Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.

Agmena™ has no historical precursor; it was designed from scratch by Jovica Veljovi? whose aim was to create a new book typeface. Although it generally has certain similarities with the group of Renaissance Antiqua fonts, it is not clearly derived from any of these. Clear and open forms, large counters and a relatively generous x-height ensure that the characters that make up Agmena are readily legible even in small point sizes. The slightly tapering serifs with their curved attachments to letter stems soften the rigidity of the typeface, bringing Agmena to life. This non-formal quality is further enhanced by numerous tiny variations to the letter shapes. For example, there are slight differences to the terminals of the b", the "d" and the "h" and minor dissimilarities in the forms and lengths of serifs of many of the letters. The tittles over the "i" and "j" and those of the German umlauts are almost circular, while the diamond shape that is more characteristic of a calligraphic script is used for the punctuation marks. Although many of these variations are only apparent on closer inspection, they are enough to give Agmena the feeling of a hand-made typeface. It is in the larger point sizes that this feature of Agmena comes particularly into play, and individual characters gain an almost sculptural quality. The italic variants of Agmena are actually real cursives. The narrower and thus markedly dynamically formed lowercase letters have a wider range of contrast in terms of line thickness and have the appearance of having been manually produced with a quill thanks to the variations in their terminals. The lowercase "a" assumes a closed form and the "f" has a descender. The italic capitals, on the other hand, have been consciously conceived to act as a stabilising element, although the way they have been inclined does not produce a simply mechanical effect. This visual convergence with the upright characters actually means that it is possible to use letters from both styles in combination. Agmena is available in four weights: Book, Regular, Semibold and Bold, and each has its matching italic variant. Veljovi? designed Book and Regular not only to provide an optical balance between various point sizes, such as between that used for the text and that used in footnotes, but also to take account of different paper forms: Regular for lined paper and Book for publishing paper. Agmena's range of characters leaves nothing to be desired. All variants include small caps and various numeral sets with oldstyle and lining figures for setting proportional text and table columns. Thanks to its pan-European language support, Agmena can be used to set texts not only in languages that use the Latin alphabet as it also features Cyrillic and Greek characters. The set of standard ligatures has been extended to include special combinations for setting Greek and Serbian. Agmena also has some initial letters, alternative glyphs and ornaments. Agmena is a poetic text font with forms and spacing that have been optimised over years of work to provide a typeface that is ideal for setting books. But its letters also cut a good figure in the larger font sizes thanks to their individual, vibrant and, in some cases, sculptural effects. Its robust forms are not merely suited to a printed environment, but are also at home among the complex conditions on terminal screens. You can thus also use Agmena as a web font when designing your internet page."Agmena has received the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design at the Type Directors Club of New York TDC2 competition in 2013.

There is plenty of lyric and literature about looking over one's shoulder in contemplation. What would you have done differently if you knew then what you know now? This is the kind of question that comes out of nowhere. When it does and whether its context is personal or professional make very little difference. It's a question that can cause emotions to rise and passions to run hot. It can trigger priority shifts and identity crises. It's never easy to answer. Three years ago, I published a font called Semilla. My aim with that was to distill the work of Bentele, a lettering artist from early 1950s Germany. Picking such an obscure figure back then was my way of pondering the meaning and efficiency of objectivity in a world where real human events and existences are inevitably filtered through decades of unavoidably subjective written, printed and oral history. And maybe to pat myself on the back for surviving surprises mild and pleasant. Having been fortunate enough to follow my professional whims for quite some time now, I took another, longer look at my idea of distilling Bentele's work again. I suppose the concepts of established history and objectivity can become quite malleable when personal experience is added to the mix. I say that because there I was, three years later, second-guessing myself and opining that Bentele's work can be distilled differently, in a manner more suited to current cultural angles. So I embarked on that mission, and Bowling Script is the result. I realize that it's difficult to reconcile this soft and happy calligraphic outcome with the introspection I've blathered about so far, but it is what is. I guess even self-created first world problems need to be resolved somehow, and the resolution can happen in mysterious ways. Bowling Script is what people who like my work would expect from me. It's yet another script loaded with all kinds of alternation, swashing and over-the-top stuff. All of that is in here. These days I think I just do all that stuff without even blinking. But there are two additional twists. The more noticeable one is ornamental: The stroke endings in the main font are of the typical sharp and curly variety found in sign painting, while the other font complements that with ball endings, sometimes with an added-on-afterwards impression rather than an extension of the actual stroke. In the philosophical terms I was mumbling earlier, this is the equivalent of alternate realities in a world of historical reduxes that by their very nature can never properly translate original fact. The second twist has to do with the disruption of angular rhythm in calligraphic alphabets. Of course, this is the kind of lettering where the very concept of rhythm can be quite flexible, but it still counts for something, and experimenting with angular white space in a project of a very dense footprint was irresistible. After playing for a bit, I decided that it would interesting to include the option of using optically back-slanted forms in the fonts. Most scripts out there, including mine, have a rhythm sonically comparable to four-to-the-floor club beats. So the weirdly angled stuff here is your chance to do the occasional drumroll. Everyone knows we need one of those sometimes. Bowling Script and Bowling Script Balls fonts comes with 1600 characters and features extended Latin-based language support. There are also a basic version of both fonts without all the alternates and extra OpenType features. Bowling family ships in cross-platform OpenType format. We also want to present “Mute”, a visual essay narated by Tomás García and Valentín Muro, about digital life created specially to introduce Bowling Script.

