With open palms, place your hands together at the center of your chest, close your eyes and bow the head slightly. Namaste! Welcome to a beautiful spiritual journey. Namaste is a font collection, designed by Coto Mendoza, consisting of two variants: a capital sans and a script font (based on watercolor calligraphy strokes). Each variant comes in 5 weights—Thin, Light, Regular, Bold and Black—and 2 versions: Essential and Pro. The script font, in its Pro version, provides a wide range of OpenType features such as swashes, alternates, ligatures and different stylistic sets. The Namaste family also includes a set of ornaments inspired by Hindu and Buddhist symbols—that Coto Mendoza saw virtually everywhere on her trip to India—like Mandalas and Yantras, and others found in textiles and monuments. Namaste is the perfect choice for wellness, healing and therapy oriented products. Its smooth shape and soft curves allow the user to create beautiful designs for essential oils, bath salts, quartz crystals, mindfoodness, candles, incense and aromatherapy products packaging. The font is well-suited for publishing design (short text); self-help and healing handbooks; tarot and divination cards; and women’s empowerment and spirituality publications. Namaste is an ideal typeface for yoga (and other body disciplines) center branding; holistic centers; and group meditation, womb blessing and circle of women invitations. Namaste is a beautiful journey full of love and inspiration. Namaste: a spiritual journey.

Linotype Bengali, a revival This project by Neelakash Kshetriymayum and Fiona Ross commissioned by Monotype is at heart a revival of the now ubiquitous original Linotype Bengali typeface designed by Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross (1978-1982) based on Ross’s research for her doctoral studies in Indian Palaeography. The new Linotype Bengali is informed by more recent research by Ross and Kshetrimayum resulting in additional glyphs that serve contemporary needs in a variety of genres – the original had been specifically designed for newspaper composition and in now outdated digital formats. The new design makes use of OpenType features with the employment of contextual vowel signs for Bengali – a feature that Ross and Holloway had first introduced in Indian scripts for the Adobe Devanagari typeface – and has sophisticated contextual mark positioning. Furthermore, whereas the original design had existed in only two typestyles, extensive work has been undertaken to produce this new design in 5 weights: Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black. It has been an important aspect of this project to remain true to the original design concepts, and so to achieve optimal readability for sustained reading at small type-sizes, but the additional weights enable differentiation in document design, and afford users scope to produce textural variety in their outputs. This revival design is intended to widen the hitherto very limited palette of typographic choices in the field of textual communication in Bengali, Assamese and other languages that make use of the Bengali script.

Mikha, designed by Carine de Wandeleer, is a delightfully handwritten family font which keeps the casual drawing of a marker with clean strokes. Its slight bounce and intentional irregularity, gives your words a wonderful flow. This new font family with 736 glyphs, includes Regular, Condensed and Sans. It has OpenType features such as Stylistics alternates, Swashes, Ligatures, up to five Stylistic sets by letter, initial and terminal forms in upper and lower, ornaments that allow you to mix and match pairs of letters and a Central European language support to fit your design. This OpenType features may only be accessible via OpenType-aware applications, or the Character Map to view and copy any of the extra characters to paste into your favorite text editor/app. This will help your creativity and make it easier to make expressive and elegant your typographic work. Also with Mikha Sans it is possible to write all in capitals. Mikha looks lovely on wedding invitations, greeting cards, logos, posters, labels, t-shirt design, logos, business-cards and is perfect for using in ink or watercolor based designs, fashion, magazines, food packaging and menus, book covers and whatever your imagination holds! Enjoy it!

