This steam era typeface, created by Gustav Schroeder in 1884, found popular use on soap box labels and tobacco tins during its initial release. Then, later, a successful and stout revival of Gustav's face, named Othello, was carried out by Morris Fuller Benton in 1934, and the typeface's appeal widened to include items such as broadside posters featuring Boris Karloff's Frankenstein. After metal gave way to film type, Gustav's creation experienced a brief fashion moment in the 1960's, but then disappeared entirely, never re-surfacing as a full digital typeface. With the release of Bathysphere, the typeface comes full circle, having been completely redrawn from scratch using Gustav's original specimens. The new extended language support establishes the typeface firmly in the modern era, while Bathysphere's refinement of subtle blunt corners restores a deep-sea grace to this iron giant.

A companion piece to Mulgrave, this font is the intermediary design between the chunky Victorian style that Mulgrave reproduces and the Ministry of Transport sans introduced in 1933 and digitised as Ministry. Although they date from between 1910 and 1933, these signs show the beginnings of several features Ministry later incorporated, notably the thinner strokes and the more modern forms of the G, M, R and S. The letter widths are approaching a monospace - the L, F and E are relatively wide compared to the W and M, a feature that may have something to do to the casting process. These idiosyncracies were all ironed out when the first version of the MOT alphabet was produced. The Device digitization, as with Mulgrave, stays true to the worn and repainted original metal source material and preserves the unusual widths.

Y'know the real trouble with Spider-man, Superman and the rest of the soulful superheroes, gloating supervillains and musing muckmonsters is They Just Don't Shut Up! For Crying Out Loud, give those iron jaws a REST willya?!? Yak Yak Yak! Blah Blah Blah! Yada Yada Yada... "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility!" "You won't get away with this, Luthor!" "I'm the best there is at what I do!" SHUT UP!!! Letterers don't get paid by the WORD you know! QUIT YER WHINING! Yeah, yeah, yeah this font IS the much requested typeset -- featuring upper AND lower case characters -- created by Starkings & Roshell for the X-Men back in the Age of Apocalypse. Hell's Squakkin' Teeth -- The X-MEN... don't even get me started on THOSE guys! What THEY need is the mutant ability to put a freakin' sock in it!

The Buum typeface evolved from the explosive lettering originally designed as part of a house style for an interactive science centre for kids. Beside its usual application as a strong display font in print and on screen, the bold angular shapes of glyphs are adapted for negative machine- or laser-cutting into structural materials such as iron sheets, plywood, or stone ... and for creating tactile expressive surfaces and 3D objects. This pictogrammic and dazzling font remotely echoes the morphology of the lettering of futurism and constructivism, when avant-garde typography was once an exciting adventure. It is a lettering building kit with a number of stylistic alternatives of glyphs that enable a user to shape the same word differently each time. Buum is recommended by nine out of ten old school futurists, favored by steampunk CNC operators and respected by the majority of infantile anarchists.

Optimisti is Finnish for optimist – and it’s an optimistic, light-hearted feeling that this trio of handwriting fonts transfuses into all kinds messages and identities. Casual, playful and character-strong as they are, the three of them make a perfect team for headlines, slogans, teaser texts and brand naming. Besides the two original fonts – “Optimisti Smooth” and “Optimisti Sparkling” differing in outline structure and texture – “Optimisti Decor” now joined the game. Optimisti Decor is loaded with a multitude of artful elements that can convey a very festive atmosphere – or, on the contrary, ironically make fun of it. Its features are is especially striking when used in all-caps setting. Use the Optimists separately or together to make a humorous – or serious but always cordial impression in print, on the web, on packaging or even on your shopping bag … All Optimisti fonts have a Western European, a Central European and an Extended Cyrillic character set. They support approximately 100 languages.

Lydia (Lydian: ‎𐤮𐤱𐤠𐤭𐤣𐤠, Śfarda; Aramaic: Lydia; Greek: Λυδία, Lȳdíā; Turkish: Lidya) was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern western Turkish provinces of Uşak, Manisa and inland Izmir. The ethnic group inhabiting this kingdom are known as the Lydians, and their language, known as Lydian, was a member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The capital of Lydia was Sardis. The Kingdom of Lydia existed from about 1200 BC to 546 BC. At its greatest extent, during the 7th century BC, it covered all of western Anatolia. In 546 BC, it became a province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, known as the satrapy of Lydia or Sparda in Old Persian. In 133 BC, it became part of the Roman province of Asia. Lydian coins, made of silver, are among the oldest coins in existence, dated to around the 7th century BC.

