Style and elegance in 14 styles PS Fournier, created by Stéphane Elbaz, is designed in tribute to Pierre Simon Fournier. Fournier was the prolific Parisian type designer whose work is best known for its iconic representation of French transitional style. PS Fournier elegantly represents the transition to the modern era of typography. Featuring three optical sizes, PS Fournier is designed to perform in any context. The Pierre Simon Fournier heritage Pierre Simon Fournier (1712—1768) was a leading innovative type designer of the mid-18th century. Early in his career, the young Pierre Simon developed a strong aesthetic that he cultivated throughout his life. His art is representative of the pre-revolutionary “Age of Enlightenment” (Siècle des Lumières). Precursor of the Modern style, Fournier’s body of work deeply influenced his times, and created the fertile ground from which the Didot family and Giambattista Bodoni developed their own styles. During the historical period of the 18th century, Fournier exemplified the intellectual pursuits of the times with his own research on type, documenting in detail the typefounding process. He also offered a unique vision: he is the first to clearly comprehend the concept of “type family,” sorting a set of similarly styled alphabets by sizes, width, and by x-heights. In addition, Fournier is one of the earliest advocates of the point system to organize the practice of typography, the point system that contemporary typographers continue to use to this day. The refined and discreet elegance of PS Fournier With a close look at the family, one finds you’ll find that the difference between the optical sizes (Petit, standard and Grand) is more than a contrast variation between the thin and the thick; the eye can also denote a palette of distinct tones: More streamlined and robust in the smaller sizes (Petit), more refined and detailed in the larger sizes (Grand). The PS Fournier standard family is designed to adapt to any situation with its intermediate optical size, from body copy to headlines. With a bit of tracking, PS Fournier Petit will make the smallest captions perfectly readable. However, Petit family is not limited to body and captions — its “slabby robustness” will make a relevant headline choice as well. PS Fournier Grand presents a higher contrast adapted to large text sizes, displays or banners. Its refined elegance makes it a perfect choice for Design, Fashion or Luxury publications. As a “modern” type PS Fournier Grand features a larger x-height than the preexistent old style typefaces such as Garamond or Jenson. These proportions provide any basic text set in PS Fournier Grand a strong typographic texture. As a result, the PS Fournier global family is a versatile alternative to the Modern typefaces commonly used in the publishing industry. The optical sizes, the large range of weights, and the design variations make this family adaptable to captions, paragraphs, and pages, as well as to large texts and displays. A leading-edge typography in the 18th century In the spirit of modernity, Pierre Simon Fournier did not find any use for the conventional swashes still produced by peers such as Caslon or Baskerville. Nevertheless the French designer created many inventive elements to decorate the page and set delightful variations in the text itself. To this regard PS Fournier includes a large set of glyphs variations, ligatures and more than one hundred glyphs for borders, rules and ornaments or — as called in French — “vignettes.” PS Fournier: A tribute to the French modern typography era by Stéphane Elbaz

Helvetica’s 50-year anniversary celebrations in 2007 were overwhelming and contagious. We saw the movie. Twice. We bought the shirts and the buttons. We dug out the homage books and re-read the hate articles. We mourned the fading non-color of an old black shirt proudly exclaiming that “HELVETICA IS NOT AN ADOBE FONT”. We took part in long conversations discussing the merits of the Swiss classic, that most sacred of typographic dreamboats, outlasting its builder and tenants to go on alone and saturate the world with the fundamental truth of its perfect logarithm. We swooned again over its subtleties (“Ah, that mermaid of an R!”). We rehashed decades-old debates about “Hakzidenz,” “improvement in mind” and “less is more.” We dutifully cursed every single one of Helvetica’s knockoffs. We breathed deeply and closed our eyes on perfect Shakti Gawain-style visualizations of David Carson hack'n'slashing Arial — using a Swiss Army knife, no less — with all the infernal post-brutality of his creative disturbance and disturbed creativity. We then sailed without hesitation into the absurdities of analyzing Helvetica’s role in globalization and upcoming world blandness (China beware! Helvetica will invade you as silently and transparently as a sheet of rice paper!). And at the end of a perfect celebratory day, we positively affirmed à la Shakti, and solemnly whispered the energy of our affirmation unto the universal mind: “We appreciate Helvetica for getting us this far. We are now ready for release and await the arrival of the next head snatcher.” The great hype of Swisspalooza '07 prompted a look at Max Miedinger, the designer of Neue Haas Grotesk (later renamed to Helvetica). Surprisingly, what little biographical information available about Miedinger indicates that he was a typography consultant and type sales rep for the Haas foundry until 1956, after which time he was a freelance graphic designer — rather than the full-time type designer most Helvetica enthusiasts presume him to have been. It was under that freelance capacity that he was commissioned to design the regular and bold weights of Neue Haas Grotesk typeface. His role in designing Helvetica was never really trumpeted until long after the typeface attained global popularity. And, again surprisingly, Miedinger designed two more typefaces that seem to have been lost to the dust of film type history. One is called Pro Arte (1954), a very condensed Playbill-like slab serif that is similar to many of its genre. The other, made in 1964, is much more interesting. Its original name was Horizontal. Here it is, lest it becomes a Haas-been, presented to you in digital form by Canada Type under the name of its original designer, Miedinger, the Helvetica King. The original film face was a simple set of bold, panoramically wide caps and figures that give off a first impression of being an ultra wide Gothic incarnation of Microgramma. Upon a second look, they are clearly more than that. This face is a quirky, very non-Akzidental take on the vernacular, mostly an exercise in geometric modularity, but also includes some unconventional solutions to typical problems (like thinning the midline strokes across the board to minimize clogging in three-storey forms). This digital version introduces four new weights, ranging from Thin to Medium, alongside the bold original. The Miedinger package comes in all popular font formats, and supports Western, Central and Eastern European languages, as well as Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish and Celtic/Welsh. A few counter-less alternates are included in the fonts.

If you want to write something sincere and genuine but not too formal then this is the font for you. It is based on real handwriting, not some artificial calligraphy made to be either too haphazard or spiky or have loads of elegant flourishes but an ordinary person's writing, and designed to look as natural and as close to the original lettering as possible. Like any person's writing it is individual and distinctive, but so easy going on the eye those differences sit comfortably with you. It is friendly and open with easy to read glyphs both as lowercase and uppercase. The letters are relatively wide with clearly shaped distinct outlines. This font may be ideal for projects where you expect a wide readership with different reading abilities from young to old. When you are using this font a slightly bigger point size usually gives a better result so for a standard letter or similar you should size up to 15 points or more. Maree has been individually crafted to the smallest detail. To create a realistic handwriting font that looks relatively simple but works in a wide variety of languages requires a complexity and attention to detail most fonts will never require. This font in any ordinary business environment would never have been made, the effort required to make it too great, the length of time too long. There have been no shortcuts in this font, no automatic scanning or tracing, no automatic generation, no class kerning. Not only is each glyph individual but the width of letters, the height, the accents and the positions of the accents are all different. Even the line weight of the letters is designed to have natural variation but yet similar enough that the font appears as though it were written effortlessly in the same pen. And in order to keep the spacing consistent even though the letters have different widths, heights, lengths of descenders and so on, there are a vast number of kerning pairs, letter to letter, number to number, letter to number... All kerning has been individually assessed with an eye to proportionality taking in character shape, size and weight. For instance if you write a telephone number the numbers all sit close together but if you write a number before a letter such as in a UK post code or before a unit of measurement an extra little bit of space has been added which makes the number more distinct and therefore readable. That space is so natural to the eye that you don’t even know it is there. However even in the spacing allowance has been made for the fact it can’t be too perfect because when you write by hand the spacing is inconsistent. There have to be some letters which are too close or far apart otherwise the font would look artificial. For similar reasons if you are going to print out this font for a letter, etc, check the print version before you make any letter spacing changes because with the zoom functions in modern applications that uneven spacing and lettering can seem more pronounced than it actually is. When this font is printed out you will find it is surprisingly neat. This font is what it is, simple clear handwriting. You will not go wow. But if you want something unique and different and looks good on the page you won’t be disappointed. This font is not a work of art but it is a work of love. This font has a soul. How many fonts can you say that about?

