Crafter Pieces - Multi-Style Font is a truly unique font that offers multiple styles within a single typeface. With a total of 8 different styles accessible through alternate characters, this font provides versatility and creative options for various design applications. From super bold and stencil to thin, slab, serif, sans-serif, sport, and postage stamp styles, Crafter Pieces is a font that can be applied to any design and suit any theme or style. Each style can stand on its own or be combined with others, making it a perfect choice for branding, logos, posters, quotes, books, magazines, headlines, and more. The versatility of Crafter Pieces is truly exceptional, as it allows you to experiment with different styles within a single font. The availability of 8 distinct styles in one typeface opens up a world of possibilities for your creative projects. Whether you need a super bold look for a striking poster, a stencil style for an edgy branding design, or a thin font for an elegant quote, Crafter Pieces has it all. With Crafter Pieces - Multi-Style Font, your design possibilities are endless. Whether you're working on a modern or vintage theme, an edgy or elegant concept, this font will be your go-to choice, offering a wide range of styles to suit every project and creative vision.

Maya Tiles was designed as a set of 62 seamless, endless patterns accompanied by font map(s) and “Idea Book” to get you started on designing your own wallpapers, textiles, stained/etched/privacy glass window films, or even wooden fancy trellises - the choice is yours :) The font features simple, fancy, intricate patterns in three variants (Fill, Outlines and Stencil). - Outlines were designed with an idea of serving as an unobtrusive pattern on its own, or as a playful addition to the Fill pattern. - Fill pattern was designed to give more statement to Outlines, which in some cases may be too subtle for the job you have to be done. - Stencil has the most robust shapes. I have thrown this one in just in case you might want to do some DIY stencils. You may also use this file as a starting point for some CNC cut fancy trellis, however please do match pattern to the cutting method (ie. CNC, bolt cutter etc) and the material you intend to cut. -By overlaying Outlines & Fill (or Stencil & Fill) and manipulating those two layers you may get “more flat” or “more 3D” look. Have fun! Note: Please be aware that you may need to prepare those patterns in order to work with them in CAD-CAM or if you intend them for bolt cutter etc.

Introduce Bomjites font. Calligraphy fonts are made by hand in detail on each letter character so that they can be combined with various kinds of writing design needs. This font is designed to produce lovely and beautiful words and sentences, creating beautiful writing has never been easier. Not limited to that, the bold calligraphy font is designed to keep paying attention to the beauty of each letter, there are alternate options for the letters which are certainly easy for you to access, so you can automatically customize the letters you want to enhance the visual appearance of your design project. This charming font also offers the beauty of abstract typography harmony for a wide variety of design projects, including digital natural handwriting for designs, quote designs, for social media business designs, advertisements, trademarks, food and beverage promotion banners, text, posters, a signature, and all designs require handwriting or whatever design you want. ============================================================================================================ What’s Included : File font Web Fonts Standard glyphs Ligature Works on PC & Mac Simple installations Accessible in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, even work on Microsoft Word. PUA Encoded Characters – Fully accessible without additional design software. Fonts include multilingual support for; Afrikaans, Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish Thank you for your purchase! Hope you enjoy our font!

Introducing Mistress Benedict Font Duo - a pair of hand brushed fonts attentively designed to work together, helping to produce beautiful typography! This pack of two fonts works so well together and can be used for so many projects, from food packaging to a simple quote that you upload to Instagram. Use them on your t-shirts, mugs, cushions, handmade card designs, anything you like! What do you get? Benedict Font has a neat, handwritten style to it and it's tall ascenders gives that added elegance. With it also being hand brushed Benedict is perfect for all hand lettering typographic designs and works well for short advertising headlines and sub-headers. Benedict has a full set of uppercase and lowercase alternates giving you a different style - it's like two fonts in one! Mistress Benedict Brush includes ligatures, discretionary ligatures and a full set of alternate characters. It also has international character support. Mistress Benedict Caps was hand brushed with the same brush pen and is the perfect companion for Benedict. It's an all caps font where the alternates are actually the lowercase letters. It looks gorgeous on it's own too! Like the brush version, Mistress Benedict also supports international languages. Well, there it is! I really hope that you enjoy using this font duo and please ask if you have any questions. Jo

Stamen is the answer to a big question: What would happen if one tried to create a typeface that was ‘out of time’? If a type designer was to turn off the internet and put away the type specimens and just try to explore limbic, phantom history, what might that look like? No slavish explorations of the past. No gropings toward the future. No exhaustive core sample of the contemporary. Instead, using what one remembers of history and our collective vision of the future (usually a future imagined from the past) and channeling that into something that is, hopefully, new… The Bentons meet Frutiger for a Manhattan on a space station while Matthew Carter sways to the sweet sounds of the chorale that occasionally played through the halls of Stephenson Blake. This smear of implicit history expressed without explicit reference—this is Stamen: a family of 12 typefaces with a ton of alternate characters. The bold weight was designed for the LP “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” ( http://ittfwbc.com/ ) by the band YACHT in response to their request for a typeface that was ‘lost in time’, and refers to neither strict historical models nor purely futuristic forms. I built a small family out from there. It works well in text, but just as well for display setting. I think you’ll enjoy using it.

Sudtipos’ new sans serif font Replete is inspired by the mixture of aesthetics and philosophies found on the streets of metropolitan cities the world over. Buildings constructed throughout the twentieth century, including those made in the Art Deco style or influenced by the Bauhaus’s gospel, stand side-by-side as symbols of their time. Typography is one factor that bonds these vistas, and simultaneously further complexifies them. Art deco letters appear on storefronts and signage in Europe’s oldest cities and as remnants of the Golden Age of economic expansion for Latin America. Typography, like architecture, sometimes coexists in perfect harmony, and other times in ideological opposition. But it is these juxtapositions in places such as Shanghai, New York, London, Buenos Aires and Tokyo that shape each city’s identity. Replete is inspired by this mixture. We wanted to create a useful modern sans serif family – a set of 7 weights with playful geometric alternates – that allows you to combine characters including wide-width and filled letterforms. Replete is apt for long texts, and equally, for instances where letterforms can stand together like a cityscape. Replete means full, packed and abounding … it is a sans, it is grotesque, it is geometric and it is Deco. Replete is a new family that has a little of everything we like, equipped with everything you need to design anything you want.

Sisters is a lively set of stencil display typefaces designed by Type-Ø-Tones’ co-founder Laura Meseguer. The family features four fresh fonts that share foundational principles of construction yet complement each other—as sisters do—by celebrating their differences. Variations in contrast, weight, and design characteristics result in four distinct styles dubbed One through Four. This cool quartet contains no lowercase, asserting the family’s rightful place in the titling typography space. Like many Type-Ø-Tones typefaces, Sisters was conceived as a custom lettering project—in this case, the design was crafted for the identity of an art exhibition. Laura initially drew only the limited character set the show required, but from the outset, she saw great potential for a fully developed type family based on her lettering concept. The first member of Laura’s new family was, naturally, Sisters One. She later added contrast to produce Sisters Two, then equalized the weight of Sisters Two to create Sisters Three. To round out the group, Laura added a deco touch to Sisters Two, resulting in the festive but retro-elegant Sisters Four. Each Sister shares DNA with the other members of the family, just as human siblings do :). Credit for the Sisters name goes to Eider Corral and we couldn’t imagine a more fitting moniker for this little family.

Silent Brush is a very lovely, elegant script font in capital letters bigger than ordinary ones to express such dramatic, attractive visual effects. To be consistently legible and harmonious in the whole context, every letter has its own proportions. One of the font’s main features is the brush scratch on every letter to show that the writing is made up of a paint brush producing a lot of rough textures. You can see the brush scratches along the letters’ edges and the letters’ sides to express dynamic moving flows. Despite being inspired by handwritings, this script font has gone through various adjustments making it more consistent and legible. Furthermore, it is much better to use this font for big text sizes to be more legible. In addition, you may enjoy the available features here as well. Features: Multilingual Supports PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuations Silent Brush fits best for any design projects requiring artistic touches such as brands’ logos, posters, merchandise designs, and other promoting media. Find out more ways to use this font by taking a look at the font preview. Thanks for purchasing our fonts. Hopefully, you have a great time using our font. Feel free to contact us anytime for further information or when you have trouble with the font. Thanks a lot and happy designing.

Pellegrino Artusi was a celebrated Italian food writer, who is credited with the creation of one of the most influential cookbooks in the history of Italian cuisine. Taking inspiration from his legacy, Francesco Canovaro decided to work on a typographic homage to the delicacy and finesse of Italian traditional cuisine. Aptly named Artusi, the typeface is an enchanting combination of traditional Italian style, contemporary refinement and a playful touch of innovation. It is a transitional serif typeface with both text and display versions, developed on a wide range of seven weights and including a huge range of alternates, OpenType features and ligatures. Each weight of Artusi works like a different course in a balanced meal. Lighter weights are our starters, with their high contrast between thicks and thins, delicate curves, balanced proportions and subtle spiky serifs. The main course are naturally the regular and bold weights, where traditional Italian old style is enriched with a peppery kick of modern details. For dessert, the heavy weights offer luscious curves, opulent calligraphic swashes and eye-catching details, suitable for packaging and logos. When it comes to typography, let Pellegrino Artusi’s legacy inspire you. From packaging to web pages, Artusi typeface will bring a feeling of tradition, craft and quality to any project. Because, as Pellegrino would say, “To make a great impression, you have to choose the finest ingredients”... Buon Appetito!

Unarmed began life as a series of rectangles in Fireworks. The task was designing my own business card for the first time in years, and the perfect lettering couldn't be found in either free or commercial fonts. While there were some good choices, none of them really communicated who I was. Initially only the lowercase letters in my name were created, with each being designed around a 7 x 4 grid of squares. I liked the result so much that I wanted to use the same typeface in different projects - and to save time in future, I decided to create this font. In creating DM Unarmed, the intention was to avoid diagonal lines, and to keep all the lines horizontal, vertical and grid-like. This made creating some of the characters - particularly the rounded ones and the letters X and Z - challenging. Coming from both worlds, I wanted to achieve a blend of technicality and creativeness, without trying to pretend one was the other. For best results this font should be used for large and prominent text, although it works at smaller sizes up to 12pt. I've spent a lot of time trying to hint a few characters that wouldn't play ball, such as 2, 7 and 8. In case you're wondering: DM Unarmed got its name from my philosophy of facing challenges without reliance on tools and weapons.

Rotis is a comprehensive family group with Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Serif, and Semi Serif styles. The four families have similar weights, heights and proportions; though the Sans is primarily monotone, the Semi Sans has swelling strokes, the Semi Serif has just a few serifs, and the Serif has serifs and strokes with mostly vertical axes. Designed by Otl Aicher for Agfa in 1989, Rotis has become something of a European zeitgeist. This highly rationalized yet intriguing type is seen everywhere, from book text to billboards. The blending of sans with serif was almost revolutionary when Aicher first started working on the idea. Traditionalists felt that discarding serifs from some forms and giving unusual curves and edges to others might be something new, but not something better. But Rotis was based on those principles, and has proven itself not only highly legible, but also remarkably successful on a wide scale. Rotis is easily identifiable in all its styles by the cap C and lowercase c and e: note the hooked tops, serifless bottoms, and underslung body curves. Aicher was a long-time teacher of design with many years of practical experience as a graphic designer. He named Rotis after the small village in southern Germany where he lived. Rotis is suitable for just about any use: book text, documentation, business reports, business correspondence, magazines, newspapers, posters, advertisements, multimedia, and corporate design.

We cannot imagine anyone not liking beer. Especially on a warm summer night there is simply little that can top an ice cold brewski. And with the current wave of home-brewed ales and lagers, Vette Letters decided to not stay behind and brew its own brand. Just so we can design our own beer bottle label using our own font. VLNL Thueringer comes from the drawing board of Jacques Le Bailly (a.k.a. Baron von Fonthausen), the German-French specialist in the fields of both beer and type design. One day Jacques got inspired by Albrecht Dürers 15th century Fraktur (blackletter) alphabet, and decided to design a contemporary rounded version of it. Although the historic context is clearly visible, Thueringer definitely stands its own ground. It's a modern techno-style blackletter with a (beer)truckload of interesting design details. Thueringer contains a number of ligatures and an alternate set of numbers. Apart from the regular uses like logos, posters, flyers and headlines we definitely would like to see our Thueringer used on beer bottle labels and crates, but also cafés and hipster bars would do well with this modern-day blackletter. Hell, even wine or liquor labels, football team jerseys, Oktoberfest flyers, it's just too much to mention. As long as it is accompanied by a cold beer.

