Cosmic Turtle is the belief that the world is supported by a giant turtle. It is mostly found in Hindu and Chinese mythology and the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. I had to think of this, as the idea of the Cosmic Turtle is referenced to in the 1982 book ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’ by Haruki Murakami - my favourite author. Cosmic Turtle is a font that I made using a broken chop stick and Chinese ink. I was actually trying to create something scary for Halloween, but this is what came out and I quite like it. Cosmic Turtle is a fat display font with rough edges, wobbly glyphs and a set of double letter ligatures for you to play with.

Well, if you found this page via Google and what you're looking for is NOT a Slam Bang display and logo font (made famous by the logo of our sister company's flagship comic book title, HIP FLASK), but in fact a small metal bottle suitable for brandy, whiskey or the spirit of your choice, then we deeply apologize. If you've read this far, then we'd like to point you to eBay where you'll find a wide selection of the items you're looking for. While you're there you might also like to consider how difficult it is for HIP FLASK fans to find back issues of our comic amongst all those pewter and stainless steel christmas gifts for your golfing friends and fellow alcoholics.

Designed as a versatile and functional family, Convexion is the result of a personal exploration into the use of convex forms in serif designs. Its humanist form is inspired by a fusion of classical serif forms with the more expressive forms found in script lettering, to create a legible yet original typeface family. Consisting of 3 weights, with accompanying cursive inspired italics, this family is suited for a wide range of applications such as branding that will expose its defined personality or editorial design were it can be used for both display titles or text. This family supports a range of Opentype features, offering multiple numeral styles, ligatures and other alternate glyphs. With an extended Latin glyph set, it will support most Latin based languages.

Esca is a display typeface designed by Jim Ford with highly compressed proportions yet with a subtle calligraphic touch. This Lite version of the typeface was designed as part of a font marathon over the course of 3.5 days in Monotype’s NY office. The design started with the aim of fitting 4 letters onto one sheet of paper and the resulting typeface keeps that tight proportion. The Esca design is mixed case and is ideally suited for logos, short headlines, and album covers. It has a great architectural feel to it that makes it suitable in signage applications and large scale settings. Monotype is proud to support Room to Read’s work in literacy and girls’ education through our font marathon initiative.

Poblano is a masterfully designed flared typeface, inspired by Gothic Tuscan that incorporates an aura of modern fun and classic southwest whimsy. With serifs that embody the beautiful, natural curve of the Poblano Pepper, it captures the pepper’s essence and attitude of having the perfect amount of piquant heat. Perfectly suited for menus, headlines, and logos, Poblano will be the ideal garnish to complete and elevate your food, rustic, grunge and hipster themed designs. The Poblano menu includes: • A range of styles from elegantly thin to boastful black • Over 400 glyphs per weight • More than 50 stylistic alternatives • Upper and lowercase characters • Uniquely stylized to elevate your design and add that finishing touch This is the ultimate niche solution to both display and functional Tuscan serif fonts.

Once upon a time, in the days BC (that's Before Computers) there lived a very talented group of men and women whose job it was to render ads by hand. So skillful were these people that some say it was possible to actually identify the typefaces that the layout artists were emulating. Their renderings were swift and slick, no time for detail as it was necessary to do a whole bunch of variations, usually within ridiculous deadlines. Their only tools: bullet-tip markers and bond paper - often mistakes resulted but no time to re-do and white paint was totally unacceptable - just let the slipups be. Here's a simulation of their craft, we don't really know what typeface this was supposed to represent… any ideas?

So glad we found each other! Enjoy Cheerful Monday, a handwritten font that has 2 variations (regular and bold), and to enhance your hand-lettering we provide 72 ligatures as your choice to summarize the words/sentences made. Also equipped with doodles as a bonus. This is perfect for quote designs, quaint logos, clever packaging, signboards, greeting cards, merchandise designs, trending Instagram photos and so much more! Cheerful Monday features: A full set of upper & lowercase characters Numbers & punctuation 72 Gorgeous ligatures Lowercase alternate (doodles) Multilingual symbols PUA Encoded Characters – Fully accessible without additional design software. Feel free to give me a message if you have a problem or question. Thank you so much for taking the time to look at one of our products.

