I like playing around with brushes and Chinese ink. I always have some kind of idea of what the final design should look like, but once it’s done, it never ever looks like what I had in mind. Apex Brush is one of those designs: it started off as a few brush strokes, but before I knew it, I had a really nice set of matching brush fonts! Use it for any design that needs a bit of rough, a splash of ink and a pinch of rebel.

Years ago the company that developed Fontographer marketed a program called Font-o-Matic, a program that distorted fonts in various ways. 99% of what it produced was garbage, but every once in a while it would yield something interesting. Since I had designed a lot of typefaces by that time, I had lots of material to feed it and it was fun to see what it produced. KolkFizzy is one of rare results that was interesting enough to save and clean up. The source font is Kolkman.

Years ago the company that developed Fontographer marketed a program called Font-o-Matic, a program that distorted fonts in various ways. 99% of what it produced was garbage, but every once in a while it would yield something interesting. Since I had designed a lot of typefaces by that time, I had lots of material to feed it and it was fun to see what it produced. BaumSquiggle is one of rare results that was interesting enough to save and clean up. The source font is Baumfuss.

When I was painting this font, I suddenly had the movie Cool Runnings (1993, directed by Jon Turteltaub) in my head. I had to name the font, so I came up with Smooth Brushings. Of course, this font has nothing to do with the movie. Smooth Brushings is an all caps brush font, which was made with a stiff brush and some China Ink. Upper and lower case glyphs can be mixed. It is a very legible and clear font, ideally suited for posters, product packaging and book covers.

The Techno sound of the 1990s, a personal computer, a font creation software and some inspiration had been the sources to the F2F (Face2Face) font series. Alessio Leonardi and his friends had the demand to create new unusual faces that should be used in the leading german techno magazine "Frontpage". Even typeset in 6 point to nearly unreadability it was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt the messages. About Al Retto: "Al" means "Alessio Leonardi" and Retto "straight", but if you read it as an italian world means "in the a**".

Can you imagine the delight that the printers of the Incunabula era would have had if they had such a tool as this font with a hundred and fifty glyphs of decorative capitals. The printers of that era were lucky to have more than a handful such delights. These Decorated initials and drop caps are all based on early period exemplars, dating to prior to 1525, from a wide range of printers such as Thomas de Blavis to Günther Zainer. Every Proportional Lime Font comes equipped with a complete character map.

New-Yorker-Type was one of the first typefaces I tried my hand at in 1985. I meant it as a revival of the typeface used by the New Yorker magazine. I did not scan it. I just looked at the type and redrew it completely by hand. Only much later did I come to know, that there is a bundle of similar typefaces of that period. Rea Irvin's design for New-Yorker magazine was just one of them, maybe the best. In the next step I repaired some of the mistakes that I made more than thirty years ago. Now on the eve of 2020 I gave the font a complete overhaul and added a set of Swash Initials, Cyrillic and Greek glyphs and many ligatures. The font now has 1075 glyphs and is all set for most latin writing systems. On top of that I made two versions, a Classic one with rounded corners and a pointed Pro version for a more up-to-date look. Take your pick. Yours sincerely, honoring Rea Irvin a great type- and magazine-designer, Gert Wiescher

New-Yorker-Type was one of the first typefaces I tried my hand at in 1985. I meant it as a revival of the typeface used by the New Yorker magazine. I did not scan it. I just looked at the type and redrew it completely by hand. Only much later did I come to know, that there is a bundle of similar typefaces of that period. Rea Irvin's design for New-Yorker magazine was just one of them, maybe the best. In the next step I repaired some of the mistakes that I made more than thirty years ago. Now on the eve of 2020 I gave the font a complete overhaul and added a set of Swash Initials, Cyrillic and Greek glyphs and many ligatures. The font now has 1075 glyphs and is all set for most latin writing systems. On top of that I made two versions, a Classic one with rounded corners and a pointed Pro version for a more up-to-date look. Take your pick. Yours sincerely, honoring Rea Irvin a great type- and magazine-designer, Gert Wiescher

FranklinGothicHandLight is part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

FranklinGothicHandDemi is part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

Quinlophe is a cute font with the theme of romance, and is made by paying attention to the shape and anatomy of the letters so as to produce unique and beautiful letter characters.

Bendita could evoke the didones of the 19th century. It has and an extreme contrast that makes it only suitable as a display typeface, with its characteristic shapes. The fatty type par excellence.

A Geometrical font. This idea flashed to me in one of the boring classes we had in college. Since its my special masterpiece we come really cheap at its price of just $8.

Günter Jäntsch designed Pierrot in 1973. Its irregular flowing letterforms express the design from this time, where many personal irregular designs had been made. Pierrot is suitable for invitation cards, posters and signage.

ITC Werkstatt is a result of the combined talents of Alphabet Soup's Paul Crome and Satwinder Sehmi, along with Ilene Strizver and Colin Brignall. It is inspired by the work of Rudolph Koch, the renowned German calligrapher, punchcutter, and type designer of the first third of this century, without being based directly on any of Koch's typefaces. Werkstatt has obvious affinities with the heavy, woodcut look of Koch's popular Neuland, but also with display faces like Wallau and even the light, delicate Koch Antiqua. Brignall began by drawing formal letters with a 55mm cap height, which Sehmi reinterpreted using a pen with a broad-edge nib. “Not an easy process,” says Brignall, “since one of the features of Koch's style is that while it was calligraphic in spirit, most of the time his counter shapes did not bear any resemblance to the external shapes, as they would in normal calligraphy. This meant that Sehmi could not complete a whole character in one go, but had to create the outside and inside shapes separately and then ink in the center of the letters.” The process was repeated, only without entirely filling in the outlines, for the Engraved version. Crome handled the scanning and digitization, maintaining the hand-made feel while creating usable digital outlines. “The collaboration of artisans with particular skills,” says Brignall, “in a modern-day, computer-aided studio environment, seems very much in step with the 'workshop' ethos that Rudolph Koch encouraged and promoted so much.”

The characteristic ‘French face’ was originally made in 1899 under the supervision of Joseph Pinel. Thus, what was originally French 10 pt. Nº 2, got its present name. The Frenchman Joseph Pinel called himself a "typographical engineer", but was at the time employed as a type draughtsman at the Linotype Works in Altrincham. It appears that this and some other faces that he supervised, were, except for use on the Linotype, also meant for manufacturing matrices for the Dyotype. This composing machine was an invention of Pinel. The Dyotype was a rather complicated machine and consisted, like the Monotype, of two separate contraptions, a keyboard which produced a perforated paper ribbon and a casting machine which produced justified lines of movable type. Unlike the Monotype which has a square matrix carrier, the Dyotype had the matrices on a drum (in fact two drums, hence the name of the machine). A Pinel Diotype company was founded in Paris and a machine was built with the help of the printing press manufacturer Jules Derriey. As is often the case, a lack of sufficient capital prevented the commercializing of this ingenious composing machine. Coen Hofmann digitized the font from a batch of very incomplete, damaged and musty drawings, which he dug up in Altrincham. He redrew all characters, bringing up the hairstrokes somewhat in the process. The result is a roman and italic, while the roman font also includes Small Caps

Hiragino Sans Rounded (Maru Gothic) is derived from the basic design of the Hiragino Sans (Kaku Gothic) with its wide counters and comfortable appearance. It features gentle typeface that provides graceful roundedness to the tips of all the strokes of a character. On the flip side of this gentle impression is the fact that every single element in the Hiragino Sans upon which this typeface is based has been carefully polished down in every respect in pursuit of an elegant roundness that makes it possible to handle carefully executed typesetting. That approach is clearly different from the general rounded typeface that makes full use of the body, and makes it possible to respond the requirement of professional typesetting. It is never-uninteresting design whose letterform is rooted in the traditions of traditional printing type. It is a font that of course can be used on its own and easily formatted just like Hiragino Sans while adding splendid coloring to the page. Furthermore, when used with other Hiragino fonts such as Hiragino Sans or Hiragino Serif (Mincho), the fact that all their designs are oriented on the same vector creates a multiplier effect. The user may be surprised at the sense of unity that cannot be experienced when combining it with other typefaces.

