Duddy is a “friendly” sans-serif typography designed by Eleonora Lana and the Letritas team. The shape of Duddy was created based on sketches that looked after carrying the concept of kindness as far as possible, keeping always in mind the readability and functionality of the font. In the stage of brainstorming, the team started listing things that were friendly to the touch or sight, such as a candy gum, or marshmallow, to become acquainted with the intended goal. Although slowly, as the letters were being created, the objects associated with the forms were not satisfactory, since when forming words a special personality of its own appeared. By reconceptualizing everything, the personality of the letter the team wanted to work with had to be redefined. Thus it went from "caramel" to "teddy bear", from "teddy bear" to "puppy" and from "puppy" to "dolphin". And Duddy is the perfect name for a dolphin. Duddy was a sound idea: friendly, intelligent, social. Once the concept was nailed, the design of graceful and “soft” shapes started. Almost chewable, almost huggable, as if composing words was a game. Duddy has a slanted version with "real italics". These italics are slightly more condensed than the regular version, in order to give it a different text texture. The typeface has 9 weights, ranging from “thin” to “heavy”, and two versions: "regular" and "italic". Its 18 files contain 729 characters with ligatures, alternates, small caps, oldstyle and tabular numbers, fractions, case sensitive, and unicase figures. It supports 219 Latin-based languages, spanning through 212 different countries. Duddy supports this languages: Abenaki, Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Amis, Anuta, Aragonese, Aranese, Aromanian, Arrernte, Arvanitic (Latin), Asturian, Atayal, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Bemba, Bikol, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Chickasaw, Cimbrian, Cofán, Corsican Creek,Crimean Tatar (Latin),Croatian, Czech, Dawan, Delaware, Dholuo, Drehu, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian Filipino, Finnish, Folkspraak, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Gooniyandi, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut)Guadeloupean, Creole, Gwich’in, Haitian, Creole, Hän, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hopi, Hotc?k (Latin), Hungarian, Icelandic, Ido, IgboI, locano, Indonesian, Interglossa, Interlingua, Irish, Istro-Romanian, Italian, Jamaican, Javanese (Latin), Jèrriais, Kala Lagaw Ya, Kapampangan (Latin), Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Karelian (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kiribati, Kirundi, Klingon, Ladin, Latin, Latino sine Flexione, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Manx, M?ori, Marquesan, Megleno-Romanian, Meriam Mir, Mirandese, Mohawk, Moldovan, Montagnais, Montenegrin, Murrinh-Patha, Nagamese Creole, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Ngiyambaa, Niuean, Noongar, Norwegian, Novial, Occidental, Occitan, Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Oshiwambo, Ossetian (Latin), Palauan, Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Potawatomi, Q’eqchi’, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Rotokas, Sami (Inari Sami), Sami (Lule Sami), Sami (Northern Sami), Sami (Southern Sami), Samoan, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Seri, Seychellois Creole, Shawnee, Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Slovio (Latin), Somali, Sorbian (Lower Sorbian), Sorbian (Upper Sorbian), Sotho (Northern), Sotho (Southern), Spanish, Sranan, Sundanese (Latin), Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tokelauan, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Tzotzil, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Wallisian, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Warlpiri, Wayuu, Welsh, Wik-Mungkan, Wiradjuri, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Yindjibarndi, Zapotec, Zulu, Zuni.

Out of a lifelong inner struggle, Philip Bouwsma unleashes a masterpiece that reconciles classic calligraphy with type in a way never before attempted. Maestro takes its cue from the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century. By this time type ruled the publishing world, but official court documents were still presented in calligraphy, in a new formal style of the high Renaissance that was integrated with Roman letters and matched the refined order of type. The copybooks of Arrighi and others, printed from engraved wood blocks, spread the Italian cancellaresca across Europe, but the medium was too clumsy and the size too small to show what was really happening in the stroke. Arrighi and others also made metal fonts that pushed type in the direction of calligraphy, but again the medium did not support the superb artistry of these masters or sustain the vitality in their work. As the elegant sensitive moving stroke of the broad pen was reduced to a static outline, the human quality, the variety and the excitement of a living act were lost. Because the high level of skill could not be reproduced, the broad pen was largely replaced by the pointed tool. The modern italic handwriting revival is based on a simplified model and does not approach the level of this formal calligraphy with its relationship to the Roman forms. Maestro is the font that Arrighi and his colleagues would have made if they had had digital technology. Like the calligraphic system of the papal chancery on which it is modelled, it was not drawn as a single finished alphabet, but evolved from a confluence of script and Roman; the script is formalized by the Roman to stand proudly in a world of type. Maestro came together on screen over the course of several years, through many versions ranging widely in style, formality, width, slant, weight and other parameters. On one end of the spectrum, looking back to tradition it embodies the formal harmony of the Roman capitals and the minuscule which became the lower case. On the other it is a flowing script letter drawing on the spirit of later pointed pen and engravers scripts. As its original designers intended, it works with simple Roman capitals and serifs or swash capitals and baroque flourishes. The broad pen supplies weight and substance to the stroke which carries energy through tension in balanced s-curves. Above all it is meant to convey the life and motion of formal calligraphy as a worthy counterbalance to the stolid gravity of metal type. The Maestro family consists of forty fonts distributed over two weights. The OpenType version compresses the family considerably down to two fonts, regular and bold, each containing the entire character set of twenty fonts, for a total of more than 3350 characters per font. These include a wide variety of stylistic alternates, ligatures, beginning and ending letters, flourishes, borders, rules, and other extras. The Pro version also includes extended linguistic support for Latin-based scripts (Western, Central and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Welsh/Celtic, Maltese) as well as Greek. For more thoughts on Maestro, its background and character sets, please read the PDF accompanying the family.

Johann Neudörffer the Elder's 1538 writing manual fascinated the German designer Helmut Bomm for years. Together with Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Andreä, Neudörffer helped create Fraktur, perhaps the most Germanic of all the blackletter styles. As a tribute to this master, and bringing its letterforms to a 21st century public, Boom released the Neudoerffer Fraktur family through Linotype in 2009. Neudoerffer Fraktur's appearance is based very much in handwriting, and Bomm had already begun using letters from prototype versions of this typeface as early as the 1990s. For years, Neudoerffer Fraktur'sletters would appear secretly and seductively in design projects like historical sign restorations or heraldry pieces. The sources that Bomm used while drawing the typeface were images from Jan Tschichold's Treasures of Calligraphy" and Albert Kapr's "Schriftkunst." The Neudoerffer Fraktur family has four separate fonts. Any user of Adobe CS applications should consider licensing Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular (the font without any numeral suffixes). This font contains three different OpenType stylistic sets. Users can pick and choose which versions of the letters that they would like to set. Anyone using Quark XPress, Microsoft Word, or other applications without support for Stylistic Sets should license Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 1, Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 2, and Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 3. Each of these three fonts has letters with slightly different style of flourish, and all three may be combined with each other. Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 1 is optimal for longer texts; Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 2 contains alternate letters, and well as more ornamented capitals; Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 3's letters have a stronger calligraphic accent."

One day, when I was walking with my daughter Greta, I stopped in front of the windowshop of a bookshop, that caught my attention, but Greta was pretty irritated, as always when it comes to books: she is dyslexic. All things written are basically a nightmare for her!So one thing came to my mind: if the great Louis Braille, with visual impairment, invented an instrument that allowed blind people to read, write and play,there had to be a tool that made it easier for dyslexics to do the same things. So, I proposed to Greta to create together a font to help her and other dyslexics. We worked on it, becoming a bit of graphic designers, inventors and guinea pigs at the same time.We brought some initial changes to the mirror letters "pq bd", based on some examples already available on the market, that improved reading times, strenghtening our willing to go ahead. That's how "GretaDS" is born, a completely new font, from the "handwritten" family, which marks a difference on the mirror letters, making them easily recognizable, as well as the lowercase couple rn (RN) which can be confused with the letter "m", not to mention the capital "I" (vowel i) indistinguishable from the lowercase "l" (L)We hope, that other graphic designers will follow its flow, modify and improve the path, and make the most of its energy, to offer dyslexics a tool that make reading as easy as drinking a glass of water.