Johann Neudörffer the Elder's 1538 writing manual fascinated the German designer Helmut Bomm for years. Together with Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Andreä, Neudörffer helped create Fraktur, perhaps the most Germanic of all the blackletter styles. As a tribute to this master, and bringing its letterforms to a 21st century public, Boom released the Neudoerffer Fraktur family through Linotype in 2009. Neudoerffer Fraktur's appearance is based very much in handwriting, and Bomm had already begun using letters from prototype versions of this typeface as early as the 1990s. For years, Neudoerffer Fraktur'sletters would appear secretly and seductively in design projects like historical sign restorations or heraldry pieces. The sources that Bomm used while drawing the typeface were images from Jan Tschichold's Treasures of Calligraphy" and Albert Kapr's "Schriftkunst." The Neudoerffer Fraktur family has four separate fonts. Any user of Adobe CS applications should consider licensing Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular (the font without any numeral suffixes). This font contains three different OpenType stylistic sets. Users can pick and choose which versions of the letters that they would like to set. Anyone using Quark XPress, Microsoft Word, or other applications without support for Stylistic Sets should license Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 1, Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 2, and Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 3. Each of these three fonts has letters with slightly different style of flourish, and all three may be combined with each other. Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 1 is optimal for longer texts; Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 2 contains alternate letters, and well as more ornamented capitals; Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 3's letters have a stronger calligraphic accent."

Vulpa is a charming serif family in regular, italic and bold, informed by the proportions of a personal favorite, Plantin. The quirky foxtail terminals (inspired in part by my script font, Gelato Script) can be seen across all three styles. These little details make the typeface very expressive at display sizes, but practically disappear at text sizes, making for a very versatile face. Across the three styles there are a number of useful OpenType features which make Vulpa capable of demanding typographic work, even though there are only three styles. Regular, italic and bold are all you really need anyway! The regular and bold weights both include small caps, and the italic features swash capitals for most letters. The italic also features quaint discretionary ligatures, and all styles include standard ligatures, automatic fractions, proportional and tabular, lining and oldstyle figures. If this isn't enough, the Vulpa family also includes Ornaments and Drop-Cap fonts. There is an ornament for A to B, a to b and 0 to 9. These have been carefully designed to match the feel of the text fonts, and many are influenced by ornaments and fleurons from the ATF 1912 Type Specimen book. The drop-caps have an engraved look, and two color versions can be made by overlaying upper and lower case. Despite the lack of weights compared to ‘workhorse’ faces, the charm and versatility of Vulpa make it a really useful typeface, that I hope you'll enjoy using as much as I enjoyed making.

Advertisers Gothic is bold and brash, like the city it comes from, Chicago. It was designed by the accomplished German-American matrix engraver, Robert Wiebking, for the Western Type Foundry in 1917. As its name suggests, it was designed for commercial headliner work, much as Publicity Gothic by Sidney Gaunt for BB&S the year before. See our Publicity Headline. Alternate letters ‘A’ & ‘S’ are provided. The most popular ad words “Free!”, “New!” and “Sale” (with both esses) are provided at an angle for dramatic tension. Advertisers Gothic became quite popular because it was effective. It can work equally well for a flyer advertising a non-profit event as for a magazine product ad. This font refuses to be a wimp. Use it boldly. Advertisers Gothic ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. A total of 335 glyphs (compare) with added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, ornm, liga, hist & salt ˜ with total 13 lookups. 3. Added 209 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. The most popular ad words “Free!”, “New!” and “Sale” (with both esses) are provided at an angle for dramatic tension The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

German graphic designer Ralf Weissmantel created Boogie in 2003. Boogie is an ironic reference to pop art, and to disco lettering from the 1960s and 70s. Its round forms and outlines evoke the flashing, pulsating lights and music of that era. Shipping with five different, width-compatible fonts, the Boogie typeface has four different components: an outlined letterform is the base element, and forms the first font. Three additional fonts may be layered over top of this base, surrounding the first font with up to three bubble-outlines. In graphics applications like Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator, these elements can each be assigned different colors. There is also a fifth font, which contains the base outlined letterform pre-surrounded by three additional outlines of the same color. Boogie works best in large headline, display and signage applications, where its forms can be clearly seen and enjoyed. When different colored layers are applied, text set in Boogie will gyrate and jive across the page! Weissmantel has worked as an art director for various international advertising agencies, and has led Corporate Design projects for firms such as Grey and MetaDesign. His design work, honored internationally, has been included in the typography collection of the Museum for Art and Trade in Hamburg. He is currently teaching graphic design at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Weissmantel has been an associate of the United Designers Network since August 2002. Boogie received an Honorable Mention in the 2003 International Type Design Contest, sponsored by Linotype GmbH.