Guanabara is the third release of Plau Type Foundry. It started from the need of a wayfinding typeface that had personality enough to be the brand typeface for a city. The city of Rio de Janeiro, with its never-ending curves and all year long summer weather provided the constraints and requirements of this typeface. From there, it evolved to be a workhorse, with 8 weights from Thin to Black and matching true italics. It just had to have the features that all us designers have grown to love, such as alternate letters (a, g and r for the romans), tabular and proportional figures in lining and oldstyle set-ups as well as small caps, fractions and all that jazz (I mean, samba). And it needed to be recognizable and distinct. For that, design features like tapered R legs, capitals with classic proportions and calligraphic finishes on the terminals proved crucial. And last, but not least, like Rio, it had to welcome many cultures. We came to think of it as the “Typeface from Ipanema”, with a classic, timeless look, swinging elegance and joyful attitude.

Henrician can claim two sources of inspiration. One of these was a set of beautiful capital letterforms seen on the cover of a 19th century album of engravings. The engravings contained therein depicted lovely examples of half-timbered Tudor architecture and there was a clear 'Tudor' intent behind the letterforms. The second source of inspiration is more conceptual-the title lettering of period films from the 30's to the 60's…think if the opening text when Errol Flynn plays Robin Hood, or think of Richard the Lionheart, or even that great comedy Classic 'Carry on Henry', and it's discussion of Sir Thomas de Cobbler….but we digress! Henrician is a set of eight display and text (but perhaps not Body Text) faces in a 'Tudor Revival' spirit. Like any good revival design they are somehow at home with a wide range period themed design work, covering the medieval until, perhaps, the 18th century, just so long as we're more concerned with fun and appearance than strict historical accuracy. The family will be at home in the realms of advertising, posters, cover design and web design. Try Henrician out today!

Muisca, that in its early edition was named as «Muisca Sans», was developed in mid-1997 and based on the graphic concept of pre-Columbian characteristics figures within some of the very few visual elements recovered from the Muisca culture. This ancient pre-Columbian tribe disappeared since the arrival of the Spanish 500 years ago, in what is now the center of Colombia. In fact, the name of the capital Bogotá goes back to Bacatá as primary or village downtown of what was once the imperial capital of the Muisca tribe. This typographic project was submitted as my work for the degree in Graphic Design, obtained in September of that year (at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia), under the creative concept of vindicating the ancient culture and identity through a functional typeface, into a fact without precedent in the country. Muisca was recently edited, arranged and completed, including multilingual diacritic glyphs to be versatile in several languages. Related and inspired by Latin America, Ethnic, Native, Tribal, Mysthical, Handmade, Aboriginal, Pre-Hispanic, Pre-Columbian, Textured, Fantasy. Ideal to be used in logos, display text & titles, games and other design applications that reminds of the Pre-Hispanic art.

The origins of Bembo go back to one of the most famous printers of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius. In 1496, he used a new roman typeface to print the book de Aetna, a travelogue by the popular writer Pietro Bembo. This type was designed by Francesco Griffo, a prolific punchcutter who was one of the first to depart from the heavier pen-drawn look of humanist calligraphy to develop the more stylized look we associate with roman types today. In 1929, Stanley Morison and the design staff at the Monotype Corporation used Griffo's roman as the model for a revival type design named Bembo. They made a number of changes to the fifteenth-century letters to make the font more adaptable to machine composition. The italic is based on letters cut by the Renaissance scribe Giovanni Tagliente. Because of their quiet presence and graceful stability, the lighter weights of Bembo are popular for book typography. The heavier weights impart a look of conservative dependability to advertising and packaging projects. With 31 weights, including small caps, Old style figures, expert characters, and an alternate cap R, Bembo makes an excellent all-purpose font family.

This set of initial decorated letters was inspired by a font in use in the beginning of 1500s in Paris. Exactly, we have used the set that Barthélémy Verand employed for the printing of Triumphus translatez de langage Tuscan en François, (from “Triumph” of Petrarque) in the year 1514. Some letters, lacked, have been reconstructed to propose a complete alphabet. It appears that the printer used some letters to replace others, as V, turned over to make a A, or D to make a Q. The original font’s letters were drawn in white on a black background only, but it was tempting to propose a negative version in black on white. It is used as variously as web-site titles, posters and flyers design, publishing texts looking like ancient ones, or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, as a very decorative, elegant and luxurious additional font. This font supports strong enlargements remaining very smart and fine. It’s original medieval hight is about one inch equivalent to about four lines of characters. This font may be used with all blackletter fonts, but works particularly well with 1543 Humane Jenson, 1557 Italic and 1742 Civilite, without any anachronism.

The origins of Bembo go back to one of the most famous printers of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius. In 1496, he used a new roman typeface to print the book de Aetna, a travelogue by the popular writer Pietro Bembo. This type was designed by Francesco Griffo, a prolific punchcutter who was one of the first to depart from the heavier pen-drawn look of humanist calligraphy to develop the more stylized look we associate with roman types today. In 1929, Stanley Morison and the design staff at the Monotype Corporation used Griffo's roman as the model for a revival type design named Bembo. They made a number of changes to the fifteenth-century letters to make the font more adaptable to machine composition. The italic is based on letters cut by the Renaissance scribe Giovanni Tagliente. Because of their quiet presence and graceful stability, the lighter weights of Bembo are popular for book typography. The heavier weights impart a look of conservative dependability to advertising and packaging projects. With 31 weights, including small caps, Old style figures, expert characters, and an alternate cap R, Bembo makes an excellent all-purpose font family.

A brighter slab n’ sans in 18 styles Referred to as Egyptian’s in the early years of the nineteenth century, today slab serifs are primarily used in display sizes but seldom used in body text. With Mislab, Xavier Dupré has designed a brighter and more legible slab serif than most. Mislab aptly combines the strength of a slab serif with the lightness of a sans serif. Bold and thick serifs make for strong impact in display uses while performing extremely well under the most stressful body text conditions. A slight cursive feel adds spice to the text while its delicate rounded rectangular structure is naturally adapted to screen displays. The capitals have fully assumed serifs while the lowercases have more discreet versions. Notable features include sanserif endings on the lowercase a, c, e & s, inducing fluidity and enhanced readability. This highly versatile typeface brings clarity to headlines. Mislab will provide foolproof stability to your layouts. Mislab, a new design by Xavier Dupré Type Directors Club 2014 Tokyo TDC 2014 Communication Arts Typography Awards 2014 Club des directeurs artistiques, 45e palmarès Slanted: Contemporary Typefaces #25

Oscar Niemeyer is one of the greatest architects of our time—his unique way of mixing straight lines and abstract curves gives rise to an unmistakable and characteristic style. This typeface is my own tribute to Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The design process started when my wife and I visited Brazil while she was running a series of workshops on calligraphy. In my spare time, I would walk through the streets of beautiful cities like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, enjoying the local architecture and urban life. I had also the opportunity to attend to some of the workshops during which I was able to observe the organic of calligraphy and people. Then, I started to draw some shapes that reflected everything about this beautiful place: Niemeyer’s architecture and work and, in his own words ‘the curves on the body of the beloved woman’. This versatile typeface comes in 8 weights with matching italics, alternative characters, oldstyle figures and much more! Niemeyer is well-suited for logotypes, advertising, publishing, branding and corporate use. Special thanks to everyone in the Latinotype Team (especially to César Araya) for their support, help with corrections and digital editing.

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

The inspiration source for MFC Botanical Borders is a collection of border treatments from the 1886 “Spécimens de caractères d'imprimerie” by E. Houpied a Paris. This collection of elegant floral and foliage borders has been put together with their original decorated rules, as well as alternate matching precision rules for added versatility. You can start with a new document or work on a new layer within an existing document. Select MFC Botanical Borders from the font menu. (Some users may have font previewing enabled in the font menu which will cause the font name to appear as border elements, disable this option in order to choose the name) Make certain that the point size of the font is the same as the leading being applied to the font so the borders will meet up properly. While we’ve adjusted this within the font, your program may override these settings. For instance a 12 point font should have 12 points of leading. A PDF guidebook for MFC Botanical Borders is included in the font package. Download and view the MFC Botanical Borders Guidebook if you would like to learn a little more.

Kornelis de Vries, a headmaster from the Dutch province of Friesland, cultivated new potato breeds that he named after pupils in his school. In the early 1900s he came up with the tasty Bintje (a Frisian girl’s name) and it became a big success – in Belgium and France it has remained the most popular potato for french fries to this day, more than a century since its introduction. Donald Roos took 10 kilos of fresh Bintje potatoes and cut the Bint typeface by hand with a short, sharp knife. He then inked each character once and printed it twice; the second, lighter printing is accommodated in the lower case alphabet. The Bint family offers a script to make the letters bounce up and down the baseline; with OpenType functionality the font randomly chooses each character from the upper- or lowercase alphabet. ‘Tabular lining figures’ will activate a series of negative numerals in boxes; ‘Discretionary ligatures’ activates specially designed letter combinations like ‘www’ as well as arrows and stars. Bint has a distinct, slightly rough handmade appearance, making it useful for a wide range of designs.

Pliego is a textface designed to offer a comfortable continuous reading, with humanist proportions, an even texture, and informal calligraphic details noticeable only at big sizes, that gives it a contemporary feeling. Pliego has been named after Pliegos de Cordel, the Spanish word for the popular books that were common during the XVI, XVII and XVIII centuries. These were rough, cheap books that basically consisted in a folded sheet attached to a string, hence the name. Their content was varied, from popular tales to ballads and songs, but also crimes and mysteries. They were cheaply made, roughly printed and bound. The name Pliego evokes the idea of a rough look, angular edges, informal taste, but classical look. To cover today’s needs, Pliego includes five weights with matching italics. Designed and engineered for continuous reading, the Book, Regular and Medium weights will perform at their best under 14 points. However, don’t be scared to use for headlines and titles: because of its quirky details and calligraphic flavour, Pliego’s personality is accentuated when enlarged. With an extensive Latin character set, Pliego covers a wide amount of Latin-based languages, including Latin Plus encoding and Vietnamese support.

A clean, smooth rendition of the magnificent B42-type used by Johann Gutenberg in his famous 42-line Bible. In addition to the usual standard characters for typesetting modern texts, the font includes a comprehensive set of special characters, alternates and ligatures, plus Opentype features, that can be used for typesetting (almost) exactly as in Gutenberg’s Bible and later incunabula. Also available as The Oldtype “Gutenberg C” Font in a slightly roughened style simulating irregularities and ink spreads associated with old metal types, papers and parchments. The main historical sources used during the font design process were high-resolution scans from several printings of Gutenberg’s Bible. Other sources were as follows: Kapr, A. (1996), Johann Gutenberg - The Man and his Invention, Aldershot: Scolar Press (ch. 7); De Hamel, C. (2001), The Book - A History of The Bible, London: Phaidon Press (ch. 8); Füssel, S. (2005), Gutenberg and the impact of printing, Burlington: Ashgate (ch. 1); and Man, J. (2009), The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Bantam (ch. 7). Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Oldtype “Gutenberg B” Font Page.

The birth of the monospaced types dates back to the past. There was a need for the creation of typesets for typewriters. The difficulty was to align the different glyphs in the same width. This led to particular problems with letters like “M” and “l”; the former seemed to be squeezed into the same width of all letters and the second one appeared way too streched. Despite – or perhaps because of – the impression of the typewriter is still popular with Graphic Designers. Nowadays there are even monospaced versions of primarily proportional types; for example the the Sans Mono designed by Lucas de Groot or the DIN Mono. Then again, why not the other way round?! In the first half of the Nineties, Erik Spiekermann developed a proportional type named ITC Officina based on the Letter Gothic. According to a survey on the 100 best fonts of all time conducted by FontShop, ITC Officina is in an eighth place, far ahead of its forerunner. This was the reason for me to create a wider design with a Serif and a Sans Serif based on the queen of all monospaced types – the Courier.