Pokerface is an industrious mixed-case display font devised on the theme of playing cards, designed by Jim Ford. Most letterforms in the font have 'four of a kind' while some are only available in pairs. It features Clarendon-style slab serif and grotesque sans serif forms. Furthermore, the letterforms are 'shuffled' to give a random appearance in standard text. It fuses a utilitarian sturdiness with a soft and friendly feel, and adds a bold flare to headlines, logos and posters. Character Set - Latin 1, OpenType extras.

The Daytona™ typeface family grew out Jim Wasco’s desire to design a readable and legible typeface for video and on screen use. Because of its high levels of legibility, the Daytona family is additionally an ideal design for display usage in digital user interfaces and a wide range of print applications. Wasco drew each character with legibility as a primary goal, some of the letters having unique attributes to minimize the ambiguity. Daytona Variables are font files which are featuring two width axes and have a preset instance from Thin to Fat.

Ayita is a new sans serif design by Jim Ford and Steve Matteson. Ayita is a Cherokee name which translates to first in dance" and recalls the rhythm and flow of this new typeface. Originally conceived as an upright italic design, Ayita remains contemporary, friendly and hard working. The open shapes render faithfully at small point sizes and on device screens while the compact design allows more characters per line for headlines. Ayita is a useful design for a wide variety of uses including interfaces, spreadsheets, greeting cards and banners."

Probably as a reaction to the pragmatism of modernist design, the seventies saw an explosion of buoyant, vivacious typography. Psychedelia fueled a return to the melting, lush shapes of Art Nouveau while Pop culture embraced the usage of funky, joyful lettering for advertising, product design and tv titling. New low-cost technologies like photo-lettering and rub-on transfer required new fonts to be expressive rather than legible, pushing designers to produce, bubbly, high-spirited masterpieces, where geometric excess and calligraphic inventions melted joyfully. Freitag is Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini's homage to this era and its typography. His starting point was the design of a heavy sans serif with humanist condensed proportions, flared stems and reverse contrast, that generated both the main family, and a variant display subfamily. The main typeface family slowly builds the tension and design exuberance along the weight axis - a bit like our desire for the weekend increases during the week. In Light and Medium weights the font shows a more controlled, medium-contrast design, tightly spaced for maximum display effect. The Book weight follows the same design but uses a more relaxed letter spacing to allow usage in smaller sizes and short body copy. As weight increases in the Bold weight the style becomes more expressive, with a visible reverse contrast building up and culminating in the Heavy weight with his clearly visible "bell bottoms" feel. In the display sub-family the design is pushed further by introducing variant letterforms that have a stronger connection to calligraphy and lettering. Also, the weight range becomes a optical one, with weights marked as Medium, Large, XLarge, as bringing the contrast and the boldness to the extreme creates smaller counterspaces that require bigger usage sizes. Another important addition of the display sub-family is the connected italics that sport swash capitals and cursive letterforms, developed with logo design and ultra-expressive editorial design in mind. To balance the extreme contrast in the XL weight, contrast of punctuation is reduced, creating a rich, highly-dynamic texture wherever diacritics and marks are used in the text. The full family includes 16 styles + 4 variable fonts, allowing full control of the design over its tree-hugging design space. All 20 fonts share an extended latin charset with open type features including case sensitive forms, single and double story variants and alternate glyphs. According to its creator, "Freitag is the typeface that sounds like an imaginary Woodstock where on the stage with Jimi Hendrix with Novarese, Motter, Excoffon and Benguiat playing onstage with Jimi Hendrix". Jeepers creepers!

If you thought you heard someone callin' your name just now, you might have caught the firm but soft spoken tones of Comicraft's classy balloon lettering font, HushHush. Created in the style of the newspaper strips of the 30s and 40s, HushHush captures the slick movements of the skilled hand letterers of that era. Gracing the pages of Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's chart-topping BATMAN storyline -- which by a staggering coincidence was also called "Hush" -- these characters have brought to life the words of Two Face, The Joker, Scarecrow, Catwoman, Batman and Robin -- from every whisper to every scream.

