The classic modernist FS Alvar grew out of a library of pure modular shapes gathered by Fontsmith’s master of the abstract starting point, Mr Phil Garnham. “It was a collection that just had to be explored and brought to life in a typographic voice. “We debated long and hard about this. It was big decision to make a shift away from the typefaces that people knew us for. And we didn’t want to compromise our reputation of well crafted typographic quality”. Modular forms A headline font that’s both graphic and functional, in the modernist tradition, FS Alvar focused Fontsmith’s eyes on the bigger issue of what makes a font show its age. “Looking at those fonts from the 1980s that were supposed to represent the ‘future’,” says Phil, “they looked so dated now. With Alvar, we weren’t concerned with creating future-thinking typography but with exploring form for form’s sake, and how that can evolve to create letterforms. Modular forms with a typographic eye.” Stencilled The concept for Alvar first materialised back in 2001 with some sketches Phil made while still at Middlesex University. Eight years later, something made him dig them out again. “There was something really nice about the proportions of that first design. Working on it again, I thought about it properly, but it still needed something to give it that edge. “Jason stood up in the studio and supplied the missing link: ‘Why don’t we make it stencilled?’ He didn’t mean in an obvious way, but by building a kind of architectural stencil into the form. It worked and the idea of using an architect’s name (Alvar Aalto) to describe the font felt perfect.” Featured in... The three weights of FS Alvar are made for standout headlines in advertising campaigns and magazines. Alvar has had a starring role in campaigns for brands from Nike to Amnesty International, as well as on CD covers, record labels and packaging.

DSType proudly presents Diversa Std, the same system as Diversa, but with separate styles: Serif, Serif Stencil, Inline, Soft Serif, Sans, Sans Stencil, Slab, Slab Stencil and Baroque. Diversa Std: Because uniformity still sucks!

The Lamia font is inspired by the work of the most famous calligrapher of the Basque Country, Jose Francisco de Iturzaeta Eizaguirre (Getaria1788-Madrid 1853). His writing method was compulsory in Spanish schools since 1835. His "unpolished Spanish font" tried to be more effective than the more commercial English version by avoiding embellishments and excessive rear tearing. More akin with the liberal values imported by the French, his offerings sought uniformity, speed and efficiency to ensure that those in the less-favored echelons of society had an effective communication tool. From his "general collection of characters of European Letters" published in Madrid in 1833, we have chosen the "lower case pancilla reformed" represented in one of the prints. We have tried to reinterpret it by keeping its essence but also ensuring that it is viable for potential contemporary uses which, thanks to its good readability and effectiveness in longer texts, basically means as a decorative or display font. The upper case was generated using the lower case as a reference.

The two great technical constraints a type designer can tackle are low resolution, which limits detail and dictates proportions between negative and positive shapes, and uniform width, which restricts each letter to a fixed horizontal space. Wrestle with both at once, and each letter becomes a black-and-white chessboard that challenges every design decision. Sometimes battling these constraints gets in the way of a good idea, but other times, tinkering with fewer options can make the job irresistibly easy and lead straight to a grid addiction. Gridlite, an experiment with a modular negative space, is the side effect of such an addiction. It’s simplified, monospaced, and variable: foreground and background alike are ready to be animated, typed, scaled up, scaled down, rounded, or otherwise deformed. Gridlite is primarily a variable font with axes that control the size of the elements, their shape, and the background (one for the rectangular field and one for the compact envelope around the letters). The fonts cover Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts. Small caps are included, for no apparent reason ... and there is a monospaced elephant, too.

The “Moorish arch” treatment of certain letters on a 2001 book on Dutch design, executed by René Knip, provided the inspiration for this exotic unicase typeface. The font also includes arabesque designs in the brace, florin and section mark positions. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin and 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan) character sets.

Mangal™ is an OpenType font for the Indic script Devanagari. Mangal can be used to write Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi and other Indic scripts. Mangal is based on Unicode, contains TrueType outlines and was designed by Raghunath Joshi for use as a UI font. Copyright ™ 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Character Set: Latin-1, Devanagari.