Enamela (rhymes with Pamela) is a monoline square sans that is available in normal width and condensed versions. Although rooted in the early years of sans serif type, the Enamela fonts have a timeless quality that is practical and unpretentious. The letterforms derive from vitreous enamel signage dating from the Victorian era and widely used in Britain for street nameplates, Post Office signs, the plates on James Ludlow wall postboxes, railway signs and direction signs, as well as for circular Automobile Association wayfinding plaques throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The quirky terminals, stemming from the compression of geometric type, invite comparison with the Charles Wright fonts used for UK vehicle registration plates. Enamela and Enamela Condensed are both available in three weights – regular, medium and bold – and as italics (optically corrected obliques). A commonly used alternative M with a vertex that touches the baseline is provided at the Alt-M (µ) keystroke on a Mac, or Alt-0181 on Windows. A commonly used G with a plain vertical throat, no crosspiece, is assigned Unicode FF27 (full width capital G).

Not to be confused with the prolific, 1980s British super-star graphic and type designer Neville Brody, this brush script typeface was designed in 1953 by the American type designer Harold Broderson. Broderson worked for ATF (the American Type Founders), who were the original publishers of this design. Body is a brush script face that mimics the show card style of lettering, which was very popular throughout the United States during the first half of the 20th Century. The letters appear as if they were drawn quickly and spontaneously with a wide, flat lettering brush. The lowercase letters connect to each other, cursive script style. Brody is the perfect display face to provoke a nostalgic feeling for the 1950s. Anything having to do with apple pie, home cooking, or last minute sales would look great in this face. You could outfit a whole supermarket signage system in a snap with Brody. If you need the original version with more lettered characters then Brophy Script is a good alternate,

Mi Casa is a new condensed version of our Home Style font which is a revival of an old 1800's classic ornate French font. This new 2021 condensed version takes this old classic to an all new level by adding small caps, italics and a new black version. Mi Casa is perfect for headlines and logos from advertising to product labels, t-shirt lettering and restaurant menus. Fill fonts are also part of this family, new to this font style is the half fill font for creating a two color effect on the letters, you'll need an application that works in layers to use the fill fonts in Mi Casa. The regular fill font for Mi Casa isn't meant to be used as a stand alone font so we've created a solid black version with thicker serifs on top and adjusted outlines throughout for a better appearance as a solo font. We hope you enjoy Mi Casa as much as we did making it. Mi Casa is a trademark of FontMesa LLC

A tessellation is a shape that can be used to completely fill the plane without gaps or overlaps—simple examples are isosceles triangles, squares, and hexagons. Tessellation patterns are eye-catching and visually appealing, which is the reason that they have long been popular in a variety of decorative situations. TessieSomeMore has two family members, a solid style that must have different colors to be useful and an outline style. They can be used separately or they can be used in layers with the outline style on top of the solid style. For rows to align properly, leading must be the same as point size. To see how patterns can be constructed, see the “Samples” file here. Shapes that tessellate and also resemble real-world objects are often called Escher-like tessellations. Most of the shapes in TessieSomeMore are Escher-like. Over half are either bug-like and bird-like shapes. There are also a few animal and other object shapes as well as some geometric or abstract shapes that have visual appeal.

Rubber B is a heavy display typeface with very tight open counters & character spacing and non-existent closed counters. It is an amalgam of styles and influences that demands attention. It is comparable with the highly geometric experimental fonts of the '90s and early '00s, but also heavily inspired by decorative fonts of the '60s and the psychedelic poster art of the '70s. Bold and loud, yet delicate, almost calligraphic in some cases. It works with Latin & Extended Latin, Cyrillic & Extended Cyrillic and Greek. It comes with 1,500+ glyphs, with more than half of them being ligatures. It also contains several Stylistic Alternates as well as Localised forms (available through the Open Type Features and also as ligatures). All these features are available in order to not only make sure that it works with as many languages as possible, but also that depending on the specific glyph or ligature one chooses to use, they have the ability to alter the emotional character of the word(s) they’re setting. Ideal for titles and logos, as it works best in medium and large sizes.

