Homelessfonts is an initiative by the Arrels foundation to support, raise awareness and bring some dignity to the life of homeless people in Barcelona Spain. Each of the fonts was carefully digitized from the handwriting of different homeless people who agreed to participate in this initiative. Please Note: these fonts include only the latin alphabet; no accented characters, no numbers or punctuation. MyFonts is pleased to donate all revenue from the sales of Homelessfonts to the Arrels foundation in support of their mission to provide the homeless people in Barcelona with a path to independence with accommodations, food, social and health care. Luis Serra was born in Alicante. There he grew up and even started a family His life was there. But at the age of 35 he split up with his wife and decided to go to Barcelona in search of a new life. And it wasn’t easy for him. He had to turn his hand to all kinds of jobs and didn’t manage to find the stability he needed. Luis is a shy, retiring person who takes great pleasure in the little things in life such as walking in the mountains or celebrating the victories of his football team, Barça. After four years living in Barcelona, Luis found himself in a position he’d never imagined. “The street’s much worse now, there’s more trouble, there’s more tension,” says Luís. In the street he had to learn, as he always had, to move fast, to find a place to sleep and something to eat. Luís is one of those people who don’t let circumstances mould him, but adapts to them and always tries to do his best.

Gummies - The fat bubble font is a stylish and playful typeface that features rounded and inflated letterforms, resembling bubbles. The letters are often chunky, with exaggerated curves and soft edges, giving them a plump and rounded appearance. This type of font is popular for its fun and whimsical nature, making it suitable for designs targeting a young audience or those looking to create a lighthearted and energetic atmosphere. The thick and rounded letterforms give a sense of friendliness and approachability, adding a touch of playfulness to any text. The fat bubble font is versatile and can be used in various design applications, such as logos, headlines, posters, invitations, stickers, or website headers. It adds a touch of personality and uniqueness to designs, helping them stand out and grab attention. Overall, Gummies font is an eye-catching and cheerful typeface that captures the joy and energy of bubbles, making it a popular choice for designs that want to exude a sense of fun and playfulness.

Type DR Krokodila was awarded an Honor Diploma for Excellence in Type Design at the International Type Design Competition Modern Cyrillic 2009 (Moscow, 2009).

The font is made in the direction of Tribal aesthetics. He is restrained, but at the same time very cityistic, has an aggressive mood.

Ingriana is an informal, serifed typeface family with nine styles that is highly readable at small point sizes. Nothing else is quite like it.

This is an Arabic font designed according at the standards of Calligraphy. It contains a consistent styling and can be used in many functions.

Retrozoid is the first Open Type font from Pizzadude. It has got loads of different autoligs, just take a look at the preview pic!

Bored by ancient Western typefaces? Try Secca Saloon. If you like the ornaments in the back, have a look at the Accolades from Astype.

Environ is a rounded and modular font. Because it utilizes many straight lines, it works well for small blocks of text at small sizes.

Yiehar! Woohee! This is a funky and chunky wild west PizzaDude font! Buy all three versions at once and save a fistful of dollars!

It is highly recommended to use this font at 72pts or higher. GOONATIC 72 PLUS is intended to be used primarily for headlines. Enjoy!

Rudolf Koch’s personal form of the geometric sanserif started at the Bauhaus in 1926; this typeface was designed for Klingspor in the following year.

Coming Together contains over 400 glyphs and is supplied as a single, cross-platform OpenType font. All glyphs are accessible using OpenType-savvy applications, Unicode-savvy utilities, the Character Map utility on Windows, and FontBook on Mac OS X. Nearly 400 designers contributed to “Coming Together”: Adam Humphries, Aditi Dilip, Adrien Midzic, Afraa Gutub, Al Insan Lashley, Alan Lima Coutinho, Alaric Garnier, Alejandro Cabrera Avila, Alejandro Lo Celso, Alejandro Paul, Alessandro Segalini, Alex Cameron, Alex Coblentz, Alexander Trubin, Alexandre Freitas, Alexey Murashko, Alicia Jabin, Aline Horta, Allison Dominguez, Amanda Postle, Amy Brown, Amy Papaelias, Anderson Maschio, Andrea Emery, Andres Perez, Andrew Boardman, Andrew Jesernig, Andrey Furlan, Andrij Shevchenko, Ann Tripepi, Antonio Gutierrez, Antony Kitson, Anushree Kapoor, Anya Cam, AP303 Estudio Design, Becky Krohe, Beejay, Ben Mitchell, Benjamin K. Shown, Benjamin Varin, Brad McNally, Brad Nelson, Bradley Trinnaman, Brady Baltezore, Brandon Horne, Breck Campbell, Brian J. Bonislawsky, Brian Jaramillo, Brian Jongseong Park, Brian Mueller, Brock French, Bruce Rodgers, Bruno Pugens, Bryan Angelo Lim, Buro Reng, Caitlin Martin-Frost, Calou, Carlos Fabián Camargo Guerrero, Carlos Vidal, Cayo Navarro, Cesar Puertas, Chank Diesel, Charles Williams, Chris Lozos, Chris Trude, Christophe Badani, Christy Lai, Claes Källarsson, Claire Coullon, Claudio Piccinini, Colby Cook, Craig Eliason, Cristina Pegnataro, Curve Doctor, Dan DiSorbo, Dan Liggins, Dan Rubin, Daniel Justi, Daniele Capo, Dav(id Hubner), Dave Bailey, Dave Cohen, David Jonathan Ross, David Sudweeks, David Thometz, Dawn Mercurio, Delve Withrington, Diana van de Blaak, Didier Mazellier, Diederik Corvers, Dino Santos, Dmytro Pobiedash, Donald Beekman, Dries Wiewauters, Duncan Bancroft, Ed Hoskin, Eddy Ymeri, Edineide Oliveira, Eduardo Manso, Eduardo Rodríguez Tunni, Eero Antturi, Eli Castellanos, Elias Bitencourt, Elias Stenalt Werner, Elman Padilla, Emery Miller, Emily Leong, Emily Maher, Enrico Limcaco, Eric Frisino, Eric Stine, Erik Brandt, Espen, Evan Moss, Evangeline Rupert, Fabiane Lima, Fabio Foncati, Fabrizio Schiavi, Farbod Kokabi, Felipe Lekich, Francisco Martin, Frank Riccio, Frans van Bellen, Gary Holmes, Gautam Rao, Gayle Hendricks, Gene Buban, Georg Herold-Wildfellner, George Aytoun, Gerd Wiescher, Giles Edwards, Gist Studio, Glen Barry, Glenn Parsons, Goro Mihok, Grace Engels, Grant Alexander, Grant Hutchinson, Greg Smith, Gunnar Swanson, Gustavo Machado, Hans Nieuwstraten, Harold Lohner, Hilary Salmon, Hillary Fayle, Hrant H Papazian, Hugo Gallipoli, Ian Drolet, Ian Lynam, Ilona Kincses, Isac Corrêa Rodrigues, Ivette Chacon, Ivo Federspiel, Jacques Le Bailly, Jae-hyoung Choi, Jaime Vasquez, James Edmondson, James Grieshaber, James L. Stirling, James Lukens-Gable, James Martin, James Ockelford, James Puckett, Jarbas Gomes, Jarett Knuth, Jason Adam, Jason Robinson, Javier Suzuki, Jay Chu, Jayson Zaleski, Jean Francois Porchez, Jeff Fisher, Jeff Jarvis, Jeffrey Vanlerberghe, Jelmar Geertsma, Jennifer Clarke, Jennifer Rutherford, Jens Kutilek, Jerry Allen Rose, Jess Latham, Jesse Ragan, Jessica Page, Jesvin Yeo Puay Hwa, Jim Ford, Jim Lyles, Jim Rimmer, Jin Ping, Jo De Baerdemaeker, Joachim Muller-Lance, Joanna