A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul

American graphic designer William Addison Dwiggins' (W.A.D. for short) first typefaces were the Metro family, designed from 1927 onward. The project grew out of Dwiggins' dissatisfaction with the new European sans serif typefaces of the day, such as Futura, Erbar, and Kabel, a feeling he expressed in his seminal book Layout in Advertising. Urged by Mergenthaler Linotype to create a solution for the problem, Dwiggins began a professional relationship that would span over the next few decades. The first Metro family typeface to be released was Metroblack, brought to market by Linotype in 1929 (Metroblack #2™ the only one of the two versions that Mergenthaler Linotype eventually put into production which is available in digital form). With more of a humanist quality than the geometric styles popular in Europe at the time, Dwiggins drew what he believed to be the ideal sans serif for headlines and advertising copy. Metroblack has a warmer character than the Modernists' achievements, and the type is full of mannered curves and angled terminals (Metroblack also has an astoundingly beautiful Q). The weights of the Metro family, Metromedium #2™ and Metrolite #2™, were each designed by Mergenthaler Linotype's design office under Dwiggins' supervision. In 2012 Toshi Omagari reworked the Metro family as "Metro Nova" with many weights into a modern type family that even contains the alternate characters from the origin Metro family from Dwiggins. Despite having been created more than three-quarters of a century ago, the Metro family types have aged well, and remain a popular sans serif family. Although spec'd less often than other bestsellers, like Futura, Metro continues to find many diverse uses. The typeface has appeared throughout Europe and the North America for decades in newspapers and magazines, and can even help create a great brand image when used in logos and corporate identity. Dwiggins ranks among the most influential graphic designers and typeface designers of the 20th Century. He has several other quality fonts in the Linotype portfolio, including the serif text faces Electra™ and New Caledonia™, as well as Caravan™, a font of typographic ornaments.

Are you looking for an appropriate typeface for coffee shops concept? We want to introduce Pistacho, the new type family of Estudio Calderon that contains 18 fonts to design great illustrations and to be applied, especially, in coffee shops, bakeries, ice-cream shops, candy stores, pastry shops, fruit shops and all those places where food is the center. Pistacho was designed by hand using pencils and markers that let us get a handcrafted and rough texture. Below, a brief description of each style: Display: A fresh and modern type, perfect to be used in coffee shops outdoor signs. The logotype of “Central Perk”, the coffee shop of the tv show “Friends” was our inspiration to develop this beautiful font that contains 317 characters and three variables: Display 1, Display 2 and Display 3, each one has specific characteristics that will be an excellent resource for your designs. Sans: Style that contains 7 fonts that can be mixed to get interesting finishes in your designs, each variable has 363 characters with standard ligatures and stylistic alternatives. You can find this styles as: Sans 1, Sans 2, Sans 3, Sans 4, Sans 5, Sans 6 and Sans 7. Good news, you can get Sans 5 DEMO for free. Script: Script 1 and Script 2, two monolineal fonts with a generous spacing that provides contrast and movement, being a suitable complement for the rest of the types of Pistacho family. Serif: Font with a lot of style and personality, inspired in the interlock alphabets shown in «Photo-Lettering´s One Line Manual of Style». Serif 1, Serif 2, Serif 3 and Serif 4 contain a great number of ligatures that generate nice compositions by combining them. One of the characteristics of this style is the combination of upper case and lower case giving as a result a different touch in each design. Soft: Humanist type with a rustic texture and geometric forms ideal for long texts and small sizes. Dingbats: We have designed a package of 244 graphics, illustrations and ornaments that are the perfect complement to combine with each font of this family. Get Pistacho type family, enjoy using it… and do not forget your cup of coffee.

Introducing the third reincarnation of TT Chocolates! The popular typeface was updated to stay up-to-date with the latest requirements and trends in design! TT Chocolates is an elegant Humanist sans serif with a dense typesetting and well-balanced proportions similar to the classical tradition. This font's nice and friendly nature makes it seem like something close and familiar. It has earned a reputation among designers as the perfect font for confectionery, but the application range of the TypeType's "sweetest" typeface goes well beyond that! In 2023, we decided to do a full-scale font update referring to extensive sans-serif market research. We figured out where the trends are headed and what users want—this information helped us enhance TT Chocolates. Specifically, we introduced a new Condensed font version, a narrow font style with the authentic proportions of the standard version. At the same time, TT Chocolates Condensed boasts a more expressive personality than the base subfamily, which allows designers to solve even more creative tasks using only one typeface. The third version of TT Chocolates has become even more modern and advanced. A large number of characters, various OpenType features, and stylistic sets make the font suitable for multiple purposes and tasks. TT Chocolates is a perfect match for both branding and layouts. The font's dynamic shapes make it easy to read in small point sizes, allowing the eye to move effortlessly across the line. This typeface can also be used in web design due to the TrueType manual hinting option. TT Chocolates 3.000 includes: 29 font styles: 14 roman, 14 italic, and one variable font; Condensed version consisting of 14 new font styles; Carefully crafted contours; Optimized font rhythm and completely new kerning; Enhanced italics in basic subfamily; Variable font with three axes of variation: width, weight, and slant; 32 OpenType features, counting in 13 new ones; 901 characters in each font style—the character set has grown compared to the previous version, which had 629 characters in each font style; 230+ languages support, including the new ones: 35 Cyrillic-based and 16 Latin-based. Elevate your design's appeal with TT Chocolates!

Inspired by a biography of Coco Chanel and trying to capture the quintessential mood of classical fashion elegance, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini designed Coco Gothic looking for the effect that the first geometric sans typefaces (like Futura, Kabel or the italian eponyms like Semplicità) had when printed on paper. The crisp modernist shapes acquired in printing charme and warmth through a slight rounding of the corners that is translated digitally in the design of Coco Gothic. This signature touch is enhanced by the inclusion of light humanist touches to the proportions of the letters, resulting in the unique mix that makes Coco Gothic one of our best sellers, with a look that is both contemporary and vintage. After six years from the original project (that has spawned in the meanwhile successful families like Cocogoose and Coco Sharp), we went back to the design to completely redraw and expand the original family, creating with a Pro version that has better on-screen readability, a wider weight range, variable type versions and more language coverage (with Coco Gothic Arabic adding a new script to the latin, greek and Cyrillic of the original). Coco Gothic Pro comes in three subfamilies, each with seven weights with matching italics and featuring an extended character set with open type support for small caps, ligatures, alternates, European languages, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. The original, body-text optimised Coco Gothic and Coco Gothic Alternate subfamilies have been kept for compatibility with the previous version, while a new Coco Gothic Display subfamily has been developed with a complete redesign aimed at display usage, featuring tighter spacing and optimised letterforms. A distinguishing feature of Coco Gothic Pro is the inclusion of ten alternate historical sets that allow you to use the typeface as a true “typographic time machine”, selecting period letterforms that range from art deco and nouveau, to modernism and to eighties’ minimalism. Equipped with such an array of historical variants, Coco Gothic Pro becomes an encyclopedia of styles from the last century, ready to transform itself and adapt to the mood of your text.

The market for humanistic sans serif type families is saturated, so what can a new release add, and what does it take to stand out from the crowd? Asterisk Sans Pro (named after my favourite glyph to make) aims to be a highly versatile type family; massively useful due to its pan-European language support and bounty of OpenType features which make it the ideal choice for demanding typography. The look is contemporary; details which give the fonts character at large sizes all but disappear when small, making the middle weights suitable for large chunks of text. The family ranges from a hairline ultra light to a pretty weighty black – a must in a new typeface. Asterisk Sans Pro supports Latin, modern Greek and Cyrillic, with localized forms for Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian to boot. This is rare enough, but to have small caps for all these scripts in both upright and italic fonts is a big plus. Your client may not need all this language support right now, but this typeface gives them the option to grow while keeping a consistent look, and at a similar price point to families with a much narrower scope. The ability to customize Asterisk Sans Pro through the use of Stylistic Sets in OpenType savvy layout programs means you are really in control. Want more italic forms in the uprights? Go for it. A more Roman italic? Easy! The spurless m, n, r and u, accessible through SS13 give a graphic, almost bauhaus feel. The Dutch IJ glyph can be changed to a much cooler thing using SS14, and the family even supports ij-acute. Other OpenType features include a wealth of numeral styles (tabular and proportional, lining and oldstyle, plus small cap figures, numerators, denominators, subscript and superscript) and automatic fractions. There are also case-sensitive forms for all caps settings, a bunch of useful arrows, and superscript lower case Latin letters. All in, there are well over 1200 glyphs per font, making Asterisk Sans Pro an invaluable tool in your typeface arsenal, great for everything from corporate identities to editorial work, apps to cookbooks.

Legible, technical, clear—with a hint of retro: Compiler is a no-frills font family straight from the heart of a microprocessor. Inspired by console typefaces, the humanist sans serif typeface combines a large x-height with striking serifs on certain letters such as i and l. Those serifs evoke the aesthetics of monospace typefaces for programming. Even though Compiler is a proportional typeface, this detail improves glyph recognition and helps differentiate between individual letters. Combined with vertical stroke ends, which allow for particularly even spacing, the serifs make for an extremely legible typeface. (Even in small sizes.) Brand recognition guaranteed: Compiler is ideal for applications that require a mechanical flavor without appearing offish. You can use it for websites, apps, branding, corporate design, annual reports, signage, and many other areas with perfect results. Compiler consists of two font families; the second one is Compiler Plain. In Compiler Plain, the signature letters lose their serifs and the forms of "a" and "g" are simplified. This way, the shapes are neutralized. The technical impression recedes into the background. Both families can be combined smoothly: you might use the standard Compiler fonts for display sizes and Compiler Plain styles for body copy. For total design control, you can toggle each of the defining design elements individually from Compiler to Compiler Plain and vice versa. Just use Stylistic Sets to fine-tune your Compiler fonts. Compiler provides you with 8 weights in 4 variations: Upright, Italics, Plain Upright and Plain Italics. That's a total of 32 fonts. Each style contains more than 860 glyphs, including advanced typographic tools such as proportional and tabular figures (both lining and old-style) or small caps—something you'll rarely find in this genre. Other glyphs are optimized for display sizes, such as circled figures and various arrows. There's also a set of glyphs designed for web use: with symbols for shopping carts, hamburger menus or checkboxes, you can implement your web projects elegantly and consistently without relying on third-party tools (like an external icon font). Powered by highly productive OpenType functions, Compiler is an intermedia workhorse straight from cyberspace.