Empresario Stephen F. Austin (1793-1836) is considered by many the “Father of Texas” for leading the first Anglo-American colony into the then-Mexican territory back in the 1820s. A few years later, while on a diplomatic mission to Mexico City, Austin was arrested on suspicion of plotting Texas independence and imprisoned for virtually all of 1834. During this time he kept a secret diary of his thoughts and musings—much of it written in Spanish. Austin Pen is my interpretation of Austin’s scribblings in this miniature prison journal (now in the collection of the wonderful Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, in the Texas city that bears his name). The little leather-bound book is filled with notes in ink and pencil—some of the faded penciled pages traced in ink years later by Austin’s nephew Moses Bryan. A genuine replication of 19th century cursive, Austin Pen has two styles: a fine regular weight, along with a bold style that replicates passages written with an over-inked pen. Each is legible and evocative of commonplace American penmanship of two centuries ago.

A tessellation is a shape that can be used to completely fill the plane—simple examples are isosceles triangles, squares, and hexagons. Tessellation patterns are eye-catching and visually appealing, which is the reason that they have long been popular in a variety of decorative situations, such as quilting. Most of the shapes in TessieSpinners suggest a spinning motion. Most do not resemble real world objects. The TessieSpinners fonts contain shapes that can be used to construct tessellation patterns. It has two styles, an outline style and a filled or black style. The black style can be used to construct colored patterns. To see how patterns can be constructed, see the “Samples” file here. Most or all of these shapes were discovered/created by the font designer during the past twenty years in the process of designing maze books, coloring books, and a book about tessellations.(Earlier tessellation fonts from IngrimayneType, the TessieDingies fonts, lack a black or filled version so cannot do colored patterns. Make sure the leading is the same as font size or the rows will not line up.)

After previously collaborating on the bestselling Distillery Set, Carolina Marando and Alejandro got together once again to create this Scrapbooker Set, a new series of fonts that multiply the possibilities. One reason scrapbookers became a kind of design demographic is the appeal of what they do. They make albums of memories, diaries composed of different elements that converge together to lead the viewer to a special moment in time. A paper, a photo, a letter, an event ticket, or a dry petal — everything ends up being part of a collage that tells a story. Words have a key role in such a collage. They use different shapes and forms and combinations to state what cannot otherwise be expressed. They make the collage stronger by clarifying a concept, defining an image, and solidifying a memory. These words for memory albums are the reason for this Scrapbooker Set, six different fonts with different impressions and different personalities — so each part of the memory can have its own identity. People tell you to write your own history. Now you can do that in style.

Jean Evans' interest in type design dates back to her third-grade fascination with fancy script writing. Years later, work at a sign-painting school she found in the Yellow Pages® cemented her relationship with letterforms. Evans went on to study with master calligraphers and type designers, including the likes of Donald Jackson, Hermann Zapf and Matthew Carter. Evans' designs have been exhibited and collected around the globe, and her distinctive calligraphic style has been lauded by leading trade organizations, annuals and publications. Hatmaker, one of Evans' more popular typefaces, was originally developed for the Boston-based broadcast design firm of the same name. Inspiration for the design came from Ben Shahn's famous hand-constructed alphabet. Shahn's alphabet, however, was limited to capital letters. Daunted by the idea of designing a lowercase that would measure up to Shahn's capitals, I developed a second set of caps-simple, quirky, yet almost classic-to work as 'lowercase' with the Shahn-like caps," explains Evans. Mixing the two in Hatmaker, creates a lively interplay of light and dark."

Abdo Rajab is the second version of the font FS Rajab which was designed by the type designer Abdulsamiea Rajab Salem for Future Soft company fonts. It is a leading company in Arabization field and producing the Arabic and Islamic programs beside the children programs. This font appeared between 1998 and 2000. In this version there were a lot of adjustments to keep the font in its spirit and uniformity between the various characters. Also added some new characters, which gave him another beautiful addition to be used in both title and text designs. Three weights (Regular, light and bold) have been created. Then the font was converted to OpenType to support Arabic, Persian and Urdu to be compatible with the various operation systems and modern software. The combination of modern Kufi and Naskh styles and varying between straight and curved parts made it a beautiful typeface appropriate to the titles and text, and able to meet the desire of the user in the design of ads and modern designs of various types of audio and visual.

Aeroport is a new typeface in the spirit of both German geometric sans serifs and Swiss neogrotesques. Its deliberately wide proportions and relatively short capitals account for the excellent way the type carries the line. Its short ascenders and descenders allow for very tight leading. When used in large point sizes, Aeroport reveals its industrial ancestry and its unconventional design: the somewhat unbalanced top of the lowercase a, the capital B that has deliberately not been compensated optically, the overly wide capital M. In smaller sizes the type creates a starkly different effect: its measured widths and low contrast make a text setting appear neutral and homogenous. This versatility is what makes Aeroport a multipurpose sans serif suitable for a wide variety of typographic applications. The family includes four weights with their italics and a monospased style. Character set includes an alternate lowercase a, two sets of figures and currency symbols, uppercase punctuation, and a set of arrows. Includes Latin and Cyrillic sets supporting over forty languages. Designed by Gayaneh Bagdasaryan & Vyacheslav Kirilenko, 2017.

Batman & Robin! Thelma & Louise! Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid! Hip Flask & Farrell! Frodo & Sam! Sonny & Cher! Calvin & Hobbes! Bert & Ernie! Dynamic Duos exist in all forms of literature & entertainment, and now Comicraft is proud to introduce its latest alliterative offering, DYNAMIC DUO! A buddy movie in font form, Dynamic Duo is a team-up of Solid and Open weights who can’t decide who is the lead and who is the sidekick! In the fine tradition of all two-in-ones and company-wide comic crossovers, first they fight and then they team up — to take your design on the biggest, loudest, most intense adventure of All Time. Dynamic Duo features comic-book style hook caps and alternate uppercase letters which automatically cycle for a more natural, hand-drawn appearance. Solid and Open weights can be layered to create chromatic effects, and matching variable fonts allow near-infinite control of weight and slant. Each weight contains 478 glyphs and supports 220 languages. Comicraft fonts are created BY comic book letterers FOR lettering comic books. Accept no substitutes! Artwork by Axel Medellin from Elephantmen #73

The two great technical constraints a type designer can tackle are low resolution, which limits detail and dictates proportions between negative and positive shapes, and uniform width, which restricts each letter to a fixed horizontal space. Wrestle with both at once, and each letter becomes a black-and-white chessboard that challenges every design decision. Sometimes battling these constraints gets in the way of a good idea, but other times, tinkering with fewer options can make the job irresistibly easy and lead straight to a grid addiction. Gridlite, an experiment with a modular negative space, is the side effect of such an addiction. It’s simplified, monospaced, and variable: foreground and background alike are ready to be animated, typed, scaled up, scaled down, rounded, or otherwise deformed. Gridlite is primarily a variable font with axes that control the size of the elements, their shape, and the background (one for the rectangular field and one for the compact envelope around the letters). The fonts cover Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts. Small caps are included, for no apparent reason ... and there is a monospaced elephant, too.

With Antipol Variable, the reversed stress font was supplemented with Wide and Extended cuts in the Hairline weight. The ability to stretch single letters extremely wide is an exclusive goodie of the Variable version. Antipol is a Sans Serif design that reverses the conventions of a regular Latin Sans Serif. With a weight emphasis on the horizontals and its vertical terminals Antipol radiates a 1970s charisma known from the like of Antique Olive. Its modern and avantgardistic attributes are most pronounced in the Hairline weight, where ultra thin lines meet distinctive arrowhead-corners. This particular weight is meant for display settings, think full-page magazine titles or posters. Antipol Wide and Antipol Extended are a generous statement for graphic design with enough space to let the type breathe: art catalogs, lead texts, invitations, letterheads or brand identity. Any style comes with a wide range of OpenType features that goes beyond a standard display font: Small Caps, Proportional and Tabular Oldstyle Figures and Lining Figures, Fractions, and much more.

