Following the success of the Ashemore family, it became clear that a rounded version of Ashemore would be a great addition to the product line that would allow designers even more design choices. Ashemore Softened’s rounder forms compliment the face well as the original font eschewed straight lines. The rounded terminators give the face a sense of friendliness that is unsurpassed. The distinct and flamboyant style of Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts style remain, but the blunted terminators give the face a more technological and contemporary look and feel. The Ashemore Softened family has a full range of six weights from thin to black and includes condensed and extended options for a total of 36 fonts. The typeface also includes some unique OpenType alternates that make the superfamily even more versatile. Ashemore Softened is equipped for complex professional typography, including alternates, small caps and many alternate characters. The face also has a number of numeral sets, including tabular figures, fractions, old-style, lining figures and superiors and inferiors. OpenType-capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe Suite can take full advantage of automatic ligatures and alternates. You can find these features demonstrated in the .pdf brochure. Ashemore Softened also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages, including Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Ashemore Softened supports over 40 languages that use the extended Latin script, making the new addition a great choice for multi-lingual publications and packaging. The original Ashemore was designed by Jeremy Dooley with production assistance from Lucas Azevedo and Marcelo Magalhaes. Kerning assistance from iKern.

Remember clear summer days as a kid? Remember open fields that you explored? Sun shining? Simple breezes sweeping past your face as you ran far and free? The feeling was uncomplicated and enjoyable. It was natural. That’s Verao, the simple spirit of summer. Alive and vibrant, Verao takes a turn away from the cold structure of today’s rigid creations and embraces the movement back to the value of things handmade. This artisan creation represents the rare, soul-invested fusion of the craftsman’s tools, materials, and hand movements, which shapes the solid--but beautifully defined--parts, pieces that, when put together, breathe a measure of life into everyday paragraphs and other bodies of text. Verao’s hand-written brush script, with its characters’ imperfect elegance and handmade quality, keeps your work looking organic. Write a word in more than a hundred different ways thanks to the large number of extra letters it offers. Two sets of lowercase alternative letters without connectors are included as is a set of swashed endings. Verao contains stylistic substitutions and ligatures, too, that you can combine however you like. Whichever way you design, the elements continue to appear balanced and separate and will undoubtedly add more personality to your design. So stop switching out cogs in your rigid set of fonts. Take time again to play with a natural face that’s both easy and energetic. Verao’s great temperament makes it a joy to design with. Let this spirit of summer take you away from the mundane. There’s a good chance Verao will lead you where you need to go. Production assistance from Lucas Azevedo.

Impressed by the quality of the Aachen typeface that was originally designed for Letraset in 1969 and extended to include Aachen Medium in 1977, Jim Wasco of Monotype Imaging has extended this robust display design to create an entire family. Derived from the serif-accented Egyptienne fonts dating to the early 20th century, Aachen has serifs that are very solid but considerably shorter than those of its precursor. The incorporated geometrical elements, such as right angles and straight lines, provide the slender letters of Aachen with a slightly technological, stencil-like quality. Despite this, the effect of Aachen is by no means static; its dynamism means that this typeface, originally designed for use in headlines, has come to be used with particular frequency in sport- and fitness-related contexts. Jim Wasco, for many years a type designer at Monotype Imaging, recognized the potential of Aachen and decided to extend the typeface to create an entire typeface family. He appropriated the existing Aachen Bold in unchanged form and first created the less heavy cuts, Thin and Regular. Wasco admits that he found designing the forms for Thin a particular challenge. It took him several attempts before he was able to achieve consistency within the glyphs for Thin and, at the same time, retain sufficient affinity with the original Aachen Bold. But he finally managed to adapt the short serifs and the condensed and slightly geometrical quality of the letters to the needs of Thin. The weights Light, Book, Medium and Semibold were generated by means of interpolation. Supplemented by Extralight and Extrabold, the new Neue Aachen can now boast a total of nine different weights. Wasco initially relied on his predilection for genuine cursives in his designs for the Italic cuts. But it became apparent with these first trial runs that the soft curves of cursives did not suit Aachen and led to the loss of too much of its original character. Wasco thus decided to compromise by using both inclined and cursive letters. Neue Aachen Italic is somewhat narrower than its upright counterparts; the lower case 'a' has a closed form while the 'f' has been given a descender, but the letters have otherwise not been given additional adornments. The range of glyphs available for Neue Aachen has been significantly extended, so that the typeface can now be used to set texts not only in Western but also Central European languages. Wasco has also added a double-counter lowercase 'g' while relying on the availability of alternative letters in the format sets for the enhancement of the legibility of Neue Aachen when used to set texts. The seven new weights and completely new Italic variants have enormously increased the potential applications of Aachen and the range of creative options for the designer. While the Bold weights have proved their worth as display fonts, the new Book and Regular cuts are ideal for setting text. And the subtlety of Ultra Light will provide your projects with a quite unique flair. The new possibilities and opportunities in terms of design and applications that Neue Aachen offers you are not restricted to print production; you can also create internet pages thanks to its availability as a web font.