Abbott Moss, Joe Francis, Joe VanDerBos, Joel Vilas Boas (J85), John Downer, John Flanagan, John Foley, John Langdon, John Lopez, John Lyttle, John Skelton, Johnny Dib, Jonathan Hughes, Jonathan Pierini, Jos Buivenga, Jose Luis Coyotl Mixcoatl, Juan Acosta, Judd Crush, Judith Lee, Julie Johnson, Julie Oakley, Julie Thomas, Juliet Shen, Jumin Lee, Jurgen Weltin, Justin Callahan, Justin Chodzko, Karel Piska, Karen MacKay, Karin Eberhardt, Karin van Soest, Karla Perez, Katie Parry, Katie Snape, Katri Haycock, Katy Brooks, Kelley Garrard, Kelly Redling, Kent Lew, Kevin D’Souza, Kevin J. Boynton, Kevin McDermott, Kim Arispe, Kokin, Kristen Caston, Kristen Hartman, Kristian Möller, Kristians Šics, Kyle Jones, L Bollinger, Lan Huang, Larry Van Dyke, Laura Ricker, Laura Worthington, Laurel Wilson, LeAndrea James, Lijklema Design, Linda McNeil, Lise Barreto, Louie Crumbley, Louis Duchesne, Luke Dorny, Luke Stouffer, Madison Cramer, Måns Björkman, Marc Salinas Claret, Marcus Leis Allion, Marcus Parker, Marcus Sterz, Marie-Anne Verougstraete, Mark Simonson, Martin Majoor, Matheus Barbosa, Mathias Forslund, Matt Desmond, Matt McInerney, Matt Millette, Matthew Jerauld, Max Kisman, Michael Browers, Michael Bundscherer, Michael Cina, Michael Doret, Michael G. Adkins, Michael Hernan, Michael Paul Young, Michael Wallner, Miguel Catopodis, Mikael Engblom, Mike Jarboe, Mike Petschek, Miriam Martincic, Moira Sheehan, Monica Pedrique, Nacho Gallego, Naomi Atkinson, Natanael Gama, Nathanael Ng, Neil Fox, Neil Patel, Neil Summerour, Neil Woodyatt, Ngoc Ngo, Nguyen Pham, Nicholas Curtis, Nicole Hudson, Nicole Sowinski, Nicolien van der Keur, Nina Stössinger, Noah Scalin, Ojasvi Mohanty, Oleg Macujev, Olivia Choi, Ong Fang Zheng, Pata Macedo, Patrick Gallagher, Patrycja Zywert, Paul Hunt, Paul Langman, Pedro Moura, Pedro Paz, Per Ohlsson, PJ Onori, Premm Design Ltd, Rae Kaiser, Rafael Carozzi, Rafael Cordeiro, Rafael Neder, Randy Jones, Ray Larabie, Raymond Forbes, Ressa McCray, Ricardo Esteves, Ricardo Martins, Riccardo Sartori, Richard Kegler, Richard Miller, Rob Keller, Roballo, Rose Coplon, Roy Rub, Rudo van der Velden, Russell McGorman, Ryan Rushing, Ryan Thorpe, Sander Neijnens, Sara Cross, Scott Boms, Scott Fisk, Sergio Jimenez, Shi-Min Chin, Sílvio Gabriel Spannenberg, Soohyen Park, Sorin Bechira, Stanley Friesesk, Stefan Hattenbach, Stefan Kjartansson, Stephen Lay, Steve Harrison, Steve Marsh, Steve Matteson, Steve Mehallo, Steve Zelle, Steven Bonner, Steven Wulf, Stuart Brown, Stuart Ford, Stuart Sandler, Sue Zafarana, Sulekha Rajkumar, Susan Surface, Tanya T Stroh, Taylor Loman, Ted Ullrich, Teja Ideja, Tena Letica, Terrance Weinzierl, Theo França, Thiago Martins, Tiffany Wardle, Tim Whalen, Titus Nemeth, Tom Plate, Tom Rickner, Tomato Košir, Tomi Haaparanta, Travis Kochel, Troy Leinster, Tyler Heron, Type Mafia, Vanessa Robertson, Veronika Burian, Victor Esteves, Victor Zuniga, Viktor Nübel, Viviana G, Wellinton Reis, Wilson Thomas, Wolfgang Homola, Xavier Dupre, Xerxes Irani, Zvika Rosenberg These designers represented the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, El Salvador, England, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Siberia, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Ukraine, United States, Venezuela, Vietnam