The Harmonia Sans™ typeface is a fine blend of contemporary geometric sans serif lettershapes and classic calligraphic proportions. Jim Wasco, who was aided by George Ryan in the production of the typeface family, began the design of Harmonia Sans with a single goal in mind. "I wanted to create a simple and legible typeface by pulling the best aspects of classic geometric sans designs, such as Futura and ITC Avant Garde Gothic," Wasco explained. The result is a design suitable for virtually all typographic applications, from text on low-resolution displays to high-resolution print and even architectural signage.

Cadmus Pro is the newly remastered and greatly expanded version of a Jim Rimmer design based on a type originally done by hand lettering artist Robert Foster. Foster’s type, named Pericles, was published by ATF in the 1930s, and used in lettering magazines and advertising headings. The design is based closely on early inscriptional Greek. Cadmus Pro comes with over 1130 glyphs, covering pretty much all Latin languages (including Vietnamese) as well as Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew. OpenType features include stylistic alternates, automatic fractions, ordinals, and small figure ranges for superiors and inferiors. Proceeds from this font will be put towards a variety of Canadian typography education causes.

Roswell was designed by Jim Parkinson, who acknowledges the 'spacey' ancestry of its name. Yes, Roswell, New Mexico. There was a big anniversary of 'the incident' in the news while I was designing in Roswell. "The incident" is of course the alleged UFO crash in Roswell. "I thought the name was acceptable as a serious font name, while, on another level, having a strangely humorous edge," says Parkinson. Roswell looks great in large sizes on a poster or in a magazine layout. It started out as "a variation on American gothic forms like Railroad Gothic", says the designer, but Roswell is an original design with eccentricities of its own."

Jim Spiece has a taste and a talent for reviving type styles from earlier in this century. ITC Deli Supreme is a “futuristic retro” face that would be at home as a logo on a car or a roadside diner from the 1940s or '50s; the lowercase nearly joins, in script style, thanks to the long extenders stretching out from the bottom-right corner of most letters, while the caps have beginning strokes leading in from the top left. ITC Deli Supreme, like ITC Deli Deluxe, features slightly rounded corners on all the letters, for a soft, streamlined look despite the squareness of the letterforms.

The Daytona™ typeface family grew out of a desire to provide improved fonts for use in televised sporting events. Jim Wasco drew the design as sturdy squared letters based on humanist shapes and proportions. Letters were kept narrow for economy of space, and inter-character spacing was established for easy reading. While televised sporting events may have initially been his target, the design considerations he incorporated into the Daytona family also enabled it to perform well in a variety of other video and on screen environments. Daytona Variables are font files which are featuring two width axes and have a preset instance from Thin to Fat.

Like many of Jim Parkinson's alphabets, Pueblo began as poster lettering. It shows a range of influences: turn-of-the-century sign painting, old Speedball lettering books, and a touch of art nouveau. While developing Pueblo, Parkinson debated whether to make the ends of the serifs rounded or square. Rounded looked more like the work of a Speedball lettering pen, but squared stroke endings made the letters more legible at small sizes. The finished design sports serifs that are just slightly rounded. According to Parkinson, the design feature is “enough to be noticed at large sizes, while going virtually unnoticed at smaller point sizes,” adding to the versatility of this distinctive typeface.

Poster Paint is a fun shocard alphabet which came about from Jim Rimmer’s admiration of Goudy Stout, a design he liked in spite of the fact that Goudy himself claimed to detest it. Extremely eye-catching and humourous to a fault, Poster Paint is an ideal fit for fun environments like theme parks, concession stands, cofee and juice bars, and in print design for children books and fun food packaging. Poster Paint was updated and remastered for the latest technologies in 2012. It comes with a glyphset of over 375 characters, and supports the majority of Latin-based languges. 20% of this font’s revenues will be donated to a GDC scholarship fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

Mister Earl, released by Bitstream in 1991, was designed by Jennifer Maestre. Inspiration came from a page in a ‘how-to’ book published in the 1930s. Later versions of Extra Light, Light and Bold were added by Jim Lyles, with the help of Wally Petty. Mister Earl is named in honor of Earl Biscoe, a Bitstream designer who retired in the mid-1980s because of illness. In the winter of 1994–1995, Richard Stetler accidentally left a copy of Mister Earl outside his Alaska home... In the spring, amazed to discover the unfortunate font was still just about alive, he decided to release the result to a wider public as Snow Cap.

The ITC Blair™ typeface is a revival and reimaging of an early 20th century metal typeface of the same name. Even though only available as single weights of extended and condensed proportions, metal fonts of the face were sold well into the 1950s. In 1997, Jim Spiece resurrected the original extended design for digital imaging and, in the process, added two new weights. Almost 20 years later, he collaborated with Monotype type designers to extend the basic family again. The result was a new suite of three condensed designs and italic complements for all the roman weights. The family also benefits from a large set of alternative glyphs and many OpenType® features.

LTC Kaatskill was made specifically for use in an edition of Rip Van Winkle for the Limited Editions Club. "I feel that Kaatskill owes nothing in its design to any existing face, and the type therefore is as truly an American type as anything so hidebound by tradition as type can be."- F. Goudy This face was one of the first digital typefaces released by the Lanston Type Co. Ltd. Jim Rimmer took painstaking measures in his faithful revival. Goudy had never designed a specific Italic to accompany this face. The Italic completed by Rimmer is a variation on Deepdene Italic. The font set was re-mastered in 2006 by Colin Kahn.

Fresno is a two-font family. Fresno Inline and Fresno Black. Fresno Black is a recent addition. It can be used alone, and it is carefully tailored to fit behind the Inline font to add color to the inline. There are alternate characters: A, M & N in the caps and lowercase key positions. Fresno is a square gothic style typical of Mid-20th Century Showcard Lettering. A lettering genre known as “Gaspipe.” Signage samples similar to this still exist on buildings in my home town, Oakland, California. I have designed over a half dozen variations of this form over the years. Including Amboy. Golden Gate Initials, Matinee, Motel, and Hotel. Designed in 2001 by Jim Parkinson, Fresno has recently been refreshed, enhanced, and re-released.

Amboy is a two-font family. Amboy Inline and Amboy Black. Amboy Black is a recent addition. It can be used alone, but it is carefully tailored to fit behind the Inline font to add color to the inline. There are alternate characters: A, M & N in the caps and lowercase key positions. Amboy is a square gothic style typical of Mid-20th Century Showcard Lettering. A lettering genre known as “Gaspipe.” Signage samples similar to this still exist on buildings in my home town, Oakland, California. I have designed over a half dozen variations of this form over the years. Including Golden Gate Initials, Matinee, Motel, Hotel and Fresno. Designed in 2001 by Jim Parkinson, Amboy has been refreshed, enhanced, and re-released.

Sackers Gothic is part of the larger Sackers series, a collection of fonts drawn from templates for producing engraved stationery and social cards by Gary Sackers, a Charlotte, North Carolina intaglio printer. Many typefaces were made from similar sources, including Monotype’s Engravers series, as well as Jim Spiece’s ITC Blair, and Mark van Bronkhorst’s Sweet Sans. Sackers’ typefaces, which were initially made into photo-set type, were digitized by Compugraphic and released in the late 1980s. Sackers Gothic has since become a popular choice for conveying sincere and plainspoken language on dust jackets, posters, and of course, in stationery. The face pairs well with display faces of a disparate nature, and serves as a ready foil for anything requiring an air of typographic sophistication.

