Rian Hughes’ 15th collection of fonts, “112 Hours”, is entirely dedicated to numbers. Culled from a myriad of sources – clock faces, tickets, watches house numbers – it is an eclectic and wide-ranging set. Each font contains only numerals and related punctuation – no letters. A new book has been designed by Hughes to show the collection, and includes sample settings, complete character sets, source material and an introduction. This is available print-to-order on Blurb in paperback and hardback: http://www.blurb.com/b/5539073-112-hours-hardback http://www.blurb.com/b/5539045-112-hours-paperback From the introduction: The idea for this, the fifteenth Device Fonts collection, began when I came across an online auction site dedicated to antique clocks. I was mesmerized by the inventive and bizarre numerals on their faces. Shorn of the need to extend the internal logic of a typeface through the entire alphabet, the designers of these treasures were free to explore interesting forms and shapes that would otherwise be denied them. Given this horological starting point, I decided to produce 12 fonts, each featuring just the numbers from 1 to 12 and, where appropriate, a small set of supporting characters — in most cases, the international currency symbols, a colon, full stop, hyphen, slash and the number sign. 10, 11 and 12 I opted to place in the capital A, B and C slots. Each font is shown in its entirety here. I soon passed 12, so the next logical finish line was 24. Like a typographic Jack Bauer, I soon passed that too -— the more I researched, the more I came across interesting and unique examples that insisted on digitization, or that inspired me to explore some new design direction. The sources broadened to include tickets, numbering machines, ecclesiastical brass plates and more. Though not derived from clock faces, I opted to keep the 1-12 conceit for consistency, which allowed me to design what are effectively numerical ligatures. I finally concluded one hundred fonts over my original estimate at 112. Even though it’s not strictly divisible by 12, the number has a certain symmetry, I reasoned, and was as good a place as any to round off the project. An overview reveals a broad range that nonetheless fall into several loose categories. There are fairly faithful revivals, only diverging from their source material to even out inconsistencies and regularize weighting or shape to make them more functional in a modern context; designs taken directly from the source material, preserving all the inky grit and character of the original; designs that are loosely based on a couple of numbers from the source material but diverge dramatically for reasons of improved aesthetics or mere whim; and entirely new designs with no historical precedent. As projects like this evolve (and, to be frank, get out of hand), they can take you in directions and to places you didn’t envisage when you first set out. Along the way, I corresponded with experts in railway livery, and now know about the history of cab side and smokebox plates; I travelled to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Nantes, France, to examine their numbering machines; I photographed house numbers in Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam and here in the UK; I delved into my collection of tickets, passes and printed ephemera; I visited the Science Museum in London, the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset, and the Museum of London to source early adding machines, war-time telegraphs and post-war ration books. I photographed watches at Worthing Museum, weighing scales large enough to stand on in a Brick Lane pub, and digital station clocks at Baker Street tube station. I went to the London Under-ground archive at Acton Depot, where you can see all manner of vintage enamel signs and woodblock type; I photographed grocer’s stalls in East End street markets; I dug out old clocks I recalled from childhood at my parents’ place, examined old manual typewriters and cash tills, and crouched down with a torch to look at my electricity meter. I found out that Jane Fonda kicked a policeman, and unusually for someone with a lifelong aversion to sport, picked up some horse-racing jargon. I share some of that research here. In many cases I have not been slavish about staying close to the source material if I didn’t think it warranted it, so a close comparison will reveal differences. These changes could be made for aesthetic reasons, functional reasons (the originals didn’t need to be set in any combination, for example), or just reasons of personal taste. Where reference for the additional characters were not available — which was always the case with fonts derived from clock faces — I have endeavored to design them in a sympathetic style. I may even extend some of these to the full alphabet in the future. If I do, these number-only fonts could be considered as experimental design exercises: forays into form to probe interesting new graphic possibilities.

Just before the end of 2020 all schools in Holland closed for the second time, because of an increase in the number of COVID 19 cases. This means that my wife and I have to educate our three kids at home. The kids are great and take their tasks seriously, but it is difficult, as all three of them require different educational levels. I am sure you parents understand. Trying to get some work done is virtually impossible, so my wife and I made a schedule and we live by ‘on duty’ and ‘off duty’ days. I was thinking of this when I created this font (obviously on an ‘off duty’ day). Home Education is a handwritten scribble font. It was made with a Sharpie pen (possibly used by one of my kids, because I noticed tiny ink stains on my wooden dining table…). It comes with all the diacritics you can hope for and lovely double letter ligatures for you to play with.

Movie Script is the script that was used in German movie-brochures. Those were small four page leaflets with a lot of sepia-colored pictures about the movie one was about to see. Today those things are collectors items. The script was also used on those hand-painted posters above the cinema entrance. I cleaned up the old script and made it just a little bit more readable, but overall I left it as it was. Of course I added the necessary glyphs for today's world, like Euro and so on. When I was a kid, my grandfather gave me 1 German Mark and I could go to the movies matinee, that was around 10:30 in the morning, the entrance cost something like 60 Pfennig and the rest was for peanuts and a drink. Still today I love my grandfather for that, movies introduced the world to me (no TV then). Your grandfather-loving designer Gert Wiescher

This type crept up the sense that it was made in Eastern Europe by poorly trained urbanites from a crippled nation, or that it is the remains of a contemporary gothic (like Eckmann) stencil. The choice of what this type signifies is up to the public. Lately I like the idea of 'putting on' (in McLuhan's sense) a genre of idea that is somewhat different from my tradition's beliefs, and fitting a core category of that toward a teleological/eschatological advantage. Therefore postmodernist/apocalyptic carelessness (which I may 'put on' by using this type) is how I abstain from the cravings of immortality, or more so that wanting it is pointless. It’s stands as memento morí; that I will have to die someday. I have to become less, He must become more. Of course, Interzone may signify a classic Joy Division track from Unknown Pleasures as well as the Cold Warish ongoings of conflicted eastern European life. I considered naming this Lunik 9.

I made the first sketches for Brocha when I first visited Easter Island in 2011. I took inspiration from pre-Columbian art for such sketches, but I must say that they were kind of rough and clumsy; it was an experimental and limited-use typeface. It took a long time, but thanks to my learning about type design gained over the years, I have finally been able to complete my project. I have made sure to preserve the Latin American spirit of my original designs in order to give my final typeface an expressively handmade, highly humanist look. Brocha is a display sans with friendly design ideal for high-impact headlines, logotypes or use on cookies packaging designs. Brocha consists of 2 subfamilies: one basic and one alternative. Each subfamily comes in 8 weights plus italics. The Alt version is highly recommended for those art directors who look for more varied fonts when designing.

My eldest son Sam always wanted to visit Japan and he has been saving up for a ticket for years now. We should have traveled there this year, but due to the pandemic, that was impossible. We’re now trying to go next year. Sam and I did make some kind of itinerary and I told him how we were going to get around, as I have been to Japan many times. I told him about the Shinkansen trains, the cute Tram in Nagasaki and the immense subway system in Tokyo. One of the lines in Tokyo is the so-called Yamanote Circle Line, which I have used on numerous occasions. A new font name was born and it stuck to this particular font! Subway Circle is a 100% handmade font. It is rounded, slightly slanted and comes with a sunny disposition. I am sure that, when you use it, you will find your 生きがい… ;-)

One day shortly after Christmas 2004, the art-director of Vogue Moscow called me. Would I maybe make a Cyrillic version of my Bodoni Classic Text typeface? Well, since I had been thinking about doing it since a long time, this was the perfect reason to finally do it. It was not an easy venture, since I do not have the faintest idea of Russian but, together with those nice people in Russia and a fellow helpful type designer in Kiev, I managed. I did an enormous amount of kerning, thanks to the help of the Moscow Vogue office. Here the fonts are now for all of you: five text cuts, plus one standard roman cut that has no Cyrillic letters but an extra set of medieval numbers. At Vogue they are happy with the fonts, even though I did not quite adhere to Bodoni's originals in this case. Nastarowje (or whatever you say in Russia), Gert Wiescher

Pantomime is an original and unusual casual Roman Script. Designed for using at larger sizes and headlines I have spaced the fortnight, as I believe this is the most effective way for producing interesting word patterns.

To design this font, Crackle, I was inspired by an advertisement in the polish weekly "Tygodnik Powszechny" from 1938. From a few letters I have created an entire typeface - uppercase characters - in crackled and uncrackled versions.

“A couple of years ago, when I was designing a package for a marmalade range, I started having a go at creating a typeface that would suit the package I had in mind. The whole process was intensely appealing to me: from merely using typefaces as an intricate part of my work as an art director, I started exploring the function of each and every element that a typeface consists of. The two things on my mind in designing a typeface for a marmalade brand were firstly, that I wanted it to have a hand-written feel, so as to exude that old-fashioned, homemade quality, and secondly, that it ought to have a certain sweetness and gentleness that would match the product. However, PF Scandal managed to outgrow its original inspiration. As I continued working on it, I toned down some of its elements to make it more versatile. And so, PF Scandal evolved into a typeface that has a contemporary, and yet handwritten look, which makes it suitable for a wide range of uses. The ‘Pro’ version comes with the full array of European characters including Latin, Greek and Cyrillic as well as 120 matching pictograms". -A.S.

Upon numerous demands of highly esteemed users of our fonts I decided to supplement the Walbaum type family by display and poster cuts. Because I obviously cannot compete with world’s renowned type foundries which already offer a number of renderings of forenamed typeface, I thought proper to decline a bit from the original Walbaum’s design, strictly speaking, from the apprehension we commonly keep about this typeface. Therefore I didn’t set forth the way of modernizing (shame!), but rather the opposite direction: towards an analysis of the original neo-classical intention. I took the 10-point character, magnified it enormously and cut off progressively all the optically thickened bobbles which raised by small-size correction. I ended up at the size of about 120 points, where it became obvious that any further thinning would lead to an undesired manneristic fragility. Resulting 8-member family Walbaum 120 is naturally usable in variety of sizes, as well as cuts marked “10” you can use, say, from 6 to 30 points. I only hope that mister Justus Erich won’t pull me by the ear when we’ll meet on the other side...

Rough Love, it’s fair to say, came before Love Script. The brushed letter specimens that would ultimately serve as the template for the much ‘cleaner’ Love Script have now been turned into a typeface. As I packed these up, I just kept coming back to them and staring at the texture and movement caught on the page. On a lark, I decided it would be fun to let people see an almost a before and after scenario of how one led to the other and decided to produce a typeface from these specimens… Rough Love. For the most part, in typical fashion for me when I brush out a typeface idea, I try to brush the entire character set along with each of the planned variants for swashes, titling, and other alternates—the reason for that is simple -- each letter looks and acts a bit differently when the same movements are imposed on them. With Rough Love, I tried to adhere to that and made very few modifications to the originals, and only had to ‘borrow’ in a few occasions when I happened to forget to brush a variant.

A brand new year is here and a brand new font is here as well. I have to say I had so much fun working on this funky slab serif typeface. I have created some quirky letters and over 100 ligatures + the font comes in four weights - light, regular, medium & italic. The font also includes full language support, punctuation, numerals and detailed instructions how to use ligatures in most of the apps on your computer, as well as in Canva. I invite you to check out the preview images, and I hope you will be immersed in my vision for this creative typeface that, I am sure, will work for all kinds of interesting projects you might be working on this year. If you end up publishing your designs on Instagram, tag me - @silverstagco and I will make sure to showcase your design and work to my audience as well! Authentic Romantic - Slab Serif Font Includes: 100+ Ligatures Numerals & Punctuation Language Support Detailed instructions on how to use alternates in most of the apps on your computer as well for Canva Happy creating everyone!

Really, there is nothing stupid about this font. In some strange and weird way, I just thought that the name sounded like something eye-catching - in the same way that the font is eye-catching! It may look like your average comic font, but it's not! I carefully put a lot of funk, twist, comic and a spoonful of pizzadude into each and every letter. The result is a bouncy crazy looking comic font. Oh, I almost forgot - I topped the letters with a spoonful of grafitti mixed with the sounds of a party...that's the recipe for this lovely multilingual font! :)

I used to be a tour guide and spent a lot of time in Asia. One thing that I really liked, was having noodles, ANY kind of noodles, for breakfast! Breakfast Noodles is a very uncomplicated headline font: I made it while seriously renovating our ‘new’ home (a fixer upper farm), which means that this particular font was made over a period of almost 3 months… It wasn’t exactly a letter at a time, but close. I will try and make the next font in, say, under two months… Hopefully! In the meantime, enjoy this one!

Pondicherry is a nice city in the South-East of India. It has changed colonial hands over time, but after the last colonial power (the French) left in 1954, it reunited with India. I have always liked the name Pondicherry. It evokes something happy and exotic and I guess I had the same feeling when I developed this font. Pondicherry font is an outlined affair with an uneven baseline and an overall 'happy' feel. It is an all caps font, but upper and lower case differ and you can use them together. Pondicherry comes with a treasure chest full of diacritics.

The term Sanseki (Japanese for Three [Brush] Traces) is used to describe three famous Heian period calligraphers: Yaseki, Gonseki and Saseki. Not that I would ever dream of comparing my messy brush-work with theirs, but the name stuck and I kind of liked it. I used Chinese ink and a high quality brush (which I got in a sale actually) to create this font. All glyphs were hand painted in one go! Sanseki is a very detailed brush font. Upper and lower case letters mingle and there’s even an alternate for every lower case glyph. Comes with an abundance of diacritics.