Empresario Stephen F. Austin (1793-1836) is considered by many the “Father of Texas” for leading the first Anglo-American colony into the then-Mexican territory back in the 1820s. A few years later, while on a diplomatic mission to Mexico City, Austin was arrested on suspicion of plotting Texas independence and imprisoned for virtually all of 1834. During this time he kept a secret diary of his thoughts and musings—much of it written in Spanish. Austin Pen is my interpretation of Austin’s scribblings in this miniature prison journal (now in the collection of the wonderful Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, in the Texas city that bears his name). The little leather-bound book is filled with notes in ink and pencil—some of the faded penciled pages traced in ink years later by Austin’s nephew Moses Bryan. A genuine replication of 19th century cursive, Austin Pen has two styles: a fine regular weight, along with a bold style that replicates passages written with an over-inked pen. Each is legible and evocative of commonplace American penmanship of two centuries ago.

Zarlino is an original typeface in the Blackletter style. It does not solidly adhere to any of the historical Blackletter classifications, but draws from all of them, with some characters owing more to the Roman than the Fraktur. Zarlino Delux includes three complete sets of upper case, ranging from the simple to the embellished to the even more embellished, two complete sets of lower case, and two more sets of embellished alternates for selected lower case characters. These alternates are available through Stylisitic Sets in OpenType aware applications. For use in non-OpenType aware applications, Zarlino Delux comes with a set of separate, standard fonts, one for each style. These standard fonts are also available for individual purchase. Zarlino was named by my cousin, a musician. Gioseffo Zarlino was a sixteenth century composer and musical theorist. Among other things, he offered detailed advice on the setting of words to music. With its blends of the old and the new, the simple and the ornate, Zarlino is suitable for many uses, from the elegant to the aggressive.

Norberto, a CastleType original, is based on a Russian design from the late 19th century that in turn appears to be based on Bodoni. However, Norberto is a much warmer design than most Bodonis, with many soft touches such as very gentle curves from the serif at the top of B, D, P, and R; a jaunty cap on the ‘A’ (and Cyrillic ‘El’, ‘De’, etc); charmingly quaint numerals; hairline accents, and other subtleties that make it a wonderful addition to the Modern typefaces. In addition to several useful OpenType features, Norberto also offers extensive language support, including modern Greek and most languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, as well as built-in keyboard support for Esperanto and Yoruba. Norberto now has a stencil version which combines the elegance of the original with the informality of a stencil cut. As one enthusiast says, "As a die-cut companion to his compact Norberto, Jason Castle's Norberto Stencil hits us right where we live with its svelte stature and sexy, Bodoni-esque bones." — Typedia

Chimpsdale name was inspired by the Fairly Odd Parents cartoon series, which tells about the parody world of Planet Of The Apes. Chimpsdale is an alternate version of Dimsdale from the ape-dominated world created by Bippy the Monkey’s wish, after he bit into a magic muffin that allowed him one rule-free wish in Abra-Catastrophe. Chimpsdale is a font that is inspired by the theme of past kingdoms, we wrap it in such a way to make it look suitable for many jobs Especially.You can use it as a logo, badge, insignia, packaging, headline, poster, t-shirt/apparel, greeting card, business card, and wedding invitation and more. The flowing characters are ideal to make an attractive messages to your taste. mix and match with a bunch of alternative characters to fit your project.It will be more interesting if you add swash / alternative swash. The alternative characters in this font were divided into several OpenType features such as Stylistic Alternates, Ligature and Ligature Alternates. Mail support : maculinc@gmail.com Thank you! Maculinc

Bouquet font is a cursive fat typeface influenced by brush writing and skilfully flavored with elements of fractur. The result is really amazing – a font with bespoke personality, strong unique presence and classy standing out amongst the other look. Type designer Dzianis Serabrakou really did well in every single letterform, aperture, curve and line, but this was probably below satisfactory and he didn’t stop here – Denis developed the font to a higher level by making it fully open-type compatible. Bouquet supports large set of multilingual diacritics plus a beautifully designed set of Cyrillic characters. Additionally you will be able to use also ligatures and really lots of alternative symbols to bring more life, versatility and personalization in your work. Initially Bouquet has been designed as a logo font – it is so identical that could easily turn every brand name into logo icon. Furthermore this font is perfect for designing t-shirts, typographic posters, packaging etc and it is highly recommended for letterpress as well as for normal offset and screen printing.