Fushar is a bold comic color font family which comes in 5 layer-styles easy to compose in a multicolor manner and 3 OpenType-SVG color styles to make the work faster and easier. Character set covers Latin alphabet of European languages, Vietnamese and Pinyin with standard ligatures, digits, punctuation, currencies and other symbols - the total of 555 glyphs. The idea came from a custom logotype I made several years ago for a local charity organisation that helps children. The logotype was based on bold letters with light that make the "balloon" effect visible in "Holes" style. Later I expanded the family with "Cuts" and all the derivative fonts that make the whole color family. The purpose was to create a funny, friendly and playful script that would embrace the beauty of the Arabic script which is available in Fushar Arabic. The Latin character set is a useful addition and is available in multilingual bundles. Solid, Cuts and Holes are classic one-color styles which can be used separately to compose a simple text. With Shadows and Lights they can produce a multicolour design, as shown on the images above. To save the time, there are three already prepared combinations in the new OpenType-SVG color format. The features include contextual alternates, standard ligatures, fractions, ordinals, case-sensitive forms, proper mark attachment, superscript (1, 2, 3) & localizations.

Sultan is a revival and expansion of a 1954 Matrin Kausche typeface called Mosaik. This design highlights the unmistakable Arabic/Moorish calligraphy influence on Celtic lettering, by way of the highly active Andalusian culture from the ninth century until the crusades in the early eleventh century. Although Celtic lettering evolved on its own and prompted different calligraphic styles after the crusades, elements of the Arabic influence survived with it, its appeal remaining evident to this very day. For instance, this kind of lettering is very similar to the one Louis Tiffany used to make the most recognizable athletic insignia in North America - the New York Yankees logo, which is now over 110 years old, and has inspired hundreds of spin-offs in many athletic and non-athletic fields all over the world. The original character set made by Kausche was quite minimal, consisting of only numerals and uppercase letters along with a few alternates. But in this digital version the set has been considerably expanded into uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation, a complete set of accented characters, and more than 15 alternate letters built into the font. Sultan is a great font choice particularly for design contexts of fantasy, middle ages legend, mystical and new age content, pirate literature, and Irish history. But it is also an excellent all-purpose display and poster font in general.

Introducing Starboy - The Hottest Bold Serif Display Font of the Moment! Starboy is here to redefine your design game with a boldness that's right on-trend. This dynamic font duo features both a regular and outline version, making it the ultimate choice for designers who want to stay ahead of the curve in today's design scene. The regular version of Starboy is a powerhouse of bold serifs and stylish sophistication, perfect for creating designs that make a bold statement. The outline version takes this to the next level, adding an extra layer of modernity and versatility to your projects. In a design world that's constantly evolving, Starboy stands out as the go-to font for capturing attention and creating memorable visuals. Whether you're working on cutting-edge branding, striking headlines, or contemporary packaging, Starboy's duo of fonts ensures your work aligns with the latest design trends. Here's what you get: Regular, Outline All Multilingual symbol Opentype features ( ligature, alternate ) Accessible in the Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, even work on Microsoft Word. PUA Encoded Characters - Fully accessible without additional design software. Multilingual character supports : (Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Zulu) Follow my shop for upcoming updates, and for more of my work, Thank you!

Jackalope is a new original script font from LetterPerfect Fonts. The design is a hybrid of pressure-pen calligraphy infused with whimsy and curlicue terminals. Letterforms are free-spirited and edges are rough, simulating spontaneous writing on rough paper. In addition to the full ANSI western character set, Jackalope includes a full set of small capitals, both lining and old-style numbers, and swash lowercase alternate characters that can be used as terminal letters at the ends of words for additional flourish. The genesis and realization of Jackalope was also a hybrid process. In 1996, LetterPerfect commissioned type designer Kathy Schinhofen to provide pen-written source material based on her commercial handwriting style and specifically on a logo she had designed for its "Viva la Fonts" line of script fonts. This work was digitized by LetterPerfect’s Garrett Boge and later fonticized by former Hallmark Cards type maven Myron McVay who unified the design and contributed additional characters. The design sat unfinished for over 12 years until Garrett Boge revived the project in 2010 filling out the extended character set. Jackalope is released in two versions: Jackalope LP Regular, which is the base font for continuous text setting; and Jackalope LP Expert, which includes swash variants, small capitals, and old-style numerals which can be swapped into text for extra flourish and effect.

Lumina combines a fluid, informal look with an upright, fairly formal character structure. The font is reminiscent of leaded or stained glass, suggesting a trying to-be-solid outline with flowing inner spaces. Characters are softened by the use of staggered heights and slightly irregular widths, creating the impression of hand-crafted, ink-drawn shapes. Lumina is unusual in that it gives a medieval treatment to a modern character outline. The outline has been given an irregular, slightly hand-crafted look that is at variance with its modern character and hints at both the informality of a grunge font and the carefully hand-drawn quality of medieval illuminated scripts (hence its name). It is one of the few informal, compressed fonts that retains a high degree of legibility. Use it when you want your text to be both relaxed and readable, and yet take up very little space on the page. Lumina Regular is not an outline font in the usual sense, since it contains one or more rounded hollows or lacunae within its outline. Use Lumina for: —Ecclesiastical book headings and illustrations —Church posters —Book covers —Greeting card design —Advertisements —The "fine print" The font contains a full 256 character set (upper and lower case, punctuation, diacritical characters, special symbols and numerals), in which all characters have been fully kerned and letter-spaced.

Broadside Text is a companion to Broadside, and is optimised for use at smaller sizes. More open counters, more generous letter-spacing and additional fractions increase legibility. The original Broadside family is suitable for headlines and larger sizes, and also comes with condensed and extended versions. Broadside is a versatile, authoritative and functional family inspired by the sans serifs seen on ’40s and ’50s patriotic posters and period advertising. It is available in seven weights across condensed, normal and extended widths, each with reweighed italics. The type from this period was very often hand-drawn, and so differs considerably from poster to poster. Many American examples of this period use a Photo-Lettering style called Murray Hill and its derivatives, although their UK counterparts, designed by such luminaries as Abram Games or Tom Eckersley, are more stylistically diverse. Even though no single model is available to base a digitisation on, there are certain recurring stylistic quirks that give the type its unique flavour, and so the most interesting examples from several sources were be combined for the final family. Alternate short descenders, allowing for tighter line spacing, can be toggled on or off in the Opentype panel of Indesign or Illustrator. Tabular and lining numerals and a single-story ‘a’ are also available in all weights and styles.

Pauline Script is a Vintage inspired Monoline script. It's a contemporary script inspired by the past, now available to the Instagram era. Pauline Script is a follow up to the popular Pauline typeface. Pauline was one of my first typefaces, all the way back in 2008. Inspired by a variety of influences, from Art Deco signage, to a simple spice label, Pauline Script has very little stroke contrast and was inspired by Retro connected scripts. Over the course of its evolution, it started to take on more influence from geometric sans serif typefaces and lost the connectors. There's a strong geometric streak, derived from 1930s sans serifs like Futura. Tall ascenders and descenders give it a unique look. Now, this script version has now come full circle, utilizing the original sans serif face design and adding connectors back in, with an optically corrected dynamic slant. For invitations, signage, logos or other applications, Pauline Script is there when you need something that stands out with a touch of class and a sense of uniqueness. Turning on Contextual Alternates (non connecting ending forms) and Discretionary Ligatures (better letter connections) is highly recommended. There's a wide range of weights available. It's a playful typeface with options to either have everything connected, or alternate forms which allow for letter connections that still maintain the sense of flow of a script. Includes plenty of ligatures!

Techarí comes from a commission in which the brief consisted of the creation of a typeface family to be used for the design of the third disc of the band called Ojos de Brujo based in Barcelona. This disc was called Techarí, which means “free” in Caló, the language of the Spanish gypsies. The starting point of the design was the music of this band, the meaning of the disc 's name, and three words given by the band as key concepts: ethnic, baroque and graffiti. Techarí is a mixture of lots of influences, which give it its unique personality. From its technical viewpoint designing Techarí was a challenge, on the one hand it had to have lots of personality, and on the other it had to work in text at 9 or 10 pt size. Its goal is precisely that, while keeping a strong personality it works in text size. The typeface also contains a Stencil version for use in display sizes which keeps Techarí's innovative spirit. The way it has been “cut" is unconventional, it has been carefully done to keep the freshness of the typeface by taking advantage of the letterforms' flow. Techarí extra complements the typeface by taking a classical typographic form, the ornament, and making it a contemporary graphic tool, vindicating this wonderful typographic element.

Geminian is a set of fonts that started as a simple idea based on a theoretical level and developed during a long time, to be able to take shape under a creative impulse inspired by the need to communicate, today more than ever. From an astrological point of view, it celebrates and contributes to this practice, the study of stars position and movement and their influence on people's destiny. As a good Gemini, this set revives the main features of the opposite twins sign. Gemini is associated with thoughts, creativity, and communication. Its ruler Mercury (Hermes for the ancient Greeks), messenger of the Gods, and spokesman of the divine word, gives the natives of this sign intelligence, wit, eloquence and poetry. Geminian aims to be a medium to carry different messages from one end to the other. And this is because when using words, Geminis always surprise. Thanks to this gitf (and language and communication), they are able to bring up the most ingenious ideas, to solve any problem and to contribute new perspectives. These qualities may be the secret of its magnetism. The Geminian set comes in 5 styles including a script with multiple ligatures and alternates, 3 sets of caps and dingbats. In addition the complete font family supports a wide variety of Latin alphabet-based languages.

Le Havre Rough. It’s high-resolution, hand-crafted letterpress to the core. Based on insigne’s popular Le Havre typeface, this new heat-treated, weathered face of all caps joins the realism and appeal of the top-quality Le Havre family. Rough’s eroded, printed look is extremely customizable, offering eleven distressed choices that appear fantastic even at large output sizes. Go ahead. Try it on, say, a billboard. Maybe even Times Square. The font includes hand-printed texture and distinctive shadow choices, too. Options include three inline versions, two shadow layers, and a clean primary version. Combine and match the options easily as you need, layering normal and shadow variations to alter appearance and texture. You can activate Art Deco alternates by using OpenType contextual alternates. Rough has an extra-large character set for many languages. Additionally, the typeface offers 62 extra ornaments like arrows, emblems, numbers & lines. Use its full texture and grit to capture the classic, genuine print feel that you need in your project. A few suggestions for use: - In Photoshop, jigger with various 'anti-aliasing' options for best outcomes. Smooth or strong is generally best. - In Illustrator, the shadow layer occasionally doesn't align when using the regular layer. To fix the alignment, open the type drop-down menu and choose Area Type Options > Em Box Height. Learn more about the using layered type styles on this informative video.

The Parisii was a small Gallic people settled in the current Paris region, which gave its name to the city of Paris. According to Caesar (53 BC.), their main town (oppidum) was Lutetia (Paris). Parisii was born of inspiration to be leafing through some old magazines on the terrace of a cafe in the beautiful city that is Paris. Parisi is like the city: casual, youth, romantic, free spirited and, at the same time, sophisticated, elegant and classic. The Parisi family font is a lovely and casual handlettering script, which is based on gestual calligraphy. Parisi has a slight bounce and intentional irregularity giving your words a wonderful flow. Fat and thin stroke in this font impresses the harmony. Parisi consists of 3 subfamilies: Regular, Italic and Condensed. This font includes Parisi font has OpenType features such as Stylistics and Contextual alternates, swashes, Standard and Discretional Ligatures, stylistic sets and ornaments that allow you to mix and match pairs of letters to fit your design. This will help your creativity and make it easier to make the impressive and elegant typographic work. This OpenType features may only be accessible via OpenType-aware applications, a Central European language support. Parisi looks lovely on wedding invitations, greeting cards, logos, business-cards and is perfect for using in ink or watercolour based designs, fashion, magazines, food packaging and menus, book covers and more!

Kubrick is an experiment in extremes. The Light font is very tall and slender, the Black font is very massive, and Kubrick's slender counters push some of its glyphs to the edge of recognition. The thin counters and negative spaces also give text set in Kubrick a definite visual sparkle, especially in all-uppercase settings. Because of its extreme letterforms, Kubrick is recommended only for large display use. The default letterspacing is set fairly wide to keep text legible. Kubrick was a double-experiment. One part of it was to see how heavy and massive a typeface I could make while still keeping it legible. The other part was to develop a Multiple Master font. Multiple Master fonts were a format developed by Adobe that allowed the user to change things like the weight and width of a typeface. Monollith started as just such a Multiple Master typeface, but when Adobe discontinued the Multiple Master format, I stopped work on the typeface. Later I decided to continue work on it, but as five separate font weights: Light, Medium, Bold, ExtraBold and Black. Very rectilinear letterforms with extremely narrow counters and negative spaces. The five fonts go from very thin and condensed to very heavy and extended. Use in large display settings where unornamented high visual impact is desired.

Biloner is a font in simple, clean sans serif base forms. Its letters have no ornaments and serifs making them look modern and simple. The firm, straight letter shapes look strong and evident. This font shows enlarged capital letters to create a brave, prominent look enabling it to be the center design and to make an explicit message. Despite its original sans serif font base form, Biloner adds detailed brush touches to the letters to give extra rough textures on the letter lines. The brush scratches are on the edge or certain parts of the letters adding dimensions and attractive visuals. Fortunately, this font is applicable for any text sizes thanks to its great legibility, and you may also enjoy the available features here.) Features: Ligatures Multilingual Supports PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuations Biloner’s flexibility enables it to adapt to any design styles, either the modern and contemporary, or brave and creative ones. It surely fits for any design contexts such as titles, posters, book covers, and brandings. Find out more ways to use this font by taking a look at the font preview. Thanks for purchasing our fonts. Hopefully, you have a great time using our font. Feel free to contact us anytime for further information or when you have trouble with the font. Thanks a lot and happy designing.

Kufi Mutamathil is an Arabetic (extended Arabic) typeface design with heavy Arabic Kufi calligraphy accent, both on a single letter level and in an overall text look and feel. Although Kufi, the earliest Arabic calligraphy style, is often described as “stiff”, it is in fact a very flexible style. The Kufi Mutamathil typeface design underlines this calligraphy style flexibility and openness through visualizing a very legible Mutamathil design with Kufi shapes. The Mutamathil type style utilizes only one isolated glyph per Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined in Unicode Standards. It is a very light style which does not require any standard glyph substitution or the shaping engine. The Kufi Mutamathil font family employs variable, unrestricted, x-height values. It comes in regular and left-slanted italic styles. Kufi Mutamathil includes all required Lam-Alif ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks, or harakat, are selectively positioned with the majority of them appearing on the same level, over or below, following a letter, to ensure that they would not interfere with individual glyphs appearance. Kashida, or tatweel, (shft-j) is a zero-width character. Keying it before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Kufi Mutamathil includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to all Standard English keyboard punctuations and major currency symbols.

Elliptical The squareness of curves. That was the elliptical – in more than one sense – notion being explored in the making of FS Hackney. The squareness of curves and vertical terminals to create a gentle, soft sans serif, with a little bit of magic. A momentary thought – “It doesn’t have to be like this” – provided the spur to explore the verticals and skeletons of letterforms beyond conventional type design limits. A 12-month gestation period gave rise to a font with a larger-than-usual character set, including non-lining figures, small caps and superior and inferior numbers. It’s a collection that speaks confidently for itself. Assertive It was the Hackney carriage – the black London cab – that gave this font its name, not the north London neighbourhood. Solid, dependable, effective and built to last, FS Hackney was honed to perform in all conditions. Cool, compelling lines and a satisfying overall simplicity lend FS Hackney its assertive air. Assured, versatile and effective; just like a black cab (but without the grumbling). Machined Over a string of meetings, Jason Smith and FS Hackney designer Nick Job worked out how to infuse Nick’s sketched letterforms with Fontsmith’s familiar geniality. “Nick is very meticulous and produces very clean design work,” says Jason. “Hackney is ideal for branding as it’s very clear and its quirks are sensible ones, not odd ones, that don’t distract from the message.”

Wakerobin takes its charming swagger from the hand-painted billboard, poster and signage lettering of the mid-19th century. These showy styles did everything they could to stand out from the background cacophony of advertising, with signwriters using sharp and high contrast serif letters, squared block shapes, or art nouveau forms to grab the attention of passersby. Wakerobin embraces the spirit of these letterforms, bringing these various styles together in one typeface - as if users had their own sign painter on hand. Just as lettering artists had to adapt to a variety of sizes - from wide streetcar lettering to compressed forms that squeezed into narrow Victorian windows - the variable version of Wakerobin scales up and down in width to fit whatever environment the user’s working in. The static fonts come in three widths and five weights. As well as its adaptability, Wakerobin is bursting with vintage flavour, making it hard to ignore. Its distinctive, spiky serifs would be right at home on food and drinks packaging, as well as shop windows, adverts, and any other place that calls for some typographic showmanship. It performs particularly well in busy environments, or anywhere with a lot of visual noise - just as its historic predecessors did. And while Wakerobin is first and foremost a display typeface, it’s surprisingly elegant when used at text size, or in the lighter end of the weight spectrum.

Introducing Fruitypops! A friendly, versatile script font ready for any project. Hand drawn with a real marker pen on paper, Fruitypops is bold and standout yet maintains large counter spaces with its large loops and carefully crafted letterforms. With 56 ligatures, a full set of unconnected lowercase alternates, and a bold version included, it’s designed to be a go-to script font for any design brief in need of a personal touch. The Fruitypops family includes; 1. Fruitypops Regular • A handwritten script font containing upper & lowercase characters, numerals and a large range of punctuation. 2. Fruitypops Bold • A bold version of Fruitypops with thicker letterforms, great for use at smaller sizes. Lowercase Alternates • A full set of a-z lowercase alternates are included with unconnected strokes. These can be accessed by turning on ‘Stylistic Alternates’, via a Glyphs panel, or pasted via Font Book/Windows Character Map. 56 Ligatures • 56 ligatures are included for lowercase letters (see image). These are uniquely designed double and triple letter combinations designed to create realistic handwriting and fix tricky character pairings. These can be accessed by turning on ‘Standard Ligatures’, via a Glyphs panel, or pasted via Font Book/Windows Character Map. Language Support • English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Malay, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, Turkish, Romanian, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Slovenian.

TT Fellows useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options There can't be too many universal fonts! Meet TT Fellows, a new workhorse whose functionality allows you to comfortably use the font in a variety of projects. Calm and neutral at first glance, the mood of TT Fellows can change. Working with the typeface, you can reveal its soft and friendly nature, or even the brutal one, for example, by typing the text exclusively in capital letters in the bold style. TT Fellows is easy to use and perfect for setting large text arrays. Thanks to the font's uniwidth and versatility, the font is ideal for use on websites or in periodicals. Bold styles will work harmoniously in headlines or as accents in print or on packaging. TT Fellows is a humanist sans serif with a mechanical touch. With its open shapes, the friendly neutral character of thin weights and an even softer character in bold weights, the new typeface differs in character from the classic TT Norms® and TT Commons sans serifs, while still offering the same functionality. Calm regular styles differ from bold, deliberately display and more expressive ones. By the way, TT Fellows is a unwidth typeface. It was important for us that the user could change the styles, knowing that the layout will not suffer. The typeface features equal width proportions, open apertures, and slightly squared ovals, which associatively brings it closer to other popular modern fonts. Since the idea of the typeface was focused on it being a uniwidth typeface, we needed to fit the bold styles into the regular em squares, which led to interesting graphic solutions that are noticeable, for example, in the k and ж characters, in which the branches are cut directly into the stems. TT Fellows consists of 19 styles: 9 upright, 9 italic and 1 variable, each with over 700 glyphs. The font has 26 useful OpenType features. For example, there is a switch to single-part versions of letters a and y, fractions, tabular characters, case versions of punctuation, and localized versions of characters for different languages. There is a ligature for a combination of two characters of a complex design fl. TT Fellows font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

JT Collect is a hybrid sans-serif typeface for the 21st century that takes a playful approach to the type design heritages of Germany and Switzerland. Confidently built on a geometric structure and infused with elements from traditional grotesque typefaces, it hits the sweet spot between geo and grot. I developed JT Collect purely digitally, drawing from years of experience with analog type design. The letters aren’t based on one particular source but seek to merge different type genres from the first half of the 20th century and lift them to a contemporary quality level. JT Collect is less reserved than strictly geometric designs and brings some industrial workmanship and honesty into the game. The six weights plus three optical sizes of JT Collect offer what you need to make an impact. While cool and elegant in the Light weight, the fonts show more presence on the page as they grow bolder. To this end, I drew the letterforms with a slightly unrefined, brawny air in the bolder weights. This sets them apart from the perceived purity of more geometric designs. The Book weight is ideal for short texts and medium-length copy, and the forceful Bold makes wordmarks look crisp and lets headlines radiate cosmopolitan self-confidence. JT Collect is suitable as a primary typeface for branding, advertising, packaging, stationery, posters, documents, and websites from trades and industries as diverse as food & fashion, media & makers, culture & creators, games & gems, sports & startups. Use JT Collect for film titles or watch faces, for leaflets or store signs, for business cards or billboards: this font family is as adaptable as a chameleon (and like a chameleon, it’s never boring). Try it in different contexts. You won’t be disappointed. Its adaptability also makes JT Collect a great starting point for poised and persuasive font combinations. Even a sans/sans pairing is possible due to hybrid nature of JT Collect—something that’d be hard to achieve with most other sans-serif typefaces on the market. You can add to it a heavy slab from the OGJ library, like Temper Wide. You might go for a geometric or a grotesque typeface as secondary (text) typeface. Or you could set your body copy in a classic serif typeface such as Caslon, Sabon, or Plantin. That’s right: JT Collect is a true team player. Whether you need a grotesque or a geometric sans: try JT Collect. You can get the best of both worlds.

Klothilde is a handwriting font which came to life in one of my doodling sessions (I must admit I still doodle with pen and paper). The idea was to create a font which resembles writing with a quill on paper with exaggerated ball terminals. Sometimes there is too much ink which makes the letters fat and the strokes uneven. The paper soaks the ink resulting in blurred line crossings. The form gets blurry. On the other hand, when the quill runs out of ink the stroke gets thinner looking like the light version of Klothilde. In order to emulate the different looks, I created six fonts with a common skeleton but different appearance which can be altered seamlessly by using the Variable Fonts technology (e.g. in latest Adobe apps or CorelDRAW Graphics Suite) along the Weight and Blurred sliders. But even without, Klothilde can be used even in longer copy. Use it from 18 pt upwards, flush left with tight leading and intersecting ascenders and descenders. Due to extensive manual kerning, it gives your text an even colour. To my knowledge, Klothilde is one of the first script Variable fonts in different weights. No, Klothilde’s letters are not connecting. But I added a whole bunch of connecting ligatures which are simply activated by the ligature feature of your app. Even Microsoft Word can do that. Thus Klothilde comes to life, as it should be expected from a handwriting font. In order to add to variety there are additional glyphs for some critical initial and standalone letters. Repeating letter combinations like nn, mm or rr are avoided by replacing the second letter by an alternative form. All features are activated by the standard ligature feature. Ligatures are available for most European languages, some even in Cyrillic (some special Serbo-Croat letters included and accessible through localization or Style Set 08 features). Romanian comma-accent characters and ligatures are accessible through the OpenType locl feature. For the topping on the cake, I added an alternate ampersand (stylistic set 1) and asterisk (ss04), an alternate Cyrillic b (ss02) and t (ss03), a few fleurons, arrows and a skull (OpenType feature ornm), fractions (frac feature), circled numbers (ss06) and an interrobang (ss07) which result in exactly 900 glyphs in each of the six fonts. There should be enough to play with. Should you be missing a special character, do give me a hint.

I am thrilled to unveil my latest creation, the Elio & Oliver font family. Inspired by the timeless elegance and undeniable allure of Italy, this sans serif typeface captures the essence of sophistication and refinement. Named after the main protagonists of the beloved novel "Call Me by Your Name," Elio & Oliver is a testament to the power of passion, beauty, and the transcendent experiences that shape our lives. Just like their story, this font aims to evoke emotions and create a lasting impression. With nine meticulously crafted weights ranging from the delicate Ultra Light to the bold intensity of Black, Elio & Oliver offers a spectrum of possibilities. Each weight is thoughtfully designed to ensure versatility and harmonious visual aesthetics across various design projects. Intricate and purposeful, the font pack boasts over 30 ligatures that seamlessly combine letters, elevating the fluidity and legibility of your typography. These ligatures add an extra touch of sophistication to your designs, making them truly stand out. Recognizing the importance of language diversity, Elio & Oliver is equipped with full language support, enabling you to effortlessly communicate your message to a global audience. From English to Italian, French to Spanish, and beyond, this font embraces the richness and cultural nuances of different languages. Whether you're working on editorial layouts, branding projects, or digital interfaces, Elio & Oliver will infuse your designs with an air of refined elegance. It is the embodiment of style and grace, effortlessly capturing attention and leaving a lasting impression on viewers. Step into the world of Elio & Oliver, where every letter tells a story and every curve is a testament to the power of design. It's time to elevate your creative projects and evoke the spirit of Italian chicness with this exquisite typeface. Discover Elio & Oliver and let your designs speak the language of timeless elegance. If you end up publishing your designs on Instagram, tag me - @silverstagco and I will make sure to showcase your design and work to my audience as well! Elio & Oliver - Elegant Sans Serif Includes: Elio & Oliver Font Family - 9 Font Weights - From Ultra Light to Black Elio & Oliver Variable Font Over 30 ligatures and alternate letters Numerals & Punctuation Language Support Web Font Kit is included as well Detailed instructions on how to use alternates in most of the apps on your computer as well for Canva Happy creating everyone!

TT Octosquares useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options TT Octosquares is a fresh, revised, expanded, and significantly improved version of our first commercial typeface TT Squares and its narrow version TT Squares Condensed. With all our love for the original font family, it felt there was a lack of functionality, character composition, features, and design freshness, which prompted us to the idea of a complete restart. Now TT Octosquares can be safely called a superfamily consisting of 4 widths (Compressed, Condensed, Standard, Expanded), 72 faces (18 in each width), and 1 incredible variable font in which variability works jointly on three axes. In addition to working on the contours themselves and their design, we completely revised the composition of the typeface. First, we added two completely new widths: Compressed and Expanded. Secondly, we increased the number of weights in each of the subfamilies—while in the old versions there were 5 weights, now in each of the subfamilies there are 9 weights. At the stage of working with the contours of characters, we revised the roundings, changed the forms of shoulder and stem crossings, added noticeable shelves at the letters, removed the sharpness from the triangular characters and cut off all sharp endings. From the very beginning of work on TT Octosquares, we planned to make a variable 3-axis version of it sewn into 1 font file. This means that by installing just one variable font file, you get access to three axial adjustment of the font: by thickness, width and inclination. Thanks to this flexibility in settings, you can always choose a custom combination of thickness, width or inclination that best suits your tasks. Due to the increased language support and the appearance of a bunch of useful OpenType features, the number of glyphs in the typeface has increased from 480 to 825 in each style. Now you can use stylistic alternates, standard and discretionary ligatures, or use old-style figures, numbers in circles and even slashed zeros in your design. Full list of features: aalt, mark, mkmk, ccmp, subs, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, frac, ordn, lnum, pnum, tnum, onum, case, zero, dlig, liga, salt, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, ss11, ss12, calt, locl. To use the variable font with three variable axes on Mac you will need MacOS 10.14 or higher. For other software and browsers, you can check the support status here: v-fonts.com/support/.

The Joanna® Sans Nova family is the only typeface in the Eric Gill Series that was not initially designed by Gill. Created by Monotype Studio designer Terrance Weinzierl over a three-year period with digital applications at the forefront of the design criteria, Joanna Sans Nova is a humanist sans serif based primarily on Gill’s original Joanna. The design comprises 16 fonts, from thin to black, each with a complementary italic. Joanna Sans Nova has a larger x-height to ensure high levels of legibility – even on small digital screens. Due to its inherent humanist proportions, Joanna Sans Nova is surprisingly comfortable for longer form reading. Its low contrast in character stroke weights also improves imaging in a variety of environments. In addition, the calligraphic and fluid details enable the roman and italic designs to shine in headlines and other display uses. Joanna Sans features a robust range of OpenType features for fine typography, including small caps, old style figures, proportional figures, ligatures, superscript and subscript figures and support for fractions. With over 1000 glyphs per font, Joanna Sans supports more than 50 languages – in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. “I've always been a fan of Gill’s work, explains Weinzierl, and found the simple, humanist qualities of Joanna really fitting for a sans serif design. I wanted to make something with Gill flavor, but with more harmony in the extreme weights than Gill Sans – and with my twist on it. I went through six or seven different italic designs before landing on the current direction.” “The original Joanna had a very distinct italic, Weinzierl continues. “It’s very condensed, and has a very shallow angle. I wanted to have an italic that stood out, but in a different way. I took a cursive direction for the italic details, which are wider and slanted more, both improving character legibility.” The Joanna Sans Nova typeface family is part of the new Eric Gill series, drawing on Monotype’s heritage to remaster and expand and revitalize Eric Gill’s body of work, with more weights, more characters and more languages to meet a wide range of design requirements. The series also brings to life new elements inspired by some of Gill’s unreleased work, discovered in Monotype’s archive of original typeface drawings and materials of the last century.

Maestrale is a paradigm-breaking new take on calligraphy, built around a compact, serif-style core and outrageously long, flamboyant extenders. At large sizes, its confident, charismatic lettershapes are ideally suited for branding and decorative uses, whereas longer texts at smaller sizes naturally weave themselves into a flowing texture. The font comprises 1299 glyphs, including many stylistic alternates, ligatures, small capitals, and initial, terminal, and linking forms, and offers extensive OpenType programming to support them. The calligraphic form of Maestrale is complemented by a matching text font (Maestrale Text) with short extenders, available in three cuts (a serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic). Maestrale is all about the lowercase; its capitals are deliberately understated so as not to steal the limelight. In fact, the font works very well when set exclusively in lowercase. Maestrale�s small capitals are fitted into the core space of the lowercase, allowing them to be freely interspersed with lowercase characters. Alternately, an OpenType feature is available to replace a and e in small-caps text with their lowercase equivalents for a fresh unicase look. Since alternates and ligatures play such an important role, Maestrale offers three different modes of use. The most straightforward approach is simply to start typing using Maestrale Pro � the extensive OpenType programming will ensure that collisions between extenders are avoided and attractive ligatures are substituted for common glyph combinations. A more interactive approach is provided by the font Maestrale Manual, which allows the user to manually select alternate forms and ligatures even in typographically unsavvy applications, such as PowerPoint (as long as standard ligatures are supported). Stylistic alternates are simply represented as ligatures of their base forms with one or more instances of the rarely-used by easily-accessed characters "~" (ASCII tilde) and "`" (spacing grave accent); linking forms are built with �_� (underscore), multi-character ligatures with "|" (pipe), and initial and terminal forms with the �less than� and �greater than� characters. For instance, the Maestrale wordmark in the posters above was simply typeset with the string (`ma`est|r_a```l```e)| in Maestrale Manual (The parentheses represent �less than� and �greater than� characters here.) Feel free to type this string into the test line below and see what happens! Make sure Standard Ligatures are enabled. An instruction sheet listing all alternate forms and their accessibility is available from the Gallery tab on this page. The third mode of usage is aimed at professional designers, who make use of sophisticated software with extensive OpenType support. These power users are advised to use the font Maestrale Pro again, where all glyphs are accessible as stylistic alternates. Maestrale Text is a less extravagant but more versatile variation on the design of Maestrale, replacing Maestrale�s swashes with efficiently compact extenders. It is intended to serve as a perfectly matching text companion to Maestrale calligraphy, but constitutes a full-fledged typeface in its own right. It is equally at home at display sizes as it is in pull quotes, titles, and high-impact blocks of text. Maestrale Text comes in three complementary faces: A serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic. Maestrale is the Italian word for �masterful�. It is also the traditional Italian name for the northwesterly mediterranean wind, better known by its French name, Mistral. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the helpful souls on the Typophile forums for extensive feedback and encouragement on Maestrale, and to the TypeDrawers forum for feedback on Maestrale Text. This font is dedicated to Simone.

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.

One menorah that I have long found particularly appealing was named The Tree of Life Menorah, a replica of which I gave as a gift one holiday to a kindly old couple who were neighbors and became friends. It had a simple, organic elegance that I see in the best of Art Nouveau sculpture. To me personally, Judeism is a celebration of life, like the triumph of the flower that blossoms in the crack of the city sidewalk. Just as Hanukkah celebrates the rededication of the temple and the miracle of the oil, it celebrates the victorious quest for freedom of the Hebrew people led by Judah Maccabee. Hanukkah represents determination and courage and faith — and it represents the presence of God in the lives of His people. It is interesting to note that the founding of the Albanian nation in the early twentieth century grew out of the resistance of the Albanian people to the imposition of Greek language and culture in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The typeface, HADASSAH, designed by Henri Friedlander (1904-1996), is my favorite Hebrew typeface. Thirty years in the crafting, I believe it is unsurpassed for its shear beauty, combining a subtle modulation of stroke with a simplicity and clarity of form. No doubt, that is why it has become so popular. For me, the Sîyn/Shîyn characters are especially satisfying. For a Hanukkah message in Hebrew, I would choose HADASSAH LIGHT for a headline and print it as large as I could. If, however, you are looking for a friendly, warm face for a seasonal message in a roman-letter based language, may I suggest BETHLEHEM EPHRATH. It will be as comfortable as a bulky, hand-knit sweater on a frosty afternoon and reflects the solid, encompassing, family orientation of this holiday. It was on the way to Ephrath that Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel gave birth to Benjamin and then died from her labor. It was to Ephrath that Naomi and Ruth returned and in Ephrath that we have the wonderful, heart-warming story of the marriage between Ruth and her Redeemer-Kinsman, Boaz. And it was to Ephrath that prophet, Samuel, went to find a new king and there in Ephrath that the prophet annointed a small shepherd boy named David. The Proverbs tell us to seek wisdom. Never underestimate the impact you have on others. Words of kindness can change people’s lives. The Talmud says that the highest form of wisdom is kindness. Be wise this holiday season. The font BETHLEHEM EPHRATH is based on the typeface Accent with the permission of URW++ of Hamburg, Germany. Like most display fonts, it is most effective at 18 points and larger. Like most script fonts, it is most effective when set with both upper and lower case. Although this font is readable in all caps (many scripts are not), that does not make it a good idea. Do so only with caution.

After doing this for so many years, one would think my fascination with the old history of writing would have mellowed out by now. The truth is that alongside being a calligraphy history buff, I'm a pop technology freak. Maybe even keener on the tech thing, since I just can't seem to get enough new gadgets. And after working with type technologies for so many years, I'm starting to think that writing and design technologies as we now know them, being about 2.5 post-computer generations, keep becoming more and more detached from what the very old humanity arts/tasks they essentially want to facilitate. In a world where command-z is a frequently used key combination, it’s difficult to justify expecting a Morris-made book or a Zaner-drawn sentence, but accidental artistic “mutations” become welcome, marketable features. When fluid pens were introduced, their liquid saturation influenced type design to a great extent almost overnight an influence professional designers tend to play down. Now round stroke endings are a common sight, and the saturation is so clean and measured, unlike any liquid-paper relationship possible in reality. Some designers even illustrate their work by overlaying perfect circles at stroke ends, in order to illustrate how “geometric” their work was. Because if it’s measured with precise geometry, it’s got to be meaningful design. And once in a while, by a total freak accident, the now-cherished mutations prove to have existed long before the technology that caused them. Rolling Pen was cued by just such a thing: A rounded, circular, roll-flowing calligraphy from the late nineteenth century seemingly one of those experimental takes on what inspired Business Penmanship, another font of mine. Looking at it now it certainly seems to be friendlier, more legible, and maybe even more practical and easier to execute than the standard business penmanship of those days, but I guess friendliness and simplicity were at odds with the stiff manner business liked to present itself back then, so that kind of thing remained buried in the professional penman’s oddities drawer. It would be quite a few years before all this curviness and rounding were thought of as symbolic of graceful movement, which brought such a flow closer to the idea of fine art. Even though in this case the accidental mutation just happens to not be a mutation after all, the whole technology-transforms-application argument still applies here. I'm almost sure “business” will be the last thing on people’s minds when they use this font today. One extreme example of that level of disconnect between origin and current application is shown here, with the so-called business penmanship strutting around in gloss and neon. Rolling Pen is another cup of mine that runneth over with alternates, swashes, ligatures, and other techy perks. To explore its full potential, please use it in a program that supports OpenType features for advanced typography. Enjoy the new Rolling Pen designed by Ale Paul with Neon’s visual poetry by Tomás García.