The birth of the monospaced types dates back to the past. There was a need for the creation of typesets for typewriters. The difficulty was to align the different glyphs in the same width. This led to particular problems with letters like “M” and “l”; the former seemed to be squeezed into the same width of all letters and the second one appeared way too streched. Despite – or perhaps because of – the impression of the typewriter is still popular with Graphic Designers. Nowadays there are even monospaced versions of primarily proportional types; for example the the Sans Mono designed by Lucas de Groot or the DIN Mono. Then again, why not the other way round?! In the first half of the Nineties, Erik Spiekermann developed a proportional type named ITC Officina based on the Letter Gothic. According to a survey on the 100 best fonts of all time conducted by FontShop, ITC Officina is in an eighth place, far ahead of its forerunner. This was the reason for me to create a wider design with a Serif and a Sans Serif based on the queen of all monospaced types – the Courier.

I had a totally different name assigned to this font at first. Then, while drifting off to sleep one night during the creation process, my sleepy brain said, "You know, BLORP would be a great name to go with these letter shapes." Normally when I have those half-asleep ideas and look at them in the morning, they make no sense. But I decided to make a sample image for BLORP, and it turns out I really like it! So ... BLORP it is! This font is extensively edited for super-smooth lines and curves, so it'll cut like butter in your Cricut or Silhouette machine. Though it's also super cute for print projects, logos, branding, or anything else you want to use it for! It has a funky mix of letter sizes and heights, and two sets of uppercase letters, so you can mix everything together JuSt LikE tHIs, and it'll still look great! BLORP includes over 300 extended Latin characters for language support, including, but not limited to: Catalan, Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh, and more!

“Designers can’t help but be inspired by the things that surround them,” says Massif’s designer Steve Matteson. An avid mountain climber, Matteson found his inspiration for his text face family in the dramatic granite formations of North America’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Most of Matteson’s type designs are custom projects designed with an end use or customer in mind. Massif, which had no customer or specific purpose, was probably his most personal typeface to date. “My goal was to embody, in Massif’s two-dimensional letterforms, the angular tension and smooth curvature characteristic of the rugged terrain of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, which was formed by eons of glacial and tectonic activity,” Matteson explains. The typeface’s striking design echoes the faults and fissures that define a massif formation, resulting in a rich texture when used for body text and revealing distinctive shapes and proportions at display sizes. The Massif family comes in six weights, from Light to ExtraBold, each with an italic companion. The OpenType Pro suite contains small caps, ligatures and old style figures, and offers a small set of decorative ornaments. Pro fonts also include an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.

When Hal Taylor saw the 1930 logo for the Stetson Shoe Company of Weymouth, Massachusetts, he didn't run out and buy a pair of loafers. Instead, he seized on this striking example of an Art Deco logotype as the basis for a new typeface design. “I was impressed with the delicate and sophisticated letter forms,” Taylor recalls, “particularly the enlarged cap S -- in any other case it would have seemed unbalanced, but in the context of this logo, it worked perfectly.” All the letters in the original all-caps Stetson Shoe logo were rendered with condensed proportions except the O, which was a perfect circle. While the prominent O added visual interest to the logo, Taylor knew that such a character would limit his typeface to display applications. For versatility's sake, he drew his O for ITC Stepp with the same proportions as the rest of the alphabet. Taylor also gave the logotype's inverted S a more traditional design, but kept the original as an alternate character in the OpenType font. Taylor's toughest challenge during the design process was creating a lowercase. “A good type design tells you what it wants to be,” he says, “and after a little while the Stepp caps began to tell me what the lowercase should look like.” Taylor's lowercase is slightly more conventional than the caps. The jaunty g" and almost upside-down "s" add subtle charm, while the capital letters provide the broader gestures of Stepp's personality. Together, they create a versatile and distinctive typeface design. One of Hal Taylor's first jobs was as a photo-lettering typographer in Philadelphia, setting headlines and creating custom lettering. This was followed by a stint doing finished lettering for John Langdon, whose ambigrams appear in Dan Brown's best-selling novel, Angels & Demons. Today, Taylor works as a graphic designer in the publishing industry, but he still finds time to create an occasional hand-lettered book jacket, and draw handsome typeface designs. ITC Stepp is available in four weights, ranging from Light to Ultra Bold. All four weights have companion italics, and the lightest three weights also offer a suite of small caps."

We named this font Scholz Secession. Fin-de-siecle Vienna, Austria is the source of this Jugendstil design from Schriftgiesserei Eduard Scholz. The original release was under the name Reklameschrift Secession. Most of the curve strokes look like commas to me. The letters are as soft and plump as the comforter on the bed I slept on in a Salzburg B&B many years ago. I was traveling with a college buddy and our next stop was Vienna. There a kind, young student named Hanna and her boyfriend took us under their wing. One of the places Hanna proudly showed us was Otto Wagner’s Majolika Haus, built in 1898, and only about 8 blocks from Secession Hall. Hanna explained to us that the style was called Jugendstil and represented Art Nouveau as interpreted within the framework of their culture. I even took a picture. After all, memories are part of who we are. Figures are old-style for text use. This font would not be my first choice for a spread sheet. Included are German ligatures ch (alt-0123) & ck (125), two period ornaments (135, 175) and lower case o and u with Hungarian long umlaut (215, 247)). A very likeable and easy-to-use font.

The dearJoe series of fonts had it’s origin somewhere around 1999, the year I created dearJoe 1, which was a first (and half-assed) attempt at converting my own handwriting into a working font. Being able to type in my own handwriting had always been a childhood fantasy, and even though I only partly understood the software, a working font was generated and I decided to put it on the internet for people to use. And that’s what they did: at this moment the dearJoe 1 font has been downloaded millions of times and can be found on just about anything, ranging from Vietnamese riksjas, a Tasmanian gym to a fancy chocolate store on 5th Avenue. The font is not something I am particularly proud of, but it started me of in building what later became the JOEBOB graphics font foundry. Inbetween creating other fonts, the dearJoe series has become a theme I revisit every once in a while, trying to create an update on how my handwriting evolved, along with my abilities in creating fonts that mimic actual handwriting. In the last decade or so I started implementing ligatures and alternate characters, which helped a lot in making something that can almost pass for actual handwriting.

Phrygia is the Greek name of an ancient state in western-central Anatolia (modern Turkey), extending from the Eskişehir area east to (perhaps) Boğazköy and Alishar Hüyük within the Halys River bend. The Assyrians, a powerful state in northern Mesopotamia to the south, called the state Mushki; what its own people called it is unknown. We know from their inscriptions that the Phrygians spoke an Indo-European language. Judging from historical records supported by ceramic evidence, settlers migrating from the Balkans in Europe first settled here a hundred or more years following the destruction of the Hittite empire (ca. 1200 B.C.). Most of what is known about Phrygian archaeology and its language derives from excavations at the capital city Gordion, located about 60 miles southwest of the modern Turkish capital of Ankara (also a Phrygian site). Gustav and Alfred Körte first excavated Gordion in 1900. The excavators did not reach Phrygian levels, but they did reveal burials dated to the late eighth century B.C. with Phrygian ceramic, metal, and wooden artifacts. From 1950 to 1973, Rodney S. Young of the University of Pennsylvania led excavations at Gordion. Archaeological work at the site resumed in 1988 and continues to the present.

Developed for screen For not the first time, Fontsmith was commissioned to develop a font for one of the UK’s terrestrial TV channels. The product was a clearly-defined three-weight family. When italics were added, it became FS Matthew, a clean, stylish, structured sans serif with swooping, open curves and a bright, lively personality. Southbank Inspiration for many of the forms of FS Matthew came from details found within the modernist buildings and architecture of London’s Southbank, such as the Royal Festival Hall. During the font’s gestation, Jason had found himself at London Studios, a TV studio on Southbank, and a wander around the neighbouring arts buildings proved thought-provoking. The result was a font with a very British character: solid forms that provide the platform for innovation and distinctiveness. Feelgood efficiency FS Matthew’s trademark is efficiency with a feelgood factor: disciplined enough for corporate identities, websites and signing systems, and colourful enough for logotypes and advertising. Its versatility and excellent legibility are achieved via some unexpected details: the reaching curves of the “g” and “y”; the simple shape of the “u”; an off-kilter “k”; generous counters; and a slightly condensed aspect that makes FS Matthew a space-saver in text or title sizes.

The font family Univers is one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century. The family has the advantage of having a variety of weights and styles, which, even when combined, give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. The clear, objective forms of Univers make this a legible font suitable for almost any typographic need. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry’s art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts — quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Peignot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype. The Deberny & Peignot type library was acquired in 1972 by Haas, and the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) was folded into the D. Stempel AG/Linotype collection in 1985/1989.

OBO Classic is the second installment of the OBO series, a type collection based on a square. Every character is mapped on a 1x1 ratio which allows for horizontal and vertical settings alike. Or mixed, like crosswords. OBO Classic is a display interpretation of a traditional Old-style Serif. The “distortion” which maps each character to a square creates unusual proportions to what we are used to from classic serif typefaces. The result is a monospaced font. While each individual letter feels conventional on its own, when brought together in words the result feels contemporary. Thanks to the square base vertical and horizontal – and mixed – settings are possible and easy to apply. There are a few exceptions for certain punctuation and special characters that are half the width for better spacing; and the word space’s width can easily be adjusted through OpenType stylistic sets. Talking about spacing, for strictly horizontal typesetting there is the option to turn on kerning for a number of characters to create a cleaner texture across words and phrases. OBO Classic is best set in large sizes and is most comfortable in editorial and display settings. A series of icons complete the character set. A selection comes as pixel graphics which adds further contrast to the traditional legacy of the typeface.

Dream Within a Dream was the title of exhibition of Czech art inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe curated by Otto M Urban and Veronika Hulíková. Three dozens of artists exhibited their works in the Czech National Gallery in 2020. The cataloguje was printed with the use of the present typeface. Artists took significant interest in Poe's literary oeuvre only after the writer's untimely death. This was mainly thanks to the poet Charles Baudelaire who translated Poe's works to French. As early as in the second half of the 19th century, prominent artists such as Edouard Manet, Odilon Redon, James Ensor and Gustave Doré created remarkable artworks inspired by Poe. Although the first Czech translations of Poe's woks date to the 1850s, artworks inspired by them only appeared several decades later, at the turn on the 20th century. Poe's poems and short stories inspired František Kupka and soon after him, Josef Váchal, Jan Konůpek and František Kobliha. Alfred Kubin, a German artist born in Bohemia, made illustrations for the German translation of Poe's collected stories. Later on, Alén Diviš and František Tichý created further Poe-inspired artworks. Poe was a source of inspiration for Jan Švankmajer and more recently, František Štorm and Jaroslav Róna.

Fontoddler Font Family, This font was created with the personality, in mind, of my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter Chloe Bella. I believe strongly that fonts have personalities that’s why we refer to their members as ‘characters’ or to be more accurate, ‘glyphs’. This font is playful, bold, colorful in form and design, a bit irregular, a bit informal, a bit irreverent, a bit humorous, a bit sassy, and a bit independent just like my little one. When used in color Fontoddler sings. She’ll be writing and creating visual words in just the nick of time. At 2 she started recognizing many colors and identifying people, places, animals, and objects and now she’s recognizing letters. I can’t wait for her to understand that this font was designed and named after her. Fontoddler currently exists in 3 styles, Medium, Heavy, and Heavy Outline. Naturally Heavy and Heavy Outline are congruous, ie. They are fitting together. I hope you enjoy and use this 24th font family from Cozyfonts Foundry. It will fit well with greeting cards, signage, birthday parties, holiday occasions, invites, stationary, headlines, logos, posters, cartoons, animation titles, movie titles and even sports events and sports logos. Have fun with this one. Tom Nikosey

Distorted fonts are great but are mostly not very practical - 360 is an attempt to create a simple distorted font that can be used far beyond a few logos or headlines. Each 360 character averages roughly half the number of sharp angles of a regular sans serif. This gives it an unusually fresh and timeless appeal and creates a dynamic presence across body text that is very legible and compact without looking overly condensed. 360 was chosen as a name because it can be used as an everyday font, all year round, and because 360 has so many unusual angles that don't conform to normal font conventions. 360 also happens to be a cool number: 360 makes a highly composite number. 360 is also a superior highly composite number and a colossally abundant number. A circle is divided into 360 degrees for the purpose of angular measurement. 360° is also called round angle. 360 is a convenient standard since, 360 being highly composite, it allows a circle to be divided into equal segments with each segment measured in integer degrees rather than fractional degrees. 360 is the sum of a twin prime (179 + 181). A year is roughly calculated as 360 days.

Like many cities in the Midlands and North of England, Stoke-on-Trent has a rich history linked to making and industry. In Stoke’s case it was pottery. In the early 1900s bottle kilns could be seen covering the landscape of the six towns making up Stoke-on-Trent with hundreds of factories producing some of the best ceramics in the world. But by the 1990s most of these had gone. Torn down for development of housing or just left to rot. During the next few decades Stoke continued to change. The industry was in a decline and Stoke itself was seen as another poor midlands city with a dwindling industry. Then in 2008, Spode, one of the largest and most famousceramics factories in Stoke entered into administration. Pens cast aside, drawings left half finished, designs left in the turned-off kilns; Spode factory was abandoned. This was a real shock and the way everything was getting thrown into skips to be put on the tip was heartbreaking. Thankfully people salvaged some of the technical drawings, sketch design, old sample pieces and ceramics that people hard worked so hard on. Potbank has been in development over a number of years taking inspiration from the heritage and designs from the ceramics industry. It has a mixed Clarendon and Antiqua style structure with its main purpose to be used as a printed type.

