A former lettering artist at Hallmark Cards, Rob Leuschke now has his own thriving design businesses, Alphabytes and the new TypeSETit. Growing up in St Charles, Missouri, where he still lives, Rob showed great artistic promise at an early age. He earned a BFA in graphic design at the University of Missouri at Columbia. After graduation, his stint at Hallmark Cards gave him the opportunity to learn from and work with some of the best lettering artists in the industry. Rob struck out on his own in 1987 and now boasts a long list of clients from all over the world. Rob has created over 250 custom typefaces, and his work has been exhibited in New York. Ambiance BT is Rob’s first typeface published by Bitstream, with more to follow.

Buddy is the new companion sans for Contenu, the book font family designed for my book on font design design. Originally, I called it Compagnon, but that seemed to pompous. Then I called it Aide, but that was too formal and dry. It's a loose, free, easy to read sans, so when my wife suggested Buddy, it clicked. This is the 4-font Buddy family of Regular, Italic, Bold, & Bold Italic. I made a new, more limited feature set for these fonts due to their designed usage, but there are still small caps, small cap figures, oldstyle figures, numerators, and denominators. The bold is closer to a black, and the italics are only slightly slanted obliques. If you need a strong black in caps, use the small caps of the bold.

Elettra is a completely new type, primarily designed for display or titling. As you can see, Elettra adopting a transitional style between the nineteenth century printing typefaces and the new fonts at the beginning of the twentieth century: in particular serif are elongated, but the oblique or round shapes continuing softly on the horizontal line instead of staying vertical. Furthermore, two more glyphs were designed for each capital letter: a swashed form, which tends to embrace the following letter, and a backswashed version, that instead embraces the previous. The swash version is accessible from swash or from stylistc set 01 OTF features, while the backswashed version is accessible from stylistc set 02 OTF feature. Be aware that the stylistic set OTF features are not available on Photoshop or Illustrator.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Alexander Branczyk and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Branczyk and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! F2F Burnout Chaos is one of 41 Face2Face fonts included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH. Branczyk designed 16 of these himself."

In the early 1960s, the German Master Printers’ Association requested that a new typeface be designed and produced in identical form on both Linotype and Monotype machines so that text and technical composition would match. Walter Cunz at Stempel responded by commissioning Jan Tschichold to design a new version of Claude Garamond’s serene and classical Roman. Its bold, and particularly its italic styles are limited by the requirements of Linotype casting machines, forcing the character widths of a given letter to match between styles, giving the italic its characteristic narrow f. The family’s name is taken from Jacques Sabon, who introduced Garamond’s Romans to Frankfurt. Sabon has long been a favorite of typographers for setting book text, due to its smooth texture, and in large part because Tschichold’s book typography remains world famous.

Parca is a straightforward new take on the classic tradition of Grotesk sans, setting a new standard in the category. The letterforms are crafted with a gentle and careful drawing process that features small details like subtle tappering on the stems and optical corrections avoiding excessive geometry artefacts. Parca is indicated for design projects and branding when you are in the need of a neutral yet warm feeling allowing the content to be the focus and letting the forms to support it. A careful kerning and spacing features have been develop for the font, allowing it to be used either for small text or huge headlines. Parca is presented in a robust family of five weights plus matching italics and it supports most of the latin-based European languages.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Stefan Hauser and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Hauser and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! F2F Haakonsen is one of 41 Face2Face fonts included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH. Hauser designed two of these himself."

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Thomas Nagel and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Nagel and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! F2F EI Dee Cons one of 41 Face2Face fonts included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype. Nagel designed nine of these himself."

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

The handwritten cursive by the famous Italian Casanova has inspired Petra Beiße to design a new script, the “Casanova Script Pro”, with a complement of over 1400 characters and symbols. “Casanova Script Regular” is the basic version of this font with a reduced West-Layout. “Petras Script”, the first digital script font created by the calligrapher Petra Beiße, has, for many years, met with worldwide success. Petra Beiße has resided for a long time in Wiesbaden, Germany, where she is working as a renowned calligrapher. It is rare that any of her scripts are transferred into digital format and sold worldwide as fonts. Because “Petras Script” became such a huge success, she decided to release this new design for digitization. Further information about Petra Beiße and her present workshops can be found under www.handlettering.de.

Italian poet and author, Francesco Pastonchi was commissioned to produce a new edition of the Italian Classics but was unable to find types which satisfied his needs. He decided to embark on designing a new typeface, assisted by Professor Eduardo Cotti at the Royal School of Typography in Torino. Early printed works, manuscripts and inscriptions were carefully studied before drawings were presented to Monotype for matrix production. A process of careful refinement of the design was carried out in the Monotype Type Drawing Office before the typeface was ready for manufacture. Pastonchi is a Venetian style face with a fresh, almost exotic appearance, ideally suited to classical works such as poetry and short stories. The Pastonchi font family has beautiful character shapes that also make excellent display and advertising copy.

Driver Gothic is based on the typeface used for Ontario license plates. Although unique among Canadian provincial license plates, this face is very similar to, if not outright identical with, the face used on car plates in 22 American states: Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia. Driver Gothic is available in all popular font formats, and is comprised of a very extended character set (over 750 characters) covering a wide range of languages, including Central and Eastern European languages, Greek, Cyrillic, Esperanto, Turkish, Baltic and Celtic/Welsh. Driver Gothic Pro, the OpenType version, contains class-based kerning and push-button stylistic alternates for use with apps that support advanced typography. Buckle up!

Razom Script is a typeface with deep roots in pointed brush calligraphy that takes advantage of current font technology to go beyond handwriting and reach new limits. A successful blend between printed and handwritten letterforms is visible when comparing upper and lowercase. The weight of the typeface evolve in a way that pushes the limits of a script typeface to suggest new uses. Normally, families are developed in weights, not proportions. Also, having several weights in a script family is rather rare. But in Razon Script, as the fonts gain weight, big differences show up in the font outlines: the thin weight looks soft and delicate but as we examine darker variables, they also seem to get broken. The counters of the letters rotate from vertical to horizontal during this process.