The original Jessen typeface, named in reminiscence of the great supporter of the printing art at the end of the 19th century, Peter Jessen, was designed in the years of 1924 until 1930. Bible Gothic was created by the famous German designer Rudolf Koch. Ralph M. Unger digitized this font exclusively for profonts in 2005, keeping his digitization as close as possible to the original design of Koch in order to preserve the distinguished character and the partly unconventional, original forms. The concept of a Bible Gothic was developing for years in Koch's mind and drove the direction of his work, but only after the experience with his Neuland design could he start the creation of his Peter Jessen typeface. Produced quite like Neuland, Jessen, however, is much more refined and more accurate in detail than Neuland. At first glance, it seems to look plain and simple, but if you look closer, the richness of its distinguished upper case forms unfold to a perfectly clear flow of text

ITC Avant Garde Gothic is a font family based on the logo font used in the Avant Garde magazine. Herb Lubalin devised the logo concept and its companion headline typeface, then he and Tom Carnase, a partner in Lubalin’s design firm, worked together to transform the idea into a full-fledged typeface. The condensed fonts were drawn by Ed Benguiat in 1974, and the obliques were designed by André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt in 1977. The original designs include one version for setting headlines and one for text copy. However, in the initial digitization, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included. The font family consists of 5 weights (4 for condensed), with complementary obliques for widest width fonts. When ITC released the OpenType version of the font, the original 33 alternate characters and ligatures, plus extra characters were included. ITC Avant Garde Gothic® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives. Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos, Best Fonts for Websites, Best Fonts for PowerPoints

Homogenic is a new casual modern script font. This font describes about girly, feminist, elegant, dynamic, humanist, easy to use and will bring a good harmony when the letters are connected and paired each other. FEATURES - Support Opentype Features - Support Ligatures - Automatic stylistic alternates bb dd ee ff gg hh ii kk ll mm nn oo pp rr ss tt zz ah ak al am an ar ba bh bl br bt cl ch eh ek el em en gh ght gl gn gr gt ie ih ik il im in ir jt lt nt oh ok ol om on or or ov ow se sh sk sl sn sp sr st ue uh uk ul um un ur ve we wi wo yl yn yt Sl Sh Sk - Uppercase - Lowercase - Numbering and Punctuations - Multilingual Support - Works on PC or Mac USE Homogenic works great in any branding, logos, magazines, apparel, wedding designs, social media posts, advertisements, product packaging, product designs, label, photography, watermark, invitation, stationery and any projects that need handwriting taste.

The font Marcel is named in honor of Marcel Heuzé, a Frenchman who was conscripted into labor during World War II. During the months Marcel was in Germany, he wrote letters to his beloved wife and daughters back home in rural France. Marcel’s letters contain rare first-person testimony of day-to-day survival within a labor camp, along with the most beautiful expressions of love imaginable. The letters — stained and scarred with censor marks — were the original source documents used by designer Carolyn Porter to create a script font that retains the expressive character of Marcel Heuzé’s original handwriting. The result of years of research and design work, P22 Marcel Script features more than 1300 glyphs. The font is a highly readable running script that includes textural details that capture the look of ink on paper. The font Marcel Caps is a hand-lettered titling face intended as a companion to the Script. Marcel EuroPost One and Two each feature more than 200 postmarks, cancellation and censor marks, and other embellishments found on historical letters and documents.

The BATTISTA typeface stands in the long tradition of the designs developed by Giambattista Bodoni, who made his famous typefaces in the end of the eighteenth century. Similar designs can be found on various specimen books e.g. Alexander Wilson, John Bell, Edmund Fry and Alexander Thibaudeau. One of the best italics was available by Stephenson Blake & Co. foundry form Sheffield, England. In the end of the nineteenth century an unknown punch cutter at the German type foundry Schelter & Giesecke made an very bold cut of this Bodoni design. He brought both designs, the regular and the italic to an new level of harmony. Compared to the original Bodoni designs the new typeface was a lot bolder, which was well taken by the audience in this time. The BATTISTA typeface is an remarkable design, assembled of ultra bold and very fine shapes, but in all, the spirit of Bodonis design was well preserved. BATTISTA is a classic display design. The fine details are best shown on larger text sizes.