CA Capoli is a fine script typeface with a vintage touch. Perfect for illustrative titles or logotypes. It comes in two styles, Regular and Stroke. The inspiration came during our trip to Italy, where we took a short rest in a bar during a hot day. We discovered a simple ceramic ashtray on the table. The word “Nido” was inscribed in a typeface that looked like it dated back to the 1950s. We made some investigations about the word, its meaning and origin but it still remains a big mystery. Was it the name of a hotel or a restaurant or some vintage Italian cigarettes? We don’t know. We were so amazed about the design of the logo that we decided to create a typeface out of it. A sophisticated endeavor because we just had four letters. How could the rest of the letters – if it ever existed – have looked like? Our hypothesis is CA Capoli. A typeface with a full Central European character set and some nice alternative letters to chose from. When we thought about “Nido” and its possible derivation of hotel business, we felt like creating a small side project for this typeface, a brand for a fictional hotel called Hotel Capoli with business cards, letterheads, a reception book, key fobs and embroidered patches for the service dress of the hotel service stuff. The Hotel Capoli is located at the wonderful beach of Cape Arcona on the fictional country of Arcona Islands where our type foundry is located.

Haarlemmer is a recreation of a never-produced Jan Van Krimpen typeface that goes one step beyond authentic: it shows how he wanted it to be designed in the first place. The original, drawn in the late 1930s, was created for the Dutch Society for the Art of Printing and Books and was to be used to set a new edition of the Bible, using Monotype typesetting. Hence the problem: fonts for metal typesetting machines like the Linotype and Monotype had to be created within a crude system of predetermined character width values. Every letter had to fit within and have its spacing determined by a grid of only 18 units. Often, the italic characters had to share the same widths as those in the roman design. Van Krimpen believed this severely impaired the design process. The invasion of Holland in World War II halted all work on the Bible project, and the original Haarlemmer never went into production. Flash forward about sixty years. Frank E. Blokland, of The Dutch Type Library, wanted to revive the original Haarlemmer, but this time as Van Krimpen would have intended. Blokland reinterpreted the original drawings and created a typeface that matched, as much as possible, Van Krimpen's initial concept. While Van Krimpen's hand could no longer be on the tiller, a thorough study of his work made up for his absence. The result is an exceptional text family of three weights, with complementary italic designs and a full suite of small caps and old style figures. Van Krimpen would be proud.

Here in the heart of Santa Monica, in the disused 1940s aircraft hangar we like to call the Comicraft Studios, we know that times are tough. As we were driving to “work” in the back of our chauffeur driven Humvee limo, sipping martinis out of the navels of Playboy bunnies and wondering what font we should release next, we decided it was time to reach out to the poor people. Yes, we felt it was time to create a font for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, for the wretched refuse of our teeming shores. A font, if you will, for the tempest-tossed. It’s a little skinny and might be described as pinched and starved, but it’s guaranteed to see you through this current economic crisis as only the 26 letters of the alphabet can. It was a tall order, but Jazzy JG Roshell created this one while he was in line at the bank, waiting for his personal bailout. Meticulously crafted using one of those ballpoint pens attached to the cashier’s station by elastic, Credit Crunch is the Hamburger Helper of comic book fonts. It’s kind of a hybrid -- just like the Priuses our trophy wives drive to their personal plastic surgeons -- and it’s solar powered and also comes with a tank full of good old fashioned Biro ink. The Recession, Climate Change AND Global Hunger will probably end mere minutes after you crack open your life’s savings to buy this font. How can you afford NOT to...? See the families related to Credit Crunch: Credit Extension.

Halloween lends itself to graphic images: witches, ghosts, bats, jack-o'lanterns and haunted houses. When we think of a haunted house, we generally think of a large, abandoned, derelict Victorian wood-frame house. The style is usually Second Empire or Queen Anne. There tends to be a lot of decoration. There is usually a porch or two with decorative spindle work. There is probably a tower, either square with a mansard roof such as one might see in Paris or round with a conical roof borrowed from a Loire Valley chateau. These houses were generally built in the United States between 1860 and 1900, products of the exuberance of a time before income tax. It took at least three servants to maintain such a house and was very expensive. Few can afford them today. That is why so many were converted to professional offices, multi-family dwellings or simply abandoned. HAUNTED HOUSE is our typographical contribution to Halloween. Based on our font PETRARKA ML, it features decorative capitol letters that utilize the silhouette of a Second Empire style house complete with a dead tree and a full moon. The font includes 8 ornaments suitable for flyers and party invitations. Revision 2.000 eliminates dual encoding, harmonizes metrics, adds new glyphs, and adds open type features. The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Metron is so far the most ambitious typeface made to order in the Czech Republic. Despite the fact that for a number of years it has not been used for the purpose for which it was designed, every inhabitant of Prague is still well aware of its typical features. Metron Pro was commissioned by the Transport Company of the Capital City of Prague in 1970 to be used in the information system of the Prague Metro. It was first published in the manual of the Metroprojekt company in 1973 and then used to the full, under the author’s supervision, for lines “A” and “C”. Since 1985 Rathouský's system has been disappearing from the Prague Metro; it survives only in the form of metal letters at its stations and at some stations of the Czechoslovak Railways. In 2014 we're mentioning the 90th birthday of Jiří Rathouský. It’s a good opportunity for updating and re-introducing his Metron. Extended was the choice of figures and fractions, new currency signs added, diacritics revised, etc., but above all the newly designed Cyrillics including true SmallCaps. Now we have six weights plus italics, where the tone of the basic style is even closer to the original. Ten years back we've had the feeling that this typeface should again take a part of Prague’s traffic system and today, when revisiting of all the fonts, the feeling turned to certainty. The main feature of this typeface is namely a noticeability a property above all welcomed in rush of platforms.

The ideal typeface for cartography The Swiss designer/typographer Felix Arnold designed Cisalpin during the late 1990s, after he had challenged himself to create a contemporary typeface that could be used for cartographic uses. Arnold came to the subject of cartographic typefaces after analyzing many maps and atlases, and discovering that there was no standard typeface for these types of documents. Like any good cartographic type, Cisalpin is very legible at small sizes. While he was drawing this typeface on his computer, Arnold used a reduction glass to refine his design, making it work in these situations. Cisalpin is a linear sans serif face, with slight resemblance to renaissance serif types. The various weights are all clearly differentiated from one another. And because space is often a premium on maps, Cisalpin runs narrow. Words close in around themselves to help them become more identifiable. The letterforms in Cisalpin are durable, and can maintain their readability when placed over complex backgrounds. They have open interior forms, flattened curves, tall x-heights, and a capital height that almost reaches the tops of the ascenders. Cisalpin also has pronounced Italics, with a very clear angle of inclination. Each letterform in the family has been optimized so that they cannot be easily mistaken for another. This again helps minimize the misunderstandings that often occur because of illegibility. Although Cisalpin was developed for use in cartography, it may be used for countless other purposes; any font that can work well in small sizes on a map could be used almost anywhere else!

Wedding Regular was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for ATF and released as Wedding Text in 1901. It is a lighter version of his ENGRAVER'S OLD ENGLISH of the same period. Wedding Regular is based on the Textura style of blackletter that continued in popularity in England into the 16th century, long after the Dutch, French and Italians had moved to a Roman model that expressed the Renaissance humanism of the period. Wedding Headline is a still lighter version of the regular text face, suitable for setting larger sizes while still preserving the delicacy of the decorative hairlines. Textura continues in use in England and the United States for newspaper mastheads, gift shop signs, wedding invitations and programs and other applications where a feeling of tradition is desired. I recently saw an 1980ish photo of a “Tubby Isaac” sign in London using textura. I believe Benton’s design captures that feeling without being heavy-handed and still remaining quite readable for eyes accustomed to Roman lettering. Both Wedding Regular and Wedding Headline convey a comfortable familiarity. These two fonts may be purchased together at an attractive discount or they may be purchased separately. The full character set may be found in the pdf file that you can download from the gallery section. The two monks (alt-0172 and alt-0177) are from a set of sixteenth century decorative initial letters by Gering and Renbolt. Please note that there are two different eszetts, the blackletter style at alt-0126 and the antiqua style at the alt-0223.

