Earlier this year I visited a bakery in Newport Beach, CA and fell in love with the organic design and typography of the place. Hand-drawn menus, table cards, chalkboards, and wall quotes surrounded the charming spot. It inspired me to create a new font family based on the combination of hand drawn fonts. Included in this package are 5 font families, with 2 graphic ornament fonts. Each font family contains at least a light, medium and bold. Here is a breakdown of what's cookin' at Catalina's Bakery: Catalina Anacapa: Tall and skinny, this font comes in 3 weights for both sans and slab serif styles. It includes contextual alternatives (giving 3 versions of each letter), stylistic alternatives for select letters (A, K, P, Q, R, Y) and also includes Small Caps. Catalina Avalon: Based off Anacapa, this sub family has a high contrasting line weight. It comes in light, regular and bold as well as an inline alternative for both sans and slab serif styles. Avalon also includes opentype features such as contextual alternatives (giving 3 versions of each letter), stylistic alternatives for select letters (A, K, P, Q, R, Y) and small caps for each letter. Catalina Clemente: In a more standard width, Clemente is one of the two sub families that can be used for paragraph text as well as headlines. It's organically geometric in style and comes in ALL CAPS and lowercase, includes upright and custom italics, and has the opentype feature giving 3 versions of each letter. Catalina Script: A great compliment with the display sub-families, Catalina Script rounds out the package with a hand-drawn cursive flair. It includes contextual alternatives (giving 2 variations to each letter) as well as stylistic alternatives for many of the capital and lowercase letters. It has special ligatures for some letter combinations, and titling alternatives for all the capital letters. Catalina Typewriter: The second of the paragraph text sub-families, this typewriter inspired hand-drawn font family works great as either a display or paragraph text. It has contextual alternatives with 3 versions of each letter, and comes in both upright and custom italics versions. Catalina Extras! These two fonts go perfectly with the Catalina Family. They includes borders, frames, arrows, banners, flourishes and more. Catalina Flourish has all of it's options in a light and bold style, to use the light version type all lowercase letters, then to make something bold, used it's uppercase (or shift+) characters. For a breakdown of graphic/letter correlation, see the breakdown PDF. All of Catalina was drawn by the same hand, using the same ink and technique. While they contrast in their type styles, they work together perfectly to create one cohesive font family.

Timeless Renaissance looks, gently updated. For novels and billboards alike. Allrounder Antiqua is an old-style serif member of the Allrounder superfamily. A timeless typeface based on classical proportions, Allrounder Antiqua is perfectly suitable for advanced book and editorial design well as packaging and branding. True: its main purpose is to set flawless body copy and to generate an evenly textured page—but its refined shapes work fantastically in display applications, too. Some details, such as the small and sharp bowl of the lowercase a, are fully appreciated in large sizes only. If you need a sophisticated serif typeface for packaging, food, fashion, consumer goods, or lifestyle branding, Allrounder Antiqua is up for it. It's also apt as an outstanding corporate typeface, be it for a more conservative venture or the latest hipster start-up. This classy serif typeface comes in four weights with corresponding true italics. Just like its sans-serif counterpart, Allrounder Grotesk, Allrounder Antiqua is equipped with plenty of Opentype Features like small caps, six sets of figures, case-sensitive forms, superiors, fractions and many ligatures. You will find alternate letters with swashes within this extended character set, as well as all the accented glyphs necessary to support more than 200 Latin-based languages. Historical Background The (French) Renaissance-influenced typeface started as Moritz Kleinsorge's graduation project within the "Expert Class Type design" course of the Plantin Institute for Typography, located in the famous Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, Belgium. There, Moritz Kleinsorge decided to create a revival of Robert Granjon's "Ascendonica Romain", described as "a beautiful face; typical of Granjon's mature style" in the inventory list of available material. "To touch punches and matrices cut by Robert Granjon back in 1567 was an invaluable inspiration", Moritz explains. Over time, the typeface moved away from being a true revival. Rather, it evolved into a Granjon-inspired typeface. That typeface is now available as Allrounder Antiqua. Perfect Pairing: Allrounder Antiqua + Allrounder Grotesk Allrounder Grotesk is the ideal complement to Allrounder Antiqua. They both share common vertical metrics and a common color. This allows you to pair both typefaces within the same layout—even within the same paragraph—without creating visual disruption. Head over to the Family Page of Allrounder Grotesk to get more information about this typeface. Design Trick: Bilingual Design With the Allrounder Superfamily Combining Allrounder Grotesk with Allrounder Antiqua is an ideal approach for bilingual designs, wherein both languages get the same emphasis yet are distinguished with two different typefaces. It's also best practice to set headlines in a different typeface than the body text if they harmonize with each other. Allrounder Grotesk and Allrounder Antiqua provide you with the perfect pair for this purpose.

Palamecia is a typeface that embodies the very essence of organic design. It is a testament to the power of the creative process, one that is imbued with the spirit of experimentation and the thirst for innovation. Its unique appearance, at first glance reminiscent of a cartoon typeface, is just the beginning of what sets it apart from the competition. Palamecia was designed with a specific purpose in mind—to withstand the rigors of scaling and blurring on a variety of user interface devices. The creators of Palamecia recognized that the legibility of typefaces can be compromised by the impact of pixel scaling, and they set out to design a typeface that would not only overcome this challenge but also thrive in its wake. What makes Palamecia truly exceptional is its design process. Unlike many other typefaces, Palamecia’s designs were not born from pen strokes, but rather from cut-out silhouettes that were meticulously chiseled and chipped away. This unique approach allowed the designers to create a typeface that is both rugged and refined, with a natural aesthetic that seamlessly blends into any interface. The end result is a typeface that is both durable and versatile. Palamecia’s unique design allows it to pierce through any type of display, regardless of resolution, making it an ideal choice for designers and developers who are looking for a typeface that can deliver the goods under any circumstances. In conclusion, Palamecia is a triumph of organic design, a typeface that is as beautiful as it is functional. Its rugged yet refined aesthetic and its ability to withstand the rigors of scaling and blurring make it a must-have for any designer or developer who values both form and function. So why wait? Try Palamecia today and experience the power of organic design for yourself. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

An entry in the Second Linotype Design Contest, Linotype Brewery, designed by Gustavs Andrejs Grinbergs, became part of the TakeType Collection in 1997. Brewery No 2 represents a significantly improved version of its precursor, and the typeface has been both extended and enhanced. When asked about prototypes, Grinbergs cites German typefaces of the early 20th century. It is thus not surprising that the characters of Brewery™ No 2 are based on geometrical forms. However, this is no mere synthetic Grotesque-derived typeface. It has significant contrasts in line thickness and triangular line terminals that are not unlike serifs, placing it in the middle ground somewhere between a Grotesque and serif font. The contrast between the features of a synthetic Grotesque and an Antiqua gives the characters of Brewery No 2 their distinctive charm and is the distinguishing attribute of this contemporary typeface. Additional vibrancy is provided by bevelled line endings (as in the case of the 'E' and the 'F'), the circular punctuation marks and the slight curve of the descending bar of the 'k'. Thanks to a generous x-height and its open counters, Brewery No 2 is also highly legible in small point sizes. Only in its bolder versions is another aspect of Brewery No 2 apparent; Grinbergs has here made the linking elements more rectangular and has emphasized the counters, so that the Bold variants of Brewery No 2 exhibit elements typical of a broken typeface. Brewery No 2 is available in seven finely graduated weights, ranging from Light to Black. Every variant has a corresponding, slightly narrower Italic version. In addition, the lowercase 'a' is given a closed form, the 'e' is more rounded and the 'f' has a descender. The character sets of Brewery No 2 leave nothing to be desired. In addition to small caps and ligatures, there are various numeral sets with old style and lining figures for setting proportional text and table columns. In its most extensive form (the Pan-European variant), Brewery No 2 can be used to set texts in many languages that employ the Latin alphabet and also texts in international languages that use Cyrillic or monotonic Greek orthography. Although some of the features of Brewery No 2, such as the tiny serifs, are only evident in the larger point sizes, this typeface is not just at home when used to set headlines. Brewery No 2 also cuts a good figure in short or medium length texts. This contemporary typeface with its formally elegant quality looks good, for example, on posters, in newspapers and promotional material. It can also be used for websites as it is also available as a web font.

Gérard Mariscalchi is a self-made designer. Born in Southern France of a Spanish mother and an Italian father, he has worked as a mechanic, salesman, pilot, college teacher – even a poet (with poetry being the worst-paying of these professions, he reports.) “Throughout all this, the backbone of my career has always been design,” Mariscalchi says. “I’ve been drawing since I was five, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I learned that my hobby could also help me earn a living.” It was about this same time that Mariscalchi fell in love with type. He studied the designs of masters like Excoffon, Usherwood and Frutiger, as well as the work of calligraphers and type designers such as Plantin, Cochin and Dürer. With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise that Mariscalchi’s typeface designs are inspired by many sources. Baylac and Evita reflect the style of the art nouveau and art deco periods, while Marnie was created as an homage to the great Lithuanian calligrapher Villu Toots. However, the touch of French elegance and distinction Mariscalchi brings to his work is all his own. Baylac Who says thirteen is an unlucky number? Three capitals and ten lowercase letters from a poster by L. Baylac, a relatively obscure Art Nouveau designer, served as the foundation for this typeface. The finished design has lush curves that give the face drama without diminishing its versatility. On the practical side, Baylac’s condensed proportions make it perfect for those situations where there’s a lot to say and not much room in which to say it Evita Mariscalchi based the design of Evita on hand lettering he found in a restaurant menu, and considers this typeface one of his most difficult design challenges. “The main problem was to render the big weight difference between the thin and the thick strokes without creating printing problems at small point sizes,” he says. Unlike most scripts, Evita is upright, with the design characteristics of a serif typeface. Mariscalchi named the face for a close friend. The end result is a charming design that is light, airy, and slightly sassy. Marnie Based on Art Nouveau calligraphic lettering, Marnie is elegant, inviting, and absolutely charming. Mariscalchi paid special attention to letter shapes and proportions to guarantee high levels of character legibility. He also kept weight transition in character strokes to modest levels, enabling the face to be used at relatively small sizes – an unusual asset for a formal script. Marnie’s capital letters are expansive designs with flowing swash strokes that wrap affectionately around adjoining lowercase letters. The design easily captures the spontaneous qualities of hand-rendered brush lettering.

Gérard Mariscalchi is a self-made designer. Born in Southern France of a Spanish mother and an Italian father, he has worked as a mechanic, salesman, pilot, college teacher – even a poet (with poetry being the worst-paying of these professions, he reports.) “Throughout all this, the backbone of my career has always been design,” Mariscalchi says. “I’ve been drawing since I was five, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I learned that my hobby could also help me earn a living.” It was about this same time that Mariscalchi fell in love with type. He studied the designs of masters like Excoffon, Usherwood and Frutiger, as well as the work of calligraphers and type designers such as Plantin, Cochin and Dürer. With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise that Mariscalchi’s typeface designs are inspired by many sources. Baylac and Evita reflect the style of the art nouveau and art deco periods, while Marnie was created as an homage to the great Lithuanian calligrapher Villu Toots. However, the touch of French elegance and distinction Mariscalchi brings to his work is all his own. Baylac Who says thirteen is an unlucky number? Three capitals and ten lowercase letters from a poster by L. Baylac, a relatively obscure Art Nouveau designer, served as the foundation for this typeface. The finished design has lush curves that give the face drama without diminishing its versatility. On the practical side, Baylac’s condensed proportions make it perfect for those situations where there’s a lot to say and not much room in which to say it Evita Mariscalchi based the design of Evita on hand lettering he found in a restaurant menu, and considers this typeface one of his most difficult design challenges. “The main problem was to render the big weight difference between the thin and the thick strokes without creating printing problems at small point sizes,” he says. Unlike most scripts, Evita is upright, with the design characteristics of a serif typeface. Mariscalchi named the face for a close friend. The end result is a charming design that is light, airy, and slightly sassy. Marnie Based on Art Nouveau calligraphic lettering, Marnie is elegant, inviting, and absolutely charming. Mariscalchi paid special attention to letter shapes and proportions to guarantee high levels of character legibility. He also kept weight transition in character strokes to modest levels, enabling the face to be used at relatively small sizes – an unusual asset for a formal script. Marnie’s capital letters are expansive designs with flowing swash strokes that wrap affectionately around adjoining lowercase letters. The design easily captures the spontaneous qualities of hand-rendered brush lettering.

Refinery is the newest font in the Evanston Collection of square typefaces. With a similar capital structure to Tavern and Alehouse, Refinery includes both lowercase and small caps, making it an ideal typeface for paragraph text settings. It also comes in a wide array of weights and widths, with 85 font files in total. DESIGN Refinery has it’s roots in early 20th century signage and saloon typography, but has been modernized - even future-ized - to fit the 21st century digital landscape. The design was aimed at providing a type family that could work in many modern design fields, from sports, tech and military to gaming, HUD, virtual reality and augmented reality. ENGINEERING Essentially. Refinery is a simple mono-linear square design has been expertly refined into an easy-reading sans serif typeface. It was designed to be used in both display and text settings. From hairline to black in ultra-narrow or extended, the wide array of weight and width options makes it easy to find the right font for each text need. SPECS Refinery not only includes 85 font files, but each one include a wide array of Opentype Extras that allow even further customization. • Stylistic Alternatives: Letters A W Y have a styling variation that rounds the pointed apex into a square curve. The S and 2 variation straightens the spine, making all curves in the alphabet read as 90º angles. • Small Capitals: A shortened version of the capitals for alternate header settings. • Titling Alternatives: In this typeface, this feature turns on lifted small caps. Take the small capitals, raise them to level with capitals and underline at the baseline. When multiple lowercase or small capital letters are typed in a row, the underlines connect, creating unique ligatures. • Figures: There are different figure styles for different text needs. Options include, proportional lining, tabular lining (for math), old style and small capitals. • Discretionary Ligatures: A little funk to this otherwise serious typeface. Letters with a long baseline or cap height stem - F, L, T - get elongated to hug a small capital vowel. Other ligatures include Co. and No. • Catchwords: These are common words that bring emphasis to a design. In English these words include ‘and’ ‘as’ ‘by’ ‘in’ ‘of’ ‘the’ ‘to’ ‘when’, among others. Refinery also includes multilingual catchwords of ‘el’ ‘la’ ‘oder’ ‘go’ ‘para’ ‘pour’ ‘und’ ‘y’, among others. For the full list, please check out the specimen images. EXTRAS To round the typeface off, a set of over 150 ornaments, icons, arrows, patterns and line breaks is included to provide complimentary graphics. These can be found in the Ornaments labelled font, it is recommended to use the Glyphs panel to select which text glyph is needed.

Light and flexible, slightly retro, casual and readable, Hoofer combines 28 brush script, mono line script and sans-serif styles with ornaments into one Mega-Family. The different styles of the Hoofer Mega-family have been chosen to work together and to harmonize in a pleasing way. The Hoofer Mega-Family of fonts can be divided into three sub-families: Hoofer BRUSH subfamily: An eclectic group of five fonts. These are mainly joined scripts. Hoofer LINE subfamily: Seven mono-line scripts with joined letters in a number of weights, widths and styles. Hoofer SANS subfamily: Sixteen casual, Sans-Serif fonts. They are very readable and in a variety of weights & styles The mood of the Hoofer mega-family is light and flexible, slightly retro, casual and readable. It combines script and many sans-serif styles with ornaments into one Mega-Family. The different styles of the Hoofer Mega-family have been chosen to work together and to harmonize in a pleasing way. The Brush Sub-Family is designed for titling, packaging and display purposes, The Line Sub-Family can also be used for titling, packaging and display, however, it is less “showy”, and conveys an air of informality. The Sans Sub-Family is designed to shine as sub-heads and as body text. The wide range of Hoofline styles gives you, the designer, great flexibility in creating just the mood or impression that you want. Most of the fonts can use one or more OpenType Features. These can be accessed in a number of ways. The reason for this is that the major software producers provide different (and often conflicting) ways of accessing OpenType Features. In some cases such software manufacturers provide NO way of accessing certain OpenType Features. We have tried to remedy this by providing a highly flexible family of fonts. OPENTYPE (these OpenType features are only available in the “otf” fonts and not in the “ttf” fonts.) OpenType features that Hoofer makes use of are: Swashes (Word-Begin and Word-End Features); Alternate Numerals; and True Small Caps. ORNAMENTS In addition the Hoofer family has a font containing 94 ornaments. ALTERNATE NUMERALS You can access two sets of figures (numbers) in Hoofer Sans fonts. Both sets are tabular and lining but they differ in the height (but not the width) of the figures. The height of the alternate figures has been chosen so that they are compatible with the small caps. However, these alternate figures are available in ALL Hoofer Sans fonts, whether they feature small cap fonts or not. Hoofer has all the features usually included in a fully professional font. Language support includes all European character sets, Greek symbols and all punctuation. Opentype features include automatic replacement of some characters and discretionary replacement of stylistic alternatives.

Look, folks! From what may just be the vernacular sign capital of the world, Chattanooga, Tennessee, it’s a brand new hyperfamily from insigne! Look includes three different related fonts, with three weights each. That’s over 70 fonts! Imagine: you turn onto a stretch of open country road. On the distressed, red background of an old barn wall, a large block of crisp white letters shout out: “See Rock City.” You soon realize this barn is not alone in competing for the passing eye. Far from it, ladies and gentlemen. This is just one of the many pieces of historic, hand-painted advertisements dotting the great Southern United States. Yes, these are the pieces of true Americana--the barns, the roadside signs, the machinery, the soda fountains, and more--that now inspire this splendid new set of three font families. This new, easily readable type from insigne digs deep to capture the very heart and passion of this splendid country’s lettering of the post-war era. Look’s compact frame quickly draws the audience to your headline, logo, subheading, or pull quote, working well in those compact spots of text without overpowering your content. You'll easily put the feeling of those days gone by into every piece with the natural beauty and simple usefulness of the Look hyperfamily. Each of the individual sub-families incorporates a variety of font weights with distressed attributes. Think Woodtype. Jeans. Antiques, folks. That deep, ingrained texture--that quality that will stand the test of time. And Look is flexible, too. Take, for example, Look Script. This powerhouse of a font offers thinner weights to give your work an easy-going, down-to-earth design. But bring in those heavier weights, and you'll have a muscular, assertive font that will go the whole nine rounds. Combine any of the Look families with Ornaments to really give your layouts a zing. Build an extraordinary design as well with Look’s swashes and alternates. To activate any of these alternates, just click on Swash, Stylistic or Titling Alternates in any OpenType-savvy application, or choose from the Glyph Palette. Explore hundreds of included extras to find that “cherry on top” for your one-of-a-kind project. There are over 70 fonts to choose from, including subfamily sans, serif, script and ornament fonts! You can't go wrong. To get the most bang for your buck, order the whole Look family now! Note on SHADOWS: Increase depth and make your designs pop! Add shadows to any of the Look fonts by duplicating the text content layer in place and switching it to its corresponding shadow. Color and offset to taste. Look shadows are offset automatically. In Illustrator, you may need to turn on Em Box Top for proper shadow alignment.

Minnak, as a whole geometric display type is our take on Square Kufic (Makili) style Latin script fonts, comes in eleven weights with linear progression. It is an Uniwidth typeface at the core. From Hairline to Black, all multiplexed weights take up the same space in width and can be used interchangeably. Supports wide range of Open Type features, with many stylistic alternates in 12 context. Minnak is also have a close relation with pixel fonts, because in spite of its based on Makili forms, it all started as a pixel font in the drawing stage before further steps came into play. The key difference between Minnak and Makili style is that the latter must have the exact square counters with no diagonal strokes, and any other components of a letterform must conform to be proportional. Such style-specific requirements determine the overall dimensions of the glyphs and therefore, there can be only minor differences between the typefaces. In Minnak, counters are rectangular because of its narrow and condensed proportions, but the Makili form influence is still manifest. This impression is best confirmed with Medium weight where negative spaces and stem thickness are equal. Contrast and virtually no optical correction were presented, as characteristic of its genre had to have equal horizontal and vertical line thicknesses. As per the minimal and authentic look of the type, all glyphs are drawn as straight or only as 45-degree diagonal strokes. The representation of the ‘diagonalless’ approach is preserved by stylistic alternatives, making its similarity in visual aesthetics clearly visible. Marks and punctuation is another feature that doesn’t follow the strict rules of the origin style. Although not a pixel font, all building parts of the glyphs in Minnak share the same unit precision as they are designed with pixel equivalents in mind. Even space characters are designed to match glyph widths, meeting the demands of certain typesetting or multi-line lettering compositions. With its Pseudo Ancient and Runic alternates, extention parts and ornaments included in all weights, Minnak is suitable for branding, logo and monogram designs, the screen titles and headlines, packaging, posters, book covers and more, where it shines at big sizes. Its pixel font-like appearance makes it a significant choice for the modern compositions. Thanks to mostly uniform width design, it is possible to use Minnak also as a system for lettering. This feature can be used as vertical fitting of the letters between the lines. As a casual expression in Turkish, “Minnak” is one of the seven typeface designs in Esintype's ancient scripts of Anatolia project, Tituli Anatolian series — representing Seljuk period in the medieval Anatolia and their tradition of architectural stone ornamentation.

Gérard Mariscalchi is a self-made designer. Born in Southern France of a Spanish mother and an Italian father, he has worked as a mechanic, salesman, pilot, college teacher – even a poet (with poetry being the worst-paying of these professions, he reports.) “Throughout all this, the backbone of my career has always been design,” Mariscalchi says. “I’ve been drawing since I was five, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I learned that my hobby could also help me earn a living.” It was about this same time that Mariscalchi fell in love with type. He studied the designs of masters like Excoffon, Usherwood and Frutiger, as well as the work of calligraphers and type designers such as Plantin, Cochin and Dürer. With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise that Mariscalchi’s typeface designs are inspired by many sources. Baylac and Evita reflect the style of the art nouveau and art deco periods, while Marnie was created as an homage to the great Lithuanian calligrapher Villu Toots. However, the touch of French elegance and distinction Mariscalchi brings to his work is all his own. Baylac Who says thirteen is an unlucky number? Three capitals and ten lowercase letters from a poster by L. Baylac, a relatively obscure Art Nouveau designer, served as the foundation for this typeface. The finished design has lush curves that give the face drama without diminishing its versatility. On the practical side, Baylac’s condensed proportions make it perfect for those situations where there’s a lot to say and not much room in which to say it Evita Mariscalchi based the design of Evita on hand lettering he found in a restaurant menu, and considers this typeface one of his most difficult design challenges. “The main problem was to render the big weight difference between the thin and the thick strokes without creating printing problems at small point sizes,” he says. Unlike most scripts, Evita is upright, with the design characteristics of a serif typeface. Mariscalchi named the face for a close friend. The end result is a charming design that is light, airy, and slightly sassy. Marnie Based on Art Nouveau calligraphic lettering, Marnie is elegant, inviting, and absolutely charming. Mariscalchi paid special attention to letter shapes and proportions to guarantee high levels of character legibility. He also kept weight transition in character strokes to modest levels, enabling the face to be used at relatively small sizes – an unusual asset for a formal script. Marnie’s capital letters are expansive designs with flowing swash strokes that wrap affectionately around adjoining lowercase letters. The design easily captures the spontaneous qualities of hand-rendered brush lettering.

An entry in the Second Linotype Design Contest, Linotype Brewery, designed by Gustavs Andrejs Grinbergs, became part of the TakeType Collection in 1997. Brewery No 2 represents a significantly improved version of its precursor, and the typeface has been both extended and enhanced. When asked about prototypes, Grinbergs cites German typefaces of the early 20th century. It is thus not surprising that the characters of Brewery™ No 2 are based on geometrical forms. However, this is no mere synthetic Grotesque-derived typeface. It has significant contrasts in line thickness and triangular line terminals that are not unlike serifs, placing it in the middle ground somewhere between a Grotesque and serif font. The contrast between the features of a synthetic Grotesque and an Antiqua gives the characters of Brewery No 2 their distinctive charm and is the distinguishing attribute of this contemporary typeface. Additional vibrancy is provided by bevelled line endings (as in the case of the 'E' and the 'F'), the circular punctuation marks and the slight curve of the descending bar of the 'k'. Thanks to a generous x-height and its open counters, Brewery No 2 is also highly legible in small point sizes. Only in its bolder versions is another aspect of Brewery No 2 apparent; Grinbergs has here made the linking elements more rectangular and has emphasized the counters, so that the Bold variants of Brewery No 2 exhibit elements typical of a broken typeface. Brewery No 2 is available in seven finely graduated weights, ranging from Light to Black. Every variant has a corresponding, slightly narrower Italic version. In addition, the lowercase 'a' is given a closed form, the 'e' is more rounded and the 'f' has a descender. The character sets of Brewery No 2 leave nothing to be desired. In addition to small caps and ligatures, there are various numeral sets with old style and lining figures for setting proportional text and table columns. In its most extensive form (the Pan-European variant), Brewery No 2 can be used to set texts in many languages that employ the Latin alphabet and also texts in international languages that use Cyrillic or monotonic Greek orthography. Although some of the features of Brewery No 2, such as the tiny serifs, are only evident in the larger point sizes, this typeface is not just at home when used to set headlines. Brewery No 2 also cuts a good figure in short or medium length texts. This contemporary typeface with its formally elegant quality looks good, for example, on posters, in newspapers and promotional material. It can also be used for websites as it is also available as a web font.

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.

Beauty Style is a luxurious font collection that includes both a signature script and a sans serif typeface. Beauty Style scripts come in four weights including 12 alternates and 56 ligatures. Programming has been added to the scripts for flow and elegance. Use Beauty Style for sophisticated designing. Fonts designed by Cindy Kinash. See font details below. SANS FEATURES: All caps letters Condensed Sans OpenType Common ff fi fl ffi ffl ligatures Available in Extended Latin Pro (Standard) or American (US) version. SCRIPT FEATURES: Signature style OpenType Common ff fi fl ffi ffl ligatures Available in Extended Latin Pro (Standard) or American (US) version. 12 alternates and 56 ligatures Programmed ligature feature for optimization. Every time you type specific pairs, ligatures are programmed to pop up to avoid letter pair collisions. Programming ligatures gives the script a more elegant and pretty flow. Make sure to turn on the feature in your preferred program that supports ligatures. FREE WORDS FEATURES: 52 free words useful for beauty and sales promoting. Keyword examples include you, sale, and beautiful. Intended use for beauty, fashion, newsletters, websites, magazines, sales, commercials and packaging. VERSIONS: American and Extended Latin Pro AMERICAN (US) Shorter version 12 alternates and 56 ligatures (scripts only) Common ff fi fl ffi ffl ligatures OpenType Includes the common alphabet, numbers, American symbols and punctuation. EXTENDED LATIN PRO (Standard) Extended version of the American. 12 alternates and 56 ligatures (scripts only) Common ff fi fl ffi ffl ligatures OpenType Includes characters for Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Feroese, Finnish Scots, French, Gaelic, Galician, German, Greek Transliterated, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Nynorsk Bokmal Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh. TIPS: Try the OpenType ligatures by turning on the feature in your preferred program that supports ligatures. FONT LAYERING — Layer the script over the sans to give a cool retro effect. There are so many fun and creative possibilities. FONT CONNECTING — Interconnect the sans and script letters together creating TYPE ART. All you need to do is convert the font into an object and have fun! (Watch the upcoming tutorials on the cultivatedmindtype Instagram) SANS — When sans text is small, widen the text tracking for legibility and style variety. Sans is diverse and can work as tight or loose tracking. Use Beauty and Style for type art, beauty marketing, fashion, apparel, product design, music, websites, promotions and film. Last tip…Always have fun when creating. This isn’t a race. Creating should always be enjoyed. TUTORIALS: For more Beauty Style font tips including font layering, vlogs and tutorials, check out @cultivatedmindtype on Instagram.

As you can see, Nefertiti is a font based on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and could be classified as a fun-font. I've always been really interested in Egyptology and a couple of years ago I thought it would be great to be able to write in hieroglyphs. I started to study them but soon realized it would take me a long time to be able to do this. Still, I was determined to find a way around this problem. At some point I came up with the idea of rearranging and reforming the hieroglyphs so as to resemble the English alphabet. During this process I tried as much as possible to preserve their ethos and appearance. However, since they are designed to write in English with, it's obvious that they are not always going to look like the real thing. Despite this, I'm really happy with the final result and I think many Pharaohphiles who just want to have some fun will be also. The only difference in this font between lower and upper case characters, is that the latter are set between two parallel, horizontal lines. These are for use with brackets (motif ends) to form cartouches - elongated ovals for names and/or titles. Try typing the following using the upper case in the sample text box. e.g. (JOHN} The zigzagged vertical lines at each end, separate the motifs from the hieroglyphs. Note the three types of ends/brackets. These lines are also used to separated words from one another and to give a more authentic appearance. So pressing the space bar gives a zigzagged line - not a space. They can also be used at any point within a cartouche to separate first and last names or titles. e.g. ; (JOHN;BROWN} walked straight home after work. Notice the eye glyph (period/full stop) at the end of the sentence. This is the only punctuation mark which can be used within a cartouche, e.g. after Mr. or to add a more Egyptian appearance to a name or title. e.g. (MR>;JOHN;BROWN} Parallel lines dividing hieroglyphical inscriptions and writing into rows or columns are very common. To incorporate these in a body of text, simple use the underline U. e.g. (OSIRUS) and {ISIS} were important gods of the ancient Egyptians. (HORUS) {HATHOR} and [RA],the sun god, were also highly revered deities. The punctuation marks available are shown below. . , " " ' ! ? "where is the king?" The font also includes the numbers 0-9, the following mathematical symbols and the hash sign(Scarab beetle). Once again, I've tried to make them look as Egyptian as possible; whether I've succeeded or not is open to debate. e.g. + - x / = # This font is named after Akhenaten's beautiful wife, Nefertiti, who's image can be seen in the graphic on this page.

The Eskapade font family is the result of Alisa Nowak’s research into Roman and German blackletter forms, mainly Fraktur letters. The idea was to adapt these broken forms into a contemporary family instead of creating a faithful revival of a historical typeface. On one hand, the ten normal Eskapade styles are conceived for continuous text in books and magazines with good legibility in smaller sizes. On the other hand, the six angled Eskapade Fraktur styles capture the reader’s attention in headlines with its mixture of round and straight forms as seen in ‘e’, ‘g’, and ‘o’. Eskapade works exceptionally well for branding, logotypes, and visual identities, for editorials like magazines, fanzines, or posters, and for packaging. Eskapade roman adopts a humanist structure, but is more condensed than other oldstyle serifs. The reason behind this stems from the goal of closely resembling the Fraktur style to create harmony in mixed text settings. Legibility is enhanced by its low contrast between thick and thin strokes and its tall x-height. Eskapade offers an airy and light typographic colour with its smooth design. Eskapade italic is based on the Cancellaresca script and shows some particularities in its condensed and round forms. This structure also provided the base for Eskapade Fraktur italic. Eskapade Fraktur is more contrasted and slightly bolder than the usual darkness of a regular weight. The innovative Eskapade Fraktur italic, equally based on the Cancellaresca script previously mentioned, is secondarily influenced by the Sütterlin forms — an unique script practiced in Germany in the vanishingly short period between 1915 and 1941. The new ornaments are also hybrid Sütterlin forms to fit with the smooth roman styles. Although there are many Fraktur-style typefaces available today, they usually lack italics, and their italics are usually slanted uprights rather than proper italics. This motivated extensive experimentation with the italic Fraktur shapes and resulted in Eskapade Fraktur’s unusual and interesting solutions. In addition to standard capitals, it offers a second set of more decorative capitals with double-stroke lines to intensify creative application and encourage experimental use. The Thin and Black Fraktur styles are meant for display sizes (headlines, posters, branding, and signage). A typeface with this much tension needs to keep a good harmony between strokes and counters, so Eskapade Black has amplified inktraps and a more dynamic structure seen in the contrast between straight and round forms. These qualities make the family bolder and more enticing, especially with the included uppercase alternates. The Fraktur’s black weights are strident, refusing to let the white of the paper win the tug-of-war. It also won’t give away its secrets: Is it modern or historic, edgy or amicable, beguiling ornamentation or brutish presentation? That all depends on how the radically expanded Eskapade family is used, but its 16 fonts certainly aren’t tame.

The Salden fonts are our tribute to the man who was dubbed the face of the Dutch book, and whose work is considered essential in 20th century Dutch design history. Helmut Salden’s exquisite book cover designs were the gold standard in the Netherlands for more than four decades. His influence over Dutch lettering artists and book designers ranges far and wide, and his work continues to be used commercially and exhibited to this very day. At the root of Salden’s design work was a unique eye for counter space and incredible lettering skills that never failed to awe, regardless of category or genre. This made our attention to his lettering all the more focused within our appreciation to his overall aesthetic. Though Salden never designed alphabets to be turned into typefaces (he drew sets of letters which he sometimes recycled and modified to fit various projects), we thought there was enough there to deduce what a few different typefaces by Salden would have looked like. The man was prolific, so there were certainly enough forms to guide us, and enough variation in style to push our excitement even further. And so we contacted the right people, obtained access to the relevant material, and had a lot of fun from there. This set covers the gamut of Salden’s lettering talents. Included are his famous caps, his untamed, chunky flare sans serif in two widths, his unique Roman letters and an italic companion and, most recognizable of all, his one-of-a-kind scripty upright italic lowercase shapes, which he used alongside Roman caps drawn specifically for that kind of combination titling. All the fonts in this set include Pan-European glyph sets. They’re also loaded with extras. Salden Roman (908 glyphs) and Salden Italic (976 glyphs) each come with built-in small caps (and caps-to-small-caps), quite a few ligatures, and two different sets of alternates. Salden Black and Salden Black Condensed (636 glyphs each) come with a set of alternates, and both lining and oldstyle figures. Salden Caps (597 glyphs) comes with a set of alternates, and Salden Titling (886 glyphs) comes with a quite a lot of swashed forms and alternates (including as many six variants for some forms), a few discretionary ligatures, and two sets of figures. There are also some form alternates for the Cyrillic and Greek sets included in all six fonts. These alphabets were enjoyably studied and meticulously developed over the past ten years or so. We consider ourselves very fortunate to be the ones bringing them to the world as our contribution to maintaining the legacy of a legendary talent and a great designer. The majority of the work was based on Salden’s original drawings, access to which was graciously provided by Museum Meermanno in The Hague. The Salden fonts were done in agreement with Stichting 1940-1945, and their sale will in part benefit Museum Meermanno.

One menorah that I have long found particularly appealing was named The Tree of Life Menorah, a replica of which I gave as a gift one holiday to a kindly old couple who were neighbors and became friends. It had a simple, organic elegance that I see in the best of Art Nouveau sculpture. To me personally, Judeism is a celebration of life, like the triumph of the flower that blossoms in the crack of the city sidewalk. Just as Hanukkah celebrates the rededication of the temple and the miracle of the oil, it celebrates the victorious quest for freedom of the Hebrew people led by Judah Maccabee. Hanukkah represents determination and courage and faith — and it represents the presence of God in the lives of His people. It is interesting to note that the founding of the Albanian nation in the early twentieth century grew out of the resistance of the Albanian people to the imposition of Greek language and culture in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The typeface, HADASSAH, designed by Henri Friedlander (1904-1996), is my favorite Hebrew typeface. Thirty years in the crafting, I believe it is unsurpassed for its shear beauty, combining a subtle modulation of stroke with a simplicity and clarity of form. No doubt, that is why it has become so popular. For me, the Sîyn/Shîyn characters are especially satisfying. For a Hanukkah message in Hebrew, I would choose HADASSAH LIGHT for a headline and print it as large as I could. If, however, you are looking for a friendly, warm face for a seasonal message in a roman-letter based language, may I suggest BETHLEHEM EPHRATH. It will be as comfortable as a bulky, hand-knit sweater on a frosty afternoon and reflects the solid, encompassing, family orientation of this holiday. It was on the way to Ephrath that Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel gave birth to Benjamin and then died from her labor. It was to Ephrath that Naomi and Ruth returned and in Ephrath that we have the wonderful, heart-warming story of the marriage between Ruth and her Redeemer-Kinsman, Boaz. And it was to Ephrath that prophet, Samuel, went to find a new king and there in Ephrath that the prophet annointed a small shepherd boy named David. The Proverbs tell us to seek wisdom. Never underestimate the impact you have on others. Words of kindness can change people’s lives. The Talmud says that the highest form of wisdom is kindness. Be wise this holiday season. The font BETHLEHEM EPHRATH is based on the typeface Accent with the permission of URW++ of Hamburg, Germany. Like most display fonts, it is most effective at 18 points and larger. Like most script fonts, it is most effective when set with both upper and lower case. Although this font is readable in all caps (many scripts are not), that does not make it a good idea. Do so only with caution.

Shakila Script is a handwritten font created at the end of March 2021. It is a unique bold font with a pretty and charming casual style with many variants of beautiful swashes, as well as an alternative to capital letters. Shakila is a lovely and delicate font duo (script and sans serif), that exudes elegance and class. This font was particularly crafted for those who need a beautiful and refreshing look to their designs. Also, this font is perfect for branding projects, logo, product designs, invitation cards, wedding cards, stationery designs, advertisements, label, photography, blogging, social media or watermark. Key Features: - Multilingual Accents - Alternative capital letters - Stylistic Alternates up to 20 choices - Has a heart connected feature for a-z and A-Z letters - Available shortcut for Stylistic Alternate by simply adding "period" (.) and “number” (1-20) to each letter. - Has lots of ligatures so the letters connect well together - Has OpenType and PUA Encodes features. This font has a total of 885 glyphs, including capital letters, uppercase alternates, lowercase, numeral and punctuation, multilingual accents, beginning and ending swashes for lowercase, and includes a large number of stylistic alternates and heart swashes (for lowercase-lowercase and uppercase-uppercase). The advantage of the Shakila Script font compared to other fonts is that the alternative capital characters are in 1 font file, so it will make it easier for you to work. Therefore, you are free to choose it as you like, especially this font has the OpenType and PUA Encodes features which means you can access all of the glyphs and swashes with ease. As I mentioned earlier, Shakila Script has a large number of Stylistic Alternates features, up to 14 options for letter a-z and up to 20 options for letter b d h k l. In fact, there is also a swash feature in the form of a connected for the combination of each lowercase-lowercase and uppercase-uppercase letters. Interestingly, you can activate all Stylistic Alternates that are owned by each letter, just by typing; letter + period + number. For example: a.1 a.2 a.3 or b.1 b.2 b.3 and so on. As for activating the heart connected for each letter a-z or A-Z is quite easy. Namely by simply typing; letter + underscore + underscore + letter. For example: a__a or A__A and so on. Shakila Script is a Font Duo pack that pairs with Shakila Sans. The two were created at about the same time, but made in separate file packages. The reason I created this font duo is to make your projects more harmonious and unique. At the end of the sentence, Shakila Font Duo is a very authentic and amazing. If there are things you want to ask, don't hesitate to contact my email. For complete details, please visit my Behance profile. Alifinart Studio alifinart@gmail.com Thank you.

Proudly present our new font. It is named Hollgates - Elegant Signature Font. Hollgates is script handwritten style with a natural charm. This font which is a modern signature and unique style handmade comes with very beautiful character changes. To keep the maximum real hand-lettered effect, there were created 240 ligatures (you can see them among the presentation pictures). When creating the font, we should take into consideration that each letter should be able to be connected with other letters. For example, the letter "a" should be well connected as well as with "l" and "n" and with any other letters. This limits us: we have to start letter from exact one point and finish at exact second point. So here come ligatures. Hollgates font contains following ligatures: ab ad af ah ai ak al am an ao ap as at az az bh bl bk bt bx br cb cl ch ck cc cr cs ct co cx cz dd db dh dl dk dt dr ds dx dz eb ef eh ek el et ett er em en es ex ez ff fh fl fk fi fo fs ft fr fz fx gg gh gr gb gf gl gk gt go gs gz hf ho hs ht hz ib if ih ik il it itt ii in im ip is ir iz ix jo kl kk kh ko ks kr kt kx kz lo li ls lu lr lx ly lz mm mf mi mh ml mk mo mp ms mt mz mx nb ni nf nh nl nk no ns nr np nt nx nz ob of oh oi oj ok ol om on op os ot ott ou ox oz ph ppl pp ps pt pu pi pr po px pz rs rr st sh sl sk sb si sm sn so sp su sx sy sz oll all ell ill ull th tl tk ti ts tr to tu tx tz ty ub ul uh uk ul ut utt un um up us ux uz vh vl wh wl wo zz ee ll ff oo rr ss tt dd ff It’s the perfect fit for all luxury projects, such as wedding invitation, signatures, luxury logos, printed quotes, grettings cards, social media headers, product packaging and many more! It includes a full set of uppercase and lowercase letters, multilingual symbols, numerals, punctuation and ligatures. It is PUA encoded which means you can access all of the glyphs and swashes with ease! Fall in love with its incredibly versatile style and use it to create spectacular designs! Use this font for any crafting project that requires a personalized look! What’s Included : – Works on PC & Mac – Easy to use ( Installations ) – Easy Convert to webfont – Compabilty Windows, Apple, Linux, Cricut, Silhouette and Other cutting machines Thanks for downloading, and I hope you enjoy it!

TT Barrels useful links: Specimen PDF | Graphic presentation | Customization options TT Barrels is an elegant scotch style modern serif with strong industrial accents in its design. The TT Barrels project was born from a fictional technical assignment in which we tried to combine the technological effectiveness of industrial production used in engineering and the restrictions imposed by it with a beautiful scotch style serif. We decided to create a typeface that could be used to press letters on the metal body of a car, all while the typeface being elegant, and possessing sophisticated details that are typical of the classic text fonts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the process of designing and sketching, we reconsidered certain aspects and abandoned some of the requirements imposed by the technology of metal letter pressing, for example, from the extensive application of visual compensators, the decreased strokes contrast, and the hyperdeformation of individual letter elements to preserve a more pronounced rhythm of these elements. First of all, we wanted both to maintain the ease of reading for the entire text array and follow the rules of aesthetics of each letter in the typeface, while still leaving some influence of industrialism. In the end, this influence is best manifested in serifs, which are quite massive and have a technologically exaggerated wedge shape. TT Barrels consists of 12 fonts: Light, Regular, DemiBold, Bold, Extrabold, Black and the corresponding Italics. Each outline consists of more than 750 glyphs and includes small capitals, ligatures (for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets), stylistic alternates, old-style figures, and many other useful features. FOLLOW US: Instagram | Facebook | Website TT Barrels OpenType features: ordn, c2sc, smcp, case, frac, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, tnum, onum, lnum, pnum, dlig, liga, calt, salt (ss01). TT Barrels language support: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian, Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian, Asu, Aymara, Banjar, Basque, Belarusian (cyr), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama, Boholano, Bosnian (cyr), Bosnian (lat), Breton, Bulgarian (cyr), Cebuano, Chamorro, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Corsican, Cree, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Embu, English, Erzya, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician, German, Gusii, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Innu-aimun, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Judaeo-Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish, Kalenjin, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karaim (lat), Karakalpak (lat), Kashubian, Khasi, Khvarshi, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Kumyk, Kurdish (lat), Ladin, Latvian, Laz, Leonese, Lithuanian, Luganda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Macedonian, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malay, Manx, Maori, Mauritian Creole, Minangkabau, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (lat), Mordvin-moksha, Morisyen, Nahuatl, Nauruan, Ndebele, Nias, Nogai, Norwegian, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Palauan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rheto-Romance, Rohingya, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Russian, Rusyn, Rwa, Salar, Samburu, Samoan, Sango, Sangu, Scots, Sena, Serbian (cyr), Serbian (lat), Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Swiss German, Swiss German, Tagalog, Tahitian, Taita, Tatar, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tsonga, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen (lat), Ukrainian, Uyghur, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Vunjo, Xhosa, Zaza, Zulu.

A mediterranean style sanserif in 4 styles The original idea of Costa was to create a contemporary mediterranean typeface style. Costa is a synthesis of the purity, as found on Greek capitals, and softness, found in Renaissance scripts. First thing was the design concept that take its roots on the Chancery script. Such writing style appeared during Italian Renaissance. Later few typefaces have been developed from such cursive models. Today most serifed typeface italic take their roots on such triangular structure we can find on gylphs like the n, p, or d. The Costa capitals remains close to pure sanserif models when the lowercases features an ending serif on many letters like the a, n, d, etc. This ending serif being more like a minimal brush effect, creating a visual contrast and referencing the exoticness of the typeface. Knowing that the Costa typeface family began life in the 90s as a bespoke typeface for Costa Crociere, an Italian cruise company — it suddenly makes sense and explains well why Jean François Porchez focused so much on Italian Chancery mixed to a certain exotism. The curvy-pointed terminals of the Costa n can obviously get find on other glyphs, such as the ending of the e, c and some capitals. So, the sanserif looks more soft and appealing, without to be to pudgy or spineless. The general effect, when set for text, remains a sanserif, even not like Rotis Semiserif. Costa is definitly not a classical typeface, or serif typeface which convey past, tradition, historicism as Garamond does beautifully. Because of the Costa crocieres original needs, Costa typeface was designed to be appropriate for any uses. Anytime you’re looking for good mood, qualitative effects, informal tone, cool atmosphere without to be unconvential or blowzy, Costa will convey to your design the required chic and nice atmosphere, from large headlines sizes, brands, to small text sizes. It’s a legible typeface, never boring. A style without neutrality which doesn’t fit comfortably into any typeface classification! Does it proves the novelty of its design and guarantees as well as its originality? Its up to you to be convinced. Barcelona trip Originally not planned, this need appeared because of a trip to Barcelona at the time of the project, where Jean François was giving a lecture. He wanted to pay an homage to that invitation to create something special. So, he designed during his flight some variations of the Spanish Ch, following ideas developed by the Argentinian type designer Rubén Fontana for his typeface called Fontana ND (published by the Barcelona foundry Bauer). Then, he presented during his lecture variations and asked to the audience which design fit the best to their language. They selected the design you can find in the fonts today. Read more about pairing Costa Type Directors Club 2000 Typographica: Our Favourite Typefaces 2004

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.

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.

Neue Haas Unica by Toshi Omagari: The original purpose behind the creation of the typeface Haas Unica was to provide a sympathetic update of Helvetica. But now the font designer Toshi Omagari has decided to make this typeface his own and has thus significantly supplemented and extended it. In the late 1970s, at the same time at which hot metal typesetting was being replaced by phototypesetting, the Haas Type Foundry commissioned a group of specialists known as "Team '77" consists of Andre Gurtler, Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind to adapt Max Miedinger's font The characters of Haas Unica are somewhat narrower than those of Helvetica so that the larger bowls, such as those of the "b" and "d", appear more delicate and have a slightly more pleasing effect. In general, the spacing of Haas Unica was increased to provide for improved kerning and thus enhance the legibility of the typeface in smaller point sizes. Major changes were made to the lowercase "a", in that the curve of the upper bowl became rounder and its spur was eliminated. The form of the "k" was additionally modified to remove the offset leg so that both diagonals originate from the main stem. The outstroke of the uppercase "J" was also significantly curtailed. In addition to many minor alterations, such as to the length of the horizontal bars of the "E", "F" and "G" and to the angle of the tail of the "Q", the leg of the "R" was extended and made more diagonal. In the case of the numerals, the upper curve of the "2" was reduced and the lower loops of the "5" and "6" were correspondingly adapted. The sweep of the diagonal of the "7" was also reduced. Several decades later, Toshi Omagari returned to the original sketches with the objective of reinvigorating this almost totally forgotten typeface. First, however, he needed to revise the drafts prepared by Team '77 to adapt them for digital typesetting. So Omagari carefully adjusted the proportions of the glyphs, achieving a more uniform overall effect across all line weights and removed details that had become redundant for contemporary typefaces. It was also apparent from the old drafts that it had been the case that the original plan was to create more than the four weights that were published. Omagari has added five additional styles, giving his Neue Haas Unica? a total of nine weights, from Ultra Light to Extra Black. He has also greatly extended the range of glyphs. Providing as it does typographic support for Central and European languages, Greek and Cyrillic texts, Neue Haas Unica is now ready to be used for major international projects. In addition, it has been supplied with small caps and various sets of numerals. With its resolute clarity and excellent typographic support, Neue Haas Unica is suitable for use in a wide range of new contexts. The light and elegant characters can be employed in the large point sizes to create, for example, titling and logos while the very bold styles come into their own where the typography needs to be powerful and expressive. The medium weights can be used anywhere, for setting block text and headlines.

While throned before your keys, under your drumming fingers awaits the most astounding standard computer typeface ever devised: BuGlobal. In addition to all the usual alphanumeric characters and symbols, this lone font lets you type more than 400 accented letters appearing in more than 80 English-variant languages worldwide, 70 common math and science symbols, and dozens of other useful characters —more than half a thousand all told— all within the digital parameters of one standard computer typeface, without needing any alternate keyboards or other clumsy digital luggage. Here is a sample: You can add any accent appearing in more than 80 English-variant languages used around the world to any letter appearing in all these languages simply by typing ANY letter then the accent. This includes more than 400 diacritic-laden letters in all —without needing to remember several keystrokes to type any of these letters as a few of them appear in standard computer typefaces. You can type more than 50 math/science symbols that do not appear in standard computer typefaces. These new symbols include several kinds of arrows plus constants, centerlines, dimensions, and graphs and scales that when retyped create continuous scales and graphs. Common symbols such as ballot boxes, rating stars, checkboxes, hearts, fancy fleurons, and similar motifs that do not appear in standard computer typefaces. Dozens of flashy arabesques like ========= [in BuGlobal these equal signs are kerned together so when you type them you create a continuous double line]. In this typeface more than 30 symbols that never appear twice in a row are kerned together so when you continuously type them you create all kinds of flashy arabesques that will make your typing more attractive. No other standard compute typeface allows you to do this. As for Beauty, BuGlobal’s characters are designed according to several axioms of ocular perception until each profile is as iconically simple as Shaker furniture. These axioms make BuGlobal’s letters easier to read compared to other typefaces, and a few of them are: Each letter should look much like the others but for one defining detail. The letters should be as similarly wide as possible. The letters’ midbars should be the same height and thickness. The higher the lowercase letters are compared to capital letters, the more legible and easily readable are their texts. BuGlobal has a typeface user’s guide, titled A Lovely Face, in which a description of each ocular axiom compares BuGlobal with Baskerville, Georgia, Palatino, and other commonly-used standard computer typefaces so you can quickly see why the other typefaces are inferior. You can download a pdf file of this typeface user’s guide, for free, at BuGlobal’s website, butlerfontforge.com, at any time so you can learn all about BuGlobal’s many amazingly new features before possibly buying it. BuGlobal’s plain letters are perfect for texts, its italics are gracefully emphatic, its bolds are ideal for titles and headers, and its arabesques are a fancy way to make your texts look dressy —all of which will add more shimmer to your semantic plumage. One good typeface is more useful than an infinity of poor ones. Robert Bringhurst

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.

Impressed by the quality of the Aachen typeface that was originally designed for Letraset in 1969 and extended to include Aachen Medium in 1977, Jim Wasco of Monotype Imaging has extended this robust display design to create an entire family. Derived from the serif-accented Egyptienne fonts dating to the early 20th century, Aachen has serifs that are very solid but considerably shorter than those of its precursor. The incorporated geometrical elements, such as right angles and straight lines, provide the slender letters of Aachen with a slightly technological, stencil-like quality. Despite this, the effect of Aachen is by no means static; its dynamism means that this typeface, originally designed for use in headlines, has come to be used with particular frequency in sport- and fitness-related contexts. Jim Wasco, for many years a type designer at Monotype Imaging, recognized the potential of Aachen and decided to extend the typeface to create an entire typeface family. He appropriated the existing Aachen Bold in unchanged form and first created the less heavy cuts, Thin and Regular. Wasco admits that he found designing the forms for Thin a particular challenge. It took him several attempts before he was able to achieve consistency within the glyphs for Thin and, at the same time, retain sufficient affinity with the original Aachen Bold. But he finally managed to adapt the short serifs and the condensed and slightly geometrical quality of the letters to the needs of Thin. The weights Light, Book, Medium and Semibold were generated by means of interpolation. Supplemented by Extralight and Extrabold, the new Neue Aachen can now boast a total of nine different weights. Wasco initially relied on his predilection for genuine cursives in his designs for the Italic cuts. But it became apparent with these first trial runs that the soft curves of cursives did not suit Aachen and led to the loss of too much of its original character. Wasco thus decided to compromise by using both inclined and cursive letters. Neue Aachen Italic is somewhat narrower than its upright counterparts; the lower case 'a' has a closed form while the 'f' has been given a descender, but the letters have otherwise not been given additional adornments. The range of glyphs available for Neue Aachen has been significantly extended, so that the typeface can now be used to set texts not only in Western but also Central European languages. Wasco has also added a double-counter lowercase 'g' while relying on the availability of alternative letters in the format sets for the enhancement of the legibility of Neue Aachen when used to set texts. The seven new weights and completely new Italic variants have enormously increased the potential applications of Aachen and the range of creative options for the designer. While the Bold weights have proved their worth as display fonts, the new Book and Regular cuts are ideal for setting text. And the subtlety of Ultra Light will provide your projects with a quite unique flair. The new possibilities and opportunities in terms of design and applications that Neue Aachen offers you are not restricted to print production; you can also create internet pages thanks to its availability as a web font.

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 famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.

TT Ricordi useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options The TT Ricordi font family is a collection of three display heading serifs designed to significantly diversify the traditional font palette. Each font from the TT Ricordi family was drawn by a separate designer and has its own story. With that, all three fonts are close in thickness and similar in their character compositions and are featured in the uppercase set and the small capitals set, which replaces lowercase characters. The fonts have the broad support of Latin languages and support basic Cyrillic. The project originates from the pre-coronavirus tourist trips to Italy, during which our art director Yulia Gonina has accumulated many photographs of historical inscriptions and tablets. Many of these inscriptions had interesting character or unusual character shapes. We wanted to work with them, to try to reinterpret them, and, if possible, make them ultramodern and accessible to the modern font user. The fonts from the TT Ricordi typeface turned out to be quite display and contemporary, but at the same time, they retained subtle references to historic inscriptions. The fonts fit perfectly both on the covers of book classics and in glossy magazine layouts. They can also be used in posters and packaging, or as the main expressive element of company branding. In addition, all three serifs from the TT Ricordi font family go well with functional sans-serifs such as TT Norms Pro or TT Commons. TT Ricordi Nobili is a display serif with a rich Roman ancestry and contemporary world views. It stands out from the crowd with its subtlety and elegance. The font was drawn by Anna Tikhonova and was inspired by an inscription carved into the stone floor of a cathedral in Florence. Because people walked over the inscription, some of the letters got thinner and worn out over time. It is this feeling of disappearing or flickering elements that we wanted to capture and implement in the project. The TT Ricordi Nobili has high contrast, even though the font itself is quite thin. The serifs in the font are not massive at all, but at the same time, they are display serifs. There is a certain tension in TT Ricordi Nobili, and the viewer perceives this tension. We can say that behind the external classic facade lies a rather modern plot. The font has a large set of discrete ligatures which allow to create interesting combinations and expand the capabilities of the font. There are 709 glyphs in the TT Ricordi Nobili font, and a whole set of useful features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, numr, ordn, tnum, pnum, case, dlig, ss01, ss02, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, calt. TT Ricordi Todi is a wide serif with a classic base and a contemporary nature. The font turned out to be refined yet sharp, and in places even pushy and aggressive. The font was drawn by Yulia Gonina, and the project was based on plaques with engraved street names from the small Italian town of Todi. The main challenge was to decipher the characteristic features of the signs and emphasize them in a modern way. In addition, it was necessary to draw a Cyrillic alphabet that would not be inferior to the Latin alphabet in its expressiveness. The TT Ricordi Todi has fairly wide character proportions, and there is practically no contrast in them. The main feature of the font is the combination of smooth round shapes with deliberately squared shapes. In addition, the font is characterized by crisp and sharp character details, exaggerated ascenders and descenders, and muted contrast. Among the interesting font peculiarities, you can choose between the characteristic long descenders and ascenders and their more tempered versions, you can find a stylistic set with triangular dots, alternative versions of the EF characters and two letter ? shapes, round and squared. There are 876 glyphs in the TT Ricordi Todi font, and a whole set of useful features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, numr, ordn, tnum, pnum, case, dlig, salt, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, calt. TT Ricordi Fulmini is a fashionable contemporary serif firmly holding on to its historic roots. The font turned out to be like a thistle flower: bright and catchy, but still subtle and delicate. TT Ricordi Fulmini was drawn by Marina Khodak, and the initial inspiration for the project was the inscription on the altar from the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. As the font was pulled into “contemporaneity”, it was completely transformed and revealed its new side. The main catchy detail in the TT Ricordi Fulmini is the aggressive and rather sharp diagonal serifs. In addition, in the process of working on the font, several graphic solutions emerged, for example, the mono-serifs and the very calligraphic connections of diagonal strokes with their historic spirit. We wanted to keep them, and thus 4 thematic stylistic sets appeared in the font, thanks to which we can greatly change the perception of TT Ricordi Fulmini. In addition, the font has a set of interesting discrete ligatures. There are 793 glyphs in the TT Ricordi Fulmini font, and a whole set of useful features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, numr, ordn, tnum, pnum, case, dlig, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, calt. TT Ricordi supports more than 180+ languages, such as: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian+, Aleut (lat), Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian+, Asu, Aymara, Azerbaijani +, Banjar, Basque +, Belarusian (lat), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama+, Boholano+, 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+, Gusii, Haitianm, Creole, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Hungarian+, Icelandic+, Ilocano, Indonesian+, Innu-aimun, Interlingua, Irish, Italian+, Javanese, Jola-Fonyi, Judaeo-Spanish, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karaim (lat), Karakalpak (lat), Karelian, Kashubian, Kazakh (lat), Khasi, 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, 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, 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.

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.

Maestrale is a paradigm-breaking new take on calligraphy, built around a compact, serif-style core and outrageously long, flamboyant extenders. At large sizes, its confident, charismatic lettershapes are ideally suited for branding and decorative uses, whereas longer texts at smaller sizes naturally weave themselves into a flowing texture. The font comprises 1299 glyphs, including many stylistic alternates, ligatures, small capitals, and initial, terminal, and linking forms, and offers extensive OpenType programming to support them. The calligraphic form of Maestrale is complemented by a matching text font (Maestrale Text) with short extenders, available in three cuts (a serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic). Maestrale is all about the lowercase; its capitals are deliberately understated so as not to steal the limelight. In fact, the font works very well when set exclusively in lowercase. Maestrale�s small capitals are fitted into the core space of the lowercase, allowing them to be freely interspersed with lowercase characters. Alternately, an OpenType feature is available to replace a and e in small-caps text with their lowercase equivalents for a fresh unicase look. Since alternates and ligatures play such an important role, Maestrale offers three different modes of use. The most straightforward approach is simply to start typing using Maestrale Pro � the extensive OpenType programming will ensure that collisions between extenders are avoided and attractive ligatures are substituted for common glyph combinations. A more interactive approach is provided by the font Maestrale Manual, which allows the user to manually select alternate forms and ligatures even in typographically unsavvy applications, such as PowerPoint (as long as standard ligatures are supported). Stylistic alternates are simply represented as ligatures of their base forms with one or more instances of the rarely-used by easily-accessed characters "~" (ASCII tilde) and "`" (spacing grave accent); linking forms are built with �_� (underscore), multi-character ligatures with "|" (pipe), and initial and terminal forms with the �less than� and �greater than� characters. For instance, the Maestrale wordmark in the posters above was simply typeset with the string (`ma`est|r_a```l```e)| in Maestrale Manual (The parentheses represent �less than� and �greater than� characters here.) Feel free to type this string into the test line below and see what happens! Make sure Standard Ligatures are enabled. An instruction sheet listing all alternate forms and their accessibility is available from the Gallery tab on this page. The third mode of usage is aimed at professional designers, who make use of sophisticated software with extensive OpenType support. These power users are advised to use the font Maestrale Pro again, where all glyphs are accessible as stylistic alternates. Maestrale Text is a less extravagant but more versatile variation on the design of Maestrale, replacing Maestrale�s swashes with efficiently compact extenders. It is intended to serve as a perfectly matching text companion to Maestrale calligraphy, but constitutes a full-fledged typeface in its own right. It is equally at home at display sizes as it is in pull quotes, titles, and high-impact blocks of text. Maestrale Text comes in three complementary faces: A serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic. Maestrale is the Italian word for �masterful�. It is also the traditional Italian name for the northwesterly mediterranean wind, better known by its French name, Mistral. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the helpful souls on the Typophile forums for extensive feedback and encouragement on Maestrale, and to the TypeDrawers forum for feedback on Maestrale Text. This font is dedicated to Simone.

Style and elegance in 14 styles PS Fournier, created by Stéphane Elbaz, is designed in tribute to Pierre Simon Fournier. Fournier was the prolific Parisian type designer whose work is best known for its iconic representation of French transitional style. PS Fournier elegantly represents the transition to the modern era of typography. Featuring three optical sizes, PS Fournier is designed to perform in any context. The Pierre Simon Fournier heritage Pierre Simon Fournier (1712—1768) was a leading innovative type designer of the mid-18th century. Early in his career, the young Pierre Simon developed a strong aesthetic that he cultivated throughout his life. His art is representative of the pre-revolutionary “Age of Enlightenment” (Siècle des Lumières). Precursor of the Modern style, Fournier’s body of work deeply influenced his times, and created the fertile ground from which the Didot family and Giambattista Bodoni developed their own styles. During the historical period of the 18th century, Fournier exemplified the intellectual pursuits of the times with his own research on type, documenting in detail the typefounding process. He also offered a unique vision: he is the first to clearly comprehend the concept of “type family,” sorting a set of similarly styled alphabets by sizes, width, and by x-heights. In addition, Fournier is one of the earliest advocates of the point system to organize the practice of typography, the point system that contemporary typographers continue to use to this day. The refined and discreet elegance of PS Fournier With a close look at the family, one finds you’ll find that the difference between the optical sizes (Petit, standard and Grand) is more than a contrast variation between the thin and the thick; the eye can also denote a palette of distinct tones: More streamlined and robust in the smaller sizes (Petit), more refined and detailed in the larger sizes (Grand). The PS Fournier standard family is designed to adapt to any situation with its intermediate optical size, from body copy to headlines. With a bit of tracking, PS Fournier Petit will make the smallest captions perfectly readable. However, Petit family is not limited to body and captions — its “slabby robustness” will make a relevant headline choice as well. PS Fournier Grand presents a higher contrast adapted to large text sizes, displays or banners. Its refined elegance makes it a perfect choice for Design, Fashion or Luxury publications. As a “modern” type PS Fournier Grand features a larger x-height than the preexistent old style typefaces such as Garamond or Jenson. These proportions provide any basic text set in PS Fournier Grand a strong typographic texture. As a result, the PS Fournier global family is a versatile alternative to the Modern typefaces commonly used in the publishing industry. The optical sizes, the large range of weights, and the design variations make this family adaptable to captions, paragraphs, and pages, as well as to large texts and displays. A leading-edge typography in the 18th century In the spirit of modernity, Pierre Simon Fournier did not find any use for the conventional swashes still produced by peers such as Caslon or Baskerville. Nevertheless the French designer created many inventive elements to decorate the page and set delightful variations in the text itself. To this regard PS Fournier includes a large set of glyphs variations, ligatures and more than one hundred glyphs for borders, rules and ornaments or — as called in French — “vignettes.” PS Fournier: A tribute to the French modern typography era by Stéphane Elbaz

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.

We have updated TT Rounds Neue! TT Rounds Neue was released as a logical continuation of the TT Rounds and TT Rounds Condensed fonts, more modern and technically advanced. In the update, we have preserved the visual nature of the font, the proportions of the letters and the balance between bold and thin faces. We have made the typeface even more functional and convenient by fixing technical flaws, expanding the character set and adding a full-fledged variable font. In the new version of TT Rounds Neue, you will find additional extended Latin and Cyrillic characters, updated kerning and hinting. The font can be used for headings or for text typesetting. The typeface is optimized for web, print and packaging design. Thanks to its soft character and rounded shapes, it is suitable for decorating baby food and eco-products. TT Rounds Neue consists of 3 subfamilies: Compressed, Condensed and Normal. There are 55 faces in the font: 27 upright, 27 italic, and 1 variable font. Variability is across all three axes, thickness, slope, and width. Each style has 684 glyphs. The font has 29 OpenType features, including ligatures, a set of alternative characters, old-style figures, and many others. ?Please note that we are removing the TT Rounds and TT Rounds Condensed fonts from the marketplace, but you can still get them by contacting TypeType's commercial department directly commercial@typetype.org TT Rounds Neue OpenType features: aalt, ccmp, locl, subs, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, frac, ordn, tnum, onum, lnum, pnum, case, salt, liga, dlig, calt, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10 TT Rounds Neue language support: English, Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (lat), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian (lat), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German, Valencian, Azerbaijani, Kazakh (lat), Turkish, Acehnese, Banjar, Betawi, Bislama, Boholano, Cebuano, Chamorro, Fijian, Filipino, Hiri Motu, Ilocano, Indonesian, Javanese, Khasi, Malay, Marshallese, Minangkabau, Nauruan, Nias, Palauan, Rohingya, Salar, Samoan, Sasak, Sundanese, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Uyghur, Afar, Asu, Aymara, Bemba, Bena, Chiga, Embu, Gikuyu, Gusii, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Luganda, Luo, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Mauritian Creole, Meru, Morisyen, Ndebele, Nyankole, Oromo, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Sena, Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Soga, Somali, Sotho, Swahili, Swazi, Taita, Tsonga, Tswana, Vunjo, Xhosa, Zulu, Maori, Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian, Belarusian (lat), Bosnian (lat), Breton, Colognian, Cornish, Corsican, Faroese, Frisian, Friulian, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician, Interlingua, Judaeo-Spanish, Karaim (lat), Kashubian, Ladin, Leonese, Manx, Occitan, Rheto-Romance, Romansh, Scots, Silesian, Sorbian, Vastese, Volapu?k, Vo?ro, Walloon, Walser, Karakalpak (lat), Kurdish (lat), Talysh (lat), Tsakhur (Azerbaijan), Turkmen (lat), Zaza, Aleut (lat), Cree, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Innu-aimun, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karelian, Livvi-Karelian, Ludic, Tatar, Vepsian, Guarani, Nahuatl, Quechua,, Russian, Belarusian (cyr), Bosnian (cyr), Bulgarian (cyr), Macedonian, Serbian (cyr), Ukrainian, Gagauz (cyr), Moldavian (cyr), Kazakh (cyr), Kirghiz, Tadzhik, Turkmen (cyr), Uzbek (cyr), Lezgian, Abazin, Agul, Archi, Avar, Dargwa, Ingush, Kabardian, Kabardino-Cherkess, Karachay-Balkar (cyr), Khvarshi, Kumyk, Lak, Nogai, Ossetian, Rutul, Tabasaran, Tsakhur, Buryat, Komi-Permyak, Komi-Yazva, Komi-Zyrian, Shor, Siberian Tatar, Tofalar, Touva, Bashkir, Chechen (cyr), Chuvash, Erzya, Kryashen Tatar, Mordvin-moksha, Tatar Volgaic, Udmurt, Uighur, Rusyn, Karaim (cyr), Montenegrin (cyr), Romani (cyr), Dungan, Karakalpak (cyr), Shughni, Mongolian, Adyghe, Kalmykk

Helvetica’s 50-year anniversary celebrations in 2007 were overwhelming and contagious. We saw the movie. Twice. We bought the shirts and the buttons. We dug out the homage books and re-read the hate articles. We mourned the fading non-color of an old black shirt proudly exclaiming that “HELVETICA IS NOT AN ADOBE FONT”. We took part in long conversations discussing the merits of the Swiss classic, that most sacred of typographic dreamboats, outlasting its builder and tenants to go on alone and saturate the world with the fundamental truth of its perfect logarithm. We swooned again over its subtleties (“Ah, that mermaid of an R!”). We rehashed decades-old debates about “Hakzidenz,” “improvement in mind” and “less is more.” We dutifully cursed every single one of Helvetica’s knockoffs. We breathed deeply and closed our eyes on perfect Shakti Gawain-style visualizations of David Carson hack'n'slashing Arial — using a Swiss Army knife, no less — with all the infernal post-brutality of his creative disturbance and disturbed creativity. We then sailed without hesitation into the absurdities of analyzing Helvetica’s role in globalization and upcoming world blandness (China beware! Helvetica will invade you as silently and transparently as a sheet of rice paper!). And at the end of a perfect celebratory day, we positively affirmed à la Shakti, and solemnly whispered the energy of our affirmation unto the universal mind: “We appreciate Helvetica for getting us this far. We are now ready for release and await the arrival of the next head snatcher.” The great hype of Swisspalooza '07 prompted a look at Max Miedinger, the designer of Neue Haas Grotesk (later renamed to Helvetica). Surprisingly, what little biographical information available about Miedinger indicates that he was a typography consultant and type sales rep for the Haas foundry until 1956, after which time he was a freelance graphic designer — rather than the full-time type designer most Helvetica enthusiasts presume him to have been. It was under that freelance capacity that he was commissioned to design the regular and bold weights of Neue Haas Grotesk typeface. His role in designing Helvetica was never really trumpeted until long after the typeface attained global popularity. And, again surprisingly, Miedinger designed two more typefaces that seem to have been lost to the dust of film type history. One is called Pro Arte (1954), a very condensed Playbill-like slab serif that is similar to many of its genre. The other, made in 1964, is much more interesting. Its original name was Horizontal. Here it is, lest it becomes a Haas-been, presented to you in digital form by Canada Type under the name of its original designer, Miedinger, the Helvetica King. The original film face was a simple set of bold, panoramically wide caps and figures that give off a first impression of being an ultra wide Gothic incarnation of Microgramma. Upon a second look, they are clearly more than that. This face is a quirky, very non-Akzidental take on the vernacular, mostly an exercise in geometric modularity, but also includes some unconventional solutions to typical problems (like thinning the midline strokes across the board to minimize clogging in three-storey forms). This digital version introduces four new weights, ranging from Thin to Medium, alongside the bold original. The Miedinger package comes in all popular font formats, and supports Western, Central and Eastern European languages, as well as Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish and Celtic/Welsh. A few counter-less alternates are included in the fonts.

While researching the history of Onitsuka Tiger's branding and graphic design, I came across an odd, yet highly appealing piece of custom lettering on the company's ONICK ski boots from the 1970s. Reminiscent of aspects of the typeface Black-Out by Eli Carrico (released by my type foundry Wordshape), yet vertically compressed with razor-sliced counters and odd stencil element that makes up one of the legs of the "K", the ONICK lettering is a potential source for an intriguing modular font. I immediately thought of Ryoichi Tsunekawa as a potential collaborator to bring this piece of lettering to full-fledged life in the contemporary context. Based in Nagoya, Tsunekawa runs an independent type foundry called Dharma Type, including three specialized foundry sub-labels: Flat-It, devoted to display lettering; Prop-A-Ganda, a series of fonts inspired by and based on retro propaganda posters, movie posters, retail sign lettering & advertisements in the early 20th century; and Holiday Type, a series of decorative and retro scripts for holiday use. The past year has seen a flurry of notice of his work abroad, having been featured in both MyFonts' "Creative Characters" and YouWorkForThem's newsletter. As the work of most Japanese type designers is almost wholly unnoticed abroad, for Tsunekawa to be interviewed by two of the most popular type distribution companies in the world is definitely something beyond the norm. Perhaps it is because he works independently, or perhaps it is due to the charm and friendliness with which his typefaces are infused. Either way, this attention is both welcome and appreciated. Beyond mere charm, Tsunekawa's work is nuanced, detailed, and accessible due to its high level of finish. His fonts stand apart from his contemporaries in Latin typeface design in Japan due to his fascination with pop, vernacular and historical lettering from "non-pure" sources- whereas type designers like Kunihiko Okano and Akira Kobayashi have spent years analyzing the essence of Western letterform construction and unlocking the essence of Latin forms, Tsunekawa views surface and the awkward nature of his sources as being of value, as well. His irreverence for the formal doctrines of history imbue his typeface designs with a rugged inventiveness that would be missed by most- glyphs without source designs are guessed at and approximated, often in a manner wildly divergent from what Western eyes would assume. It is in these moments that I find sheer delight in Tsunekawa’s work and what make me most pleased to invite him aboard Neojaponisme and Onitsuka Tiger’s type development project. His assorted typefaces show an eclecticism in finish and as holistic systems- Tsunekawa's return email to me about the proposed type project showed a digital sketch of how a completed typeface family from the source lettering might look, rendered with an effortlessness and dedication to detail that belies a skilled craftsperson. Further development showed Tsunekawa’s rigor- the typeface in development rapidly featured glyphs ignored by many: a full set of fractions, Eastern European diacritics and accents, superior and inferior numerals, alternate characters, and custom ligatures - all designed with regulated, detailed spacing. ONICK is a typeface Tsunekawa should be proud of- an homage to a moment in history rendered in the absolute best fashion. We are proud to present it to the world! --Ian Lynam