Finally the time has come to publish our new ‘BlackHand’ font. It is a bold and upright handwritten font featuring 150 ligatures, which make for a credible handwritten look and feel. The ligatures will appear quasi random without the user having to search for the right alternate character in a list of glyphs. As you will notice, the font does well in both headers (it even has an ‘instant logo’ quality) and in plain text. The font finds it’s origin in handwritten notes which were done without paying attention to aesthetics. The regular characters and the ligatures were handpicked to form an organic and natural, very readable result. The original writing was done with an Edding 1340 brushpen, giving the font frivolous thick/ thin strokes. We hope you enjoy using the font as much as we did creating it. As an introduction offer, you can get it now at 50% off in the first month after publishing.

The beautiful Art Deco monoline pen lettering on the cover of a 1940s piece of sheet music inspired Central Park JNL. The 1940s was an era when couples took romantic walks along the pathways of Manhattan's Central Park or rode around it in hansom cabs. Big bands played at the major clubs and ballrooms and "uptown" meant the well-to-do. Men dressed in their tuxedos and top hats and the ladies were in their jewels and evening gowns.

Always intrigued by Bodoni's original work, I was set out—back in 2000—to examine his work and study Manuale Tipografico, one of the greatest specimen books ever printed. Issued in 1818 at Parma, Italy by Bodoni's widow, the two-volume work shows an impressive array of 142 roman alphabets and some foreign ones such as Greek and Cyrillic. After a careful examination of all characters, I decided to create a typeface based on the distinct script capitals presented in the book. Matching lowercase italics were later selected and designed to complete the series. Since my intention was not to create simply a digital version of Bodoni's work, this typeface was designed with connected characters and capitals with extra calligraphic elements. The result was released in 2002 and published in our award-winning catalog/book IDEA/Trendsetting Typography vol.1. Later in 2005 we revived a large number of ornaments and borders (credit goes to designer George Lygas). All this work was left behind till recently when it was revisited to create a complete 'Pro' family. Several new uppercase and lowercase glyphs were designed in order to create a distinct typeface, which is based on Bodoni but yet it stands out on its own. The new version also takes care of conflicts between neigbouring letters, something that was not included in the first version. Bodoni Script Pro is a 3-weight superfamily. It supports 10 special opentype features including 'contextual alternates' as well as support for both Latin and Greek. Each font comes with 725 glyphs including a large number of alternates as well as 144 ornaments. Furthermore, when you purchase the whole package you get a bonus font which contains 120 frame parts. These parts, when put together, create some truly amazing borders. -Panos Vassiliou

In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e." In the 1990s, Robert Slimbach designed his contemporary interpretation, Adobe Jenson™. It was first released by Adobe in 1996, and re-released in 2000 as a full-featured OpenType font with extended language support and many typographic refinements. A remarkable tour de force, Adobe Jenson provides flexibility for a complete range of text and display composition; it has huge character sets in specially designed optical sizes for captions, text, subheads, and display. The weight range includes light, regular, semibold, and bold. Jenson did not design an italic type to accompany his roman, so Slimbach used the italic types cut by Ludovico degli Arrighi in 1524-27 as his models for the italics in Adobe Jenson. Use this family for book and magazine composition, or for display work when the design calls for a sense of graciousness and dignity.