Crypto-typography - the passion for unknown, weird and unusual character shapes - is a disease commonly affecting type designers. Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini has celebrated it in this typeface family, aptly named Hagrid after the half-blood giant with a passion for cryptozoology described by R. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter books. Extreme optical corrections, calligraphic counter-spaces, inverted contrast, over-the-top overshoots: all the inventions that abound in vernacular and experimental typography have been lovingly collected in this mongrel sans serif family, carefully balancing quirky solutions and solid grotesque design. Hagrid is a typeface designed for editorial & display use, bringing dynamism to the printed and digital page thanks to its extreme contrast and unique details. It has been developed in a range of six display weights ranging from the monolinear and more traditional thin to the expressive heavy weight. For better readability in small sizes and on the web, a companion text family has been developed, with a slightly different selection of weights, wider metrics, and fine adjustments to keep the dynamic expressivity of the design without sacrificing legibility. This is evident in the design of italics: while the display italics sport a cursive feel with calligraphic terminals to lowercase letters, the text design is more restrained, with a more classical geometric grotesque slanted look. Given the crypto-typographer love for foreign specimens of letters, special care has been put into making Hagrid ready for multilingual projects, giving it an extended character sets covering over two hundred languages that use Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets and adding a selected range of OpenType features to handle alternate forms and stylistic sets.

Norwich Aldine ML is a all-cap typeface with enlarged serifs, designed and produced in wood by William Hamilton Page of Norwich, Connecticut in 1872. Norwich Aldine ML is a fine example of the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for a simple, visually strong typeface. Although about 14 miles inland, Norwich, Connecticut lies at the head of the Thames River. The river is both wide and deep, and therefore was not bridged in the early 20th century. Until then, if you wanted to get from Groton on the west bank to the whaling port of New London on the east bank by land, you had to go by way of Norwich. Because of its size, the Thames is navigable all the way from Norwich to New London. Docks were built in Norwich around 1685 and the city became Connecticut’s 2nd largest port by 1800. With the construction of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad in 1835, Page could easily ship his wood type north by rail or south by coastal schooner. Included with our font, Norwich Aldine ML, are two 19th century printer’s ornaments of sailing ships similar to those that sailed up the Thames to Norwich. Reference: Moon’s Handbooks, Connecticut 2nd Edition (Emeryville CA 2004) The family has expanded from one to four fonts: 1. Norwich Aldine ML: the concept font, computer-sharp corners and smooth curves, as we imagine it was designed. 336 Glyphs including some reduced-width alternatives for better letter spacing. 2. Norwich Aldine Worn ML: the way actual wooden type would look after have been used for a while. 332 Glyphs 3. Norwich Aldine Distressed ML: the way the wooden type would look after it had really been used, perhaps abused. Alternatives to the more popular letters reflect the damage that typically occurs on a well-wormn font, with nicks, cuts and scratches and the overall wear that reduces the overall height and leads to uneven inking due to varying heights in the chase. A couple of bullets look like bullet holes. 345 glyphs. 4. Norwich Aldine Cyrillic: Cyrillic includes alll English and Cyrillic letters for MS Windows Code Page 1251, ISO 8859-5 and MacOS Cyrillic. 235 glyphs. We did Cyrillic because is was fun and we felt the basic design cried out for Cyrillic. While obviously subjective, we hope you will agree.

Opinion varies regarding the role of Claude Garamond (ca. 1480–1561) in the development of the Old Face font Garamond. What is accepted is the influence this font had on other typeface developments from the time of its creation to the present. Garamond, or Garamont, is related to the alphabet of Claude Garamond (1480–1561) as well as to the work of Jean Jannon (1580–1635 or 1658), much of which was attributed to Garamond. In comparison to the earlier Italian font forms, Garamond has finer serif and a generally more elegant image. The Garamond of Jean Jannon was introduced at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900 as Original Garamond, whereafter many font foundries began to cast similar types. The famous Stempel Garamond interpretation of the 1920s remains true to the original Garamond font with its typical Old Face characteristics. The bold italic was a modern addition at the end of the 1920s and the small caps provided an alternative to the standard capital letters. In the mid 1980s, a light version was added to Stempel Garamond. Since its appearance, Stempel Garamond has been one of the most frequently used text fonts.

In the October 31, 1920 edition of Wid's Daily (the predecessor to The Film Daily), a block of ad copy from a 1920 film called "Down Home" had the text printed in such a fluent pen-lettered style that a bit of a shortcut was used at the beginning of the design process for this typeface. Normally, font inspirations are redrawn [and not by simply using auto-trace] except under specialized circumstances like this one where that feature is a help, rather than a replacement for the creative process. The entire block of text copy was auto-traced, then the necessary letters were selected from the available wording and cleaned up to remove any sharp points and irregular curves in an effort to make the end results as close to the original and unusual hand-drawn text. From there the missing characters needed to produce a finished type font were created utilizing the standard methods of drawing and font construction. The end results turned out very well. Using the film's title as its namesake, this design is now available digitally as Down Home JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Lipa is the name of the Slovenian national tree 'Linden'. The typeface Lipa Agate by Croatian designer Ermin Međedović, is part of a bigger type collection, comprising various type groups into one coherent system which Ermin developed over the past 10 years. Lipa Agate is the first to be released; a sans serif designed and engineered to be used in the smallest text sizes, best under 10pt, and in very bad printing conditions. It is perfect for phone books, classified ads, directories or any other job requiring economy without jeopardising legibility. To achieve this, Lipa Agate employs a range of tools, such as deep ink-traps, narrow proportions and a tall x-height. Contemporary editorial design requires a high amount of flexibility to respond to various design situations in a consistent fashion. Lipa Agate — with its 3 levels of condensation, 4 weights and 2 sets of different x-heights, 'High' and 'Low', which share the same width — fulfils these requirements wonderfully. That's a total of 24 fonts! To make this clean and honest workhorse face complete, its large character set also includes small caps, arrows, info-numerals and much more.

Type Tiles JNL is based on a ‘completed’ version of ‘Alpha-Blox’ by American Type Founders, circa 1944. The capitals, lower case and numerals shown in the sample sheet put out by ATF depicted type made with five-high blocks comprised of modular units spaced two points apart. These units could be combined in varying ways to create custom type of varying heights and widths and was available for purchase in both linear (multi-line) and reverse (white on black) formats. Using the 'reverse' model shown on the sample sheet, all of the characters were re-created digitally, and missing punctuation, foreign characters and other glyphs found in a basic computer font were drawn and added. The 'J' and 'T' in the type sample had truncations, so a more complete character was created for each of those letters. For those wanting an unbroken string of words or blank end caps, there is a double column space on the vertical bar key. A single column space is located on the broken bar key for shorter end caps. Type Tiles JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions