English Grotesque is based on the proportions of an early 20th century signwriter’s sans, emphasising the characteristic idiosyncrasies of type of the period. Sharing a similar Roman circle-and-square construction as Gill Sans or Johnston Railway, it has a wide T and W, a narrow S, and a long-tailed R. The Roman alphabet did not include a lower-case, and therefore early sans-serifs tended to base theirs on handwritten or cursive models, resulting in more even character widths. English Grotesque, by contrast, carries the more characterful proportions of the capitals through to the lower case. Available in six weights, with optional alternative versions for the Q, &, £ and J.

Castellar is a capital letter typeface from John Peters, named after a location in the Alps. It first appeared in 1957 with Monotype. Peters modelled the design on the Roman script Scriptura Quadrata as it was used in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire. One distinguishing characteristic is the quadratic proportions of many letters, which are however mixed with circular and narrow forms. The original script was called Scriptura Quadrata because the ancient engravers used rectangular stone plates for their work. Castellar is a typical title typeface and is best used in large and very large point sizes to highlight its classic elegance.

ITC Tempus is the work of British designer Phill Grimshaw. He claims that every calligrapher's aspiration is to draw perfect roman capitals with a pen, but admits that this is extremely difficult. For this typeface, Grimshaw used a fountain pen on cheap, porous paper and, of course, the ink bled. The resulting forms are classic but their rugged edges deviate from the perfection of roman type. And Tempus Sans is just Tempus with the serif surgically removed, yet the proportions of the characters work nicely," says Grimshaw. Because of its rough quality, the typeface works best in larger point sizes, yet maintains its characters even in smaller sizes.

Linotype Mateo is part of the Take Type Library, which features the winners of Linotype’s International Digital Type Design Contest from 1994 to 1997. Jürgen Ellenberger included three styles in his font, roman, bold and outline. The characters of Mateo consist exclusively of lines, giving the font an extremely angular look. However, Mateo retains a certain handwritten style somewhat reminiscent of the graffiti left on wooden grade school desks by previous classes. The bold and outline styles have emphasized stroke contrasts but keep the angular, consciously irregular look. The roman style is best for smaller texts and the bold and outlines styles for headlines.

FONT UPDATE → CFF Accelerator Roman is the ultimate logo typeface. It’s an efficient font family, consisting of 8 fonts with 4 weights and 2 widths. The masculine wide shoulders and sharp diagonal serifs are instantly recognizable and leave a lasting impression. CFF Accelerator is a space-age font made for heavy lifting. The original Accelerator Italic font was designed in 2005, making it our very first commercial font. It was created as an all-caps typeface. Now, the new Accelerator Roman font family has lowercases, an extended glyph set, a gazillion discretional ligatures, and loads of OpenType features. CFF Accelerator is currently our all-time bestseller!

Revival 565 is the Bitstream version of type Berling. The face was created by Karl-Erik Forsberg for the Swedish Berling foundry in 1951, with other weights added in 1958. The design is an old style roman, particularly useful for books, journals, and other text applications. Despite the fact that it has higher contrast than most old style typefaces, Berling has the classic features of old style romans with its small x-height, and ascenders that exceed the height of the capital letters. Berling is good for text settings as well as display work. Cyrillic version was developed for ParaType by Manvel Shmavonyan in 2008.

Herculanum is a part of the 1990 program “Type before Gutenberg”, which included the work of twelve contemporary font designers and represented styles from across the ages. Herculanum is a work of Swiss typeface designer Adrian Frutiger. It takes its name from the city of Herculaneum, an ancient Roman resort town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows from Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD (the same eruption that destroyed the nearby city of Pompeii). Herculaneum's ruins are located today in the commune of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Ancient Roman writings of the 1st century influenced the font's design. Herculanum is distinguished by its broad characters with narrow strokes and its willful character.