Monotype Bembo is generally regarded as one of the most handsome revivals of Aldus Manutius' 15th century roman type, but the original had no italic counterpart. The story is told that Stanley Morison commissioned Alfred Fairbank, a renowned calligrapher, to create the first italic for Bembo, which was released as metal fonts in 1929. Alfred Fairbank, however, claimed that he drew the design as an independent project and then sold his drawings to Monotype. According to him, the statement has been made that I was asked to design an italic for the Bembo roman. This is not so. Had the request been made, the italic type produced would have been different." Whichever version you believe, it was obvious that Fairbank's design - while undeniably beautiful - was not harmonious with Bembo roman. A second, more conventional italic was eventually drawn and added to the Bembo family. Fairbank's first design, which was based on the work of sixteenth-century writing master Ludovico degli Arrighi, managed to have a modest life of its own as a standalone font of metal type. It never made the leap into phototype fonts, however, and the face could have been lost, were it not for Robin Nicholas, Monotype Imaging's Head of Typography in the United Kingdom, and Carl Crossgrove, a senior designer for Monotype Imaging in the US. Nicholas and Crossgrove used the original drawings for Fairbank as the starting point for a new digital design, but this was only the beginning. They improved spacing, added subtle kerning and optimized the design for digital imaging. In addition, Nicholas created an alternative set of lowercase letters, fancy and swash capitals and enough alternate characters to personalize virtually any design project. By the time his work was complete, Nicholas and Crossgrove had created a small type family that included Fairbank, a revived version of the earlier metal font, and Fairbank Chancery, a more calligraphic rendition of the design. An additional suite of ornate caps, elegant ligatures, and beginning and ending letters accompanies both fonts, as does a full complement of lowercase swash characters. Now, instead of a failed Bembo italic, Fairbank emerges in its true glory: a sumptuous, elegant design that will lend a note of grace to holiday greetings, invitations, and any application where its Italianate beauty is called for."

Karibu™ is a 100-font original, ultra versatile geometric grotesk family with a lot of character. It is designed for modern projects, to serve as display as well as paragraph text typeface. It is perfect for lots of design situations - from magazine editorial use, logo design & branding, to web design, user interfaces and mobile applications. Main features: - 5 widths (Narrow, Condensed, Normal, Expanded, Wide), each consisting 20 fonts - 10 weights for each width (from Hairline to Black) - handdrawn, carefully crafted italics - alternate stylistic set for more technical and minimalistic projects - pronounced ink traps and large x-height improving legibility in small sizes and adding strong personality to display sizes - flatten letter shapes adding vertical rhythm and elegance to narrow widths - extended latin language support - OpenType features (case sensitive forms, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic sets, contextual alternates, lining, oldstyle and tabular figures, slashed zero, fractions, superscript and subscript, ordinals, currencies and symbols)

Flatpen is a font that was written with a pen we used to call "Redis-Pen". It had a flat, round tip that enabled you to write letters, with the same width of stroke.

Schoolblock is the typeface German schoolchildren learn to imitate when they are taught the printed letters. I just had to do this one for use in a German schoolbook. Your education-designer, Gert Wiescher

Ruly is my newest font creation. My roommate in college always had the coolest writing. I thought that it deserved to be a font. The font is a great choice for newsletters, cards, etc.

Bold, graphic and with a strong vertical emphasis. Built from simple geometric shapes, Zeno is similar to some of Joseph Albers’ Bauhaus experiments, though with attention paid to normalising the lettershapes to improve readability.

Crayon En Folie ('Pencil Madness' in French) is a straightforward pencil font, created with an extra thick black pencil. Use it for books, posters and packaging. Comes with a coloring box full of diacritics.

Some time ago I bought my smallest book ever: Kate Greenaway’s Alphabet* 57 x 72 mm. I thought it was the sweetest little book I had ever seen. Not knowing about the fame of the designer Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), I put it in some dark drawer and looked at it from time to time. Kate’s books were all outstanding successes in English publishing history; she was an icon of the Victorian era. Some of those books are still being reprinted today. This little gem I had accidentally acquired has become very rare and I have not found any reprints yet. So I thought maybe I could adapt her drawings for use on today’s computers. I ventured to redraw her delicate illustrations, blowing them up 300 percent, being forced to simplify them without losing her touch. It took quite some time! While redrawing them, I discovered that she most certainly drew them in at least three different sessions as well. Then I scanned my drawings and put them in a font. To make the font more usable, I added the ten numerals in Kate’s style; the original does not have those. I hope she would have liked my adaptations. Yours in a very preserving mood, Gert Wiescher. * Kate Greenaway’s Alphabet, edited by George Rutledge & Sons, London and New York, ca. 1885.

Handwriting of a strong Carelian personality revived: It’s autumn time once again, harvesting season, mushroom & berry time – the favourite season of my Karelian aunt Katri. A postcard she sent me more than twenty years ago had inspired me to SyysScript, “Script of Autumn” in Finnish. Katri had a very kind but also energetic personality, and I always thought her handwriting was a mirror of it. By making SyysScript I felt I could revive some of her unforgettable character. My Finnish autumn font has by now become a favourite for many and is branding fine food in both the Eastern and the Western hemisphere – even far beyond the arctic circle. “SyysScript“ is actually a growing family. For enhanced functionality in small sizes I added “SyysScript Eco” a year ago, a style with shortened extensions and simplified letterforms especially suited for packaging. And this autumn, a special one for Finland which is celebrating its 99th birthday, SyysScript grew again: Two long awaited newcomers, “SyysScript FeltTip” and “SyysScript FeltTip Eco” joined the family. They are bolder and softer than the previous styles but keep their positive, lighthearted feel. Use them to make a powerful individual mark on any background. – They are equally well suited for paper, packaging, a screen or even a concrete wall! Language support: Western and Central European, Extended Cyrillic.

Rodley is a geometric sans-serif typeface and a ground-up redrawing of Bairne – the first ever typeface from Fettle Foundry – with a completely new character set that closer resembles the original vision for the typeface. The changes are so substantial that Rodley has taken on a life of its own, becoming a brand new typeface. Inspired by low-contrast Swiss and Modernist grotesque typefaces, with the addition of characterful geometric shapes, Rodley aims to be a more disruptive choice for brands, while retaining the appeal of those popular styles. Based upon a Latin S character set with additional glyphs, Rodley supports many latin-based languages, with a focus on pan-European and South American languages. Thorough kerning has been applied to uppercase/lowercase, uppercase/uppercase, lowercase/lowercase and CamelCase character combinations, with thorough attention paid to an incredibly large number of diacritical combinations. Available in 5 weights, from thin to bold, with matching italics, Rodley has been designed with a wide range of uses and sizes in mind.

Once upon a midnight dreary, this Comicraftsman pondered, weak and weary, For a name synonymous with Mighty and Marvelous comics lore. Solid, Outline, Inline was the nameless font I'd crafted, I nodded, nearly napping o'er the work I'd grafted When suddenly came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my cubicle door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my cubicle door-- Calling out "EXCELSIOR!" Then an Amazing Vision beguiled my sad fancy into smilin', By the Spectacular decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven," he said, "thou art sure no craven, And thy font should not remain nameless here forevermore!" Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow From comic books surcease of sorrow, letters that called out "EXCELSIOR!" Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking of the nominative neuter singular thing Like Some Silvered Surfer wandering from the Nightly shore-- The Vision shrieked, upstarting--"Tell me what thy lordly name is thus!" Quoth the Craftsman: "EXCELSIUS!"

Johnny is the latest addition to the long line of popular psychedelic/hippy/funky art nouveau fonts representing the retro side of the Canada Type library. It is the digitization of a popular 1969 Phil Martin typeface that was known by two different names: Harem and Margit. The film type version had plenty of irregularities and quirks that made it seem like it was done in a hurry. In this digital version the errors have been corrected and the character set expanded to include international characters with built-in alternates, to be on par with what today's layout artists expect from a high quality font. This font saw a lot of use on record sleeves and music posters throughout the pre-disco part of the 1970s, which makes it a veteran of both the psychedelic and funk periods. This makes it the sharper, sturdier art nouveau contemporary personality of Canada Type's Tomato font. This font contains a very expanded character set that includes full support for Central, Eastern and Western European languages, as well as Baltic, Turkish, Esperanto, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese.