Buffet Script is based on fantastic calligraphy by Alf Becker, arguably the greatest American sign lettering artist of all time. The Alf Becker series of nameless alphabets published by Sign of the Times magazine in 1941 has attracted letter digitizers for a few years now, so it’s really a wonder that a few of those alphabets are still in the non-digital realm. It is understandable, though, that the basis for Buffet Script was not digitally attempted until now. The page presenting this alphabet shows a jungle of letters running into each others and swashes intertwining. The massive amount of work involved in digitizing such lettering, where scanning is nowhere near being an option, is quite obvious at a mere glance. If anyone was going to commit this particular alphabet to a digital form, it would have to be redrawn stroke by stroke and curve by curve on the computer. And don't we love a challenge! But seriously, the challenge was not the main attraction. In a way, the Becker approach to lettering is so far from digital that the imagination is almost forced to work out possibilities and letter combinations to solve problems presented by the scant showings in that magazine. After a few imaginative visualizations, the digital potential becomes clear in the mind, and the eye and hand follow. The result with Whomp (another Alf Becker-inspired work) was an enormous font with a lot of alternates and ligatures. With Buffet Script the imaginative process was no different, but the result particularly shines here, because this is some of the most fascinating flowing calligraphy ever seen. Calligraphy is where the accountability of all the little extra touches, such as alternates and swashes and ligatures, is raised to a higher level than in most other type categories. Buffet Script’s OpenType programming contains discretionary ligatures, stylistic and contextual alternates, interacting with each other to allow the composition of just the right word or sentence. This font is best used where lush elegance is one of the design’s requirements.

The courageous Russian author of the best seller Anastasia, Vladimir Megre, once said that this remarkable woman would inspire creative people around the world to produce their best work. Since I consider myself a creative person who has been deeply touched by her story, I sincerely hope that this will be true for me also. Anastasia talks a lot about God, the wonders of the natural world and how all things have been created so perfectly. This belief in universal perfection, however, is not confined to mystics alone. Many great mathematicians and scientists, including Albert Einstein, were of the same opinion. Having read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, I became quite fascinated with the so-called Fibonacci series; "a sequence of integers in which each integer (Fibonacci number) after the second is the sum of the two preceding integers; specif., the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . ." (Webster’s Dictionary). These mysterious numbers, which are said to give divine proportions, are found throughout nature in everything from a rose to a spiral galaxy. Many believe that this reinforces the argument that there is a divine intelligence back of creation. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could somehow create a font using these numbers in the design process. If I have succeeded - even partially - in attaining these mystical proportions, it will definitely have been worth all the hard work. And, I sincerely hope that many will enjoy using this font in producing their own best work.

Created by German designer Jürgen Weltin, Linotype’s Agilita is a contemporary humanist sans serif family with a wide variety of weights, including both ultra thin hairline options and heavier, dark type. Agilita has rather classical proportions; its clear ascenders and descenders lend more distinct word shapes. Weltin’s design has a dynamic, yet strong and very functional appearance with a fine but clear emphasis on the horizontals. This traditional approach makes it a versatile typeface for large-scale text setting, but it can also be used in complex information design projects, and orientation systems, for example. Hence it was developed carefully into a wide range type family system consisting of 32 styles. This even covers the requirements for display and headline setting. Corresponding condensed weights are suitable where horizontal space is scarce, as in narrow columns and tables, for example. The Agilta Hairline and Agilta Ultra Thin styles were especially made for display use. These fonts should be set at a minimum size of 20 pt for printed project, and about 40 pt on output to laser printers, depending on the paper used. Agilita’s character sets include special symbols and signs that may be used in dictionaries; like arrows for lemmata and signs for cross references, idioms or colloquial language. There are two sets of arrows available in each weight for use in orientation systems. Each font in the Agilta family is built according to Linotype’s Extended European character set guidelines. These offer support for more than 48 Latin-based languages used in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, including Baltics and Turkey.

Wedding Regular was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for ATF and released as Wedding Text in 1901. It is a lighter version of his ENGRAVER'S OLD ENGLISH of the same period. Wedding Regular is based on the Textura style of blackletter that continued in popularity in England into the 16th century, long after the Dutch, French and Italians had moved to a Roman model that expressed the Renaissance humanism of the period. Wedding Headline is a still lighter version of the regular text face, suitable for setting larger sizes while still preserving the delicacy of the decorative hairlines. Textura continues in use in England and the United States for newspaper mastheads, gift shop signs, wedding invitations and programs and other applications where a feeling of tradition is desired. I recently saw an 1980ish photo of a “Tubby Isaac” sign in London using textura. I believe Benton’s design captures that feeling without being heavy-handed and still remaining quite readable for eyes accustomed to Roman lettering. Both Wedding Regular and Wedding Headline convey a comfortable familiarity. These two fonts may be purchased together at an attractive discount or they may be purchased separately. The full character set may be found in the pdf file that you can download from the gallery section. The two monks (alt-0172 and alt-0177) are from a set of sixteenth century decorative initial letters by Gering and Renbolt. Please note that there are two different eszetts, the blackletter style at alt-0126 and the antiqua style at the alt-0223.

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.

The Scriptuale family, which contains eight styles, is a contemporary upright calligraphic face. Designed by German designer Renate Weise in 2003, this family of typefaces speaks to the present, while at the same time reflecting on a lyrical past. The letterforms of the Scriptuale family are romanticized, they reference German calligraphic styles from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. For instance the design of Scriptuale's uppercase strays from the canon of classical proportion into romantic idealism. While the C and O are drawn according to the ancient quadratic proportions - almost twice as wide, optically, as the E or the L - the letter A is wider than would be expected, and the D narrower. These subtle differences introduce a different rhythm into text set in Scriptuale than Italic styles of calligraphy may offer. Scriptuale's Gs merit special notice: both the upper and lower case G lunge slightly forward, further enhancing the dynamic quality of the text. Also unique in Scriptuale's design is the lowercase width: the letterforms appear slightly condensed; they have large x-heights to compensate for this. In a delightful twist, the number 2's beak has been closed by drawing it full-circle, back into the stem: this references a style of letter design that was practiced, among other places, by artists from the old Klingspor foundry in Offenbach Germany. Typefaces constructed there easily captured the zeitgeist of the romantic period, but are less calligraphic than Scriptuale (e.g., Rudolf Koch's Koch Antiqua). A semi-serif face (like Prof. Hermann Zapf's Optima or Otl Aicher's Rotis Semi), some of Scriptuale's letters have serifs (D), and some do not (A). And although both the B and the E normally have the same "structure" on their left side, Weise has drawn them differently in Scriptuale. These strengthen the calligraphic-like quality of the family. Traces of the pen are easy to see in Scriptuale's design; it is a thoroughly calligraphic face. The eight typefaces in the Scriptuale family include Light, Regular, Semi Bold, and Bold weights. Each weight has a companion italic. Scriptuale is similar to one other contemporary calligraphic family in the Linotype portfolio, Anasdair , from British designer

Farmhouse is a rustic serif typeface that was inspired by the woodcarved store signs on Main Street in a quaint little village nearby. Farmhouse is based upon the shapes of Baskerville but has a unique rustic character all its own.

Compliments was inspired by a few hand-lettered words on a 1930s brochure by Western Union entitled “The Yellow Blank is Correct for Every Social Need.” It is now available in OpenType format with contextual alternates for a better script effect.

Elle is a geometric sans in three weights with rounded stroke terminals and circular forms. Classy, elegant and modern, with just a hint of the future. Inspired by a single-weight Typositor headline typeface from the early 1970s called Pipeline.

Woebegone is a cute little handmade font. I started off by drawing the glyphs with a Pilot pen, then added some strokes with a Japanese brush pen. Woebegone comes in Regular and Italic and has all the accents you need.

A sans-serif font that I created when long raining in my city. The shape is clean with a dynamic semi-bold stroke. It's suitable for a minimalistic, "less is more" design and useful for display and larger body text.

If you look into the past to see what was expected of us in the future, Amoeba is where we wanted to be by now. Amoeba is a constrained but quirky future font, designed on a computer by a human.

This would be a great font for a book. There are 7 fonts in the font family, so there are a lot of choices to work with. The font features all capital letters with some alternate glyphs for certain characters.

A bit grungy, a bit stern, 21 Emmerson is a tribute to my birthplace and was designed with punky headline posters in mind. The simple lines of this font are angular and sharp - great for party posters, invitations, labels, etc.

Aeron started with a no-nonsense geometric sans-serif structure that grew into a functional semi-serif family of fonts. Half-rounded slabs mix with curvy and squared-off terminals for a personable yet structured family that works in all sizes.

Super Monogram is a perfect shaped monogram font consisting of 26 letters. With just a single font file you will be able to create beautiful monograms in just a matter of minutes after the purchase! Numbers and special characters not included.

LD Buttercream is such a great font...it mimics the look of a frosted remembrance on a birthday cake...but it's uses are so universal and fun, you'll find many ways to put this font to work in your clever creations!

Frankie remains a classic among classics. A pioneer of the Type-Ø-Tones catalog, this is their personal eroded Franklin Gothic.  Avoid imitations. Try Frankie, today still their best-seller. Now, in this updated version with a complete CE Character Set.

Vartek is a geometric sans-serif type family. Inspired by the "space-age" and functionalist aesthetics, Vartek is a high-contrast utilitarian design. It comes in a variety of weight and width options. Opentype features include inferiors, superiors, fractions and ligatures.

Candy Shop is a vintage decorative font. It has a classic elegant look, perfect for food packaging and label design. Additional curly swashes can help you to create a unique lettering compositions. Five additional swashes can be found in "Glyphs" panel.

HU BlackoutKR is a typeface for titles that feels like letters are trapped in a square and has a constant and very narrow inner space. It is composed of three types of family typeface to increase usability. HU BlackoutKR includes Korean.

A Hand Made hand painted font with over 100 ligatures to give the text a real free flowing and hand written feel. Great for wide range of applications and works best as upper and lowercase text in a range of sizes.

OkraCubo in a distressed font with a cubist bent. This font work nicely for both grunge and modern styles. Used at large point sizes the cubist look really comes out. This font is as strange as Okra is a vegetable????

Honey Jar is a bold and modern display font, carefully handcrafted to become a true favorite. This font will look outstanding in any context, whether it’s being used on busy backgrounds or as a standalone headline, especially on natural farm theme !

Lettering artist Alf Becker suggested that this typeface was suitable for postcard work, and we agree (although it's suitable for a great many other uses, as well). It packs a lot of information in a limited amount of horizontal space.

Lecture Hall JNL is a reworking of Dance Hall JNL. By removing the Art Deco flairs and realigning the horizontal strokes in order to create a more traditional design, the font now takes on the look of a classic headline face.

Banzai Bros is a deadly efficient multidisciplinary all-caps assault font. It's highly recommended for posters, signs, flags & banners. Banzai Bros comes with a small set of ornaments. Available as a single font or in packs with other Fenotype fonts.

A softer, streamlined and more elegant development of the ideas originally explored in Jude. Incised letterforms are now rounder and more intuitive, less geometric. Union is a modern classic‚ typeface, avoiding quirky idiosyncrasies to produce a useable and highly contemporary type.

Digital Clock Font is a typeface designed specifically for use in digital alarm clocks and other timekeeping devices. It is characterized by clear, legible numerals and symbols, and a modern, minimalistic design that is easy to read at a quick glance.

Need a semi-formal yet unique font? Thinkerbery is the answer! The look of Thinkerbery is like a digital typing style but still has its uniqueness. We bring a strong looks for your text. Enjoy in creating unique arts using Thinkerbery! :)

Prevya is a display family. Inspired by the metalwork of the early twentieth century. Have appropriate characteristics for ornamental titles. Is accompanied by a light version for featured texts and it has a shadow layer to combine in beautiful designs.

April rain is a delicate, elegant font with teardrop line endings. It is designed to be interesting and a little unusual while remaining robust enough to be used in a variety of contexts from titling and lists to short paragraphs.

A hand-lettered title on a children's stencil book for sale in an online auction served as the basis for Rustic Stencil JNL. Reminiscent of classic wood type, this stencil design adds a Western-influenced flair to any typographic project.

Sumida is a special ward in Tokyo AND the river running through the city. Sumida script is a nice, handwritten font, which was made using a sharpie pen. Sumida Script comes with double letter ligatures and an extensive language support.

A fun trendy font with a monoline calligraphy style. This is a display sans-serif font that we recommend using in the following types of work; magazines (titles and layouts), logos and branding, invitations, quotes, blog headers, posters and advertising.

Albion Signature is a value packed font of exceptional character, with lots of old world charm to make your next project personal and special. Containing over 2,200 glyphs, it’s large enough to handle any demanding project, big or small. It also contains over 400 flourishes in three sections (dingbats, geometric shapes, and misc. geometric shapes) in numerous styles, that can be used in endless combinations. It’s like several fonts in one. Everything you need to do a stellar project is included. A script font that lines up perfectly with a few extra endings and hidden treasures spread throughout. It also contains a complete easy to use PDF index, so you will be able to find exactly the glyph you are looking for fast. This font can only enhance the fonts that you already own, making them more versatile and useful. On its own, it is a very elegant calligraphy script, that will make every project you create look great. The capital letters overlap and intertwine just like in days gone by, for a unique style. Also included are tools that can give you very precise spacing, right inside a word processor. Usage: Photoshop styles, InDesign, personal promotion logos, monograms & signatures.... That’s where it shines, yet it’s still great for art, cards, fancy documents, really fancy labels & even notes to Mom. Imagine, most people used to write letters like these at one time. Now you too can have documents that look like the work of a studied penman.

A practical sans serif need not appear dry, constructed, or derivative. It can excel in its sensible role and yet possess a distinct flair. Iskra (spark or flash) is a new sans serif designed by Tom Grace. It was conceived to challenge the limits between utilitarian and decorative. Sporting a low-contrast profile, it is a study of bridled energy in the Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Its eye-catching forms are an oblique tribute to the less-predictable style of brush lettering, and contain daring, elegant curves, economical proportions, and a slight top-heavy asymmetry. Its warmth comes from the subtle emphasis on the structures and details of individual letterforms, whereas its solidity is demonstrated through its balanced rhythm over long spans of text. Each font supports over 75 languages and is hand-tuned for a pleasing legibility and aesthetic both in print and on screen. This type family makes an excellent choice for presentations, articles, branding, and advertising. Available in 14 styles, Iskra represents a fresh, stimulating, forward-looking perspective on how we see both the vitality of the particular letter and the overall harmony of text. Iskra is available in three different character repertoires: Iskra, complete set — Iskra CYR, Cyrillic-based subset with a Latin supplement — Iskra Cyr, Latin-based subset. Both the LAT and CYR series conform to most standard codepages used by typical software covering their respective scripts. All three series have similar OpenType functionality."

The history of Able’s connection with the Harry Potter phenomenon is really up in the air. It’s a catch-22 in this business - you either promote your own work and negotiate expensive exclusive licenses, or you work with a promoter and sell your designs to anyone and everyone. It could have been an in-house designer at Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, or a freelancer who proposed Able for the headings and such. The responsible party licensed it from T26, and JK Rowling’s storytelling made it a star. (I suppose it’s ironic that there’s a whole lot of unwritten history in the typography business.) Able’s rise to fame really is a classic love story between reading and type design. If the books weren’t so popular, Able might still be waiting for some Mexican fast food chain to pick it up for packaging design. The movie deal certainly made the font all the more recognizable, what with its merchandising campaign. Popularity can also cripple a great decorative face. It’s always being recognized as “The Harry Potter Font.” It might just have to wait a few decades for the Potter phenomenon to subside to be freed from the “Chamber of Pigeonholed Fonts.” In the meantime, I’m sure that a lot of fledgling graphic design apprentices are reading their new Potter books, being charmed by the idea of type design when they’re not turning the pages too fast to notice.

A tessellation is a shape that can be used to completely fill the plane. Simple examples are isosceles triangles, squares, and hexagons. Tessellation patterns are eye-catching and visually appealing, which is the reason that they have long been popular in a variety of decorative situations. These Tessie fonts have two family members, a solid style that must have different colors when used and an outline style. They can be used separately or they can be used in layers with the outline style on top of the solid style. For rows to align properly, leading must be the same as point size. To see how patterns can be constructed, see the “Samples” file here. Shapes that tessellate and also resemble real-world objects are often called Escher-like tessellations. This typeface contains Escher-like tessellations of birds. Quite a few of them resemble swimming birds, but there are also some that resemble flying birds or birds in other positions. Most or all of these shapes were discovered/created by the font designer during the past twenty years in the process of designing maze books, coloring books, and a book about tessellations. (Earlier tessellation fonts from IngrimayneType, the TessieDingies fonts, lack a black or filled version so cannot do colored patterns. The addition of a solid style that must be colored makes these new fonts a bit more difficult to use but offers far greater possibilities in getting visually interesting results.)

The rounded forms found in Chennai have proven to be one of insigne's more popular designs for web-based company logotypes. Now, insigne's new superfamily Madurai takes its popular predecessor to a new level, offering a wide range of complementary fonts. Madurai removes Chennai's rounded stems and then adjusts the character width to account for its reduction in geometry, resulting in a balanced sans-serif face with humanist touches that works well for extended text. The Madurai family has a full range of six weights from thin to black and includes Condensed and extended options for a total of 36 fonts. All members of the Madurai series include a wide variety of OpenType alternates. Madurai is equipped for complex professional typography, including alternates, small caps and plenty of alts, including "normalized" capitals and lowercase letters that include stems. The face also has a number of numeral sets, including fractions, old-style and lining figures with superiors and inferiors. OpenType-capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. You can find these features demonstrated in the .pdf brochure. Madurai also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages, including Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Madurai supports over 40 languages that use the extended Latin script, making the new addition a great choice for multi-lingual publications and packaging. For your next project, explore the fantastic potential of Madurai.