Relato Sans is the other face of Relato Serif (a typeface with much idiosyncrasy) nevertheless, the sans version of this typeface is more austere and aseptic. A humanistic type, with a contemporary cut, created for general use in texts and holders and with a great variety of weights, which allow enough flexibility for projects of great magnitude. Although leading with an independent family it maintains many of the characteristics of its homologous such as proportions, the “x” height, the construction based on air lines of the italic, ornaments and so on. These details show coherence with the serif version, and at the same time reinforce its personality. Being a multifunctional type, the “kerning” has been worked to function in small sizes as well as in larger ones such as holders. The contrast between weights, was optimized to be used in pairs (Light with Semibold, Regular with Bold and Medium with Black). Relato Sans is presented in 6 different weights, in Roman, Italic, Small Caps and Small Caps Italic with three different styles of numerals, Old style figures, Lining figures and Small Caps figures.

A tessellation is a shape that can be used to completely fill the plane without gaps or overlaps—simple examples are isosceles triangles, squares, and hexagons. Tessellation patterns are eye-catching and visually appealing, which is the reason that they have long been popular in a variety of decorative situations. TessieSomeMore has two family members, a solid style that must have different colors to be useful and an outline style. They can be used separately or they can be used in layers with the outline style on top of the solid style. For rows to align properly, leading must be the same as point size. To see how patterns can be constructed, see the “Samples” file here. Shapes that tessellate and also resemble real-world objects are often called Escher-like tessellations. Most of the shapes in TessieSomeMore are Escher-like. Over half are either bug-like and bird-like shapes. There are also a few animal and other object shapes as well as some geometric or abstract shapes that have visual appeal.

A tessellation is a shape that can be used to completely fill the plane—simple examples are isosceles triangles, squares, and hexagons. Tessellation patterns are eye-catching and visually appealing, which is the reason that they have long been popular in a variety of decorative situations. These Tessie fonts have two family members, a solid style that must have different colors when used and an outline style. They can be used separately or they can be used in layers with the outline style on top of the solid style. For rows to align properly, leading must be the same as point size. To see how patterns can be constructed, see the “Samples” file here. TessieBugs contains shapes that resemble insects such as moths, ants, butterflies, and weevils. (Earlier tessellation fonts from IngrimayneType, the TessieDingies fonts, lack a black or filled version so cannot do colored patterns. The addition of a solid style that must be colored makes these new fonts a bit more difficult to use but offers far greater possibilities in getting visually interesting results.)

Ragazza Script isn’t just another display typeface. It honors the greatest handwriting skills but in a different way. Although It doesn't represent any traditional calligraphy style, it is still part of that expressive world. With more than 1000 glyphs, and taking advantage of the Opentype features, Ragazza is full of personality. When in use, it gives a feel very close to ornamental Copperplate mixed with some kind of modern 'high-contrast' typeface. Lots of alternates, swashes and initial capitals are the spine of this face, assuring almost infinite combination possibilities. The early forms that would eventually lead to what Ragazza is today, began as a college project –around 2006– in the context of the 'Hyperfuente' exercise developed during Typography 2, chair E. Longinotti, at the University of Buenos Aires. But that seed would never stop growing. Since then a lot of work had been made to take that initial project to a professional quality level. Ragazza Script is perfect for headlines and short phrases. It is the brand new modern script, designed by Guille Vizzari and published by Latinotype.

When I was a kid, I loved the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I thought it was pretty stupid of the boy to trick the villagers into believing wolves are attacking his flock of sheep. But I also thought it was a bit sad that the sheep are eaten by a wolf in the end. I didn’t really feel sorry for the boy (he really was stupid), nor the wolf (he just does what he is supposed to do in life), but I did feel sorry for those poor sheep. I guess this is what disinformation leads to in the end. Cry Wolf is a bit of a scary font: it was made with a really old and battered brush, using Chinese ink and some quality French paper. It has a slight tilt to the right and I added some inky splatter for dramatic effect. Use Cry Wolf for your book covers, product packaging and headlines; use if to spice up you invitations and your halloween posters. Comes in a slightly tilted Regular style and an outright Italic style.

Abdo Salem is the second version of the font FS_Salem which was designed by the type designer Abdulsamie Rajab Salem for Future Soft company fonts. It is a leading company in Arabization field and producing the Arabic and Islamic programs beside the children programs. This font appeared between 1998 and 2000. In this version there were a lot of adjustments to keep the font in its spirit and uniformity between the various characters. Also added some new characters, which gave him another beautiful addition to be used in both title and text designs. Three weights (Light, bold and black) have been created. Then the font was converted to OpenType to support Arabic, Persian and Urdu to be compatible with the various operation systems and modern software. The combination of modern Kufi and Naskh styles and varying between straight and curved parts made it a beautiful typeface appropriate to the titles and text, and able to meet the desire of the user in the design of ads and modern designs of various types of audio and visual.

‘Пивная’ (Pivnaya) means ‘bar’ or ‘brewhouse’ in Russian. Pivnaya Latin is a display font published by Roman Type. Initially designed for a poster, the family quickly turned multi-script. In 2019, the global design community is busy celebrating the centennial of Bauhaus, silently triggering the question as to if or how the phenomenon matters in the lives we lead today, or whether it could rather be reduced to mere historic purposes. At that point, I found myself falling into the Bauhaus trap myself, preparing a typeface design workshop for a group of Lithuanian and Russian students. But by a typing error, I accidently made Google translate ‘Brauhaus’ (brewhouse) instead of ‘Bauhaus’. That is why I called this family ‘Pivnaya’ in the end. Pivnaya Latin works for: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanisch, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Zulu. Though being a decorative font, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) increases usability for all kinds of purposes.

In the early 1980s, at the start of my career, I had the opportunity to work in a print shop with classic lead setting. In those days I would study issues of U&lc magazine from ITC. What really caught my attention were scripts in the Spencerian style. I’ve been fascinated by this American penmanship tradition ever since. A few years ago I developed a font. Boris Bencic used it when he was redesigning L’Officiel magazine in Paris. I took these initial forms and developed them into the font Mommie when I started my own foundry. Although I usually design text typefaces, working on Mommie taught me how complex it can be to create a script headline font. The biggest challenge in this process has been to keep it alive and fresh. The Regular weight is only made for very big headlines. The thin lines with the bold drops are very elegant. For smaller sizes use the Medium and Small weight. It won the TDC 2008 award and was Judges Choice of Christian Schwartz.

Playing with old rub-on letters led to this alphabet. On the Letraset sheets (the older ones still remember...) there were always letters left over that were never or rarely used. I sometimes let interns play with it. To explain, I first rubbed an example myself. Two y's from a Helvetica made a pretty shape. Looking closely, you see a contoured, italic N. I developed the HGB Ypsilon font from this N. A purely decorative typeface – it could be interesting for some logo.

Made up of sixteen individual weights and spread over three different optical sizes, Essonnes is designed to bring utility back to the Didot genre. It’s a common belief among designers that Didones don’t work for text. This wasn’t true in 1819 and it isn’t true today. Like its forbearers, Essonnes is a truly optical family—not just a study in adjusting contrast. The text and display weights have been designed from the ground up for their intended roles. This means that everything from the height of the uppercase & lowercase letters have been specifically tuned for their intended purpose. Like many typefaces, Essonnes started after falling in love with a piece of history. In this case, it was the eccentric forms of Pierre Didot’s Type and the evolution of the High contrast Didone throughout the 19th century. It was out of curiosity and love for these forms that led to the first draft of what would become Essonnes back in 2011. These unique situations—screens, modern printing methods, the previous 200 years of typographic innovation since the original design, my own life experiences—have led to a typeface that, while based on history, is not stuck in it.