An American Scotch remixed in 27 fonts Mencken has twenty seven styles, divided into three widths, three optical sizes, romans and italics. Generally, optical size typeface families belong to a same common construction. It falls into the same category of type classification, while presenting different x-heights or contrasts. Mencken is unique because it is designed according to different axis and optical sizes. Firstly, Mencken Text is a low-contrast transitional typeface, designed on an oblique axis, asserting horizontal with featuring open counters. Its capitals follow Didots to better harmonize the rest of the family. On the other side of the spectrum, Mencken Head (and narrow variations) is designed on a vertical axis, high contrast, in a contemporary Didot style. The Mencken is therefore a typeface answering to different sorts of uses, whose design is different according to its uses: from oblique axis in small size to vertical axis in large sizes. Vertical proportions (x-height, capitals height, etc.) were calibrated to be compatible with many Typofonderie typeface families. Lucie Lacava and I followed the idea launched by Matthew Carter few years ago for some of his typefaces intended for publications. From Baltimore Sun’s project to Typofonderie’s Mencken It is a bespoke typeface for American newspaper The Baltimore Sun started at the end of 2004 which marks the beginning of this project. The story started with a simple email exchange with Lucie Lacava then in charge of redesigning the American East Coast newspaper. As usual, she was looking for new typeface options in order to distinguish the redesign that she had started. At the time of its implementation, a survey of the newspaper’s readers has revealed that its previous typeface, drawn in the mid-1990s, was unsatisfactory. The Mencken was well received, some reader responses was particularly enjoyable: “It’s easier to read with the new type even though the type is designed by a French.” Why it is called Mencken? The name Mencken is a tribute to H. L. Mencken’s journalistic contributions to The Sun. According to the London Daily Mail, Mencken ventured beyond the typewriter into the world of typography. Because he felt Americans did not recognize irony when they read it, he proposed the creation of a special typeface to be called Ironics, with the text slanting in the opposite direction from italic types, to indicate the author’s humour. Affirming his irreverence, the Mencken typeface does not offer these typographic gadgets. Henry Louis Mencken (1880 — 1956) was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. Known as the “Sage of Baltimore”, he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements. Creative Review Type Annual 2006 Tokyo TDC 2018

“Hey, look at me!” cried the new advertising typefaces. With the nineteenth century and the industrial revolution came an esthetic revolution in type design. Brash, loud, fat display faces elbowed their way into the crowd of book faces, demanding attention. Those who admired traditional book types harumphed and complained. Robert Thorne had fired the opening round with his Fatface. With the cutting of Figgins Antique, the battle was well and truly joined. Job printing came into its own and it seemed like everything changed. The world of printing had been turned upside down and the gentile book-type aficionados recoiled in horror much as the rural landed gentry recoiled at the upstart middle class shopkeepers and manufacturers. William Savage, approvingly quoted by Daniel Berkeley Updike over a hundred years later, described the new display faces as “a barbarous extreme.” These were exciting times. According to Geoffrey Dowding in his An Introduction To The History Of Printing Types, “The types which we know by the name of Egyptian were first shown by Vincent Figgins in his specimen book of 1815, under the name Antique.” Of course, dating the design is not quite as simple as that. Nicolete Gray points out that Figgins used the same “1815” title page on his specimen books from 1815 to 1821, adding pages as needed without regard to archival issues. As a result, there are different versions of the 1815 specimen book. In those copies that include the new Antique, that specific specimen is printed on paper with an 1817 watermark. The design is dated by the 1817 watermark rather than the 1815 title page. Figgins Antique ML is an all-cap font. This typeface is for bold statements. Don't waste it on wimpy whispers of hesitant whimsies. And please don't use it for extended text -- it will only give someone a headache. Think boldly. Use it boldly. Set it tight. Go ahead and run the serifs together. Solid and stolid, this face is very, very English. FIGGINS ANTIQIE ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 331 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: liga and pnum. 3. Added 86 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Redesigned mathamatical operators. 6. Included of both tabular (standard) & proportional numbers (optional). 7. Refined various glyph outlines.

Once, Blackletter was a calligraphy style. Full of ligatures, with letters bumping into each other to create an unapologetic picket-fence pattern. Some even claimed that the regularity improved legibility! But then Blackletter was cast into metal, and only a handful of established ligatures survived, while most interletter connections were disentangled. Everyone since followed suit, and hundreds of years later, digital Blackletter fonts were modelled mostly on the metal fonts that prevailed rather than the original handwriting. Up until now! AJ Quadrata is an authentic revival of the textura quadrata hand, and its major inspiration is a 15th-century Latin manuscript of the Bible from Zwolle, the Netherlands. The typeface is delivered in two flavors. The default cut is a modern take on textura quadrata that can be useful for today and tomorrow. The standard ligatures feature employs nearly all letters. The tittle of i retains its original, hasty squiggle form (except for the Turkish localization). Discretionary ligatures include medieval ligatures da, de, do, pa, pe, po (and their mixed-case counterparts!). Stylistic sets allow to use historic letter variants such as long s and rotunda r, closed-counter a, and alternate capitals. AJ Quadrata Medieval is perfect for setting Latin. Default forms of capital F, H and O are swapped with the alternates. The squiggles above i only appear for disamibiguation nearby m, n or u, as in original manuscripts. Discretionary ligatures and historic variants are promoted to the standard ligatures feature to make room in the discretionary ligatures feature for a variety of scribal abbreviations. Dedicated stylistic sets include medieval punctuation and justification alternates — glyphs with elongated terminals used for lengthening lines that end up too short. The Rubrum styles can be layered and colored to create the illuminated effect on the capital letters. Besides a faithful rendition of extended Latin including Vietnamese, numerous synthetic additions are included: polytonic Greek, Armenian, and Cyrillic (with Bulgarian and Serbian/Macedonian localizations). Both flavors of the typeface can be considered a starting point that can be further customized using OpenType features, including Stylistic Sets (some features differ between AJ Quadrata and AJ Quadrata Medieval): ss01 Alt E ss02 Descending F / Roman F ss03 Uncial H / Roman H ss04 Angular O / Round O ss05 Contextual closed-counter a ss06 Diamond-dot i j / Always dotted i, j ss07 Contextual rotunda r / No r rotunda ss08 Contextual long s / No long s ss09 Dotless y ss10 Serbian Cyrillic ss11 Alt Cyrillic de ss12 Alt Cyrillic zhe ss13 Alt Cyrillic sha ss14-ss17 [reserved for future use] ss18 Scribal punctuation ss19 Alt linking hyphen ss20 Justification alternates

Blossoms, leaves, buds and tendrils create fragile objects of words and letters. · Weingut Script Flourish is a decorative display font with high contrasts, perfectly hand-drawn to the tiniest details. The font is trimmed to fairly large font sizes and is highly suitable for chapter titles or book jackets as well as Headlines, Invitations and wine labels :), although also impressing with an astounding legibility in small typesettings. Inspired by the handmade Blätterschrift from the 19th century Mettenleiter’s Schriftenmagazin, its basic structure is related to the English Script which makes it a perfect wedding font. The Weingut Family – noticable bouquet, beautiful structure with full fruit and a long finish. · Design with bicoloured capitals: In Weingut Script and Weingut Flourish, leaves and letters are available separately. You can stack them and apply different colours to the foreground and background. · Decoration and patterns: Weingut Swashes and Ornaments offers extra decorative elements in a separate font. Leaves, flourishes and borders available on their own or merged to ornaments. · Please make sure to use an application that supports the layering of text (two-coloured capitals) and OpenType features (contextual alternates). Be aware if you intend to combine Weingut Script Flourish and Weingut Flourish that these two do not go together. The floral outlines differ slightly and inaccurate overlaps will be the end result. · View other fonts from Georg Herold-Wildfellner: Sofa Serif | Sofa Sans | Mila Script Pro | Pinto | Supernett | Mr Moustache | Aeronaut | Ivory | Weingut · Language Report for Weingut Script / 151 languages supported: Abenaki, Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Amis, Anuta, Aragonese, Aranese, Arrernte, Arvanitic, Asturian, Aymara, Basque, Bikol, Bislama, Breton, Cape Verdean, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chickasaw, Cofan, Corsican, Danish, Dawan, Delaware, Dholuo, Drehu, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, Folkspraak, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, Genoese, German, Gooniyandi, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean, Gwichin, Haitian Creole, Han, Hiligaynon, Hopi, Icelandic, Ido, Ilocano, Indonesian, Interglossa, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Javanese, Jerriais, Kala Lagaw Ya, Kapampangan, Kaqchikel, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kiribati, Kirundi, Klingon, Latin, Latino Sine, Lojban, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Makhuwa, Malay, Manx, Marquesan, Meriam Mir, Mohawk, Montagnais, Murrinhpatha, Nagamese Creole, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Ngiyambaa, Norwegian, Novial, Occidental, Occitan, Oshiwambo, Palauan, Papiamento, Piedmontese, Portuguese, Potawatomi, Qeqchi, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romansh, Rotokas, Sami Southern, Samoan, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Seri, Seychellois, Shawnee, Shona, Sicilian, Slovio, Somali, Sotho Northern, Sotho Southern, Spanish, Sranan, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tokelauan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Tzotzil, Uzbek, Venetian, Volapuk, Voro, Walloon, Waraywaray, Warlpiri, Wayuu, Wikmungkan, Wiradjuri, Xhosa, Yapese, Yindjibarndi, Zapotec, Zulu, Zuni

It's a very happy day when we stumble upon beautiful alphabets that were never digitized. It is even a happier day when the beautiful alphabet finds its way to us through friends and people who like our work. Some two months ago, the forms of this gorgeous font were pointed to us by a friend who saw it in an old Dover Publications specimen book showcasing historical alphabets. It was there under the name Vanessa, with nothing else to go by. We looked and researched for further information but found nothing else. So this gem comes to you like a coal that winked its way out of the ashes because it wanted to shine again. Flirt is very authentic art deco with a noticeable element of artistic pride, swashy delicate majuscules and very aristocratic, fashionable and flirty minuscules. The majuscules can be used as every other capitals usually are, or as initial caps. The minuscules can very nicely stand on their own quite independently from the caps whenever desired. These letters are quite similar to the hand lettering used on of the kind of theater posters, specifically burlesque and opera entertainment, which are now considered very retro-chic and fashionable to see hanging on walls in home or office. The initial specimen we worked from showed a single basic art deco alphabet with numerals which seemed as they belonged to another font. That alphabet became the base Flirt font, the numerals were redrawn to fit much better with the minuscules, and the character set was greatly expanded to include punctuation, accented characters, and many many alternates, especially for the majuscules. Majuscules with a descending right vertical stroke were a common artistic touch in the high days of theater posters, so we thought they would be great additions to the character set. These alternates can be found all over the font. So to maximize the design fun, have a character map or glyphs palette handy when you use Flirt. After the base font was finished, we thought it would be a good idea to give it a bold treatment unlike anything seen out there, and the farthest thing from the mechanical bolds seen everywhere now. This bolding treatment consisted of thickening the lowercase's vertical strokes inwards, but leaving the horizontal stroke weight as is, and thickening only the thicker vertical strokes of the uppercase. The result is quite the visual feat. We encourage you to test both the regular and bold weights and see for yourself.

Milan-based Leftloft studio developed LFT Iro Sans, an expansive family that solves the significant, wide-ranging challenges of branding, wayfinding, pictographic language, and complex editorial use. LFT Iro Sans began as the clear and welcoming wayfinding project of San Siro stadium in Milan. Over time many other styles and weights have been added. LFT Iro Sans never finds itself outmatched by the task at hand. The primary aim was to design a technical typeface that was readable in any low visibility condition, for instance in a poorly lit area with awkward wall shapes and overhangs. This worked well for stadium and large lettering use, but other problems also needed to be addressed, such as complementary iconography. A location developer was left mixing — clashing, really — one type family with a different family of icons, resulting in a cobbled-together look which diluted the brand and the experience. They set out to radically simplify and clarify each shape and its meaning, accepting uniqueness as part of the final visual language. LFT Iro Sans pictograms answers the need for having a consistent and large group of icons, perfectly suited to the text typeface. As it concerns public spaces, this didn’t exist before. LFT Iro Sans incorporated a branding project too, so they decided to let LFT Iro Sans go out on a limb and created a unicase style that demands attention. Each unicase letter is a combination of the lowercase and capital form, quite noticeable in the ‘i’, ‘m’, ‘t’, and unique ‘d’ and ‘b’, balanced by more restrained forms of ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘c’, and ‘e’. LFT Iro Sans is not only a technical typeface, but, thanks to letters’ proportions, can also be used for editorial purposes. Assertive and economical in stature, the text weights are clear and assured. And a display version for headlines in Ultralight and Heavy (with italics) was developed for stunning headlines. For enthusiasts of every stripe, LFT Iro Sans can be a brand’s rallying cry with its arresting unicase, be a developer’s go-to pictogram choice, or set the most demanding editorial text in digital or print. With its many OpenType features, simplified pictogram commands (even available in Apple’s Pages and Microsoft Word), and a total of 30 targeted family members, LFT Iro Sans is a brilliant, easy choice. As with the rest of the TypeTogether catalogue, the complete LFT Iro Sans family, designed by Lefloft and developed by Octavio Pardo, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Today's digital font technology allowed the world-renowned typeface designer/calligrapher Hermann Zapf to finally realize a vision he first had more than fifty years ago: creating a typeface that could capture the freedom and liveliness of beautiful handwriting. The basic Zapfino™ font family, released in 1998, consists of four alphabets with many additional stylistic alternates that can be freely mixed together to emulate the variations in handwritten text. In 2003, Herman Zapf completely reworked the Zapfino design, creating Zapfino™ Extra. This large expansion of the Zapfino family was designed in close collaboration with Akira Kobayashi. Zapfino™ Extra includes a cornucopia of new characters. It features exuberant hyper-flourishes, elegant small caps, dozens of ornaments, more alternates and ligatures, index characters, and a very useful bold version, named Zapfino™ Forte. A version of the 1998 Zapfino typeface ships as one of the pre-installed fonts included with Mac OSX. The Mac OSX version's letters are four times larger than the Linotype standard. In order to minimize compatibility problems for Macintosh users, Linotype has created OSX versions of its Zapfino Extra Pro typefaces, which have been enlarged to correlate visually with the Mac OS Zapfino system font. These special Linotype fonts can be distinguished by the letter X" in their name. Zapfino Extra is an OpenType format font, which is available in two versions. Which version you purchase should depend on which software applications you use the most and what features they support! The Contextual version of Zapfino Extra Pro contains a treasure-trove of extra contextual features. When created in 2004, this was the most advanced OpenType font released to date. By purchasing this version, users of OpenType-supporting applications, such as Adobe InDesign, may access all of the features available in the entire Zapfino family through just two fonts, Zapfino Extra LT Pro (Contextual) and Zapfino Forte LT Pro! Unfortunately, most non-Adobe applications currently do not support the contextual features made possible by recent OpenType developments. Users of Quark XPress and Microsoft Office should instead purchase all of the non-contextual fonts of Zapfino Extra Pro family, in order to access all of the Zapfino Extra family's 1676 glyphs. The Zapfino Extra family's character set supports 48 western and central European languages. Use Zapfino Extra to produce unusual and graceful advertisements, packaging, and invitations. Zapfino Extra is so joyously abundant that it's tempting to over-indulge, so be sure to check out the tips for working well with the possibilities."

Keep Calm is a family of fonts developed from the now famous World War 2 poster that was designed in 1939 but never issued, then rediscovered in 2000. As well as the original Keep Calm font, the medium weight of the poster, new weights are now available – Keep Calm Book (regular weight), Heavy and Light – and each weight comes with a complimentary italic. Version 2.0 (2017) is a comprehensive update which consists of numerous refinements and improvements across all weights. The family now contains a full complement of Latin Extended-A characters, Welsh diacritics and Irish dotted consonants. The four italics have been optically corrected with revised, ‘true italic’ forms of a and f. The crown motif from the top of the Keep Calm poster is located at the plus minus ± and section § keystrokes (Alt 0177 and Alt 0167 on Windows). The lowercase g follows the Gill/Johnston eyeglass model, but also included is an alternative, single-story g at the Alt G keystroke (Alt 0169 on a Windows keyboard), the normal location of the copyright symbol which has been relocated elsewhere in the fonts. An alternative lowercase t, without the curved wedge cutaway, is provided at the Alt T (dagger) keystroke (Alt 0134 on Windows). When I first saw the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, I wrongly assumed the letters to be Gill Sans. Recent research at the National Archive by Dr. Bex Lewis of Manchester Metropolitan University has revealed that the original poster was hand drawn by the illustrator and painter, Ernest Wallcousins. The Gill Sans influence is apparent, in the R particularly, the M’s perfectly pointed vertex is redolent of Johnston’s Underground, and the most anomalous character, the C, resembles the ‘basic lettering’ of engineers that provided the vernacular sources for the Gotham typeface. Developing the Keep Calm typeface has been an exercise in extrapolation; an intriguing challenge to build a whole, high quality font family based on the twelve available capitals of the Keep Calm poster, and on similar lettering from the other two posters in the original series. This has required the creation of new lowercase letters that are believably 1939; that maintain the influence of Gill and Johnston while also hinting at the functional imperative of a wartime drawing office. Wallcousins’s lettering balanced intuitive human qualities and the pure pleasure of drawing elegant contemporary characters, against an underlying geometry of ruled lines, perfect circles, 45° terminals, and a requirement for no-nonsense clarity.

Norwich Aldine ML is a all-cap typeface with enlarged serifs, designed and produced in wood by William Hamilton Page of Norwich, Connecticut in 1872. Norwich Aldine ML is a fine example of the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for a simple, visually strong typeface. Although about 14 miles inland, Norwich, Connecticut lies at the head of the Thames River. The river is both wide and deep, and therefore was not bridged in the early 20th century. Until then, if you wanted to get from Groton on the west bank to the whaling port of New London on the east bank by land, you had to go by way of Norwich. Because of its size, the Thames is navigable all the way from Norwich to New London. Docks were built in Norwich around 1685 and the city became Connecticut’s 2nd largest port by 1800. With the construction of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad in 1835, Page could easily ship his wood type north by rail or south by coastal schooner. Included with our font, Norwich Aldine ML, are two 19th century printer’s ornaments of sailing ships similar to those that sailed up the Thames to Norwich. Reference: Moon’s Handbooks, Connecticut 2nd Edition (Emeryville CA 2004) The family has expanded from one to four fonts: 1. Norwich Aldine ML: the concept font, computer-sharp corners and smooth curves, as we imagine it was designed. 336 Glyphs including some reduced-width alternatives for better letter spacing. 2. Norwich Aldine Worn ML: the way actual wooden type would look after have been used for a while. 332 Glyphs 3. Norwich Aldine Distressed ML: the way the wooden type would look after it had really been used, perhaps abused. Alternatives to the more popular letters reflect the damage that typically occurs on a well-wormn font, with nicks, cuts and scratches and the overall wear that reduces the overall height and leads to uneven inking due to varying heights in the chase. A couple of bullets look like bullet holes. 345 glyphs. 4. Norwich Aldine Cyrillic: Cyrillic includes alll English and Cyrillic letters for MS Windows Code Page 1251, ISO 8859-5 and MacOS Cyrillic. 235 glyphs. We did Cyrillic because is was fun and we felt the basic design cried out for Cyrillic. While obviously subjective, we hope you will agree.

We introduce our Variable Font from the high-complex BD Gitalona font family. Consisting of 3 axes; weight, optical size, and serif, that will give you a different experience extending the family of BD Gitalona. We don't want to mention how many families can be generated from this variable font. During the development process, we got up to more than 50 families and stopped to allow you to continue to play with the slide buttons. And again, BD Gitalona is filled with an explorative and experimental decorative version that we present separately. Figure out the decorative version BD Gitalona Moxa to make the aesthetic appeal of this whole typeface here! Inspiration The world of entertainment moves non-stop. One by one, figures appeared and left. We expect to create something to entertain previous trends with packaging more relevant to the present. More specifically, we admire and are inspired by some of the world's leading and top singers with a segmented nature. We imagine so many figures that can affect every viewer. However, each artist or singer has a segment because almost all of them have characteristics. The Design The basic design of this typeface begins with a transitional serif shape with sharp, shapeless corners. Then in the middle of the invention, there was an opportunity to explore it further from the readability side by adding an optical variable that can adjust the serif thickness when used together between large, medium to paragraph text sizes for editorials. The shift from serif to sans-serif with the contrast initiated by the shift of the serif family form as a different variable also makes this font richer in terms of the features it contains. Parts are expected to add to the user satisfaction with the complexity of this font. The Features BD Gitalona consists of one sub-family intended for body text with nine weights from Thin(100) to Black(900) and four other display sub-families such as Display serif, Flick, Harmony Sans and Contrast Sans. Each consists of four weights Thin(100), Regular Weight(400), Bold(700), and Black(900). And again, there are also retailed separately; the BD Gitalona Variable font, which is designed to accommodate all Subfamily in 1 font file, and BD Gitalona Moxa, an experimental typeface. A total of 700+ glyphs in each style. Advanced OpenType features functionally and aesthetically, such as Case-sensitive forms, small caps, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, numerator, denominator, superscript, subscript, circled number, slashed zero, old-style figure, tabular and lining figure. Supports multi-languages ​​including Western Europe, Central Europe, Southeast Europe, South America, and Oceania.

Useful links: TT Supermolot Neue PDF Type Specimen TT Supermolot Neue graphic presentation at Behance Looking for a custom version of TT Supermolot Neue? TT Supermolot Neue is a redesigned, extended and greatly enhanced reincarnation of the popular TT Supermolot and TT Supermolot Condensed font families. During its existence, the hammers (‘molot’ in Russian) managed to get into the spotlight in a huge number of projects, for example, in popular video games, films, and branding. Despite its popularity, the limited composition of old families put boundaries their development, which prompted us to release a completely redesigned and greatly extended version. And while the old families could offer designers only a limited number of tools, in the new version you can already find 54 fonts, and each individual font now consists of more than 620 glyphs. First, we have added a completely new subfamily, TT Supermolot Neue Extended. But this is only the tip of the iceberg—in order to achieve visual harmony between the three subfamilies, we completely revised the distribution of widths among them. As a result of this work, the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Basic subfamily became a bit narrower, and the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Condensed subfamily became even narrower than it was in the old version. Secondly, we’ve increased the number of weights. While in the old versions there were only 5 weights, in the new ones there are 9 in each of the subfamilies. In addition, we gave a facelift to the lowercase and uppercase letters. In TT Supermolot Neue, the design of all controversial grapheme forms was soothed and now the family can also be used in the text set. We have completely redrawn italics. It took us half a year to compensate for all the circles, to transform italic strokes, to work out the position of the diacritics, to make right the spacing, and to finish kerning. Following a good tradition, in the TT Supermolot Neue extensive support for useful OpenType features was added, and hinting was also improved. If we talk about visual features, we recommend paying closer attention to two stylistic sets: the first set (ss01) is designed to make the typeface more humanist, and when you turn on the second set (ss02), the typeface becomes even more technological. In addition, the typeface has more than 26 items of standard and discretionary ligatures. We also have not forgotten about the figures and we added a set of old-style figures to the standard version. In addition, the typeface has case, ordn, frac, sups, sinf, numr, dnom, onum, tnum, lnum, pnum, calt, liga, dlig, salt, ss01, ss02.

Get your Aussie on! The new typeface, Ainslie, with its mix of influences from Oz, makes its mark as the first semi-serif from insigne Design. Ainslie, named for Mt. Ainslie and Canberra’s inner suburb of the same name, was originally developed for the Canberra Australia Centennial Typeface Competition. Canberra is Australia’s capital, and it’s a planned city designed by American Walter Burley Griffin, a contemporary and one-time associate of Frank Lloyd Wright. Griffin’s plan involved a distinctly geometric design with several focal points--one of which was Mt. Ainslie. This same purely geometric scheme is now the basis for insigne’s new release. Similar to the Chatype project in its scope, its challenge, and the way its concept was developed, Ainslie incorporates influences from Canberra and surrounding areas to form a font that is uniquely Australian. In comparison, Chatype was developed for the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee by insigne in conjunction with designer Robbie de Villiers. Chatype took elements from Chattanooga’s industrial character and Cherokee past and merged them with the area’s technological influences. Likewise, Ainslie takes Canberra’s distinct, geometric design and blends it with the organic, flowing effect of aboriginal art. Add in touches from the smooth, aerodynamic design of the boomerang and Ainslie gives you a look uniquely Australian yet usable in a wide range of applications. The fashionable typeface includes a multitude of alternates that can be accessed in any OpenType-enabled application. These stylish alternates along with a number of swashes as well as meticulously refined details with ball terminals and alternate titling caps keep the font well accessorized. Also included are capital swash alternates, old style figures, and small caps. Peruse the PDF brochure to see these features in action. OpenType enabled applications such as the Adobe suite or Quark can take full advantage of the automatic replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also offers the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. While Ainslie wasn't selected as the final font in the Canberra competition, the outcome allowed for additional adjustments to the typeface. Several approaches were attempted for the final product including a technological hexagonal concept, which may still be developed to another form later. Some of the organic forms were removed and substituted with more abrupt endings, leaving the face looking pretty spiffy and a fair bit more legible. In the end, Ainslie was pulled back to the basic forms from which it was started. Give it a go for your next project. It’s guaranteed to be anything but a barbeque stopper.