Pargrid is a grid-based typographic experiment from the young Swiss designer Michael Parson. In the Pargrid family, which contains three separate weights, Parson has created an intriguing system of small circles-similar to LED's or light bulbs-that live separately on a grid, creating unique letterforms. In small sizes, these circles blend together to create seemingly fluid lines, giving Pargrid's letters a wide, rectangular appearance. In larger sizes, the letterforms transform themselves into objects d'art-virtual and ordered communities populated by various points. Fantastic in both display settings as well as short strings of text, Pargrid may offer the exact look that your next project is looking for. Pargrid and nine other constructed type designs from Parson are included in Take Type 5 collection, from Linotype GmbH."

Flourish breaks the mold of traditional typography. Part italic, part roman, this iconoclastic font is all style. William Millstein casts the contours of formal pen strokes in a taut upright framework to create a typeface that nods back to its origins while looking defiantly forward. The neat and light semi-serif flaunts crisp geometric touches without conceding warmth or personality. A sophisticated design solution that isn’t stuck up, Millstein Flourish makes invitations, identities, and editorial settings thrive. Originally offered by Photo-Lettering in the early 1940s, Millstein Flourish was digitally updated by Jeremy Mickel in 2011. Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

The origin of this font was a frieze in the RAF Chapel in Westminster Abbey which Michael Harvey was commissioned to design and create. It was comprised of the names of the top brass in wartime Bomber Command, namely Dowding, Harris, Newall, Tedder, Portal and Douglas. The Brief was to cut the letters in bronze and gild them. Instead, they were cut in perspex and gilded. To sit comfortably within the long and narrow vertical space available beneath the chapel’s stained glass window, extended letterforms were used with many vertical serifs omitted and with lengthened horizontal serifs. Some twenty years later, the missing upper-case letters were drawn together with the lowercase letters and Frieze, the font, was born. Subsequently, additional weights and styles were added to create a font family of six styles.

German type designer Hans Reichel created this sans FontFont in 1996. The family has 6 weights, ranging from Light to Black and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, book text, film and tv, editorial and publishing as well as small text. FF Schmalhans provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths.

Rotis is a large typeface family consisting of, Serif, Semi Serif, Semi Serif and Sans Serif font styles. Agfa Rotis was created for Agfa Compugraphic. The font styles are matched for weight and height to give consistency when mixed. Certain round characters have a distinctive calligraphic treatment which is apparent in all styles. A versatile family which can be used for text as well as display setting. Designed by Otl Aicher at Druckhaus Maack, Agfa Rotis is very readable and good for use in any contemporary texts.

Rotis is a large typeface family consisting of, Serif, Semi Serif, Semi Serif and Sans Serif font styles. Agfa Rotis was created for Agfa Compugraphic. The font styles are matched for weight and height to give consistency when mixed. Certain round characters have a distinctive calligraphic treatment which is apparent in all styles. A versatile family which can be used for text as well as display setting. Designed by Otl Aicher at Druckhaus Maack, Agfa Rotis is very readable and good for use in any contemporary texts.

Basati is a display typeface designed for headlines and hard-hitting messages. It is sharp, heavy, and hard as an axe. But don’t be fooled by its rough look or the impression of having been carved with a machete. Each character is precise and sharp as a scalpel, and in that perfectly cut informality lies her deliberately wild temperament. Perhaps because its design was conceived during a severe bout of lumbago, its strokes are heavy and provocative, as if trying to defy logic and gravity alike.

This set of initial letters is an entirely original creation, inspired by French renaissance patterns used by Bordeaux printers circa 1580-1590. It contains two roman alphabets : the first of decorated letters, the second of single large capitals, all with Garamond style, and a few fleurons using the same background pattern style. Both containing Thorn, Eth, L slash and O slash. It can be used as variously as website titles, posters and flyers design, publishing texts looking like ancient ones, or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, as a very decorative, elegant and luxurious additional font... This font is conceived for enlargements, possibly strong ones, remaining very smart and very fine (especially decorated initials). This font may be used with all GLC Foundry blackletter fonts, but preferably with 1543 Humane Jenson, 1557 Italique, 1589 Humane Bordeaux, 1742 Civilite, 1776 Independence without any fear of anachronism.

