A heavy graffiti-inspired font! Don't drop it, 'cos it's weight might crush the floor!

Philip Bouwsma's Symposium Pro is a wide Carolingian script that can be set simply or with a wide range of flourishes. It takes its inspiration from the scriptoria of the twelfth century, particularly in Spain, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived harmoniously in a brilliant culture for two centuries. As manuscripts were translated and copied to meet the Western demand for classical texts, calligraphic elements from Arabic and Hebrew spread throughout Europe, sparking a proliferation of new styles that brought the simple book hand to a higher level. Symposium Pro spans a broad range of time and space, from the court of Charlemagne to the Arabian nights and Renaissance Florence. Symposium Pro comes in four weights, ranging from Light to Bold, with each font containing over 1200 glyphs. Variations on every letter form, from swashes to subtle alterations, are plenty, with some even having up to 40 alternates. Also plenty are the embedded ornaments and flourishes, over a hundred of them. Keep that glyph palette handy for many pleasant surprises and easy setting solutions.

The Catenary typeface was designed with the goal of creating an extremely-readable sans-serif font that could weather the future. Inspired by the beauty of the catenary curve, it's a blend of the transitional and the geometric that allows it to be readable while keeping its forms precise and consistent. Every character in its set is unique, leaving no confusion between similar letter forms. Sixes and nines can be distinguished even when they're upside down or sideways. The number one, the lowercase-L, and the uppercase-I can never be confused with one another, even without context. Throw b, d, g, p, and q into a jumble and the challenge of distinguishing the characters can easily be overcome. The Catenary family consists of eight fonts, six of which, the standard light/italic, regular/italic, and bold/italic, work as both excellent text fonts and exceptional display fonts. The two bonus fonts, a stencil and a guerrilla grunge style, make for great additional display font choices. The Catenary family is extremely versatile and ready for your toughest design work.

Georgia was originally designed in 1996 by Matthew Carter and hand-tuned for the screen by Tom Rickner. The Georgia family received a major update in 2011 by Monotype Imaging, The Font Bureau and Matthew Carter. Georgia is the serif companion to the sans serif screen font, Verdana. It was designed specifically to address the challenges of on-screen display with elegant yet sturdy and open forms. If you must have one serif face for reading on a computer, then you've found the best one right here. The original Georgia family included four fonts: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. The new and expanded Georgia Pro family contains 20 fonts in total. The Georgia Pro and Georgia Pro Condensed families each contain 10 fonts: Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold and Black (each with matching italic styles). Georgia Pro includes a variety of advanced typographic features including true small capitals, ligatures, fractions, old style figures, lining tabular figures and lining proportional figures. An OpenType-savvy application is required to access these typographic features.

Tweed is a journey into the 1930s world of hand-lettering. The design looks very much like the personal scribblings of an old-fashioned cartoon animator. It’s the sort of sketch-style you might find describing a goofy caterpillar or laughing willyworm. Tweed is fun and light-hearted with open and rounded letters of a somewhat musical quality. Derived from old letterforms popularized by Carl Holmes in his wonderful book on the subject, Tweed is basically friendly in nature. This typeface is great for personal greeting cards and stationery - any kind of casual correspondence. It works well in display situations, too. And yes, there is an alternate to the funny-looking “w” character. Just press option l (el) on Mac. Or Alt 0172 on Windows. Tweed is now available in the OpenType Std format. Some new stylistic alternates have been added to this OpenType version. Advanced features work in current versions of Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades.

ROARRR! THE STYLES -Pantera Pro is the most complete style, and although its default look is mono-rhythmic it gets really playful and crazy like the examples of the posters by just activating the Decorative Ligatures button in the Open-type Panel of Adobe Illustrator. However, I recommend using also the Glyphs Panel because there you'll find much more variants per letter. Pantera Pro is in fact, coded in a way the combination of thicknesses will always look fantastic. -Pantera Black Left, and Pantera Black Right are actually “lite” versions of Pantera Pro: They have very little Open-Type code, so what you see here is what you get. Pantera Black Left has its left strokes thick, while Pantera Black Right has its right strokes thick. -Pantera White is a lovely member in this family that looks lighter and airy, hence its name. With the feature Standard Ligatures activated (liga) the font gets very playful. -Pantera Caps is based on sign painters lettering and since it follows the same pointed brush rules as the other styles, it matches perfectly. -Pantera Claws like its name suggests, is a set of icons that were done by our dear panther. THE STORY It is said that typography can never be as expressive as calligraphy, but sometimes it can get close enough. I tend to think that calligraphic trials, in order to work well as potential fonts, need first to go through very strict filters before going digital: While calligraphy is synonym of freedom (once its rules are mastered), type-design, in the other hand, has its battlefield a little tighter and tougher. When I practice pointed brush lettering, there are so many things happening on the paper. And most of them are delicious. The ones who know my work may see that although many of my fonts are very expressive, my handmade brush trials are much more lively than them. With that in mind, this time I tried to go further and rescue more of those things that are lost in the process of thinking type when first sketches are calligraphic. I wondered if I could create something wild, hence its name Panther, by understanding the randomness that sometimes calligraphy conveys and turning it to something systemic: With Pantera, I created an ordered disorder. Like it happens a lot in many kinds of lettering styles, in order to enrich the written word the scribe mixes the thickness of the strokes and the width of the letters. Like one of my favorite mentors say (1), they make thoughtful gestures Some lively strokes go down with a thick, while some do that with a thin. Some letters are very narrow, meaning some of them will need to be very wide to compensate. Why not?. The calligrapher is always thinking on the following letters, and he/she designs in his head the combination of thicks and thins before he/she executes them. He/she knows the playful rhythm the words will have before writing them. It takes time and skill to master this and achieve graceful results. Going back to the font, in Pantera, this combination of varying thicknesses and widths of letters were Open-Type coded so the user will see satisfactory results by just enabling or disabling some buttons on the glyphs panel. I'm very pleased with the result since it’s not very easy to find fonts which play with the words' rhythm like Pantera does, following of course, a strong calligraphic base. I believe that if you were on the prowl for innovative fonts, this is your chance to go wild and get Pantera! NOTES (1) Phrase by Yves Leterme. In fact, it’s the title of a book by him. EPILOGUE Esta fuente está dedicada a mi panterita