Futura is a classic geometric sans serif, one of the crucial typefaces of the 20th century. It remains relevant today and is widely used in logos, headings, web and print. Futura was designed by Paul Renner for Bauersche Gießerei (Bauer) in 1927. The typeface is based on simple geometric forms and is close in the aesthetics to 1920s-30s constructivism and the Bauhaus. Futura PT is the most complete Cyrillic version of Futura. It’s a type system of 25 styles: 16 regular and 9 narrow, from Thin to Extrabold. Futura PT has linear and old style figures, subscripts and fractions. The typeface supports more than 100 languages: Western and Central European Latin and the Cyrillic-extended. The Cyrillic version of Futura was designed by Vladimir Yefimov in 1991–1995. He partially redesigned the typeface in 2007, making it a wholesome consistent system, and Isabella Chaeva added new styles. The typeface was released under the name Futura PT. Isabella Chaeva returned to work on Futura in 2022. The typeface has three new styles, old style figures and extended Cyrillic support.

After the success of our best-selling Mr Black, we decided to once more use my grandfather’s dry transfer lettering sheets. My grandfather was a Polish military cartographer and he left us some used-up sheets. The letters didn't transfer so well but we liked the way they were damaged. Mr Tiger has upper- and lowercase characters with up to four alternate glyphs. First three variations are only slightly damaged but the fourth one is usually more distorted. All of the glyphs have a very high resolution so they can be used in a large scale and they will still look great. One of the best things in Mr Tiger is the OpenType Contextual Alternates feature. It will automatically set alternate glyphs depending on frequency of appearance of the same character. The script doesn’t throw random glyphs. For example in the word “HIPPOPOTAMUS” you will automatically get three different “P” glyphs and two “O” glyphs. It really works great but of course you can always fine tune it by hand.

Rialto dF is a book face inspired by calligraphic tradition. Named after the famous bridge in Venice, it was conceived as a bridge between calligraphy and typography, roman and italic. It can also be thought of as an imaginary bridge between Italy and Austria, since it is the result of collaboration started in 1995 between the Austrian Lui Karner and Venetian Giovanni de Faccio. The letterforms of Rialto dF were drawn directly in digital format with a starting point deriving from humanistic letterforms memorized in the hearts, minds and the manual ability of its designers… As tradition demands, uppercase, numerals and punctuation are used in combination with italics – the same solution adopted by Francesco Griffo when he cut his first italic for the Virgil, the first of the octavo series printed and published in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1501. Rialto dF comes in two optical weights: Piccolo, for up to 14 pt, and Grande for 16pt and above. Alternate characters and various dingbats are also provided and these are available through OpenType features developed by type designer and technician Karsten Luecke.

Introducing! New Elegant Script Font. Just Sunday! Just Sunday is modern feminine font, every single letters have been carefully crafted to make your text looks beautiful. With modern script style this font will perfect for many different project ex: logo, photography, watermark, quotes, blog header, poster, wedding, branding, logo, fashion, apparel, letter, invitation, stationery, etc. Just Sunday also includes Regular and Bold, full set of uppercase and lowercase letters, multilingual symbols, numerals, punctuation. The font has smooth wet ink texture, so would be perfect for all types of printing techniques+you can do embroidery, laser cut, gold foil etc. Just Sunday has beautiful ligature following : Ju Su St af ah ak al am an as at ay ch ck cl ct dd ef eh ek el em en es et ey ff if ih ik im in il is it iy ll nn oo sh sl ss st tt uf uh uk um un ul us ut uy Contact me if you have any questions: dharmasahestya@gmail.com Thanks! dharmas Std

Folkwang is an unusual roman type with a lowercase that resembles an upright italic. Unusual top serifs are contrasted by almost no foot serifs. Originally released by the Klingspor foundry in 1955, this face originated from Hermann Schardt while he was the director of the Folkwang Werkkunstschule in Essen Germany circa 1949. According to British book designer and printing historian John Dreyfus in the 1955 Penrose Annual: Folkwang “…is a lovingly made piece of work which could have easily have been little more than an act of awe-struck reverence for the calligraphic techniques rediscovered by Edward Johnston and spread abroad in Germany by Anna Simons. Of special interest is the serif treatment of the lower-case letters: at the feet the terminals are mostly left bare, but the ascenders and the cross-strokes of the f and t are given elaborate curving serifs which in the mass create an effect unusual in a page of letters made as movable types, resembling rather more a piece of intaglio engraving. The ligatures ch and ck are original and successful.”

While there can be similar handwriting styles out there, no two handwritings are exactly the same. I like to think that I have the same handwriting style as my father, but I had never seen him write with lowercase letters, only in all capitals, except when signing his name on something in cursive. I recently came across a letter my father had written long ago to a friend. It was returned to sender, yet he kept it intact. The letter primarily thanked his friend for his hospitality when my father unexpectedly dropped in for a visit while traveling. I was so taken by the handwriting, that I decided to make it into a font, not only to remember my father, but also to forever preserve his handwriting. Generous Hospitality not only taps into the character of the person the letter was written to, it also reflects the personality of my father. If you are looking for a masculine handwriting type style for your designs, I think this font could be a nice fit.

Tweed is a journey into the 1930s world of hand-lettering. The design looks very much like the personal scribblings of an old-fashioned cartoon animator. It’s the sort of sketch-style you might find describing a goofy caterpillar or laughing willyworm. Tweed is fun and light-hearted with open and rounded letters of a somewhat musical quality. Derived from old letterforms popularized by Carl Holmes in his wonderful book on the subject, Tweed is basically friendly in nature. This typeface is great for personal greeting cards and stationery - any kind of casual correspondence. It works well in display situations, too. And yes, there is an alternate to the funny-looking “w” character. Just press option l (el) on Mac. Or Alt 0172 on Windows. Tweed is now available in the OpenType Std format. Some new stylistic alternates have been added to this OpenType version. Advanced features work in current versions of Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades.

The Dalecarlian runes, or dalrunes, was a late version of the runic script that was in use in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century.The province has consequently been called the "last stronghold of the Germanic script. When Carl Linnaeus visited Älvdalen in Dalarna in 1734, he made the following note in his diary: The peasants in the community here, apart from using rune staves, still today write their names and ownership marks with runic letters, as is seen on walls, corner stones, bowls, etc. Which one does not know to be still continued anywhere else in Sweden. The Dalecarlian runes were derived from the medieval runes, but the runic letters were combined with Latin ones, and Latin letters would progressively replace the runes. At the end of the 16th century, the Dalecarlian runic inventory was almost exclusively runic, but during the following centuries more and more individual runes were replaced with Latin characters. In its last stage almost every rune had been replaced with a Latin letter, or with special versions that were influenced by Latin characters.

“Fanfare is such a fun typeface,” says Toshi Omagari, who revived the design for The Wolpe Collection. “It was my happiest discovery when I was digging through the Monotype archive. I came across it and had to check the designer’s name.” No wonder: Fanfare is modern, light and playful – not what you’d expect from an 80-year old design. From the original, very heavy weight design, Omagari started by creating a black weight, followed by four lighter weights for Wolpe Fanfare, preserving the character of the letterforms all the way down to a thin version. “I wanted to do more than digitize the original weight,” he says. “It’s surprisingly modern, and its skeleton, its basic structure, is so beautiful.” The new design packs more into a small space than most typefaces. It’s a natural for publication and advertising design. With displays capable of revealing fine details such as Fanfare’s subtly slanted baseline, its lovely forms will easily translate to mobile devices. With an extended European character set that includes Greek and Cyrillic language support, Wolpe Fanfare can speak in many languages.

Vialog is a large and versatile sans serif family consisting of four weights of roman with corresponding italics, each with small caps and Old style Figures. Designers Werner Schneider and Helmut Ness based the concept for Vialog on the forms in "Euro Type," an unpublished type designed by Schneider in 1988 for the German Federal Transportation Ministry. For Vialog, Schneider made comprehensive legibility studies of the existing European transportation fonts, and combined and adapted the best features to make a new information system font family. He fine-tuned Vialog's characters and spacing with a special regard to the legibility problems of transportation settings, such as viewing type at distances and while moving. For example: cap I, J and lowercase i, j are common legibility problems in sans serif fonts, so in Vialog, these characters have serifs. In addition to its usefulness to the transportation industry, the Vialog family confidently meets the needs of corporate design and branding systems with its space-saving attributes for text settings, as well as the large number of weights and styles.

The year 1914 marked the appearance of Washington Ludlow's first typograph machine. This remarkable invention permitted typesetters to quickly cast a full line of lead type in one operation using supplied brass matrices, a procedure which was for the time a major technological improvement over the usual hand-set foundry type methods. Casting type the Ludlow way necessitated the creation of an entire range of new Ludlow typefaces, a development which made Ludlow not only a major manufacturer of printing machinery, but also one of the world's leading sources of professional type design. Renowned typographers such as Douglas C. McMurtrie and Ernest F. Detterer created original faces at Ludlow's request. Robert Hunter Middleton was Ludlow's design director for over fifty years, and during his distinguished career produced an entire library of typefaces representing virtually every known typographic style. He is recognized as one of the most prolific type designers of all time. Today, new Ludlow computer fonts are in preparation, including optically-correct versions of many classic Ludlow typefaces, drawn directly from the originals in the Ludlow company library.

Once upon a midnight dreary, this Comicraftsman pondered, weak and weary, For a name synonymous with Mighty and Marvelous comics lore. Solid, Outline, Inline was the nameless font I'd crafted, I nodded, nearly napping o'er the work I'd grafted When suddenly came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my cubicle door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my cubicle door-- Calling out "EXCELSIOR!" Then an Amazing Vision beguiled my sad fancy into smilin', By the Spectacular decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven," he said, "thou art sure no craven, And thy font should not remain nameless here forevermore!" Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow From comic books surcease of sorrow, letters that called out "EXCELSIOR!" Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking of the nominative neuter singular thing Like Some Silvered Surfer wandering from the Nightly shore-- The Vision shrieked, upstarting--"Tell me what thy lordly name is thus!" Quoth the Craftsman: "EXCELSIUS!"

Franklin Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company in 1903-1912. Early types without serifs were known by the misnomer "gothic" in America ("grotesque" in Britain and "grotesk" in Germany). There were already many gothics in America in the early 1900s, but Benton was probably influenced by the popular German grotesks: Basic Commercial and Reform from D. Stempel AG. Franklin Gothic may have been named for Benjamin Franklin, though the design has no historical relationship to that famous early American printer and statesman. Benton was a prolific designer, and he designed several other sans serif fonts, including Alternate Gothic, Lightline Gothic and News Gothic. Recognizable aspects of Franklin Gothic include the two-story a and g, subtle stroke contrast, and the thinning of round strokes as they merge into stems. The type appears dark and monotone overall, giving it a robustly modern look. Franklin Gothic is still one of the most widely used sans serifs; it's a suitable choice for newspapers, advertising and posters.

Some years ago, a good friend and typophile, Gonzalo García Barcha, approached me with the idea of designing a typeface for his editorial project Blacamán Ediciones. He had just came across an hitherto unknown manuscript by Luis Lagarto, a colonial illuminator and scribe, working in Mexico City and Puebla in the late 1500s. The manuscript calligraphy was incredible and stunningly original. It featured three different hands by the scribe, intermingled in the text: a kind of baroque «Roman» roundhand; a very ornate, lively «Italic»; and some sort of irregular, playful, even funny «small caps». All imbued with an eccentric, convoluted zest and vivacious rhythm. Lagarto is the final result of translating these extraordinary hands into a digital type family. Since the manuscript had no numerals, math signs and many other characters now in use, part of the fun of the job was to infer them from the stylistic peculiarities of Luis Lagarto's calligraphy. Lagarto received an Award of Excellence at the Type Directors Club of New York annual competition.