VLNL Berlagebrug Designer Donald DBXL Beekman daily crosses the Berlage bridge spanning the Amstel river in Amsterdam. The Berlagebrug was built as part of the city planning project ‘Plan Zuid’ by H.P.Berlage and opened in May 1932. Its name, carved out of two granite headstones, sparked the design of this font family. The original lettering is attributed to Anton Kurvers in the early 19th century, and can be seen on many Amsterdam buildings and bridges. It’s typical lettering of the Amsterdamse School, the Dutch equivalent of the expressionist art deco architectural style, and mostly known for its extravagant brick work. VLNL Berlagebrug is a rounded display font that comes in three outline styles matching the building materials used in the bridge. Gietijzer (cast iron) is smooth, Zandsteen (sandstone) has a softly distressed outline, and Graniet (granite) is outspoken rough and crumbled. The capital letters in VLNL Berlagebrug are in the Amsterdamse school style, the lowercases are more straight alternate capitals, giving you more design options.

Dante was designed by Giovanni Mardersteig. Mardersteig started work on Dante after the Second World War when printing at the Officina Bodoni returned to full production. He drew on his experience of using Monotype Bembo and Centaur to design a new book face with an italic which worked harmoniously with the roman. Originally hand-cut by Charles Malin, Dante was adapted for mechanical composition by Monotype in 1957. The new digital font version has been re drawn, by Monotype's Ron Carpenter, free from any restrictions imposed by hot metal technology. The Dante font family was issued in 1993 in a range of three weights with a set of titling capitals. Dante is a beautiful book face which can also be used to good effect in magazines, periodicals etc. Dante® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Emoli is a strong font family with a laid-back style. Inspired by the strong bending of iron, a unique character can be felt through controlled letterforms and blunt finishes. Each font in this family is standalone, and strong and cute. Emoli consists of ten fonts Emoli-Thin & Emoli-Thin Italic, with the thinnest complexion looks luxurious in high appearance. Emoli-Light and Emoli-Light Italic looks elegant combined with the weight of the Emoli Font family. Regular and italic emojis, the basis of emollient fonts, balance shapes, and letter uniqueness are found in this weight. Emoli Bold and Emoly Bold Italic will gently emphasize a strong character. Emoli Extra Bold and Emoli Extra Bold Italic, the thickest weights that will facilitate legibility and strong attitude. FEATURES 10 weights / Italics / Lines / Numbers & Signs Font family Emoli works well on applications, brands, logos, magazines, films. Different weights give you the full range to explore a variety of applications, while illustrated fonts give a modern, relaxed and powerful feel to any project.

MANUFAKTUR is a gas-pipe sans. A typeface influenced by an cast iron sign on an old Swedish industrial machine. The simple curves of the characters suited well for an 21st century update and the new and modern MANUFAKTUR is now a variable typeface with thousands of combinations of width and weight. MANUFAKTUR comes with stylistic alternates (smaller glyphs with underline) and small caps. The small caps also works as lowercase glyphs by default. With an OpenType-enabled app - or your website - you can control the width and weight of the typeface via a slider or with code. VARIABLE FONT SUPPORT: Currently Adobe only supports variable fonts in Photoshop and Illustrator. InDesign are still waiting on variable font support. This hardworking sans serif is perfect for display use, signage, poster, prints, editorial use, branding, logos, magazines, films and lots more. The variable weight and width makes MANUFAKTUR very versatile and flexible. If variable fonts isn't your bag MANUFAKTUR also comes predetermined weights and widths as a traditional font.

The starting point for VLNL Kouseband was spotted by Donald DBXL Beekman on the Christian Reformed Church in the Dutch town of Naarden. The iron wire lettering contained a number of unusual characters and details, which eventually led to this five weight family. The Kouseband fonts mix elements of geometric sans serifs and upright unconnected scripts, with a hint of Dutch school writing. VLNL Kouseband is monolinear and has an very large cap height compared to the (lowercase) x-height, giving the capital letters an elongated condensed appearance. Kouseband is the Dutch word for ‘garter (belt)’ and also gave the name to a long tropical bean known as Yardlong bean. Kouseband beans are a common ingredient in Roti and other Surinamese dishes. As the Dutch Christian church is sometimes referred to as ‘Zwarte kousenkerk’ (Black stocking church), and stockings are held up by garter belts, we have come full circle and VLNL Kouseband has a name. VLNL Kouseband contains a set of oldstyle numbers matching the lowercase letters, and a couple of wider alternate capitals (HMNOQ) to enhance the liveliness of your designs.

Are you looking for a typeface that exudes style and class? Look no further than Rakesly, the zesty compact grotesque headliner that’s sure to add some piquant charm to your message. Rakesly boasts well-balanced, charismatic letterforms that draw inspiration from a variety of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sans-serif metal typefaces. Its upright styles feature tasty, cherry-picked features, while its italics draw upon the unique industrial essence of the Art Deco era. This stunning typeface is available in six weights and italics, including the wispy and delicate Rakesly Ultra-Light. Plus, Rakesly includes OpenType fractions and numeric ordinals, mathematical symbols, and a wide variety of currency symbols. For those who love a bit of texture in their designs, Rakesly also offers four grainy, letterpress texture styles called Rakesly Iron, which are available in Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. And if you want to add a little extra spice to your typography, Rakesly even includes OpenType contextual alternates that automatically shuffle three letter/numeral variations for a more convincing effect. And if you’re a typography pro who likes to get hands-on, the Iron styles contain private use (PUA) encoding that lets you manually access alternate characters via a glyph table or character table. So why settle for a boring historical revival when you can add Rakesly’s peppery blend of classical elements to your typographic spice rack? Try Rakesly today and experience the rare flavor that only this typeface can provide. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Hey there, so you want to look like a walking throwback to the 1980s? Well, lucky for you, Teeshirt is here to help you achieve that coveted slovenly appearance. If you’re looking for a typeface that screams, “I don’t care” then Teeshirt is your new best friend. It’s designed to mimic vintage t-shirt lettering, so you can rock that “I just rolled out of bed and put on the first thing I found on my floor” look. And if you’re worried about being too uniform with your letters, fear not! Teeshirt has got you covered with letter pair ligatures. Because who wants to look like they put any effort into their appearance, right? And if you’re feeling adventurous and want to shake things up a bit, you can always disable the “standard ligatures” feature in your application. Teeshirt comes in two styles: Regular and Pressed. The bouncy Regular style will make it look like your letters are ready to jump right off your shirt, while the orderly Pressed style will give you that crisp, just-ironed look (although let’s be real, who has time for ironing?). So what are you waiting for? Embrace your inner sloth and give Teeshirt a try. Because who needs effort and a polished appearance when you can look like a hot mess instead? Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Coil feels comfortable like a well-worn pair of shoes. It could easily pass for an assertive industrial European sans serif of the early 1960s with its slight reverse contrast, monotonous proportions, and squared-off curves, if not for its less predictable side. What appears initially as ellipses upon closer inspection turns out to be irregular shapes, closer to an inverted egg than an oval. The s looks topsy-turvy with its higher curve that is larger than the lower. Some terminal strokes overhang the bowl (as in the a), others open flat (as in the Q, the f, the j, and the t). The resulting effect shakes up this seemingly “retro” face just to make it new. Our midcentury recollections are slightly distorted and reinterpreted by this ironic typeface making it fresh while deceptively cozy and familiar. Coil’s high x-height and even texture make it readable even in small sizes despite its tight apertures. Available in four weights with their italics, with two sets of figures, fractions, and alternates for Extended Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Designed by Vyacheslav Kirilenko and Gayaneh Bagdasaryan, 2020-21.

Kornelis de Vries, a headmaster from the Dutch province of Friesland, cultivated new potato breeds that he named after pupils in his school. In the early 1900s he came up with the tasty Bintje (a Frisian girl’s name) and it became a big success – in Belgium and France it has remained the most popular potato for french fries to this day, more than a century since its introduction. Donald Roos took 10 kilos of fresh Bintje potatoes and cut the Bint typeface by hand with a short, sharp knife. He then inked each character once and printed it twice; the second, lighter printing is accommodated in the lower case alphabet. The Bint family offers a script to make the letters bounce up and down the baseline; with OpenType functionality the font randomly chooses each character from the upper- or lowercase alphabet. ‘Tabular lining figures’ will activate a series of negative numerals in boxes; ‘Discretionary ligatures’ activates specially designed letter combinations like ‘www’ as well as arrows and stars. Bint has a distinct, slightly rough handmade appearance, making it useful for a wide range of designs.

Fer is a sans-serif font for body text, not lacking in its own distinctive voice. The aftertaste of reading the text set in Fer is like reading the letters on old rusty plates somewhere in Southern Europe, hence the name (Fer means iron in French). Being a modern system that includes a variable font with weight and optical size axes, Fer combines the features of geometriс sans serifs and old sans serifs with closed apertures. The typeface contains three sets of styles: for captions, text and headings, — with the weight ranging from regular to black. Fer was created with the idea to unite nations. The Latin character set supports all European languages, most African languages and Vietnamese. Cyrillic has support for all living Cyrillic languages and some obsolete characters too. The font also supports the Greek language. Additionally, the character set includes currency signs of all supported languages’ countries, old style, lining, tabular and proportional figures as well as numbers in squares and circles. Lastly, the font has lots of localized letterforms and stylistic sets. Fer was designed by Dmitry Goloub for Paratype in 2020–2023.

I designed Conium to be a sister font to Nightshade. It was meant to have the appearance of the hemlock plant without being too derivative; it’s thin drooping stems conjure images of Hamlet’s mad Ophilia clutching sickly weeds while thinking them to be flowers. It also projects the appearance of an ice cold, wrought iron, cemetery gate. The sort that one might pass on a damp overcast day. A fitting compliment to an Edward Gorey illustration from top, right down to the frigid ground from which it sprang. Conium has a glyph count of 388 and supports the following languages Afrikaans, Albanian, Asu, Basque, Bemba, Bena, Bosnian, Catalan, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, German, Gusii, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kabuverdianu, Kalaallisut, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Lower Sorbian, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Scottish Gaelic, Sena, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Turkmen, Upper Sorbian, Vunjo, Walser, Zulu

Abril is an extension of the Abril typographic system that was engineered as a response to a very specific requirement from the editorial design community: a low contrast typeface for head- lines. Given its broad range of styles though, Abril deserves to be considered a separate font family on its own. Based on the original text styles of Abril, the letter shapes are sturdy, very legible, and deliver a newsy and trustworthy feel. The accented editorial style of the Scotch Roman finds continuity in this new type family, but some of the details have been ironed out for improved performance in headline, both in print and on screen. The family is conceived as four series of different widths, with four weights in each series plus matching italics, a total of 32 fonts. This wide range of styles allows for setting titles at almost any size. The wider series are aimed for smaller point sizes while the con- densed weights can deliver a striking and cohesive appearance as front cover headlines. Abril was designed as a versatile tool for those graphic and web designers looking for a workhorse with high impact. It is also an excellent companion for the rest of the Abril type family: Abril Titling and Abril Narrow.

Malden Sans is a mischievous grotesque sans serif with charming details that gives designers a solid typographic voice. It was created by Michele Patanè with regular and condensed widths, as a utilitarian typeface family for print and digital environments. It was originally designed as part of a type system for cinema magazines, and embodies the devil-may care attitude of the silver screen. Designer Michele Patanè looked back to an earlier era of typography to create the typeface, embracing unusual details, rather than ironing them out. “There is a very naive way of using typography in the 30s and 40s, something not as clean as how it’s used in the late 50s and 60s when everything passed through a rationalisation of the typographic palette,” he explains. “In film magazines you can still see a bit of roughness, and I like that.” This is a design that’s desperate to be used in editorial environments, and has been created to stand up to lower quality paper. It would be equally at home on posters, packaging, and even in digital environments where designers are looking for something more expressive than another geometric sans serif. Malden Sans includes a Normal and Condensed range, with 7 weights in the normal and 6 in the Condensed, both including italics.

Swiss 721™ is a sans serif family that ranges in style from thin to black while mixing in a few unexpected, but beautifully made and ironically flattering, outline weights that spice up the grotesque design. Couple these upstanding letterforms with matching italic styles and you have yourself a beautiful tool that is as legible on screen as it is off, has the technical prowess to conquer even the trickiest of design riddles and will work in a myriad of projects. Swiss 721 is a staple sans serif that you’ll never be sorry you have in your library. It’s been said that a simple sans serif is one of the most difficult typefaces to design. This is because when letters are reduced to their most basic details, irregularities and inconsistencies in design become immediately visible. The Swiss 721 typeface family is a quintessential example of letterforms distilled to their essence while still possessing warmth and verve. Based on mid-century sans serif typefaces, Swiss 721 is a versatile family of weights and proportions ideally suited to a wide variety of print and interactive design projects and is equally at home as headlines on billboards as it is navigation content on small screens. Swiss 721 takes the essence of mid 20th century sans serif typefaces and melds it with modern design consistency and a systematic weight range.

Designed by Francesco Canovaro with help from Andrea Tartarelli and Maria Chiara Fantini, Kitsch is a typeface happily living at the crossroads between classical latin and medieval gothic letterforms. But, rather than referencing historical models like the italian Rotunda or the french Bastarda scripts, Kitsch tries to renew both its inspirations, finding a contemporary vibe in the dynamic texture of the calligraphic broad-nib pen applied to the proportions of the classical roman skeleton. The resulting high contrast and spiky details make Kitsch excel in display uses, while a fine-tuned text version manages to keep at small sizes the dynamic expressivity of the design without sacrificing legibility. Both variants are designed in a wide range of weights (from the almost monolinear thin to the dense black), and are fully equipped with a extended character sets covering over two hundred languages that use latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets. Special care has been put in designing Kitsch italic letterforms, with the broad-nib movements referencing classical italian letterforms to add even more shades to your typographic palette. The resulting alternate letter shapes have also been included in the roman weights as Stylistic Alternates - part to the wide range of Open Type features (Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Positional Numerals, Small Caps and Case Sensitive Forms) provided with all the 32 weights of Kitsch. Born for editorial and branding use, Kitsch is fashionable but solid, self-confident enough to look classic while ironic enough to be contemporary.

