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

Deva Ideal was inspired by women’s beauty. It didn’t come only from the desire to create a new typeface. It also seeks to materialize beauty in a visual form. Instead of imitating the shapes of the female body or other formal attributes, Deva Ideal is an abstract expression of the women’s beauty. The unique character of the typeface is achieved by the use of soft, almost invisibly bent strokes, since one of the priorities of the typeface is not to disturb the eye of the reader with odd design details. Deva Ideal excels in her cold beauty and shows her sex appeal. The soft curves present in Deva Ideal differ from the masculine and technical shapes used in most contemporary typefaces. Deva Ideal has ideal proportions (90 / 60 / 90) and its shapes are essential and simple. Because of this, it is ideal for setting text in all kinds of printed matter: catalogues, books and magazines. The letter forms are wide and open, so text can be set in small sizes and thus space can be saved, while keeping the same degree of readability. The author wishes to acknowledge František Štorm for his invaluable opinions. Also to Palo Bálik and Peter Bilak for their contributions. I am specially grateful to all the devas (archaic expression for beautiful young girl), who inspired me to design this typeface. This is dedicated to Janka Ráczová, Jarka Krajčiová, Mariana Felgueiras and obviously to Martinka Filípková! Every use of Deva Ideal is a little homage to these interesting women.

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!

I've been learning to read Cyrillic and Greek letters lately, mainly because I've been playing the game GeoGuessr. (If you haven't played it, I highly recommend! It plops you down somewhere in the world in Google Street View, and you have to figure out where you are.) Cyrillic shows up in so many more places than Russia! You can see it in Bulgaria, Mongolia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kyrgyzstan, and more. Because of that, I made sure to include a fun double-uppercase version of those alphabet sets in Sleepy Bear. They're styled the same way as the Latin characters: all uppercase height, with some lowercase-styled letters thrown in at that same height for a fun look for all ages. I've also made two weights of Sleepy Bear: a plump and smooth regular weight, and a lighter weight that's built to stack on top of the regular (though you can use it on its own). Just type out a word in Sleepy Bear, copy it, and then change the copy to Sleepy Bear Light. You'll get a great outline look in seconds! All characters are extensively cleaned up, with smooth curves and rounded ends. Sleepy Bear is great for all print projects, and also cuts out of all materials like a dream. It's a cute and quirky monoline font family that's great for all of your family's designs. Each font contains over 850 glyphs, and includes: - Latin and extended Latin characters to support over 100 languages; - Cyrillic and Greek double-uppercase alphabet sets; - 18 fractions; - Punctuation galore; - 38 double-letter ligatures for variety (including international pairs like KK and II); - And a half-dozen alternates for even more variety!

One of the most widely used typefaces in the world is actually a legacy of 18th century aesthetics, representing the spirit of late Baroque design, architecture, fashion and society. It has been created and printed for millions of readers around the world for more than two and a half centuries. It influenced many modern typographers. It shaped culture, education, entertainment and science, but also the development of typography itself. As a calligrapher and technical innovator, Baskerville invented new design, papermaking and printing methods, and his typography is very natural and legible to this day. Graphic design today calls for clean and minimalistic solutions, where the use of historical typefaces can achieve a vivid contrast with contemporary elements on the page or screen. Baskerville is undoubtedly the best choice for any kind of publishing house. In keeping with the original inventor’s spirit of excellence, we hereby offer its most advanced digital version. This is not a precise remake of rare Baskerville prints or a restoration of the original punches cut by John Handy, but rather our ideal essence of transitional typography. The old masters were limited by the technology of the time, but today we can dare to have very fine lines, unlimited ligatures, size variations and sophisticated OpenType functions. Drawing, programming, proofing and testing took us many years of development and brought thousands of new letters and dozens of language options. We are convinced that your readers will enjoy this font mainly for reading extensive works, but also for creating corporate identity, orientation systems and cultural posters. Baskerville is perfectly modern in its antiquity, striking in its modesty and timeless in its transiency.

The designer of ITC Medea , Silvio Napoleone said: “I've always had an interest in early letter shapes, particularly how they influenced modern typographic designs. While I was on vacation in Greece, I had a chance to see, first-hand, examples of early letterforms and typography. They really made an impression on me.” The idea of combining the ancient and the modern to create something new was the primary inspiration behind ITC Medea. ITC Medea is essentially a careful blending of the modern sans serif with the elegant forms of the uncial. At first glance, Medea appears to be constructed of geometric shapes. However, closer inspection reveals many calligraphic subtleties. Stroke terminals are flared slightly in characters like the 'e' and 'c.' The top curve of the 'd' is more pronounced than the bottom, and characters like the 'o' are elliptical rather than round. “I gravitated towards the simplicity and legibility of the uncial and half-uncial,” Napoleone recalls. “I thought it would make a great titling font, and I was surprised at how attractive ITC Medea looked in a body text.”

Crypto-typography - the passion for unknown, weird and unusual character shapes - is a disease commonly affecting type designers. Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini has celebrated it in this typeface family, aptly named Hagrid after the half-blood giant with a passion for cryptozoology described by R. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter books. Extreme optical corrections, calligraphic counter-spaces, inverted contrast, over-the-top overshoots: all the inventions that abound in vernacular and experimental typography have been lovingly collected in this mongrel sans serif family, carefully balancing quirky solutions and solid grotesque design. Hagrid is a typeface designed for editorial & display use, bringing dynamism to the printed and digital page thanks to its extreme contrast and unique details. It has been developed in a range of six display weights ranging from the monolinear and more traditional thin to the expressive heavy weight. For better readability in small sizes and on the web, a companion text family has been developed, with a slightly different selection of weights, wider metrics, and fine adjustments to keep the dynamic expressivity of the design without sacrificing legibility. This is evident in the design of italics: while the display italics sport a cursive feel with calligraphic terminals to lowercase letters, the text design is more restrained, with a more classical geometric grotesque slanted look. Given the crypto-typographer love for foreign specimens of letters, special care has been put into making Hagrid ready for multilingual projects, giving it an extended character sets covering over two hundred languages that use Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets and adding a selected range of OpenType features to handle alternate forms and stylistic sets.