Alphard - Handwritten Font by erlosDESIGN Alphard is a delicate, elegant and flowing handwritten font. It has beautiful and well balanced characters and as a result, it matches a wide pool of designs. Alphard features a varying baseline, smooth lines, gorgeous glyphs and stunning alternates. Add it to your most creative ideas and notice how it makes them come alive!

Scriptissimo-Forte is the bold version of Scriptissimo. When using the normal cut of Scriptissimo I sometimes had the feeling that I could well use a bolder cut to make a bigger impression, so I simply made that cut for myself. I think you can use it too; try it out. Yours very bold scriptissimo, Gert Wiescher

Holiday Doodles includes a set of numbers plus 50 seasonal year-long holiday doodles. Great for a newsletter, monthly price list, or invitations. These illustrations have more detail, so they are great used at large point sizes as small illustrations. This font is designed to work well with the hand-lettering fonts offered by Outside the Line.

This unique geometric design will make your projects stand out from the crowd! If you're looking for a futuristic but with an edgy twist, "Polanix" could be the one. The interesting deformation of its variable version also works great with animation, game design and film/TV credits & titles as well as interface, app and web designs.

British type designers David Crow and Ian Wright created this display FontFont in 2002. The family contains 2 weights and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, editorial and publishing as well as poster and billboards. FF Beadmap provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures and case-sensitive forms. It comes with tabular lining figures.

Ridley Grotesk is a modern sans-serif. It comes in nine weights with matching italics, designed with powerful opentype features in mind. Each weight includes true small capitals, alternate characters, extended language support, 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.

Motiraw is contemporary sans-serif typeface made up of 28 fonts across 7 weights with normal and alternate options. It’s a unique and modern sans typeface, which is well suited for a variety of typographic applications such as headlines and small texts. Motiraw font family supports multiple languages and is available as both webfont and desktop font.

Who doesn’t like Spaghetti & Cheese? Well, my son doesn’t like it, because he hates cheese, but he seems to be one of the few. Spaghetti & Cheese is also a handmade font: slightly slanted, slightly eroded, yet very legible and clear. It was made with a Japanese ‘Shake & Write’ marker pen. Comes with a generous topping of diacritics.

Birka is the first typeface I designed from scratch. It took a whole year of my weekend and evening hours and is the typeface that teached me everything I know about type design. It is easy too see that I had Garamond in mind when drawing it. Birka is beautiful" was the comment of the well known Swedish designer Bo Berndal when he first saw it. That comment gave me the courage to design more and more typefaces. In a Danish article about Scandinavian type design, Birka was taken as example of a typical Swedishness in typography. I am not sure what the writer had in mind, but it surely sounded well. Birka has its name from the ancient Viking town Birka, whose remains are found not far away from Stockholm. Birka was released in 1992."

Magenos Soft is the rounded version of Magenos typeface family. It is a modern geometric sans serif family characterized by its simplicity and extensive functionality. With its open apertures, geometric architecture and low contrast strokes, it expresses a sincere tone with a modernistic, neutral, yet friendly personality. It has been designed to work well for a wide range of applications and is a reliable workhorse. Equally suitable for print and screen usage, it works well for both text and display at a wide range of point sizes. The addition of true italics gives the whole family a dynamic edge and flexibility. Magenos Soft comes with many OpenType features including stylistic alternates, standard ligatures, oldstyle and lining (proportional and tabular) numerals, slashed zero and a variety of symbols, making it a perfect choice for contemporary and professional typography.

Robson is a fluid, condensed, uppercase font made up of eight weights, as well as a variable, that will provide instant visual impact to your projects. The font is made up of 486 glyphs which features extensive language support & stylistic alternates to give your designs the versatility they require. The font has a retro edge to it by using rounded structures on the A, M, N, W and Y glyphs that are reminiscent of posters and promos from the 70s and 80s. The ultra tight thin weight is made to be used at super sizes to bring a focal point to your designs. Robson is meant to be seen big (well, he's a bit of a show-off) Robson is perfect for your digital, print or branding projects. Or, for a poster on your fridge that says "You rock".