Teksi Teksi I saw you everywhere, I just had to have you. Teksi is a marker felt style font, I’ve seen various hand drawn styles of this typeface or something similar on taxis and vans all over the island of Penang.This hand drawn style is slowly being replaced with boring Arials and other Serif printed fonts, so I wanted to capture the charm of the original. A heavily weighted font which could work for comic styles and headlines. I hope you like it.

Justin Brown is a Sans serif display font with a modern, classy, fun, unique and versatile style. It looks amazing on any screen size and is easy to read in any text size. This font also has tons of unique alternatives and binders that will make for stunning design projects. This will add a fun and friendly touch to any of your projects. This font is PUA encoded which means you can access all the glyphs and sweeps easily and more.

Fonton is a contemporary and modern bigger display font, inspired on bigger ton barrel shape, designed as posters font, with very soft curves drawing each stroke, The project regards 2 weight sizes, regular & small. Is useful in poster but also in covers and headings, letterhead, magazines, POP & Graphic culture, hip-hop topics, urban representations, and big sizes prints, Volumetric 3D shapes, etc. Now decorative ligatures, alternates and figures as the same graphic style as Fonton all powered by OTF technology.

Dexa Pro is now available on variable version. The family was designed by Ceyhun Birinci in 2020 with an inspiration to create a contemporary super family with inspiration from classic sans serif families. It's a workhorse family consisting of condensed, narrow, normal and expanded widths. Each width has a wide weight range from thin to black, along with their true italic counterparts. With more than 770 glyphs per font, It offers a ton of language support from all the Latin languages to Cyrillic.

Kettering 205 is a geometric slab-serif with Art Deco influences, such as lowered crossbars on many characters, and a crossed W. It includes old style non-aligning (lower case) numbers, both proportional and tabular as well as accented characters for Central European languages. It’s a highly individual looking font, but retains good legibility coupled with striking looks as a display font. The Kettering 205 family comprises of six weights and is closely related to Kettering 105, its less Deco flavoured cousin.

-OC Revolt is a variable display font made for the protest graphics of the NYC based T*#@p Brexit era Non-Complicit project who initially made guerrilla type with masking tape applied directly in situ or to silk screens. An uppercase only font there are alternate versions of each character on the lowercase keyboard. Double letter ligatures are used to prevent direct mechanical repetition of letters in the static styles and the Shift axis can be used to make each letter variably unique.

Mariken van Nieumeghen is a late medieval Dutch text from the early 16th century. The protagonist of the play (a young maid called Mariken) spends seven years with the devil (called Moenen), after which she is miraculously released. Mariken is a handmade font, which was based on the works of Robert Granjon (1545-1588), a French type designer and printer. Use it for product packaging, books and posters. Comes in 3 weights (with italics) and a hellish amount of diacritics.

The original, highly acclaimed, Drone Ranger Display Font has been completely re-drawn, re-vamped, and upgraded with a ton of extra features. Drone Ranger PRO is a bold, chiseled display family inspired by dystopian, retro propaganda. The font is very industrial in its aesthetic, and is built on strict, rigid geometry. Features include a full uppercase alphabet with alternate glyphs, varying stroke weights for better legibility, improved glyphs & numerals, fractions, and a full set of Adobe Latin 4 diacritics + basic cyrillic.

Hasan Hiba is an Arabic display typeface. It is useful for titles and graphic projects The font is based on the simple lines of Fatemic Kufi calligraphy. Hasan Hiba won the 5th place in Linotype’s first Arabic Type Design Competition. It supported Arabic, Persian and Urdu. In November, 2008, Hasan Hiba was upgraded by working with Mirjam Somers an award-winning Arabic type designer to the DecoType font format for use in WinSoft Tasmeem which is now bundled with InDesign CS4.

A new font inspired by classic retro and mid-century modern interlocking hand-written typography. Do you need to create some fun snack packaging to stand out on the shelf? PM Alcorn will quell your appetite. Are you designing a product that needs a funky, friendly retro vibe? PM Alcorn is fun, funky, friendly, and easy to read! It's perfect for everything from games to bath products. Plus with tons of ligatures and stylistic alternates it has real hand-lettered feel.

If you are into the vintage feel, you will love this one. This is as vintage as it probably gets. There are probably only a handful of places in the world where schools still use blackboards and chalk – they’ve given way to their white board and marker counterparts for decades now. White boards are definitely more practical and less messy when compared to chalk, but then if you are creatively inclined you will agree that a little bit of mess is worth it if you are going to get the effects that you desired! Well, we can give you the effects minus the mess with our chalk hand lettering fonts! As the name suggests, this font gives you that distinctly unique chalk on slate feel, and if you are wondering what’s distinct about it; writing on slate or blackboard was a slow process which required deliberated and concentrated efforts resulting in a handwriting which was usually quite different to a person’s handwriting on paper. Typography of chalk on slate was an everyday event in the classrooms of yesterday, and today we hardly ever get to see one of these if it all. Writing on a black board with chalk was quite an interesting achievement in its own right, if you ended up with anything legible and if your writing remained focused and ‘in-line’! But of course like everything else, his took time to master and when you did get it right, chalk hand lettering was quite an enjoyable experience! For semi-permanent designs, say for example an eventful day at school; students of the day would create beautiful typography on the boards, and add a solidarity to it sometimes by shading one side of the lettering – usual y the right side towards which the lettering leaned. This is the effect our chalk hands lettering shaded variation gives you. You could get this font individually, but we strongly advise you check out the “chalk hand lettering pack” font. It includes the simple “chalk hand lettering” (minus the shading effect) and also a “chalk hand elements” bag of tricks. The elements is a collection of graphic art which resemble shapes and designs that used to be added to chalk art, to beautify the typography. If you enjoyed seeing the effects of our Chalk Hands font, and the shaded variant – you are simply going to go gaga over Chalk Hand Elements! The chalk hand font of course enables you to make typographic art similar to the effect of chalks on slates and black boards. This was quite the art form in the days gone by! The shaded variation added a bit of solidarity and the technique was commonly used to make semi-permanent designs say for example a welcome note when somebody important was to visit. Classic chalk hand designs, especially the semi permanent ones often had little pieces of art to help beautify the creation as a whole. It could simply be symmetrical graphics appearing before and after the title and headings, maybe just an interesting shape to fill in an empty area on the board, and such…our Chalk Hand Elements offers you a ton of such graphics. The two chalk hand variations and the elements are all included in the Chalk Hand Family, and this is strongly recommended if you want to make designs that are truly reminiscent of the days of chalk on slate.

