a, g, k and y It was a forensic examination by Jason Smith of his existing designs that laid the groundwork for FS Jack. Jason made a list of unique characteristics that would give the sans serif font its typographic thumbprint, which included an unusually large x-height and slightly off-the-wall letters like the lower-case “a”, “g”, “k” and “y”. “I wanted to make something that was slightly uncomfortable,” says Jason, “and in doing so simplify the quirkiness down to a few letters.” Fernando Mello did “the rest of the cooking”, filling the design out and making the additional weights. Tipos Latinos Upon its release in 2010, FS Jack was submitted by Fernando, who is Brazilian, for the esteemed type design biennial, Tipos Latinos, where it was selected as a winner in the Families category. It went on to be selected for type exhibitions throughout Latin America and around the world. “FS Jack is a workhorse,” says Fernando, “but also very ownable and distinctive, and available in a good range of weights, crafted by Jason and I.” Corporate “FS Jack took a couple of years to get noticed and is still fairly underused,” says Jason, “which is good in a way, for our Brandfont clients that have adopted it.” FS Jack was chosen as the signature font for The Shard in London, from its signage down to business cards. Fontsmith also worked with Lloyds Bank to customise FS Jack into a bespoke font for the bank’s updated brand identity – part of Fontsmith’s Brandfont service, which you can read about here. Fat Jack Included in the FS Jack family – just – is FS Jack Poster, the super-heavy weight of the range. “That was a last minute addition,” says Fernando, “after Jason and I started talking about how much we liked Gill KO, a typeface that is almost comically fat.”

The Bitstream version of Linotype Janson. Nicholas Kis (Miklos Kis) was a Hungarian punchcutter who worked in Amsterdam. His types are some of the greatest in the Dutch old face style and have been used as models for a number of developments in this century. The Linotype version of this style, Janson, was created by Chauncey H.Griffith in 1937 and based on an original face cut by Kis in 1670–90. The face is named after Anton Janson, a Dutchman who worked in Leipzig, with whom the face has no connection. The typeface is used for text setting. Cyrillic version was developed at ParaType in 2001 by Vladimir Yefimov.

It's cool to be square. Among the many strange attempts to conceal writing, these two systems allegedly used by the Masons have a wonderful simplicity and relative ease of use. Both systems, the Rosicrucian and Free Mason, (also called the Pigpen cypher) as simple replacement ciphers never offered very great cryptographic security, but certainly would ensure that the casual observer would not be able to read documents written in such scripts.

Stone and steel FS Benjamin is a flared serif typeface designed by Stuart de Rozario. Consisting of 12 styles ranging from Light, Book, Regular, Medium, SemiBold and Bold with Italics it has clear, delicate letterforms, punctuated with brutal chiselled angles. With a pure and crafted feel to the forms the typeface has traditional roots but has been designed to work in a contemporary setting. Archetypal proportions in terms of x-height to cap height and ascender to descender ratio, allow the typeface to feel familiar and be legible in all platforms. Delicate brutalism Inspired by the contrasts of London and named after Big Ben, FS Benjamin was designed by Stuart de Rozario and founder, Jason Smith. Walking around London Jason was inspired by the juxtaposition of the old and the new. Glass and steel architecture can often be found amongst traditional signage and coats of arms seen around the City. These surroundings sparked an idea to create a modern design based on an alphabet that would traditionally be carved from stone. “Much of the typography we see today is so similar. I thought what if we created a typeface with traditional roots but modernised it to sit amongst the punk and noise of the streets of London? Old with new. Business with busyness. This is what London is all about.” Jason Smith

Technobaby is a funky futuristic font done with modular letterforms. This typeface arose from playing around with the basic rounded rectangle shape. Jason wanted to see how many different letters he could create by simply changing the locations of the slots cut into the rectangles. Overall it lends the font a very cohesive and unique look. Get your "mod" on with Technobaby!

Kangaroo FS Joey was the offspring of a project with Rudd Studio to develop a logotype for an online streaming TV service, in 2008. While under wraps, the secret project was code-named Kangaroo. The logotype led to a second project, to design a corporate typeface for the service. It was the first big project Fernando Mello had worked on with Jason Smith. “Like any designer who just joined a team, I was very excited about it, drawing and sketching lots of ideas. I remember Jason and I experimenting with lots of possibilities, for both the logo and the typeface.” Online As the font for a Spotify-style, internet-based service, FS Joey needed to be highly legible on-screen, including at very small sizes. There had to be a range of weights, and they’d have to work well in print, too. It was also important that it felt corporate, not too quirky, while still having a strong character of its own. Quirkiest “We designed three weights specifically for use on the Web,” says Jason Smith. “There was the usual fight between me and my team. I wanted at least one identifiable letter that was a quirk. As always I went straight for the lowercase ‘g’, and it was drawn numerous times with lots of variation. I got the quirkiest one accepted by the client.” But, later in 2009, the Competition Commission blocked Project Kangaroo, and Fontsmith were left with a couple of weights of an as yet unused font. From Kangaroo, Joey was born. A favourite “Straight away, people started to notice the typeface,” says Jason. “I can take the credit for pushing the art direction and standing up for the quirks. But it was Fernando who was the key to pulling it all together and adding his own distinct flavour. Now it’s one of my favourite designs in our library.” Fresh and friendly, geometric and energetic, Joey is available in five weights, all with italics, all finely-tuned for both screen and print.

Kangaroo FS Joey was the offspring of a project with Rudd Studio to develop a logotype for an online streaming TV service, in 2008. While under wraps, the secret project was code-named Kangaroo. The logotype led to a second project, to design a corporate typeface for the service. It was the first big project Fernando Mello had worked on with Jason Smith. “Like any designer who just joined a team, I was very excited about it, drawing and sketching lots of ideas. I remember Jason and I experimenting with lots of possibilities, for both the logo and the typeface.” Online As the font for a Spotify-style, internet-based service, FS Joey needed to be highly legible on-screen, including at very small sizes. There had to be a range of weights, and they’d have to work well in print, too. It was also important that it felt corporate, not too quirky, while still having a strong character of its own. Quirkiest “We designed three weights specifically for use on the Web,” says Jason Smith. “There was the usual fight between me and my team. I wanted at least one identifiable letter that was a quirk. As always I went straight for the lowercase ‘g’, and it was drawn numerous times with lots of variation. I got the quirkiest one accepted by the client.” But, later in 2009, the Competition Commission blocked Project Kangaroo, and Fontsmith were left with a couple of weights of an as yet unused font. From Kangaroo, Joey was born. A favourite “Straight away, people started to notice the typeface,” says Jason. “I can take the credit for pushing the art direction and standing up for the quirks. But it was Fernando who was the key to pulling it all together and adding his own distinct flavour. Now it’s one of my favourite designs in our library.” Fresh and friendly, geometric and energetic, Joey is available in five weights, all with italics, all finely-tuned for both screen and print.

Kis Classico™ is named after the Hungarian monk Miklós Kis who traveled to Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century to learn the art of printing. Amsterdam was a center of printing and punchcutting, and Kis cut his own type there in about 1685. For centuries, Kis's type was wrongly attributed to Anton Janson, a Dutch punchcutter who worked in Leipzig in the seventeenth century. Most versions of this type still go by the name Janson. In 1993, the Italian/Swedish type designer Franko Luin completed Kis Classico, his own contemporary interpretation of the Kis types. About the Kis/Janson story, Luin says: If you understand Hungarian I recommend you read the monograph, 'Tótfalusi Kis Miklós' by György Haiman, published in 1972 by Magyar Helikon. It has hundreds of reproductions from his Amsterdam period and from the time when he was an established printer in Kolozsvár (today's Cluj in Romania)." Kis Classico has five weights, and is an admirable version of this classic type.

If you're in need of a sophisticated sans serif font, look no further than type designer Jason Castle’s Carisma (Paul Shaw in HOW magazine). Carisma, a CastleType Original, combines the elegance of classic capitals, the simplicity of clean-cut, geometric lowercase letters and the warmth of sensuous curves, subtle contrasts and sensitively tapered terminals, making it the perfect typeface for an understated, modern, sophisticated look. Available in two styles: Carisma Classic (the original), and Carisma Gothic, plus Carisma Inline.

In 1912 Gerard Meynell, with J.H. Mason, Ernest Jackson and Edward Johnston, commissioned this large x-height typeface modelled on Caslon’s designs from Pierpont and the Monotype Corporation as the text face for The Imprint, a short-lived magazine about fine printing and typography.

After the popular successes of Exocet and Mason, Emigre has once again teamed up with Jonathan Barnbrook to bring you his latest venture into type land. Priori is a logical progression from Mason, a typeface he designed around ten years ago. Where Mason was designed purely for display purposes and featured only caps, Priori includes lower case, companion serif and sans serif versions, alternates and, according to its creator, is shooting for text face status - a bold claim from a designer who loves to wear his influences on his sleeve and who has little use for typography that aspires to be "neutral" or "transparent." Like many of Barnbrook's typeface designs, Priori is based on his interest in British typography of the early 20th century. It is inspired by the work of famous British typographers, such as Eric Gill and Edward Johnston. But it also embraces all of the signage and lettering that Barnbrook observes in the streets, cathedrals, and public buildings of his London neighborhood. This mixing of native influences with a contemporary pop culture intent is what gives Barnbrook's types a distinct and unique flavor. Like its creator, Priori is a one of a kind.

After the popular successes of Exocet and Mason, Emigre has once again teamed up with Jonathan Barnbrook to bring you his latest venture into type land. Priori is a logical progression from Mason, a typeface he designed around ten years ago. Where Mason was designed purely for display purposes and featured only caps, Priori includes lower case, companion serif and sans serif versions, alternates and, according to its creator, is shooting for text face status - a bold claim from a designer who loves to wear his influences on his sleeve and who has little use for typography that aspires to be "neutral" or "transparent." Like many of Barnbrook's typeface designs, Priori is based on his interest in British typography of the early 20th century. It is inspired by the work of famous British typographers, such as Eric Gill and Edward Johnston. But it also embraces all of the signage and lettering that Barnbrook observes in the streets, cathedrals, and public buildings of his London neighborhood. This mixing of native influences with a contemporary pop culture intent is what gives Barnbrook's types a distinct and unique flavor. Like its creator, Priori is a one of a kind.

This casually elegant script, similar to the logotype lettering found on Mason jars (hence the name), is patterned after an offering from the 1930s chapbook 60 Alphabets by The Hunt Brothers. The Opentype version of this font supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages, as well as Unicode 1252 (Latin) languages.

HT Mason is bold and hand painting font. This font is retrospective and decent, but it is also funny and cute. Holiday Type Project offers retro hand drawing scripts. Inspired by retro script on shopfront lettering, wall paint advertisements in Italy around 1950s. Check out the script fonts from Holiday Type!

This elegant typeface was suggested to me by type critic Daniel Will-Harris. Jensen Arabique is based on a set of capital letters drawn by Gustav Jensen that included the word "ARABIQUE" at the top of the first page, therefore the name. Daniel Will-Harris has this to say about Jensen Arabique: "I found an example of this unexecuted Gustav Jensen typeface in a type sample book from 1933, and Jason Castle lovingly digitized it with all its rare and unusual curves intact." Uppercase with alternates, numerals and some punctuation.

Youthful Fontsmith received a brief to develop a font that would form part of the broadcast identity for the UK’s first digital Freeview channel – E4. It needed to work seamlessly in text and display, both in print and on-screen, and please the eye of the target audience, 18-34-year-olds. So, young, fresh and informal. No problem. Except for one thing: the timing. Daughter As he worked on FS Maja, Jason Smith was occupied by another imminent deadline: the birth of his third child. The pressure was mounting, but rather than let it get to him, Jason embraced the challenge and made light of the tension, fashioning a bright, bubbly, entertaining type with a personality made for memorable headlines. Beautifully random FS Maja’s soft, rounded shapes and assured, fluent lines encompass lots of notable features that contribute to its warm, fun-loving personality, including: a very large x-height; a short, rounded serif to allow for close spacing and give texture to body text; a slight convexity, or bulge, in the stroke terminals; a calligraphic fluidity in the entry to the down-stroke of most lowercase letters; open, generous curves, especially in the “B”, “P” and “R”; and a “w” made of two “u”s.