Ganges is a condensed sans serif typeface inspired by Central European advertising typography from late XIX century. The font has condensed proportions and original letter shapes. Ganges is designed mainly for editorial design, especially for display use, as well as short paragraphs of text. Its narrow proportion makes it very practical to use for posters and magazine covers. Characteristic letter forms fit great for branding, logo and packaging design. It is also a very interesting choice for websites and e-book headlines. Ganges family consist of 27 fonts - 9 weights, 9 italics and 9 obliques. It supports extended set of latin languages, as well as broad number of OpenType features, such as case sensitive forms, standard and dicretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, contextual alternates, lining, oldstyle and tabular figures, slashed zero, fractions, superscript and subscript, ordinals, currencies and symbols.

Orca Pro is a modern sans-serif font family. Its lowercase letters are inspired by the well known OCR-A font, however every single glyph has been more or less revised. Capitals, numerals and all other characters and punctuation marks are entirely new. Feel free to download the PDF Specimen for detailed info and examples. The Orca Pro family consists of 10 fonts – light, regular, medium, bold and heavy weights including real italics. It supports many OpenType features like automatic fractions, ordinals, proportional/tabular figures, numerators, denominators, superiors, inferiors or case sensitive forms and offers great multilingual support for most of Latin-based languages (including CE). Orca Pro contains a number of standard and discretionary ligatures, numerals as well as 62 bullets, symbols and arrows. Orca reveals its soft, rounded character in bigger sizes while it remains distinct and legible in small sizes.

Elvira Serif is a typeface family that proposes to make the use of display serifs a little more fun, including in its anatomy some sharp points, ink traps implanted in some glyphs, and the formality of a traditional serif. All of these elements make Elvira Serif a great option that balances the contemporary with traditional touches. Elvira Serif has 9 weights, as well as true italics, which gives it dimension and versatility in its use. It can be used for a wide variety of purposes: it works well on the web, headlines and especially designed for book publishing at small sizes. Elvira Serif has the ability to look robust and imposing in its black weight, and subtle and elegant in its light weight. Enjoy it, it is made with a lot of passion and fun by Sudtipos and Vástago.

Zin Display is a contemporary typeface designed for various situations of typographic usage. Characteristic feature is a large x-height and balance between neutral construction of letters (strictly vertical axis), dynamic open forms (opened terminals) and sharp instrokes, outstrokes and serifs. Another typical feature is a visually narrower connection between stems and strokes. The complete font family consist of three width proportions (Normal, Condensed and Extended). Every sub-family has 5 weights, ranging from Light to Black with matching Italics. Zin Display can be effectively used especially for display typesetting but works for longer text as well. It can be used especialy in magazine layouts and editorial design, as well in advertising typography, orientation systems, corporate identities and many other situations. Zin Display is a member of the Zin super family, which also includes Zin Sans, Zin Slab and Zin Serif fonts.

What do you get when you mix iconic Cooper Black from 1922 with an even older font, equally iconic Windsor from 1905? Well of course, you get Manchego! Manchego combines the best of both: the plump features and serifs from Cooper with seriously bold forms, such as the oversized bowl of R, peg-legged N, pinched U and leaning a, h, m & n giving it an adorable retro-appeal. With these distinguishable features Manchego works extremely well with illustrations or can actually be used as an illustration per se. Despite its vintage charm, Manchego is fully equipped with modern OpenType features. Standard ligatures help with certain difficult character combinations. In addition Manchego sports Swash, Titling & Stylistic Alternates that can be deployed for more original look. Try Manchego with a bit tighter kerning for more 70s feel.

Vectis, named in honor of the Roman settlement of Britain's south coast on the Isle of Wight, brings a fresh approach to the classic simple elegance of ancient Roman faces. Vectis is offered as a small caps face designed to add a fresh hint of character to this style of classical design. Vectis can lend a note of formal dignity to any design project or poster and is ideal for clear headings and titles with a traditional feel. Two basic weights are offered, regular and bold, as well as a range of alternate letterforms and ligatures. This popular family has now been expanded with the incised 'Monumental' display face, and well as 'miniscule' lower case forms and condensed widths. Vectis and our Anavio families compliment each other perfectly, and can also be purchased together in a value pack.

Santoro Script is a fun, happy script font created in the style of handpainted sign lettering. The first brand-new font added to the Jukebox library since 2011, it displays a jubilant attitude which will add a spontaneous, warm and friendly look to any design. The typeface contains three versions of every letter found under the Swash and Stylistic Alternates OpenType features as well as a few additional letter versions and ligatures under the Titling and Discretionary Ligatures OpenType features. These extra alternates help give the font a hand painted feeling. Jukebox fonts are available in OpenType format and download packages contain both .otf and .ttf versions of the font. They are compatible on both Mac and Windows. All fonts contain basic OpenType features as well as support for Latin-based and most Eastern European languages.

Last year, we visited Brazil and we were totally captivated by its cheerful and warm people. Its wild nature is absolutely amazing and very noticeable in textile printing as well as in floral design. That was precisely what inspired us to create some ornaments and dingbats, which we then turned into a single typographic work. The resulting typeface was called Garden , a serif display handmade font with a playful and spontaneous feel. The Garden family offers a font with a set of original “catchwords” (‘Garden Catchwords’, based on brush calligraphy), floral dingbats and botanical ornaments. Please be aware, “Garden Catchwords” is a ‘Catchwords’ font, and does not offer standard AlphaNumeric characters. The OpenType version provides a wide range of creative options. Garden is well-suited for text composition, posters, headlines, label design and handmade-style items. Garden is inspiration, nature and joy!

Brandon Grotesque is a sans serif type family of six weights plus matching italics. It was designed by Hannes von Döhren in 2009/10. Influenced by the geometric-style sans serif faces that were popular during the 1920s and 30s, the fonts are based on geometric forms that have been optically corrected for better legibility. Brandon Grotesque has a functional look with a warm touch. While the thin and the black weights are great performers in display sizes the light, regular and medium weights are well suited to longer texts. The small x-height and the restrained forms lend it a distinctive elegance. Brandon Grotesque is equipped for complex, professional typography. The OpenType fonts have an extended character set to support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European languages. Brandon Grotesque won the TDC2 Award, 2011.

Six Hands is a set of handwritten fonts based on various writing tools, such as pencil, felt-tip pen, ball-point pen, and brush. The character set of each of these fonts supports the Cyrillic alphabet, as well as the extended Latin script for all European languages. Most of the styles also contain additional alternatives that have the capability of automatically interchanging in the setting, which significantly variegates and humanizes the text. Six Hands is quite a rare combination of diverse display fonts that work well together. It is made for talented designers who can use it creatively in packaging, advertising, displays, posters, menus, invitations and so on. The design of Six Hands was a result of collaboration between Alexandra Korolkova, Alexander Lubovenko and all those who assist them in this work. This set of fonts was released by Paratype in 2018.

Important! There is a whole new redesigned version (remake) of Uni Sans called Uni Neue . The Uni Sans font family includes 14 weights - seven uprights with seven italics. It is characterized by excellent legibility in both - web & print design areas, well-finished geometric designs, optimized kerning, excellent web-font performance and legibility etc. Inspired by the classic grotesque strong typefaces like DIN and Dax - Uni Sans has his own unique style in expressed perfect softened geometric forms. The font family is most suitable for headlines of all sizes, as well as for text blocks that come in both maximum and minimum variations. Uni Sans font styles are applicable for any type of graphic design in web, print, motion graphics etc and perfect for t-shirts and other items like posters, logos. PDF Specimen also available - click here .

Alius is something else. Experimental shapes combined with traditional ones result in an extremely legible typeface that—because of its economically spaced characters—works extraordinarily well for copy texts as well as big striking headings. Alius has been created with great attention to detail which is particularly noticeable in smaller sizes where proportions and shapes remain intact. The Typeface includes stylistic alternates that provide the designer with endless possibilities for combinations and variations. Alius contains PS-Hinting and is therefore as legible on screen as it is on paper. The typeface comes with powerful OpenType features that will satisfy even the most demanding of designers. With more than 680 Glyphs and a coverage of over 130 languages, Alius is as versatile as it is beautiful. The development of the typeface started in the summer and concluded in the fall of 2021.

German type designer Erik Spiekermann, American type designer Christian Schwartz, and New Zealand type designer Kris Sowersby created this slab FontFont in 2009. The family has 14 weights, ranging from Thin to Ultra (including italics) and is ideally suited for editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries as well as web and screen design. FF Unit Slab provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. As well as Latin-based languages, the typeface family also supports the Cyrillic and Greek writing systems. This FontFont is a member of the FF Unit super family, which also includes FF Unit and FF Unit Rounded.

Wakerobin takes its charming swagger from the hand-painted billboard, poster and signage lettering of the mid-19th century. These showy styles did everything they could to stand out from the background cacophony of advertising, with signwriters using sharp and high contrast serif letters, squared block shapes, or art nouveau forms to grab the attention of passersby. Wakerobin embraces the spirit of these letterforms, bringing these various styles together in one typeface - as if users had their own sign painter on hand. Just as lettering artists had to adapt to a variety of sizes - from wide streetcar lettering to compressed forms that squeezed into narrow Victorian windows - the variable version of Wakerobin scales up and down in width to fit whatever environment the user’s working in. The static fonts come in three widths and five weights. As well as its adaptability, Wakerobin is bursting with vintage flavour, making it hard to ignore. Its distinctive, spiky serifs would be right at home on food and drinks packaging, as well as shop windows, adverts, and any other place that calls for some typographic showmanship. It performs particularly well in busy environments, or anywhere with a lot of visual noise - just as its historic predecessors did. And while Wakerobin is first and foremost a display typeface, it’s surprisingly elegant when used at text size, or in the lighter end of the weight spectrum.

officially funky is a brand new, creative & unique font duo. It is a part of my font duo series and after French Lovers & Silver Garden it was time to create a font that is both modern and nostalgic. It is a 2 in 1 font, where the sans makes it modern and alternate serif letters & cool ligatures will make each of projects projects 100% unique. The font also includes over 45 ligatures and I am sure you will love this funky vibe. It also includes full language support, punctuation, numerals and detailed instructions how to use alternate letters most of the apps on your computer, as well as in Canva. I invite you to check out the preview images, and I hope you will be immersed in my vision for this creative typeface that, I am sure, will work for all kinds of interesting projects you might be working on this year. If you end up publishing your designs on Instagram, tag me - @silverstagco and I will make sure to showcase your design and work to my audience as well! Officially Funky - Modern Font Duo Includes: Over 45 ligatures in sans & serif font Numerals & Punctuation Web Font Kit is included as well Detailed instructions on how to use alternates in most of the apps on your computer and in Canva Happy creating everyone!

And the day in which I introduce my second typographic family has arrived. In order to do this, I borrowed several passages from this beautiful book by Maurice Maeterlinck, “Life and Flowers”. His poetic observation of Nature made me reflect about the small discoveries behind the flow of my pen on paper. About that quick, spontaneous, overwhelmed stroke, with some awkwardness as well as certainty in it. About the writing that looms line after line. About the mischievous stains of ink flooding my writing tool. Lady Dodó was born as a product of these drawings, pieces of writing and reflections. Following the steps of its ancestor and friend, Lady René, it takes advantage of the goodness of the Open Type technology to propose a systematized as well as a personalized writing font. Both friendly and challenging. Due to the large number of alternate characters (both for lower and upper case as well as for numbers) and to its precise programming, it proposes to design diverse and rich typographical sets with multiple strokes in a simple way. However, Lady Dodó is not just made of typographical signs; it also proposes a set of modules to make patterns and another one to design frames. From the combination of these modular signs, an infinite universe of possibilities for decoration arises. Here is Lady Dodó, ready to get started and write its destiny. July 2015.

