The history of Able’s connection with the Harry Potter phenomenon is really up in the air. It’s a catch-22 in this business - you either promote your own work and negotiate expensive exclusive licenses, or you work with a promoter and sell your designs to anyone and everyone. It could have been an in-house designer at Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, or a freelancer who proposed Able for the headings and such. The responsible party licensed it from T26, and JK Rowling’s storytelling made it a star. (I suppose it’s ironic that there’s a whole lot of unwritten history in the typography business.) Able’s rise to fame really is a classic love story between reading and type design. If the books weren’t so popular, Able might still be waiting for some Mexican fast food chain to pick it up for packaging design. The movie deal certainly made the font all the more recognizable, what with its merchandising campaign. Popularity can also cripple a great decorative face. It’s always being recognized as “The Harry Potter Font.” It might just have to wait a few decades for the Potter phenomenon to subside to be freed from the “Chamber of Pigeonholed Fonts.” In the meantime, I’m sure that a lot of fledgling graphic design apprentices are reading their new Potter books, being charmed by the idea of type design when they’re not turning the pages too fast to notice.

Name says it all! Just a basic character set. Uppercase, lowercase & numbers only.

A set of blocky shadowed outline capitals designed by Tom Carnase for ITC.

Mandragora is a set of 16th century decorative initials with a floral theme.

This font contains a set of symbols that are used on the EEC

Notetaker is a quickly written yet very neat looking font, perfect for notetaking!

A powerful yet happy look. A great headline face with a distinct look.

Banyan utilizes dramatic brush strokes to create a paradoxically strong yet delicate face.

A set of ornaments was designed at ParaType in 1992 by Elvira Slysh.

ROARRR! THE STYLES -Pantera Pro is the most complete style, and although its default look is mono-rhythmic it gets really playful and crazy like the examples of the posters by just activating the Decorative Ligatures button in the Open-type Panel of Adobe Illustrator. However, I recommend using also the Glyphs Panel because there you'll find much more variants per letter. Pantera Pro is in fact, coded in a way the combination of thicknesses will always look fantastic. -Pantera Black Left, and Pantera Black Right are actually “lite” versions of Pantera Pro: They have very little Open-Type code, so what you see here is what you get. Pantera Black Left has its left strokes thick, while Pantera Black Right has its right strokes thick. -Pantera White is a lovely member in this family that looks lighter and airy, hence its name. With the feature Standard Ligatures activated (liga) the font gets very playful. -Pantera Caps is based on sign painters lettering and since it follows the same pointed brush rules as the other styles, it matches perfectly. -Pantera Claws like its name suggests, is a set of icons that were done by our dear panther. THE STORY It is said that typography can never be as expressive as calligraphy, but sometimes it can get close enough. I tend to think that calligraphic trials, in order to work well as potential fonts, need first to go through very strict filters before going digital: While calligraphy is synonym of freedom (once its rules are mastered), type-design, in the other hand, has its battlefield a little tighter and tougher. When I practice pointed brush lettering, there are so many things happening on the paper. And most of them are delicious. The ones who know my work may see that although many of my fonts are very expressive, my handmade brush trials are much more lively than them. With that in mind, this time I tried to go further and rescue more of those things that are lost in the process of thinking type when first sketches are calligraphic. I wondered if I could create something wild, hence its name Panther, by understanding the randomness that sometimes calligraphy conveys and turning it to something systemic: With Pantera, I created an ordered disorder. Like it happens a lot in many kinds of lettering styles, in order to enrich the written word the scribe mixes the thickness of the strokes and the width of the letters. Like one of my favorite mentors say (1), they make thoughtful gestures Some lively strokes go down with a thick, while some do that with a thin. Some letters are very narrow, meaning some of them will need to be very wide to compensate. Why not?. The calligrapher is always thinking on the following letters, and he/she designs in his head the combination of thicks and thins before he/she executes them. He/she knows the playful rhythm the words will have before writing them. It takes time and skill to master this and achieve graceful results. Going back to the font, in Pantera, this combination of varying thicknesses and widths of letters were Open-Type coded so the user will see satisfactory results by just enabling or disabling some buttons on the glyphs panel. I'm very pleased with the result since it’s not very easy to find fonts which play with the words' rhythm like Pantera does, following of course, a strong calligraphic base. I believe that if you were on the prowl for innovative fonts, this is your chance to go wild and get Pantera! NOTES (1) Phrase by Yves Leterme. In fact, it’s the title of a book by him. EPILOGUE Esta fuente está dedicada a mi panterita