Originally designed in 1998 as a 3-font family, updated in 2016 by new italics, small caps and many OpenType functions, resulting in a set of highly visible poster typefaces. If a  text is set in a  good Egyptienne, we can observe a  kind of sparkle in the lines. Slab-serifs are cheerful typefaces, possibly due to the fact that they developed simultaneously with Grotesque typefaces. The design principle originating from the first half of the 19th century does not have such firm and long-established roots as for example, the Venetian Roman typefaces, hence it’s much more prone to a  “decline”. We know of Egyptiennes with uneven color, with letters falling backwards (this often happens in the case of “S”), and especially with slightly bizarre modeling of details. In the course of time, however, it was realized that such things could be quite pleasant and tempting. After a  century and a  half, we find that such Egyptiennes could refresh uniform computer typography. The forms of many twisted letters resemble the gestures of a  juggler: others, rectangularly static ones, reflect the profile of a  rail or a  steel girder – things which, in their times, were new and were observed by the first creators of Egyptiennes. These typefaces are ideal for circus posters and programs for theatre performances, just as for printing on cement sacks.

Stamen is the answer to a big question: What would happen if one tried to create a typeface that was ‘out of time’? If a type designer was to turn off the internet and put away the type specimens and just try to explore limbic, phantom history, what might that look like? No slavish explorations of the past. No gropings toward the future. No exhaustive core sample of the contemporary. Instead, using what one remembers of history and our collective vision of the future (usually a future imagined from the past) and channeling that into something that is, hopefully, new… The Bentons meet Frutiger for a Manhattan on a space station while Matthew Carter sways to the sweet sounds of the chorale that occasionally played through the halls of Stephenson Blake. This smear of implicit history expressed without explicit reference—this is Stamen: a family of 12 typefaces with a ton of alternate characters. The bold weight was designed for the LP “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” ( http://ittfwbc.com/ ) by the band YACHT in response to their request for a typeface that was ‘lost in time’, and refers to neither strict historical models nor purely futuristic forms. I built a small family out from there. It works well in text, but just as well for display setting. I think you’ll enjoy using it.

Ruth Script is perfect for neon signs, we took as referents some of these signs found in the street, especially those hanging in bars, billiard halls, motels and night clubs, we also took into consideration the Photo-lettering One Line manual to solve ligatures and alternatives (We want to thank Ed Ronthaler for that treasure to study and learn). The scripts can be considered as a compendium of connections, aesthetic and functional alternatives, where all the possible word combination is a universe depending on the language and the user's creativity. We have developed a project that offers to our customers a bridge that connects the brush with the digital typography through a partial vowels and consonants control and ligatures with opentype programming. We know that the scripts make typography users, fall in love. That is why we have created a type font that achieves all the demands and requests for any project where our font can be applied. Ruth Script was designed with patience and love, with the purpose of recovering the work done by those people who have been working as letterer during decades and that have left us hundreds of guides, books and videos. A great legacy! We want to invite you to use Ruth Script in your projects and fall in love with ESTUDIO CALDERÓN's new daughter. ENJOY IT!

The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

When type historians look back on Jim Rimmer, they will consider him the last type designer who just couldn't let go of metal type, even though he was just as proficient in digital type. Lancelot is one definite case in point: A face designed and produced in digital as late in the game as 1999, only to spring onto the new millenium a couple of years later as a metal type cast in three sizes. That was Jim, a time traveler constantly reminding the craft of its origins. This particular time machine was originally designed as a simple set of attractive caps that emphasize the beauty of the variable conventional dialogue between the drawing tool and the intended final form, and the one exchanged within the totality of the forms themselves. Jim designed two weights, with contrast and counterspace being the main difference between them. In 2013, the Lancelot family was remastered and greatly expanded. Lancelot Pro is now a wonder of over 840 glyphs per font, including smaller versions of the caps in the minuscule slots, and alternates and ligatures that can transform the historic spirit of the original design into anything from half-uncial to outright gothic. Language support goes beyond the extended Latin stuff, to cover Cyrillic and Greek as well. 20% of the Lancelot Pro family's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

STF Eclectic One is a visual cornucopia of symbols, like the junk drawer in your kitchen. Stuff you'll need someday for a graphic element, bullet or dingbat application. Perfect for website icons! The Eclectic family is legendary, with a cult-like following among the inititated. As one of the first dingbat fonts available on the web, it gain popularity after its design in the early 1990s. With over 150 characters in the complete set, you'll find yourself using Eclectic One almost daily to add spice to your otherwise san-serif typographic existence. This font is essentially a soap opera of typographic image elements, created for projects when I couldn't find the "thingbat" I needed. Almost more of a collection of illustrations, there are many characters which connect to form patterns, and of course it's like a "small neutral European country" army knife for the creative community. EcOne features complete hour, quarter, and half-hour notations in an analog clock design glyph, recycled/recyclable symbols, a registration mark, a toaster, globes, sideways diamond arrows, spaceships, stoplights, the "running man," several atomic references, da buzz saw, target icons, the unusual smiley face floating in a ball (with a drop shadow, no less!), and the fish skeleton which complements the fallout shelter symbol, and more. Make your own juxtapositions! One reviewer proclaims "for whatever you do, Eclectic One is an excellent dingbat source." Available in Mac and PC formats. License it today!

An exquisite Didot font in 18 series Ambroise is a contemporary interpretation of various typefaces belonging to Didot’s late style, conceived circa 1830, including the original forms of g, y, &; and to a lesser extent, k. These unique glyphs are found in Gras Vibert, cut by Michel Vibert. Vibert was the appointed punchcutter of the Didot family during this period. It is the Heavy, whom sources were surest that Jean François Porchez has been used as the basis for the design of the typeface family. In the second half of the 19th century, it was usual to find fat Didots in several widths in the catalogs of French type foundries. These same typefaces continued to be offered until the demise of the big French foundries in the 1960s. Ambroise attempts to reproduce more of what we see printed on paper in the 19th century; a more accurate representation of Didot punches. So, the unbracketed serifs are not truly square straight-line forms but use tiny transitional curves instead. The result on the page appears softer and less straight, particularly in larger sizes. The illustrious Didot family of type founders and printers Every variation of the typeface carries a name in homage to a member of the illustrious Didot family of type founders and printers. The condensed variant is called Ambroise Firmin. The extra-condensed is called Ambroise François. Ambroise Pro brought back to life: fifteen years in the making! Club des directeurs artistiques, 48e palmarès Bukva:raz 2001

From the designer, Tim Ahrens... I started designing this typeface about half a year after learning that Frutiger was not a new brand of sweets and that Garamond is not the name of a fragrance. In time it became clear that designing a sans serif must always be considered as a transformation of traditional serifed typefaces instead of deriving it from typefaces that have been derived from others which have been derived from others again. I did not want Aroma to be one of those odourless and tasteless typefaces wich sacrifice a natural feeling and the characteristic shapes of the letters to neutrality. I think that beauty often evolves unintentionally. For example, I am fascinated by the beauty of airfoils, which are actually a careful transformation of a bird's wing. I love their anorganic and abstract shape which still bears the essence and all the complexity of what they are modelled on. This is exactly the formal concept behind Aroma. Many of the outlines are actually parabolics. The small r, for example, consists exclusively of straight lines and parabolics. I decided to give Aroma more stroke contrast than it is usual for sans serif designs. Many strokes are slightly convex, which gives the font an anorganic feeling. The font was intended to have a feel similar to the antiqua. More specifically, it is based on Old Style Faces. The character of those fonts, which were cut during the Renaissance, is still inherent to Aroma.

Lust Didone’s character set was expanded as well during the redraw and update, the Italics were separated and reimagined anew from the universal italics in the original offering. Lust Didone also includes the new Fine optical size with complementing Italics for each size as well. And, yes, more swashes. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

Lust’s original masters were completely redrawn, expanded, with a new optical size added based on customer requests. Lust now sports 6 fonts, instead of the original 4: Standard, Display, Fine, and complementing Italics. The character set has been expanded as well to include more OpenType features and more swashes. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

Yafferbuddle comes in the category of 'a funky fun font' with a pleasing rounded shape, but it still has the extensive range of features you'd expect in a modern OpenType font. It's especially useful for posters, headlines and comics. There's 5 weights and a Shadow version in Regular and Italic, making 12 fonts in all. To let you know what's in the font that you might otherwise not suspect . . . With Discretionary Ligatures on, you get special characters if you type Mc St. Rd. Bd. Ave. c/o No. (p) (P) - include the full-stop/period where given. With Stylistic Alternates switched on, you get plenty of extra characters - including a WiFi symbol (type Wifi or WiFi) / bullet numbers instead of ordinary numbers / that different U-dieresis / special characters for c/o No. Mc / an upside down ~ / a huge bullet, and different forms for cent, dollar, percent, per-thousand. As you'd expect, there's all the accented characters for all Western European scripts using Latin letters, and standard ligatures, plus other Open Type features including Class Kerning, Slashed-Zero, Historical Forms, Sub- and Superscript numbers, fractions for halves, thirds and quarters, Ornamental forms giving bullet numbers, etc. There's even some of the more obscure stuff like the main mathematical operators, symbols like card-suits and male/female signs and so on, schwa, U-horn O-horn, and there's more if you can Access All Alternates. Much will depend on what features your software recognises.

Hal Taylor's ITC Outpost was not the result of a detailed design brief, nor was there a methodical development of key concepts or characters. Outpost just seemed to emerge all at once during a brief sketching session," says Taylor. "I guess what I was thinking of was an antiquated Western perception of some sort of Middle Eastern hand lettering - a 'mysterious East' sort of thing." ITC Outpost's sense of the exotic has an almost Art Nouveau quality, with its sensuous curves and sweeping strokes. The open bowls and opposing weight bias in many of the characters add to the design's striking personality. A suite of alternate and swash letters enables the setting of distinctive display copy. ITC Outpost's family of roman, italic, and swash characters is compact but versatile. The caps have the grace and authority of a titling face. Add in the lowercase and swash letters and copy is transformed into something lighthearted and full of verve. ITC Outpost creates dramatic headlines and adds a flourish to invitations, menus, logos and packaging An accomplished designer, Taylor has spent most of his career in the lettering and typographic arts. He began as a photo-lettering typographer, setting headlines and creating custom lettering, and now works in the publishing industry. "

To design a text typeface "at the top with, at the bottom without" serifs was an idea which crossed my mind at the end of the sixties. I started from the fact that what one reads in the Latin alphabet is mainly the upper half of the letters, where good distinguishableness of the individual signs, and therefore, also good legibility, is aided by serifs. The first tests of the design, by which I checked up whether the basic principle could be used also for the then current technology of setting - for double-sign matrices -, were carried out in 1970. During the first half of the seventies I created first the basic design, then also the slanted Roman and the medium types. These drawings were not very successful. My greatest concern during this initial phase was the upper case A. I had to design it in such a way that the basic principle should be adhered to and the new alphabet, at the same time, should not look too complicated. The necessary prerequisite for a design of a new alphabet for double-sign matrices, i.e. to draw each letter of all the three fonts to the same width, did not agree with this typeface. What came to the greatest harm were the two styles used for emphasis: the italics even more than the medium type. That is why I fundamentally remodelled the basic design in 1980. In the course of this work I tried to forget about the previous technological limitations and to respect only the requirements then placed on typefaces intended for photosetting. As a matter of fact, this was not very difficult; this typeface was from the very beginning conceived in such a way as to have a large x-height of lower-case letters and upper serifs that could be joined without any problems in condensed setting. I gave much more thought to the proportional relations of the individual letters, the continuity of their outer and inner silhouettes, than to the requirements of their production. The greatest number of problems arose in the colour balancing of the individual signs, as it was necessary to achieve that the upper half of each letter should have a visual counterbalance in its lower, simpler half. Specifically, this meant to find the correct shape and degree of thickening of the lower parts of the letters. These had to counterbalance the upper parts of the letters emphasized by serifs, yet they should not look too romantic or decorative, for otherwise the typeface might lose its sober character. Also the shape, length and thickness of the upper serifs had to be resolved differently than in the previous design. In the seventies and at the beginning of the eighties a typeface conceived in this way, let alone one intended for setting of common texts in magazines and books, was to all intents and purposes an experiment with an uncertain end. At this time, before typographic postmodernism, it was not the custom to abandon in such typefaces the clear-cut formal categories, let alone to attempt to combine the serif and sans serif principles in a single design. I had already designed the basic, starting, alphabets of lower case and upper case letters with the intention to derive further styles from them, differing in colour and proportions. These fonts were not to serve merely for emphasis in the context of the basic design, but were to function, especially the bold versions, also as independent display alphabets. At this stage of my work it was, for a change, the upper case L that presented the greatest problem. Its lower left part had to counterbalance the symmetrical two-sided serif in the upper half of the letter. The ITC Company submitted this design to text tests, which, in their view, were successful. The director of this company Aaron Burns then invited me to add further styles, in order to create an entire, extensive typeface family. At that time, without the possibility to use a computer and given my other considerable workload, this was a task I could not manage. I tried to come back to this, by then already very large project, several times, but every time some other, at the moment very urgent, work diverted me from it. At the beginning of the nineties several alphabets appeared which were based on the same principle. It seemed to me that to continue working on my semi-finished designs was pointless. They were, therefore, abandoned until the spring of 2005, when František Štorm digitalized the basic design. František gave the typeface the working title Areplos and this name stuck. Then he made me add small capitals and the entire bold type, inducing me at the same time to consider what to do with the italics in order that they might be at least a little italic in character, and not merely slanted Roman alphabets, as was my original intention. In the course of the subsequent summer holidays, when the weather was bad, we met in his little cottage in South Bohemia, between two ponds, and resuscitated this more than twenty-five-years-old typeface. It was like this: We were drinking good tea, František worked on the computer, added accents and some remaining signs, inclined and interpolated, while I was looking over his shoulder. There is hardly any typeface that originated in a more harmonious setting. Solpera, summer 2005 I first encountered this typeface at the exhibition of Contemporary Czech Type Design in 1982. It was there, in the Portheim Summer Palace in Prague, that I, at the age of sixteen, decided to become a typographer. Having no knowledge about the technologies, the rules of construction of an alphabet or about cultural connections, I perceived Jan Solpera's typeface as the acme of excellence. Now, many years after, replete with experience of revitalization of typefaces of both living and deceased Czech type designers, I am able to compare their differing approaches. Jan Solpera put up a fight against the digital technology and exerted creative pressure to counteract my rather loose approach. Jan prepared dozens of fresh pencil drawings on thin sketching paper in which he elaborated in detail all the style-creating elements of the alphabet. I can say with full responsibility that I have never worked on anything as meticulous as the design of the Areplos typeface. I did not invent this name; it is the name of Jan Solpera's miniature publishing house, in which he issued for example an enchanting series of memoirs of a certain shopkeeper of Jindrichuv Hradec. The idea that the publishing house and the typeface might have the same name crossed my mind instinctively as a symbol of the original designation of Areplos - to serve for text setting. What you can see here originated in Trebon and in a cottage outside the village of Domanín - I even wanted to rename my firm to The Trebon Type Foundry. When mists enfold the pond and gloom pervades one's soul, the so-called typographic weather sets in - the time to sit, peer at the monitor and click the mouse, as also our students who were present would attest. Areplos is reminiscent of the essential inspirational period of a whole generation of Czech type designers - of the seventies and eighties, which were, however, at the same time the incubation period of my generation. I believe that this typeface will be received favourably, for it represents the better aspect of the eighties. Today, at the time when the infection by ITC typefaces has not been quite cured yet, it does absolutely no harm to remind ourselves of the high quality and timeless typefaces designed then in this country.In technical terms, this family consists of two times four OpenType designs, with five types of figures, ligatures and small capitals as well as an extensive assortment of both eastern and western diacritics. I can see as a basic text typeface of smaller periodicals and informative job-prints, a typeface usable for posters and programmes of various events, but also for corporate identity. Štorm, summer 2005

Haarlemmer is a recreation of a never-produced Jan Van Krimpen typeface that goes one step beyond authentic: it shows how he wanted it to be designed in the first place. The original, drawn in the late 1930s, was created for the Dutch Society for the Art of Printing and Books and was to be used to set a new edition of the Bible, using Monotype typesetting. Hence the problem: fonts for metal typesetting machines like the Linotype and Monotype had to be created within a crude system of predetermined character width values. Every letter had to fit within and have its spacing determined by a grid of only 18 units. Often, the italic characters had to share the same widths as those in the roman design. Van Krimpen believed this severely impaired the design process. The invasion of Holland in World War II halted all work on the Bible project, and the original Haarlemmer never went into production. Flash forward about sixty years. Frank E. Blokland, of The Dutch Type Library, wanted to revive the original Haarlemmer, but this time as Van Krimpen would have intended. Blokland reinterpreted the original drawings and created a typeface that matched, as much as possible, Van Krimpen's initial concept. While Van Krimpen's hand could no longer be on the tiller, a thorough study of his work made up for his absence. The result is an exceptional text family of three weights, with complementary italic designs and a full suite of small caps and old style figures. Van Krimpen would be proud.

A revival and major expansion of a 1926 Ludwig Wagner Schriftgiesserei typeface called Titanic, Lexington is the ultimate art deco expression of the high times of signage and theater during the first half of the twentieth century. Big feminine caps and cozy direct minuscules make for a unique combination rarely found in other deco faces. Topped off with the humorous and quite suave tall and pointy ascenders and descenders of the alternates, Lexington makes for a versatile and uniquely eye-catching display face beneficial to poster art, book covers, classy menus, product packaging and music paraphernalia. The original specimen Hans van Maanen worked from showed the majuscules, minuscules, figures, and 4 alternates of some ascending minuscules. This new digital version includes all of the above, plus many more additions: - Plenty more alternates, for some caps as well as for all the ascending and descending lowercase. - Three different size variations for the comma and the period. - Oldstyle figures. - A full complement of accented characters to support more Latin-based languages than ever, including Baltic, Celtic, Turkish, and Central/Eastern European languages. - A Handtooled style variation that covers both the main character set and the alternates. Lexington was named after Manhattan's Lexington Avenue, home of the some of the most famous and polished art deco architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. Lexington and Lexington Handtooled come in all popular font formats. The OpenType versions combine their respective alternates with the main character sets, for ease of use within OpenType-savvy applications.

Boom. You asked for more, um, well just ‘more’—more swashes, more options, more weights, more of everything. I cannot give you more weights. The design just won’t allow it and anything else would be a compromise or a bastardization of the exemplars just to make money that I am unwilling to do. But, I did give you an overly indulgent, 90% cacao bar and espresso, Lust Script Fine. The ending strokes on these glyphs will literally draw blood. Enjoy it as much as I have. The Lust Collection is the culmination of 5 years of exploration and development, and I am very excited to share it with everyone. When the original Lust was first conceived in 2010 and released a year and half later, I had planned for a Script and a Sans to accompany it. The Script was released about a year later, but I paused the Sans. The primary reason was the amount of feedback and requests I was receiving for alternate versions, expansions, and ‘hey, have you considered making?’ and so on. I listen to my customers and what they are needing… and besides, I was stalling with the Sans. Like Optima and other earlier high-contrast sans, they are difficult to deliver responsibly without suffering from ill-conceived excess or timidity. The new Lust Collection aggregates all of that past customer feedback and distills it into 6 separate families, each adhering to the original Lust precept of exercises in indulgence and each based in large part on the original 2010 exemplars produced for Lust. I just hate that it took so long to deliver, but better right, than rushed, I imagine.

Sonrisa is a design that evolved from my sketches of the skeletal structure of Jakob Erbar’s Koloss, trying to discover its underlying essence without all the contrast and bulkiness of the original design. Sonrisa Thin was the resulting font, from which the other weights of the family were developed. Gentle curves, open counters, generous x-height, and sleekly tapered terminals give Sonrisa a very legible, modern, elegant appearance. When she saw the first draft of this typeface, the smile on my friend Jennifer’s face gave me the idea to call it “Sonrisa” (Spanish for “smile”). Jennifer, a clinical psychologist, described Sonrisa’s personality as: "happy, clean, clear, open, joyful, spacious, playful, calm. I can see it being used for body product lines such as oils and lotions. Can see it being used in home/travel magazines or even Architectural Digest. Yoga magazine, definitely." Sonrisa is what some foundries call a “Pro” typeface family with all the bells and whistles that provide typographic versatility: true small caps, oldstyle numerals, arbitrary fractions, discretionary ligatures, and other powerful OpenType features. All fonts in the family, except Sonrisa Titling, support most European languages, including modern Greek and languages that use the Cyrillic Alphabet. (Cyrillic glyphs designed in consultation with Ukrainian type designer, Sergiy S. Tkachenko.) Sonrisa is available in the original Thin, monoline version as well as six weights (Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Extra Bold, Black), and a Titling font that is essentially a display font construction kit. If you enjoy using Sonrisa even half as much as I enjoyed creating it, then I know you will have a “sonrisa” (smile) on your face!

Dever’s brute, industrial lines are rounded up in this new typeface from Jeremy Dooley. Dever combines plenty of inspirations. It’s the flair of the Wild West melded with a shout out to the sign painters and package lettering artists of the 1800s. Dever’s big, bold, and handy frame moves through all three of the family’s strapping members. First is the sans. No doubts on what this brother’s like. Dever Sans is as straight-forward as you’ll find in this family with its four separate weights and numerous distressed options. The second of the kin’s a bit of half-breed, you might say. Pointed serifs bring a sharpness to this outfit. Rounding out the family is Dever Wedge, a bit of wild rodeo all its own. This poke’s a quick draw with any of its 107 font, and with it’s auto-replacing alternates, no two repeating characters are alike. You’re guaranteed a great show anytime Dever leaves the chute. The route to Dever was long, with many a switchback. The Wedge variant was designed first, shelved, then developed into Plathorn. But I wanted to return to those brutish forms and decided to round out the family with a sans, serif and plenty of other options. Any of the Dever family have an extended character set including Central and Eastern European languages. The strong faces have specially adapted sub-families, too, so they’re bound and determined to have an outstanding impact at whatever size you use ‘em. It’s a hard ride ahead corralling all those words. Be sure and add these able-bodied boys to your posse today!