Matthew Carter designed the Shelley family 1972 for Mergenthaler Linotype to be used as a new script face for the photo typesetting machines. The basic idea was to create one script face that would offer dfferent elegant letterforms. Matthew designed Shelley in three different versions, Allegro which is in the style of Kuenstler Schreibschrift, Andante where the caps are less flowrish and wide and Volante where the letters have its most expressive and wide forms and the lowercase z in this font is in the french anglian double stacked form. All three versions can be easily mixed to give the text a more individual calligraphic look Besides Shelley Linotype Zapfino from Hermann Zapf shows similar basics, but in a totally different letterform. In Linotype Zapfino the individual lowercase letters from the four different versions have different letterforms which gives the text an even more individual touch.

Between twilight and daybreak it is said that the dark side of the human psyche eclipses the sun that shines from the depths of our souls. Certainty turns to doubt, clarity becomes confusion, man turns into wolf, the dead wake, vampires seduce the young are restless and milk boils over on the stove. Those that seek only to bathe in the light of a romantic new moon often end their tragic lives soaked in nothing other than their own blood, and the milk spilt on the stovetop has no one left to cry over it. There are fifty shades of grey during those hours after sunset and I think just as many in my porridge this morning. Yes, okay, I admit it, I spoiled the milk! This porridge tastes like it was left in a graveyard overnight. Death warmed over. Gothic and lumpy. Just like the Buried weights of this font.

Double Nines JNL is a dingbat font containing fifty-five glyphs for the tiles found in the second level of domino games. Sets of dominoes can be of either double six, double nine or double twelve. In this font, the double blank tile is located on the zero keystroke, while the one/blank and 1/1 tiles are on the 1 and 2 keystrokes. The rest of the tiles (in numerical order through 9/9) are located on the A-Z and a-z keystrokes respectively. To use any or all of the images contained in Double Nines JNL in any manufactured products or services, please refer to the software license agreement provided when purchasing this font. A separate royalty license must be secured from Jeffrey N. Levine for such purposes. The images are NOT licensed for use in proprietary logos or service marks.

Braga Huis typeface is a font family that is inspired by the famous street in Bandung that was made to embodies the atmosphere and the environment of Netherland-Indie city at its golden time, whereby all the elements were designed to give the impression of structural, artistic, and advance. Braga Huis typeface has a strong Art Deco character, where the impression is depicted from the strong lines, curvy passion so it is very appropriate to describing the future atmosphere from the perspective of the 19th century. Braga Huis typeface has 3 font styles consisting of uppercase, lowercase and various alternative options that can be customize to your taste, poster is one of the media form of presentation that we believe is very appropriate for this type of font. But whatever the medium is, honestly we say; using Braga Huis typeface will make your artwork will never be cracked by time.

Chapman is the result of spending too many hours staring at the often all-capital engraver typefaces from long-gone foundries. The wide serifs, high contrast, and various widths seem to have so much character but also remain so neutral. From these references, Chapman began to emerge. It seemed natural that the lowercase would be based on a Scotch Roman model, much like the original all-capital faces. Chapman does not pull directly from any one source but from the genres themselves. It was, from the beginning, the goal to create a typeface that would be relatively neutral but not boring; an adaptable solution that works anywhere and, depending on the chosen width, can be squeezed or stretched to fit anywhere. The idiosyncrasies of the original designs are tamed in some places and turned up in others. The result is something familiar but unique and contemporary.

Hi. Introducing a new version of my one of the most popular fonts. Now Humblest Pro includes much more characters and has west european multilingual support. This font has a smooth and clean shape without any grain unlike the original one. Almost all of the capital leters has two version, for the begining and for the ending of the word. The final alternative letter will be automatically replaced if you type a big last letter in the word (check out if the "contextual alternates" opentype feature is activated). Decorative swashes are now a part of the font. To use this decorative lines just type an underscore character and the corresponding number from _00 to _39 (make sure that “standard ligatures” opentype feature is activated). Also a lot of ligatures for small letters are available, please check out the previews with all available glyphs. Thank you and have fun!

