The Ouido typeface has tastefully narrow characters with enough default spacing for comfortable reading at small sizes. Equipped with features like letter-spaced small caps and conservatively drawn italics for emphasizing words that maintain the reading speed—providing the reader a pleasant overall experience. Ouido (pronounced as “widow”) is derived from the Portuguese word OUVIR which means to hear or to listen. Ouido refers to the ability to play a song on any musical instrument after listening to it a couple of times and without reading the notes. The Ouido typeface is a modernized nostalgia for music enthusiasts, a whimsical revamp of the classic serif font. It bears resemblance with printed classical music scores, characterized by each letter’s rounded strokes like how one drew clefs with passion. Each dot is a twin of the quarter note minus the stem, so weaving sentences together could feel like composing a melody. Inspired by the astounding phenomenon of absolute pitch, the visual appeal of this typeface may hone your imaginative ability to embellish your creation without needing a reference.

Gens De Baton is based on a charming lower case alphabet that appeared in the Almanach des Enfants pour 1886 (Paris 1886) under the heading “Amusing Grammar Lessons.” Gens De Baton means simply “Stick People.” The unknown designer turned the bare letter forms into drawings of people for the enjoyment of the children for whom the almanac was intended. The letter forms themselves were based on the French Romain du Roi (King’s Roman), except for the ‘g’ and the ‘j’ -- which were based on Baskerville. The letters ‘w’ and ‘y’ were not included, as they are seldom seen in French. We have left the letters somewhat rough, as they appeared in the Almanach des Enfants , resisting the temptation to clean up all the lines and render them with digital perfection. We have used our HiH Firmin Didot to supply an upper case and auxiliary characters, as Didot was originally a modified version of Romain du Roi. It is interesting to observe the contrast between the polished look of the Didot upper case and the rough, hand-drawn look of the lower case. Purchasers of this font have our permission to use it for the amusement of adults as well as children. We recommend setting Gens De Baton at 24 points or larger.

The retro-inspired design of Aviano Copper Variable echos the bold style of America’s Gilded Age. Inspired by the copper-inscribed intaglio printing designs of the early 20th century, the powerful, wide character shape of this font walks softly across your page while carrying a big stick. To create the right balance, small wedge serifs were added onto Aviano Sans, giving you a sophisticated style that looks and acts like it belongs nowhere short of Boardwalk. Developed to a new level of excellence, this design offers a wide range of weights from thin to black. There's full multilingual support of all Latin-based languages and five stylistic sets, swash designs, and 1000 glyphs per weight, including some unique ligatures. Number options include old style figures, tabular figures, and superscripts. Unique median spur alternates, swashes, and ligatures will help you customize every single design. The feel of last century’s personal and business correspondence is waiting for you in this member of the Aviano family. While ideal for headings, displays, logos, and short texts, Aviano Copper’s use for everything from letterhead to wine labels may just give you the monopoly you’re looking for.

The retro-inspired design of Aviano Copper echos the bold style of America’s Gilded Age. Inspired by the copper-inscribed intaglio printing designs of the early 20th century, the powerful, wide character shape of this font walks softly across your page while carrying a big stick. To create the right balance, small wedge serifs were added onto Aviano Sans, giving you a sophisticated style that looks and acts like it belongs nowhere short of Boardwalk. Developed to a new level of excellence, this design offers a wide range of weights from thin to black. There's full multilingual support of all Latin-based languages and five stylistic sets, swash designs, and 1000 glyphs per weight, including some unique ligatures. Number options include old style figures, tabular figures, and superscripts. Unique median spur alternates, swashes, and ligatures will help you customize every single design. The feel of last century’s personal and business correspondence is waiting for you in this member of the Aviano family. While ideal for headings, displays, logos, and short texts, Aviano Copper’s use for everything from letterhead to wine labels may just give you the monopoly you’re looking for.