Cocomat has been designed by Francesco Canovaro and Debora Manetti as a development of the Coco Gothic typeface system created by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini. It shares with all the other subfamilies in the Coco Gothic system a geometric skeleton with open, more humanistic proportions, a sans serif design with slightly rounded corners and low contrast proportions, without optical compensation on the horizontal lines, resulting in a quasi-inverted contrast look in the boldest weights. What differentiates Cocomat from the other subfamilies in Coco Gothic are some slight design touches in the uppercase letters, with a vertical unbalancing reminiscent of art deco design, notably evident in uppercase "E", "A","F","P" and "R" - while lowercase letters have been given some optical compensation on the stems, like in "n","m", "p" and "q". These design choices, evoking the second and third decade of the last century (Cocomat is also referred as Coco 1920 in the Coco Gothic Family) all give Cocomat a slight vintage feeling, making it a perfect choice every time you need to add a period vibe or an historical flair to your design, like in food or luxury branding. The typeface, first published in 2014, has been completely redesigned by the original authors in 2019 as Cocomat PRO to include eight extra weights (thin, medium, black and heavy in both roman and italic form), extra open type features (including alternate forms, positional numerals), and extra glyphs making Cocomat cover over two hundred languages using latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets.

Alfie™ is lively, friendly, inviting and easy on the eyes. What more could you want in a script? How about four flavors of the same design? Alfie Script is a delightful connecting script with a touch of comfortable elegance. Use it for everything from social announcements to headlines and packaging. Alfie Casual is a little more laid-back with letters standing on their own. It works great in short blocks of text copy, subheads and navigational links. Alfie Informal has spirited serifs and its own demeanor, while Alfie Small Caps does a fine job of supporting its other siblings. There’s an immediacy to words and messages set in these lighthearted confections. Jim Ford was practicing drawing with a new brush pen when the inspiration for Alfie came to him. He had filled several pages in a notebook with letters and, at one point, realized that there might be a typeface among them. As it turned out, there were four. The process, however, wasn’t choosing one design and modifying it. The makings of all the designs were on the pages. It was just a matter of culling out the right collection of characters to build the foundations for the four flavors of Alfie. Because they share the same family roots, each design in the Alfie family can be paired and intermixed. Ford admits that there’s a hint of Emil Klumpp’s 1950s Murray Hill typeface (https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/murray-hill/) in the Alfie family. Just enough to give the design a 50s vibe. (Some fashions never go out of style.)

Whomp takes its inspiration from the work of an American master in sign painting and alphabet manipulation: Alf Becker . In 1932, Becker began designing a series of alphabets to be published in Signs of the Times magazine at the rate of one alphabet per month. Nine years later, 100 of those alphabets were compiled in one book that became an enormous success among sign painters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many Alf Becker alphabets were digitized with blurbs that falsely credit an “Alf Becker typeface”. Alf Becker was not really a typeface kind of guy. He was more of a calligrapher and sign painter. His alphabets were either incomplete or full of variations on different letters, and didn't become typefaces until the digital era. This particular Becker alphabet was quite incomplete. In fact, it wasn't a showing of an alphabet, but words on a poster. Alejandro Paul took the challenge of drawing, digitizing, restructuring, and finally building a complete usable typeface from that partial alphabet. He then extended his pleasure by once again playing with the wonderful possibilities of OpenType. Whomp comes with more than 100 alternates, tons of swashy endings and ligatures, all built into the font and accessible through OpenType palettes in programs that support such features. This is the in-your-face kind of font that stands among other Becker-based alphabets as paying most homage to the vision of this great American artist who saw letters as live ever-changing beings. Whomp is right at home when used on packaging, signage, posters, and entertainment related products.

La tipografía “Tipo Metro CDMX” fue desarrollada por Lance Wyman como parte del proyecto “Metro” desde los años setenta, y es uno de los elementos clave de la cultura visual del transporte del Sistema de Transporte Colectivo Metro (STC Metro). Este estilo se ha convertido en el icónico fundamental del trasporte público para los residentes de la Ciudad de México. En esta edición, los tipos minúsculas son una adaptación “no oficial” para el Tipo Metro CDMX, enriqueciendo la tipografía a un estilo visual de altas y bajas, por lo que se prescinde del diseño base como trabajo propio para enfatizar los tipos minúsculas exclusivamente, además de que se han añadido algunos caracteres de acentuación extendiendo su uso a otros lenguajes. Los tipos son una nueva propuesta por Ixipcalli en el presente año 2023. The “Tipo Metro CDMX” typeface was developed by Lance Wyman as part of the “Metro” project since the 1970s, and is one of the key elements of the visual culture of transportation of the Metro Collective Transportation System (STC Metro). This style has become the iconic fundamental of public transportation for the residents of Mexico City. In this edition, the lowercase types are an “unofficial” adaptation for the Tipo Metro CDMX, enriching the typography with a visual style of highs and lows, so the base design is dispensed with as my own work to emphasize the lowercase types exclusively, In addition, some accentuation characters have been added, extending their use to other languages. The types are a new proposal by Ixipcalli in the current year 2023.

The Palatino™ typeface was first designed over 50 years ago by Hermann Zapf, and is probably the most universally admired and used of his type designs. In 1950, it was punchcut in metal by August Rosenberger at D. Stempel AG typefoundry in Frankfurt am Main, and then adapted for Linotype machine composition. Zapf optimized Palatino's design for legibility by giving it open counters and carefully weighted strokes, producing a typeface that was legible even on the inferior paper of the post-World War II period. The font was named after Giambattista Palatino, a master of calligraphy from the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Palatino is a typeface based on classical Italian Renaissance forms. It has become a modern classic in itself, and is popular among professional graphic designers and amateurs alike. Palatino works well for both text and display typography. The new Palatino™ Linotype typefaces are OpenType format fonts, which include many newly designed characters in four large character sets; including extensive support for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, as well as for Central European and many other languages. The Palatino Linotype OpenType fonts contains the following Microsoft code pages: 1252 Latin 1, 1250 Latin 2 Eastern, 1251 Cyrillic, 1253 Greek with polytonic Greek, 1254 Turk, 1257 Windows Baltic, and 1258 Windows Vietnamese. The fonts also include many ligature glyphs, including some historical long s-ligatures, as well as sets of Small Caps, Old style Figures, and vertical & diagonal fractions. Each font contains 1325 different glyphs.

The Handel Gothic? typeface has been a mainstay of graphic communication for over 40 years - all the while looking as current as tomorrow. Designed by Don Handel in the mid-1960s, and used in the 1973 United Airlines logo developed by Saul Bass, Handel Gothic was an instant success when released to the graphic design community. Its generous lowercase x-height, full-bodied counters and square proportions make the design highly readable at a wide range of sizes. Handel Gothic's slightly idiosyncratic character shapes gave the face a futuristic look 40 years ago that retains its power today. In addition, its Uncial-like lowercase is instantly identifiable - and unique among sans serif typestyles. Award-winning type designer Rod McDonald was attracted to the simple, decisive forms of the original, but he felt the design needed to be refined and updated. ?One of my goals was to bring a modern typographic discipline to what was really an old phototypesetting font.? To achieve his goal, McDonald re-proportioned every character and balanced the delicate relationship between the curves and the straight strokes. He also added a number of alternate characters to extend the range of the design. ?I wanted to give designers a large enough character set so they wouldn't feel constrained in what they could do. I want them to be able to play with the fonts, not just set words.? McDonald enlarged the family from the single-weight original to five weights, each with a full suite of alternate characters.In 2015 Nadine Chahine designed matching arabic weights to this family.

Caslon Antique is a decorative American typeface that was designed in 1894 by Berne Nadall. It was originally called "Fifteenth Century", but was renamed "Caslon Antique" by Nadall's foundry, Barnhart Bros. & Spindler, in the mid-1920s. The design of the typeface is meant to evoke the Colonial era. Early printers would reuse metal type over and over again, and the faces would become chipped and damaged from use. Caslon Antique emulates this look. Despite the name, it is not a member of the Caslon family of typefaces. The renaming is believed to have been a marketing maneuver to boost the popularity of a previously unpopular typeface by associating it with the highly popular Caslon types. Caslon Antique is popular today when a "old-fashioned" or "gothic" look is desired. It is used by the musical group The Sisters of Mercy on their albums, for the logo of the musical Les Misérables, and for the covers of the books in A Series of Unfortunate Events. It is also frequently used on historical displays. It was used for the previous edition of the Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play. Most recently, it has been used on promotional material for the smash musical Monty Python's Spamalot on Broadway, the West End, and its tour of the United States. British 80's band The The also used the font in several of their music videos, usually displaying several lyrics from the song in the opening scenes. It used on the cover of Regina Spektor's album, Begin to Hope. This description was sourced (in part) from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

LaFarge is a typeface primarily inspired by the historic mosaic titling capitals found in the New York City Subway, designed by architect Squire J. Vickers and his staff between 1915-1927. These elegant but industrial signs are characteristic of early-20th century American architectural lettering, and show an evolution of the classical Roman capitals to lower contrast, bolder serifs, and more regular character widths. The majority of this lettering still remains in subway stations today, and though elements of the style vary from sign to sign, many carry the unique features that are reflected in LaFarge: high-waisted crossbars with angled serifs, elegantly curved “R” leg, and distinctive trapezoidal serifs. LaFarge expands this style into a lower case, taking cues from contemporary typefaces like Bookman, Cheltenham, and Della Robbia. A number of typographic features are included, such as small caps, ordinal indicators / superscript letters, arrows, and a set of borders inspired by early subway tile. The result is a fashionable, architecturally-minded typeface that is just as at home on the façade of a grand public building as it is on packaging, magazines, or the web. LaFarge works well in both text and display settings, remaining readable at small sizes but showing off its elegant details in larger uses. LaFarge has received the Communication Arts Typography Award, the ADC Annual Merit Award, is included in the 2020 STA 100, and was part of designer Greg Shutters’ winning portfolio in the 2019 Type Directors Club Ascender Awards. You can download a PDF specimen of LaFarge, and also view a video of LaFarge in action.

Built in 1930 - 1935 by Dutch architect Wolff Schoemaker, the Swarha Islamic Building was originally used as a lodging for the honoured guest country and the journalists for Asia-Africa Conference in 1955. This building has an important role as one of Bandung historical art deco heritage, with the art deco typefaces styles on it's singage in this building, giving it a more classic west and east taste. Wolff Schoemaker was trying to combine the elements between eastern and western culture in design. One of his works was the Swarha Islamic Building in a circular design with rounded and high dynamic angle. Unfortunately the Swarha Islamic Building has been abandoned and and less attentioned by the local people itself to preserve this historic building. So I'm trying to raise the value of the historical heritage by creating this typefaces. This typefaces was inspired by the Swarha Building characteristic itself with its solid construction and dynamic, by adding classic taste on each characters. Available in two styles, Neue and Rounded represents the classic architectural Swarha Islamic Building styles with tropical Bandung Art Deco taste. This typeface is highly usable as a display type for your designs, and will fit with movie titles, magazines, your classic shops logo and signage designs, or you can use this typefaces as your web pages headlines. The characters of this typefaces are only in uppercase style, but it built with small caps on the lowercase featured, and additional Opentype Features were loaded, some stylistic alternates, accessible catchwords in the discretionary ligatures, and standard ligatures.

ITC Johnston is the result of the combined talents of Dave Farey and Richard Dawson, based on the work of Edward Johnston. In developing ITC Johnston, says London type designer Dave Farey, he did “lots of research on not only the face but the man.” Edward Johnston was something of an eccentric, “famous for sitting in a deck chair and carrying toast in his pockets.” (The deck chair was his preferred furniture in his own living room; the toast was so that he’d always have sustenance near at hand.) Johnston was also almost single-handedly responsible, early in this century, for the revival in Britain of the Renaissance calligraphic tradition of the chancery italic. His book Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering (with its peculiar extraneous comma in the title) is a classic on its subject, and his influence on his contemporaries was tremendous. He is perhaps best remembered, however, for the alphabet that he designed in 1916 for the London Underground Railway (now London Transport), which was based on his original “block letter” model. Johnston’s letters were constructed very carefully, based on his study of historical writing techniques at the British Museum. His capital letters took their form from the best classical Roman inscriptions. “He had serious rules for his sans serif style,” says Farey, “particularly the height-to-weight ratio of 1:7 for the construction of line weight, and therefore horizontals and verticals were to be the same thickness. Johnston’s O’s and C’s and G’s and even his S’s were constructions of perfect circles. This was a bit of a problem as far as text sizes were concerned, or in reality sizes smaller than half an inch. It also precluded any other weight but medium ‘ any weight lighter or heavier than his 1:7 relationship.” Johnston was famously slow at any project he undertook, says Farey. “He did eventually, under protest, create a bolder weight, in capitals only ‘ which took twenty years to complete.” Farey and his colleague Richard Dawson have based ITC Johnston on Edward Johnston’s original block letters, expanding them into a three-weight type family. Johnston himself never called his Underground lettering a typeface, according to Farey. It was an alphabet meant for signage and other display purposes, designed to be legible at a glance rather than readable in passages of text. Farey and Dawson’s adaptation retains the sparkling starkness of Johnston’s letters while combining comfortably into text. Johnston’s block letter bears an obvious resemblance to Gill Sans, the highly successful type family developed by Monotype in the 1920s. The young Eric Gill had studied under Johnston at the London College of Printing, worked on the Underground project with him, and followed many of the same principles in developing his own sans serif typeface. The Johnston letters gave a characteristic look to London’s transport system after the First World War, but it was Gill Sans that became the emblematic letter form of British graphic design for decades. (Johnston’s sans serif continued in use in the Underground until the early ‘80s, when a revised and modernized version, with a tighter fit and a larger x-height, was designed by the London design firm Banks and Miles.) Farey and Dawson, working from their studio in London’s Clerkenwell, wanted to create a type family that was neither a museum piece nor a bastardization, and that would “provide an alternative of the same school” to the omnipresent Gill Sans. “These alphabets,” says Farey, referring to the Johnston letters, “have never been developed as contemporary styles.” He and Dawson not only devised three weights of ITC Johnston but gave it a full set of small capitals in each weight ‘ something that neither the original Johnston face nor the Gill faces have ‘ as well as old-style figures and several alternate characters.

Sultan is a revival and expansion of a 1954 Matrin Kausche typeface called Mosaik. This design highlights the unmistakable Arabic/Moorish calligraphy influence on Celtic lettering, by way of the highly active Andalusian culture from the ninth century until the crusades in the early eleventh century. Although Celtic lettering evolved on its own and prompted different calligraphic styles after the crusades, elements of the Arabic influence survived with it, its appeal remaining evident to this very day. For instance, this kind of lettering is very similar to the one Louis Tiffany used to make the most recognizable athletic insignia in North America - the New York Yankees logo, which is now over 110 years old, and has inspired hundreds of spin-offs in many athletic and non-athletic fields all over the world. The original character set made by Kausche was quite minimal, consisting of only numerals and uppercase letters along with a few alternates. But in this digital version the set has been considerably expanded into uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation, a complete set of accented characters, and more than 15 alternate letters built into the font. Sultan is a great font choice particularly for design contexts of fantasy, middle ages legend, mystical and new age content, pirate literature, and Irish history. But it is also an excellent all-purpose display and poster font in general.

Kadigan: (noun) A placeholder word. A kadigan can be used to substitute for any other noun: persons (John Doe, Acme Company), places (Anytown, 123 Main Street) or things (whatchamacallit, thingamajig). Just like kadigans can be used in nearly any situation, the members of the Kadigan font family can be used in nearly any design! These sans-serif beauties are clear and easy to use, but they also have a little bit of wiggle in their strokes and weights, for a fun hand-lettered look! The three members of the family: - Kadigan Light: An all-purpose lightweight stroke, with sharp corners. - Kadigan: A nice mid-weight stroke, with slightly rounded corners. - Kadigan Heavy: A thick, chonky stroke with pillowy rounded corners. And each member of the family is packed with features, including: - All of the basic stuff you expect from every font; - 340+ extended Latin characters; - Cyrillic character set; - Greek character set; - Those character sets? Support over 110 languages! - 52 double-letter ligatures for variety (That's right, EVERY letter. I'm looking at you, savvy revved trekkers!); - A full set of small caps (including Cyrillic & Greek); - And more! (Seriously, it was hard to stop.) So whether your work is in English, Español, български, ελληνικά, Türkçe, or over a hundred other languages, this cute and fun sans-serif may be just what you've been looking for!

Lc Trinidad is the result of a series of wonderings regarding geometric Sans Serif typography design, in particular; Futura of Paul Renner. A “conversation” arose between me and the designer – actually there was no conversation, it is an euphemism for “I saw his designs, I draw them and discussed with myself some of his decisions – that ended up being the origin of this font firsts glyphs: A, H, N, O, R and S. I started with uppercase letters, and here is when Rudolf Koch with Kabel and his “Das schreibbuchlein” joined the conversation. This is how I could develop some alternative lowercase letters so as to illustrate this imaginary discussion. The result is a sans serif, geometric, modern typeface with classical Roman proportion in the uppercase letters; two stylistic sets for lowercase letters (setKoch and setRenner), rational, open and sharp ends. It is ideal to form titles, medium length texts, branding, exhibitions and animations. The family consists of 9 weight variants and their corresponding oblique versions and small caps. With more than 900 glyphs, it covers more than 190 Latin languages and together with its Opentype functions it creates a modern and versatile family. Besides, it has powerful OpenType features for each style, including stylistic sets, extended language support, ligatures, contextual alternates, lining figures, oldstyle figures, small caps numbers, arrows, fractions, superscripts, subscripts and many more.

Over the past few years, every designer has seen the surprising outbreak of blackletter types in marketing campaigns for major sports clothing manufacturers, a few phone companies, soft drink makers, and more recently on entertainment and music products. In such campaigns, blackletter type combined with photos of usual daily activity simply adds a level of strength and mystique to things we see and do on a regular basis. But we couldn't help noticing that the typography was very odd in such campaigns, where the type overpowers all the other design elements. This is because almost all blackletter fonts ever made express too much strength and time-stamp themselves in a definite manner, thereby eliminating themselves as possible type choices for a variety of common contemporary design approaches, such as minimal, geometric, modular, etc. So extending the idea of using blackletter in modern design was a bit of a wild goose chase for us. But we finally found the face that completes the equation no other blackletter could fit into: Leather is a digitization and major expansion of Imre Reiner's forgotten but excellent 1933 Gotika design, which was very much ahead of its time. In its own time this design saw very little use because it caused problems to printers, where the thin serifs and inner bars were too fragile and broke off too easily when used in metal. But now, more than seventy years later, it seems like it was made for current technologies, and it is nothing short of being the perfect candidate for using blackletter in grid-based settings. Leather has three features usually not found in other blackletter fonts: - Grid-based geometric strokes and curves: In the early 1930s, blackletter design had already begun interacting back with the modern sans serif it birthed at the turn of the century. This design is one of the very few manifestations of such interaction. - Fragile, Boboni-like serifs, sprout from mostly expected places in the minuscules, but are sprinkled very aesthetically on some of the majuscules. The overall result is magnificently modern. - The usual complexity of blackletter uppercase's inner bars is rendered simple, geometric and very visually appealing. The contrast between the inner bars and thick outer strokes creates a surprising circuitry-like effect on some of the letters (D, O, Q), wonderfully plays with the idea of fragile balances on some others (M, N and P), and boldly introduces new concepts on others (B, F, K, L, R). Our research seems to suggest that the original numerals used with this design in the 1930s were adopted from a previous Imre Reiner typeface. They didn't really fit with the idea of this font, so we created brand new numerals for Leather. We also expanded the character set to cover all Western Latin-based languages, and scattered plenty of alternates and ligatures throughout the map. The name, Leather, was derived from a humorous attempt at naming a font. Initially we wanted to call it Black Leather (blackletter...blackleather), but the closer we came to finishing it, the more respect we developed for its attempt to introduce a plausible convergence between two entirely different type categories. Sadly for the art, this idea of convergence didn't go much further back then, due to technological limitations and the eventual war a few years later. We're hoping this revival would encourage people to look at blackletter under a new light in these modern times of multiple design influences.