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

Phinney Jenson ML is a font with deep historical roots firmly planted in the fertile soil of the Italian Renaissance. Twenty years after Lorenzo Ghiberti finished his famous East Doors, the Gates of Paradise, of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and about fifteen years before Sandro Botticelli painted his “Birth of Venus,” a French printer by the name of Nicolas Jenson set up a small print shop in the powerful city-state of Venice. The fifteenth century marked the end of the plague and the rise of Venetian power, as the merchants of Venice controlled the lucrative trade of the eastern Mediterranean and sent their ships as far as London and even the Baltic. In 1470, Jenson introduced his Roman type with the printing of De Praeparatio Evangelica by Eusebuis. He continued to use his type for over 150 editions until he died in 1480. In 1890 a leader of the Arts & Crafts movement in England named William Morris founded Kelmscott Press. He was an admirer of Jenson’s Roman and drew his own somewhat darker version called GOLDEN, which he used for the hand-printing of limited editions on homemade paper, initiating the revival of fine printing in England. Morris' efforts came to the attention of Joseph Warren Phinney, manager of the Dickinson Type Foundry of Boston. Phinney requested permission to issue a commercial version, but Morris was philosophically opposed and flatly refused. So Phinney designed a commercial variation of Golden type and released it in 1893 as Jenson Oldstyle. Phinney Jenson is our version of Phinney’s version of Morris' version of Nicolas Jenson’s Roman. We selected a view of the Piazza San Marco in Venice for our gallery illustration of Phinney Jenson ML because most of the principal buildings on the Piazza were already standing when Jenson arrived in Vienna in 1470. The original Campanile was completed in 1173 (the 1912 replacement is partially visible on the left). The Basilica di San Marco was substantially complete by 1300. The Doge’s Palace (not in the photo, but next to the Basilica) was substantially complete by 1450. Even the Torre dell'Orologio (Clock Tower) may have been completed by 1470—certainly by 1500. Phinney Jenson ML has a "rough-and-ready" strength, suitable for headlines and short blocks of text. We have sought to preserve some of the crudeness of the nineteenth-century original. For comparison, see the more refined Centaur, Bruce Rogers's interpretation of Jenson Roman. Phinney Jenson ML has a strong presence that will help your documents stand out from the Times New Roman blizzard that threatens to cover us all. Phinney Jenson ML Features: 1. Glyphs for the 1252 Western Europe, 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Accented glyphs for Cornish and Old Gaelic. Total of 393 glyphs. 400 kerning pairs. 2. OpenType GSUB layout features: onum, pnum, salt, liga, dlig, hisy and ornm. 3. Tabular (std), proportional (opt) & old-style numbers (opt). 5. CcNnOoSsZz-kreska available (salt).

Divina Proportione is based from the original studies from Luca Pacioli. Luca Pacioli was born in 1446 or 1447 in Sansepolcro (Tuscany) where he received an abbaco education. Luca Pacioli was born in 1446 or 1447 in Sansepolcro (Tuscany) where he received an abbaco education. [This was education in the vernacular (i.e. the local tongue) rather than Latin and focused on the knowledge required of merchants.] He moved to Venice around 1464 where he continued his own education while working as a tutor to the three sons of a merchant. It was during this period that he wrote his first book -- a treatise on arithmetic for the three boys he was tutoring. Between 1472 and 1475, he became a Franciscan friar. In 1475, he started teaching in Perugia and wrote a comprehensive abbaco textbook in the vernacular for his students during 1477 and 1478. It is thought that he then started teaching university mathematics (rather than abbaco) and he did so in a number of Italian universities, including Perugia, holding the first chair in mathematics in two of them. He also continued to work as a private abbaco tutor of mathematics and was, in fact, instructed to stop teaching at this level in Sansepolcro in 1491. In 1494, his first book to be printed, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita, was published in Venice. In 1497, he accepted an invitation from Lodovico Sforza ("Il Moro") to work in Milan. There he met, collaborated with, lived with, and taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci. In 1499, Pacioli and Leonardo were forced to flee Milan when Louis XII of France seized the city and drove their patron out. Their paths appear to have finally separated around 1506. Pacioli died aged 70 in 1517, most likely in Sansepolcro where it is thought he had spent much of his final years. De divina proportione (written in Milan in 1496–98, published in Venice in 1509). Two versions of the original manuscript are extant, one in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the other in the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire in Geneva. The subject was mathematical and artistic proportion, especially the mathematics of the golden ratio and its application in architecture. Leonardo da Vinci drew the illustrations of the regular solids in De divina proportione while he lived with and took mathematics lessons from Pacioli. Leonardo's drawings are probably the first illustrations of skeletonic solids, an easy distinction between front and back. The work also discusses the use of perspective by painters such as Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forlì, and Marco Palmezzano. As a side note, the "M" logo used by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is taken from De divina proportione. “ The Ancients, having taken into consideration the rigorous construction of the human body, elaborated all their works, as especially their holy temples, according to these proportions; for they found here the two principal figures without which no project is possible: the perfection of the circle, the principle of all regular bodies, and the equilateral square. ” —De divina proportione

Although Andi AW. Masry designed his Coomeec typeface with one eye on comic books, this is more than just another cartoon font. Even in our short profile of the font below, we're sure you'll find enough to be surprised by the calligraphic aesthetic and the wide range of potential uses of Coomeec. Typography had been one of Andy AW. Masry's hobbies before he turned professional in 2008 and formed his own agency in Jakarta in Indonesia. The former construction engineer had already spent many hours of his leisure time in following his pastimes of designing, photography and Latin typography. Fascinated by the close interaction between text and image in comic books, one of his first projects was the development of his font Coomeec™. The condensed letters of Coomeec seem to have more in common with a calligraphic brush typeface than a more conventional cartoon font. With the characteristic line forms of a brush font, the not unextensive variations in line thickness and numerous small embellishments to the glyphs, Coomeec can be used to enhance your projects with animated effects. You can achieve this not just in the larger font sizes; the font is also very legible in small sizes thanks to its large x-height. There are certain unusual letter forms, such as that of lowercase 'g', 's' and uppercase 'Y', that provide Coomeec with a touch of the exotic. As Coomeec has numerous character alternatives, you can use it not only to create diverse designs but also to ring the changes with the character of the text itself. There are variants for most lowercase letters, some of which exhibit only minor differences, such as the lack of a curlicue on the 'b', a modified downstroke on the 'h' and an elongated base for the 'k'. In the case of other letters, such as the 'q' and the 'r', there are significant disparities between variants. The uppercase characters are also available in a lively swash style with significantly extended terminals. Among the range of characters of Coomeec are oldstyle and lining figures designed for proportional and tabular setting. All alternatives are available in the form of the corresponding OpenType versions. Coomeec comes in two weights; Regular and Bold, each with its Italic version. The form of the slightly inclined Italic characters is identical to that of their upright counterparts with the exception of the lowercase 'f', which has an ascender in its Italic version. As an OpenType Pro font, the glyphs available for Coomeec ensure that it can be used to set not only western European but also central European texts. Coomeec is not just at home when used to set headlines. The excellent legibility of this individual and vibrant typeface means that it's also ideal for setting shorter texts. The various alternative letters provide the designer with the opportunity to vary the textual appearance, and to choose between creating a more formal or more light-hearted effect. Coomeec is not only available in an OpenType version but is also obtainable as a web font, so that you can employ its exotic features to good effect when creating internet pages.

I love geometric sans serifs, their crispness and rationality. Le Havre taps into this style, but for a while, I've wanted to create a font recalling the printed Futura of the 1940s, which seems to have an elusive quality all its own. After seeing an old manual on a World War II ship, I developed a plan for "Le Havre Metal" but chose to shelve the project due to Le Havre's small x-height. That's where Steagal comes in. When Robbie de Villiers and I began the Chatype project in early 2012 (a project which led one publication to label me the Edward Johnston of Chattanooga!), we started closely studying the vernacular lettering of Chattanooga. During that time, I also visited Switzerland, where I saw how designers were using a new, handmade aesthetic with a geometric base. I was motivated to make a new face combining some of these same influences. The primary inspiration for the new design came from the hand-lettering of sign painters in the United States, circa 1930s through 1950s. My Chatype research turned up a poster from the Tennessee Valley Authority in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which exhibited a number of quirks from the unique hand and style of one of these sign artists. Completing the first draft of Steagal, however, I found that the face appeared somewhat European in character. I turned then to the work of Morris Fuller Benton for a distinctly American take and discovered a number of features that would help define Steagal as a "1930s American" vernacular typeface--features I later learned also inspired Morris Fuller Benton's Eagle. The overall development of Steagal was surprisingly difficult, knowing when to deliberately distort optical artifacts and when to keep them in place. Part of type design is correcting optical illusions, and I found myself absentmindedly adjusting the optical effects. In the end, though, I was able to draw inspiration from period signs, inscriptions, period posters, and architecture while retaining just enough of the naive sensibility. Steagal has softened edges, which simulate brush strokes and retain the feeling of the human hand. The standard version has unique quirks that are not too intrusive. Overshoots have almost been eliminated, and joins have minimal corrections. The rounded forms are mathematically perfect, geometric figures without optical corrections. As a variation to the standard, the “Rough” version stands as the "bad signpainter" version with plenty of character. Steagal Regular comes in five weights and is packed with OpenType features. Steagal includes three Art Deco Alternate sets, optically compensated rounded forms, a monospaced variant, and numerous other features. In all, there are over 200 alternate characters. To see these features in action, please see the informative .pdf brochure. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe Creative suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. Steagal also includes support for all Western European languages. Steagal is a great way to subtly draw attention to your work. Its unique quirks grab the eye with a authority that few typefaces possess. Embrace its vernacular, hand-brushed look, and see what this geometric sans serif can do for you.

INTRODUCTION When I started the first Selfie back in 2014 I was aware that I was designing something innovative at some point, because at that time there were not too many, (if any) fonts which rescued so many calligraphy features being at the same time a monolinear sans. I took inspiration from the galerías’ neon signs of my home city, Buenos Aires, and incorporated the logic and ductus of the spencerian style. The result was a very versatile font with many ligatures, swashes and a friendly look. But… I wasn’t cognizant of how successful the font would become! Selfie is maybe the font of my library that I see the most when I finally go out, (type-designers tend to be their entire lives glued to a screen), when I travel, and also the font that I mostly get emails about, asking for little tweaks, new capitals, new swashes. Selfie was used by several renowned clients, became part of many ‘top fonts of the year’ lists and was published in many magazines and books about type-design. These recognitions were, at the same time, cuddles for me and my Selfie and functioned as a driving force in 2020 to start this project which I called Selfie Neue. THE FONT "Selfie for everything" Selfie Neue, because it’s totally new: All its glyphs were re-drawn, all the proportions changed for better, and the old and somehow naive forms of the first Selfie were redesigned. Selfie Neue is now a family of many members (you can choose between a Rounded or a Sharp look), from Thin to Black, and from Short to Tall (because I noticed the feel of the font changed notoriously when altering its proportions). It also includes swashy Caps, which will serve as a perfect match for the lowercase and some incredibly cute icons/dingbats (designed by the talented Melissa Cronenbold, see also Selfie Neue Rounded for more!) which, as you see in the posters, make the font even more attractive and easy to use. You'll find tons of alternates per glyph. It's impossible to get tired with Selfie! Like it happened with the old Selfie, Selfie Neue Sharp was thought for a really wide range of uses. Magazines, Book-covers, digital media, restaurants, logos, clothing, etc. Hey! The font is also a VF (Variable Font)! So you can have fun with its two axes: x-height and weight, in applications that support them. Let me take a New Sharp Selfie! TECHNICAL If you plan to print Selfie Neue VF (Rounded or Sharp), please remember to convert it to outlines first. The majority of the posters above have the "contextual" alternates activated, and this makes the capitals a little smaller. I'd recommend deactivating it if you plan to use Selfie for just one word. Use the font always with the "fi" feature activated so everything ligatures properly. The slant of the font is 24,7 degrees, so if you plan to have its stems vertical, you may use Selfie with that rotation in mind. THANKS FOR READING

Out of a lifelong inner struggle, Philip Bouwsma unleashes a masterpiece that reconciles classic calligraphy with type in a way never before attempted. Maestro takes its cue from the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century. By this time type ruled the publishing world, but official court documents were still presented in calligraphy, in a new formal style of the high Renaissance that was integrated with Roman letters and matched the refined order of type. The copybooks of Arrighi and others, printed from engraved wood blocks, spread the Italian cancellaresca across Europe, but the medium was too clumsy and the size too small to show what was really happening in the stroke. Arrighi and others also made metal fonts that pushed type in the direction of calligraphy, but again the medium did not support the superb artistry of these masters or sustain the vitality in their work. As the elegant sensitive moving stroke of the broad pen was reduced to a static outline, the human quality, the variety and the excitement of a living act were lost. Because the high level of skill could not be reproduced, the broad pen was largely replaced by the pointed tool. The modern italic handwriting revival is based on a simplified model and does not approach the level of this formal calligraphy with its relationship to the Roman forms. Maestro is the font that Arrighi and his colleagues would have made if they had had digital technology. Like the calligraphic system of the papal chancery on which it is modelled, it was not drawn as a single finished alphabet, but evolved from a confluence of script and Roman; the script is formalized by the Roman to stand proudly in a world of type. Maestro came together on screen over the course of several years, through many versions ranging widely in style, formality, width, slant, weight and other parameters. On one end of the spectrum, looking back to tradition it embodies the formal harmony of the Roman capitals and the minuscule which became the lower case. On the other it is a flowing script letter drawing on the spirit of later pointed pen and engravers scripts. As its original designers intended, it works with simple Roman capitals and serifs or swash capitals and baroque flourishes. The broad pen supplies weight and substance to the stroke which carries energy through tension in balanced s-curves. Above all it is meant to convey the life and motion of formal calligraphy as a worthy counterbalance to the stolid gravity of metal type. The Maestro family consists of forty fonts distributed over two weights. The OpenType version compresses the family considerably down to two fonts, regular and bold, each containing the entire character set of twenty fonts, for a total of more than 3350 characters per font. These include a wide variety of stylistic alternates, ligatures, beginning and ending letters, flourishes, borders, rules, and other extras. The Pro version also includes extended linguistic support for Latin-based scripts (Western, Central and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Welsh/Celtic, Maltese) as well as Greek. For more thoughts on Maestro, its background and character sets, please read the PDF accompanying the family.

Father's Day, or June 17 of this year, is in the middle of Argentinian winter. And like people do on wintery Sunday mornings, I was bundled up in bed with too many covers, pillows and comforters. Feeling good and not thinking about anything in particular, Father's Day was nowhere in the vicinity of my mind. My eleven year old son, Matías, came into the room with a handmade present for me. Up to this point, my Father's Day gift history was nothing unusual. Books, socks, hand-painted wooden spoons, the kind of thing any father would expect from his pre-teen son. So you can understand when I say I was bracing myself to fake excitement at my son's present. But this Father's Day was special. I didn't have to fake excitement. I was in fact excited beyond my own belief. Matí's handmade present was a complete alphabet drawn on an A4 paper. Grungy, childish, and sweeter than a ton of honey. He'd spent days making it, three-dimensioning the letters, wiggle-shadowing them. Incredible. A common annoyance for graphic designers is explaining to people, even those close to them, what they do for a living. You have to somehow make it understandable that you are a visual communicator, not an artist. Part of the problem is the fact that "graphic designer" and "visual communicator" are just not in the dictionary of standard professions out there. If you're a plumber, you can wrap all the duties of your job with 3.5 words: I'm a plumber. If you're a graphic designer, no wrapper, 3.5 or 300 words, will ever cover it. I've spent many hours throughout the years explaining to my own family and friends what I do for a living, but most of them still come back and ask what it is exactly that I do for dough. When you're a type designer, that problem magnifies itself considerably. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you start looking for the nearest exit, but none of the ones you can find is any good. All the one-line descriptions are vague, and every single one of them queues a long, one-sided conversation that usually ends with someone getting too drunk listening, or too tired of talking. Now imagine being a type designer, with a curious eleven year old son. The kid is curious as to why daddy keeps writing huge letters on the computer screen. Let's go play some ball, dad. As soon as I finish working, son. He looks over my shoulder and sees a big twirly H on the screen. To him it looks like a game, like I'm not working. And I have to explain it to him again. This Father's Day, my son gave me the one present that tells me he finally understands what I do for a living. Perhaps he is even comfortable with it, or curious enough about that he wants to try it out himself. Either way, it was the happiest Father's Day I've ever had, and I'm prouder of my son than of everything else I've done in my life. This is Matí's font. I hope you find it useful.

The Thief Bird is an informal grotesque font. Although informal and grotesque may seem to be two quite different ideas, we have to dig into the origin of this typeface in order to understand the matter. The concept behind The Thief Bird was inspired by the adaptation that the vintage sign painters made when they took the grotesque style characters they saw in newspapers and magazines and reproduced them using a brush, aiming to make the prices of the products displayed on wooden boards stand out, as opposed to highlighting large headlines (such as the idea behind fonts like Franklin Gothic). The Thief Bird takes the language from sign painters and turns it into a font --this time around not aiming to set prices but to bring children stories to life. Thus, some legibility features from grotesque fonts were mixed with the brush calligraphy to add grace and zest to a font intended for children. The Thief Bird is a playful display font, with cheerful ligatures and alternate characters. It is really attractive for setting short paragraphs that tell stories for little people. The Thief Bird has one single weight and it’s ideal to be used in storybooks, candy packaging, films, toys, logos, labels, etc. The font has an extended set of 643 characters supporting 219 Latin languages. It has a complete set of small caps, sensitive cases, more than 30 pairs of ligatures, alternate characters and much more. This cool, informal and laid back typeface will be the perfect match for illustrations of fairy tales, comics for children and any product or publishing for the little ones. The Thief Bird supports this languages: Abenaki, Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Amis, Anuta, Aragonese, Aranese, Aromanian, Arrernte, Arvanitic (Latin), Asturian, Atayal, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Bemba, Bikol, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Chickasaw, Cimbrian, Cofán, Corsican Creek,Crimean Tatar (Latin),Croatian, Czech, Dawan, Delaware, Dholuo, Drehu, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian Filipino, Finnish, Folkspraak, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Gooniyandi, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut)Guadeloupean, Creole, Gwich’in, Haitian, Creole, Hän, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hopi, Hotcąk (Latin), Hungarian, Icelandic, Ido, IgboI, locano, Indonesian, Interglossa, Interlingua, Irish, Istro-Romanian, Italian, Jamaican, Javanese (Latin), Jèrriais, Kala Lagaw Ya, Kapampangan (Latin), Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Karelian (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kiribati, Kirundi, Klingon, Ladin, Latin, Latino sine Flexione, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Māori, Marquesan, Megleno-Romanian, Meriam Mir, Mirandese, Mohawk, Moldovan, Montagnais, Montenegrin, Murrinh-Patha, Nagamese Creole, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Ngiyambaa, Niuean, Noongar, Norwegian, Novial, Occidental, Occitan, Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Oshiwambo, Ossetian (Latin), Palauan, Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Potawatomi, Q’eqchi’, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Rotokas, Sami (Inari Sami), Sami (Lule Sami), Sami (Northern Sami), Sami (Southern Sami), Samoan, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Seri, Seychellois Creole, Shawnee, Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Slovio (Latin), Somali, Sorbian (Lower Sorbian), Sorbian (Upper Sorbian), Sotho (Northern), Sotho (Southern), Spanish, Sranan, Sundanese (Latin), Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tokelauan, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Tzotzil, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Wallisian, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Warlpiri, Wayuu, Welsh, Wik-Mungkan, Wiradjuri, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Yindjibarndi, Zapotec, Zulu, Zuni.

The Novera family is a sharp geometric sans in ten weights plus matching italics, available in two versions – Modern and Classic. It has a contemporary, approachable and multifunctional yet characteristic design, that comes with an extensive glyphs set of 1000+ glyphs per font, meeting all typographic demands. The Design Vertical terminals, circular shapes and angular apexes – Novera truely breathes geometry! But the concept goes beyond the application of rational geometry. The intension was to create a highly legible family suitable for every day usage inspired by the work of Paul Renner, Eric Gill or Jakob Erbar, combining the geometric with the human and the functional with the unconventional. Although Novera is inspired by the past, its appearance is unmistakingly modern. Modern vs Classic Novera is available in two versions - Modern and Classic - born from the same source file but with different characters set as default. This creates subtle but effective distinctions such as the double-storey a (Novera Modern) which is optimized for legibility in longer text paragraphs, as opposed to the single-storey a (Novera Classic) which allows a purely geometric appearance. Another distinguishing feature are the ascenders on Novera Mondern, which extend above the cap height for an elegant presence, compared to the ascenders on Novera Classic, ending at the cap height, for a compact and helvetica-flavored look. Novera Modern was intended for usage in body copy, whereas Novera Classic was planned for headlines, short paragraphs or logos, but both versions can be used vice versa too, of course. Alternate Characters To maintain neutrality and a modern appearance, the standard character set largely dispenses with idiosyncratic forms. This is in contrast to the alternative forms with the gill-like lowercase letters g and t as well as a traditional shape of S and the German ligature t/z, which traces back to old German spellings. Also inspired by German poster designs from the early 20th century are the elongated i-dots and dieresis-dots that can create eye-catchers in headlines or logos. By the way, both versions, Novera Modern and Classic, can be created via stylistic set 1, 17 and 18. Opentype Features and Symbols The family comes with many opentype features to support modern typesetting. This includes ligatures, different number sets or alternative shapes for texts set in all caps. If you like arrows and other shapes, you will love Novera! The family has a built-in extensive symbols-set including 48 different arrows and various geometric shapes or icons. Weights With its 40 styles and 1000+ glyphs per font, the Novera family covers all thinkable design scenarios from branding to web, app or editorial usage. It blends in perfectly in text heavy paragraphs with its mid-weights like Light, Regular, Medium or Bold or stands out like a monument in headlines and posters with its extreme weights like Thin, ExtraLight, Black or Ultra. Testfonts If you like to test the fonts before buying the full version, please follow the link below. Please note, all test fonts are available for evaluation purposes only and contain a limited character set! A commercial license for the full version must be purchased separately. Please send a mail to contact@renebieder.com for more information. Download the test fonts here: https://www.renebieder.com/test-fonts

This vintage, iconic typeface of original Czech letter-founding has been faithfully revised, extended and newly rendered in 2012. The majority of Vojtěch Preissig’s type faces have been, from their very creation, subject to controversial evaluations which might perhaps fill more pages than have been set in these type faces so far. The considerable technological backwardness of Czech typography between the world wars intensified the author’s creative effort even more. He had been devoting thought to his Antikva type face from 1912 onwards and dozens of hardly perceptible nuances of the same design have been preserved in his drawings. It was his only book type face, but it shows no signs of any hard struggle in creating it. Its extraordinary vividness and elegance are really surprising. It may be still indebted to the forms of Art Nouveau, which was withering away at that time, but its proportions, colour and expression inspire other Czech type designers. Preissig’s Antikva, Menhart’s Figural (and also Růžička’s Fairfield) and Týfa’s Antikva represent a clear line of development, very far away from the soft aesthetics of Tusar, Dyrynk or Brunner. The co-author of the modification for computer composition is Otakar Karlas. Without his experience the work would remain only a shadow of Preissig’s design. Our aim was to produce a large family of type faces for the setting of both books and jobbing works. The digital transcription of Preissig’s Antikva came into existence from summer till winter 1998. The direct model for this type face is the most successful, two-cicero (24 pt.) design dating from 1925. The designs of other sizes (12 pt., 14 pt., 16 pt. and then 36 pt. and 49 pt.) lack vividness and are the source of the widespread mistaken belief that Preissig’s Antikva consists of straight lines. That is, unfortunately, how even Muzika and Menhart describe it. Neither is it a Cubist type face as many of the semi-educated think today. Special attention had to be paid to italics. It is apparent that their design is not as perfect as that of Preissig’s Antikva. In contradistinction to the original we have deleted almost all lower serifs in the lower-case letters, enlarged the angle of inclination and completely redesigned the letters a, e, g, s, k, x, ... All crotches have been lightened by marked incisions. In other words, none of the italic letters corresponds to Preissig’s model. The signs which were missing have been supplemented with regard to the overall character of the alphabet. Preissig did not deal with bold designs, but the crystal-clear logic of his “chopping-off” of the round strokes enabled us to complete the type face family without any greater doubts. An excessively fragile type face, however, cannot be used for setting in smaller sizes; that is why we have prepared a separate family of text designs which has shortened ascenders, normal accents, slightly thickened strokes, and is, in general, optically more quiet and robust. We recommend it for sizes under 12 points. By contrast, the elegance of the basic design will be appreciated most in the sizes used for headlines and posters. Preissig’s Antikva is suitable not only for art books and festive prints, but also for poetry and shorter texts.