This is the 100th font released by CheapProFonts, and I wanted to make something special - so I have chosen to upgrade one of the most popular free fonts ever: the one and only Scriptina by the infamous Fredrick “Apostrophe” Nader! After first cleaning up the outlines, spacing and kerning, Scriptina Pro has been expanded with a set of alternate letters without the loops and swashes, using the OpenType contextual alternates feature to switch them around automatically to avoid too many overlapping and repeating elements. You can also manually turn off the loops and swashes with the OpenType titling and swash features respectively. The originals alternate letters have been incorporated as stylistic alternates (and stylistic set 02) and the ligatures as discretionary ligatures if you should want them. The alternate non-script lowercase z is programmed as stylistic set 01. In addition Scriptina Pro has been given the usual CheapProFonts large multilingual character set, of course. I hope many will enjoy the improvements and additional language support. And, naturally: it is still free! ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual “western” glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

Like many cities in the Midlands and North of England, Stoke-on-Trent has a rich history linked to making and industry. In Stoke’s case it was pottery. In the early 1900s bottle kilns could be seen covering the landscape of the six towns making up Stoke-on-Trent with hundreds of factories producing some of the best ceramics in the world. But by the 1990s most of these had gone. Torn down for development of housing or just left to rot. During the next few decades Stoke continued to change. The industry was in a decline and Stoke itself was seen as another poor midlands city with a dwindling industry. Then in 2008, Spode, one of the largest and most famousceramics factories in Stoke entered into administration. Pens cast aside, drawings left half finished, designs left in the turned-off kilns; Spode factory was abandoned. This was a real shock and the way everything was getting thrown into skips to be put on the tip was heartbreaking. Thankfully people salvaged some of the technical drawings, sketch design, old sample pieces and ceramics that people hard worked so hard on. Potbank has been in development over a number of years taking inspiration from the heritage and designs from the ceramics industry. It has a mixed Clarendon and Antiqua style structure with its main purpose to be used as a printed type.

Engaging the issue of scalability, Beaufort® is configured so that serifs render with great sharpness, independent of type size, limited only by device resolution. This scale of effect empowers the typographer with a design axis stretching from awesomely huge to preciously tiny, further enhanced by weights from Light to Heavy, small caps, and alternate figure styles. In style, Beaufort has a number of affinities. In particular, the bold romans recall a kind of “grotesque with small serifs” style popular with sign painters and package lettering artists in the early 20th century, and still going strong. In proportion, the basic Beaufort is in the vein of the classic oldstyle types that descend from Granjon , via the French Oldstyles, or Elzevirs, to Plantin and Times in the early twentieth century. Designed for optimum clarity, readibility, and word count, these types have a pronounced angle of stress in the lower case, which is quite large and fairly narrow in relation to the caps. None of the caps are exceptionally narrow, and both cases have an evenness of width that makes for a no-nonsense, orthodox appearance. The strength of the capitals distinguishes these types from those of another “optimizing” era, the 1970s and ’80s, when puny caps made for monotonous text. However, strong though they may be, Beaufort’s caps are not as obtrusive in text as those of Times or Plantin.

A characteristic of the Minea font family is the achievement of the calligraphic handwriting effect. In addition to basic, simple letter forms, it contains a large number of additional stylistic alternatives and ligatures that, by combining and changing without repetition, give the effect of calligraphic writing. Some of these characters can be changed by automatically turning on a particular OpenType function, when ligatures replace the combination of letters that are part of them, the letter is replaced by a certain alternative when found in a given context, and capital letters are replaced with decorative initials. Letter swap functions can be used in all programs that support OpenType programming. Minea is an attractive font that is sleek, clean, feminine, sensual, glamorous, simple and very easy to read. The Minea font family, based on original calligraphic sketches, contains a total of six weights. Thin, regular and medium weights have ligatures and alternate letter shapes, which help make the syllable look like an authentic calligraphic print. Semi-bold, bold, and black weights contain only basic letter shapes. The font family contains Latin and Cyrillic. Includes Russian and Serbian alternative letter forms. The family of calligraphic fonts Minea can be used on various occasions, and is intended for use in print and online. Can be used in the realization of certain tasks, unusual advertisements, packaging and invitations, diplomas ... as well as for all purposes where this type of letter is needed.

