Diorite is modern face built on classical letterforms -- but left with a bit of residual roughness. Some might call Diorite forthright, others brutal. (It reminded the designer of the dark, hard igneous rock of the same name, treasured by the ancient Egyptians for statuary.) The typeface has a relatively chunky, four-style family; the italics are true cancellaresca corsiva, also writ heavy. "The cancellaresca is of course a Gothic design," notes the designer. "Just use a broader pen, and you'll see!" Has four styles: regular, bold, cursive, and cursive bold.

In creating Vectora, Adrian Frutiger was influenced by American Gothic styles, especially those of Morris F. Benton’s Franklin Gothic and News Gothic. Vectora is light and balanced, giving text legibility and a harmonious appearance.

Tuscan wood types cover a fairly wide range of styles, and there is sometimes confusion over what is classified as a Gothic Tuscan and what is considered an Antique Tuscan. HWT American Chromatic and P22 Tuscan Expanded are more precisely faces of the Antique Tuscan variety. Gothic Tuscans are generally absent of the heavy serifs typically associated with their Antique Tuscan brethren (although decorative bifurcation of terminals can imply serifs). Additional internal decoration with spikes along the stems gives some Tuscans their distinctive look, these faces are often described as “Circus Types.” Tuscan Extended is an extremely wide design, with a distinctive slab crossbar running through the center of most characters. Each letter is a complex system in its own right. This typeface is best used very large in short headline work. The style defies falling clearly into either the Antique Tuscan or Gothic Tuscan category. The new HWT version of Tuscan Extended has been meticulously redrawn by Frank Grießhammer. During production, he also incorporated a number of new letterforms, bringing the font to over 300 characters (including a full ASCII character set and Central European accented characters).

The first Tuscan lettering was penned in the mid-fourth century by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. The style was still in common usage as calligraphy when Vincent Figgins designed the first Antique Tuscan for print in 1817. Antique and Gothic Tuscan woodtype fonts appeared in the 1830’s. By the 1850’s, Tuscan fonts had become popular in America. These styles continued in print use into the twentieth century. Tuscan Antique and Gothic styles, borrowed from print and calligraphy, were perfect for signs, posters, handbills and other large format advertising. Sign painter, Frank Atkinson demonstrated several Tuscan forms in his book Sign Painting, A Complete Manual. Modified & Spurred Tuscan Romans were inspired by this and other works of the same period.

After researching the type styles contemporary graphic designers have been using over the past few years, I noticed a consistent use of Copperplate Gothic, and its derivative designs, for various corporate advertising campaigns. That level of usage gave me the inspiration to design a display font possessing subtle characteristics of Copperplate Gothic, and various Latin Condensed designs. The font I ended up designing was semi-condensed, with more contrast between thicks and thins than in Copperplate. Baltra also has a subtle flair in its otherwise traditional lowercase, while possessing a larger than average lowercase x-height. Copperplate Gothic, on the other hand, has minimal contrast and uses small capitals for its lowercase. After examining extensive type specimens from wood type, metal type, phototype and digital type, I was not able to find a single design possessing a majority of Baltra's characteristics. Consequently, I consider Baltra to be a truly unique design, sharing with Copperplate Gothic only its flairs on stems, and having only subtle characteristics in common with traditional Latin designs.