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.

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.

Designs of characters that are almost forty years old can be already restored like a historical alphabet – by transferring them exactly into the computer with all their details. But, of course, it would not be Josef Tyfa, if he did not redesign the entire alphabet, and to such an extent that all that has remained from the original was practically the name. Tyfa published a sans-serif alphabet under the title Juvenis already in the second half of the past century. The type face had a large x-height of lower-case letters, a rather economizing design and one-sided serifs which were very daring for their time. In 1979 Tyfa returned to the idea of Juvenis, modified the letter “g” into a one-storey form, narrowed the design of the characters even further and added a bold and an inclined variant. This type face also shows the influence of Jaroslav Benda, evident in the open forms of the crotches of the diagonal strokes. Towards the end of 2001 the author presented a pile of tracing paper with dozens of variants of letter forms, but mainly with a new, more contemporary approach: the design is more open, the details softer, the figures and non-alphabetical characters in the entire set are more integral. The original intention to create a type face for printing children’s books thus became even more emphasized. Nevertheless, Juvenis with its new proportions far exceeds its original purpose. In the summer of 2002 we inserted all of this “into the machine” and designed new italics. The final computer form was completed in November 2002. All the twelve designs are divided into six variants of differing boldness with the corresponding italics. The darkness of the individual sizes does not increase linearly, but follows a curve which rises more steeply towards the boldest extreme. The human eye, on the contrary, perceives the darkening as a more fluent process, and the neighbouring designs are better graded. The x-height of lower-case letters is extraordinarily large, so that the printed type face in the size of nine points is perceived rather as “ten points” and at the same time the line spacing is not too dense. A further ingenious optical trick of Josef Tyfa is the figures, which are designed as moderately non-aligning ones. Thus an imaginary third horizontal is created in the proportional scheme of the entire type face family, which supports legibility and suitably supplements the original intention to create a children’s type face with elements of playfulness. The same applies to the overall soft expression of the alphabet. The serifs are varied; their balancing, however, is well-considered: the ascender of the lower-case “d” has no serif and the letter appears poor, while, for example, the letter “y”, or “x”, looks complicated. The only serif to be found in upper-case letters is in “J”, where it is used exclusively for the purpose of balancing the rounded descender. These anomalies, however, fit perfectly into the structure of any smoothly running text and shift Juvenis towards an original, contemporary expression. Tyfa also offers three alternative lower-case letters *. In the case of the letter “g” the designer follows the one-storey form he had contemplated in the eighties, while in “k” he returns to the Benda inspiration and in “u” adds a lower serif as a reminder of the calligraphic principle. It is above all the italics that are faithful to the tradition of handwritten lettering. The fairly complicated “k” is probably the strongest characteristic feature of Juvenis; all the diagonals in “z”, “v”, “w”, “y” are slightly flamboyant, and this also applies to the upper-case letters A, V, W, Y. Juvenis blends excellently with drawn illustrations, for it itself is modelled in a very creative way. Due to its unmistakable optical effect, however, it will find application not only in children’s literature, but also in orientation systems, on posters, in magazines and long short-stories.