Over the past few years, every designer has seen the surprising outbreak of blackletter types in marketing campaigns for major sports clothing manufacturers, a few phone companies, soft drink makers, and more recently on entertainment and music products. In such campaigns, blackletter type combined with photos of usual daily activity simply adds a level of strength and mystique to things we see and do on a regular basis. But we couldn't help noticing that the typography was very odd in such campaigns, where the type overpowers all the other design elements. This is because almost all blackletter fonts ever made express too much strength and time-stamp themselves in a definite manner, thereby eliminating themselves as possible type choices for a variety of common contemporary design approaches, such as minimal, geometric, modular, etc. So extending the idea of using blackletter in modern design was a bit of a wild goose chase for us. But we finally found the face that completes the equation no other blackletter could fit into: Leather is a digitization and major expansion of Imre Reiner's forgotten but excellent 1933 Gotika design, which was very much ahead of its time. In its own time this design saw very little use because it caused problems to printers, where the thin serifs and inner bars were too fragile and broke off too easily when used in metal. But now, more than seventy years later, it seems like it was made for current technologies, and it is nothing short of being the perfect candidate for using blackletter in grid-based settings. Leather has three features usually not found in other blackletter fonts: - Grid-based geometric strokes and curves: In the early 1930s, blackletter design had already begun interacting back with the modern sans serif it birthed at the turn of the century. This design is one of the very few manifestations of such interaction. - Fragile, Boboni-like serifs, sprout from mostly expected places in the minuscules, but are sprinkled very aesthetically on some of the majuscules. The overall result is magnificently modern. - The usual complexity of blackletter uppercase's inner bars is rendered simple, geometric and very visually appealing. The contrast between the inner bars and thick outer strokes creates a surprising circuitry-like effect on some of the letters (D, O, Q), wonderfully plays with the idea of fragile balances on some others (M, N and P), and boldly introduces new concepts on others (B, F, K, L, R). Our research seems to suggest that the original numerals used with this design in the 1930s were adopted from a previous Imre Reiner typeface. They didn't really fit with the idea of this font, so we created brand new numerals for Leather. We also expanded the character set to cover all Western Latin-based languages, and scattered plenty of alternates and ligatures throughout the map. The name, Leather, was derived from a humorous attempt at naming a font. Initially we wanted to call it Black Leather (blackletter...blackleather), but the closer we came to finishing it, the more respect we developed for its attempt to introduce a plausible convergence between two entirely different type categories. Sadly for the art, this idea of convergence didn't go much further back then, due to technological limitations and the eventual war a few years later. We're hoping this revival would encourage people to look at blackletter under a new light in these modern times of multiple design influences.

INTRODUCING THE GEMINI TYPE FONTPACK, an industrial-strength OpenType font bundle inspired by and optimized for dimensional type. Chank Co is proud to introduce the new “Gemini Type Fontpack,” a collection of ten fonts available for use on your desktop computer or web pages, but also optimized for use as exterior cast-metal signage in bronze or aluminum in collaboration with Gemini, a family-owned industry leader in the wholesale manufacture of dimensional letters, logo and plaques based in Cannon Falls, MN. Gemini collaborated with Chank Co to assemble a line of fonts that would work well as dimensional, cast-letter signage for use on the sides of buildings, in stores, and other public spaces. The fonts included in the “Gemini Type Fontpack” are reinterpretations of previous Chank Fonts, now optimized for dimensional signage display, but then also repackaged and presented for your use as an OpenType desktop computer font collection: GT-Adrianna DemiBold GT-Adrianna Bold GT-Adrianna ExtraBold GT-Fairbanks GT-Forward Thinking GT-Hydropower ExtraCondensed GT-Kegger GT-Shopaganda GT-Shopaganda Condensed GT-Timeless Geometric. This is a multi-purpose collection of heavy-lifting fonts to convey your message strong and clearly, full of legibility and clarity, but also displaying personality and distinction. You can purchase and download these fonts in OpenType format for your desktop computer right now via MyFonts. Get it today and you'll also get a great introductory special sale price. These exclusive typefaces are also available as dimensional letters, manufactured by Gemini in bronze or aluminum, from 6" tall up to 18" tall, with a variety of finish options, for use in public signage and wayfinding systems. Gemini manufacture their products in 20 plants through out the US, Canada and Mexico, and all their products are backed by a lifetime guarantee. Chank Co is excited to offer these ten strong, industrial font designs in durable cast metal format via Gemini. ----- More about the fonts in the Gemini Type Fontpack: GT-Adrianna DemiBold, Bold, and Adrianna ExtraBold Clear, invisible, no-nonsense, multi-purpose. A versatile sans-serif heavy-lifting font family. GT-Fairbanks Vintage, silent film, speedball, old-timey, old-fashioned, retro. Based upon the lettering in the 1914 silent film, “The Good Bad Man.” GT-Forward Thinking Futuristic, semi-serif, clean, distinctive, contemporary, idiosyncratic. A font for tomorrow and the future. GT-Hydropower ExtraCondensed Extra-condensed, compressed, strong, rigid and concise. GT-Kegger Strong, sporty, collegiate, athletic. Nothing says “GO TEAM” quite like a big, bold slab-serif font. GT-Shopaganda and GT-Shopaganda Condensed Industrial, geometric, constructivist, propaganda, oh there’s so much to love about the strength and clarity of these two fonts. Based on Chank’s Liquorstore and Nicotine fonts, which have been married and unified here, with a few new twists and turns to their letterforms. GT-Timeless Geometric Bauhaus, anyone? The geometric and minimalist alphabet here is about as clean and straight-forward as a semi-condensed sans can get. ----- All of the fonts in this package are available individually, or save money when you purchase all ten of them as a collection. Download this digital font package from MyFonts today and you'll receive both OpenType and TrueType formats in your download for your desktop computer. Webfont format is also available. (If you'd like to use these fonts as cast-metal letters for exterior, architectural purposes, visit the Gemini website to learn more about how you can find a signage retailer near you.)