New York vibes FS Irwin was born in New York while Senior Designer, Fernando Mello, was studying an intensive 5 week typeface design course at the Cooper Union. His brief was to design a perfectly clear typeface that could communicate well, without loud or overtly mannered design features. Fernando was influenced by the subway font in New York: ‘It is very in your face and clear, always in bold. It doesn’t shout much but at the same time is very present and unique. The design is completely different but it was this spirit I wanted to capture for FS Irwin.’ And the vibe of the city: ‘In a similar way to London, New York is so mixed and so cosmopolitan. I was amazed by the different styles and identities I saw there, and tried to encapsulate this essence to create something new, relevant and very now.’ Incisive quality Rather than focusing on quirks or distinctive characteristics, the key to FS Irwin is the quality of its design and spirit of simplicity. The design, proportions and details are usable and authentic and it is suitable for countless situations, without running the risk of being instantaneously noticeable. Families like this can be used on nearly anything, from more playful designs to serious corporate IDs. ‘Extensively tested and precisely drawn text-oriented typefaces are what I enjoy designing the most. There is a beauty and a different approach, a different way of making them interesting, sellable and usable rather than adding flicks or unexpected details.’ Inscriptions and calligraphy FS Irwin’s origin lies in Fernando’s studies in inscriptional lettering and writing-calligraphic exercises at the Cooper Union. Mello started the process by digitising his explorations and adapting them into a more workable sans serif structure. The traditional forms of writing which gave the basis to Latin type as we know it today were the perfect place to start. This influence can be seen in the proportion of the capitals and in slight writing-calligraphic details in the lowercase, such as the slightly angled, chiselled spurs and their open terminals.

Razumec is a carefully crafted display serif typeface with a highly unique personality. Its epic yet warm sentiment is established by a skillful blend of slab and wedge serifs, tapered stems, curves with raised center, and creative weight distribution. Proper pronunciation of these style elements influenced wide proportions and medium-to-high contrast. Besides its main typology, it incorporates subtle allusions to a spectrum of typographic and visual traditions, from calligraphy, ordinary handwriting, blackletter, and medieval uncial script to the neoclassical Didone and industrial typefaces. All of these flavors are combined tastefully and consistently throughout the whole set. With its rich visual identity, Razumec is primarily intended for display usage, as shown in the promo images. It's perfect for branding and packaging. Fantastic for projects focusing on storytelling like fairy tales, epic fantasy books, board and video games with historic or adventurous themes. Superb for theme magazines, quotes, headlines, museum and concert brochures. On the other side, its authentic historical voice works great as a strong counterpart point in ultra-modern contemporary designs for print and screen. Web design, motion graphics, conceptual art, posters, and social media material are just the first few ideas. The laborious production process focused on achieving a high level of classical typographic virtues rather than having an extensive character set. Beautiful stylistically consistent characters with balanced weight and width, high-quality curves, meticulous spacing and kerning, well-articulated diacritics, and punctuation were priorities. Special attention is given to solving problematic letter pairs through contextual alternates, which enable better spacing and smooth joints (hence the recommendation to always keep the Contextual alternates feature on for this font. Learn more about it HERE). Razumec is a small but well-executed and thoroughly tested font. Font family comprises nine weights plus variable font.* * Variable font lets you access all the weights through the single font file. In apps that support it, you will find a slider where you can pick any number from 100 to 900 corresponding to 800 possible font weights. Learn more about variable fonts and their support on the following two links: VF ABOUT and VF SUPPORT.

English description Karela is a humanist slab serif family. Karela is also the Basque word for gunwale, this is, the widened edge at the top of the side of a boat, where the edge is reinforced with wood or other material and to which the thwarts are attached. Gunwales resemble the way slab serifs reinforce vertical stems giving a more robust appearance to the letters. The sturdy, solid and often mechanical structure that is customary in slab serif or mechanistic typefaces is softened in Karela applying subtle tweaks as: humanist proportions, slightly curved endings in ascenders, and curved edges in serifs. The influence of calligraphy is noticeable all over the character set, especially in counters and letters with instrokes like “m”, “n” and “r”, and it becomes explicit in the italics. On the other hand, its low contrast, generous x-height and the constant width of characters across weights makes it very convenient for editorial uses when low resolution is a concern. Karela pursues to give a human touch to a strong and highly functional structure. It seeks for the ideal combination of strength, precision and warmth of the wooden parts painstackingly handcrafted by ancient boat builders. Besides its 12 standard styles, Karela offers also four additional fonts called "grades". Grades are subtle changes in stroke weight in order to compensate for differences in printing media or display conditions of text layouts. To minimize these subtle changes without a reflow of the text they have to be designed with the same character width of the base style. Karela offers 4 grades for its Regular weight: Grade Minus 5, Grade Minus 5 Italic, Grade Plus 5 and Grade Plus 5 Italic. This makes possible to counteract the effect of changes in paper, temperature, paper, background color… In addition, Karela takes this no‑reflowing idea from grades and extends it to the whole range of styles, allowing to play with any of its weights without undesirable text reflows. Enjoy the layout stability while you experiment and play with variations! Karela presents also a wide range of Opentype features for a professional text layout.

Bradley Texting: a clear, friendly and easily legible calligraphy font, also suited to electronic devices With Bradley Texting, Richard Bradley has published another calligraphic typeface that recalls the style of Bradley Hand and Bradley Type. In this case, however, Bradley has advanced the style with clearer forms for display on electronic instruments and on other formats. Two other font families paved the way to the newly introduced Bradley Texting. In the mid-1990s, Bradley published Bradley Hand, with its rough contours. Since these coarse forms do not cut a good figure in the larger font sizes, Bradley Type followed, with smooth letters. During the development of Bradley Type, the idea for a further font came about ? one in the style of the two other calligraphic typefaces, but with simpler, easily legible forms and suited to electronic devices like mobile phones or tablets. The letters for Bradley Texting began with a marker on paper. Looking back, Bradley describes one of the biggest challenges as having the calm required to draw the relaxed-looking letters repeatedly while still making them fit the general style.The somewhat narrow and dynamically designed letters have round line ends, like those left by a felt-tipped pen. As a hand-written print font, the individual letters are not connected to one another. Nonetheless, they demonstrate the influence of a written font, such as the extended ends and the flowing transitions. Clear forms with open counters and a large x-height guarantee Bradley Texting good legibility in the smaller font sizes. Bradley Texting is also effective under more challenging conditions, such as on mobile phones, e-book readers or tablets; the fonts friendly and lively character comes through. With Regular, Semibold and Bold, Bradley Texting is adequately equipped for use as a headline or text font in various sizes. The selection of characters covers the Western European languages and German typographers will be happy to note the presence of the upper-case ß. Use the dynamic and clear forms of Bradley Texting anywhere you need a friendly character with a personal accent. Bradley Texting is persuasive in the print realm, in advertisements or on posters, as well as on electronic devices.

Touch Me is a Script hand-drawn style typeface—designed by Coto Mendoza—resulting from polyrhythmic exploration, sign deconstruction and altered calligraphic contrast plays with watercolour brush. Coto has been using these experimental calligraphy techniques when creating the catchwords for Macarons, the Boho Family, Bikini Season Script and Matcha Script and so forth. Touch Me was inspired by a character in a story written by Coto while attending a literary workshop with Ina Groovie in Santiago de Chile. The character is a tribal girl who lives on an island in the Caribbean. She is heir of ancestral knowledge and possesses wild beauty, very passionate and sensual: intense, strong and free. These features are reflected in the polyrhythm of the typeface's curves: an irregular baseline, variable x-height, different lengths of initial and terminal strokes (that sometimes expand and sometimes shrink) and amount of brush pressure that generates changes in contrast within the characters. This way, when composing, signs with stroke contrast randomly alternate with monolinear ones and with signs of altered contrast, thanks to the typeface's OpenType programming. The family, with more than 3,000 glyphs, provides a number of alternative characters, swashes, ligatures, initial and terminal forms, in short, a vast ocean of choices! Touch Me is a spontaneous typeface with a fresh and unique personality. It is the perfect choice for short text in both print and digital formats. The family comes with a Script Regular version and a seductive Script Drop that you will enjoy a lot! The Extras set includes some catchwords, dingbats and ornaments that allows for endless composition options. The family also comes with a Caps version —designed by Luciano Vergara—in 2 styles: a funny and big-headed condensed Sans Grotesk display of inverted vertical proportion plus a Grotesk, neutral and slightly expressive Petite. Both versions, available in 6 weights, have been especially designed to create hierarchies when composing. This allows for balance between strokes of different weight when it comes to the Sans and Script fonts. Come and dare yourself! Touch Me! Thanks Alisa for sharing your amazing and beautiful picture with us.

For everyone wishing for a modern serif that’s as clear and readable as a sans in restrictive digital environments, meet Portada by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione. Sans serifs are commonly used on small screens to save space and carry a modern tone. Serifs may appear fickle and unsteady, pixel grids change from one product to another, and space is at a premium. Portada now provides a serif option for these restrictive digital environments, putting that old trope to rest. The screen has met its serif match. Portada was created from and for the digital world — from e-ink or harsh grids to Retina capability — making it one of the few serifs of its kind. Portada’s text and titling styles were engineered for superlative performance, making great use of sturdy serifs, wide proportions, ample x-height, clear interior negative space, and its subservient personality. After all, words always take priority in text. It’s not all business, though. Portada’s italics contain an artefact of calligraphy in which the directionality of the instrokes and the returning curves of the outstrokes give the family a little unexpected brio. Yet even the terminals are stopped short of flourished self-absorption to retain their digital clarity. When printed these details are downright comforting. Portada’s titling styles enact slight changes while reducing the individual width of each character and keeping the internal space clear. Titling italics have increased expressiveness across a few characters rather than maxing out the personality in each individual glyph. Digital magazines, newspapers, your favourite novel, and all forms of continuous screen reading benefit from Portada’s features. This family can also cover many of the needs developers have: user interface, showing data intensive apps on screen, even one-word directives and dialogs. And, as a free download, an exhaustive set of dark and light icons is included to maintain Portada’s consistent presence, whether as a word or an image. The complete Portada family (eight text styles, ten titling styles, and one icon set) is designed for extensive, clear screen use — a rare serif on equal footing with a sans.

Laima is the brush-formed stencil from Bogidar Mascareñas that will create an ovation for branding, album art, upscale venues, and packaging. If wide appeal, attention to detail, or international reach is necessary for your brand, consider Laima’s high-calibre design as your personal ambassador. The general font user is accustomed to stencil typefaces that have a brute look to them — industrial, mechanical, restrictive, or even militarised. Stencils are commonly used because they serve a function, like spray-painting over template letters, giving the reader a warning that must be heeded for safety, or a command to follow immediately. Wooden crates and grunge art are the medium and black or red paint are the norm. Laima, instead, creates a stencil from the world of calligraphy to turn all this on its head. Laima’s 12 stencil styles (six roman and six italic) use the junctures of calligraphic strokes as an opportunity to achieve an uncommon stencil effect, shifting to create unexpected shapes and the illusion of twisted, disconnected overlaps. Inspired by “Arte Nueva de Escribir”, an engravings book published by Francisco Palomares in 1776, Laima progressed well beyond its beginning as a Type and Media Master’s project at KABK, The Hague (NL). It sometimes required completely new character shapes to accommodate the space needed for clear diacritic marks, and was further enhanced with flourishes and alternates for liveliness and variety in individual or branded work. Laima’s italic begins with swashes and uses OpenType features to automatically turn them off with more than two successive capital letters. Use one swashed character for a drop cap, two for ligatured fun, turn them on or off at your discretion, or change the ascender length and swash shape to suit your creative need. With two styles of numerals and stylistic sets for final forms, Laima’s 12 styles and hundreds of Latin-based languages can turn simple words into an occasion that would immediately benefit high-class brands and special uses. Set that article title, release that new product, code your best-looking UI yet, letterpress that business card, and print that gourmet label. Whatever is next, Laima is the unexpected stencil partner to introduce it to an expectant world.

The Scriptuale family, which contains eight styles, is a contemporary upright calligraphic face. Designed by German designer Renate Weise in 2003, this family of typefaces speaks to the present, while at the same time reflecting on a lyrical past. The letterforms of the Scriptuale family are romanticized, they reference German calligraphic styles from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. For instance the design of Scriptuale's uppercase strays from the canon of classical proportion into romantic idealism. While the C and O are drawn according to the ancient quadratic proportions - almost twice as wide, optically, as the E or the L - the letter A is wider than would be expected, and the D narrower. These subtle differences introduce a different rhythm into text set in Scriptuale than Italic styles of calligraphy may offer. Scriptuale's Gs merit special notice: both the upper and lower case G lunge slightly forward, further enhancing the dynamic quality of the text. Also unique in Scriptuale's design is the lowercase width: the letterforms appear slightly condensed; they have large x-heights to compensate for this. In a delightful twist, the number 2's beak has been closed by drawing it full-circle, back into the stem: this references a style of letter design that was practiced, among other places, by artists from the old Klingspor foundry in Offenbach Germany. Typefaces constructed there easily captured the zeitgeist of the romantic period, but are less calligraphic than Scriptuale (e.g., Rudolf Koch's Koch Antiqua). A semi-serif face (like Prof. Hermann Zapf's Optima or Otl Aicher's Rotis Semi), some of Scriptuale's letters have serifs (D), and some do not (A). And although both the B and the E normally have the same "structure" on their left side, Weise has drawn them differently in Scriptuale. These strengthen the calligraphic-like quality of the family. Traces of the pen are easy to see in Scriptuale's design; it is a thoroughly calligraphic face. The eight typefaces in the Scriptuale family include Light, Regular, Semi Bold, and Bold weights. Each weight has a companion italic. Scriptuale is similar to one other contemporary calligraphic family in the Linotype portfolio, Anasdair , from British designer

Albertina was a typeface ahead of its time. It was in the early 1960s when designer Chris Brand, an accomplished calligrapher, aspired to draw a typeface based on the principles of calligraphy. Unfortunately, typesetting machines of that era put many restrictions on designers. Characters had to be drawn within a very coarse grid, which also defined their spacing. Technological limitations meant that italic designs often had to share the same character widths as the romans. Designers were forced to draw italic faces much wider and with more open spacing than what would be typical in calligraphic lettering or hand-set type. Not surprisingly, production of the first Albertina fonts went very slowly. Brand would submit his character drawings, and the Monotype Drawing Office would modify them to be compatible with the company's typesetting equipment. The new drawings would then be sent back to Brand for approval or rework. Most were reworked. The process took so long, in fact, that by the time the face was completed it was once again out of phase with the times: instead of being released as metal type for the Monotype composing machines it had been tailored for, Albertina debuted as phototype fonts for the Monophoto typesetter. The design's first use was for a catalog of the work of Stanley Morison, exhibited at the Albertina Library in Brussels in 1966. Sales of the design were not remarkable. With the advent of digital type technology, Albertina's story took a far happier turn. Frank E. Blokland, of the Dutch Type Library, used Brand's original, uncompromised drawings as the foundation of a digital revival. The Monophoto version had taken a considerable battering from the limitations of Monotype's unit system," recalls Blokland, "but there was no need for me to incorporate these restrictions in the digital version." With the full backing of Monotype and original designer Brand looking over Blokland's shoulder, a new design for Albertina emerged, displaying all the grace and verve of Brand's original drawings. The basic family drawn by Brand also grew into three weights, each with an italic complement and a suite of small caps and old style figures."

Sabor is a voluptuous upright connected display font with mixed taste of script fonts. There were many inspirations for Sabor, but all started with a book from the 1950s about the battles of World War II. To that first sketches of a naive dense display typeface we, day by day, start to create a mixed style evolving some lettering concepts from 1950s, some calligraphy notions and the first display ideas. The feeling of this font is good to be used in many artworks, like logos, packaging, party invitations, layouts for t-shirts, magazine headings, and much more, since websites to and all kind of printed jobs. That font is not really a script, but, like the scripts we strongly recommends to use the caps only in the beginning of words and sentences, to contrast with the lower cases : it’s not designed for all-caps settings, so avoid that kind of use. This font has almost 700 glyphs and supports the most important Latin-based languages. We works hard in a tour-de-force kerning: over 12.000 kerning pairs soft adjusted handily. Its OpenType features include final forms, initial forms, special sets (upper and lowercase's), hundreds of contextual alternates ligatures providing letter-form variations and connections that make your designs really special, and ornaments (tails). Because of its high number of alternate letters and combination's, we suggest the use of the glyph palette to find ideal solutions to specific designs. The sample illustrations will give you an idea of the possibilities. You have full access to this amazing stuff using InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXpress and similar software. However, we still recommend exploring what this font has to offer using the glyphs palette: principally to get all the power of the Contextual Alternates feature. You can get an idea of the power of this font looking at the “Sabor User Guide”, a pdf brochure in the Gallery section. Also available two sister fonts easy to use : SaborWords and SaborRasgosEscritura Sabor has original letters designed by Iza W and overall creative direction plus core programming by Paulo W.