Based on drawings of Medieval versals (capitals used at beginning of verses in manuscripts) by Frederic W. Goudy. Works beautifully as initials with Goudy Text Oldstyle. Uppercase only, no numerals or punctuation; several letters have alternates. Framed, inversed caps are also included. This version of Lombardy Capitals is purposely less regular and clean-cut than some available to maintain a more hand-drawn look similar to the irregularities that would be found in a Medieval manuscript. The alternates help contribute to that look.

Gundrada ML was inspired by the lettering on the tomb of Gundrada de Warenne. She was buried at Southover Church at Lewes, Sussex, in the south of England in 1085. The Latin inscription on her tomb, STIRPS GUNDRADA DUCUM, meaning “Gundrada, descendant of the Duke” may have led to the speculation that she was the daughter of William, Duke of Normandy and bastard son of Robert the Devil of Normandy and Arletta, daughter of a tanner in Falaise. In 1066 William defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings and was crowned William I of England. More commonly known as William the Conquerer, he commissioned a string of forts around the kingdom and charged trusted Norman Barons to control the contentious Anglo-Saxon population. William de Warenne, husband of Gundrada, was one of these Barons. There has also been the suggestion that Gundrada may have been the daughter of William’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, by a previous marriage. According to the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, England 1921-22), both of these contentions are in dispute. Searching the past of a thousand years ago is like wandering in a heavy fog: facts are only dimly in view. Regardless, I know that I found these letterforms immediately engaging in their simplicity. Unadorned and unsophisticated, they have a direct honesty that rests well in the company of humanistic sans serifs like Franklin Gothic or Gill Sans, appealing to a contemporary sensibility. The lettering on the tomb is in upper case only. Although Gundrada does not sound Norman French to me, her husband certainly and her father probably were Norman French. Nonetheless, the man that carved her tombstone was probably Anglo-Saxon, like most of the people. For that reason, we are quite comfortable with a fairly generic lower case from an Anglo-Saxon document of the time. The time was a time of transition, of contending language influences. This font reflects some of that tension. Features 1. Multi-Lingual Font with 389 glyphs and 698 Kerning Pairs. 2. OpenType GSUB layout features: onum, dlig, liga, salt & hist. 3. Tabular Figures and Alternate Old-Style Figures. 4. Alternate Ruled Caps (line above and below, matching to brackets). 5. Central Europe, Western Europe, Turkish and Baltic Code Pages. 6. Additional accents for Cornish and Old Gaelic. 7. Stylistic alternates A, E, y and #. 8. Ligatures ST, Th, fi and fl. 9. Historic alternate longs. The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

In 1980, Peter Malutzki, Heidi Hübner-Prochotta and Manfred Prochotta founded the FlugBlatt-Presse and began producing broadsheets, which they called FlugBlätter and which also gave their press its name. They were mostly woodcuts or linocuts, combined with hand-set typography. When they finished the series in 1984 there were 67 FlugBlätter. During a Frankfurt Book Fair in the 1980s the collector Rob Saunders acquired FlugBlatt No. 37 along with other prints. Later they became part Letterform Archive, a non-profit museum and special collection library in San Francisco, which Rob Saunders founded in 2014. In 2021, Letterform Archive posted the FlugBlatt No. 37 on social media, where type designer Lena Schmidt saw it, immediately fell in love with it, and developed the plan to bring it into the digital world. After contacting Peter Malutzki – who is still working as a book artist today – and in close consultation with him, Schmidt translated the letterforms into a font series, Malutzki Initials. The three fonts can be used for black (single-color) text using the Regular style, or for multicolor text by applying different colors to the Letter Layer and Figure Layer styles.

Designed by German graphic designer Jochen Schuss. ITC Schuss Hand and ITC Schuss Hand Bold can probably best be described as excellent all around scripts useful for a broad spectrum of advertising purposes as well as for those applications that benefit from a refined handwritten appearance. The characters themselves have a soft, almost “liquid” appearance which is enhanced by the subtle swelling at most of the stroke terminals. The slightly condensed nature of the characters plus a relatively large x-height ensures that both weights are ideal for the advertising arena. An additional feature on ITC Schuss Hand and ITC Schuss Hand Bold are the capital letters which can actually be used on their own in word settings whereas most script capitals are designed just for initialing purposes. The designer has also invested a good deal of careful thought to the way in which a high percentage of the lowercase letter combinations overlap to create an authentic hand-scripted appearance. This, together with the italicized letter forms, will make Schuss Hand and Schuss Hand Bold ideal candidates for those occasions when paper correspondence requires an informal style. So, as is claimed, an excellent all around script style.

Daiquiri is a revival of a handlettered font in two weights, from an ad for Puerto Rico Rum dating back to the forties or fifties. I found the ad on a French antique market on my last visit for Mardi Gras in Nice. The ad read "Breeze through the heat, be a Daiquiri fan". That's why they had this "fan" in the illustration! Did they want you to rotate like a fan when you had enough Daiquiris? Or did they just do it for that little "Jeu des mots"? Anyway I found the handlettering very pretty, so I took those few letters and made a whole font out of them. I think Daiquiri has that touch that brings those happy and uncomplicated times back when advertising was still fun. I started something like 20 years later in advertising and things had gotten more stringent. We already had to satisfy those marketing guys with their scholarly attitude. They have taken all the fun out of the job, for the creators as well as for the consumers. I would like to see more uncomplicated ads like this again, yours Gert Wiescher

A few years ago I've discovered the work of one of the most prolific typeface designers of the Bruce type Foundry in NYC during late nineteenth century. Browsing Julius Herriet's work I found a very unique kind of ligatures in his patented "Old Style Ornamented" type design. Some letters were designed with a little top tail that allowed them to connect to each other. After that, I found that he also designed a single italic weight of the same font 7 years later. Since the beginning of the Opentype days I’ve been deeply obsessed with exploring different ways to build ligatures, so that lead me up to this point where I felt the need to create “Plethora”, this new font inspired by Herriet’s work. Extrapolating weights, adding variable technology and playing with additional interconnected letters and alternates. Definitely, Plethora means a large or excessive amount of something, and this font tries to bring back this abundance of details two centuries later. Available in 9 weights, from roman to italic, and also as variable format, “Plethora” supports plenty of latin languages and is a perfect choice for today’s design tides.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.