Grungy Old Typewriter is based on two typed letters, each on two pages and dated 1901. The results are eroded, rough, irregular and grungy. The final results are a vintage look. As a designer, I wanted as much flexibility as possible, so there are six versions that are designed to work together. Additionally, I decided to keep the grunge and irregularities within the shape and not include surrounding typewriter or paper marks. I leave it to the design to add those elements as desired. One note, the letter spacing is much tighter than an old typewriter. I felt that readability for modern readers suffered from the added space. Of course, you can get that same look by increasing the letter spacing in your favorite design program.

The story of Humana begins with an exclusive volume about some manuscripts in Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, Italy. The title page uses the characters upon which I designed Humana. I suppose they were drawn for that volume. Examining the reproductions in the book I found that the characters on the title page immitate the lettering in a manuscript from the 15th century with Petrarca's Rime volgari". Not bad as origin! But I cannot free myself from the thought that there may be a typeface with that looks, not just a few characters drawn for that volume. My reference books could not give me any answer about that. The name Humana refers to the humanistic era from which the characters originate. Humana was released in 1994.

A modern neo-grotesque typeface. Having grown up in Sheffield and been completely immersed in the work of The Designers Republic I became very drawn to their treatment of Helvetica, especially the close tracking of the letter space. This visual investigation led me to the study of the font Hass Unica, a so called improvement to Helvetica. In order not to replicate and become a clone of Unica I redrew all the characters from scratch improving optical appearance, developing subtle corrections and reshaping individual letterforms. The result is a remixed neo-grotesque font that has strong general optical balance with great rhythm under close tracking. Details include 10 weights, an extended European character set, true italic, manually edited kerning and Euro symbol.

First things first: I am really not a Star Trek fan. I did come up with this name, which I thought had a good ring to it. When I checked whether the name was already taken, I found out that Black Cluster is a term from Star Trek. Now you want to know what a Black Cluster is, so just check out poster 2 and read all about it. For me, Black Cluster is a handmade ink font, with a lot of jumping glyphs, a lot of diacritics and a handful of ligatures. It may be rough, but you will be pleasantly surprised by what it can do to a design! May the font be with you. Oh, no, that was from Star Wars…

There's something satisfying about tweaking to perfection a typeface based on the particular style of lettering applied to a particular kind of paper by a particular human hand. One day, in pursuit of this curious sense of satisfaction, I sat down with a porous pad of lined note paper and printed out the alphabet with a ballpoint pen. I found particularly interesting the bulbous ends of the strokes where the ink soaked in. I couldn't help myself: I drew out the rest of the character set, scanned, hand-traced, and -- as with all 3IP font designs -- manipulated every glyph to an obsessive degree. Named it Cedar Street, after a favorite address of mine. Full release has a single medium weight with a thorough character set.

Pomarosa is a typographic family that consists of capital roman letters and twisted lower case letters set randomly. Each one of them is characterized by its multiple calibers and widths. Pomarosa was planned to accompany graphic works done with different techniques and materials such as hand made collages. The narrowness of its glyphs involve its audience with abstract imprecision. Its spirit was born between fabric snippets intervened with pencil and painting. Its three members work in group and also in words or phrases with a non-finished look. Regular Pomarosa and Standard Pomarosa have 260 glyphs each. Both of them simulate to have been done by a right-handed person that works with its left hand. Pomarosa dingbats has 26 illustrations useful for frames and textures.

Codeline Mono is a friendly monospaced typeface designed to appear more modern, softer and less formal than the usually robotic and strict mono fonts. Unique and highly versatile, this family includes over 400 glyphs in each of its twelve styles (six weights and six obliques). While great at all the typical mono use cases where a technical look is needed, Codeline also creates an ease of reading not commonly found in mono typefaces. This duality makes it a perfect fit for other uses in the role of a uniquely technical yet remarkably breathable display font. The character set implemented in Codeline Mono ensures full support for over 100 languages by including an extensive list of localized forms, precomposed accented letters and modifiers.

Think of Garamouche as Garamond's drunken cousin. This font replicates a long lost document ravaged by time and the elements (with a little sloppy printing for good measure.) Unlike the fake bolding option found in software programs, Garamouche Bold is a variant with more appropriate thick and thin features. The "dancing along the baseline" that has made Garamouche a favorite, is also a feature in Garamouche Bold, but the letters align and tilt in on their own terms. Using the two Garamouche fonts together can produce much more expressive results than just hitting "bold". P22 Garamouche Ornaments is a set of 72 ornamental embellishments designed to complement the Garamouche fonts but can be used with almost any layout that calls for historical decoration.

The newest Sanggar serif font, which is iconic and skilled with many unique alternative styles, based on our experience as graphic designers working in many companies, we are often asked to design logos with a unique style but with an elegant shape. So, we tried to create a Studio type and create this font to get the idea out. It is perfect for BRANDING and LOGO DESIGN. You will get a classy, elegant, and of course unique logo with this font. Important information: To access the alternatives, you must have access to an older version of Photoshop to copy/paste the glyphs from the included PSD, OR the Glyphs Panel, which can be found in Photoshop CC or any Version of Adobe Illustrator.

Hunterland is a modern signature font. This font was created to look as close to a natural handwritten as possible by including some alternates lowercase, ligature and underlines. Perfect for any awesome projects that need hand writing taste. Comes with regular and italic. Built in Opentype features, this script comes to life as if you were writing it yourself. Also support multilingual. It's highly recommended to use it in opentype capable software - there are plenty out there nowadays as technology catches up with design ... Other than Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, many standard simple programs now come with Opentype capabilities - even the most basic ones such as Apple's Text Edit, Pages, Keynote, iBooks Author, etc. Even Word has found ways to incorporate it. AminMario

Los Lana Pro is a handmade display typeface. Unlike other font families, this type has not a modular structure, that is, each character has been individually designed. The coherence of structure elements across different characters is given by irregular strokes. This curveless typeface is perceived as being curved because of its straight lines, which form different-size angles. Los Lana Pro is a rustic typeface that captures the stereotypical “Andean hippie” handmade aesthetics. Irregular shapes and broken lines give it a distinct personality. Los Lana Pro looks better in larger sizes. Includes many ligatures, two groups of alternate characters, and titling caps characters. Languages include: Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian and Pan Africa Latin. Photos by Sergio Recabarren.

Cal Roman Modern is one more font from PKG “Cal” (Calligraphic) group. This time for calligraphic sketches we used a wide brush instead of the iron pen. Instead of minuscule letters, there are Small Caps (which are the same weight as capitals). Because there is no difference in the stroke thickness of capital letters and lowercase capital letters the difference in height is only one pen width, because of that, it is possible to use small capitals together with capital letters without noticing a difference in the thickness of the letters. Cal Roman Modern font is rhythmic, informal elegant, bright and light. As such, this font is widely used in the typographic creation of shorter text forms: magazine, catalogs and book titles, logos, posters, movie spots, banners...

Gardner Sans is a humanist sans serif with a range of weights, italics, small caps stylistics alternates and a set of decorative ornaments. The light and regular faces work at smaller sizes and the heavier weights are good for display lettering. It is inspired by a few historical sources including Stephenson Blakes' Granby, Gill Sans, as well as some old hand-done lettering for sales tickets. The name (and the basis for the small caps) derives in-particular from the Roy Gardner collection of sales tickets from early 20th century that can be found on spitalfieldslife.com The heavier weights were particularly influenced by a later cut of Gill Sans, Extra Bold 321. The italic is more of a contemporary mix of humanist styles.

Hijabella, a natural handwriting font, weaves an organic elegance into the realm of digital typography. With fluid strokes and a graceful rhythm, this font emulates the authenticity of hand-scripted messages. Each letter carries a unique charm, reflecting the imperfections and nuances found in real handwriting. The subtle variations in line thickness and the gentle slant of characters create an inviting and personal touch, reminiscent of pen meeting paper. Whether used for invitations, heartfelt notes, or creative projects, Hijabella’s natural flow captures the essence of a handwritten message, adding warmth and sincerity to the digital medium. Its versatile and effortless aesthetic makes it a perfect choice for those seeking a font that seamlessly blends the convenience of technology with the personal touch of genuine penmanship.

Breve was designed for use in editorial projects. Simple but with enough personality to stand by is own, in a quest for a more forceful and contemporary appearance. All the fonts in Breve superfamily, share the same exact structure, both in terms of anatomy and functionality. The Text versions provide a softer and warm feel to the typographic palette and is intended for use in much longer passages of text, while the Title versions are distinguished by non-descending letterforms, making the titles and headlines much more uniform and interesting. The News version is more classic, with ball terminals and classic proportions, while the Display is, somehow, the set of fonts we had to design: extra-black, ultra-contrasted, proud-display fonts.

Based on the hit album by Glen Campbell, Southern Nights is the font with a style that’s “free as a breeze,” as the song says. It’s fun and casual, yet it has a flair for fashion and elegance. It also has an art nouveau look which lends itself to greeting cards as well as the branding of perfume, clothing, retailing, dining, and other luxury/high-end uses. This font includes alternate characters for the upper R, S, and T, the lower g and z, plus ligatures that include a double lower t and double lower l (L). As the song might say, I apologize to anyone who can truly say that they have found a better font! Digitized by John Bomparte.

Get some beach holiday vibe so needed during a crazy year in the city! BEACHCLUB fonts are inspired by tropical islands hand-painted signs. Bring the summer beach parties feeling with sunshine, music and strong cocktails. We crafted digital versions of woodcrafted letters as if it was made for a beach bar in Hawaii. Then the time, sea and sand did the rest. Use our fonts to bring this fun and relaxed energy to your graphics! Key Features: BEACHCLUB fonts will be a great help and perfect fit for various posters, banners, typography and illustrations. Fonts can be used for both personal and commercial projects. Credits: BEACHCLUB clean and BEACHCLUB grunge are designed by Royalclub. For purchasing the full kit (brushes/frames) proceed to www.royalclub.sh/royalclub-supplies

Where's the party? Don't forget Contempo Elan! This stunning new font comes with it's own party ornaments. The right solution for any festive occasion, this super innovative face comes in two flavors. Contempo Elan Grand Script is a surprisingly elegant alternative to a more traditional formal script. Designed by Wesley Poole of Hawaii, this alphabet is definitely a hip script. Early reviews call this font "remarkable" and "a masterwork". Contempo Elan Ornamental is elegant and fun! Just perfect for those last minute Holiday announcements or any use that requires a classy, celebratory typeface, Contempo Elan Ornamental fits the bill. Equally at home on board the Enterprise or beckoning revelers at Mardi Gras, Contempo Elan belongs in every type library, just for fun. Party on.

A hand-drawn stencil font for video games and film titles with a grungy urban design. This all-caps display font offers a simple way to replicate the look of hand-drawn or sprayed on stencil lettering. An industrial style that's used for it's quick real-world applications found on everything from roadworks, storage containers and military vehicles; with an urban visual language uniquely suited to video games, film titles and album covers. See above for more usage ideas. This font family includes uppercase-only characters, plus all punctuation, numerals and language support. Contents: ReRun includes 4 styles: - Rough - Clean - Outline - Light Recreate the textured look in these visuals using our infinite textures for Adobe Illustrator. Available to download from our website.

This font family is display sans-serif with different stylistic layers available as open type font. The main characters are geometric and neutral but when we change the contextual alternates open type feature the letterforms activate the cursive stylish set. The word composition is divided by initial, medial and final forms, available for all uppercase and lowercase, the diacritics for Latin encodings (Western and central Europe and Baltic countries) are available. However the contextual alternate features (cursive mode) can only work on Adobe CS Indesign and Illustrator softwares. This typeface also has uppercase swash and stylish alternates. A large group of discretionary ligatures are also available to improve better legibility and readability on specific characters combinations, giving a natural and simple solution.

Introducing Asheboro, a groovy retro font with modern style! Asheboro pairs the elements of groovy psychedelic lettering of the 1960's and 70's with the clean lines found in a modern geometric sans-serif. This combination creates a completely new aesthetic without losing the familiarity of the iconic typography of the past. With its iconic retro look, Asheboro is a great typeface selection for special branding projects, themed events, websites, even comic books and graphic novels. The Asheboro font family includes nine font weight variations for the ultimate font styling versatility. Each font weight is meticulously balanced and well-kerned for the optimal look. In addition, Asheboro includes a beautifully crafted number set, an expanded symbols set, and a large library of multilingual characters.

»Supra« – designed by Gert Wiescher in 2012/13 – is a new sans typeface family of eight weights with matching italics. Supra is influenced by current and past sans typefaces, but has a completely new look. The pleasant flow and warm touch combined with great legibility makes Supra unique. The light and normal weights and the dominant x-height with its high ascenders make for easy reading of long copy. The heavy and x-light weights are great for elegant headlines. Supra is an OpenType family for professional typography with an extended character set of over 700 glyphs. It supports more than 40 Central- and Eastern-European as well as many Western languages. Ligatures, different figures, fractions, currency symbols and smallcaps can be found in all cuts.

Iliad was designed to bridge the gap between traditional serif faces and modern humanist fonts. It uses a gentle, traditional, partial serif combined with a subtle curving of many of the "corners" in the characters. The combination of these two elements makes it decidedly contemporary yet it retains the readability that is associated with more traditional typefaces. The contemporary look is enhanced by a gentle tapering and shortening of the terminals and by less dramatic shifts in stroke width than is found in traditional typefaces. The lowering of the midline provides just a hint of "moderne". It has carefully crafted spacing and kerning, making it easy to use in any display setting. It also includes all punctuation, symbols, special characters and diacritical marks.

Mexico’s storied culture is one of the most recognizable today. Its amazing vibrant art and delicious foods have made the leap to influence many parts of the world in recent years. This proud, intense and diverse identity was the inspiration behind La Taqueria, a set of four fonts that express different characteristics of Mexican pop culture. The heavy and spicy, the light and gentle, the constant dynamism, all come together with one rhythm to produce an explosion of personality. Just like its predecessors Distillery and Scrapbooker, the La Taqueria set contains down-to-earth alphabets perfect for chalkboard art and handmade design. All the fonts include alternates and ligatures, providing plenty of variation for that spontaneous appearance everyone is looking for these days.

Capital Love just contains capital letters decorated with hearts. By pressing a lowercase button a alternative to the uppercase letter will appear. All shapes are drawn individually and do not oblige a geometrical system. The lighthearted vivid ductus remind me of a quality that can be found in the dynamics of Keith Haring drawings. Capital Love is a part of the Light Hearted Font Collection that is inspired by a recording of Jean Baudrillard with the title, "Die Macht der Verführung" (The Power of Seduction) from 2006. Further inspiration came from the article, "The shape of the heart: I'm all yours". The heart represents sacred and secular love: a bloodless sacrifice. by British writer Louisa Young printed in EYE magazine (#43) London, 2002.

Breve was designed for use in editorial projects. Simple but with enough personality to stand by is own, in a quest for a more forceful and contemporary appearance. All the fonts in Breve superfamily, share the same exact structure, both in terms of anatomy and functionality. The Text versions provide a softer and warm feel to the typographic palette and is intended for use in much longer passages of text, while the Title versions are distinguished by non-descending letterforms, making the titles and headlines much more uniform and interesting. The News version is more classic, with ball terminals and classic proportions, while the Display is, somehow, the set of fonts we had to design: extra-black, ultra-contrasted, proud-display fonts.

BIG is an elegant condensed display font created for strong and impactful headlines. It comes from a series of hand printed specimens taken from wood type found in Andrew Howard’s Studio in Porto (Portugal). A wooden type that reassembles the industrial victorian style which has now been expanded to 20 cuts, ranging from ExtraLight to Bold, with Italics and a stencil version, covering all your needs for a striking visual effect just with plain type with distinctive features and personality, standing out from the crowded world of display sans serif. The font was engineered with essential OpenType features, that allows the user to compose the headlines in two different heights, with case-sensitive punctuation, symbols and special ligatures such as “the”, “of” and “le”.

ITC Greengate is the result of a time-traveling, intercontinental collaboration--one between 21st century South African designer Richard Every, and early 20th century Scottish artist Jessie Marion King. Jessie Marion King (1875-1949) began her professional career as a book designer and illustrator, but over time her creativity found its outlet in many forms, including posters, jewelry, ceramics, wallpaper, fabrics, murals, interior design and costumes. After eventually settling in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, she founded Green Gate Close, a center for women artists. Although her style is reminiscent of the Art Nouveau artist, Aubrey Beardsley, King's aesthetic was an offshoot of the “Glasgow Style,” a Scottish hybrid of the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau. Often, her illustrations included hand lettering. It was just this kind of lettering that gave Richard Every his inspiration for ITC Greengate. When he saw some children's book illustrations that King created in 1898, he knew on the spot he had to complete the hand lettering as a typographic font. He began working on the typeface in 1996, but it took six years to be released as an ITC typeface. Every simplified and harmonized King's letterforms slightly and, most importantly, added a suite of lowercase characters. The result is a somewhat earthy Art Nouveau design, with a character quite distinct from typical digital revivals. Every's career has been as diverse as King's. He was born in Durban, South Africa and studied graphic design at ML Sultan Technikon in Durban. He's been an art director, freelance designer, the owner and manager of a nightclub and co-manager of a South African band. “Through it all,” he says, “typography has always been one of my passions.”

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Price Didone has inspired a full alphabetic font - Mastadoni, so if you're after more than numerals, head over there! Price Didone is a font with a singular purpose: The setting of elegant, stylish price tags. As such it is non-alphabetic, featuring instead numerals, a large array of currency symbols, and a smattering of typographic niceties such as quotes, brackets, pilcrow, daggers and a very curvaceous ampersand. Certain currency symbols that are not independent glyphs (Q, Ft, kr etc.) are included as their constituent letters, some of which also have automatic ligatures for that little something extra. There are currency symbols included which have not (yet) been accepted to unicode, such as the Russian Ruble and Bitcoin symbols. For ease of access, these can be typed using the standard ligatures feature. See features below for the full list. Features: Automatic Fractions - with fractions feature engaged, arbitrary fractions are a doddle. Stylistic Sets: SS01 - an alternate look for 4 SS02 - a double stroked dollar symbol SS03- the # sign becomes a stylish numero Stylistic Alternates - for software that doesn't support stylistic sets, the above three features are grouped into the one SALT feature. Standard Ligatures - certain typed combinations automatically change to different glyphs: B|| = Bitcoin symbol P- = Russian Ruble RM = Malaysian Rimgit symbol Rp = Indonesian Rupiah Rs = Rupees Ft = Hungarian Forint kr = Kroner symbol % off;%off;%ff = Special percent off ligature Discretionary Ligatures - this feature sets decimal prices like $5.95 with the numerals after the period smaller and raised from the baseline, underlined by a nice swoosh. It also shrinks the dollar, sterling, and Euro symbols for a more authentic look. While intended for one sole purpose, Price Didone could nevertheless be quite versatile. Quote marks and typographic symbols can be used for decoration. Everybody loves a nice ampersand and this is one I'm really proud of. Or you might just want some pretty numbers for your house, or sports jersey, or just to stand out a little from the rest of your text. Whatever use you may have in mind, go for it. And do let me know if your currency symbol isn't included, and I'll quickly add it to the glyph set in future versions.

Rian Hughes’ 15th collection of fonts, “112 Hours”, is entirely dedicated to numbers. Culled from a myriad of sources – clock faces, tickets, watches house numbers – it is an eclectic and wide-ranging set. Each font contains only numerals and related punctuation – no letters. A new book has been designed by Hughes to show the collection, and includes sample settings, complete character sets, source material and an introduction. This is available print-to-order on Blurb in paperback and hardback: http://www.blurb.com/b/5539073-112-hours-hardback http://www.blurb.com/b/5539045-112-hours-paperback From the introduction: The idea for this, the fifteenth Device Fonts collection, began when I came across an online auction site dedicated to antique clocks. I was mesmerized by the inventive and bizarre numerals on their faces. Shorn of the need to extend the internal logic of a typeface through the entire alphabet, the designers of these treasures were free to explore interesting forms and shapes that would otherwise be denied them. Given this horological starting point, I decided to produce 12 fonts, each featuring just the numbers from 1 to 12 and, where appropriate, a small set of supporting characters — in most cases, the international currency symbols, a colon, full stop, hyphen, slash and the number sign. 10, 11 and 12 I opted to place in the capital A, B and C slots. Each font is shown in its entirety here. I soon passed 12, so the next logical finish line was 24. Like a typographic Jack Bauer, I soon passed that too -— the more I researched, the more I came across interesting and unique examples that insisted on digitization, or that inspired me to explore some new design direction. The sources broadened to include tickets, numbering machines, ecclesiastical brass plates and more. Though not derived from clock faces, I opted to keep the 1-12 conceit for consistency, which allowed me to design what are effectively numerical ligatures. I finally concluded one hundred fonts over my original estimate at 112. Even though it’s not strictly divisible by 12, the number has a certain symmetry, I reasoned, and was as good a place as any to round off the project. An overview reveals a broad range that nonetheless fall into several loose categories. There are fairly faithful revivals, only diverging from their source material to even out inconsistencies and regularize weighting or shape to make them more functional in a modern context; designs taken directly from the source material, preserving all the inky grit and character of the original; designs that are loosely based on a couple of numbers from the source material but diverge dramatically for reasons of improved aesthetics or mere whim; and entirely new designs with no historical precedent. As projects like this evolve (and, to be frank, get out of hand), they can take you in directions and to places you didn’t envisage when you first set out. Along the way, I corresponded with experts in railway livery, and now know about the history of cab side and smokebox plates; I travelled to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Nantes, France, to examine their numbering machines; I photographed house numbers in Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam and here in the UK; I delved into my collection of tickets, passes and printed ephemera; I visited the Science Museum in London, the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset, and the Museum of London to source early adding machines, war-time telegraphs and post-war ration books. I photographed watches at Worthing Museum, weighing scales large enough to stand on in a Brick Lane pub, and digital station clocks at Baker Street tube station. I went to the London Under-ground archive at Acton Depot, where you can see all manner of vintage enamel signs and woodblock type; I photographed grocer’s stalls in East End street markets; I dug out old clocks I recalled from childhood at my parents’ place, examined old manual typewriters and cash tills, and crouched down with a torch to look at my electricity meter. I found out that Jane Fonda kicked a policeman, and unusually for someone with a lifelong aversion to sport, picked up some horse-racing jargon. I share some of that research here. In many cases I have not been slavish about staying close to the source material if I didn’t think it warranted it, so a close comparison will reveal differences. These changes could be made for aesthetic reasons, functional reasons (the originals didn’t need to be set in any combination, for example), or just reasons of personal taste. Where reference for the additional characters were not available — which was always the case with fonts derived from clock faces — I have endeavored to design them in a sympathetic style. I may even extend some of these to the full alphabet in the future. If I do, these number-only fonts could be considered as experimental design exercises: forays into form to probe interesting new graphic possibilities.

With its extended complement, this comprehensive redesign of Bank Gothic by Elsner+Flake offers a wide spectrum for usage. After 80 years, the typeface Bank Gothic, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1930, is still as desirable for all areas of graphic design as it has ever been. Its usage spans the design of headlines to exterior design. Game manufacturers adopt this spry typeface, so reminiscent of the Bauhaus and its geometric forms, as often as do architects and web designers. The creative path of the Bank Gothic from hot metal type via phototypesetting to digital variations created by desktop designers has by now taken on great breadth. The number of cuts has increased. The original Roman weight has been augmented by Oblique and Italic variants. The original versions came with just a complement of Small Caps. Now, they are, however, enlarged by often quite individualized lower case letters. In order to do justice to the form changes and in order to differentiate between the various versions, the Bank Gothic, since 2007 a US trademark of the Grosse Pointe Group (Trademark FontHaus, USA), is nowadays available under a variety of different names. Some of these variations remain close to the original concept, others strive for greater individualism in their designs. The typeface family which was cut by the American typefoundry ATF (American Type Founders) in the early 1930’s consisted of a normal and a narrow type family, each one in the weights Light, Medium and Bold. In addition to its basic ornamental structure which has its origin in square or rectangular geometric forms, there is another unique feature of the Bank Gothic: the normally round upper case letters such as B, C, G, O, P, Q, R and U are also rectangular. The one exception is the upper case letter D, which remains round, most likely for legibility reasons (there is the danger of mistaking it for the letter O.) Because of the huge success of this type design, which follows the design principles of the more square and the more contemporary adaption of the already existing Copperplate, it was soon adopted by all of the major type and typesetting manufacturers. Thus, the Bank Gothic appeared at Linotype; as Commerce Gothic it was brought out by Ludlow; and as Deluxe Gothic on Intertype typesetters. Among others, it was also available from Monotype and sold under the name Stationer’s Gothic. In 1936, Linotype introduced 6pt and 12pt weights of the condensed version as Card Gothic. Lateron, Linotype came out with Bank Gothic Medium Condensed in larger sizes and a more narrow set width and named it Poster Gothic. With the advent of photoypesetters and CRT technologies, the Bank Gothic experienced an even wider acceptance. The first digital versions, designed according to present computing technologies, was created by Bitstream whose PostScript fonts in Regular and Medium weights have been available through FontShop since 1991. These were followed by digital redesigns by FontHaus, USA, and, in 1996, by Elsner+Flake who were also the first company to add cursive cuts. In 2009, they extended the family to 16 weights in both Roman and Oblique designs. In addition, they created the long-awaited Cyrillic complement. In 2010, Elsner+Flake completed the set with lowercase letters and small caps. Since its redesign the type family has been available from Elsner+Flake under the name Bank Sans®. The character set of the Bank Sans® Caps and the Bank Sans® covers almost all latin-based languages (Europe Plus) as well as the Cyrillic character set MAC OS Cyrillic and MS Windows 1251. Both families are available in Normal, Condensed and Compressed weights in 4 stroke widths each (Light, Regular, Medium and Bold). The basic stroke widths of the different weights have been kept even which allows the mixing of, for instance, normal upper case letters and the more narrow small caps. This gives the family an even wider and more interactive range of use. There are, furthermore, extensive sets of numerals which can be accessed via OpenType-Features. The Bank Sans® type family, as opposed to the Bank Sans® Caps family, contains, instead of the optically reduced upper case letters, newly designed lower case letters and the matching small caps. Bank Sans® fonts are available in the formats OpenType and TrueType.