Motley Crew is my last font for 2016. It is quite a lively, quirky and a little bit scary typeface, which will give your designs a little more ‘joie de vivre’. It was made with a soft brush and Chinese ink. The splatter was added after I had painted the glyphs. I forgot to put away my laptop, which now looks like this font… Motley Crew wishes you all the best for the coming year - in a lot of languages, as it comes with a generous splatter of diacritics.

Smiling Cat is a cute little font. It is an adaptation of and older font of mine: Harimau Dua. I have had many requests for a bold version of Harimau, so I started working on it, changed a few glyphs, redid the kerning and cleaned it up. Rather than adding it as an extra bold style to my existing font, I thought it’d be better to launch it as a new one. Smiling Cat is handmade, cute and quirky, it would be ideal for Children’s Book Covers. Comes with a litter of diacritics.

Attic Antique by Three Islands Press. Flipping through a friend’s old hardbound collection of John Burroughs nature essays a while back, I thought it'd be fun to try to develop a typeface with the same uneven, imperfect look to it. I picked and chose among various printed characters, enlarged them somewhat with a photocopier, then hand-rendered each. Had to custom-make some of the accents and symbols, then added a couple goofy dingbats just for the heck of it. The result: an amazingly legible serif family akin to the Century faces.

Fortuna has some resemblance with handtexted characters based, loosely, on the classic italic. But, like Ad Hoc, Fortuna is drawn on a monitor in every detail. The name is Latin and means fate, luck. The composer Carl Orff was actual at the time when I worked with Fortuna, because he had been born 100 years earlier. Orff's Carmina Burana were being introduced on the radio when I was wondering what to call my most recent creation. The song cycle begins with a song to Fortuna: a fated choice of name. Fortuna was released in 1995.

Piano Keybuild is a small font designed for creating piano keyboard layouts. It was inspired by my Yamaha CLP-840, a wonderful digital piano. The face consists entirely of keyboard keys that can be combined to form realistic keyboards. These keys come in four styles: basic outlined keys, filler keys (for adding a second color inside the outlines), keys with note names, and pre-made sets of keys. Keys of a given kind will kern with one another, but only in the order that they would naturally occur on a keyboard. (This makes it easier to spot incorrect key sequences.) It also includes digits 0 through 9 inspired by numerals used in traditional music notation. The user guide (PDF under Gallery tab) demonstrates the locations of all the glyphs as well as how to use them together effectively.

Designed by expert ad artist Herbert Thannhaeuser for East German foundry Typoart in 1955, Lotto was until now one of the long lost gems of European sign and brush lettering faces. Unlike in Kurier (Thannhaeuser’s other brush face digitized by Canada Type as Puma), the forms’ brush construct uses a series of strokes that are mostly sudden, whimsical, and at times even look like great genius being born out of simple afterthought or straight-forward idiosyncracy. For instance, check out the simple brush pause that is the top of the f, the confident yet welcoming serifs on the T, the similarly-themed C/E and O/Q relationship, and much more. Lotto comes with over 400 glyphs, contains a few alternates and ligatures sprinkled throughout the character set, and includes support for the majority of Latin languages.

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. Recently I designed a family of seven »Bodonian Script« fonts, that can be mixed with most of my Bodonis. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

Modesto Initials had existed as a single font for several years. I recently added a fill font to put color in the Inlines. The Inline font still works by itself. The Fill font works alone too, as an ultra Modesto on steroids. They work best together. Modesto is a loose-knit family based on a signpainters lettering style popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It evolved from the lettering I used for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Logo. The Modesto family was not planned. It just happened, a few fonts at a time over about fifteen years. In 2014 seven new Italic fonts and two Chromatic families were added. There is a downloadable MODESTO USER MANUAL PDF in the Gallery section for this family.

Kobely is a reproduction of a local broadcaster's real handwriting. My daughter thought her boss's handwriting was so neat and uniform, it would make a great font and asked if I would be willing to create it. I agreed. She had him write out all the basic characters, which he gladly did with both a standard ink pen and a Sharpie¨ marker. I then turned it into a three weight family, perfect for use on post-it notes, shopping and to-do lists - anywhere you need the natural feel of real handwriting. I created it in various weights to spare you from adding a stroke to make it bolder. Adding a stroke can often compromise the small details of a font. Kobely is designed to be readable in even the boldest weight!