The history of Able’s connection with the Harry Potter phenomenon is really up in the air. It’s a catch-22 in this business - you either promote your own work and negotiate expensive exclusive licenses, or you work with a promoter and sell your designs to anyone and everyone. It could have been an in-house designer at Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, or a freelancer who proposed Able for the headings and such. The responsible party licensed it from T26, and JK Rowling’s storytelling made it a star. (I suppose it’s ironic that there’s a whole lot of unwritten history in the typography business.) Able’s rise to fame really is a classic love story between reading and type design. If the books weren’t so popular, Able might still be waiting for some Mexican fast food chain to pick it up for packaging design. The movie deal certainly made the font all the more recognizable, what with its merchandising campaign. Popularity can also cripple a great decorative face. It’s always being recognized as “The Harry Potter Font.” It might just have to wait a few decades for the Potter phenomenon to subside to be freed from the “Chamber of Pigeonholed Fonts.” In the meantime, I’m sure that a lot of fledgling graphic design apprentices are reading their new Potter books, being charmed by the idea of type design when they’re not turning the pages too fast to notice.

ITC Don't Panic's distressed shapes and craggy outlines evoke the feeling you get when you're just barely in control of a situation. This is type design on the edge. ITC Panic is further down the emotional track, when you've actually lost control and there is no hope in sight. Thompson says the inspiration for these faces arrived one day in the mail. I received an envelope that looked like it had a rough trip; the type that was stamped on it had a tired, ragged appearance. Ironically, the haggard envelope woke me up. I got excited and wanted to replicate the look as a font of type." Thompson designed ITC Don't Panic, then stood back and looked at it and decided it cried out for a more agitated companion. ITC Don't Panic gave birth to the positively psychotic offspring, ITC Panic. Both are all-cap designs with alternate characters in the unshift position. Creating an authentically disturbed appearance proved to be a challenge for Thompson. "I tried to design agitated characters, but they looked staged. So I tried multiple photocopies, but that didn't work. Eventually, I laser-printed the basic characters, wadded up the lasers, then flattened them out and stomped on them with heavy boots. The end result was scanned and used as the basis for the rest of the design." Thompson's work on web sites and multimedia has influenced his interest in type and typography that transcends the cool, unemotional nature of the computer."

Whether with pen on paper, or in digital, realistically connecting vertical handwriting is never an easy task to accomplish. After working with many handwriting fonts, and after intently dissecting so many different handwritings, one tends to expect such things to be quirky, disconnected, and almost never upright. In fact, in spite of vertical handwriting’s academically-sung virtues of rationality, efficiency, clarity and logic, very few people manage to deviate from the natural slant when writing. Even fewer manage to make the vertical handwriting connect and keep its natural flow. Calligraphy and upright cursive aside, it is almost impossible to make a vertical letters connect and maintain a real handwriting appearance. This is where the genius of this design comes in to bridge the gap between upright handwriting and calligraphy. Sincerely is based on one of the most fascinating handwriting designs to ever come out of Germany: Karlgeorg Hoefer’s 1968 Elegance for the Ludwig & Mayer foundry. It is a handwriting with the full meaning of the word, yet it possesses the rare, very commanding and appealing trait of being both vertical and connected while managing to remain realistic. It is the ultimate branding iron of handwriting fonts. When set and printed, Sincerely simply cannot be ignored. Ideal for humanity-asserting poster designs, lettering of short wording with plenty of space, poetry, notes, greeting cards, craft literature, book covers, history-related designs, and a whole range of other applications.

ITC Don't Panic 's distressed shapes and craggy outlines evoke the feeling you get when you're just barely in control of a situation. This is type design on the edge. ITC Panic is further down the emotional track, when you've actually lost control and there is no hope in sight. Thompson says the inspiration for these faces arrived one day in the mail. I received an envelope that looked like it had a rough trip; the type that was stamped on it had a tired, ragged appearance. Ironically, the haggard envelope woke me up. I got excited and wanted to replicate the look as a font of type." Thompson designed ITC Don't Panic, then stood back and looked at it and decided it cried out for a more agitated companion. ITC Don't Panic gave birth to the positively psychotic offspring, ITC Panic. Both are all-cap designs with alternate characters in the unshift position. Creating an authentically disturbed appearance proved to be a challenge for Thompson. "I tried to design agitated characters, but they looked staged. So I tried multiple photocopies, but that didn't work. Eventually, I laser-printed the basic characters, wadded up the lasers, then flattened them out and stomped on them with heavy boots. The end result was scanned and used as the basis for the rest of the design." Thompson's work on web sites and multimedia has influenced his interest in type and typography that transcends the cool, unemotional nature of the computer."

Lycia (Lycian: 𐊗𐊕𐊐𐊎𐊆𐊖 Trm̃mis; Greek: Λυκία, Lykia; Turkish: Likya) was a geopolitical region in Anatolia in what are now the provinces of Antalya and Muğla on the southern coast of Turkey, bordering the Mediterranean Sea, and Burdur Province inland. Known to history since the records of ancient Egypt and the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age, it was populated by speakers of the Luwian language group. Written records began to be inscribed in stone in the Lycian language (a later form of Luwian) after Lycia's involuntary incorporation into the Achaemenid Empire in the Iron Age. At that time (546 BC) the Luwian speakers were decimated, and Lycia received an influx of Persian speakers. Ancient sources seem to indicate that an older name of the region was Alope (Ancient Greek: Ἀλόπη, Alópē). Lycia fought for the Persians in the Persian Wars, but on the defeat of the Achaemenid Empire by the Greeks, it became intermittently a free agent. After a brief membership in the Athenian Empire, it seceded and became independent (its treaty with Athens had omitted the usual non-secession clause), was under the Persians again, revolted again, was conquered by Mausolus of Caria, returned to the Persians, and finally fell under Macedonian hegemony upon the defeat of the Persians by Alexander the Great. Due to the influx of Greek speakers and the sparsity of the remaining Lycian speakers, Lycia was rapidly Hellenized under the Macedonians, and the Lycian language disappeared from inscriptions and coinage.

The Camunic language is an extinct language that was spoken in the 1st millennium BC in the Valcamonica and the Valtellina in Northern Italy, both in the Central Alps. The language is sparsely attested to an extent that makes any classification attempt uncertain - even the discussion of whether it should be considered a pre–Indo-European or an Indo-European language has remained indecisive. Among several suggestions, it has been hypothesized that Camunic is related to the Raetic language from the Tyrsenian language family, or to the Celtic languages. The extant corpus is carved on rock. There are at least 170 known inscriptions, the majority of which are only a few words long. The writing system used is a variant of the north-Etruscan alphabet, known as the Camunian alphabet or alphabet of Sondrio. Longer inscriptions show that Camunic writing used boustrophedon. Its name derives from the people of the Camunni, who lived during the Iron Age in Valcamonica and were the creators of many of the stone carvings in the area. Abecedariums found in Nadro and Piancogno have been dated to between 500 BC and 50 AD. The amount of material is insufficient to fully decipher the language. Some scholars think it may be related to Raetic and to Etruscan, but it is considered premature to make such affiliation. Other scholars suggest that Camunic could be a Celtic or another unknown Indo-European language.

German graphic designer Ralf Weissmantel created Boogie in 2003. Boogie is an ironic reference to pop art, and to disco lettering from the 1960s and 70s. Its round forms and outlines evoke the flashing, pulsating lights and music of that era. Shipping with five different, width-compatible fonts, the Boogie typeface has four different components: an outlined letterform is the base element, and forms the first font. Three additional fonts may be layered over top of this base, surrounding the first font with up to three bubble-outlines. In graphics applications like Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator, these elements can each be assigned different colors. There is also a fifth font, which contains the base outlined letterform pre-surrounded by three additional outlines of the same color. Boogie works best in large headline, display and signage applications, where its forms can be clearly seen and enjoyed. When different colored layers are applied, text set in Boogie will gyrate and jive across the page! Weissmantel has worked as an art director for various international advertising agencies, and has led Corporate Design projects for firms such as Grey and MetaDesign. His design work, honored internationally, has been included in the typography collection of the Museum for Art and Trade in Hamburg. He is currently teaching graphic design at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Weissmantel has been an associate of the United Designers Network since August 2002. Boogie received an Honorable Mention in the 2003 International Type Design Contest, sponsored by Linotype GmbH.

Swiss 721™ is a sans serif family that ranges in style from thin to black while mixing in a few unexpected, but beautifully made and ironically flattering, outline weights that spice up the grotesque design. Couple these upstanding letterforms with matching italic styles and you have yourself a beautiful tool that is as legible on screen as it is off, has the technical prowess to conquer even the trickiest of design riddles and will work in a myriad of projects. Swiss 721 is a staple sans serif that you’ll never be sorry you have in your library. It’s been said that a simple sans serif is one of the most difficult typefaces to design. This is because when letters are reduced to their most basic details, irregularities and inconsistencies in design become immediately visible. The Swiss 721 typeface family is a quintessential example of letterforms distilled to their essence while still possessing warmth and verve. Based on mid-century sans serif typefaces, Swiss 721 is a versatile family of weights and proportions ideally suited to a wide variety of print and interactive design projects and is equally at home as headlines on billboards as it is navigation content on small screens. Swiss 721 takes the essence of mid 20th century sans serif typefaces and melds it with modern design consistency and a systematic weight range. OpenType® fonts of Swiss 721 also benefit from a rich character set and a range glyphs supporting most Western European and many Eastern European languages.

One design sparks another. As Alejandro Paul experimented with the strokes and curves of the monoline script Business Penmanship, he discovered interesting new forms and shapes that didn't fit the Spencerian theme of that typeface. These forms simmered in Ale’s subconscious over the next three years, during which time he visited New York City, pored over rare type specimen books in the New York Public Library, and explored Brooklyn’s neighborhoods. Brownstone, the face born from these explorations, is an original 21st-century design, yet one subtly infused with historical and cultural references -- keen observers might spot influences from decorative typefaces of 19th-century foundries. And just as faces from that era were influenced by contemporary architecture, the frames included with Brownstone echo the ornate iron railings of Park Slope’s row houses. (There’s also a slight 1960s vibe to Brownstone, of novelty swash-sans photocompositing faces, that can be played up at your discretion.) Influences aside, Brownstone has broad appeal to modern audiences. A soft, monoline sans-serif, with elements of Swiss geometry (see the ‘k’ and ‘x’), its marriage of highly legible, draftsman-like letterforms with decorative swashes and ornaments reflects the old-meets-new aesthetic of the DIY craft culture seen in Brooklyn and other urban centers. It’s ornamental but unfussy, romantic but understated. Brownstone includes character sets for Latin-based languages, including Western and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Maltese, Celtic and Welsh. Over 1500 glyphs, including small capitals, swash characters, alternates, and ligatures, in both Light and Thin weights. Ornamental frames are also included in both weights. The Brownstone Frames fonts are available as separate fonts in the new Brownstone Slab family.

Cooper Black's second coming to American design in the mid-sixties, after almost four decades of slumber, can arguably be credited with (or, depending on design ideology, blamed for) the domino effect that triggered the whole art nouveau pop poster jam of the 1960s and 1970s. By the early 1970s, though Cooper Black still held its popular status (and, for better or for worse, still does), countless so-called hippie and funk faces were competing for packaging and paper space. The American evolution of the genre would trip deeper into psychedelia, drawing on a rich history of flared, flourished and rounded design until it all dwindled and came to a halt a few years into the 1980s. But the European (particularly German) response to that whole display type trend remained for the most part cool and reserved, drawing more on traditional art nouveau and art deco sources rather than the bottomless jug of new ideas being poured on the other side of the pond. One of the humorous responses to the "hamburgering" of typography was Friedrich Poppl's Poppl Heavy, done in 1972, when Cooper Black was celebrating its 50th anniversary. It is presented here in a fresh digitization under the name Gator (a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ray Kroc, the father of the fast food chain). To borrow the title of a classic rock album, Gator is meaty, beaty, big and bouncy. It is one of the finest examples of how expressively animated a thick brush can be, and one of the better substitutes to the much overused Cooper Black. Gator comes in all popular font formats, and sports an extended character set covering the majority of Latin-based languages. Many alternates and ligatures are included in the font.

Reminiscent of circuitry and wrought iron, Anachrony constructs the forms of an Old English Blackletter with the strokes of a Modern Geometric Sans, and lands in the vicinity of Art Deco. For such an unusual chimera, the Anachrony family is legible and versatile. Its glyphs cover pan-European Latin, Greek, and a wealth of symbols including arrows, zodiac, planets, chess, suits, and circled numbers. It is also packed with Opentype features: Small Capitals: Of similar proportions to the default numerals, tall enough to be a suitable choice in place of regular capitals. All Caps Forms: In addition to the four usual types of numerals, there are numerals and currency symbols that match the capitals. Swash: A leading curly swash on capitals, and fancy looped ascenders in the lowercase that are handled by over a hundred standard ligatures where they would collide. Style Set 01: Romanized forms. Especially recommended for all caps. Plainer A/M/T/V/W/Y, J/Q reined in to the baseline, and alternate g. Style Set 02: Masthead forms. Old-fashioned capitals with descenders and that lower left dealy. Also f/x/z/ß in a more traditional fraktur mode. Style Set 03: Mild embellishments. Tall bifurcated ascenders and descenders. Style Set 04: Extravagant swash descenders. Style Set 05: Final swashes for the end of a word. Style Set 06: Converts capital letters into the corresponding connected Roman numerals. Seemed like it could be useful sometime. Easy swooshes: Standard ligatures allow you to type two to seven commas in a row to append an assortment of sweeping or ending swashes. Catchwords: In Anachrony Royale, turn on Discretionary Ligatures for a variety of decorative articles and prepositions.

Update November 2022: ULGA Grid now features an oblique variant. It’s also been expanded into a family of different but related designs with the addition of ULGA Grid Solid and ULGA Grid Rounded typeface families. All variants and new designs are monospaced, sharing the same width as the original ULGA Grid font and matching character sets. The character set has also been enlarged and now supports Western Europe, Vietnamese, Central/Eastern Europe, Baltic, Turkish and Romanian. ULGA Grid is a modular, monospaced typeface reminiscent of the old Letraset LCD & Quartz typefaces from the 1970/80s with lots of alternative characters and ornaments to bring a fresh twist to the genre. The idea’s seed germinated while I was going through a phase of binge watching my favourite 1980/90s sci-fi movies (classics such as Terminator, Total Recall and RoboCop). However, perception and reality don’t always align. Thirty years later, when compared to today’s technology, some visual elements look kind of outdated, almost Retro Futuristic. The initial design process started out in Adobe Illustrator when I constructed letters from a few geometric shapes within a square block. Just playing around with different shapes was so engrossing that it wasn’t long before there were enough characters for a basic typeface. The project grew again as I experimented with designs within the shapes and set paragraphs of text in patterns, resulting in over a hundred alternative characters and ornaments, some of which double up as border designs. This typeface may be square but it’s anything but boring. What it lacks in legibility ULGA Grid makes up for in style and the end result is a surprisingly versatile typeface that you'll have fun using for a wide range of display purposes including CD covers, posters, packaging, advertising, brochures and film titles. Ironically, the fixed grid structure frees the characters to create patterns of text not possible with variable widths.

Futura is the fully developed prototype of the twentieth century Geometric Sanserif. The form is ancient, Greek capitals being inscribed by the Cretans twenty-five hundred years ago at the time of Pythagoras in the Gortyn Code, by the Imperial Romans, notably in the tomb of the Scipios, by classical revival architects in eighteenth century London, which formed the basis for Caslon’s first sanserif typeface in 1817. Some aspects of the Geometric sanserif survived in the flood of Gothics that followed, particularly in the work of Vincent Figgins. In 1927, stimulated by the Bauhaus experiments in geometric form and the Ludwig & Mayer typeface Erbar, Paul Renner sketched a set of Bauhaus forms; working from these, the professional letter design office at Bauer reinvented the sanserif based on strokes of even weight, perfect circles and isosceles triangles and brought the Universal Alphabet and Erbar to their definitive typographic form. Futura became the most popular sanserif of the middle years of the twentieth century. Ironically, given its generic past, Futura is the only typeface to have been granted registration under copyright as an original work of art, and, further irony, given the key part played by the Bauer letter design office, the full copyright belongs to Renner and his heirs. This decision in a Frankfurt court implies that a further small group of older typefaces may also be covered by copyright in Germany, particularly those designed for Stempel by Hermann Zapf. This situation appears to be limited to this small group of faces in this one country, although protection of designers’ rights in newer typefaces is now possible in France and Germany through legislation deriving from the 1973 Vienna Treaty for the protection of typefaces. Mergenthaler’s Spartan is a close copy of Futura; Ludlow’s Tempo is less close. Functional yet friendly, logical yet not overintellectual, German yet anti-Nazi... with hindsight the choice of Futura as Volkswagen’s ad font since the 1960s looks inevitable.

Are you tired of flimsy typefaces that can’t stand up to the rigors of modern design warfare? Then it’s time to enlist in the Tank army! Tank is a typeface that means business. With its heavy letterforms and industrial appearance, it commands attention and demands respect. The tight spacing and lack of negative space give it a robust precision that other typefaces can only dream of. It’s the perfect weapon for delivering a knockout blow with bold color blocks or as a photo cut-out effect. And don’t let the name fool you—this typeface may be called Tank, but it’s far from slow or clunky. It comes in a large Regular style that will leave your competitors in the dust, an ironically titled Light version that still packs a punch, and a pair of oblique styles that add a dynamic twist to your designs. So what are you waiting for? Show the world that you mean business with the heavy headline artillery of Tank. Most Latin-based European, and some Cyrillic-based writing systems are supported, including the following languages. A Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Komi-Permyak, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.