Introducing Mistress Benedict Font Duo - a pair of hand brushed fonts attentively designed to work together, helping to produce beautiful typography! This pack of two fonts works so well together and can be used for so many projects, from food packaging to a simple quote that you upload to Instagram. Use them on your t-shirts, mugs, cushions, handmade card designs, anything you like! What do you get? Benedict Font has a neat, handwritten style to it and it's tall ascenders gives that added elegance. With it also being hand brushed Benedict is perfect for all hand lettering typographic designs and works well for short advertising headlines and sub-headers. Benedict has a full set of uppercase and lowercase alternates giving you a different style - it's like two fonts in one! Mistress Benedict Brush includes ligatures, discretionary ligatures and a full set of alternate characters. It also has international character support. Mistress Benedict Caps was hand brushed with the same brush pen and is the perfect companion for Benedict. It's an all caps font where the alternates are actually the lowercase letters. It looks gorgeous on it's own too! Like the brush version, Mistress Benedict also supports international languages. Well, there it is! I really hope that you enjoy using this font duo and please ask if you have any questions. Jo

The Cabrito family is back again to make a statement. Released as a complement to the children's book, The Clothes Letters Wear, the original Cabrito is light-hearted, fun, and easy to read. Now, balancing this friendliness with a new elegance, Cabrito Contrast steps forward--a handsome typeface with an extra-sophisticated sensibility injected into the design. Still bright and playful in its Cabrito ancestry, this new Cabrito member approaches the field with a cleaner, more reductionist form, ensuring that its polished look retains the readability. Regular features and Italic forms of the 54 fonts include upright alternates, ligatures, and old figures. A range of weights include extended and condensed variants. To preview any of these interactive features, see the PDF manual. The family also includes language support for 72 Latin-based languages, and there are over 600 glyphs for further refining your work. Cabrito Contrast is best used for logos and packaging as well as flyers and websites, though its readability makes it a great option across a wide variety of works. In short, it’s well-designed just for you. Take a stroll with Cabrito Contrast, and see how much fun refinement can be. Along the way, take a look at a few other members of Cabrito, too and see how well the likes of Original, Inverto or Didone can pair with the new Contrast.

The idea of Limes emerged at the seashore last year in late summer. Getting ready in advance for a dark winter, we've decided to design a special fontfamily which would bring a bit of vitamins and summer sun into the rough everyday routine and help us survive the cold winter. Limes is both a dream of the sun while it’s gone and a refreshing breeze for the time when it finally gets warm! Limes is a completely handwritten fontfamily and consists of 23 typefaces. To create Limes Sans and Limes Slab families, we've used regular watercolor brushes, and to create monolinear Limes Script, as well as for Catchwords and Dingbats, we've used a felt-tip pen with circular section. Limes Sans and Limes Slabs fonts work perfectly together with Limes Script due to the general handwritten idea, as well as due to the widths contrast – despite its width, Limes Script mixes well with narrower opponents and adds a bit of human spontaneity into the general handwritten concept. The Limes collection includes: Limes Sans (Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, Black & italics), Limes Slab (Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, Black & italics), Limes Script, Catchwords and Dingbats. Limes Sans and Limes Slab widely support OT features: tnum, ordn, frac, case, numr, dnom, subs, sups, and Limes Script uses a large number of context alternatives.

A modern sans serif – large x-height, lively forms The Lech Sans Pro is businesslike-modern but at the same time present the effect of liveliness and movement. The shapes of the individual characters follow the "humanistic" form language of modern faces. In this way, Lech Sans Pro offers an attractive alternative to most of the sans serif fonts used today. The proportions have been selected to be very legible even as a body type for longer texts. The font is so robust in detail that a title in large capitals is very eye-catching. It can function positively as well as negatively and is also still legible from a great distance. Lech Sans Pro supports West European languages including Scandinavian, Central and Eastern European languages, also including Turkish, Vietnamese as well as Greek and Cyrillic. Along with ligatures for the letter combinations fi, ff, fl, tt and tz the font also includes stylistic alternates for N, R, f, l as well as for the German sharp s and the figure 3. Additionally, Lech Sans Pro offers several sets of figures: proportional standard figures of equal height lining figures in height of the capitals proportional medieval figures with ascenders and descenders disproportional tabular figures of equal width superior and inferior scientific figures and numerators resp. denominators for fractions circled figures