Centennial Script was designed and cut by Hermann Ihlenburg in 1876 (the centennial of American independence, hence the typeface's name) for the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan foundry in Philadelphia. Ihlenburg was then only 33 years old, and these beautiful forms put him on his way to become the most prolific and innovative deco, ornamental and script typeface designer and punch cutter of the nineteenth century. In trying to be a true homage to the history of the new world, Centennial Script transcends its then-contemporary deco fashion to embrace script elements historically similar to lettering found on maps or political documents of the 18th century. Letters like the p and s extend themselves high and mighty to accentuate words and lines of text in a fancy hand-drawn manner. The dots on the i and j are those of a careful scribe who acknowledges the importance of the document being lettered. The lowercase letters connect with two slight angular motions of the hand, also very carefully and elegantly. Even the ligatures and ending swashes Ihlenburg made for this face were reminiscent of a mapmaker's patient hand, though Ihlenburg's elegant touch in them cannot be mistaken. Although Centennial Script was one of the few Ihlenburg faces to make it to film type technology, the transition was neither credited nor faultless. The film type version was a bit sloppy in the way the connectors were made, so the lowercase needed a lot of manual work to typeset properly. To alleviate such waste of time for the user of this digital version, the connectors were redrawn according to the original metal ones made by Ihlenburg himself, and tested thoroughly in print to ensure the quality of the typeface's flowing cursive nature. This wasn't an easy task, and very time-consuming, since the changing angles on both ends of the connection made it impossible to escape from having to build every lowercase letter with both left and right connectors that would fit with the rest of the letters. This is one typeface that couldn't be revived in any other manner than the way it was originally made, regardless of more than 130 years of technological advances since the face was designed. Centennial Script comes in all popular font formats, and supports most Latin-based languages. Also included is an Alts fonts that contains alternates, ligatures, snap-on swash endings, some ornaments, as well as a complete set of the lowercase without left side connectors, for a more natural combination when following a majuscule, or just in case the user finds it fit to set the copy in a non-connecting script instead of the face's original connected flow. Centennial Script Pro, the OpenType version, combines the main font with the Alts font in a feature-packed single font. Use the ligature feature to set wordmarks like Mr, Ms, Mrs, Dr, and &Co, the stylistic alternates feature to replace some letters with their alternative forms, the contextual alternates feature for better uppercase-lowercase sequences, and the titling feature to set your text in a disconnected script. Centennial Script is the only script we currently know of that can be set connected or disconnected simultaneously, either using the titling feature in the OpenType Pro version, or manually in the other formats.

Erik Spiekermann, working in collaboration with Ole Schäfer, originally designed FF Info® Display for use in the context of wayfinding systems. The variants FF Info™ Text and FF Info™ Correspondence were developed later for text setting and office communication. FF Info Display The sober and clear forms of the sans serif FF Info Display have been deliberately molded to make them perfect for use on wayfinding systems. The font by Ole Schäfer and Erik Spiekermann not only takes the problem of lack of space into account - it is some 15% narrower than comparable typefaces - the characters have also been designed to ensure they remain legible even in adverse conditions for reading. As text on signs often contains words with which readers are unfamiliar and which are thus deciphered letter for letter rather than perceived as whole words, it is essential to provide for a clear differentiation between glyphs. Additional serifs on the lowercase "i" and uppercase "I" and a small arch on the terminal of the lowercase "l" ensure that it is possible to readily discriminate between these particularly problematic letters. Moreover, sharp corners on glyphs can also make it difficult to read signs with backlighting or when driving past. The rounded corners of FF Info Display counteract this effect and make sure that the character forms remain well defined.FF Info Display is available in five carefully coordinated weights, from Regular to Bold. In the corresponding italic variants, the letters appear overall more rounded while the lowercase "a" has a closed form and the "f" has a descender. Also included among the glyphs of FF Info Display are several ligatures and arrow symbols. Pictograms with different themes that complement the typeface are also available in four weights. FF Info Text Thanks to his know-how gained through designing other typefaces, Erik Spiekermann became aware that fonts created for use in problematic environments can be used in many different situations. In smaller point sizes, FF Info Display cuts a fine figure when used to set longer texts. So Spiekermann carefully reworked FF Info Display to produce FF Info Text, a font perfected for use in this context. Not only can the characters be more generously proportioned, certain features, such as additional serifs to aid with the differentiation of problematic letters, are also no longer necessary in textual surroundings. The upright styles have a double-story "g" while Spiekermann has added oldstyle figures and small caps. FF Info Correspondence FF Info Correspondence has also been designed for setting block text although it recalls the style of old typewriter characters and is specifically intended for use in office communication. The characters of this third member of the family are thus more formal, without rounded terminals but with rectangular punctuation marks. The narrower letters are provided with large serifs to give them more space although, at the same time, this reduces the differences in terms of letter width among the alphabet. In contrast with its two siblings, FF Info Correspondence has only three weights, each with corresponding italic.The three styles of the FF Info super family cover an extensive range of potential applications. If the different kerning is adjusted manually, the three styles harmonize happily with each other and can be readily used in combination to set, for example, headlines and texts and also creative display options.

If you are into the vintage feel, you will love this one. This is as vintage as it probably gets. There are probably only a handful of places in the world where schools still use blackboards and chalk – they’ve given way to their white board and marker counterparts for decades now. White boards are definitely more practical and less messy when compared to chalk, but then if you are creatively inclined you will agree that a little bit of mess is worth it if you are going to get the effects that you desired! Well, we can give you the effects minus the mess with our chalk hand lettering fonts! As the name suggests, this font gives you that distinctly unique chalk on slate feel, and if you are wondering what’s distinct about it; writing on slate or blackboard was a slow process which required deliberated and concentrated efforts resulting in a handwriting which was usually quite different to a person’s handwriting on paper. Typography of chalk on slate was an everyday event in the classrooms of yesterday, and today we hardly ever get to see one of these if it all. Writing on a black board with chalk was quite an interesting achievement in its own right, if you ended up with anything legible and if your writing remained focused and ‘in-line’! But of course like everything else, his took time to master and when you did get it right, chalk hand lettering was quite an enjoyable experience! For semi-permanent designs, say for example an eventful day at school; students of the day would create beautiful typography on the boards, and add a solidarity to it sometimes by shading one side of the lettering – usual y the right side towards which the lettering leaned. This is the effect our chalk hands lettering shaded variation gives you. You could get this font individually, but we strongly advise you check out the “chalk hand lettering pack” font. It includes the simple “chalk hand lettering” (minus the shading effect) and also a “chalk hand elements” bag of tricks. The elements is a collection of graphic art which resemble shapes and designs that used to be added to chalk art, to beautify the typography. If you enjoyed seeing the effects of our Chalk Hands font, and the shaded variant – you are simply going to go gaga over Chalk Hand Elements! The chalk hand font of course enables you to make typographic art similar to the effect of chalks on slates and black boards. This was quite the art form in the days gone by! The shaded variation added a bit of solidarity and the technique was commonly used to make semi-permanent designs say for example a welcome note when somebody important was to visit. Classic chalk hand designs, especially the semi permanent ones often had little pieces of art to help beautify the creation as a whole. It could simply be symmetrical graphics appearing before and after the title and headings, maybe just an interesting shape to fill in an empty area on the board, and such…our Chalk Hand Elements offers you a ton of such graphics. The two chalk hand variations and the elements are all included in the Chalk Hand Family, and this is strongly recommended if you want to make designs that are truly reminiscent of the days of chalk on slate.

TT Ricordi Greto useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options TT Ricordi Greto is the 5th project from the TT Ricordi collection of fonts, the main task of which is to find gems in old tablets and on stones and bring these inscriptions back to life in the form of contemporary fonts under the general name TT Ricordi. TT Ricordi Greto is Kseniya Karataeva’s original experimental project, inspired by a floor plaque dating from 1423 found in the Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence. When working on the typeface, we wanted to do something new and modern, but at the same time find details or artifacts in the source that could be exaggerated to the maximum. TT Ricordi Greto is a non-contrasting Florentine sans-serif with dynamic proportions and a hint on what would be serifs. The main features of the typeface are the closed aperture, dynamic proportions, and the combination of historical forms with modern visual solutions, flowing terminals with curling dash ends and flared ends, and subtle serifs that hint at the historical material. Another feature of the typeface is a large set of graphic icons (characters and objects), margin markers (flowers, stars and drops) and thirteen catchwords. All icons and spacing have been carefully selected and rendered in order to best match the visual plasticity of the font and interact well with it. The TT Ricordi Greto font family consists of 4 styles: Regular, Medium, Demibold + the Variable font. Each style includes 678 glyphs and 14 OpenType features. In addition to wide language support (extended Latin and basic Cyrillic), each style has two sets of figures and currencies (proportional and tabular), a set of arrows alternative versions of the letter M (flared and straight versions) and the letter Ф (round and oval) and the same a set of icons, margin markers and catchwords. TT Ricordi Greto OpenType features list: aalt, ccmp, locl, numr, ordn, tnum, pnum, case, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, calt. TT Ricordi Greto language support: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian+, Aleut (lat), Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian+, Asu, Aymara, Azerbaijani +, Banjar, Basque +, Belarusian (lat), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama+, Boholano+, Bosnian (lat), Breton +, Catalan+, Cebuano+, Chamorro+, Chichewa, Chiga, Colognian+, Cornish, Corsican +, Cree, Croatian, Czech+, Danish, Dutch+, Embu, English+, Esperanto, Estonian+, Faroese+, Fijian, Filipino+, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian+, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician+, Ganda, German+, Gikuyu, Guarani, Gusii, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Hungarian+, Icelandic+, Ilocano, Indonesian+, Innu-aimun, Interlingua, Irish, Italian+, Javanese, Jola-Fonyi, Judaeo-Spanish, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Kamba, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karaim (lat), Karakalpak (lat), Karelian, Kashubian, Kazakh (lat), Khasi, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Kurdish (lat), Ladin, Latvian, Leonese, Lithuanian+, Livvi-Karelian, Luba-Kasai, Ludic, Luganda+, Luo, Luxembourgish+, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay+, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Marshallese, Mauritian Creole, Meru, Minangkabau+, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (lat), Morisyen, Nahuatl, Nauruan, Ndebele, Nias, Norwegian, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Palauan, Polish+, Portuguese+, Quechua+, Rheto-Romance, Rohingya, Romanian +, Romansh+, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Salar, Samburu, Samoan, Sango, Sangu, Sasak, Scots, Sena, Serbian (lat)+, Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Silesian, Slovak+, Slovenian+, Soga, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho+, Spanish+, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish+, Swiss, German +, Tagalog+, Tahitian, Taita, Talysh (lat), Tatar+, Teso, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan+, Tsakhur (Azerbaijan), Tsonga, Tswana +, Turkish+, Turkmen (lat), Uyghur, Valencian+, Vastese, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Vunjo, Walloon, Walser+, Welsh+, Wolof, Xhosa, Zaza, Zulu+, Belarusian (cyr), Bosnian (cyr), Bulgarian (cyr), Erzya, Karachay-Balkar (cyr), Khvarshi, Kumyk, Macedonian+, Montenegrin (cyr), Mordvin-moksha, Nogai, Russian+, Rusyn, Serbian (cyr)+, Ukrainian.

Classic Grotesque by Rod McDonald: a traditional font with a modern face. The growing popularity of grotesque typefaces meant that many new sans serif analogues were published in the early 20th century. Setting machines were not compatible with each other but all foundries wanted to offer up-to-date fonts, and as a result numerous different typeface families appeared that seem almost identical at first glance and yet go their separate ways with regard to details. One of the first fonts created with automatic typesetting in mind was Monotype Grotesque®. Although this typeface that was designed and published by Frank Hinman Pierpont in 1926 has since been digitalised, it has never achieved the status of other grotesque fonts of this period. But Monotype Grotesque was always one of designer Rod McDonald’s favourites, and he was overjoyed when he finally got the go-ahead from Monotype in 2008 to update this “hidden treasure”. The design process lasted four years, with regular interruptions due to the need to complete projects for other clients. In retrospect, McDonald admits that he had no idea at the beginning of just how challenging and complex a task it would be to create Classic Grotesque™. It took him considerable time before he found the right approach. In his initial drafts, he tried to develop Monotype Grotesque only to find that the result was almost identical with Arial®, a typeface that is also derived in many respects from Monotype Grotesque. It was only when he went back a stage, and incorporated elements of Bauer Font’s Venus™ and Ideal Grotesk by the Julius Klinkhardt foundry into the design process, that he found the way forward. Both these typefaces had served as the original inspiration for Monotype Grotesque. The name says it all: Classic Grotesque has all the attributes of the early grotesque fonts of the 20th century: The slightly artificial nature gives the characters a formal appearance. There are very few and only minor variations in line width. The tittles of the ‘i’ and ‘j’, the umlaut diacritic and other diacritic marks are rectangular. Interestingly, it is among the uppercase letters that certain variations from the standard pattern can be found, and it is these that enliven the typeface. Hence the horizontal bars of the “E”, “F” and “L” have bevelled terminals. The chamfered terminal of the bow of the “J” has a particular flamboyance, while the slightly curved descender of the “Q” provides for additional dynamism. The character alternatives available through the OpenType option provide the designer with a wealth of opportunities. These include a closed “a”, a double-counter “g” and an “e” in which the transverse bar deviates slightly from the horizontal. The seven different weights also extend the scope of uses of Classic Grotesque. These range from the delicate Light to the super thick Extrabold. There are genuine italic versions of each weight; these are not only slightly narrower than their counterparts, but also have variant shapes. The “a” is closed, the “f” has a semi-descender while the “e” is rounded. Its neutral appearance and excellent features mean that Classic Grotesque is suitable for use in nearly all imaginable applications. Even during the design phase, McDonald used his new font to set books and in promotional projects. However, he would be pleased to learn of possible applications that he himself has not yet considered. Classic Grotesque, which has its own individual character despite its neutral and restrained appearance, is the ideal partner for your print and web project.