Euro Sans Pro ? created by German type designer Ralph M. Unger - is a classical and modern Roman Sans Serif at the same time. The family comprises of 12 styles, each with more than 500 glpyhs covering standard Latin, Central European, and Cyrillic. It is an all purpose typeface, a strong and expressive roman sans serif with a French touch to it. Euro Sans Pro provides excellent readability in all sizes, for small copy as well as for very large letters on posters and signs. The character complement also includes small caps and old style figures, and the corresponding OTF features are built into the fonts as well.

Gessetto is an extensive chalk font family, containing script, sans, roman, figures and ornaments. One of the things most charming about chalkboard lettering is the variation; in both texture and style. Our goal was to achieve a real chalk effect using the varied typographic genres in a digital format. With flexibility and control for the designer in mind, we built a digital chalk toolkit. The script is a fusion of Italic Roman and cursive, it contains swashy alternates for each capital letters with some long and extended flair on some ascendent and descendent letters. An all caps high contrast sans is in 5 complimentary styles. The Roman is precisely proportioned and maintains elegance while being bold. There is a set of Figures and ornaments. Gessetto is perfect to grab attention on signage, print advertising and editorial applications like book covers, but suits branding applications too. The diverse styles and subtle handcrafted textures in this display type family will well serve any designer looking for the authentic chalkboard aesthetic. We recommend to combine Timberline with: Turquoise

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.

Like a lovechild of American Typewriter and Cooper Black, typewritten in melted chocolate, this is Margot. A bold single weight display typeface in roman and italic styles, Margot is boisterous but cuddly; warm but impactful. Margot comes fully loaded with a bunch of esoteric dingbats (grouped in the ornament feature), four figure styles (proportional- and tabular- lining, and proportional- and tabular- oldstyle), a spattering of swash capitals (K, Q and R), stylistic alternates and one discretionary gi ligature in the Roman. Stylistic alternates are split into stylistic sets thus: SS01 - alternate forms for ampersand and asterisk, and # changes to an attractive numero symbol. SS02 - in the Roman, a and g change to single storey versions; in the italic, the ae digraph changes to a less ambiguous double storey version. SS03 - the lining figure 3 gets changed to its alternate form. SS04 - the lining figure 4 gets changed to its alternate form. Margot is perfect for friendly headlines, logos, T-shirts (I love New York, perhaps?), food packaging and videogame apps. Margot gets its name from my equally boisterous and cuddly cat. Enjoy!

Rome Ionic is a serif display font inspired by architectural features in ancient Roman building columns. The Ionic columns are taller and slender compared to 'Doric and Corinthian' columns. On the Ionic Capitol column, there is a geometric spiral like a paper roll. We used those elements in this roman style font. The base of this font is serif shaped, more slender and towering, and equipped with 8-18 stylistic set alternates. This is the development of the basic shape on which we added spiral ornaments to the left and right. This serif font's characteristic is soft and simple, not sharp and complicated like Doric and Corinthian. The composition of the softness of the basic and alternate fonts does not reduce the splendor of this font. We complemented this font with support for the Latin extend as an analogy to the Roman region. Rome Ionic is perfect for 'impressive luxury and power' designs. With this font, your branding will show the robustness and refute the splendor of other products.

@andinistas presents Rapsodia, an uncommon roman caps font with serif and high contrast, designed by #carlosfabiancg. Rapsodia was inspired by Stunt Roman, Speedball Textbook for Pen & Brush Lettering by Ross F. George. Rapsodia has a high and sweetened amount of contrast between thin and thick with drop-shaped finishes, reminiscent of Didot, Baskerville and Bodoni. Its artistic accent translates into Tuscan letters drawn with a flexible tip pen. In that order, Rapsodia combines the visual theatricality of an art nouveau corset, with creative historical classics such as Liza Minnelli, Gene Simmons and Freddie Mercury. Its calligraphic curlers full of Mannerist virtuosity are unnatural in Roman caps typefaces with serif. That is why its internal vein in ascending and descending flourishes protrudes with Chicano circus details like triangular diamonds located in vertical strokes. Rapsodia serves to design words and phrases in fine publications, for this reason most of its upper and lower case letters communicate feelings with classic and luxurious sensation through substitutes, ligatures and alternatives for beginning, middle or end of word, functioning as initials and terminals.