Ernie is a new animated typeface by Jim Ford, intended as a complimentary serif design to Freeman Craw’s fun retro hit, Ad Lib. The serif drawings mimic the behaviors of Ad Lib, on a Clarendon-esque structure. The application of Ad Lib’s behaviors to a serif design highlights it's quirky characteristics; notably in the added contrast, the bending of serifs and the translation to Ernie’s ball terminals. The lowercase g is probably the most extreme example of this "translation." Ernie has a savvy system of text animation built in; with dualing lowercase alphabets, 34 ligatures, and an extensive glossary of custom words, all programmed to automatically make intelligent pseudorandom wordshapes. It's called RMS, aka the Randomagic System. The glossary of “buzz” words is based on the most common and powerful words in marketing and advertising, as well as words that are specific to Ernie’s intended uses.. Additionally, Ernie Alt provides the opposite randomization effects in lowercase text, thus reversing the rhythm of the bounce. Ernie Sorts is a bonus font which includes fun printers fists, expandable banners and other graphic elements. The Ernie character and cartoons were created by Johnny Sampson, as a visualization of the typeface, it's character and it's unique features.

By the 1990s, the availability of font creation software opened the door to an explosion of creativity, experimentation and exploration into the world of digital typography by amateur and professional alike. The undisputed king of the freeware fonts was Ray Larabie through his Larabie Fonts website. It seemed at the time that Ray’s output was endless, and he amassed dozens upon dozens of fonts that ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. In fact, Ray was the driving force of encouragement and a behind-the-scenes “mentor” who helped Jeff Levine Fonts get underway in January of 2006. As Larabie’s focus changed to higher-quality commercial type design with the launch of Typodermic, Inc., many of his “less than perfect” font experiments were withdrawn and shelved. Ray eventually turned those lost (and sometimes questionable) typefaces into a bundled zip archive released into the public domain through Creative Commons. One particular design “Boron” (circa 1996) featured computer-oriented lettering as if etched onto a circuit board. Running with this idea, and with Ray's approval, the electronic elements were stripped away, the characters cleaned up and modified, and the font reworked in Retro Checkbook JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Wood Type Catalogs of the 19th century often offered tools and accessories alongside alphabets of wood type. Probably the most closely related was wood type borders and ornaments. Decorative Borders were often sold by the foot and accompanied by corner pieces that matched the designs. These borders could be assembled in almost any size dimensions as needed. The digital version uses the same principals of modular assembly to create the exact size border that is needed. Along with the borders, included in this font are a selection of "streamers". These banners would have been made to order with the font designs reversed out along a horizontal banner with decorative end caps. The digital version allows for a modular assembly by selecting choice of end caps and then typing the = as many times as needed to achieve the desired length. 10 styles of 9 piece borders can be created in any size variations as well as 8 styles of streamers in any desired length. Some of the designs can be mixed and matched for unusual contemporary design interpretations of these historic styles. It is recommended that the line height (leading) is set to the same size as the point size setting, this will visually lock all elements together.

Freundschafts-Antiqua AR is based on a 20th-century German type design. Freundschafts-Antiqua (which was also called Chinesische Antiqua) was designed by the Chinese calligrapher Yü Bing-nan when he was a student at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst at Leipzig in 1960. It was cast in 1964 by VEB Typoart, Dresden, in 9-pt and 28-pt (Didot). The design combines the best German traditions with the Chinese bamboo pen. It is a unique, wholly modern, yet quiet and dignified typeface which is well suited for text-setting in many sizes. The original design was carefully crafted with all non-kerning letters (none of the letters overhangs its side-bearings); the lower-case f was designed so that no ligatures were needed. The AR fonts include the type's ch and ck logotypes, monetary signs and all the standard accents. The letterfit of the original design is retained and, as can be seen in the attached printable .pdf, text composed at normal sizes is very agreeable indeed. Freundschafts-Kursiv AR A features old-style (non-lining) figures and 'kerning' letters; Freundschafts-Kursiv AR B contains lining (cap-height) figures and all non-kerning letters following the original design of the face.

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.

Business Penmanship is an ode to the business handwriting from the era penmanship was a highly-valued part of business education and practice.
  In the early 1800s, Platt Rogers Spencer (1800-1864) created what would become the most widely accepted and prized cursive writing method used in business. Before the American Civil War, Spencer was the undisputed king of handwriting. He was also an outspoken supporter of American business education. By the late 1800s business education included some focus on penmanship, and there were many colleges that specialized in it. One of the most influential penmanship schools was founded by Charles Paxton Zaner and his partner E. W. Bloser. Later on, in the early 1900s Austin Palmer introduced the Palmer Method of business penmanship, and it soon became the most popular handwriting system in the United States.
  Business Penmanship is a single feature-rich font that includes over 1100 characters, covering ligatures, alternates, a large set of beginning and ending extensions, as well as a wide range of Latin-based languages, including Turkish and the languages of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic region. To take advantage of all the OpenType features included in the font, please use within programs that support such advanced typography.

