How many times have you seen lettering on a book cover, poster, or card and wanted to make something similar? Decorata’s eight intertwining weights finally make that possible in an intelligent way. The first major collaboration of its kind, Decorata pairs the talents of supreme lettering artist Martina Flor and masterful type designer Neil Summerour. Lettering was traditionally understood as using words in an artistic way, while type design created written language for easy reading, the one overlapping the other in several ways. For this unique project, Martina created several versions of the alphabet and its decorative layers in her eye-catching style. Neil then took those designs and created an enormous eight-style font family that respects the designer’s need for control and capitalizes on the artist’s expressiveness. Each style can work separately but, on top of the foundational styles, try placing the Lace, then Filigree in contrasting colors. Use any OpenType-capable program to turn headlines from blasé to wowza, make posters with some pow, and design your own cards with that just-right level of detail. Whatever idea you can imagine with the Decorata family, it promises to be a playful and precise wordsmith where the words themselves are the art. Decorata’s glyphs are bifurcated, have medium contrast to showcase their intricate interactions, and include Shadow, Regular, Outline, Filigree, Lace, Fancy, Intricate, and Dingbat styles — eight in all. The Regular style sets the word or phrase to begin the design, Shadow ensures it lifts off the background, and Outline attempts to restrain its ornate flair. Think of those as the foundation and use the rest of the styles for flamboyance. The Intricate and Filigree styles vary only in the thickness of the glyphs, with Filigree being thinner. Lace removes the external curls around each letter but keeps the internal negative space from those decorative lines. The Fancy style is a solid lettershape that includes its attendant elements, and the Dingbats are exactly as expected: borders, manicules, patterns, frames, and many stylized items to bring designs to life.

PT Serif Pro is an universal type family designed for use together with PT Sans Pro family released earlier. PT Serif Pro coordinates with PT Sans Pro on metrics, proportions, weights and design. It consists of 38 styles: 6 weights (from light to black) with corresponding italics of normal proportions; 6 weights (from light to black) with corresponding italics of narrow proportions; 6 weights (from light to black) with corresponding italics of extended proportions; and 2 caption styles (regular and italic) are for texts of small point sizes. The letterforms are distinguished by large x-height, modest stroke contrast, robust wedge-like serifs, and triangular terminals. Due to these features the face can be qualified as matched to modern trends of type design and of enhanced legibility. Mentioned characteristics beside conventional use in business applications and printed stuff made the fonts quite useable for advertising and display typography. Each font next to standard Latin and Cyrillic character sets contain alphabet glyphs of title languages of the national republics of Russian Federation and support the most of the languages of neighboring countries. The fonts were developed and released by ParaType in 2011 with financial support from Federal Agency of Print and Mass Communications of Russian Federation. PT Serif family together with PT Sans won the bronze in Original Typeface category of ED-Awards 2011. Design – Alexandra Korolkova with assistance of Olga Umpeleva and supervision of Vladimir Yefimov

More Printing Helpers JNL gathers another assortment of vintage printing embellishments and ornaments from the late 1800s. Within the standard twenty-six alphabet keys are pointing hands, corner pieces, border elements and decorative center and end pieces. On the lower case, certain elements have been flipped or inverted for matching effects. Some additional positions are available on the 1 through 9 keys and on the colon and semicolon. A bonus to this font: three expandable panels. the first (with decorative end caps) is attained by typing the left parenthesis for the left side, the hyphen for the center lines and the right parenthesis for the right side. The second one features ribbon ends, and the combination of the less than-equal-greater than keys creates this panel. The third design can be made by typing the left brace/vertical bar/right brace keys.