Alexander Quill was originally designed in the early 1980s to be cut in 14 point for casting into foundry type for the setting and printing of limited edition books at Pie Tree Press, Jim Rimmer's private sanctum. This alphabet exhibits traditional calligraphic tension, which helps its simple, somewhat octagonal forms play well together for an easy read. Its setting expresses a dramatic sense of history or fantasy. Alexander Quill was updated and remastered for the latest technologies in 2012. It comes with plenty of built-in alternates, a glyphset of over 410 characters, and supports the majority of Latin-based languges. 20% of this font's revenues will be donated to the GDC Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

Esca is a display typeface designed by Jim Ford with highly compressed proportions yet with a subtle calligraphic touch. This Lite version of the typeface was designed as part of a font marathon over the course of 3.5 days in Monotype’s NY office. The design started with the aim of fitting 4 letters onto one sheet of paper and the resulting typeface keeps that tight proportion. The Esca design is mixed case and is ideally suited for logos, short headlines, and album covers. It has a great architectural feel to it that makes it suitable in signage applications and large scale settings. Monotype is proud to support Room to Read’s work in literacy and girls’ education through our font marathon initiative.

Jim Ford's Hideout typeface is definitely walking on the wrong side of the law. Inspired by the flared serif lettering of antique tobacco tins, its sturdy shapes are confident, eye-catching, and hark back to the Wild West. Large sizes bring Hideout's details to life, emphasising the delicate nicks in its Ks and Rs. For designers that need to soften some of its swagger, a set of decorative alternatives offer a little Art Deco elegance, adding some refinement to its chunky letterforms. With its 14 weights, Hideout is an adaptable design that works especially well when used for display – for example in book covers, packaging, posters, restaurant menus, or editorial. Don't miss the ghost weights, which hint at the kinds of weathered lettering found on faded and peeling Wanted posters.

Inspired by butcher shop and supermarket window advertising, Beefcakes™ emulates "big brush” style lettering – with a contemporary twist. Not for the typographically timid, this is a design that makes a powerful and friendly statement in print and on screen. Advertising headlines, posters, cover art, menus and packaging are all in Beefcakes’ wheelhouse. While it would be a little crowded on small screens, big type in web sites and games are also part of Beefcakes kit-bag. Drawn by Jim Ford, Beefcakes’ big, sassy and playful shapes are sure to grab attention. Its letterforms are dense and sturdy – yet soft and welcoming as your mom’s old couch. The suite of Beefcakes fonts is available as all-caps designs with small caps, in roman, italic and shadow flavors. As a nod to the typeface’s inspiration, Beefcakes fonts also include a set of decorative abbreviations (lb, oz, kg, in, etc.) for bold signage and showcard-style displays.

Frederic Goudy joined Lanston as art advisor in 1920. One of his first initiatives was to design a new version of Garamond based on original Garamond designs of 1540. Goudy intended his free-hand drawings to be cut exactly as he had drawn them and fought with the workmen at Lanston to keep them from “correcting” his work. This new type was called Garamont (an acceptable alternate spelling) to distinguish it from other Garamonds on the market. (The other Garamonds on the market at that time were later confirmed to be the work of Jean Jannon.) In 2001, Jim Rimmer digitized Garamont in two weights. The display weight is based on the actual metal outlines to compensate slightly for the ink gain that occurs with letterpress printing. The text weight is a touch heavier and more appropriate for general offset and digital text work. Digital Garamont is available to the public for the first time in 2005.

Jim Parkinson's Diablo typeface is a single weight display design. The look comes from samples found in early 20th century books on hand-lettering books, as well as general poster lettering styles from that same of the period. Diablo has a touch of the Arts and Crafts" movement in its appearance, and it also looks rather heavy. It is a unicase design, in that there is no real "lowercase." Some glyphs on the uppercase keys are alternates to the capital-style forms found on the lowercase keyboard, like A, E, F, H, J, K, M, N, Q, R, V, W, and Z. In fact, the uppercase itself is a bit more decorated and round than the lowercase. Nevertheless, the upper and lowercase letters may be freely interchanged with each other to create the best possible image for the text. The name of the typeface, Diablo, is another term for the devil, or Satan."

ITC New Winchester is a revival of a typeface that never really had a first release. The original Winchester was an experimental design created by the American type designer W.A. Dwiggins in 1944. Dwiggins was interested in improving the legibility of the English language by reducing the number of ascenders and descenders; to do this, he gave Winchester very short descenders and created uncial forms for a number of letters. The result was a distinctive text typeface that was occasionally used by Dwiggins and Dorothy Abbe in handset form. Fifty years later, Indiana type designer Jim Spiece has turned Dwiggins's experiment into a new family of digital text types. Spiece gave New Winchester a bold weight, as well as small caps (both roman and italic) and old style figures; he also created two forms of the lowercase f, one with and one without an overhang (in metal type, a kern), and a full set of f-ligatures.

