Monarda™ is Terrance Weinzierl’s take on the loud and splashy brush scripts of the 1950s. It’s energetic, playful, and equally at home in hardcopy headlines as it is in interactive banners. In addition to the basic alphabet, OpenType® fonts of Monarda are also awash in super-sized swash caps, contextual alternate characters and ligatures. Pair Monarda with a mid-century structural sans like Trade Gothic® or a sturdy slab serif like Egyptian Slate™ to create typographic counterpoint that’s confident, compelling and memorable! Named for a riotous bright red flower that attracts butterflies and humming birds, Monarda is a rare combination of flamboyance and effortless beauty. Weinzierl describes it as “casual yet precise: a stiff denim jacket or perfectly white sneakers at a formal event.” Monarda clearly stands out – and always fits in. Well, almost always. Drawn for print, the design’s robust x-height, open counters and wide apertures also make Monarda screen-friendly. Monarda can be perfect for a wide variety of food and lifestyle applications as well as travel, stationery and packaging projects. Advertising campaigns and product branding are also well within its reach. Monarda works best when used large – but economically. Two or three words are its sweet spot. Think: product name, print headline or the lettering on the side of a truck. It could easily become your go-to design for projects that call for a script with a bright personality and fearless demeanor. The excellence of Weinzierl’s work has been recognized by the Type Directors Club and Print Magazine. When not working on creating new typefaces, he augments his professional practice through calligraphy, lettering, and letterpress printing. Monarda is another winner from Weinzierl’s creative mind and talented hand.

Shueitai is a typeface that has been undergoing development for more than a century, starting from the days when Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. (DNP) was still known as Shueisha. As Japan underwent rapid modernization during the early years of the Meiji era, Shueisha, believing that printing was a business befitting a modern civilized society, began operations with a focus on letterpress. Before long the company expanded into developing its own typefaces. In 1912 it completed a full range of Mincho type, in sizes from Sho-go (#0 size, 42pt) through Hachi-go (#8, 4pt), which it called "Shueitai" a new style that came to form one of the two mainstreams of Japanese typefaces and continues to have a significant influence on font design even today. The Shueitai typeface is distinguished by abundant variations matching the size of type and the changing demands of the times. Whether it is the spirited and powerful Sho-go, the delicate and flowing San-go (#3, 16pt), or the bright and solidly reassuring Shuei-Mincho L, all Shueitai typefaces share a vibrant brushwork that adds an expression of eloquence and a burst of brilliance to every printed word. Currently, Shueitai is composed of 17 kinds of fonts useful for various purposes. The world has witnessed vast changes in the environment surrounding the printed world, with the tran-sition first from letterpress to Desktop Publishing, and most recently to e-books. But no matter how this environment might evolve, the written word remains the basis of communication, and the importance of beautiful and readable typefaces stays unchanged. In preparation for the changes that will inevitably come during the future, DNP will continue to evolve the Shueitai designs from now on. Through its continual reinvention, Shueitai, a typeface consistently adopted at the vanguard of the industry, perhaps represents Japanese innovation at its very best.

Plantin is a family of text typefaces created by Monotype in 1913. Their namesake, Christophe Plantin (Christoffel Plantijn in Dutch), was born in France during the year 1520. In 1549, he moved to Antwerp, located in present-day Belgium. There he began printing in 1555. For a brief time, he also worked at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Typefaces used in Christophe Plantin's books inspired future typographic developments. In 1913, the English Monotype Corporation's manager Frank Hinman Pierpont directed the Plantin revival. Based on 16th century specimens from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, specifically a type cut by Robert Granjon and a separate cursive Italic, the Plantin" typeface was conceived. Plantin was drawn for use in mechanical typesetting on the international publishing markets. Plantin, and the historical models that inspired it, are old-style typefaces in the French manner, but with x-height that are larger than those found in Claude Garamond's work. Plantin would go on to influence another Monotype design, Times New Roman. Stanley Morison and Victor Larent used Plantin as a reference during that typeface's cutting. Like Garamond, Plantin is exceptionally legible and makes a classic, elegant impression. Plantin is indeed a remarkably accommodating type face. The firm modelling of the strokes and the serifs in the letters make the mass appearance stronger than usual; the absence of thin elements ensures a good result on coated papers; and the compact structure of the letters, without loss of size makes Plantin one of the economical faces in use. In short, it is essentially an all-purpose face, excellent for periodical or jobbing work, and very effective in many sorts of book and magazine publishing. Plantin's Bold weight was especially optimized to provide ample contrast: bulkiness was avoided by introducing a slight sharpening to the serifs' forms."

The engraver’s sans serif—strikingly similar to drafting alphabets of the early 1900s—has been one of the most widely used stationer’s lettering styles since about 1900. Its open, simple forms offer legibility at very small sizes. While there are digital fonts based on this style (such as Burin Sans™ and Sackers Gothic™, among others), few offer the range of styles and weights possible, with the versatility designers perhaps expect from digital type families. Sweet Sans fills that void. The family is based on antique engraver’s lettering templates called “masterplates.” Professional stationers use a pantograph to manually transfer letters from these masterplates to a piece of copper or steel that is then etched to serve as a plate or die. This demanding technique is rare today given that most engravers now use a photographic process to make plates, where just about any font will do. But the lettering styles engravers popularized during the first half of the twentieth century—especially the engraver’s sans—are still quite familiar and appealing. Referencing various masterplates—which typically offer the alphabet, figures, an ampersand, and little else—Mark van Bronkhorst has drawn a comprehensive toolkit of nine weights, each offering upper- and lowercase forms, small caps, true italics, arbitrary fractions, and various figure sets designed to harmonize with text, small caps, and all-caps. The fonts are available as basic, Standard character sets, and as Pro character sets offering a variety of typographic features and full support for Western and Central European languages. Though rich in history, Sweet Sans is made for contemporary use. It is a handsome and functional tribute to the spirit of unsung craftsmanship. Burin Sans and Sackers Gothic are trademarks of Monotype Imaging.

The requirements of Middle Ages scribes who copied and produced books in monasteries were fundamentally to preserve space, due to the high cost of the writing surface. During this long period of the development of Gothic forms, many other variations of the style of black letters appear: Textur or “Gothic-antique”, another group called Rotunda preferred by Italian and Spanish scribes. In 1490, the style "Bâtarde" (according to the the French classification) began to be widely used in Germany with more rounded shapes and named Scwabacher (probably derived from the city of Schwabach, but not certified) Fractur is a more condensed and narrower form than Schwabacher. This style is attributed to Johann Neudörfer of Nuremberg, cut in 1513; it was quickly imitated, therefore a few years later became to be a German national identity that extended over the next four centuries. The shape of its characters can be considered as a fusion of Texture and Schwabacher: the lowercase actually has medium strictly vertical and half curved strokes. The first expressions of the baroque influence this writing whose appearance of movement is due to the ornaments applied to the uppercase letters and the ascending and descending features of the lowercase. Despite having spent so many years and being a typeface not suitable for extensive reading texts, the Gothic Fractur has endured over time for possessing a strong and solid characteristic, as well as being closely linked to the spirit of gothic cathedrals of countries in northen Europe. In fact, it is probably that this expressive feature leads them to be chosen in the most varied graphic communication needs, which run from from banks and financial companies, insurers, law offices, publishers, newspapers and TV networks, till alcoholic drinks, funeral tombstones, packaging and even tattoos.

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." In the 1990s, Robert Slimbach designed his contemporary interpretation, Adobe Jenson™. It was first released by Adobe in 1996, and re-released in 2000 as a full-featured OpenType font with extended language support and many typographic refinements. A remarkable tour de force, Adobe Jenson provides flexibility for a complete range of text and display composition; it has huge character sets in specially designed optical sizes for captions, text, subheads, and display. The weight range includes light, regular, semibold, and bold. Jenson did not design an italic type to accompany his roman, so Slimbach used the italic types cut by Ludovico degli Arrighi in 1524-27 as his models for the italics in Adobe Jenson. Use this family for book and magazine composition, or for display work when the design calls for a sense of graciousness and dignity.