Etelka was designed for purposes of corporate identities, branding, product package design and outside lettering. It works anywhere an extremely legible typeface is needed. Package and label design often requires a wide choice of weights and widths: light and narrowed fonts to fit huge amount of mandatory informations onto a small box, or to squeeze text lines around a bottle, fat and wide styles to emphasize information on a poster or vehicle. The regular styles will serve well for business card, small texts and for your website. Etelka’s design idea is wide, open rounded square. Some details are extremely minimized: lower-case “a, n” or “u” lack their typical spur. The typeface has a distinctive industrial expression with all diagonals slightly softened, and her overall strict mono-linear principle is exceptionally broken only for fine optical adjustments in joints. Cyrillic and Greek scripts are present for international business, as well as rich latin diacritics. Etelka is actually very well suited for all kinds of visual communication, especially orientation systems in modern architecture. The first drawing of the font, which was later named “Etelka”, was submitted in 2004 for the Czech Television identity competition and was rejected by the jury. We later concluded that the design was worth extending to the current superfamily of 42 fonts. It is a reliable typeface for corporate identities and websites.

Wakerobin takes its charming swagger from the hand-painted billboard, poster and signage lettering of the mid-19th century. These showy styles did everything they could to stand out from the background cacophony of advertising, with signwriters using sharp and high contrast serif letters, squared block shapes, or art nouveau forms to grab the attention of passersby. Wakerobin embraces the spirit of these letterforms, bringing these various styles together in one typeface - as if users had their own sign painter on hand. Just as lettering artists had to adapt to a variety of sizes - from wide streetcar lettering to compressed forms that squeezed into narrow Victorian windows - the variable version of Wakerobin scales up and down in width to fit whatever environment the user’s working in. The static fonts come in three widths and five weights. As well as its adaptability, Wakerobin is bursting with vintage flavour, making it hard to ignore. Its distinctive, spiky serifs would be right at home on food and drinks packaging, as well as shop windows, adverts, and any other place that calls for some typographic showmanship. It performs particularly well in busy environments, or anywhere with a lot of visual noise - just as its historic predecessors did. And while Wakerobin is first and foremost a display typeface, it’s surprisingly elegant when used at text size, or in the lighter end of the weight spectrum.

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.

Palatino Arabic is a collaboration between Lebanese designer Nadine Chahine and Prof. Hermann Zapf. The design is based on the Al-Ahram typeface designed by Zapf in 1956 but reworked and modified to fit the Palatino nova family. The design is Naskh in style but with a strong influence of the Thuluth style as well. This is evident in the swash-like finials and the wide proportions of the letterforms. It is designed for use in print in both large and small sizes. The counters are wide open to allow for better readability in small sizes as well as to maintain an open and friendly appearance. The font has 1091 glyphs and includes a large number of extra ligatures and stylistic alternates as well as the basic Latin part of Palatino nova and support for Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. Palatino Arabic wins Type Directors Club award. Each year, the New York-based Type Directors Club judges typeface designs from all over the world in their TDC2 contest. Linotype is pleased to announce that a very new typeface of its own is among 2008’s winners: Palatino Arabic. A collaboration between Nadine Chahine and Prof. Hermann Zapf, this face is an extension of Zapf’s Al-Ahram Arabic type from 1956 recreated to join the Palatino nova family.

ITC Johnston is the result of the combined talents of Dave Farey and Richard Dawson, based on the work of Edward Johnston. In developing ITC Johnston, says London type designer Dave Farey, he did “lots of research on not only the face but the man.” Edward Johnston was something of an eccentric, “famous for sitting in a deck chair and carrying toast in his pockets.” (The deck chair was his preferred furniture in his own living room; the toast was so that he’d always have sustenance near at hand.) Johnston was also almost single-handedly responsible, early in this century, for the revival in Britain of the Renaissance calligraphic tradition of the chancery italic. His book Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering (with its peculiar extraneous comma in the title) is a classic on its subject, and his influence on his contemporaries was tremendous. He is perhaps best remembered, however, for the alphabet that he designed in 1916 for the London Underground Railway (now London Transport), which was based on his original “block letter” model. Johnston’s letters were constructed very carefully, based on his study of historical writing techniques at the British Museum. His capital letters took their form from the best classical Roman inscriptions. “He had serious rules for his sans serif style,” says Farey, “particularly the height-to-weight ratio of 1:7 for the construction of line weight, and therefore horizontals and verticals were to be the same thickness. Johnston’s O’s and C’s and G’s and even his S’s were constructions of perfect circles. This was a bit of a problem as far as text sizes were concerned, or in reality sizes smaller than half an inch. It also precluded any other weight but medium ‘ any weight lighter or heavier than his 1:7 relationship.” Johnston was famously slow at any project he undertook, says Farey. “He did eventually, under protest, create a bolder weight, in capitals only ‘ which took twenty years to complete.” Farey and his colleague Richard Dawson have based ITC Johnston on Edward Johnston’s original block letters, expanding them into a three-weight type family. Johnston himself never called his Underground lettering a typeface, according to Farey. It was an alphabet meant for signage and other display purposes, designed to be legible at a glance rather than readable in passages of text. Farey and Dawson’s adaptation retains the sparkling starkness of Johnston’s letters while combining comfortably into text. Johnston’s block letter bears an obvious resemblance to Gill Sans, the highly successful type family developed by Monotype in the 1920s. The young Eric Gill had studied under Johnston at the London College of Printing, worked on the Underground project with him, and followed many of the same principles in developing his own sans serif typeface. The Johnston letters gave a characteristic look to London’s transport system after the First World War, but it was Gill Sans that became the emblematic letter form of British graphic design for decades. (Johnston’s sans serif continued in use in the Underground until the early ‘80s, when a revised and modernized version, with a tighter fit and a larger x-height, was designed by the London design firm Banks and Miles.) Farey and Dawson, working from their studio in London’s Clerkenwell, wanted to create a type family that was neither a museum piece nor a bastardization, and that would “provide an alternative of the same school” to the omnipresent Gill Sans. “These alphabets,” says Farey, referring to the Johnston letters, “have never been developed as contemporary styles.” He and Dawson not only devised three weights of ITC Johnston but gave it a full set of small capitals in each weight ‘ something that neither the original Johnston face nor the Gill faces have ‘ as well as old-style figures and several alternate characters.

The Joanna® Sans Nova family is the only typeface in the Eric Gill Series that was not initially designed by Gill. Created by Monotype Studio designer Terrance Weinzierl over a three-year period with digital applications at the forefront of the design criteria, Joanna Sans Nova is a humanist sans serif based primarily on Gill’s original Joanna. The design comprises 16 fonts, from thin to black, each with a complementary italic. Joanna Sans Nova has a larger x-height to ensure high levels of legibility – even on small digital screens. Due to its inherent humanist proportions, Joanna Sans Nova is surprisingly comfortable for longer form reading. Its low contrast in character stroke weights also improves imaging in a variety of environments. In addition, the calligraphic and fluid details enable the roman and italic designs to shine in headlines and other display uses. Joanna Sans features a robust range of OpenType features for fine typography, including small caps, old style figures, proportional figures, ligatures, superscript and subscript figures and support for fractions. With over 1000 glyphs per font, Joanna Sans supports more than 50 languages – in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. “I've always been a fan of Gill’s work, explains Weinzierl, and found the simple, humanist qualities of Joanna really fitting for a sans serif design. I wanted to make something with Gill flavor, but with more harmony in the extreme weights than Gill Sans – and with my twist on it. I went through six or seven different italic designs before landing on the current direction.” “The original Joanna had a very distinct italic, Weinzierl continues. “It’s very condensed, and has a very shallow angle. I wanted to have an italic that stood out, but in a different way. I took a cursive direction for the italic details, which are wider and slanted more, both improving character legibility.” The Joanna Sans Nova typeface family is part of the new Eric Gill series, drawing on Monotype’s heritage to remaster and expand and revitalize Eric Gill’s body of work, with more weights, more characters and more languages to meet a wide range of design requirements. The series also brings to life new elements inspired by some of Gill’s unreleased work, discovered in Monotype’s archive of original typeface drawings and materials of the last century.