Eclectic FS Siena is a typeface with history, and not just in the sense of having its origins in classical Roman lettering. Fontsmith founder Jason Smith first committed it to tracing paper while still at college, instinctively redrawing letterforms based on Hermann Zapf’s Optima according to ‘what felt right’. When Krista Radoeva took up the challenge to edit and extend the typeface, she and Jason were determined to preserve its subtly nonconformist and eclectic spirit. Like a great dish, there are individual components throughout the character set that all add flavour, and need to be balanced in order to work together. The smooth connection of the ‘h’ ‘m’ ‘n’ and ‘r’ contrasts with the corners of the ‘b’ and ‘p’. The instantly recognisable double-storey ‘a’ – the starting point of the design – contrasts with the single-storey ‘g’ and the more cursive ‘y’. And only certain characters – ‘k’, ‘w’, ‘v’ and ‘x’ in the lowercase and ‘K’, ‘V’, ‘W’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ in the caps – have curved strokes. Transitional FS Siena is a contrasted sans-serif typeface, blending classical elegance and modern simplicity. Its construction and proportions are descended from classical broad-nib calligraphy and humanist typefaces, with a high contrast between the thick and thin strokes. The angle of the contrast, though, is vertical, more in the character of pointed-nib calligraphy and modernist typefaces. This vertical stress helps to give FS Siena a strong, cultured presence on the page. Idiosyncratic italics The italics for FS Siena were developed by Krista to complement the roman upper and lower-case alphabets first drawn by Jason. Many of the letterforms are built differently to their roman counterparts: there’s a single-tier ‘a’, a looped ‘k’ and connections more towards the middle of stems, such as in the ‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘u’. These distinctions, along with generally much narrower forms than the roman, give the italics extra emphasis within body copy, where the two are side-by-side. In editorial, especially, the combination can be powerful. To cap it all… In his original draft of the typeface, Jason found inspiration in Roman square capitals of the kind most famously found on Trajan’s Column in Rome. In keeping with those ancient inscriptions, he intended the capitals of FS Siena to also work in all-upper-case text, in logotypes for luxury consumer brands and property developments, for example. A little added space between the upper-case letters lets the capitals maintain their poise in a caps-only setting, while still allowing them to work alongside the lower-case letterforms. The caps-only setting also triggers a feature called case punctuation, which adapts hyphens, brackets and other punctuation to complement the all-caps text.

Elliptical The squareness of curves. That was the elliptical – in more than one sense – notion being explored in the making of FS Hackney. The squareness of curves and vertical terminals to create a gentle, soft sans serif, with a little bit of magic. A momentary thought – “It doesn’t have to be like this” – provided the spur to explore the verticals and skeletons of letterforms beyond conventional type design limits. A 12-month gestation period gave rise to a font with a larger-than-usual character set, including non-lining figures, small caps and superior and inferior numbers. It’s a collection that speaks confidently for itself. Assertive It was the Hackney carriage – the black London cab – that gave this font its name, not the north London neighbourhood. Solid, dependable, effective and built to last, FS Hackney was honed to perform in all conditions. Cool, compelling lines and a satisfying overall simplicity lend FS Hackney its assertive air. Assured, versatile and effective; just like a black cab (but without the grumbling). Machined Over a string of meetings, Jason Smith and FS Hackney designer Nick Job worked out how to infuse Nick’s sketched letterforms with Fontsmith’s familiar geniality. “Nick is very meticulous and produces very clean design work,” says Jason. “Hackney is ideal for branding as it’s very clear and its quirks are sensible ones, not odd ones, that don’t distract from the message.”