TT Phobos useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options TT Phobos is a pliable display serif with a soft and gentle character. The features of the typeface are the moderate contrast between bold and thin strokes, pliable visual compensators, and the counter-clockwise bend of internal ovals. In addition to 6 weights and 6 italic, TT Phobos also includes two original decorative fonts, inline and stencil. Despite its pliability and display character, TT Phobos is dynamic enough and is well suited for text arrays even in large text blocks. The serifs of letters are completely asymmetrical and bring in dynamics when reading the text from left to right. Thanks to the harmonious contrast of black and white forms and internal negative spaces of the letters, as well as its broad letter spacing, the typeface is well read in small sizes. In this case, the character of the letters is completely preserved, partially thanks to the exaggerated elegant visual compensators. The ornamental pattern used in TT Phobos Inline varies for capital and lowercase letters. Capital letters implement a more complex double inline with a rhombic element in the middle, and in the lower case features a simplified form of the inline, made in a single movement. Thanks to the original cutting, TT Phobos Stencil stands out for its expression, and the rounded cuts add even more visual style to the font. TT Phobos consists of 14 faces: 6 weights (Light, Regular, DemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold, Black), 6 Italics, inline and stencil. There are 17 ligatures in TT Phobos, including several Cyrillic ones. The typeface has stylistic alternates, which adds an italic effect to the upright fonts, and a little solemnity of the upright version to the italics. In addition, we have not forgotten about the old-style figures and other useful OpenType features, such as ordn, sups, sinf, dnom, numr, onum, tnum, pnum, liga, dlig, salt (ss01), frac, case.

DIN Stencil on Behance. DIN Stencil: Specimen Manual PDF. Despite the fact that over the years several designers have manually created stencil lettering based on DIN for various projects, there has never been a professional digital stencil version of a DIN-based typeface. After the successful introduction of DIN Monospace a few months earlier, PF DIN Stencil now completes Parachute’s extensive library of DIN superfamilies. It was based on its original counterpart DIN Text Pro and was particularly designed to address contemporary projects, by incorporating elements and weights which are akin to industries such as fashion, music, video, architecture, sports and communications. Traditionally, stencils have been used extensively for military equipment, goods packaging, transportation, shop signs, seed sacks and prison uniforms. In the old days, stencilled markings of ownership were printed on personal possessions, while stencilled signatures on shirts were typical of 19th century stencilling. Two companies dominated the market in the mid-twentieth century: the Marsh Stencil Machine Company in the United States and the Sächsische Metall Schablonen Fabrik in Germany. Ever since the late 1930s, it was the German Sächsische Metall Schablonen Fabrik which used heavily the new DIN 1451 standard font (introduced in 1936), attempting to overthrow the reign of the Didot-style modern roman which was at the time the most common stencil letter in Germany. These letters were manufactured mainly as individual zinc stencils which could be ordered in sizes between 10 and 100mm. The DIN Stencil family manages to preserve several traditional stencil features, but introduces additional modernities which enhance its pleasing characteristics and make it an ideal choice for a large number of contemporary projects. Furthermore, the spacing attributes of the glyphs were redefined and legibility was improved by revising the shape of the letterforms. The DIN Stencil family consists of 8 diverse weights from the elegant Hairline to the muscular Black. Currently, it supports Latin, Eastern European, Turkish and Baltic.

Roc is a sans serif grotesk inspired by American wood types from the end of the 19th century. With nine weights in five widths, this family contains 45 fonts in total. The character set supports Western and Central European languages, as well as Turkish. Roc Grotesk comes in a range of five widths: Compressed, Condensed, Normal, Wide and ExtraWide, in order to cover a wide scope of applications. Although the styles at both ends of each range are made in their most pronounced form in terms of width and weight, they are not taken to such extremes as to become absurd, and are quite usable in display settings. The Normal width keeps all its nine styles in proportionally similar widths. The Compressed width, however, is deliberately made to be disproportionate, so that every style takes the least possible horizontal space. That is why the contrast between Compressed Thin and Compressed Heavy style is substantial. As the weights progress from Thin to Heavy, the stroke contrast becomes more prominent. It is intentionally exaggerated in heavier weights, which is particularly apparent in the uppercase E and R of the Black and Heavy style. Roc has a large x-height and relatively short descenders and ascenders. No uppercase letter descends below the baseline, so the lines of an all-caps text can be packed tightly on a poster or a headline. The Regular style is somewhat generously spaced, as it is most likely to be used for setting longer passages of text. Its Bold counterpart is spaced in such a way that the width of the text column will be similar to the text set in Regular. Tabular figures in these two styles have exact matching widths, so for example, you could emphasize one row of numbers in a data column without visually disrupting the vertical order of the table. The lowercase g and r have alternatives to accommodate what most designers expect from a typical Grotesk typeface. The single-story g and the cut-off r are accessible via the OpenType feature.

OpenBookING is a gimmick or novelty font that has letters on pages of a book. It is caps only and monospaced. The letters on the upper-case keys are on the left-handed pages of an open book and the letters on the lower-case keys are the same letters but on the right-handed pages of an open book. One could alternate upper and lower case keys to get letters on complete books, but the Opentype feature of contextual alternatives (calt) does this automatically. Several previous typefaces from IngrimayneType used the calt feature to alternate shapes that fit together in an interlocking pattern, such as alternating concave and convex shapes. OpenBookING uses the calt feature in a different way, to alternate two halves of a symmetrical shape. To provide two copies of numbers and common symbols, some non-alphabetical characters are unavailable because their slots were taken by the second form of the number or common symbol. If stylistic set one (ss01) is turned on, spaces are replaced with empty pages. This may leave you with unwanted spaces at the end of lines, and to eliminate them, turn off the feature (or change the font) for these spaces. The empty pages can be used in a layer to add color to the text. There is also a second set of empty pages with a filled page that can also be used in layers. (See poster for examples.) These pages are on the (logicalnot multiply) and (register divide) characters for the first set and on the (ordmasculine ellipsis) and (macron trademark) keys for the second set. Finally, OpenBookING has a large set of accented characters if anyone should need them. The letters used on the books were derived from the font Myhota-Bold. For a related typeface of letters on book covers, see NewLibrary. OpenBookING has limited uses and is priced accordingly.

You stand, poised at the brink. If you do not choose the right, the best typeface, this may be one of the greatest disasters in your history. The whole root and core and brain on which and around which your project is built seems about to perish into an ignominious end. But I do not for a moment fail to believe that Winsel shall prevail for you. This bold new face, founded from the tested mind of insigne design, will in the moment of need wield for you the full might of its ancestors. The entire strength of the British Empire’s vernacular poster lettering spanning the 1920’s to the 1950’s drives the very heart of every feature and weight this font has to offer. Winsel’s expanded design is sharp and angular, based on pointed brush strokes. Its thick, sturdy appearance will draw and direct your reader’s mind to the weight and importance of your messages and titling. Within the font’s full forces work a range of styles to achieve victory in the contest ahead: thick weights that are compact and muscular for carrying a heavier load and lighter, finer weights to lead you through your more sensitive operations. It stands equipped with OpenType features, ready to support most European Latin-based languages and providing features such as Small Caps and Titling Caps in all nine of its weights. Well-honed for the task ahead, Winsel has been crafted to ride out the storm of mediocrity and to outlive the merits of inconsequence, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. There has never been in all the world such an opportunity for you. With Winsel, you shall go on till the end. You shall write on the beaches. You shall write on the landing grounds. You shall write with growing confidence and growing strength in print or on the air. Every morn has brought forth a noble chance. Your chance this day is Winsel.

Farmland JNL is an unusual Western version of Cornfield JNL. The shape of the original letters (inspired by a 1950s popcorn box) create a new variation on the lettering of the Old West.

Art Nouveau lettering on the cover of sheet music for the 1911 song "The Skeleton Rag" (by Edward Madden and Percy Wenrich) is both the lettering inspiration and namesake for Skeleton Rag JNL.

The typeface "AI" is designed base on the new relationship between Human and machine. Reflecting the concept of "Ghost in the shell" which contains typeface features from both Sans-serif and Serif font.

Cerulean echoes the elegant lines of an Old English typeface, but is pared down for versatility. The alternative characters, available in the swash version are intended to compliment the more legible regular style.

Moon Corps was designed as a simplistic approach to the Japanese katakana script. Though the look of the font is supposed to evoke futurism, the primary intent was always to put legibility first.

Sasparillo is an "extreme" Tuscan face, with reversed emphasis, by which we mean the horizontals are far heavier than the verticals. Recreate the spirit of the "Wild West" with a sense of fun!

The hand-lettered name of the "Junior Showcard Printer" (a 1930s-era rubber stamp printing set manufactured by the Superior Marking Equipment Company of Chicago) served as the prototype for Junior Printer JNL.

Vintage Comics JNL was inspired by the way the word “comics” was hand lettered on many of the comic book covers of the 1940s, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Maria-Ballé-Initials are derived from the Ballé series I made by the Bauer foundry. When set at 60 pt this font will match the size of the original 48-pt Didot design.

Danger Neue is the latest version of the popular Danger font. In this version, the contours of the letters are finalized and improved. Contains an extended set of glyphs and open type features.

Mad Cash is punked, grunged and shattered - all at the same time! When viewed at a small scale, the font seems grungy - but the larger you view it, the more shattered details appears!

This font was inspired by music from the band Silverstein. The main characteristics are the incredibly thin, orgainic lines.

Fragua Pro is a family of 14 fonts (Latin Extended-A and the Cyrillic alphabet) Condensed Sans Serif of geometric construction inspired by the Russian constructivism of the mid-20th century; the typography has a rounded finish in all corners to avoid the coldness of the rectilinear fonts and providing warmth and docility, the ascending and descending short and a high height of the x make it very compact, all this results in a unique typeface with maximum readability due to the careful configuration of metrics and Kerning. The cursive styles have an inclination of 8 degrees and a narrower proportion than the regular ones, they also have their own letters and meticulous optical corrections to compensate for the deformations produced by the inclination. Fragua Sans has Advanced Open Type functions, several alternative letters, full support for numbers, monetary symbols and crypto currencies and more. 681 glyphs. This typography is specially designed for advertising and editorial composition, behaving correctly in both short and medium texts and headlines where horizontal space saving is needed, being an ideal typographic system for signage, editorial or corporate design. This typography is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather C·ndido (Pa), the blacksmith of my town. THE COMPLETE 14 FONTS PACKAGE INCLUDES THE REGULAR VERSION IN "VARIABLE FONT" FORMAT, compatible with Adobe CC 2018.

RRollie is a typeface family inspired on the proportions of the Roman capital in the Augusto's age, some of them can be seen in inscriptions of Pompeii; in this particular case, it has taken an inscription from a tomb of the year 15 AD. The subtlety of the serif is hardly insinuates, helping to strut the terminals of the stems. Ascenders and descenders are very short. The thickness variation is presented quite delicate, highlighting the light-dark passage and even the agile counterblocks of the typeface. These fonts can be used in many kind of graphic works by its strong personality, visual impact and readability. This font family include OpenType features: Standard and discretionary ligatures, small caps, case sensitive from, old style figures, tabular, diacritics for western languages and many others. Roberto Rollie (1935-2003) was an outstanding professional of Graphic Design, Photography and Visual Artist. He was involved in the creation of the career of Visual Communication Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts (National University of La Plata, Argentina), in the late '60s; he was a pioneer and great teacher too, who loved the Roman Capitals for its subtle and balanced design, especially for high readability and clever design. Those who, like me, knew him as a person and teacher, we are deeply grateful for having received their warmth and enthusiasm for graphic design.

The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

Essay is an elegant serif typeface intended for setting books, with many stylistic alternates and other typographic goodies, designed by Stefan Ellmer. It is a highly legible text face with a natural flow of reading. This is enhanced by a slight slant of the roman, the combination of open and closed apertures and the amalgamation of organic strokes and counters with a static, fully straight baseline. Essay Text Regular looks back to the spirit of the french Renaissance, when the roman typographic letterforms came to full emancipation. Departing from that historical reference, Essay Text gets rid of all sentimental antiquity and becomes a contemporary interpretation of the “archetypes” of that period. Essay Text Italic refers to that more vaguely, resulting in a formalised look with fairly upright and open shapes and little cursiveness. As in the Renaissance, before the mating of roman and italic, Essay Text Italic works as a separate text face and a perfect secondary type. The name Essay derives from the literary meaning of the word, attempt or trial. Therefore, the typeface Essay can be seen as an attempt to express an opinion about reading, the omnipresence of history, the importance of calligraphy and the importance to deviate from that calligraphic source; as well as an attempt to crystallise lettershapes in balance between convention and the designer’s personal idiom.

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.

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul