Loaded with personality and functionality, Cresta is built to look good while surviving the worst conditions. It is at home on screen and in a magazine. Its six weights are intended to be used everywhere. Unlike most typefaces, Cresta was built without a reference. For this project, everything design choice was based on what worked best for a workhorse sans serif family. Cresta was originally created as the primary typeface for this website. This meant it needed to work in copy, headlines, and navigation across all devices, browsers and operating systems. This meant it needed to be sturdy and have enough character to make it stand out from other UI typefaces. With its large x-height, ample counters, and giant apertures, Cresta is meant for easy utility in rough conditions. Even with all of this, that doesnít mean that its dull; as the weights increase, the style of Cresta becomes more appearant. This style is defined most apparently by the terminals on the lowercase r and the angle of the joins between the curved and straight strokes (such as in the connection on the n).

The origins of Bembo go back to one of the most famous printers of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius. In 1496, he used a new roman typeface to print the book de Aetna, a travelogue by the popular writer Pietro Bembo. This type was designed by Francesco Griffo, a prolific punchcutter who was one of the first to depart from the heavier pen-drawn look of humanist calligraphy to develop the more stylized look we associate with roman types today. In 1929, Stanley Morison and the design staff at the Monotype Corporation used Griffo's roman as the model for a revival type design named Bembo. They made a number of changes to the fifteenth-century letters to make the font more adaptable to machine composition. The italic is based on letters cut by the Renaissance scribe Giovanni Tagliente. Because of their quiet presence and graceful stability, the lighter weights of Bembo are popular for book typography. The heavier weights impart a look of conservative dependability to advertising and packaging projects. With 31 weights, including small caps, Old style figures, expert characters, and an alternate cap R, Bembo makes an excellent all-purpose font family. Bembo® Book font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Quendel has been expanded to become Quendel Happy Family. Apart from the new Bold weight for easy distinction and emphasis, there are now four other very exciting variants, rendering different writing tools and writing materials. The basic form of Quendel was written with a Japanese bamboo tip and therefore embodies a form letter of natural flow. The new versions show other features that provide the feel of written scripts. While the styles Wood and Crayon include some alternate characters, Q Marking Pen and Q Fingertip, due to their apparently more complex enacted forms, do not need additional alternates without looking stiff or boring. The wood relief of Quendel Wood was created by a freehand wood relief drawn with oiled chalk. Quendel Marking Pen seems to be written with a felt-tip pen soon depleted. At the same time it is also reminiscent of the blooming effect, which we know from photography. The name of Quendel Fingertip suggests what can be seen - someone seems to have written with the finger in a grainy material. One would like to try it himself. The effect of broken lines which can be gained by writing with chalk as reflected in Quendel Crayon. Almost like parched sandy soil, the writing material seems to crumble.

For decades, visitors to Times Square could look up and read the up-to-the-minute news flashes that moved across a giant electric sign on the face of the old New York Times Building (now known simply as One Times Square). According to Wikipedia's article on OneTimes Square: "On November 6, 1928, an electronic news ticker known as the Motograph News Bulletin (colloquially known as the "zipper") was introduced near the base of the building. The zipper originally consisted of 14,800 light bulbs and a chain conveyor system; individual letter elements (a form of movable type) were loaded into frames to spell out news headlines. As the frames moved along the conveyor, the letters themselves triggered electrical contacts which lit the external bulbs (the zipper has since been upgraded to use modern LED technology)." An example of this was seen in the 1933 Warner Bothers film "Picture Snatcher" starring James Cagney. This example inspired Moving Headlines JNL.

Art into type In 2008, Fontsmith were approached by their friend, Jon Scott, to investigate whether a typeface could assume the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon’s not-for-profit charity, Measure, was organising an event for the artist, Conrad Shawcross, whose giant mechanical installation, entitled Chord, was going on public display in the long-disused Kingsway tram tunnel in Holborn. Chord explores the way we perceive time, as either a line or a cycle. Two enormous machines with dozens of rotating arms and moving in opposite directions, weave rope with almost infinite slowness. An unusual brief Phil Garnham visited Conrad in his Hackney studio to get a feel for his work and ideas. “Conrad is a very clever and philosophical guy. He struggled to see how typeface design had any relevance to him and his art. This was going to be a challenge.” The artist presented the type designer with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and mathematical workings. “This was, in essence, my brief.” Phil developed three concepts, the simplest of which ticked all the boxes. “The idea of the strokes in the letterforms appearing and ending at peaks or points of origin fitted perfectly with Conrad’s idea of time occurring and ending at two ends of the sculpture.” Two versions Phil planned modules for two versions of the typeface: one with five lines in the letterforms and one with seven. He then drew the modules on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is FS Conrad. “This is not a simple headline typeface,” says Phil. “It’s not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, and it’s informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as piece of functioning, harmonious type.”