ATF Franklin Gothic® A new take on an old favorite Franklin Gothic has been the quintessential American sans for more than a century. Designed by Morris Fuller Benton and released in 1905 by American Type Founders, Franklin Gothic quickly stood out in the crowded field of sans-serif types, gaining an enduring popularity. Benton’s original design was a display face in a single weight. It had a bold, direct solidity, yet conveyed plenty of character. A modern typeface in the tradition of 19th-century grotesques, Franklin Gothic was drawn with a distinctive contrast in stroke weight, giving it a unique personality among the more mono-linear appearance of later geometric and neo-grotesque sans-serif types. Franklin Gothic has been interpreted into a series of weights before, most notably with ITC Franklin Gothic. But as the original type was just a bold display face (later accompanied by a few similarly bold widths and italics), how Benton’s design is expanded to multiple weights and styles as a digital type family can vary significantly. Benton designed several gothic faces that harmonize with one another, including Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, and Monotone Gothic, that can serve as models for new interpretations of his work. With ATF Franklin Gothic, Mark van Bronkhorst looked to Benton’s Monotone Gothic—originally a single typeface in a regular weight, and similar to Franklin Gothic in its forms—as the basis for lighter styles. ATF Franklin Gothic may appear familiar given its heritage, but is a new design offering a fresh take on Benton’s work. The text weights are wider and more open than some previous Franklin Gothic interpretations, and as a result are quite legible as text, at very small sizes, and on screen. ATF Franklin Gothic maintains the warmth and the spirit of a Benton classic while offering a suite of fonts tuned precisely for contemporary appeal and utility. The 18-font family offers nine weights with true italics, a Latin-extended character set, and a suite of OpenType features. Download the PDF specimen for ATF Franklin Gothic.

An inline adaptation of a distinctive slab serif, Cesium is an unusually responsive display face that maintains its high energy across a range of different moods. The Cesium typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2020. An energetic inline adaptation of Hoefler’s broad-shouldered Vitesse Black typeface (2000), Cesium is named for the fifty-fifth member of the periodic table of the elements, a volatile liquid metal that presents as a scintillating quicksilver. From the desk of the designer, Jonathan Hoefler: I always felt that our Vitesse typeface, an unusual species of slab serif, would take well to an inline. Vitesse is based not on the circle or the ellipse, but on a less familiar shape that has no common name, a variation on the ‘stadium’ that has two opposing flat edges, and two gently rounded sides. In place of sharp corners, Vitesse uses a continuously flowing stroke to manage the transition between upright and diagonal lines, most apparent on letters like M and N. A year of making this gesture with my wrist, both when drawing letterforms and miming their intentions during design critiques, left me thinking about a reduced version of the typeface, in which letters would be defined not by inside and outside contours, but by a single, fluid raceway. Like most straightforward ideas, this one proved challenging to execute, but its puzzles were immensely satisfying to solve. Adding an inline to a typeface is the quickest way to reveal its secrets. All the furtive adjustments in weight and size that a type designer makes — relieving congestion by thinning the center arm of a bold E, or lightening the intersecting strokes of a W — are instantly exposed with the addition of a centerline. Adapting an existing alphabet to accommodate this inline called for renovating every single character (down to the capital I, the period, and even the space), in some cases making small adjustments to reallocate weight, at other times redesigning whole parts of the character set. The longer we worked on the typeface, the more we discovered opportunities to turn these constraints into advantages, solving stubbornly complex characters like € and § by redefining how an inline should behave, and using these new patterns to reshape the rest of the alphabet. The New Typeface The outcome is a typeface we’re calling Cesium. It shares many of Vitesse’s qualities, its heartbeat an energetic thrum of motorsports and industry, and it will doubtless be welcome in both hardware stores and Hollywood. But we’ve been surprised by Cesium’s more reflective moods, its ability to be alert and softspoken at the same time. Much in the way that vibrant colors can animate a typeface, we’ve found that Cesium’s sensitivity to spacing most effectively changes its voice. Tighter leading and tracking turns up the heat, heightening Cesium’s sporty, high-tech associations, but with the addition of letterspacing it achieves an almost literary repose. This range of voices recommends Cesium not only to logos, book covers, and title sequences, but to projects that regularly must adjust their volume, such as identities, packaging, and editorial design. Read more about how to use Cesium. About the Name Cesium is a chemical element, one of only five metals that’s liquid at room temperature. Resembling quicksilver, cesium is typically stored in a glass ampule, where the tension between a sturdy outer vessel and its volatile contents is scintillating. The Cesium typeface hopes to capture this quality, its bright and insistent inline restrained by a strong and sinuous container. Cesium is one of only three H&Co typefaces whose name comes from the periodic table, a distinction it shares with Mercury and Tungsten. At a time when I considered a more sci-fi name for the typeface, I learned that these three elements have an unusual connection: they’re used together in the propulsion system of nasa’s Deep Space 1, the first interplanetary spacecraft powered by an ion drive. I found the association compelling, and adopted the name at once, with the hope that designers might employ the typeface in the same spirit of discovery, optimism, and invention. —JH Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos

Gravtrac is a slab serif headliner designed to deliver solid punches while taking up as little horizontal space as possible. Inspiration comes from mid twentieth century classics: Univers 59 Ultra-Condensed, Helvetica Inserat and Compacta. It’s all about flat sides, a steady rhythm and tight, precision curves. The widest style of Gravtac is Condensed—compact, yet a comfortable read, available in 7 weights from Ultra-Light to Heavy. Gravtrac Compressed is probably the width where most typefaces would quit. It's narrow enough for most...but not for you. That’s why we have Gravtrac Crammed. It’s audaciously narrow—perfect for times where you want the reader to slow down and truly pay attention to the message. Gravtrac Crushed is devilishly slender. Try it with wide tracking for a stark, opulent look. All styles are also available in obliques varying from 7 to 10 degrees—58 styles in total. Gravtrac includes Opentype fractions, numeric ordinals, a breadth of currency symbols and old-style (lowercase) numerals. Every skilled designer already has slab serif typefaces in their stockpile but some of us have the need to squeeze. Most Latin-based European, Vietnamese, Greek, and most Cyrillic-based writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dungan, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaingang, Khalkha, Kalmyk, Kanuri, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kazakh, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Komi-Permyak, Kurdish, Kurdish (Latin), Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Nahuatl, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Rusyn, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tajik, Tatar, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Uzbek (Latin), Venda, Venetian, Vepsian, Vietnamese, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec, Zarma, Zazaki, Zulu and Zuni.

Actium is a contemporary multilingual sans serif typeface developed to help perfect typography automatically. Type Mafia has focussed on words with odd combinations of capital letters and numbers, such as product names and postal codes such as WD40 and H1N5, jump out of the text. They sit awkwardly together as the numerals have been designed to work with the lowercase, not the uppercase letters – affecting readability.To fix this Type Mafia invented Smart Capo™. Smart Capo™ Smart Capo is a feature that automatically activates once you type an uppercase letter together with a number. When a capital letter is sat next to a numeral, Smart Capo converts the letter to a mid-cap — a contemporary alternative to small caps — and the default old-style numeral to a lining numeral. Actium’s mid-caps and lining numerals have been designed with the same height (between cap and x-height) so they sit comfortably next to each other and fit more harmoniously into text. Smart Capo applies equal attention to capitalised words without any numbers, such as NAVO and USA, and are also automatically set into mid-capitals. Working on its own, Smart Capo saves time and money for the typographer — taking the pain out of text formatting — and makes it a more pleasurable experience for the reader. This feature is made possible by the use of ‘contextual alternates’, an OpenType feature used in modern font software, working with a set of characters specially designed at mid-cap height. By default these changes automatically take place so it doesn't need to be switched on, it will just work. Actium Actium’s design has an unusual diagonal contrast — much more common in a serifed face than in a sans serif — giving it more bite. The typeface looks elegant when set in large sizes and remains very legible when shown in small sizes. The family consists of six weights in two styles, making a dozen fonts. Weights range from light to black in roman and true italic. All fonts are fully loaded with functional elements. Actium boasts an extended Latin character set and with Greek. This means a wide range of Western languages are supported: perfect for use in bilingual publications and packaging. For numerals, each font includes old-style and lining figures in both proportional and tabular widths, with superiors and inferiors. These allow you to select the right set of numbers for the right task.

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul