The font Speech Bubbles offers a convenient way to integrate text and image. While the font can be used to design comics, it also gives the typographer a tool to make text speak – to give words conversational dynamics and to emphasize visually the sound of the message. The font includes a total of seventy outlines and seventy bubble backgrounds selected from a survey of historic forms. What follows is a discussion of my process researching and developing the font, as well as a few user suggestions. My work on the Speech Bubbles font began with historic research. My first resource was a close friend who is a successful German comic artist. I had previously worked with him to transform his lettering art into an OpenType font. This allowed his publishing house to easily translate cartoons from German to other languages without the need to use another font, like Helvetica rounded. My friend showed me the most exciting, outstanding and graphically appealing speech bubbles from his library. I looked at early strips from Schulz (Peanuts), Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobes), Hergé (TinTin), Franquin, as well as Walt Disney. The most inspiring was the early Krazy Kat and Ignatz (around 1915) from George Herriman. I also studied 1980’s classics Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s Ronin and Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vandetta. Contemporary work was also a part of my research—like Liniers from Macanudo and work of Ralf König. With this overview in mind I began to work from scratch. I tried to distill the typical essence of each author’s or era’s speech bubbles style into my font. In the end I limited my work down to the seventy strongest images. An important aspect of the design process was examining each artist’s speech bubble outlines. In some cases they are carefully inked, as in most of the 80’s work. In others, such as with Herriman, they are fast drawn with a rough impetus. The form can be dynamic and round (Schultz) with a variable stroke width, or straight inked with no form contrast (Hergé). Since most outlines also carry the character of the tool that they are made with, I chose to separate the outline from the speech bubble fill-in or background. 
This technical decision offers interesting creative possibilities. For example, the font user can apply a slight offset from fill-in to outline, as it is typical to early comic strips, in which there are often print misalignments. Also, rather than work in the classic white background with black outline, one can work with colors. Many tonal outcomes are possible by contrasting the fill-in and outline color. The Speech Bubbles font offers a dynamic and quick way to flavor information while conveying a message. How is something said? Loudly? With a tint of shyness? Does a rather small message take up a lot of space? The font’s extensive survey of historic comic designs in an assembly that is useful for both pure comic purposes or more complex typographic projects. Use Speech Bubbles to give your message the right impact in your poster, ad or composition.

A Postmodern vernacular sanserif in 8 fonts Prosaic designed by Aurélien Vret is a Postmodern typographic tribute to the french vernacular signs created by local producers in order to directly market their products visible along the roads. These signs drawn with a brush on artisanal billboards do not respect any typographic rules. The construction of these letterforms is hybrid and does not respect any ductus. Nevertheless the use of certain tools provokes a certain mechanism in the development of letter shapes. It’s after many experiments with a flat brush, that’s these letterforms have been reconstructed and perfected by Aurélien Vret. This is the starting point for the development of an easily reproducible sanserif with different contemporary writing tools. From non-typographical references of Prosaic towards readability innovation The influence of the tool is revealed in the letterforms: angular counterforms contrasting to the smoothed external shapes. This formal contrast gives to Prosaic a good legibility in small sizes. These internal angles indirectly influenced by the tool, open the counterforms. In the past, to deal with phototype limitations in typeface production, some foundries modified the final design by adding ink traps. In our high resolution digital world, these ink traps — now fashionable among some designers — have little or no effect when literally added to any design. Should one see in it a tribute to the previous limitations? Difficult to say. Meanwhile, there are typeface designers such as Ladislas Mandel, Roger Excoffon, and Gerard Unger who have long tried to push the limits of readability by opening the counters of their typefaces. Whatever the technology, such design research for a large counters have a positive impact on visual perception of typefaces in a small body text. The innovative design of counter-forms of the Prosaic appears in this second approach. Itself reinforced by an exaggerated x-height as if attempting to go beyond the formal limits of the Latin typography. It is interesting to note how the analysis of a non-typographical letters process has led to the development of a new typographic concept by improving legibility in small sizes. Disconnected to typical typographic roots in its elaboration, Prosaic is somewhat unclassifiable. The formal result could easily be described as a sturdy Postmodern humanistic sanserif! Humanistic sanserif because of its open endings. Sturdy because of its monumental x-height, featuring a “finish” mixing structured endings details. The visual interplay of angles and roundness produces a design without concessions. Finally, Prosaic is Postmodern in the sense it is a skeptical interpretation of vernacular sign paintings. Starting from a reconstruction of them in order to re-structure new forms with the objective of designing a new typeface. Referring to typographic analogy, the Prosaic Black is comparable to the Antique Olive Nord, while the thinner versions can refer to Frutiger or some versions of the Ladislas Mandel typefaces intended for telephone directories. Prosaic, a Postmodern vernacular sanserif Prosaic is radical, because it comes from a long artistic reflection of its designer, Aurélien Vret, as well a multidisciplinary artist. The Prosaic is also a dual tone typeface because it helps to serve the readability in very small sizes and brings a sturdy typographic power to large sizes. Prosaic, a Postmodern vernacular sanserif

