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.

In Holland, all kids have a six week long school holiday during the summer months. To prevent chaos, traffic jams and other madness, the government has divided the country in three regions (North, Middle and South) and school holidays start a few days to a week and a half apart. For kids this is the best time of the year, as they can have fun for a month and a half, but for us parents this sometimes is a bit of a logistic nightmare, as we still have to work! Six Week Holiday is an ode to the chaos of summer. It is a cute handmade ‘school’ font that will put some sunshine in your designs! Comes with extensive language support.

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.

Acid Green has quite a psychedelic flair, but its origins are from long before the sixties psychedelia. Its roots date back to 1914, from an unnamed alphabet by J.M. Bergling, the amazing jewelry engraver and 'letterform inventor'—as he considered himself—whose books of art alphabets and lettering influenced countless artists, including, not surprisingly, those involved with the genesis of Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements. Perfect for multiple display uses, including retro designs and trippy letterings, Acid Green has an extensive character set, with multilingual support covering 208 languages. There are yet some handy stylistic alternatives for some extra grooviness. Acid Green is somewhat retro looking, for sure, but it can sound perfectly contemporary too. Tune in and enjoy a creative trip! [Pizza illustration on the first graphic by our neighbor @pedrocorrea84]

Charles Gibbons' Fleischman BT Pro revives J.M. Fleischman's quirky and elegant text faces of the 1730s. Born in Germany, Fleischman worked in Holland, primarily at Enschedé en Zonen where he cut dozens of faces. His types represent some of the earliest examples of the Transitional style, predating and influencing the work of Fournier, Baskerville, and Bodoni. They were wildly popular in their day, used for everything from newspapers to currency, and Fleischman himself has enjoyed a renaissance of late. Fleischman BT Pro preserves the feel of the printed metal types while expanding the original to include four OpenType fonts: roman, italic, bold, and bold italic. They all include small caps, old style and lining figures, discretionary and historical ligatures, ornaments, and superiors. Fleischman Pro also supports Western, Central European, and Eastern European languages.

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.

Named in tribute to the members of the American Typecasting Fellowship, this font is an original expression of Jim Rimmer's left-handed calligraphy. It was designed and cut in 24 p in the early 1980s, then cast as foundry type on Jim's own Thompson typecasting machine. This alphabet exhibits classic semi-italic text tension, with sqaurish minuscules and hybrid renaissance majuscules. Jim's unique sense of restrained but attractive typo-calligraphic creativity puts on quite a show here. Fellowship was updated and remastered for the latest technologies in 2013. It comes with plenty of built-in alternates and ligatures. Its glyphset contains over 420 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.

Now here's a font that is named Like Butterflies, but has got nothing to do with butterflies! What? Why? Well, I recently heard the song "Even flow" by Pearl Jam and took a trip down memory lane - back to my early twenties. I remember how the lyrics affected me, and had an impact on how my life changed the years to follow. Maybe the style of the font does not reflect the inner meaning of the song, but it does reflect a look back in time for me - and the change that took place. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy the somewhat simple, handmade style of Like Butterflies and the 4 versions that works very well together! Please notice that each letter has got 5 slightly different versions to choose from!

In 1999, Jeff Levine released a freeware font called "Channel Tuning JL" scanned from drawings made with a felt tip marker and designed as if the letters were breaking up due to poor reception such as on pre-digital TV sets. Over a decade later, Jeff has totally reworked the font—giving it cleaner lines, an extended character set and renaming it Channel Surfing JNL to set it apart from the roughly-drawn original.

VLNL Jelly Donuts’ Jelly Donuts is the round sibling of VLNL Donuts. Equally funky, just round. Like its counterpart Jelly Donuts is heavily infused by hip 1970s geometric fonts like Blippo, Pump and ITC Bauhaus. It nonetheless has both feet in this modern day and age. Meticulously designed and tightly spaced, VLNL Jelly Donuts is very suitable for logos, headlines and music artwork. We especially recommend using it on big 12" album covers. VLNL Jelly Donuts is deep fried, filled with cream, custard or jam, and ometimes glazed or covered in a variety of sweetness: sprinkles, cinnamon, coconut, chopped peanuts, powdered sugar or maple syrup. As a very sweet and saturated snack should, VLNL Jelly Donuts is fitted with a full set of alternate swoosh caps that can be deployed to liven up your already ‘out there’ designs. You can’t get any more funky than this.