Originally published by OurType, Dan Milne’s Tasman has found a new home at Retype. Milne first conceived Tasman as a typeface for newspapers. This influenced the proportions and look of the face considerably: the goal was to keep the personality as warm and playful as possible without losing the credible tone required to deliver all kinds of news. A sturdy, warm type family that is neither mechanical nor fragile. It borrows its name from Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603–1659), a Dutch seafarer, explorer, and merchant who mapped parts of Australia in 1642, including Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania). Tasman’s primary purpose is an unbiased presentation of information; it strives for neutrality over elegance. Its characters are sturdy and unambiguous, sporting strong serifs, punctuation, and diacritics, as well as generously sized small caps and hybrid figures. Rationalized letterforms give the face enough robustness to withstand the stress of screen applications and laser printing. The figures’ three-quarter x-height makes them considerably larger than traditional oldstyle numerals, yet they still integrate with the lowercase much better than lining figures do. Although initially intended for newspapers, Tasman’s somewhat corporate, objective appearance also makes it an excellent candidate for digital and print magazines, websites, annual reports, and corporate identities. Tasman is a suite of feature-rich OpenType fonts fully equipped to tackle complex, professional typography. The character set includes small caps, fractions, case-sensitive forms, bullets, arrows, special quotes, and nine sets of numerals. Besides standard Latin, its extensive character set supports Central European, Baltic, and Turkish languages.

Fux is a condensed, neutral looking font, that features and extended ligature set, small caps, old style numbers and stylistic alternates, that should help to fulfill all your type setting needs. Is perfect to be used as big display and title font, and works very good in small sizes and paragraphs.

Kyoko is a font inspired by Japan. It comes with uppercase and lowercase characters, set of punctuation marks, numbers, alternative set of latin characters, Cyrillic characters, ligatures and multilingual support. Perfect for logos, quotes, posters, branding projects, product packaging, t-shirt, book cover, greeting cards and applicable for any graphic design.

Schwenk is a wide reversed-contrast typeface made to be used in display settings – headlines, logotypes, store windows. The Regular style is adjusted for smaller point size while the Thin is made in a higher contrast for large headlines. An alternative (wide) capital letter I is available via the Stylistic Set.

Gothic Initials One was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

Gothic Initials Three was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

Gothic Initials Seven was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

Gothic Initials Four was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

This quaint headline typeface is based on an offering from the Cleveland Type Foundry, originally named Oxford. The centered small caps treatment makes for unusual and alluring headlines. All versions of this font include the Unicode 1250 Central European character set in addition to the standard Unicode 1252 Latin set.

Inspired by blackletter type styles. Sillium is built on modular basis. As a result, it excels in a wide range of display settings, logotypes, and short text. Determine the grid and create a complete set of cohesive characters (a-z) and multilanguage characters (latin based) in either lowercase or uppercase.

Pepito is a nonconnected version of Pepita Script. Pepito has a nice set of special features, including a set of ornaments and Swash, Stylistic and Contextual Alternates that you can easily access in any OpenType-savvy program. For the best price, purchase Pepito with Pepita Script or other Fenotype fonts.

A set of charming letters of the alphabet combining picturesque landscapes with inventive lettering. This entrancing and uniquely inventive font depicts a beautiful and decorative alphabet representing an idyllic era now gone. Includes one set of A-Z ornamental initials conveniently assigned to both the upper and lower case alphabet characters.

RNS Susana is a hand lettered brush font, with a great groovy touch. The font has a set of alternates used on contextual substitution to give it a more organic look. The design was set with a marker brush pen, making emphasis on showing the imperfections to reach its expressive personality.

Gothic Initials Six was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

Futuristic Ballad is a modern, stylish and elegant font. It comes with uppercase and lowercase characters, a set of punctuation marks, numbers, Cyrillic characters, an alternative set of latin and cyrillic, ligatures and multilingual support. This font is suitable for use in future technology projects, branding, logos, posters, product packaging, etc.

Homazing is inspired by daily working at home, doing something amazing. It presents a flexible, dynamic, clean, and unique personality. Ideal for advertising, packaging, cards, quotes, and in others display settings. Homazing Font features OpenType and is packed with ligatures, stylistic sets, ornaments, and also supports most Eastern European characters.

Gothic Initials Two was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

Gothic Initials Five was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

Consuelo a font inspired by brush strokes. The family consists of a set of 4 variants, with their respective italics, plus a set of ornaments that will give the designer multiple choices when composing texts. Consuelo is ideal to be used in decorative titles, short phrases, magazines, logotypes and advertising.

Gothic Initials Nine was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.

Gothic Initials Eight was inspired by the beautifully-written gothic scripts of medieval scribes. The font contains the upper case letters A through Z under both the character set and shift+character set. This font is intended for use as initials, monograms, drop caps or wherever fancy letters are desirable.