant, made even more customizable by the inclusion of variable font technology that allows fine tuning of the weight range as well as precise choice of typeface slant. In each of the 44 weights of the typeface family (as well as in the all-in-one variable type solution) Thicker offers a extended charset of over 900 latin, Cyrillic and Greek glyphs, covering over two hundred languages and including useful Open Type features (Alternate forms, Positional Numerals, Small Caps and Case Sensitive Forms) for flawless typesetting.
  40. Vendetta by Emigre, $69.00
    The famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.
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