Thirteen or 14 years ago I admired, out loud, a book I found on a shelf in Matt Carter's office. That Christmas I was pleasantly surprised to find that Matt had found another copy of the book and he gave it to me. The book was about the life of Oswald Cooper and it contained numerous specimens of Cooper's lettering jobs. Among them was an interesting image of 7 letter that spelled out the word 'Robusto'. These letters were used as the model for the font Robusto. All I needed to do was develop 221 other glyphs to finish the font.

This face was recommended to me by Mark Solsburg, president of FontHaus. At first I was a bit reluctant to revive it, if for no other reason than Frederic Goudy’s admission that he created this design “in a moment of typographic weakness.” However, I put the sample that Mark sent me up on my bulletin board, and over a period of time, it grew on me. It finally got to the point that I had to recreate the face, and from the response that I’ve gotten, I’m glad I did! Uppercase only with numerals and punctuation.

My wife was watching ‘Memoirs Of A Geisha’ the other day, and I am going to take my son Sam to see Japan in May this year, so when I started drawing out the glyphs for this font, the name was already chosen! Tokyo Geisha is a handmade brush font. I made it with Chinese ink and one of the Chinese brushes my late father in law gave me. Tokyo Geisha is a font with speed and a certain flamboyance. It comes with extensive language support and a cool .notdef glyph. I am sure you will put it to good use! Arigato Kozaimasu!

I grew up with the ‘Save The Whales’ slogan: I remember watching the news and seeing little Greenpeace dinghies taking on huge Japanese whalers, and activists clinging on for dear life. I haven’t heard that slogan for a while: maybe because whaling is soooo 1890’s, but also maybe because the world has other problems to address. Out of respect for the ‘Save The Whale’ activists, I named this fattish font Whale Song. Whale Song is a robust comic font. It was especially created for book covers, product packaging and posters and, of course, it comes with a whale of diacritics.

I've been obsessed with type since I was very young, says designer Pelle Piano. “In fact, when I was ten, I used to sneak into stores who sold Letraset sheets, and I actually stole their catalog with all the typefaces. They were perfect good-night stories for me - alphabet after alphabet!” In ITC Lingo, Piano tried out the effect of taking a very rigid underlying letter shape and representing it with “really sloppy outlines.” The underlying form is a condensed Bodoni-like alphabet, with high contrast between thick and thin strokes, but the effect of Lingo is sketchy and informal.

Since 2017, I have been improving my font creating skills. In the same year, I went through my father's notes and decided to make a font with his handwriting style. I completed the initial version with a lower number of glyphs in 2018. It supported only basic Latin, Turkish, and Azerbaijani alphabets. On the 15th of January 2021, my dad will turn 60. I am planning to finalize the updated version of the Father font by then. 584 glyph, 100+ Languages Set. Multilingual support: Latin basic, Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Central Europe, Turkish, Romanian, Euro, West European diacritics

I have upgraded my existing font software and also bought new font software to play around with. It takes some time getting used to working with it; the upgraded software feels similar to what I am used to, but handles things differently and the new software is intuitive, but comes with its own language and ways of doing things. I spend most days reading the handbooks and watching online tutorials, but I did manage to create a font. Steamed is a hand drawn all caps display font that comes with a whole bunch of accented glyphs (even Vietnamese) to play around with.

Whenever I see clippings on TV of demonstrations, protesting against this or that, with people holding up signs, I am surprised about the signs being professionally printed or plotted in Helvetica or Futura condensed. I've even seen signs in Zapfino! That doesn't really cut it, it doesn't look much like a real protest. So I decided to give the protesting world a real good font for the occasion. In German a Revolte is an uprising, I thought that was a good name for the font. Hasta la victoria siempre from your revolutionary type designer Gert Wiescher.

When drawing a new font, there is a time when the final form is found – almost – but the curves are not slick and clean yet, that's what I call the "raw" form. Raw – no sweeteners added! In this family I redefined this moment in type development for the eternally beautiful "Franklin Gothic". I call the design "Franklin Gothic Raw". This packet is the semi-serif addition. There never was a Franklin-Gothic with serifs but actually the font lends itself perfectly to a slab-serif. I started with adding a half serif and eventually add a full slab-serif later on.

Karamelia is my grungy hand drawn brush script. Uppercase is pretty steady, while the lowercase dances and bounces in an unpredictable way. The font has got at lot of of OpenType features such as swashes, ligatures and stylistic alternates - which easily makes your text look more like authentic handwriting. I can think of loads of great opportunities in which this font would look absolutely great ... invitations, weddings, café menus, birthdays, various greeting cards ... or maybe even a loveletter?! I could mention more, but I think I got your fantasies started! Go crazy with Karamelia, and the world will love you for it!

I needed a name with ‘brush’ in it and most have already been taken, so I did a little digging and found out that Purshia tridentata, a flowering plant native to the mountainous areas of western North America is called bitterbrush. It is also known as antelope brush, quinine brush and buckbrush - but I settled on Bitterbrush. There’s nothing bitter about Bitterbrush. It is actually a very sweet hand brushed font. It comes with ligatures for double letter combinations and a truck load of diacritics. And (something I am very proud of): it supports the Vietnamese language!

Hello Buena - From Wood to Digital Type Buena is the first word I read on a letterpress paper, printed by my colleague and friend Wolfgang Wick. I was fascinated by the power of this fat wooden letters at first glance. So I started to create a digital version of it and »Buena Black« was born. Due to the fact that the original punches had only upper- case glyphs, I created the lowercase characters by myself. After that it was time to design the family... Buena is full of OpenType features. To get fully acces, go to www.mazefonts.de and Download the Type Specimen.

PostScript fonts are constructed by connecting dots, dots that have special attributes that control the shape of the connecting lines. In designing Minimalist, I wanted to see how few dots could be used to construct each letter. This is the source of the name--it is (or was) a minimum-point alphabet. I did not expect much from it, and was surprised that it turned out as well as it did. Since I originally drew it, I have added some points to some of the letters to get them to generate proper bitmaps, so it no longer has minimum points.

Personally I think a brush font should have the word ‘Brush’ in its name. It’s not that easy finding a name - you need some magic to come up with a good one! Magical Brush is a completely handmade font. I used a small brush (a number 3 to be precise) and Chinese Ink. I wanted just a little ‘erosion’, so I used copier paper rather than my expensive French water color paper (which is quite rough). Magical Brush comes in the normal variant and a chickenpox one. Use it for your posters, your book covers and your Christmas invitations!

I like orange juice. Come on, who doesn't? Orange juice is the drink of heroes; it's the elixir of life; it's the gods' own ambrosia. Suco De Laranja means orange juice in Portuguese and I named this font thus, just because I love the stuff! Suco De Laranja is a very narrow, very gentle typeface with a rough edge. It comes in a variety of languages and guess what? I have added Cyrillic as well. Just to be complete. So there you have it: a font named after a juice. Take a sip and enjoy! На здоровье!

Akagi started as a rough sketch while on a really long plane ride to Tokyo in 2007. I wanted to develop a sans that was a complete departure from my successful Aaux Pro (now Aaux Next) sans serif family. Whereas Aaux and its siblings are rather unforgiving and stark in their presentation, I wanted this new sans serif to "smile" at you when it's on the page. When the plane landed and I realized I did not sleep through the 15 hour trip, my brain shut off, the laptop closed and I hopped in the car to the hotel—forgetting the "new sans" folder on my desktop. Fast forward a few months and I found myself seeing a lot of crisp, rigid, robot-like sans serif typefaces everywhere... I enjoy these new crop of faces but wanted to see something "friendlier" and remembered my earlier sketch work. The groundwork was there screaming at me to complete and Akagi arose from the ashes. To be truly satisfied with it personally, a great deal of time was spent trying to create a harmony between line and curve in an attempt to show that you can be crisp, clean and legible and still keep some personality. The Light and Fat weights (regular and italic) are my favorites and I hope to see them as the workhorses of the typeface.

While I was in Boston in 2014, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts and to my good fortune there was an exhibit of etchings by Rembrandt, one of my favorite artists. As to be expected, many were simply gorgeous, but one especially caught my eye. It was an etching of a priest (Jan Cornelis Sylvius, Preacher) with an extensive amount of writing in Latin. While I'm not certain that it was Rembrandt's own hand, the script was beautiful and I was fascinated by it because it had to be written on the etching plate in reverse. I snapped a few photos using my phone and later found other editions on line. I was so taken by the script that it begged me to create a modern typeface from it. The result is Saskya, named after Rembrandt's wife Saskia. There were many ligatures and glyph variants in the print, of which I captured many of them and made them accessible via OpenType features. The complete alphabet was not present in the sample, however, I discovered some other source material to sensitively fill in those gaps, with a remaining last few that I created myself. A truly romantic hand, Saskya will work well for invitations of many sorts, and when you're looking for that 'old thyme' scripty feeling in your graphics.

Z-Rex looks like the copies I was getting from a lousy copier before I threw it out. You might think it has been eaten by a T-Rex, or maybe it looks like swiss cheese blech.