The great enigma There are hidden depths to FS Silas Sans. First impressions are of a functional, multi-purpose typeface with a cool, edgy, angular character. Gaze into its eyes a little longer, though, and you'll detect a more nuanced, colourful personality, with full, open, satisfyingly squarish forms balancing the abruptness of the sharply-angled terminals and ascenders. Authoritative, official and stern on the outside; amiable and welcoming on the inside. You’re so Dane The designers, led by Phil Garnham, were trying to capture something straight-talking, authentic, and a little... Scandinavian. ‘We were thinking about some of the characters in Danish dramas that were on in the early stages of the font’s development, like The Killing and The Bridge,’ says Phil. ‘The police officers, that is, not the psychopathic killers. Smart and a bit cool, but with a warm heart.’ For a good Danish name, we settled on Silas. It was that or Hans-Christian. The finer points Silas Sans rewards close inspection. Study, if you will, its amply squarish forms, the roomy ‘o’ and ‘e’, in particular. Observe the angular ascenders and terminals of, for example, the ‘L’, ‘I’, ‘d’ and ‘i’, inferring the movement and lift of a pen. Consider the cuts to the ‘A’ and ‘v’ that create harmony with adjacent letters. And scrutinise the subtle ink traps set within the ‘A’ and ‘Y’ for reproduction at small sizes. A fine subject, we think you’ll agree, and available in a versatile range of weights to make (with FS Silas Slab) a typographic system with a comprehensive hierarchy.

Now available as Opentype font with extended character set, Coranto 2. It is originally based on Unger’s typeface Paradox, and arose from a desire to transfer the elegance and refinement of that type to newsprint. Coranto 2 has a larger x-height and in many places has been made more robust. Over the past 25 years newspaper production has seen spectacular improvements in paper and print quality, the introduction of colour printing, and vastly better register. Newspaper production still demands a lot of letter forms, but advanced printing brings out details better and makes typography more appealing to readers. For text type the newspaper is no longer an environment in which survival is the chief assignment. Today, newspapers are not merely a matter of cheap grey paper, thin ink and super-fast rotary printing, and type design no longer has to focus on surviving the mechanical technology and providing elementary legibility. Now there is also room to create an ambience, to give a paper a clearer identity of its own; there is scope for precision and refinement. One consequence of this is that newspaper designers can now look beyond the traditional group of newsfaces. Conversely, a newsface can be used outside the newspaper — not an uncommon occurrence. The update to this beautiful font family, Coranto 2, includes the addition of over 250 glyphs featuring full Latin A language support, new ligatures, 4 sets of numerals, arbitrary fractions and superiors/inferiors. Furthermore, kerning was added and fine tuned for better performance.

Calissha Script is a handmade font created with a brush and ink, bold and irregular baseline. Contains a complete set of lowercase, uppercase, alternates, ligatures, punctuation, numbers, and multilingual support. And additional Calissha Capitals, working in harmony with Calissha Script to create typography awesome creations. Get some inspiration from the preview above. Contains a complete set of lowercase, uppercase, ligatures, punctuation, numbers, and multilingual support. Calissha Script is perfect for use in watercolor design or lettering style bold hand, such as blog header, branding, t-shirt, weddings, social media, product design, stationery, advertising, apparel, cover books, business cards, greeting cards, branding, merchandise, invitations and handmade quotes and more. Calissha Script features OpenType stylistic alternates, ligatures and International support for most Western Languages is included. To enable the OpenType Stylistic alternates, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7, Microsoft Word 2010 or later versions.How to access all alternative characters using Adobe Illustrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzwjMkbB-wQ Calissha Script is coded with PUA Unicode, which allows full access to all the extra characters without having special designing software. Mac users can use Font Book , and Windows users can use Character Map to view and copy any of the extra characters to paste into your favourite text editor/app.How to access all alternative characters, using Windows Character Map with Photoshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go9vacoYmBw If you need help or have any questions, please let me know. I'm happy to help :) Thanks & Happy Designing!

Resist Sans is a free-spirited neo-grotesque that embodies both the innate desire for revolt and a tendency towards uniformity. While Resist Sans preserves the neat, minimalist look which is associated with neo-grotesques, it also accentuates the tentativeness of each letter form. The name, too, hints at the rebellious character of the typeface. Resist Sans comes in 28 styles (14 uprights and matching obliques). Text vs Display Resist Sans comes in two versions: Display and Text, which serve different purposes but remain interchangeable and even complementary in some cases. Resist Text is equipped with deep ink traps and optical compensators, which really come into play at smaller sizes. The Display version is smoother and more consistent, so better for use in larger sizes and headlines. Styles/Weights Each of the two versions of Resist Sans comes in 7 weights (Thin to Black) and is equipped with matching Obliques, which brings the total number of styles to 28. Two trial styles (Text Light and Display Medium Oblique) can be downloaded free of charge. Each style contains 900+ glyphs, awesome OpenType features, and around 1500 kerning pairs. Language Support Resist Sans is truly multilingual. It supports most European and Latin-languages and features Extended Cyrillic, which gives access to such languages as Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian, Macedonian and many more. Free Styles Two styles of Resist Sans can be downloaded for free on MyFonts. Type Specimen Resist Sans PDF Type Specimen can be downloaded here: Resist Sans PDF Type Specimen

My brother is an architect, and I have always loved his lettering, you know, the style of writing that can be found on architectural drawings. There is a common thread to it, yet each architect or engineer brings their own personality to it. I have seen a similar style being used by some hand-letterers for invitations, place cards and signage. Inspired, I set out to create my own, and the result is my new typeface, Robard! I wanted something compact, somewhat modular, done quickly but with control, and sourced from hand-lettering. Starting out with a handful of pigment ink pens, I settled on a 0.1mm Copic Multi-Liner, and using a light table with a grid underneath the paper, I cranked out grouping after grouping, letter after letter, numbers, punctuation, accents, just trying to zero in on the feeling and the look I was after. There were some ideas that didn't work, like unicase (there would be no regular lowercase), or swash alternates. Ultimately, I ended up with a decent array of glyphs to choose from, and alternates like oldstyle numbers, and an alternate set of caps for the lowercase slots, and even alternative figures so doubles like 88 would be different. In the font, the OpenType ligature code automatically alternates the cap and lowercase (alternate cap) letters, and numbers as you type, lending Robard that hand-lettered look in a digital typeface that I was hoping for. There are also oldstyle figures, and unlimited fractions, ordinals, and a few alternate letters. I hope you like Robard!

In the typedesign industry the terms ‘nova’, ‘neue’, ‘next’, ‘new’ are often used to refer to a typeface that has been modified in different ways: redesign, technical readjustments, greater number of characters, etc. At Latinotype we are now starting to use the word ‘niu’ to refer to these kinds of typefaces. Niu is an adaptation of the original word ‘new’, i.e., we have adapted this English word to the phonology and spelling of our own language but keeping the original meaning. Race mixing, diversity, change and adaptation are part of the essence of Latin American culture and, at Latinotype, we are all constantly expressing these elements in everything we do. Latin Power! Hernández Niu was designed by César Araya and Daniel Hernández. The font is based on the design of Hernández Bold: the thickest weight has been adapted to fit small text better. Five new styles have been added, ranging from neutral to more expressive fonts. Hernández Niu is a display slab serif font of thickened serifs, functional expressive ink-traps and true italics. Detailed forms and counterforms allow this typeface to be used in very large sizes. Hernández Niu is well-suited for publishing, small text and headlines. A wide variety of weights make the font a perfect choice for hierarchical type-setting, branding, logotypes, magazines, etc. This font consists of 6 weights, ranging from Extra Light to Heavy, each with matching true italics. Hernández Niu comes with a set of 397 characters, making it possible to use the font in 212 different languages.

Historical Background Old South Arabian Script (OSA) was used before the Islamic era not only in the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula, but actually in the entire Peninsula. In addition, samples of OSA have been found as far as Uruk in Mesopotamia, Delos in Greece, and Giza in Egypt. Archaeological finds show that as far back as the 8th century BCE, OSA was used in trade, religious writing, and in civil records. Following the spread of Islam in Yemen, the decline of OSA began in the 7th century CE as it was gradually supplanted by Arabic script. OSA was typically known by the name of the then-dominant peoples in the Southern Peninsula. At various times, it was known as Sabaean, Qatabani, or Hadramite, among others. Although it was used for a variety of languages, OSA is most strongly associated with Sabaean. Many Peninsular languages borrowed OSA before introducing further changes of their own. Prime examples are the Thamudic, Safaitic, and Lihyanite scripts which eventually developed into independent scripts. The westward migration of the Sabaean people into the Horn of Africa introduced the South Arabian consonantal alphabet into the region. The transplanted script formed the roots of the Geez script of Ethiopia, which, in time and under presumably external influences, developed into a rich syllabary unlike any other Semitic script in history. Even a cursory examination of the letter forms of Modern Ethiopic writing reveal a striking similarity to South Arabian Script. OSA inscriptions typically reveal a dominant right-to-left directionality, although there are also many cases of alternating directions, known as boustrophedon writing. Figure 1 is a fine example of this style of writing. OSA inscriptions were discovered early in the 19th century. Soon thereafter, two orientalists, Gesenius and Rödiger, made great strides towards deciphering the script. Styles of Writing Old South Arabian inscriptions have survived primarily on stone, ceramic, and metallic surfaces. Hundreds of artifacts have been found and, to this day, continue to be discovered. Some of the best examples number of inscriptions on softer materials, such as wood and leather, have also been discovered. Although there is a significant difference between the styles of letters on the hard surfaces and those on the soft. Old South Arabian (Musnad) is composed of 29 letters , that is one letter more than the Arabic alphabet, which is between “S” and “Sh”, and names “Samekh”. Aspects of difference between Musnad and the present Arabic writing is that Musnad is written in separate letters, and the shape of the letters do not change according to its place in the word. However, some letters change according to the beginning of the writing. Musnad is either prominent, or deep. Prominent writings are for important writings and deep writings are for ordinary. The material on which the Musnad was written were stones, rocks, wood, and metal. In the course of its development the Musnad use appeared in the “Lehyanite’, “Thamudic”, “Safaitic”, pen to which many changes and amendments were made. And from it “Habashi’ writing was born. As regards his place among the Arabs of the Peninsula , when we look at the internet and its role in cultural dialogue , the Arabs of the Peninsula considered Musnad inscription which was indisputably their national writing until the dawn of Islam. It was used by people in all parts of Arabia in their homeland and abroad . It was their means of chronology and record of their glories and history.2- Features of Musnad Script: 1. It is written from right to left and vice versa. 2. Its letters are not joined. 3. Shape of letters are uniform despite their positions in the word. 4. Words are separated by vertical lines. 5. A letter is doubled in case of assertion. 6. No points and punctuations. 7. Easy to be learned by beginners. My OSA Musnad Font My design and technical work is only a treatment of the OSA Musnad as a symbol of writing. And it is possible to use in computer.. My design is not aimed at demonstrating the linguistic and intellectual structure of the Old South Arabian (Musnad). It is so simple that it could be easy to learn by learners and those who are interested in the OSA Musnad letters in computer. The basis of such importance is that it spares a lot of time and effort for researchers and students in this field. Formerly they used to write the Musnad texts either by handwriting or scan them , But now they can easily write its texts in OSA Musnad by using keyboard directly, so that they can change , amend and fulfill easily and accurately . So, we made use of speed, easiness and accuracy. And anyone interested in the South Arabian history in any part of the world can due to this design read and write OSA Musnad letters most easily. This design will also be used by historians and archeologists. , as well as specialist linguistics . The design also demonstrates the aesthetics of the Himyarit writing. About this font family Old South Arabian is An Arabic, Old South Arabian and Latin typeface for desktop applications ,for websites, and for digital ads. Old South Arabian font family contains two types: Old South Arabian and Old South Arabian serif. The font includes a design that supports Arabic, Old South Arabian and Latin languages. Old South Arabian typeface comes with many opentype features.