LiebeRuth is your 100 percent hand-made organic type. She absolutely loves to be typeset in large *and* small sizes, because Legibility is her middle name. (Yes, we know it’s not a typical girl’s name.) She is friendly and polite, but she also has a few quirks. Her friends are impressed with how natural she manages to look every day. Her four weights ensure that Ruth has the right boldness for any context: birthday invitation, personal correspondence, photo album, or billboard ad. During the creation of this font, her designer ate plenty of healthy, organic foods. We think this is the reason why Ruth looks so fresh and lively. And of course Ruth has been designed with lots of Liebe (which is German for “love”—and she speaks many other languages, too). One more thing Ruth is marvelous at: showing off her curly-swirly swashed alternative letterforms that can be activated via OpenType. (Please make sure your software supports OpenType if you wish to use the advanced features.) Each style contains more than 560 gluten-free glyphs—now that is great value! If you like this font, you may want to look at LiebeRuth’s bolder sister LiebeDoni and our best-sellers LiebeErika and LiebeKlara. Or add in some LiebeOrnaments to prepare a curly-licious feast. By the way: LiebeRuth also gets along great with our wide range of illustrative fonts, including LiebeCook, LiebeFish, and LiebeTweet.

The TYMA Garamont Roman was inspired by the Berner-Egenolff type sample from the 1560s. The Italic was inspired by a sample from Robert Granjon, also from the 1560s. The name TYMA is short for AB Typmatriser, a Swedish company founded 1948, because the Second World War stopped all import of matrices for Linotype and Intertype typesetting machines. It took until 1951-52 before the import was up to speed again. Until then, Sweden had to fend for itself. TYMA produced all technical equipment needed for type production, including the pantograph to cut the matrices, a complete set for each size and version. The templates for Garamont Roman were initiated by Henry Alm 1948. Bo Berndal was hired the following year, and continued the work by drawing and cutting templates for the rest of Garamont Roman, as well as for the remaining Garamont family. Bo Berndal stayed at TYMA until it went bankrupt in 1952. At that time Bo Berndal had already kick-started his career as type designer by drawing the typeface Reporter for one of the big daily newspapers, Aftonbladet, a version of Cheltenham for another daily, Dagens Nyheter, and copied several old typefaces for other customers. Librarian Sten G. Lindberg at The Royal Library of Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, procured copies of original type samples. Henry Alm started the work in 1948, and Bo Berndal completed it - finally in this OpenType version.

Night Train is a new font built from the ground up; while Night Train may resemble an old classic wood type there are a few lines that make this font a little more modern setting it apart from other wood type revivals. If you're a railroad enthusiast you're sure to enjoy the steam locomotive graphic located on the less than and greater than keys on all versions of this font, due to the fine detail of this train illustration the best printing results will be at 600dpi or higher on a laser printer. An alternate K and R are within the Night Train fonts, for Win Type1 these alternates are on the left and right bracket keys, for Truetype and OpenType you may access the alternates by using the Character Map in Windows or Adobe Illustrator, for OpenType you may also find them on the stylistic alternates page of the glyph map in Illustrator. There's something new with Night Train that the sign making people will love, for the first time FontMesa is pleased to offer a block shadowed version in four directions. One fill font is all that is needed for all four open faced fonts, you'll need an application that works in layers in order to use the fill font with the open faced fonts, simply place the fill font in its own layer then move it behind one of the open faced fonts of Night Train. The Night Train name has been on my list to use as a font name for a few years, a friend from years ago used to sail his boat in the Mackinac race from Chicago to Mackinac Island, the name of that boat was the Night Train. Watching the 2010 Olympic four man U.S. bobsled team win gold with their sled also called Night Train has inspired me to complete this font.

Lend a little Jazz Age elegance to your next project with this tasty typeface, a faithful rendering of Eduard Ege's eponymous Ege Schrift, released by the Genzsch and Heyse foundry of Hamburg in 1921. For best results at large sizes, choose the TrueType version, rendered at a full 2,048 UPM. Both versions include the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets, as well as localization for Moldovan and Romanian.

The cool, the sans and the light: Mudstone fonts are proudly packed with nice oddities and quirks. These are definitely fonts for getting noticed, in an affirmative, authentic way. Mudstone fonts are all caps, each with at least 2 sets of uppercase letters that will cycle at the command of the contextual alternates feature. There are also stylistic alternates in each font, for that extra something. Critically cool, seriously creative, dangerously unique. Definitely trying? Cool!!

Mosse is an extraordinary sans-serif typeface that designed for improve readability, formal but casual, with straight cut at terminal and reverse angled at spur and finial give a little bit sweet. Mosse is simple and identical, come with nine weights allowed you to use the right weight to the right proportions. Mosse also support many languages, thanks to extended latin glyphs. Mosse come with standard Adobe Latin 4 glyphs, world-ready and mark2mark support.

I wanted to combine a classical antiqua with corners and edges. I was convinced this combination would create a new, a fresh design of types. At the beginning I used the forms from "Goudy Old Style", later I modified the sizes, the widths of the letters, the x-height and their forms in general. At the moment the Easton Family consists of 3 styles called Easton Serif, Easton Semiserif and Easton Sans.

Conifer is a blocky geometric sans serif font that adheres to strict grid rules in order to define its corner angles. Its seemingly rigid form is tempered by the soft, rounded corners, and fine notched details present at acute angles in the glyphs. Available in a clean solid and a varied, textured rough. The result is a rugged, retro, typeface that is at home in fashion lookbooks and wood-carved park signage alike.

After doing this for so many years, one would think my fascination with the old history of writing would have mellowed out by now. The truth is that alongside being a calligraphy history buff, I'm a pop technology freak. Maybe even keener on the tech thing, since I just can't seem to get enough new gadgets. And after working with type technologies for so many years, I'm starting to think that writing and design technologies as we now know them, being about 2.5 post-computer generations, keep becoming more and more detached from what the very old humanity arts/tasks they essentially want to facilitate. In a world where command-z is a frequently used key combination, it’s difficult to justify expecting a Morris-made book or a Zaner-drawn sentence, but accidental artistic “mutations” become welcome, marketable features. When fluid pens were introduced, their liquid saturation influenced type design to a great extent almost overnight an influence professional designers tend to play down. Now round stroke endings are a common sight, and the saturation is so clean and measured, unlike any liquid-paper relationship possible in reality. Some designers even illustrate their work by overlaying perfect circles at stroke ends, in order to illustrate how “geometric” their work was. Because if it’s measured with precise geometry, it’s got to be meaningful design. And once in a while, by a total freak accident, the now-cherished mutations prove to have existed long before the technology that caused them. Rolling Pen was cued by just such a thing: A rounded, circular, roll-flowing calligraphy from the late nineteenth century seemingly one of those experimental takes on what inspired Business Penmanship, another font of mine. Looking at it now it certainly seems to be friendlier, more legible, and maybe even more practical and easier to execute than the standard business penmanship of those days, but I guess friendliness and simplicity were at odds with the stiff manner business liked to present itself back then, so that kind of thing remained buried in the professional penman’s oddities drawer. It would be quite a few years before all this curviness and rounding were thought of as symbolic of graceful movement, which brought such a flow closer to the idea of fine art. Even though in this case the accidental mutation just happens to not be a mutation after all, the whole technology-transforms-application argument still applies here. I'm almost sure “business” will be the last thing on people’s minds when they use this font today. One extreme example of that level of disconnect between origin and current application is shown here, with the so-called business penmanship strutting around in gloss and neon. Rolling Pen is another cup of mine that runneth over with alternates, swashes, ligatures, and other techy perks. To explore its full potential, please use it in a program that supports OpenType features for advanced typography. Enjoy the new Rolling Pen designed by Ale Paul with Neon’s visual poetry by Tomás García.

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul