Before 1959, in pre-Castro Havana, Cuba, the preeminent nightclub was the Tropicana. During the regime of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba was resplendent with nightclubs and gambling casinos catering to [mostly] the North American tourists; which brought it the title of the Monte Carlo of the Americas. Although Cuba (and the world as a whole) has changed vastly over the decades, the hand-lettered logo of the Tropicana Night Club has survived, and has been reproduced as a complete digital font called Tropicano JNL (a slight twist to the club's name). At first the font seems to be awkward, crude and amateurish, but in taking a second look, there's a playful charm to it. Additionally, this font can double as a "spooky" font for the Halloween season, monster parties and in other similar themes.

Nosegrind is a bit of a departure from our usual more traditional font offerings. It's based on skate-culture graffiti gleaned from various samples of similar style found on walls in Austin and online. The font includes two character sets, one which is plain and one which is enhanced with outlines. In normal usage the characters should nest, with slight overlap from one character to the next as shown in the sample to the right, but the lower case characters in the font are spaced evenly but not pre-nested, leaving the degree of overlap up to the user - nesting is easily adjusted with the tracking option in programs like Photoshop, Quark or InDesign. Ultimately Nosegrind will be added to our Modern Fonts collection, where it ought to fit in nicely.

Introducing Megatropolis : intellectual, architectural, urban and urbane. What started as an idea where the counters would be letters (3 scribbled glyphs on a piece of scrap paper), has grown into a mighty font family of eight stackable fonts. First came Megatropolis itself, a Deco font within a Deco font; Double Deco, you might say. In Illustrator, you can deconstruct it to make solid letters, outline letters or just the inset letters on their own, and you can stack them how you wish. Or you can get the whole Megatropolis family with Black , Outline , Inset , Smog , Shade and Shade with Inset and keep them all separate stackable, editable fonts. In addition, there’s Megatropolis Benday (available in TT only), with its fabulous stackable comic dots. Megatropolis is a typographer’s playground.

Although ITC Styleboy has a retro feel, it isn't based on any earlier typeface. As far as inspiration goes," says designer Chester Wajda, "I'd have to say comic strips of the '20s and '30s, and silent-film marquee lettering from the '20s - with a hint of a Chinese brush?" He originally created the typeface for a children's book he was working on. "I wanted it to be fun, but still somewhat formal in its underlying structure," he says. "It's largely based on right and 45-degree angles, with slight tucks inward on the stems and bowls, and a few flourishes here and there." Styleboy's top-heavy look is most noticeable in the caps, but it's exaggerated too in the "8" and the lowercase "g." Styleboy is Wajda's first typeface design."

TT Nooks useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options TT Nooks is an experimental font family that includes a high contrast serif, TT Nooks, and an upright italic, TT Nooks Script. Despite the difference in style, both subfamilies get along well, which is partially thanks to their similar proportions. Each of the subfamilies includes 4 weights: Light, Regular, Bold and Black. The main subfamily is TT Nooks—a stylish high-contrast serif with a light touch of self-centeredness. If TT Nooks were a person, it would be an elegant lady with an independent and firm personality. In the original sketches of TT Nooks there were traces of a broad pen, but in the course of further evolution the typeface moved away from this style, retaining only the high contrast of strokes. In addition, in the process of design searches TT Nooks has obtained a touch of geometricity. The serifs in TT Nooks stand out especially visibly thanks to their geometric shape that resembles slippers. In addition to their peculiarity, such serifs add stability to the font and allow better compensation of the black and white ratio within the letters. TT Nooks has small capitals for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, as well as a set of stylistic alternates (including some figures) that makes the typeface a bit more geometric. In addition, we have drawn more than 25 ligatures, including ligatures for capital letters, slashed zero and many other useful OpenType features. TT Nooks Script is a complementary family designed to harmoniously extend the main family and expand its scope. The forms of the characters in bold and light fonts of TT Nooks Script are quite different. For example, Black & Bold have high contrast strokes and an open aperture, and in Regular & Light the aperture of the characters is closed. TT Nooks also has small capitals for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, ligatures, oldstyle figures and other OpenType features. In light faces, TT Nooks Script is more humanist and has artifacts inherent to the continuous movement of a flat pen. In bold faces, TT Nooks Script has a very dense and dynamic typing rhythm, and the shape of the letters begins to geometrize. We had had the difficult task of preserving the continuity of forms between bold and light faces, and we have managed to solve it thanks to the found rhythm, which united different fonts, and proximate stylistic solutions.