Rot is clunky, clumsy, and utilitarian. It comes straight from a second rate oracle’s prognostications of a not-so-distant dystopian future. A place where film noir meets twenty first century computer cards; and rainy melancholy nights meet global warming. It speaks of a world that welcomes everyone; provided that they are romantically inclined to living life at the short end of the stick. Metaphorically, Rot is a shot of hard liquor served in a dirty glass. Rot 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

This slick, marker style font was created by our fontmeister, Mr Fontastic, based on the slick, marker style of... Well, Mr Fontastic himself! Check it out in the pages of Marvel's classic DAREDEVIL story GUARDIAN DEVIL. DD scribe and indy movie maker Kevin Smith himself told us it was the coolest font he'd ever seen in his entire life! No, sorry, that is a lie, but he did tell us he liked the design work Mr Fontastic created for the JAY & SILENT BOB trades, No, seriously, he did. We wouldn't lie to you. Well, except for that last time. By the way, this font also doubles as a dynamite sound effect font, that's why we're charging you twice as much as usual. No, sorry, lying again. About the price, not the sound effect thing.

Few fonts reach cult status. Despite its ubiquity—and perhaps because of its lack of subtlety—for a hundred years Cooper continues to draw the faithful. It’s even come to define an entire typographic genre and recently starred in its own documentary. Cooper Nouveau is Dave West’s imaginative contribution to the Cooper oeuvre. Drawn in 1966, Nouveau refreshes Oswald Cooper’s original italic with an energetic pitch, simplified contours, and a plump friendly figure. Uniform strokes and generous curves push the font’s playful personality and springy silhouette even further. A selection of swashed characters and ligatures offers options for lively logos and strong captions. While Cooper Nouveau looks laid-back and easy-going, it’s more than capable of pulling it’s own typographic weight. Put it to work where relaxed needs to project confident. Set Nouveau large for eye-magnet posters, packaging, and advertisements. Maximize its youthful energy for kids’ themes, craft action, and apparel bounce. Or set it alongside a master like Benguiat Buffalo or Chalet to show how Cooper Nouveau can communicate on paper and screens with an inherent ability to speak the language of style in many tongues. But like any cult icon: beware! Cooper has a way of setting the needle, and Nouveau just may become your go-to design fix. FEATURES ALTERNATES: Cooper Nouveau contains several alternate characters, which add flair to your designs and can help solve spacing issues LIGATURES: Many letter combinations in Cooper Nouveau form a ligature to solve spacing issues and produce more pleasing designs. COOPER NOUVEAU CREDITS Typeface Design: Dave West Digitization: Dave Foster Typeface Direction: Ben Kiel, with Ken Barber Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

It can be a difficult task to find a unique, attractive, prominent display font for your design because you always want to use a more distinctive font than the others. Therefore, Chubby Lines offers you the best solution. It is a lovely display font in rounded shapes to express soft, friendly nuances to your design. Its unique geometry details and contrast sketch lines create a visually interesting font. To be easily readable, this font is best applied for big text sizes, which also provides you with a special clipart as a bonus. Furthermore, you can enjoy the available features here. Features: Multilingual Supports PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuations Chubby Lines fits best for various design projects, such as brandings, posters, banners, headings, magazine covers, quotes, printed products, merchandise, social media, etc. Find out more ways to use this font by taking a look at the font preview. Thanks for purchasing our fonts. Hopefully, you have a great time using our font. Feel free to contact us anytime for further information or when you have trouble with the font. Thanks a lot and happy designing.

The birth of the monospaced types dates back to the past. There was a need for the creation of typesets for typewriters. The difficulty was to align the different glyphs in the same width. This led to particular problems with letters like “M” and “l”; the former seemed to be squeezed into the same width of all letters and the second one appeared way too streched. Despite – or perhaps because of – the impression of the typewriter is still popular with Graphic Designers. Nowadays there are even monospaced versions of primarily proportional types; for example the the Sans Mono designed by Lucas de Groot or the DIN Mono. Then again, why not the other way round?! In the first half of the Nineties, Erik Spiekermann developed a proportional type named ITC Officina based on the Letter Gothic. According to a survey on the 100 best fonts of all time conducted by FontShop, ITC Officina is in an eighth place, far ahead of its forerunner. This was the reason for me to create a wider design with a Serif and a Sans Serif based on the queen of all monospaced types – the Courier.