It started with an italic, or to be more precise, half an italic. The slanted styles of Urge Text exhibit a certain bipolarity, the tops of glyphs having a standard italic form, the bottoms of glyphs being more Roman in their construction. This sturdy footing really locks the italics to the baseline, making them very legible while still being distinct from the uprights. The same bipolar approach didn't work very well in upright styles, so the Romans are more toned down. Ranging from the almost monoline, Egyptian style light weights to higher contrast ‘Modern’ bolds, there is much potential for use in typographically demanding scenarios. The family consists of six weights, normal and condensed widths, all with italics, making a total of 24 fonts; it’s a highly usable text typeface with an array of OpenType features. All styles include small caps, multiple figure styles (proportional- and tabular-, oldstyle and lining, small cap proportional figures, numerators, denominators, superscript and subscript), standard ligatures, alternate forms (stylistic sets), automatic fractions, case sensitive forms, and a handy (perhaps!) ‘percent off’ ligature in the discretionary ligatures feature.

Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) was called the King of Printers and the Bodoni font owes its creation in 1767 to his masterful cutting techniques. Predecessors in a similar style were the typefaces of Pierre Simon Fournier (1712–1768) and the Didot family (1689–1836). The Bodoni font distinguishes itself through the strength of its characters and embodies the rational thinking of the Enlightenment. The new typefaces displaced the Old Face and Transitional styles and was the most popular typeface until the mid-19th century. Bodoni’s influence on typography was dominant until the end of the 19th century and even today inspires new creations. Working with this font requires care, as the strong emphasis of the vertical strokes and the marked contrast between the fine and thick lines lessens Bodoni’s legibility, and the font is therefore better in larger print with generous spacing. Chauncey H. Griffith’s Poster Bodoni displays characteristics of the advertisement fonts of the first half of the 20th century. The font was most often used for posters and signs, eventually including neon signs.

Rolphie can be your go-to sans-serif, with 16 easy-to-read weights and 10 versions for each weight, and the subtlety of choice that represents. The versions contained in each weight are: Regular; Condensed; Half-Condensed; Expanded; Small Capitals: and their italic counterparts. (At heavier weights particularly it seemed to be justified to have two Condensed versions). Plus there's 20 funky versions with the letters all shook up (that would make a good title for a song), or jumbled around, plus some Shadow, Doubled-Up, College, and other FX versions. In total there's 180 variations, giving a comprehensive selection of both standard and funky fonts, and that subtle degree of choice of weight. To make things easier, the weights are put in ascending numerical order from 01 to 16, and the FX versions have been stuck in the 80s and 90s, (like two musicians I know). There are grouped packages available for certain weights (which have 10 fonts in them) and the complete family package (180 fonts) which represent better value than the individual fonts, and there's a basic package containing the Normal and Italic versions of all 16 weights (32 fonts). A limit of 5 sub-family packages has been imposed, unfortunately, which precludes a more comprehensive selection. To let you know what's in the font that you might otherwise never know about . . . 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. 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 also the main mathematical operators, symbols like card-suits and male/female signs and so on, and some more obscure stuff like schwa and O-horn, U-horn - and there's lots more if you can Access All Alternates. Much will depend on what your software recognises. The Small Caps versions have (intentionally) lost the ligatures for lower case ff, fi, fj, fl, fr, fu, ffi, ffj, ffl, ffr, ffu. The names for the weights are not absolute - we had to make up some names to make them stretch out to sixteen - so rather - see them as relative to each other, being in ascending numerical order by weight.

Henrician can claim two sources of inspiration. One of these was a set of beautiful capital letterforms seen on the cover of a 19th century album of engravings. The engravings contained therein depicted lovely examples of half-timbered Tudor architecture and there was a clear 'Tudor' intent behind the letterforms. The second source of inspiration is more conceptual-the title lettering of period films from the 30's to the 60's…think if the opening text when Errol Flynn plays Robin Hood, or think of Richard the Lionheart, or even that great comedy Classic 'Carry on Henry', and it's discussion of Sir Thomas de Cobbler….but we digress! Henrician is a set of eight display and text (but perhaps not Body Text) faces in a 'Tudor Revival' spirit. Like any good revival design they are somehow at home with a wide range period themed design work, covering the medieval until, perhaps, the 18th century, just so long as we're more concerned with fun and appearance than strict historical accuracy. The family will be at home in the realms of advertising, posters, cover design and web design. Try Henrician out today!

In 1925, at the request of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, the foundry he worked for, Oswald Bruce Cooper designed a wide selection of "screamers", oversized exclamation points used to grab attention in display advertising. The foundry rushed the screamers into production, much to Cooper's dismay. Cooper was disappointed with the final form of the screamers– they were designed in assorted weights to match the assorted Cooper series of typefaces, as well as in a variety of other formal solutions- squaredoff, incised, wavy, Tuscan, and rounded. Cooper's working design methodology was to re-draw his projects a number of times in order to refine the formal results. However the screamer project was hastily cut by the head of BB&S's matrix engraving room in fourteen sizes from the initial sketches, causing Cooper to fire off a fiery missive stating, "Everything I draw is bum the first half-dozen times I draw it; the trouble with these is that I drew them only once!" This typeface is the result of researching Cooper's original drawings and series of engraved proofs for the screamers, as well as the original Screamer type specimen. Cooper Screamers have never been available before in digital format.

Artist and calligrapher Daniel Reeve, well known for the lettering and maps in The Lord of the Rings films, is creating hand-crafted fonts of some of his writing styles - Kereru is the inaugural release, allowing users to emulate some of his much-admired calligraphy. Nominally a half-uncial style, clever arrangements of the stylistic sets allow Kereru to be set as full uncial or standard roman, as well as offering numerous alternates, ligatures, swashes and flourishes, ornaments, unlimited fractions, scientific inferiors and numeric superscript, all accessible via OpenType features. Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are included, in addition to the letters required for all the languages of Western, Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic. Kereru is very legible and easy on the eye, without sacrificing calligraphic flair. A pdf description of the Stylistic Sets and their usage is included with the font package, which comprises regular, bold and italic variations. Kereru Italic supercedes and improves upon its previous incarnation, Shire Regular. The name Kereru comes from New Zealand's Maori language - it is our native wood pigeon, a bird of generous and rounded form, like the font itself.

Forme Furniture Type Em and Furniture Type En Designed by using the pieces of letterpress furniture usually hidden, to create letter shapes. The square nature of the type means it could be used as a low resolution type. Forme Furniture Type Em – Low resolution type. Designed using *Furniture and **Em quads from letterpress printing. *Furniture: Pieces of wood or metal placed around or between metal type to make blank spaces and fasten the printed matter in the chase. ** Quads: (originally quadrat) is a metal spacer used in letterpress typesetting. An em quad is a space that is one em wide and one em high. Also available as Em Shadow to be used as a headline or display font. Forme Furniture Type En – Low resolution type. Designed by using *Leads and ** En quads from letterpress printing. *Lead or Reglet is a piece of Lead or wooden spacing material used in letterpress typesetting, to provide spacing between paragraphs. **An En quad is a space that is one En wide half the width of an Em quad, and the same height as the typeface. Also available as En Shadow to be used as a headline or display font.

This is a decorative and steganographic Braille font based on Lorraine Cross pattern. As the Lorraine cross splits space into six areas, it may be used to represent Braille glyphs. Provided Glyphs * Lowercase letters (a..z): a White cross and Black square dots * Uppercasecase letters (A..Z): a Black cross and White square dots * Special characters (e.g. !#$%*+<>{}()[]...) * Decorative glyphs (provided in black and white as well) Glyph code intervals - Codes 48..57: Bullets (0..9 digits) - Codes 130..150: 'White Stars' - Codes 192..233: 'Black Stars', Black border glyphs and other black patterns. - Codes 214..233: Border/Decorative glyphs (Black) - Codes 235..255: Border/Decorative glyphs (White) - Codes for Cross w/o dots: Black (192), White (235) - Codes for Cross and 6 dots: Black (191), White (234) - Code for 'Half-width space' (166) Posters 1. Logo: illustrates usage of border glyphs 2. Meta: Two big Lorraine Braille glyphs drawn with pattern glyphs 3. Stars: illustrates usage of 'Star' and pattern glyphs 4. Bullets: illustrates usage of bullet glyphs (0..9) 5. Human rights - Article 1 NB: - Encoding is: Windows Latin ("ANSI") - Published in two versions: Commercial and Free for personal use

Inspired by the lettering on a perfume, Halmos extrapolated a complete uppercase alphabet, and he also created a matching lowercase. Now the character set has been expanded completely, and this stylish Art Deco font is ready to create some headlines, new logos and wordmarks in many more languages. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

Hortensia, designed around 1900 by Emil Gursch for his own Berlin foundry, is a typeface most expressive of the post-Victorian aesthetic that was all the rage in both Europe and America during the second half of the 19th century and up until the Great War. It is a reduced aesthetic of sharp points and natural curves that almost want to apologize for their own elegance, but clearly embody the simple excitement about the blossoming of industry and crafts during the period. This deco script trend would get a re-run for about a decade on either side of the second World War — especially in the entertainment and financial industries — before giving way to art nouveau and big brush faces. Hortensia was Gursch's most popular typeface, used extensively and prominently in many beautiful type catalogs, and a commonly seen design element in Germany for quite a while after its release. This digital version brings plenty of fixes and additions to the original metal Hortensia design, including many alternates sprinkled throughout the character set, and support for a wide range of Latin-based languages (including Central European, Baltic, Turkish and Welsh).

The Vondelpark is the famous Amsterdam city park, 47 hectares stretching out from Leidseplein to the Amstelveenseweg. It was founded in 1864 when a group of well-to-do Amsterdam citizens got together and bought land at the (then) edge of the city centre in order to create a park ‘for riding and strolling’. Designed by architect J.D. Zocher, it opened officially in 1865. The park received its name two years later when a statue of Dutch writer Joost van den Vondel was placed in the park. In the 1960s and 1970s the Vondelpark became a symbol and epicenter of the hippie flower power era. The park was declared a state monument in 1996. Donald DBXL was intrigued by the handmade iron nameplate lettering on the park’s entrance gates, and decided to design VLNL Vondelpark in its glory. The somewhat clumsy iron letters were not revived as is but optimized to turn it into a useful typeface. The all-caps serif with a deliberate constructed feel, contains a Positional Open Type feature that places half circles on the vertical stems, at the beginning and end of a word, to enliven the rhythm.

The lightest weight of Presley Slab takes inspiration from a late nineteenth-century type specimen, but what began as a decorative and delicate contrasted serif stirred Alejandro Paul’s imagination to conjure voluptuous reverse contrasted letterforms. These became the heaviest weight of Presley Slab, which nods to the lacquered hairstyles from the birth of rock ’n roll with its idiosyncratic ball terminals. Its playful allure and swagger remains visible in the weights that stand between these two extremes but as the curls loosened, many things happened in the design process including the appearance of swashes and alternates. Presley Slab’s personality has breadth; it is a fun, confident and contemporary palette of letters that will perfectly perform for any job, from editorial design to branding. The Extra Bold and Black weights are a powerful option at large sizes for use on posters and billboards; the graceful Thin and Extra Light weights are delicate options for packaging design or fashion branding. Despite it conjuring images of mid-century music halls, Presley Slab is also staunchly European in it’s aesthetic, offering everything from good-humour to elegance with its unique touches.

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.

Leroy is a font family of 5 members designed from geometrizing Roman and Gothic skeletons. Its purpose is to provide optimal reading of titles and paragraphs with strong mechanical flavor. Because of this, its variables are designed to sort information in media such as labels, signs and industrial atmosphere packaging related with the Soviet Union’s fonts in 1920. This idea matured white horizontal lines superimposed on alphabets drawn with an ancient architectural team known as “Leroy K & E Controlled Lettering System”. Then that evolved into a family concept unifying its proportion to the same X height for its members, resulting in a versatile type system. Therefore, Regular and Bold variables have low contrast between thick and thin strokes. Its upstream and downstream are extremely short, generating a suitable interline that clogs the vertical area. Its overall width equal to its X height, supports its tight spacing that compacts the horizontal area. Therefore, the variant with black caliber has plenty of contrast between thick and thin strokes. The light variable has a “blind” effect radiating light halos, ideal to propose hierarchies and combinations with orthogonal projection. In that sense, Leroy’s modular character reminds constructivist ideology merged with typographical variants suitable for graphic design with geometric look. To achieve this, I studied the softening of forms and counter blocks into a typographical system specially designed for composing useful information to attract attention. In that sense, the dingbats were obtained through a careful process of research and testings done with drawings that provided full and empty visual strategies that with the passage of time helped to forge the major decisions of a metamorphosis from industrial tools, birds and humans from pictogram mixing various genres.

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.

Techarí comes from a commission in which the brief consisted of the creation of a typeface family to be used for the design of the third disc of the band called Ojos de Brujo based in Barcelona. This disc was called Techarí, which means “free” in Caló, the language of the Spanish gypsies. The starting point of the design was the music of this band, the meaning of the disc 's name, and three words given by the band as key concepts: ethnic, baroque and graffiti. Techarí is a mixture of lots of influences, which give it its unique personality. From its technical viewpoint designing Techarí was a challenge, on the one hand it had to have lots of personality, and on the other it had to work in text at 9 or 10 pt size. Its goal is precisely that, while keeping a strong personality it works in text size. The typeface also contains a Stencil version for use in display sizes which keeps Techarí's innovative spirit. The way it has been “cut" is unconventional, it has been carefully done to keep the freshness of the typeface by taking advantage of the letterforms' flow. Techarí extra complements the typeface by taking a classical typographic form, the ornament, and making it a contemporary graphic tool, vindicating this wonderful typographic element.