Drawn shortly before Jim Rimmer's passing in 2010, Loxley was designed to be used in a fine press edition of the folklore story of Robin Hood. It was named after the cited birthplace of the story's classic hero. Loxley's shapes were inspired the same early Roman faces (such as Subiaco from the late 1400s) that influenced Frederick Goudy's Aries, Franciscan and Goudry Thirty types. It exhibits the preculiarities of Jim's left-handed calligraphy, as well as his outside-the-box thinking with exit strokes and serif variations. Loxley was remastered for the latest technologies in 2013. Now it comes with a character set of over 450 glyphs, including plenty of stylistic alternates, a full compliment of f-ligatures, a Th-ligature, basic fractions, ordinals, a long s for historic setting, comprehensive class-based kerning, and extended Latin language support. 20% of this font's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

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.

When you think of marmalade or jam (that’s Marmellata in Italian), images of a happy breakfast table are conjured up into the mind, with of course the unforgettable emotive response accompanied. These emotions are exactly what our Marmellata fonts can conjure up for your designs as well (we agree, nothing can beat marmalade on a hot toast)! Our Jar 1 is ideal for all designs where you need to send across a feeling of care, childhood, comfort, motherhood or friendship...amongst all those ideas you will get on your own! With that classic breakfast table feel, you are sure to connect on a very comforting level with all those who view your designs using these fonts. May we suggest, these fonts go very well with unusually dull colours, and can add a spark of life to the most mundane of words! Try getting a taste of our Jar 2 if you want even more of the classic taste (sorry, touch!).

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.

Wolfsblood is a new display face by Jim Ford, adapted from hand-lettered logos spawned by punk rock bands like The Misfits and Bad Brains. The style can be traced back further to Hollywood and the explosion of low-budget exploitation, horror and sci-fi films, which also had an influence in punk rock. Wolfsblood captures this bizarre dark-spirited lettering which has become a staple in the designer‘s work for bands and posters. The Wolfsblood font has an expanded character set with borders, dingbats (yes, Bats!), and contextual ligatures programmed to give the typeface a random appearance by default. As with some of Jim‘s other typographic experiments, Wolfsblood encourages the designer to play with upper and lowercase, and mixed-case settings, to replicate the decisions that a lettering artist might make. Wolfsblood is great for logos, posters, headlines and short bits of text, and will add a fun, aggressive energy to your dark and other-worldly creations.

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).

In 1990 I designed the font XLeafMeAlone. In 2006 I decided that it was time to improve it. Instead of adding to it, I created two new fonts containing almost 200 leaves: MapleOaks and More Leaves. Among the leaves you will find in MoreLeaves are elm, cottonwood, tulip tree, ash, hickory, locust, ginko, aspen, sassafras, hawthorn, beech, and birch. There are also a few that come from shrubs and I am not sure what they are, but they looked interesting so I put them in. You will not find oaks, maples, or sycamores--they are in MapleOaks. Why leaves? Because people like them. As a large part of the biological world that is all around us, leaves are fascinating in their shapes and endless variations. In XLeafMeAlone I took about 50 shapes and rotated them 180 degrees to give a typeface with approximately 100 glyphs. In each of these two typefaces, MoreLeaves and MapleOaks, there are almost 100 glyphs. Each of those glyphs is rotated in 90-degree increments to yield two families of four typefaces that should be very useful if one wants to create borders of leaves.

Cotillion is an original design Jim Rimmer finished just before the turn of the century. Alongside its evidence of Jim's nostalgia at the deco type designs he was exposed to as a child, it distinctly shows a type designer who has become very comfortable with that rarest of design abilities: Bringing efficient typographic solutions to what is essentially a calligraphic endeavour. This design has all the elements of what made a traditional deco typeface display unmistakable elegance and luxury: The expressively low x-height, the precisely calculated upwards comfort and reserved grace of the vertical metrics, the subtle fusion of calligraphic ornamentation and clean minimalist type technique, and the unique indentity of the original lowercase flow. Cotillion was refined and remastered in 2012 to include a weath of aesthetic and functionality improvements. This Cotillion Pro set includes small caps, true italics, ligatures, seven types of figures, automatic fractions, extended Latin language support, stylistic alternates that include lowercase serif angle options, and plenty of extra OpenType features like caps-to-small-caps substitution, case-sensitive positioning, ordinals, and extended class-based kerning. At over 780 characters, each of the Cotillion Pro fonts is the equivalent of three fonts in one.

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.

Isabelle is the closest thing to a metal type revival Jim Rimmer ever did. The original metal face was designed and cut in late 1930s Germany, but its propspects were cut short by the arrival of the war. This was one of Jim's favourite faces, most likely because of the refined art deco elements that reminded him of his youthful enthusiasm about everything press-related, and the face's intricately thought balance between calligraphy and typography. Not to mention one of the most beautiful italics ever made. Jim's early 2000s digitization included mathematical corrections to the original metal cut, as well as some functional improvements for digital use. In 2013, during the remastering of the entire Rimmer collection, Isabelle underwent a considerable rethinking/expansion and was rechristened Isabelle Pro. The new revisions include small caps, ligatures, seven types of figures, automatic fractions, extended Latin language support, stylistic alternates that include lowercase serif angle options in the roman and looped ascenders/descenders in the italic, and plenty of extra OpenType features like caps-to-small-caps substitution, case-sensitive positioning, ordinals, and extended class-based kerning. Now each of the Isabelle Pro fonts includes over 680 glyphs. 20% of this font's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

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.

Inspired by the Indonesian island’s laid back feel and easy going culture, Bali Script is a tribute to the hand-lettered signage on beach bars, surf shacks and cafes. The swell of the stroke endings and the bolder-than-your-average gooey look convey a cool, contemporary take on baseball scripts. Overlay Bali Script Highlight for a cartoonish, glossy finish. Perfect for logos. This font is jam-packed with OpenType features that make smooth flowing text a doddle. Contextual alternates and ligatures are best left on by default. The alternates especially work a subtle magic that helps letters connect with an even rhythm, and automatically substitutes letters with the best fit alternatives based on their context, such as at the end of words, or adjacent to certain other letters. There are four stylistic sets (or all grouped together in the stylistic alternates feature for those without easy access to them) which do the following: SS01 - changes the r to a script form SS02 - makes certain caps more ‘scripty’ SS03 - capital I (and accented versions of it) get serifs SS04 - underline function. typing two or more underscores extends on underline beneath the previous word. Also included for your pleasure - oldstyle figures, automatic fractions, superior and inferior numbers, ordinals, some discretionary ligatures, swash alternates and extended language support.

Jim Rimmer aptly described his Dokument family as a sans serif in the vein of News Gothic that takes nothing from News Gothic. Building on that internal analysis, Dokument Pro is the thoroughly reworked and expanded of the original main set released in 2005, with different widths still in the pipeline. This new version updates Jim’s work to six Pro weights and their italic counterparts, each of which takes advantage of OpenType stylistic sets to introduce different degrees of graduation from gothic to humanist. Dokument Pro is now a unique text sans family, with an adaptable personality suitable for the kind of edgy, uncompromising corporate and media typography that just tells it like it is, instead of having to resort to the common contemporary luring and baiting tactics. Dokument Pro’s range of weights, styles and features (over 775 glyphs per font, built-in small caps, alternates galore, and support for over 45 Latin languages) allows for multi-application versatility and clear, precise emotional delivery. This is the kind of straight-shooter sans that should be in every designer’s toolbelt. For more details on the fonts' features, text and display specimens and print tests, consult the Dokument Pro PDF availabe in the Gallery section of this page. 20% of Dokument Pro’s revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

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.

The source of inspiration for MFC Decatur Monogram is a beautifully styled blackletter from JM. Bergling’s 1914 book on Monograms and Engraving Alphabets. This elegant decorative style was shown only displayed as Capital letters, so we took it further by crafting matching Smallcaps, Numerals, and lined Capitals, Smallcaps, and Numerals. MFC Decatur Monogram can create one, two, or three letter monograms as well as basic headline and titling settings. It is a refined look that is as darling as it is elegant. Decatur Monogram's numeral set and bullet dividers allow for even more detailed and personalized monograms. If you want to create a more customized look, you can add any of a handful of complimentary brackets to surround your monogram setting. Any monograms or typesettings surrounded by brackets, braces, or parenthesis will auto line the middle lettersets. And lastly, due to its traditional smallcaps - Capitals - smallcaps composition, Decatur Monogram can also type unique headings & titles.

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.