P22 Flora Mambo is based on the distinctive style of 20th century illustrator Jim Flora. Most widely known for his Jazz album covers of the 1940s & 50s, Flora's style shows his fantastic imagination and bold graphic style. The P22 Flora Mambo Set contains 3 fonts- Flora Mambo, a 2-part font that can be used to achieve 2-color text in the style of Flora's iconic 1955 album design, Mambo for Cats and Flornaments, a set of 72 ornaments that features a variety of Flora's illustrative styles from his Jazz album covers to children's books to his fine art prints. Please note that P22 Flora Mambo B is not intended to be used on its own but rather is included with P22 Flora Mambo to create 2-color text. For best results, use with page layout applications. The fonts contained in the P22 Flora Mambo Set are licensed through the Estate of James Flora and JimFlora.com .

The design of the first "Fat Face" is credited to Robert Thorne just after 1800 in England. It is considered to be the first type style designed specifically for display or jobbing, rather than for book work. The first instance of Fat Face in wood type is found in the first wood type specimen book ever produced: Darius Wells, Letter Cutter 1828. This style was produced by all early wood type manufacturers. The style is derived from the high contrast, thick and thin Modern style of Bodoni and Didot developed only decades previously. The extended variation makes the face even more of a display type and not at all suitable for text. This type of display type was used to compete with the new Lithographic process which allowed for the development of the poster as an artform unto itself. This new digitization by Jim Lyles most closely follows the Wm Page cut. The crisp outlines hold up at the largest point sizes you can imagine. This font contains a full CE character set.

Elicit Script is a hybrid script family, that can be as casual or formal as the occasion demands. Created by Laura Worthington and Jim Wasco, the design is based on pointed pen Spencerian Script handwriting. “It’s like one of those German italics from the early 20th century, that have beautiful shapes that hold their own,” says Wasco. Elicit Script spans five weights, from Extra Light to Bold, and three styles – Formal, Normal and Casual. This makes it an incredibly versatile script design, easily paired with other typefaces and able to be dressed up or down, depending on what it’s used for. The monoline Casual style offers a more relaxed tone of voice, while Formal sits at the more decorative end of the spectrum. Designers can keep things straightforward, tidy and practical with the typeface’s simple caps, or add in swash caps if they need more exuberance and expression. Generous spacing means Elicit Script works well at smaller sizes as well. Elicit Script Variable Set is a single font file that features two axes: Weight and Contrast. The Weight axis has instances from Extra Light to Bold. The Contrast axis has instances from Casual (low contrast) to Formal (high contrast).

The name of this typeface comes from the surname of James (Jim) Bowie, American pioneer and inventor of the famous Bowie knife. This is exactly what inspired English rockstar David Jones to change his stage name to David Bowie. Bowie is thenew font by Bercz and Latinotype Team. The typeface is a type system that reflects a strong personality, an urban feel and an unprejudiced style. Bowieis well-suited for publishing projects, branding and packaging. This font family is composed of three sections: a group of sharp-shaped uppercase fonts (smallcaps and all caps) in 5 weights, each with matching regular/back slant italics,providing users with 15 different styles for multiple combinations; a set of script catchwords and eclectic sets of dingbats and flags that communicate the blue-sky thinking and feel of the project. Bowie —a collaborative project between Bercz and Latinotype Team—was developed by Leonidas Loyola, Valentina Vega, Rodrigo Fuenzalida, César Araya and Bruno Jara, under the supervision of Dany Berczeller, Daniel Hernández y Luciano Vergara.. Bowie consists of 5 weights, ranging from Thin toBlack, and comes with a 439-character set that supports 206 languages.

Ernie is a new animated typeface by Jim Ford, intended as a complimentary serif design to Freeman Craw’s fun retro hit, Ad Lib. The serif drawings mimic the behaviors of Ad Lib, on a Clarendon-esque structure. The application of Ad Lib’s behaviors to a serif design highlights it's quirky characteristics; notably in the added contrast, the bending of serifs and the translation to Ernie’s ball terminals. The lowercase g is probably the most extreme example of this "translation." Ernie has a savvy system of text animation built in; with dualing lowercase alphabets, 34 ligatures, and an extensive glossary of custom words, all programmed to automatically make intelligent pseudorandom wordshapes. It's called RMS, aka the Randomagic System. The glossary of “buzz” words is based on the most common and powerful words in marketing and advertising, as well as words that are specific to Ernie’s intended uses.. Additionally, Ernie Alt provides the opposite randomization effects in lowercase text, thus reversing the rhythm of the bounce. Ernie Sorts is a bonus font which includes fun printers fists, expandable banners and other graphic elements. The Ernie character and cartoons were created by Johnny Sampson, as a visualization of the typeface, it's character and it's unique features.

Originally released in 2008, Stern is the only typeface to be produced and marketed simultaneously in digital and metal. In the twenty-first century, no less. It is also the last typeface Jim Rimmer ever completed. The process he used for its design and manufacture is the stuff of legend, and can be seen in the Richard Kegler documentary, Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century. The design is a delicate upright italic named in memory of Chris Stern, the late artist and printer from Washington State. In 2013, Canada Type remastered and expanded the design's offerings to a glyphset of over 1200 characters, updated programming. Now Stern Pro includes the following features: - Small caps. - Caps-to-small-caps functionality, useful for setting mid-height caps alongside lowercase. - Tall caps. - Historical forms. - A wide variety of alternates for both uppercase and lowercase letters. - Plenty of ligatures. - Seven types of numerals, enclosers, cojoiners and currency symbols. - Automatic fractions. - A complete set of lowercase ordinals, from a to z. - Case-sensitive forms. - Language support for Greek and over 50 Latin languages. 20% of this font's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

Metron is so far the most ambitious typeface made to order in the Czech Republic. Despite the fact that for a number of years it has not been used for the purpose for which it was designed, every inhabitant of Prague is still well aware of its typical features. Metron Pro was commissioned by the Transport Company of the Capital City of Prague in 1970 to be used in the information system of the Prague Metro. It was first published in the manual of the Metroprojekt company in 1973 and then used to the full, under the author’s supervision, for lines “A” and “C”. Since 1985 Rathouský's system has been disappearing from the Prague Metro; it survives only in the form of metal letters at its stations and at some stations of the Czechoslovak Railways. In 2014 we're mentioning the 90th birthday of Jiří Rathouský. It’s a good opportunity for updating and re-introducing his Metron. Extended was the choice of figures and fractions, new currency signs added, diacritics revised, etc., but above all the newly designed Cyrillics including true SmallCaps. Now we have six weights plus italics, where the tone of the basic style is even closer to the original. Ten years back we've had the feeling that this typeface should again take a part of Prague’s traffic system and today, when revisiting of all the fonts, the feeling turned to certainty. The main feature of this typeface is namely a noticeability a property above all welcomed in rush of platforms.

The Richie™ typeface grew out of a lettering experiment inspired by the work of Czech type designer Oldrich Menhart (1897-1962). Menhart’s typefaces were primarily text designs with a strong personal calligraphic influence. Monotype Studio designer, Jim Ford, wondered what a display typeface from Menhart might look like, and began drawing bold script characters with a broad-tipped chisel marker. “It was a familiar but laborious exercise,” explains Ford, “I tried to achieve an authentic – yet controlled – randomness that would serve as the foundation of a typeface.” Ford first drew a large suite of characters using the marker. All the drawings were then carefully adjusted, and scanned. Ford then pieced together a typeface from the best versions of letters, and refined those further. The result is a rugged, somewhat eccentric and playful script built on an obvious hand-drawn foundation. In a world of smooth scripts, the Richie design is heavy, chunky and rough. Its hand-made feel and vigorous rhythm put the power of raw brush lettering into the typographer’s hands. OpenType® fonts of Richie include standard, contextual and discretionary ligatures, in addition to contextual and stylistic alternates, old style, lining and superior figures, plus a large complement of swash characters. The name “Richie”? It grew out of Ford’s original premise for the design. “I wondered what it might it look like if ‘Old Richie’ had designed a heavy display face or script.”

Brother To create a truly global font family, FS Albert needed an Arabic script sibling. Emanuela Conidi set about the delicate task of creating an alphabet to harmonise visually with its Latin sans serif counterpart so that the two could be used side-by-side in bilingual publications. Working with the Kufic style of script, with its simpler, geometric forms, Emanuela sculpted letters with the a similar optical size, weight and rhythm as FS Albert, with open counters and monolinear strokes. It never hurts to Naskh But there’s more to FS Albert than a simple, geometric structure. To match Albert’s cheery, charming character, FS Albert Arabic needed an injection of warmth and informality. Emanuela incorporated some of the more expressive, calligraphic shapes of the Naskh script style, which lent the letterforms a looser, softer, more handwritten quality, while remaining functional and structured. The Naskh influence is most noticeable in the bowl of characters such as Jim, Qaf and Nun, in the curved tail of Waw and Reh, and the deep joining of Tah. Follow the script The end result is an Arabic script that’s the perfect partner to FS Albert: open counters, monolinear strokes and a friendly, rounded appearance. FS Albert Arabic is available in Opentype format, in five weights from Thin to ExtraBold. It supports Persian and Urdu, with proportional and tabular numerals for both, plus full vocalisation and the Hijra feature.

Hassan is a traditional-style Arabic text face designed by Hassan Sobhi Mourad, an experienced calligrapher and teacher of the art and first produced by the Linotype Design Studio (U.K.) as a PostScript font in 1993. An individual Naskh style, Hassan cleverly combines elegant proportions, echoing an inscriptional Thuluth in its tall vertical stems and deeply rounded final jim and ain. The effect of verticality is enhanced by the tense, reined-in kerning strokes of ra and waw, the well-poised lam-alif, and the compactly drawn ligatures. The broad-band strokes of Hassan Bold smooth some of the angularity and relax the tension apparent in the Light. The traditional-style ligatures are rendered with an easy flow. Because of the economical character count, Hassan Light and Bold text may be headed by the compact titling styles (Hisham, Mariam) as well as designs like Ahmed or Kufi which answer to the inscriptional qualities of Hassan. In addition to other uses, Hassan would be particularly suited to document text-setting. Hassan’s two OpenType weights include Latin glyphs from Janson Text Roman, and Janson Text Bold, respectively, inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. The OpenType glyph ranges incorporate Basic Latin and the Arabic character set, which supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The fonts include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals, as well as a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.

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.

Alfie™ is lively, friendly, inviting and easy on the eyes. What more could you want in a script? How about four flavors of the same design? Alfie Script is a delightful connecting script with a touch of comfortable elegance. Use it for everything from social announcements to headlines and packaging. Alfie Casual is a little more laid-back with letters standing on their own. It works great in short blocks of text copy, subheads and navigational links. Alfie Informal has spirited serifs and its own demeanor, while Alfie Small Caps does a fine job of supporting its other siblings. There’s an immediacy to words and messages set in these lighthearted confections. Jim Ford was practicing drawing with a new brush pen when the inspiration for Alfie came to him. He had filled several pages in a notebook with letters and, at one point, realized that there might be a typeface among them. As it turned out, there were four. The process, however, wasn’t choosing one design and modifying it. The makings of all the designs were on the pages. It was just a matter of culling out the right collection of characters to build the foundations for the four flavors of Alfie. Because they share the same family roots, each design in the Alfie family can be paired and intermixed. Ford admits that there’s a hint of Emil Klumpp’s 1950s Murray Hill typeface (https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/murray-hill/) in the Alfie family. Just enough to give the design a 50s vibe. (Some fashions never go out of style.)