Welcome to the old version of Kage. "Old does not mean obsolete" In April 2022, we updated whole letterforms. We redrew all glyphs and refined the nodes, corners, rounded shapes, flowing tails, etc. Of course, you can still use the update of an older version of Kage, although we highly recommend you move to the Pro version for the full benefits. Kage Pro has massive development, puts forward experimentation on alternate letters, and applies an oblique style to provide diverse style choices. Come with tons of swirly ligatures and advanced opentype features include case-sensitive forms, small caps, standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions, numerator, denominator, superscript, subscript, circled number, slashed zero, old-style figure, tabular and lining figure. Learn more about Kage Pro here: Kage Pro 2.0 | Type Specimen About Kage The Inspiration: The radical exploration world of fashion inspires us. It leads our minds to the Neo-classical type style created during the age of enlightenment in the 18th century. It has a reasonably extreme contrast from the previous serif style, making the impression that it is emitted more expensive and classy. Organically, this Neo-Classical typeface is closely related to the fashion world, especially in Europe, and even spread across the globe. Fashion and this typeface reflect each other. After, we boldly observed Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. Famous for radical & deconstructive fashion, which makes the world of fashion more flexible and dynamic. The Design: As well as the typeface that we made, we started it with a cultural foundation of the Didone typeface. We tried to deconstruct the appearance. The decoration that better reflected the dynamic of fashion implemented in the fashionable alternate and calligraphical stylistic set ended with ball terminals. The versatile impression created is like taking off a scarf on the model's hair during a fashion show. The deconstructive image is combined with a legibility structure like the appearance of the Neo-Classical style. Kage is designed to visualize a costly and exclusive image of a thing, product, world clothing brand, famous fashion magazine, etc. The modern transitions of each letterform are softer, so when repositioning and escalating the size of this font, it will remain beautiful without injuring other elements. So, Kage is a bold choice on headlines and more prominent media with a portion of 50% even more. The Feature: Kage has 11 styles, from thin to black; all family-style consist of one variable font with two axes. The total number of glyphs is 748 in each style. She comes with tons of swirly ligatures and stylistic alternates in Advance OpenType features, including: discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, ordinals, fractions. Support multi-language including Western European, Central European, Southeastern European, South American, Oceanian, Vietnamese.

Gundrada ML was inspired by the lettering on the tomb of Gundrada de Warenne. She was buried at Southover Church at Lewes, Sussex, in the south of England in 1085. The Latin inscription on her tomb, STIRPS GUNDRADA DUCUM, meaning “Gundrada, descendant of the Duke” may have led to the speculation that she was the daughter of William, Duke of Normandy and bastard son of Robert the Devil of Normandy and Arletta, daughter of a tanner in Falaise. In 1066 William defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings and was crowned William I of England. More commonly known as William the Conquerer, he commissioned a string of forts around the kingdom and charged trusted Norman Barons to control the contentious Anglo-Saxon population. William de Warenne, husband of Gundrada, was one of these Barons. There has also been the suggestion that Gundrada may have been the daughter of William’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, by a previous marriage. According to the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, England 1921-22), both of these contentions are in dispute. Searching the past of a thousand years ago is like wandering in a heavy fog: facts are only dimly in view. Regardless, I know that I found these letterforms immediately engaging in their simplicity. Unadorned and unsophisticated, they have a direct honesty that rests well in the company of humanistic sans serifs like Franklin Gothic or Gill Sans, appealing to a contemporary sensibility. The lettering on the tomb is in upper case only. Although Gundrada does not sound Norman French to me, her husband certainly and her father probably were Norman French. Nonetheless, the man that carved her tombstone was probably Anglo-Saxon, like most of the people. For that reason, we are quite comfortable with a fairly generic lower case from an Anglo-Saxon document of the time. The time was a time of transition, of contending language influences. This font reflects some of that tension. Features 1. Multi-Lingual Font with 389 glyphs and 698 Kerning Pairs. 2. OpenType GSUB layout features: onum, dlig, liga, salt & hist. 3. Tabular Figures and Alternate Old-Style Figures. 4. Alternate Ruled Caps (line above and below, matching to brackets). 5. Central Europe, Western Europe, Turkish and Baltic Code Pages. 6. Additional accents for Cornish and Old Gaelic. 7. Stylistic alternates A, E, y and #. 8. Ligatures ST, Th, fi and fl. 9. Historic alternate longs. The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Lyra is an Italian Renaissance script that might have developed if metal type had not broken the evolution of broad pen calligraphy. It lies in the area between the humanist bookhand and the chancery cursive, combining the fullness and articulation of the Roman letters with a moderate italic slant and condensation. A steep pen-angle allows use of a broader pen relative to the x-height, giving the letters more contrast with light verticals and heavy curves. Lyra embodies the Renaissance spirit of refining technical advances of the late middle ages with reintroduction of ancient classical principles. Based on the moving penstroke with constantly changing pen-angle, it brings the vitality of handwriting to the ordered legibility of type. Lyra is a formal italic, too slow for copying books. By eliminating the element of speed, digital technology opens up a new level of calligraphy, bringing it into the sphere of typography as would naturally have happened if metalworkers had not controlled the process. If classical Western traditions are respected, digital calligraphy has the potential to recapture the work of the past and restart its stalled evolution. There is of course no substitute for the charm of actual writing, with each letter made for its space; but the tradeoff is for the formal harmony of classical calligraphy as every curve resonates in tune with every other. This three-weight font family marks Philip Bouwsma's much-requested return from a three year hiatus. It also reminds us of his solid vision in regards to how calligraphy, typography and technology can interact to produce digital beauty and vesatility. Each of the three Lyra fonts contains almost three character sets in a single file. Aside from the usual wealth of alternates normally built into Bouwsma's work, Lyra offers two unique features for the user who appreciates the availability of handy solutions to subtle design space issues: At least three (and as many as six) length variations on ascending and descending forms, and 65 snap-on swashes which can be attached to either end of the majuscules or minuscules. The series also offers 24 dividers and ornaments built into each weight, and a stand-alone font containing 90 stars/snowflakes/flowers, symmetric contstructs for building frames or separators, masking, watermarking, or just good old psychedelia.

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

Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) was called the King of Printers; he was a prolific type designer, a masterful engraver of punches and the most widely admired printer of his time. His books and typefaces were created during the 45 years he was the director of the fine press and publishing house of the Duke of Parma in Italy. He produced the best of what are known as modern" style types, basing them on the finest writing of his time. Modern types represented the ultimate typographic development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They have characteristics quite different from the types that preceded them; such as extreme vertical stress, fine hairlines contrasted by bold main strokes, and very subtle, almost non-existent bracketing of sharply defined hairline serifs. Bodoni saw this style as beautiful and harmonious-the natural result of writing done with a well-cut pen, and the look was fashionable and admired. Other punchcutters, such as the Didot family (1689-1853) in France, and J. E. Walbaum (1768-1839) in Germany made their own versions of the modern faces. Even though some nineteenth century critics turned up their noses and called such types shattering and chilly, today the Bodoni moderns are seen in much the same light as they were in his own time. When used with care, the Bodoni types are both romantic and elegant, with a presence that adds tasteful sparkle to headlines and advertising. ITC Bodoni™ was designed by a team of four Americans, after studying Bodoni's steel punches at the Museo Bodoniana in Parma, Italy. They also referred to specimens from the "Manuale Tipografico," a monumental collection of Bodoni's work published by his widow in 1818. The designers sought to do a revival that reflected the subtleties of Bodoni's actual work. They produced three size-specific versions; ITC Bodoni Six for captions and footnotes, ITC Bodoni Twelve for text settings, and ITC Bodoni Seventytwo - a display design modeled on Bodoni's 72-point Papale design. ITC Bodoni includes regular, bold, italics, Old style Figures, small caps, and italic swash fonts. Sumner Stone created the ornaments based on those found in the "Manuale Tipografico." These lovely dingbats can be used as Bodoni did, to separate sections of text or simply accent a page layout or graphic design."

Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) was called the King of Printers; he was a prolific type designer, a masterful engraver of punches and the most widely admired printer of his time. His books and typefaces were created during the 45 years he was the director of the fine press and publishing house of the Duke of Parma in Italy. He produced the best of what are known as modern" style types, basing them on the finest writing of his time. Modern types represented the ultimate typographic development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They have characteristics quite different from the types that preceded them; such as extreme vertical stress, fine hairlines contrasted by bold main strokes, and very subtle, almost non-existent bracketing of sharply defined hairline serifs. Bodoni saw this style as beautiful and harmonious-the natural result of writing done with a well-cut pen, and the look was fashionable and admired. Other punchcutters, such as the Didot family (1689-1853) in France, and J. E. Walbaum (1768-1839) in Germany made their own versions of the modern faces. Even though some nineteenth century critics turned up their noses and called such types shattering and chilly, today the Bodoni moderns are seen in much the same light as they were in his own time. When used with care, the Bodoni types are both romantic and elegant, with a presence that adds tasteful sparkle to headlines and advertising. ITC Bodoni™ was designed by a team of four Americans, after studying Bodoni's steel punches at the Museo Bodoniana in Parma, Italy. They also referred to specimens from the "Manuale Tipografico," a monumental collection of Bodoni's work published by his widow in 1818. The designers sought to do a revival that reflected the subtleties of Bodoni's actual work. They produced three size-specific versions; ITC Bodoni Six for captions and footnotes, ITC Bodoni Twelve for text settings, and ITC Bodoni Seventytwo - a display design modeled on Bodoni's 72-point Papale design. ITC Bodoni includes regular, bold, italics, Old style Figures, small caps, and italic swash fonts. Sumner Stone created the ornaments based on those found in the "Manuale Tipografico." These lovely dingbats can be used as Bodoni did, to separate sections of text or simply accent a page layout or graphic design."

A friend once jokingly told me that what I really do is mine extinct arts for parts to use in modern things, like going to the scrapyard to pick up bumpers, quarter-panels and dashboards off of Datsuns and Ponies to build a shiny new Ferrari. I still kind of grin at that, but I certainly do spend a lot of time looking at old things and imagining ways they would work today. This shiny new Ferrari here is called Bibliophile, and it contains scrap heap parts from various pages by Louis Prang, the Prussian-American printer and publisher who inspired my Prangs fonts. This is my second engagement with the late 19th century man, and it’s quite a bit more intricate than just an italic Didone with a connected lowercase. Bibliophile marries Round Hand calligraphy with Italian capitals, two styles not often relayed in the same alphabet, but work together beautifully when combined well. When you combine them well with a few long-practised tricks of the trade, then mix in a few trusted features from my previous work over the years, you get my usual crazy exuberance, like 17 different shapes for the d, 21 different forms for the y, endings, beginnings, swashes, ornaments, and so on. It’s no secret that I can get carried away when I’m so consumed by an idea. — Bibliophile comes in 2 weights, each of them with over 900 glyphs covering all the latin languages. Bibliophile also comes with a bold weight, something I’m always reluctant to do with something as adventurous and complex as the structure of this historical mashup. But I couldn’t chase away the idea of increasing the contrast while maintaining the hairlines in a lowercase this narrow. Part of it was the curiosity about the outcome, and part was the sheer challenge of it. I think it turned out OK. Words set in either weight will show delicateness and elegance, and the more time you spend inside the font and micro-manage the setting, the more ways you will find to magnify either. Bibliophile can be as muted or luxurious as you want it to be. This is the kind of alphabet that fits well in fashion marketing and high-end packaging, from the very subdued to the super-exquisite. Enjoy the gleaming new vehicle made with freshly polished old parts.

Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) was called the King of Printers; he was a prolific type designer, a masterful engraver of punches and the most widely admired printer of his time. His books and typefaces were created during the 45 years he was the director of the fine press and publishing house of the Duke of Parma in Italy. He produced the best of what are known as modern" style types, basing them on the finest writing of his time. Modern types represented the ultimate typographic development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They have characteristics quite different from the types that preceded them; such as extreme vertical stress, fine hairlines contrasted by bold main strokes, and very subtle, almost non-existent bracketing of sharply defined hairline serifs. Bodoni saw this style as beautiful and harmonious-the natural result of writing done with a well-cut pen, and the look was fashionable and admired. Other punchcutters, such as the Didot family (1689-1853) in France, and J. E. Walbaum (1768-1839) in Germany made their own versions of the modern faces. Even though some nineteenth century critics turned up their noses and called such types shattering and chilly, today the Bodoni moderns are seen in much the same light as they were in his own time. When used with care, the Bodoni types are both romantic and elegant, with a presence that adds tasteful sparkle to headlines and advertising. ITC Bodoni™ was designed by a team of four Americans, after studying Bodoni's steel punches at the Museo Bodoniana in Parma, Italy. They also referred to specimens from the "Manuale Tipografico," a monumental collection of Bodoni's work published by his widow in 1818. The designers sought to do a revival that reflected the subtleties of Bodoni's actual work. They produced three size-specific versions; ITC Bodoni Six for captions and footnotes, ITC Bodoni Twelve for text settings, and ITC Bodoni Seventytwo - a display design modeled on Bodoni's 72-point Papale design. ITC Bodoni includes regular, bold, italics, Old style Figures, small caps, and italic swash fonts. Sumner Stone created the ornaments based on those found in the "Manuale Tipografico." These lovely dingbats can be used as Bodoni did, to separate sections of text or simply accent a page layout or graphic design."

“Hello My Love” is a font love story. Inspired by my own long and happy marriage of 35 years, it was created to celebrate love! A classic hand-lettered script with a modern and fresh feel, it fits beautifully with current designs and yet is sure to stand the test of time. Made with invitation designers in mind, the Hello My Love Pro script font includes a total of 1985 glyphs plus a BONUS FONT, Hello My Love Ornaments! It has 91 hand illustrations including frames, florals and design elements. As a result, you will be able to create a variety of designs to highlight your special project. It’s especially well-suited for invitations for branding weddings and other special occasions! And it supports 129 languages! The font is loaded with features: Stylistic and Contextual Alternates, Swash Caps, Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Beginning Swashes for lower case letters, Cross-less t and f that can be combined with a flourished letter to avoid clashing plus 3 ampersands, small word art "and" & "No.", Roman Numerals, Ordinals and Fractions. This font was created to make designing easy. Need to convert upper case letters into Roman numerals throughout a guest list? Just turn on contextual alternates in Open Type capable programs and presto, the caps become Roman! Want a variety of letter choices? There are 215 stylistic alternate upper cases and 259 stylistic alternate lower cases as well as 69 ligatures to give you plenty of options. You can choose from swashes in 4 different styles and 3 different lengths resulting in unique beginning lower case letters. Works for Cutting Machines! No special software is required to use Hello My Love. All of my fonts have been specially coded for PUA (Private Use Area) so you can access all of the swashes and alternates using Character Map (PC) or Character Viewer (Mac) or with any number of apps including PopChar. If you would like to purchase PopChar at a special discount email me and I will send you the link. For Microsoft Word users, you can easily access the Stylistic and Contextual Alternates and the Roman Numerals through the Typography feature. (Microsoft Word 2010 and later) For more details about how to use my fonts, check out my video tutorials on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Letteringartstudio/videos

Bunyan Pro is the synthesis of Bunyan, the last face Eric Gill designed for hand setting in 1934 and Pilgrim, the machine face based on it, issued by British Linotype in the early 1950s — the most popular Gill text face in Britain from its release until well into the 1980s. Gill’s last face doesn't date itself anywhere near as obviously as Gill’s other serif faces, which were all really products of their time, heavily influenced by the richly ornamental and constantly changing aesthetic trends of the interwar period. When compared to Gill’s previous work, Bunyan seems like a revolution in the way he thought and drew. It’s as if he was shrugging off all heavy burden of what was popular, and going back to the basics of older standards. Bunyan had no bells and whistles, doesn't risk functionality with contrasts that are too high or too low, and didn't venture far outside the comfortable oldstyle rhythm Gill grew up with. By interbellum standards, this was utter austerity, a veritable denial of deco excess. Surprisingly, even without all the cloying trivialities, Bunyan still stood indisputably as an aesthetically pleasing, space saving design that could have been made only by Eric Gill. Bunyan Pro comes in three weights and their italics. The main font is intended for use between 8 and 14 points. The medium and the bold are great for emphasis but also have good merit in larger sizes, so can make effective display types as well. All six fonts include small caps, ligatures, alternates, six sets of figures, and three original Gill manicules. We tried to keep the best features of the handset (Bunyan) and machine (Pilgrim) versions while building a text face that can function in today’s immersive reading media. Deciding on which useful letterpress features to preserve for aesthetic importance was hell on our eyeballs — which lead to complex and painstaking ways of ironing out irregularities and inconsistencies related to metal technologies, in order to provide something with authenticity. The result is a unique typeface based on a Gill design that, to a much greater extent than any of his other faces, works well as a text face that can be used for entire books and magazines. For more information on Bunyan Pro’s character set, features, development process and some print tests, please consult the PDF in the gallery section of this page.

Here is another design by jewelry designer Max Joseph Gradl. Zier is a verb, meaning to decorate, adorn or ornament; zierlich means decorative, elegant, fine, neat. Schrift means type. Zierschrift, therefore, means decorative type. Gradl Zierschriften is a decorative type in the Art Nouveau style, rather than the more ornate Victorian style. Very modern, very young, with an elegant simplicity of form. Maria Makela, in her book The Munich Secession (Princeton 1990) suggests that the frequent use of simple, flowing, organic forms that was so characteristic of Art Nouveau was a reaction against the growing complexity and rapid urbanization that resulted from 19th century industrialization. In keeping with that reaction is the hand-drawn quality that intentionally rejects a mechanistic mathematic precision of line rendering. Gradl Zierschriften preserves that hand-drawn quality. Designed with upper case only, this face was obviously intended for short headlines only and is best set at 18 points or larger. However, I don't think you really get to experience the grace of this design until you get to 36 points or more. In the larger sizes, it is simply stunning. Please note that while most of the uppercase letterforms are repeated in the lower case for convenience, the ‘F’,‘L’ and ‘T’ are rendered a little narrower than in the uppercase to provide for visual variety. The font also includes a generous supply of ligatures for just the right fit ... and just for the fun of using them. Three common ways of inserting a ligature, accented letter or other special character are: 1) Key in “ALT”+“0”+[ascii #]; for example ALT+0233 for the e-acute, 2) From within your application program, go to the INSERT menu and look for something like “Insert Symbol,” (this function is NOT available in all application programs) & 3) Cut & Paste from the CHARACTER MAP display that has been supplied by every generation of Windows Operating System that I can recall (All Programs>Accessories>System Tools). Isn't it amazing what you can do? Don't be afraid to experiment. If you back up your work, you have very little to lose and a lot to gain. Not only do you acquire a new tool, but by the very process you have learned how to continually expand your knowledge and skill base.

Rahere Esoteric is a gothic-flavoured, quasi-Roman display font with an eccentric persona and more quirks than a Tim Burton film. A member of the extended Rahere typeface family, it’s the enigmatic cousin of Rahere Roman Display & Rahere Sans. This is a niche display font that doesn’t try to please everyone. Rahere Esoteric revels in its mystical aura, using a bewildering array of ligatures to magically transmute itself as characters loop, curl, jerk and strut, randomly connecting and disconnecting into words like a retro-futuristic steam train clattering along a disused railway track, challenging and delighting the reader at the same time. To add more sparkle, there are alternatives, inferior and superior caps plus a [Wicca] basketful of symbols, ornaments, weird faces and even a snake-infused ampersand. Whilst Rahere Esoteric has been designed primarily as an all-caps font, the lowercase slots contain small caps with corresponding numerals. However, because this is an arcane, unpredictable font, order and regularity are frowned upon, which means there are no tabular numerals – so company reports or accounts are a solid no! Unless they’re for the Golden Circle of Alchemists PLC or Gothic Blackstar Corporation. It is ideal for all things pagan, esoteric, alchemy, other-worldly or magic-related projects and particularly useful for music genres across the Gothic / Darkwave / Ethereal spectrum. What about legibility? Hey, look into my eyes: Esoteric is all about the mystique. If a secondary font is needed for the important stuff, I recommend its cousin, Rahere Sans, which pairs beautifully with this display font and is perfect for long passages or small text. The initial idea for Rahere Esoteric came about during a visit to Whitby, a small coastal town in Yorkshire, UK and famous for its inclusion in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. A Steampunk festival was in full swing and the narrow streets of the town centre were teeming with people adorned in a glorious fusion of clothing and accessories influenced by a love of 19th-century life, science fiction, horror, fashion and art. I was fascinated by the juxtapositions of colour, patterns, material and style – archaic mechanical Sci-fi, gothic, the American Wild West and romantic Victorian. But what intrigued me the most, somehow, all the disparate elements worked as a whole. Thus, like Frankenstein, this font jolted into existence. Supported languages include Western Europe, Vietnamese, Central/Eastern Europe, Baltic, Turkish and Romanian.