Cloister Open Face was designed in 1929 by Morris Fuller Benton as one weight of the Cloister Old Style family. Cloister itself appeared from 1897 with American Type Founders, and later for the typesetting machines of the Linotype, Intertype and Monotype companies. At that time, it was the truest modern industrial revival of the Jensonian Roman. Benton stayed close to the style of his model in both design and spacing. Cloister Open Face has an old-world elegance, and it works well for titling in books and magazines. In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e.""

The spurred serif style of Roman lettering has long been a favorite of sign painters and show card writers. Spur Handlettered JNL from Jeff Levine gives this classic design an ultra-casual look, complete with all of the nuances of hand-lettering.

This font can be used as a play'n learn tool to teach the meaning of these modern day communication symbols. Each alphabetical character can be printed with or without the corresponding roman symbols. NOTE: comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

A partial set of antique brass stencils inspired Old Spur Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. The lettering is based on a traditional Roman stencil design with Western-style spurs added to the approximate centers of each character.

Based heavily on Gill especially in the mid weights, Astoria has a subtle top left serif which makes it not quite a Roman and not quite a Sans. Designed specifically as a text face it still works very well as a headline font.

Kareemah is humanist typography, composed of roman and italics with 16 styles and 8 weights (800 glyphs) including ligatures, alternates, small caps,old style figures, fractions, superiors, inferiors and more. Perfectly legible and clean for long, simple texts in headlines. "Specimen Kareemah PDF"

The 1897 specimen book from Barnhart Brothers and Spindler showed a enchanting little face called Dotted Roman. Here's a faithful revival, ready to warm up the 21st century. Both versions support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

Larque is a slab serif text typeface. The tall x-height and the open counters makes the font very legible at small sizes. Larque includes extended latin characters, ligatures, oldstyle figures and Open Type features. It is available in roman and medium weight.

This font can be used as a play'n learn tool to teach the meaning of these modern day communication symbols. Each alphabetical character can be printed with or without the corresponding roman symbols. NOTE: comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

This humanist slab-serif style is an extension from Gazeta font family, the letterform are more sharp, racional and mechanical. Italics are having small differences from roman letterforms, the characters are slightly more narrow (weight) and the proportions are less open (width).

Bramble is a lively organic font that draws reference from Roman characters rather than Italic forms. Use Regular for small point-size setting to retain legibility. For invigorating display settings try combining Regular and Wild. Warning: you may become attached to Bramble!

Simeon is well suited for setting an short and medium amount of text with an historic impression. OpenType features: - over 650 glyphs - Central European faces - stylistic alternates and historical forms - ornaments, signs, zodiac, symbols - proportional & mediaeval numerals - numerators, denominators and fractions - Roman numerals

Citation was designed by British lettering artist Trevor Loane. It is a solemn, all caps roman alphabet whose coolly elegant letters look as though they were etched in stone. Citation is perfect for any work which should have a stately and expensive appearance.

Written in a ballpoint pen style POST BOX is a neighborly sans serif is slightly condensed and slanted. Scribbled quickly but readable. Exact but still human. Perfect for print, package and display use. You can also use it in shorter paragraph text.

This font can be used as a play'n learn tool to teach the meaning of these modern day communication symbols. Each alphabetical character can be printed with or without the corresponding roman symbols. NOTE: comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

The capitals of the Triplett font bare a strong resemblance to Roman inscriptions, while the lowercase alphabet has been drawn with a rounded hand, inspired by the cursive uncial handwriting. Serifs are very small, giving a clean modern look to texts and headings.

FDI Triumph revives Albert Auspurg’s “Triumph” typeface originally released in 1929 by the type foundry Ludwig Wagner in Leipzig. The forgotten design was carefully digitized from the original wood type font and extended to cover the Western codepages Win 1252 and Mac Roman.

This font can be used as a play'n learn tool to teach the meaning of these modern day communication symbols. Each alphabetical character can be printed with or without the corresponding roman symbols. NOTE: comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

Constantine - an exquisite display modern serif, inspired by classic roman arts and vintage cars aesthetics. Specially designed for luxury, clean, high-end projects, perfectly suitable for creating elegant, classy design such as magazine, social media, and more. The font features standard ligatures.

"Humanista" is the name of a multilingual chancery script font by Bertram Kaiser. The idea in this long-term project was to blend the boundaries between analogue calligraphic handwriting and designing a font digitally, while using all technical possibilities of modern type design. All glyphs were originally written with a broadnib and then carefully vectorized, creating a human charme inside the font. In this design you will find influences from great calligraphy masters like Hermann Zapf or Werner Schneider. The pro version comes along with a big variety of alternate glyphs, initial and terminal forms, swash capitals and ligatures, which gives you the possibility of designing individual text layouts. Inside the font you will also find a set of italic roman capitals plus fitting numerals and interpunction, which can be treated like a font itself. You can activate them through the Open-Type menue (stylistic-set 4) or set manually via the glyphs window (ADOBE applications). When using the feature "swashletters" make sure to also activate the feature "contextual alternates" to get an appealing textdesign with alternating swashletters. This font can be used for display sizes as well as for smaller textsizes like on Invitationcards or in magazines.

It’s like hiring your own professional sign painter with a solid repertoire of styles; each one is distinctive, yet clearly by the same hand. No variants were created on the computer – each weight and version was individually hand-lettered. Ed’s Market lets you evoke the warm, inviting vibe of classic 20th-century grocery posters and showcard lettering right from your type menu. Smart programming ensures that digital perfection doesn't trump human charm: each display face features three variations of each letter, to ensure a natural hand-painted look when characters repeat. Ed’s Market includes three script styles, each with more than 100 alternate characters and swash forms. Seven display faces feature three variations of each letter, to ensure a natural hand-painted look when characters repeat. Design Elements offer expandable arrows, rules and ribbons; along with badges, swashes, scribbles, clouds and snipes. See what’s included! http://bit.ly/1Mzurs3 *NOTE* Basic versions DO NOT include swashes, alternates or ornaments These fonts have been specially coded for access of all the swashes, alternates and ornaments without the need for professional design software! Info and instructions here: http://lauraworthingtontype.com/faqs/

New Lincoln Gothic is an elegant sanserif, generous in width and x-height. There are twelve weights ranging from Hairline to UltraBold and an italic for each weight. At the stroke ends are gentle flares, and some of the round characters possess an interesting and distinctive asymmetry. The character set supports Central Europe, and there are three figure sets, extended fractions, superior and inferior numbers, and a few alternates, all accessible via OpenType features. Back in 1965, Thomas Lincoln had an idea for a new sanserif typeface, a homage of sorts, to ancient Roman artisans. The Trajan Column in Rome, erected in 113 AD, has an inscription that is considered to be the basis for western European lettering. Lincoln admired these beautiful letterforms and so, being inspired, he set out to design a new sanserif typeface based on the proportions and subtleties of the letters found in the Trajan Inscription. Lincoln accomplished what he set out to do by creating Lincoln Gothic. The typeface consisted only of capital letters. Lincoln intentionally omitted a lowercase to keep true his reference to the Trajan Inscription, which contains only magiscule specimens. The design won him the first Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) National Typeface Competition in 1965. The legendary Herb Lubalin even used it to design a promotional poster! All this was back in the day when typositor film strips and photo type were all the rage in setting headlines. Fast forward now to the next millennium. Thomas Lincoln has had a long, illustrious career as a graphic designer. Still, he has one project that feels incomplete; Lincoln Gothic does not have a lowercase. It is the need to finish the design that drives Lincoln to resurrect his prize winning design and create its digital incarnation. Thus, New Lincoln Gothic was born. Lacking the original drawings, Lincoln had to locate some old typositor strips in order to get started. He had them scanned and imported the data into Freehand where he refined the shapes and sketched out a lowercase. He then imported that data into Fontographer, where he worked the glyphs again and refined the spacing, and started generating additional weights and italics. His enthusiasm went unchecked and he created 14 weights! It was about that time that Lincoln contacted Bitstream about publishing the family. Lincoln worked with Bitstream to narrow down the family (only to twelve weights), interpolate the various weights using three masters, and extend the character set to support CE and some alternate figure sets. Bitstream handled the hinting and all production details and built the final CFF OpenType fonts using FontLab Studio 5.

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.

ITC Legacy¿ was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and character. As Jenson did not include a companion italic, Arnholm turned to the sixteenth-century types of Claude Garamond for inspiration for the italics of ITC Legacy. Arnholm was so taken by the strength and integrity of these oldstyle seriffed forms that he used their essential skeletal structures to develop a full set of sans serif faces. ITC Legacy includes a complete family of weights from book to ultra, with Old style Figures and small caps, making this a good choice for detailed book typography or multi-faceted graphic design projects. In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e."" Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos

ITC Legacy¿ was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and character. As Jenson did not include a companion italic, Arnholm turned to the sixteenth-century types of Claude Garamond for inspiration for the italics of ITC Legacy. Arnholm was so taken by the strength and integrity of these oldstyle seriffed forms that he used their essential skeletal structures to develop a full set of sans serif faces. ITC Legacy includes a complete family of weights from book to ultra, with Old style Figures and small caps, making this a good choice for detailed book typography or multi-faceted graphic design projects. In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e."" ITC Legacy® Sans font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Petrarka may be described as a Condensed, Sans-Serif, Semi-Fatface Roman. Huh? Bear with me on this. The Fatface is a name given to the popular nineteenth-century romans that where characterized by an extremity of contrast between the thick and thin stroke. The earliest example that is generally familiar is Thorowgood, believed to have been designed by Robert Thorne and released by Thorowgood Foundry in 1820 as "Five-line Pica No. 5." Copied by many foundries, it became one of the more popular advertising types of the day. Later, in the period from about 1890 to 1950, you find a number of typeface designs with the thin stroke beefed up a bit, not quite so extreme. What you might call Semi-Fatfaced Romans begin to replace the extreme Fatfaces. Serifed designs like Bauer’s Bernard Roman Extra Bold and ATF’s Bold Antique appear. In addition, we see the development of semi-fatface lineals or Sans-Serif Semi-Fatfaces. Examples include Britannic (Stephenson Blake), Chambord Bold (Olive), Koloss (Ludwig & Mayer), Matthews (ATF) and Radiant Heavy (Ludlow). Petrarka has much in common with this latter group, but is distinguished by two salient features: it is condensed and it shows a strong blackletter influence, as seen in the ‘H’ particularly. Petrark was released about 1900 by the German foundry of Schelter & Giesecke of Leipzig and is one of the designs of the period that attempts to reconcile roman and blackletter traditions. Making a cameo appearance in this Multi-Lingual font is the Anglo-Saxon letter yogh (#729), which, along with the thorn and the eth, is always useful for preparing flyers in Old English. There are still pockets of resistance to the Norman French influence that washed up on England’s shores in 1066. This font stands with King Canute, seeking to hold back the tide (ignoring the fact that Canute was a Dane). Support the fight to preserve Anglo-Saxon culture. Buy Petrarka ML today. Petrarka Initials brings together the Petrarka upper case letters with a very sympatico Art Nouveau rendering of a female face.

Based on Transitional Roman forms, this tasteful and well crafted Humanist display face exudes an air of authority along with a subtle playfulness. Narrow proportions allow for space conservation. Alternate letterforms & ligatures give this caps-only font expanded possibilities for any given text setting.