As a late work the “Meier Kapitalis” forms an arch within the typographic creations of the Swiss type designer Hans Meier who died in 2014. The first sketches of this typeface can be found in the teaching manual “The Development of Script and Type” (German: “Die Schriftentwicklung”; French “Le développement des caractères”) which was published in 1994, however, under the title “Roman Lapidary, 1st Century”. The booklet was first published by the Syntax Press, Cham, Switzerland and contains an introduction by Max Caflisch in which he writes: „The present work, „The Development of Script and Type“ is a concise, authoritative textbook, concentrating on the essentials in a wide survey from ancient Greek inscriptions to the printer’s typefaces of the present day. His (Meier’s) 72 varieties of letterforms enable the student or general reader to understand the history of script and type, while more than 60 of his own calligraphic specimens provide excellent models for all who practice this art.“ Unfortunately, the “Meier Kapitalis” is one of the few typeface families in this publication which has been digitized. It was to be the last type project fully realized by Meier. In cooperation with Elsner+Flake, the typeface family was developed and expanded and now contains the four cuts: Roman, Medium, Demi Bold and Bold with either a complement of characters for 78 Latin-based languages (EL=EuropaPlus) or in West-Layout.

Everything your head should not be or would rather not do is here. A complete collection of 225 illustrations (plus bonus shadows) in three fonts. The illustrations collected in the Capsbats keep the free-flowing lines of the ink-on-paper sketches. As a dingbat, or pictorial typeface, the Capsbats are very versatile: you can use them immediately in any application. The vectorial format of the font file means they are scalable with no loss of quality. And you can customize them in no time in your favourite graphics program. They can be used out of the box, as accents or spot illustration, or enlarged, combined, coloured, textured... to achieve an infinite variety of results easily. With Capsbats you have an incredible resource for your concept illustration needs: enlarge them and you can create a high impact page layout, posters, magazine covers and book jackets, advertising... The Capsbats Shadows are bonus silhouettes that you can use in very different situations. Use these shadows to fill them with your own patterns, or use them as a mask or clipping path, to paste the images you want inside them. The possibilities are endless. We didn't limit our imagination in drawing them, so why would you when using them? The book 1000 Heads is a compendium of the drawings featured in the Capsbats and Entestats and it gives a glimpse of the limitless applications of this collection.

A typeface that celebrates marching to the beat of your own drum. Snare is a jazzy little display type that presents like a stencil but behaves in its own way.Featuring angled section breaks and variable heights, Snare keeps each character’s footprint steady as as its heights change, revealing unique crossbars, periscoping capitals and deep-sinking descenders. Because each character follows its own rules, the more each word grows, the more it shows the beautiful rhythm of variety. Or stretch individual characters to shape the contours of your words. Beyond just being playful, fun to dress in colors, and delightfully useful for tight spaces,Snare’s lanky verticals and nervous energy reflect the time it was created. In this second pandemic spring, Snare brings up the drumroll-expectant heartbeat of our uncertainty, and the wish that when we can all meet again, our newfound weirdnesses will find a home in the world. The Snare font family includes one uppercase alphabet with two lowercase variants and comes in ten standard weights-which-are-just-really-heights (.otf) and as a variable type(.ttf) for designers using compatible platforms. Snare was designed by Alexander Wright and In-House International and developed byRodrigo Fuenzalida at FragType. In-House International’s foundry was launched in the summer of 2020 to offer bold, experimental, display typefaces that tell a story. Our previous releases have been featured on Design Milk, DesignBoom, Slanted and all sorts of exciting places.

Youthful Fontsmith received a brief to develop a font that would form part of the broadcast identity for the UK’s first digital Freeview channel – E4. It needed to work seamlessly in text and display, both in print and on-screen, and please the eye of the target audience, 18-34-year-olds. So, young, fresh and informal. No problem. Except for one thing: the timing. Daughter As he worked on FS Maja, Jason Smith was occupied by another imminent deadline: the birth of his third child. The pressure was mounting, but rather than let it get to him, Jason embraced the challenge and made light of the tension, fashioning a bright, bubbly, entertaining type with a personality made for memorable headlines. Beautifully random FS Maja’s soft, rounded shapes and assured, fluent lines encompass lots of notable features that contribute to its warm, fun-loving personality, including: a very large x-height; a short, rounded serif to allow for close spacing and give texture to body text; a slight convexity, or bulge, in the stroke terminals; a calligraphic fluidity in the entry to the down-stroke of most lowercase letters; open, generous curves, especially in the “B”, “P” and “R”; and a “w” made of two “u”s.

With the publication of the “Today Sans Now” Elsner+Flake extends its offering of the “Today Sans Serif” type family, developed in 1988 by Volker Küster for Scangraphic, by another cut so that the gradation of the stroke width can now be more finely calibrated. The type complement is available for 72 Latin-based languages as well as Cyrillic. Where available, small caps were integrated, and mathematical symbols as well as fractions were included. In order to make the symbols for text applications in regard to headlines more flexible, the insertions which were formerly added, for technical reasons in order to sharpen the corners, were eliminated, and the optical size adjustments of the vertical and diagonal stem endings (I, v, H, V) to the horizontal bars (z, Z) were scaled back. Already since the end of 1984, Volker Küster experimented with broad sticks of chalk and a broad felt pen in order to develop a new sans serif typeface which, in the interest of easy legibility, would be built on the basic structures and proportions of the Renaissance-Antiqua. Using a normal angle of writing, his experiments lead to the form structure of the characters: a small contrast between bold and light weights, serif-like beginning and end strokes in some of the lower-case characters, and the typical, left-leaning slant of all round lower-case letters and the typical left-leaning axis of all round letter forms. In this way, a rhythmization of a line of type was achieved which created a lively image without being “noisy”. With this concept, Volker Küster has enlarged the Sans Serif by a distinctive, trend-setting form variation.

Pumpkin Field is a font designed to capture the atmosphere of Halloween. It was hand-painted with ink, using a stick. Therefore, it is suitable as an imitation of sloppy, messy writing. The font will also serve perfectly for any materials that are meant to have a slightly spooky, quirky feel - whether it's Spooktober or not! There are several alternative glyphs in the font. The font supports 68 languages. Supported languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Asu, Basque, Bemba, Bena, Breton, Catalan, Chiga, Cornish, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, German, Gusii, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Kinyarwanda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Manx, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Scottish Gaelic, Sena, Shambala, Shona, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Uzbek (Latin), Volapük, Vunjo, Zulu

Trajan The original template for this one-weight, all-caps font was the inscription on Trajan’s Column, carved in AD 113 to celebrate the emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. College student Jason Smith copied the stone lettering from the cast on display in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. In Roman times, the signmaker would paint letters onto stone with a wide brush for the stone mason to chisel out later. The signwriter would end each stroke with a flick of his brush, which the mason would also carve into the stone. Ecce (as they would have said in Rome): the serif was born. Hand-crafted “I first drew this typeface when I was 17,” says Jason. “I drew it with a very sharp 9H pencil on polydraw film. “Then, using a Rotring pen, I inked the letters in and scraped back the serifs so they were perfectly sharp. These letters were then reduced on a PMT camera. I’d designed my first typeface, although it wasn’t digitised till much later.” Digitised Years after Jason had drawn the original typeface, its transfer into digital form made further refinements necessary. The serifs and weights needed thickening slightly, creating a crisp, new version whose delicate elegance is best appreciated in larger sizes. A classically-inspired font, timeless and perfectly-proportioned, to reflect the refinement of premium brands.

At the turn of the 20th century monolinear alphabets were often despised for their dullness. Typographers, therefore, took great pains to breathe some kind of individuality into the monotonous sans-serif scheme. They started with subtle differentiation in the thickness of vertical and horizontal strokes and finished by improving details. By this they arrived at a more decorative appearance of the type face which thus became more regardful of the eye of the bourgeoisie. Ideal Gothic is no exception. It is characterized by a correct stiffness which will improve the morals of every idea printed by this type face. The awkward curves of the italics are a little suggestive of openwork iron products or the bent iron of the decorative little railings in a Prague park. The so-called "hidden" and, furthermore, curved serifs complete the inconspicuous "charm" of this type face. All its above-mentioned features, however, suddenly turn into advantages when we need to design a magazine, a brochure or an annual report, in short whenever illustrations dominate. It is not by accident that the basic design of "Ideal Gothic" has such a light tonal value - it competes neither with fine pencil sketches, nor with sentimental landscapes. It is very suitable for business cards and corporate identity graphics.

Welcome to Gobah, a font that presents the future atmosphere in an amazingly modern and futuristic style. Are you looking for the perfect solution for modern, futuristic, sci-fi, and future-themed projects? Gobah is the right choice. Gobah is a font that transports you to an extraordinary world with a unique look that reflects a sophisticated future feel. Each letter is uniquely designed, giving your project a modern, innovative, and charming look. With Gobah, you can steal the show and create an unforgettable impression. The main benefit of Gobah is its ability to deliver stunning styles. Each letter has an exclusive design, creating an eye-catching futuristic look. This font will give your projects a strong visual appeal, reinforcing the message you want to convey. Gobah also supports multilingualism, allowing you to display text in multiple languages without a hitch. This flexibility ensures that you can easily reach a global audience and convey your message with consistent clarity across cultural contexts. Take a step forward in your design with Gobah. This font will give a stunning modern and futuristic twist, creating a memorable impression on your logos, posters, and web presence. Let Gobah be the right choice for your vibrant, modern, futuristic, sci-fi, and future projects.

Worldly Even though it’s a new arrival, FS Brabo has seen the world. Designed by a Brazilian working in London and studying in Belgium under a Dutchman, it’s certainly well-travelled. And it was inspired by the extraordinary archive of early book typefaces at the world-renowned Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, while Fernando Mello was attending Frank Blokland’s Expert class Type Design course at the Plantin Institute of Typography. It was there that Fernando became engrossed in the collection of early metal type, matrices, punches and type samples by figures such as Garamond and Granjon. So much so that he took on the mighty task of developing ‘a beautiful, functional, serifed text font’ of his own. Heroic FS Brabo’s journey from sketch to font family took an epic three years, starting in Antwerp, continuing at Fontsmith in London, and reaching its conclusion back in Fernando’s home city of São Paulo. No wonder Fernando was reminded of another titanic face-off: that of Antwerp’s Roman hero of legend, Silvius Brabo, and the evil ogre, Antigoon. Brabo came to the town’s rescue after the tyrannical giant had been charging ships’ captains extortionate taxes and chopping off the hands of those who refused to pay up. Having finally downed Antigoon after a long and terrible duel, Brabo cut off the giant’s own hand and threw it into the river Scheldt, unwittingly giving the town its name: the Dutch for ‘hand-throw’ is hand werpen. What better way for Fernando to name his literary typeface than after the hero of Antwerp’s oldest tale? The garalde factor FS Brabo is not a revival, but a very much a contemporary, personal interpretation of a garalde – a class of typeface originating in the 16th century that includes Bembo, Garamond and Plantin, with characteristically rounded serifs and moderate contrast between strokes. Brabo’s ‘ct’ and ‘st’ ligatures, upper-case italic swashes and contextual ending ligatures – ‘as’, ‘is’, ‘us’ – all preserve the beauty and character of traditional typefaces, but its serifs are chunkier than a garalde. Their sharp cuts and squared edges give them a crispness at text sizes, helping to bring a beautifully bookish personality to hardworking modern applications. A workhorse with pedigree It may give the appearance of a simple, four-weight typeface, but FS Brabo has hidden depths beneath its simplicity and beauty. OpenType features such as cap italic swashes, contextual ending swashes – programmed only to appear at the end of words – and stylistic alternatives make this a complete and well-equipped typeface. Comprehensive testing was carried out at text and display sizes, too, to prevent counters from filling in. All of which makes FS Brabo a very modern take on a traditional workhorse serif typeface: colourful and versatile enough to adorn not just editorial projects but also signage, advertising and logotypes.

Worldly Even though it’s a new arrival, FS Brabo has seen the world. Designed by a Brazilian working in London and studying in Belgium under a Dutchman, it’s certainly well-travelled. And it was inspired by the extraordinary archive of early book typefaces at the world-renowned Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, while Fernando Mello was attending Frank Blokland’s Expert class Type Design course at the Plantin Institute of Typography. It was there that Fernando became engrossed in the collection of early metal type, matrices, punches and type samples by figures such as Garamond and Granjon. So much so that he took on the mighty task of developing ‘a beautiful, functional, serifed text font’ of his own. Heroic FS Brabo’s journey from sketch to font family took an epic three years, starting in Antwerp, continuing at Fontsmith in London, and reaching its conclusion back in Fernando’s home city of São Paulo. No wonder Fernando was reminded of another titanic face-off: that of Antwerp’s Roman hero of legend, Silvius Brabo, and the evil ogre, Antigoon. Brabo came to the town’s rescue after the tyrannical giant had been charging ships’ captains extortionate taxes and chopping off the hands of those who refused to pay up. Having finally downed Antigoon after a long and terrible duel, Brabo cut off the giant’s own hand and threw it into the river Scheldt, unwittingly giving the town its name: the Dutch for ‘hand-throw’ is hand werpen. What better way for Fernando to name his literary typeface than after the hero of Antwerp’s oldest tale? The garalde factor FS Brabo is not a revival, but a very much a contemporary, personal interpretation of a garalde – a class of typeface originating in the 16th century that includes Bembo, Garamond and Plantin, with characteristically rounded serifs and moderate contrast between strokes. Brabo’s ‘ct’ and ‘st’ ligatures, upper-case italic swashes and contextual ending ligatures – ‘as’, ‘is’, ‘us’ – all preserve the beauty and character of traditional typefaces, but its serifs are chunkier than a garalde. Their sharp cuts and squared edges give them a crispness at text sizes, helping to bring a beautifully bookish personality to hardworking modern applications. A workhorse with pedigree It may give the appearance of a simple, four-weight typeface, but FS Brabo has hidden depths beneath its simplicity and beauty. OpenType features such as cap italic swashes, contextual ending swashes – programmed only to appear at the end of words – and stylistic alternatives make this a complete and well-equipped typeface. Comprehensive testing was carried out at text and display sizes, too, to prevent counters from filling in. All of which makes FS Brabo a very modern take on a traditional workhorse serif typeface: colourful and versatile enough to adorn not just editorial projects but also signage, advertising and logotypes.

Phoenician/Canaanite The Phoenician alphabet developed from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, during the 15th century BC. Before then the Phoenicians wrote with a cuneiform script. The earliest known inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabet come from Byblos and date back to 1000 BC. The Phoenician alphabet was perhaps the first alphabetic script to be widely-used - the Phoenicians traded around the Mediterraean and beyond, and set up cities and colonies in parts of southern Europe and North Africa - and the origins of most alphabetic writing systems can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet, including Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, as well as the scripts of India and East Asia. Notable features Type of writing system: abjad / consonant alphabet with no vowel indication Writing direction: right to left in hortizontal lines. Sometimes boustrophedon. Script family: Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician Number of letters: 22 - there was considerable variation in their forms in different regions and at different times. The names of the letters are acrophonic, and their names and shapes can be ultimately traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. For example, the name of the first letter, 'aleph, means ox and developed from a picture of an ox's head. Some of the letter names were changed by the Phoenicians, including gimel, which meant camel in Phoenician, but was originally a picture of a throwing stick (giml).

THE SPARK Uniform started as a spark of inspiration one day while I was shopping at the store. I was looking at some typography on a can of dog food and the idea popped into my head, “What if there was a geometric typeface with a circular O that when condensed, the O became straight sided, instead of becoming an oval?” I quickly sketched out the concept of Uniform and liked what I saw, the only problem was I was working full time as a graphic designer, and as a newly married husband, I didn’t have any time to make the extensive typeface. LETDOWN A year and a half later, shortly after the birth of my first child, my boss cut my hours in half. Although stressful, I saw this event as an opportunity to finally have time to complete the typeface I had in my head. I spent a couple months putting together a Kickstarter campaign, thinking it would be a smashing success, and I would be able to live off the donations long enough to complete the typeface. Wrong! The campaign was a flop and I was left discouraged and dejected, thinking that the great idea I had in my head would never become a reality... PERSEVERANCE At the end of the year, in December 2013, I decided to go for it and make this new type family no matter what it took. I began waking up a few hours before work each morning (getting only four hours of sleep each night) carefully crafting each individual glyph day by day. After nine months of hard work (and just about killing myself in the process!) in October 2014, I finally had a finished product ready to be released to the public! THE PINNACLE Fast forward a few years and now Uniform has reached it's pinnacle, Uniform Pro. Uniform Pro now offers extended language support including Cyrillic and Greek character sets, integrated italic styles, additional weights, and additional OpenType features.