This family was inspired by the pure Garamond pattern set of fonts used by Egenolff and Berner, German printers in Frankfurt, at the end of the sixteenth century. All the experts said it was the best and most complete set of the time. The italic style used with it was Granjon’s, as in 1543 Humane Jenson. A few fleurons from the same printers have been added. It can be used variously for web-site titles, posters and flyers design, publishing texts looking like ancient ones, or greeting cards, various sorts of presentations, as a very elegant and legible font... This font supports very large sizes as easily as small sizes, remaining very smart, elegant and fine. Its original cap height is about five millimeters. Decorated letters like 1512 Initials, 1550 Arabesques, 1565 Venetian, 1584 Rinceau from GLC Foundry, can be used with this family without anachronism.

Ela Sans is the sister of the typeface I originally designed for the business of my second wife and mother of my two sons, her name is - of course - Michaela. Ela - the typeface - is suitable for magazines, newspapers, posters, advertiments, books, text, documentation/business reports, business correspondence, multimedia, and corporate design. Because lately this typeface became very popular I decided to extend the Ela Sans family to eight weights and I added italic and smallcaps versions to it. So now Ela Sans and Demiserif together is a full fledged typeface family.

Linotype Clascon is part of the Take Type Library, which features winners of Linotype’s International Digital Type Design Contest. Designed by the British artist Rachel Godfrey, the constructed forms of the capitals are reminiscent of sketches of many famous 16th century artists, Albrecht Dürer and Nicolas Jaugeon among them. This style emphasizes the mathematic construction of the letters, based on the circle, rectangle and triangle, but Clascon’s historical roots lie in Transitional and Modern Face styles. This font is particularly suited to very short texts, headlines and initials.

Rockner is a family of fraktur typefaces designed by the calligrapher/designer Julius de Goede. Like all Blackletter styles, fraktur evolved out of Northern Europe's medieval manuscript tradition. Fraktur was the most used Blackletter variety between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike many similar fraktur font families, Rockner is available in three weights: Regular, Medium, and Bold. This flexibility allows for richer design possibilities. The OT fonts contain the many alternate characters, such as the long s and historical ligatures, which are often necessary for the setting of historical documents.

German type designer Hans Reichel created this sans FontFont in 1999. The family has 12 weights, ranging from Light to Black (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, festive occasions, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, poster and billboards as well as web and screen design. FF Sari provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, small capitals, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, and super- and subscript characters. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths.

Rincon is a serif font with 201 glyphs including ligatures and alternatives. It was designed by Rachel Kick in Los Angeles, California. Inspired by beautiful serif while maintaining a friendly and approachable feel, Rincon is perfect for branding, display, or marketing. Rincon has the ability to hold it's own as a single word headline, or in a paragraph form. It also works well with simple sans serif or script font compliments. The ligatures increase its legibility and adjust each character to work perfectly with the character next to it.

The legendary retro-futuristic typeface returns, now in digital format! While there may be copycats of varying quality, none of them have taken the time and care to revive, reproduce, and expand the original Roc Mitchell “Corporate” typeface like Corporatus has. Made directly from scans of the original type specimens and expanded to include the full WGL4, Corporatus is YOUR solution for your retro, futuristic, and corporate design needs. Descended from Microgramma and originally designed to be the American competition to distant cousin Eurostile, Corporate and subsequently Corporatus is best known for being the typeface used by video game developer and publisher Nintendo for many NES-related media in the West, including its controllers, and by Colecovision for its logo. With the original Latin character set as well as Greek and Cyrillic lettering available, now you're playing with TYPOPOWER!

Great Scott, Marty! This font is your density, charged up to 1.21 gigawatts through the Power of Love! Originally created by Comicraft for the official BACK TO THE FUTURE fan club, Remastered DOUBLEBACK has been rebuilt from the ground up, with a new vertical “Curve” weight, six new “Parallel” weights, stylistic alternate letters AMNUWY, and language support for Western & Central Europe and Vietnamese. And if that weren't enough, we've traveled into the future and brought back Solid & Open Variable Fonts which provide precise control of Time and Warp! We cannot be held responsible for any ruptures in the space-time continuum due to use of these fonts. SPECIAL INTRO SALE: from October 21 through November 12, get DoubleBack at half price and we will donate $20.15 of each sale to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. We love ya, Mike.

This family was inspired by the sets of fonts used in 1543 by Michael Isengrin, printer in Basel (Germany) to print the splendid New Kreüterbuch...(New herbal...), with numerous nice pictures, the masterpiece of Leonhart Fuchs, father of the modern botany. It is a Schwabacher pattern, with three different sets of fonts, small (± 4mm for the upper case) in the main text, larger for titles (± 8mm for the upper case) and large Initials or lettrines (five lines of main text). This font contains standard ligatures and German historical ligatures (German double s, long s, tz, ch,...) and diacritics (special umlaut "e superscript" and "∞" unstead of dieresis with letters a, o and u,) naturally, we have added numerous letters lacking in the original to permit a contemporary use of the font. It can be used in complement with 1538 Schwabacher or/and 1534 Fraktur.

In 1529, Geofroy Tory, French scholar, engraver, printer, publisher and poet, was publishing the well known so called Champ Fleury, printed by Gilles de Gourmond, in Paris. It is a fully illustrated handbook where the author explains how to draw Roman characters. The font used for the text - a Humane/Jenson type - was not a very beautiful one, but rough and ready, and the book is well known for its capital letters designs. We are offering here the two complete historical type sets and more -- we have entirely redrawn the lacked letters: J, U and W, Eth, Lslash, Thorn and Oslash in the two initial forms. The text font, 1529 Champ Fleury Regular is now containing all characters for West European (including Celtic), Baltic, East and Central European and Turkish language, and the Initial set 1529 Champ Fleury Init is containing two complete alphabets, with a very great effort to be as close as possible to the original pictures.

The Vale Press was a contemporary of Willam Morris's Kelmscott Press. The types used by the Vale Press were designed by artist Charles Ricketts, who also supervised the design and printing of Vale Press books. The main type used, Vale, was based on the Jenson 15th century roman type style. The King's Fount was an experimental semi-uncial font based on the Vale type. The King's Fount was designed in 1903 for the Vale edition of the 15h century poem "The Kingis Quair". This semi-uncial font evokes old English and Anglo-Saxon lettering. P22 Vale Pro combines the two fonts P22 Vale Roman and P22 Vale King's Fount into one "Pro" font. This pro font also includes a Central European character set, old style figures, fractions, ornaments and a special faux "Middle English" feature to make "anee text appeer Olde." This feature is not known to exist in any other font.

Rapsed – Display Serif Font is a captivating work of typographic art that seamlessly merges the timeless grace of serifs with the contemporary edge of stencil-inspired elements and bold reversed contrast. It’s not just a font; it’s a visual narrative that demands attention and ignites curiosity. Imagine Rapsed as a rebellious poet among typefaces, infusing its letters with intrigue and a touch of avant-garde flair. Its unique stencil-inspired accents carve out an element of surprise, while the reversed contrast adds a modern twist. Choosing Rapsed is not merely a design decision; it’s a creative manifesto—an invitation to explore the uncharted territories of expressive typography. Visualize Rapsed on your posters, headlines, or branding materials. It’s the font that guarantees your message becomes a visual masterpiece, one that captures the essence of tradition and innovation in a harmonious dance. Rapsed is your creative accomplice, beckoning you to join the avant-garde and make a lasting impression that leaves audiences both intrigued and inspired.

Right on the heels of the tremendous popularity wave that made Hollandse Mediaeval the most used Dutch typeface during the Great War years, Sjoerd H. de Roos was asked to design a 15 point type for De Zilverdistel, Jean François van Royen’s publishing company. So between 1914 and 1916, de Roos and van Royen collaborated on the typeface eventually known as Zilvertype, and which both parties viewed as an improved version of Hollandse Mediaeveal. Like Hollandse Mediaeval, Zilvertype was based on the Jenson model, but it is simpler, with more traditional metrics, lighter and more classic in color. This Pro digital version of Zilvertype comes expanded in all directions. It contains a roman, a bold and an italic. Each font contains over 685 glyphs, including small caps, eight different sets of figures, plenty of ligatures, some Dutch ornaments, and extended language support covering most Latin languages. Zilvertype Initials is also there to round out this distinctively Dutch text family and make it ideal for immersive text design.

Marco is a lively text face, with an informal touch, inspired by 15th century Italian letter-forms with strong calligraphic traces and intended to be used primarily in continuous and intensive reading conditions. Marco is full of features required for high-quality book typography, including: strong language-support in extended Latin, Cyrillic and polytonic Greek, a multitude of swashes in the italic styles of Latin and Cyrillic, stylistic alternates to obtain the best possible solutions and other typographic niceties. Inspiration for Marco goes back to Italian humanist typography such as those of Nicholas Jenson or Aldus Manutius, and general influences from calligraphy. As a result, Marco has matured into a personal and unique text face where its lively and somewhat informal style is an ideal counterpart to its careful and ingenious crafting. Toshi Omagari’s Marco features a huge set of over 1900 characters per style —and almost 2600 in the italics— and is available in Regular, SemiBold, Bold with matching Italics.

This set of initial decorated letters is an entirely original creation, drawn inspired by Italian renaissance engraver Vespasiano Amphiareo's paterns published in Venice circa 1568. It contains two roman alphabets : the first of large Initials, the second of small caps. Both containing thorn, eth, L & l slash, O & o slash. It can be used as variously as web-site titles, posters and flyers design, publishing texts looking like ancient ones, or greeting cards, all various sorts of presentations, as a very decorative, elegant and luxurious additional font... This font is conceived for enlargements remaining very smart and fine. The original height of the initials is at least about one inch equivalent to about four lines of characters, small caps may have the same height than the caps of the font used with, but cover two lines is better. This font may be used with all GLC blackletter fonts, but preferably with "1543 Humane Jenson", "1557 Italic", "1742 Civilite", "1776 Independence" without any fear for doing anachronism.

This all started with a love for Jenson. I know there're hundreds of variations on that theme. But, that is where I began, several years ago. How far it came, as usual as I wandered through the vagaries of font design, is not unusual. If you've read any of my font design books, you know my design processes are quite loose and spontaneous. I wanted the general feel of a favorite old font, but softer, easier, and more comfortable. I built these on the same vertical metrics as my Librum Publishing Group. However, this family is not part of that group. I used the metrics because that shows my current taste in fonts. This family does work with the Librum group—but to be honest, I haven't experimented enough to come up with a good companion. I suspect I'll need to make another companion family. I may need make a non-modulated bold version also. But, that remains to be seen. I'm pleased with this.

The regular style of this family was inspired from the typeface used in Nuremberg, Germany, by Johannes Petreius in 1543 to print the famous “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium,” the well-known mathematical and astronomical essay by Nicolaus Copernicus. Petreius was also using an original italic style, as he did for the “De Sculptura” by Gaurico Pomponio, in 1542. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know who was the punchcutter of this Jenson-style font. Also included is a title file, containing initials (without diacritics) and small caps (with diacritics). In our three styles (Regular & Italic + Titling), font faces, kerning and spacing are as closely as possible identical to the original. This Pro font is covering Western, Eastern and Central European, Baltic and Turkish languages, with standard and long-s ligatures in regular and italic styles. Both have twin-letter ligatures, but the italic style has extra (genuine) ligatures for f and t with vowels.

ITC Wisteria was designed by Michael Stacey, a Florida-based artist and graphic designer. An ardent collector and recycler of vintage graphic design and typography, Stacey is especially intrigued by the lettering styles of sign painters and show-card lettering artists from the days when most display typography was hand-rendered. ITC Wisteria is one such style, taken from the 1930s, which he has updated for digital imaging. His goal was to retain the loose, casual feel of handlettering, while imparting what he calls “the crisp finish of current precision typography.” Like the plant it was named after, ITC Wisteria is both rugged and beautiful. The design is a constructed brush script that successfully melds the strength and dynamism of strong character shapes with the grace of script letterforms. The split-brush strokes, although obviously constructed, also impart a sense of immediacy to the design.

German type designer Hans Reichel created this sans FontFont in 2004. The family has 6 weights, ranging from Light to Black and is ideally suited for editorial and publishing and small text. FF Dax Compact provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, super- and subscript characters, and stylistic alternates. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. This FontFont is a member of the FF Dax super family, which also includes FF Dax and FF Daxline.

Swan Song is a digitization of gorgeous free form calligraphy by British artist Rachel Yallop. It first appeared in The Calligraphy Source Book edited by Miriam Stribley (Running Press, 1986). Rooted in day to day handwriting, Swan Song is a quick and irregular artistic jolt at first impression, and surprisingly richly-textured art at second glance. Whatever these letters are used to communicate, the communicator is content, confident, humorous, strong and experienced, and the reader will be glad to receive the personal contact of such a communicator. Swan Song comes in all popular font formats, and includes plenty of built-in alternates.

Our Mouse Memoirs Pro was inspired by vintage Mickey Mouse, Beagle Boys, and Uncle Scrooge comic books put out by Walt Disney in the 50's and 60's. It nods to the Disney aesthetic with an all-around fun personality and truly animated look. The chipper letterforms engage the audience, while the SmallCaps and extensive figure sets expand the scope of use. Opentype features include: - SmallCaps. - Full set of Inferiors and Superiors for limitless fractions. - Tabular, Proportional, and Oldstyle figure sets (along with SmallCaps versions of the figures). - Stylistic Alternates for Caps to SmallCaps conversion.

Blackletter fonts are timelessly beautiful and still very popular. At some point, it seems that every type designer discovers the beauty of these forms and the great pleasure in creating blackletter characters. Like also Dutch designer Coen Hofmann who, after designing Caxtonian Gothic, has designed yet another Blackletter font: Holland Gothic. Holland Gothic reminds of the 18th century »Duytsch« typefaces of Joan Michael Fleischmann and Christoffel Van Dyck. But Hofmann was mainly inspired by the Dutch calligraphers from the 17th and 18th century. Holland Gothic develops its full charm and beauty at larger sizes because of the hairlines in the upper case characters. To enable users composing texts in the style of our ancestors, Coen Hofmann added a series of pre-composed ligatures, also in combination with the long s, plus an alternate form for the lower case r which was used in combination with letters b, d, g, o, p, v, and w.

Because Contenu is designed for text use, it is spaced for body copy in the 9-12 point range. That is far too much spacing for heads, subheads, and the like. So I made the display version of Contenu Book to use for headers. In the process of tightening the spacing at the very large sizes, I also made some minor modifications to the glyph shapes to make this version a little more elegant. Contenu Opentype has two Opentype families for print design. Contenu Book has five fonts: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, and Display. Contenu has Medium, Medium Italic, Black, and Black Italic. The name is French for content and this is what the family is designed for: text, body copy, and book layout. If it has a style, it is a modern take on oldstyle serif font using Jenson as a mask. There are no plans for display versions of the bolder weights or the italics. If you want them, use Contenu Medium, Book Bold, Contenu Black, or any of the four italics and tighten the tracking.

Because Contenu is designed for text use, it is spaced for body copy in the 9-12 point range. That is far too much spacing for heads, subheads, and the like. So I made the display version of Contenu Book to use for headers. In the process of tightening the spacing at the very large sizes, I also made some minor modifications to the glyph shapes to make this version a little more elegant. Contenu Opentype has two Opentype families for print design. Contenu Book has five fonts: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, and Display. Contenu has Medium, Medium Italic, Black, and Black Italic. The name is French for content and this is what the family is designed for: text, body copy, and book layout. If it has a style, it is a modern take on oldstyle serif font using Jenson as a mask. There are no plans for display versions of the bolder weights or the italics. If you want them, use Contenu Medium, Book Bold, Contenu Black, or any of the four italics and tighten the tracking.

RoglianoPro is a 70-font humanist slab serif super family (7 weights on 5 styles each plus matching italics) that while maintaining a strong and direct backbone, sustains a warm undertone that nods to the lettering and lithographic posters of the Victorian era when you take into account its multiple stylistic alternates, borders and decorative ornaments. Extremely legible for small text as well as finely-detailed enough to be very attractive when used in large settings, RoglianoPro is a versatile typeface that offers a wide range of voices that can move from mechanical to humanistic with absolute ease, and perform efficiently from branding to editorial design. Its Slab serif letterforms are strong, but gregarious and approachable – it’s friendly, but its solid presence is still a typographic force to be reckoned with. Rogliano includes a large set of over 900 glyphs, support for more than 200 latin script languages, a full complement of ligatures, small caps, swashes, William Morris-influenced borders and many Opentype features. In summary, a great addition to any multi-purpose type library.

Leprechaun Vomit is just a pretty way of saying Lucky Charms, which I had to use something else besides the name of a cereal anyway. Leprechaun Vomit is a ding bat of luck including images of rainbows, horseshoes, clovers, diamonds, moons, the number 7, japanese "lucky" calligraphy, The Maneki Neko (the Beckoning Cat which is a lucky symbol), and some shooting stars (make a wish). You can use these images to create Irish themed designs like St. Patrick's Day art, or you can use them for lucky purposes. Bellafonts' user license allows for commercial use, so you can make products for re-sale, including services offering graphic design. You can choose from a variety of clovers for your own version of a "Kiss me I'm Irish" T-shirt, and you can add some shooting stars and rainbows to make any design for any occasion extra special. If you are a graphic designer with any clients like a ranch, horseback riding schools, and so forth, you may like these lucky horseshoes for your library.

This family was inspired by the beautiful roman font used by Aldus Manutius in Venice (1499) to print for the first time Hypnerotomachia Poliphili..., the well known book attributed to Francesco Colonna. Francesco Griffo was the punchcutter. The present font contains all of the specific latin abbreviations and other ligatures used in the original. The Italic style, carved by Francesco Colonna, the so called "Aldine" style, was inspired from various documents, all printed with this first Italic font. We offer the complete set of ligatures (about 60) we have been able to find, contained in the original font. In the two styles, we have made differences between I and J, V and U, to make easier a modern use. Added are the accented characters and a few others not in use in this early period of printing. The Italic style may be used as a complement to our 1470 Jenson Latin. The font contains all characters for West European (including Celtic), Baltic, East and Central European and Turkish language.

This new script font was based on our previous font ‘Rachele’. Mentha is a very flexible script with a big set of swashes, condensed, strong and with nice loops at the end of some letter shapes. This font script was designed using small brush pens and playing with pressure and release methods. Mentha Medium has a tiny extra stroke, that helps to make this font a bit stronger and solid, specially if you need to use in a very small scale. Mentha is fresh! If you are looking for a new and original script Mentha suits your needs! We recommend to combine Mentha with Turquoise

A vintage look to the future of type, this funky typestyle with circular cut outs was stylish for its day, and a true novelty for today. Blackhole PB began as a digitization of a film typeface known as Circue Solid by LetterGraphics. This typestyle has such funkadelic appeal to it that it just makes me smile. Definitely not for broad uses, but full of novel flair. This font is the bees knees for anyone with a circle fetish. They are like hidden mickeys in this typestyle, building up curves and counters all over the place. Take it for a spin and have a flashback to wilder times.

Developed over several years by the late Otl Aicher and first released in the late 1980s, the Rotis® typeface has become a timeless classic. ROTIS II SANS HISTORY Aicher was a renowned German designer and corporate image consultant. He created the four basic designs of Rotis – sans serif, semi sans, semi seif and serif – within an extended typeface family concept, wherein all designs share a common cap height, lowercase x-height, basic stem weight and general proportions. While each version is part of the large, integrated family, each was also designed to function on its own as a distinctive typestyle. The result is that all members of the Rotis family combine smoothly with each other. Aicher, however, did not design the Rotis family with the weights and proportions normal for more contemporary releases. Rotis Sans Serif, for example, was drawn with just six weights and only two italics. Starting in 2010, Robin Nicholas, senior designer for Monotype Imaging in the UK, and freelance designer Alice Savoie collaborated to bring Rotis Sans Serif up to current standards. The result is Rotis II Sans, a completely new addition to the Rotis family. “We devised our approach together,” recalls Savoie, “deciding which weights to start with, what kind of alterations to make to the original Rotis, etc. I went to work on the typefaces, regularly submitting proofs to Robin. We would then decide in tandem on the next steps to take.” Nicholas elaborates, “We revisited the range of weights and added matching italics so that the new additions to the family offer increased versatility. We optimized the outlines, corrected the weight of several letters and re-examined overall spacing and kerning. In addition to a new set of numerals, with a height similar to the capitals, we also drew case-sensitive punctuation.” ROTIS II SANS USAGE The new Rotis II Sans suite comprises 14 typefaces: seven weights, ranging from extra light to black, each with a companion italic. The designs are available as OpenType® Pro fonts, allowing for automatic insertion of ligatures and fractions. Pro fonts also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. Aicher’s original Rotis designs were widely used for branding and advertising. With the addition of Rotis II Sans, the family is again poised to become a powerful communicator.

A Venetian serif in 6 styles The Apolline typeface family was created by Jean François Porchez as a means to study the transition from Renaissance writing into the first printing types. Rather than sticking to the method commonly used these days for the creation of revivals of Jenson or Bembo types, it seemed more interesting to try and get in the same mindset as those exceptional designers during this pivotal period in the history of typography. Thus Apolline is an exploration of the design methods used by people like Nicolas Jenson and his contemporaries for adapting handwriting with its multiple occurrences (a, a, a, b, b, b…) into single, unique signs (a, b…). Initially Jean François made drawings modelled after his own calligraphy. They were done at a very small size on tracing paper (2 cm high for the capitals) to preserve the irregularity of human handwriting. Besides emphasising the horizontal parts of the letter forms, the serifs were designed asymmetrically to reinforce the rhythm of the writing. The final drawings were produced at a large size (10 cm high for the capitals) to allow for subtle optimisation of specific details. The very narrow and fluid Apolline italic Influenced by various concepts for an ideal italic by Van Krimpen, Gill, etc. Apolline italic was designed at 8° degrees. Although the structure of the letterforms were informed by chancery scripts, the italic has full serifs like the roman. Very narrow and fluid, its unique design creates a good contrast when used in combination with its upright counterparts. Thanks to the presence of the serifs similar to roman typefaces it sets very neatly in large sizes. The next step was digitising the drawings with Ikarus (the pre-Bézier-curves era) to create the final roman and italic fonts. Two years later, when the family was expanded to six series the same method was used, this time with Fontographer. This was necessary for correcting a few problems caused by the conversion to Bézier outlines, and to add intermediate weights. Before the advent of feature-rich OpenType, quality type families consisted of several separate fonts for each weight to provide users with various sets of numerals, an extended ligature set and alternates, ornaments, and so on. Introducing Apolline Morisawa Awards 1993