A flare-serif socialite. Elegant and affable at once. Leifa is a flare-serif typeface that strikes a balance between elegant and affable. It’s pleasant to read in text sizes yet takes center stage in headlines and display applications. With its higher-than-usual contrast, Leifa might evoke Didone typefaces at first. However, it differs from strictly Didone designs in the details: flattened serifs and deeply incised, tapered spurs provide an organic effect. These humanist elements are restrained and almost inconspicuous in body copy. It’s in display sizes that they realize their full potential. Set your message in Leifa, set it large, and it will get noticed. A true socialite, Leifa is a most welcome guest on any party. With its dual character and a range of weights that allow for fine-tuning the desired visual voice, it’s a brilliant choice for branding and editorial design. Its good-natured yet sophisticated character makes Leifa the perfect typeface for fashion, sports, lifestyle, social media, food and cooking, health, beauty, architecture, interior design, art, literature, theater, and travel. (And any other topic that you’d love to talk about at a dinner in good company.) The entire font family consists of eight weights. Each comes with an italic counterpart, totaling 16 styles. Leifa’s italics are oblique, optically corrected versions of the upright styles. Each style comprises a character set of 883 glyphs that includes small caps, a set of ligatures, tabular and old-style figures, case-sensitive forms, fractions, symbols, and many other features. Four stylistic sets allow you to adjust the appearance of the Leifa fonts: a single-story a (SS01), a simple f (SS02), a triple-story g (SS03), and thin punctuation marks (SS04) are at your disposal. If you’re looking for a typeface with some debonair spirit, look no further than Leifa.

The Journal Sans typeface was developed in the Type Design Department of SPA of Printing Machinery in Moscow in 1940–1956 by the group of designers under Anatoly Schukin. It was based on Erbar Grotesk by Jacob Erbar and Metro Sans by William A. Dwiggins, the geometric sans-serifs of the 1920s with the pronounced industrial spirit. Journal Sans, Rublenaya (Sans-Serif), and Textbook typefaces were the main Soviet sans-serifs. So no wonder that it was digitized quite early, in the first half of 1990s. Until recently, Journal Sans consisted of three faces and retained all the problems of early digitization, such as inaccurate curves or side-bearings copied straight from metal-type version. The years of 2013 and 2014 made «irregular» geometric sans-serifs trendy, and that fact affected Journal Sans. In the old version curves were corrected and the character set was expanded by Olexa Volochay. In the new release, besides minor improvements, a substantial work has been carried out to make the old typeface work better in digital typography and contemporary design practice. Maria Selezeneva significantly worked over the design of some glyphs, expanded the character set, added some alternatives, completely changed the side-bearings and kerning. Also, the Journal Sans New has several new faces, such as true italic (the older font had slanted version for the italic), an Inline face based on the Bold, and the Display face with proportions close to the original Erbar Grotesk. The new version of Journal Sans, while keeping all peculiarities and the industrial spirit of 1920s-1950s, is indeed fully adapted to the modern digital reality. It can be useful either for bringing historical spirit into design or for modern and trendy typography, both in print and on screen. Designed by Maria Selezeneva with the participation of Alexandra Korolkova. Released by ParaType in 2014.

Born in the 70s Personal influences are unavoidable in type design and usually find their way through into finished fonts. At Fontsmith, one period in particular provides inspiration, according to FS Pimlico designer, Fernando Mello. “Jason and Phil have always known that I’m very into the visual language of the 70s. I know that Jason shares my love of the 70s and Phil will sometimes admit to being a fan, too. I think that’s the reason they were both so supportive in the development of this font. “And, of course, we all share an interest in good-humoured and intelligent design. We like to think it’s a Fontsmith characteristic.” Back from black FS Pimlico started in an unusual place: with a tubby, penguin-like lowercase “a” that Fernando Mello had been sketching. From “a” grew the rest of the alphabet – a bubbly, fat, friendly family with a brush-written quality that became FS Pimlico Black. The black weight certainly isn’t the normal starting point for creating a regular and bold weight, but Fernando pressed on, driven by a glut of influences: brush-writing; Letraset and early digital systems catalogues; the type of Herb Lubalin and Tony di Spigna; 70s clothes and vinyl; and 70s revival disco nights in London’s Pimlico and Vauxhall. Natural or flourished Not often do fonts come along that seem to span the ages. FS Pimlico is at home in an office environment providing a fresh clear identity in communications or providing text that’s clear and easy to read. But it likes to party, too, 70s style. With the OpenType features switched on, a designer can totally change the look of their work, and create point-of-sale, headlines and titles that stand out and get noticed.

The Geometry Pro family has been designed to be the final word in purely geometric fonts, and this rounded “Soft” sub-family is the ultimate web 2.0 style font collection. Even though it is strictly geometric (as drawn with a compass and a ruler fixed to 90 and 45 degree angles) it is not slavishly modular: letters have differing widths, and the sidebearings, spacing and kerning has been finely adjusted to create smooth text. The Soft family contains three weights each with 6 variants: A is the basic form and the starting point B has more dynamic and modern shapes C has open and swirly shapes X is the serious text version Y has a very horizontal look Z is a collection of all the remaining more funky shapes Mix and match to your heart’s desire! Please enjoy the free “Bold N” version - this “notched” variant lets you test out the quality of the outlines and the language support. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual “western” glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

LFT Arnoldo began as an all-caps book cover typeface created during the rebranding of Oscar Mondadori, the most important Italian publisher, with over 4,500 titles from ancient classics to contemporary works, and spanning academic essays to children’s and self-help books. For such a diverse catalogue, it was necessary to find a coherent and flexible paradigm which took into account genre and readership differences and ensured harmony among its works. The main idea was to create a typeface suitable for the branding element and which could be used for each title of the immense catalogue. So what makes LFT Arnoldo a companion to the centuries? Starting with the design of the capital letters, it is first a rational typeface with contemporary proportions. But rationality without style wasn’t enough, so its glyphic nature carries an engraved feeling to resemble letters when chisel is put to stone. Once these two traits were settled, the entire character set was developed as a flared humanist sans in order to complete the family and extend its usage, from titles and display settings to texts. LFT Arnoldo sets titles with dignified authority to appear digitally carved and more arresting than the usual sans or flared sans designs of the past. It is calm and dependable in paragraph use and a captivating vehicle of aesthetic expression in title and display use. At once rugged and syncopated, the slight hourglass stems and incised details make each letter come alive and engrave each paragraph upon our emotions. LFT Arnoldo intends to be a resilient type family for centuries to come. Its seven roman weights have italic counterparts and the entire family is loaded with OpenType features: alternates, ligatures, small caps, oldstyle and lining numerals, and science and math capabilities. In the battle of charisma, where the right voice must project intelligence, influence, and refinement, LFT Arnoldo is the victor.

Eksja is a modern slab serif available in four weights, each with a corresponding italic. All the fonts in the family have small caps, the extended latin character set, diacritical f-ligatures, enclosed numerals (numbers in circles) and case-sensitive punctuation. The general design of the typeface has been with a strong human touch in mind. The ends of the serifs have been given a subtle rounding, just enough to take the edge off which, when coupled with the largely humanist structure of the design, creates an open, friendly and approachable design, abandoning the usual geometric severity commonly associated with slab serif typefaces. Eksja contains quite a comprehensive numerals system. Obviously, each font has the standard proportionally and tabularly spaced lining and old-style figures but, crucially, the tabular numerals share the exact same width in each font variant. That means that you can choose to use the thin, regular, bold, black and their italic forms all in the same setting and they will always line up. In addition to the 'normal' numerals there are super-script and sub-script numerals and OpenType fractions that can be automatically composed as you type. There are also the enclosed numerals, numbers inside a circle, that are useful for numerically listing items and, thanks to the wizardry of OpenType, they can contain any number of digits (typically, enclosed numerals are precomposed single digits, only encompassing the 0–9 range, the enclosed numerals in Eksja can go to double digits, triple digits or, in fact, any number of digits*). *The automation of the enclosed numerals is accessed via either "Stylistic Set #1" or "Stylistic Alternates" which requires the use of an application that supports OpenType stylistic sets or stylistic alternates, such as Adobe's InDesign or Photoshop.

To Rafaella, a menina dos cachos. We, designers, have grown accustomed to seeing that lowercase letters—not only in calligraphy but also in typography (1)—may be very playful and decorative. Almost every part of them can become a potential swash, ligature or decorative accolade (2) if the designer has some expertise regarding this matter. However, since we are living in an era that elevates the status of handcrafts, lettering has gained a lot of ground in different kinds of mediums, and with it there’s a sort of overuse of capitals. This may be due to the reason that lettering pieces need a high impact to convey their messages and many times why big capitals are the only solution. With this in mind, I started Rafaella: A font consisting entirely of capitals which go from unadorned to very decorative. Rafaella has ductus and forms vaguely based on the 1970s Bookman-like styled fonts. The presence and behaviour of serifs and ball terminals in this style were the perfect excuse to make really attractive aternates which the user can choose from the glyphs panel. The result is a font full of life. Able to be both very playful and formal due to its roman style which can be combined with (and between) a wide range of other styles of expressive scripts or geometric fonts with nice results (3). Also try Rafaella Shade Solo combined with Rafaella or Rafaella Bold for a layer effect to emphasize any given word or phrase. NOTES (1) See my fonts Erotica from 2013 or Dream from 2014. (2) Accolades is a wonderful word that refers to the ornaments made around the words in the spencerian style of calligraphy (3) Combinations often seen in different pieces of lettering were usually a contrast of style is wanted.

HWT Konop is a monospaced (fixed-width) typeface that is also square! Designed by Mark Simonson (Proxima Nova) as square characters that can be arranged vertically or horizontally and in any orientation. To a traditional letterpress job printer, a font like this wouldn’t make much sense. But to a modern letterpress printer it is an unusual and creative design toolkit. The bold gothic style is reminiscent of gothic wood types but more geometric. Since the characters are meant to be used in any orientation, the usual optical adjustments, such as making verticals thicker than horizontals and making tops smaller than bottoms are set aside. This results in a quirky but charming design. To provide more design options, Simonson came up with a modular system consisting of three sizes: 12-line, 8-line, and 6-line. These three sizes can be used together like Lego® bricks, with endless arrangements possible. And the sidebearing match so that characters always align when different sizes are used together. The digital version of Konop replicates the wood type version as much as possible, including the three different size designs. It includes OpenType stylistic sets that allow most characters to be rotated in place, 90° left, 90° right, or 180°, just like the wood type version. Extra characters not available in the wood type version are included with the digital fonts. The set of 3 is priced just $5 more than one single font, so order via "Package Options" HWT Konop is named for Don Konop, a retired Hamilton Manufacturing employee, who worked from 1959 to 2003. In addition to serving on the Two Rivers Historical Society Board from 2004 to present-day, he was also instrumental as a volunteer in helping with the museum’s move to its current home in 2013.

MAS AMOR POR FAVOR (1) (more love, please) Fluire means -to flow- in Italian and that’s what this font is all about. The story began when a friend of mine asked for a tattoo with the word -Fluir- (to flow in Spanish). She didn't want a tattoo full of swashes and swirls, like I'm used to doing, but something more fluent, soft and minimal. My very first attempts were more related to copperplate calligraphy but I wasn't even close: I discovered that I needed to forget a little bit about the classic contrast and speed of the engrosser's nib and started playing with a tiny flat metal nib. Letters started to flow, and I immediately thought of turning them into a font. Inspired by the tattoo I created and by other tattoos I saw, I started the journey of what would be a very fun process. The result is a very cute, almost monoline font with a wide range of uses. USES If not used for a tattoo (my first ‘target’), the font delivers amazing results in combination with Fluire Caps: These two need each other, they go together, they talk. I designed Fluire Caps Down and Fluire Caps Up so it’s easier to manage their colors. Also there’s Fluire Caps Down Lines, which has a decorative thin line to add yet another dimension. Use the fonts in magazines, book covers, posters, greeting cards, weddings, lettered walls, storefronts! TIPS Since the font is Open-Type programmed, I strongly recommend using it in applications that support that feature. Also, the font looks way better when -contextual alternates- are activated, but it’s your choice :) Try Fluire, and keep flowing. NOTES (1) The phrase alludes to maybe the most tattooed phrase in Latin America.

While Adelle is a slab serif typeface conceived by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione specifically for intensive editorial use, mainly in newspapers, magazines, and online, its personality and flexibility make it a true multipurpose typeface. Adelle’s superior screen rendering and cross-platform consistency has also made it one of our most popular webfonts. The intermediate weights deliver a neutral look when used in text sizes, providing the usual robustness expected in a newspaper font. The unobtrusive appearance, excellent texture, and slightly dark colour allow it to behave flawlessly in continuous text, even in the most unforgiving editorial applications. As it becomes larger in print, Adelle shows its personality through a series of measured particularities which make it easy to remember and identify. Its energetic character, so inherent to slab serif fonts, becomes evident when used for subheadings and headlines. A condensed series of seven weights with matching italics expand Adelle’s possibilities. This extension provides flexible solutions in situations where saving space is vital but losing legibility is not an option. The new condensed series shares the same personality, proportions, and skeleton of the Adelle family, creating an harmonious texture when combined. Be sure to check out the companion to Adelle, Adelle Sans, to complete the look of your design with the intended personality and flexibility. Awards – Third prize for Latin text typeface in the 2009 Granshan Type Design Competition – Won Gold for Original Typeface in the 2010 European Design Awards – Selected in the first Ukrainian typeface competition in 2010 – Exhibited at the Rutenia Calligraphy & Typography Festival (http://rutenia.org.ua/en/index_u.html) in Kyiv, 2010 – Selected in the 2011 Type Directors Club Tokyo Exhibition – Selected in Communication Arts 2011 Typography Annual – Selected in Yearbook of Type I, 2013 – Part of the exhibition «Call for Type» and subsequent book Neue Schriften (New Typefaces)

Plantin is a family of text typefaces created by Monotype in 1913. Their namesake, Christophe Plantin (Christoffel Plantijn in Dutch), was born in France during the year 1520. In 1549, he moved to Antwerp, located in present-day Belgium. There he began printing in 1555. For a brief time, he also worked at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Typefaces used in Christophe Plantin's books inspired future typographic developments. In 1913, the English Monotype Corporation's manager Frank Hinman Pierpont directed the Plantin revival. Based on 16th century specimens from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, specifically a type cut by Robert Granjon and a separate cursive Italic, the Plantin" typeface was conceived. Plantin was drawn for use in mechanical typesetting on the international publishing markets. Plantin, and the historical models that inspired it, are old-style typefaces in the French manner, but with x-height that are larger than those found in Claude Garamond's work. Plantin would go on to influence another Monotype design, Times New Roman. Stanley Morison and Victor Larent used Plantin as a reference during that typeface's cutting. Like Garamond, Plantin is exceptionally legible and makes a classic, elegant impression. Plantin is indeed a remarkably accommodating type face. The firm modelling of the strokes and the serifs in the letters make the mass appearance stronger than usual; the absence of thin elements ensures a good result on coated papers; and the compact structure of the letters, without loss of size makes Plantin one of the economical faces in use. In short, it is essentially an all-purpose face, excellent for periodical or jobbing work, and very effective in many sorts of book and magazine publishing. Plantin's Bold weight was especially optimized to provide ample contrast: bulkiness was avoided by introducing a slight sharpening to the serifs' forms."

Lapis was Jim Rimmer's venture into a territory he'd earlier explored with his Lancelot and Fellowship faces. This time he stayed much longer, dug pretty deep, and had plenty of fun in there. The end result is the kind of mosaic of influences only a guy like Jim could consider, gather, manage and apply in a way that ultimately makes sense and works as a type family. On the surface Lapis seems like something that can be billed as what Jim would have called an "advertising text face". But under the hood, it's a whole other story. On top of the calligraphic, nib-driven base Jim usually employed in his faces, Lapis shows plenty of typographic traits from a variety of genres, from Egyptian to Latin, from blackletter angularity to Dutch-like curvature, with an overall tension even reminiscent of wood type. There are some Goudy-informed shapes that somehow fit comfortably within all this. Then it's all strung together with a mix of wedged, tapered and leaning serifs, placed with precision to reveal expert spontaneity and a great command of guiding the forms through counterspace. In the fall of 2013, the Lapis fonts were scrutinized and remastered into versatile performers for sizes large and small. The three weights and their italic counterparts have been refined and expanded across the board to include small caps, alternates, ligatures, ordinals, case-sensitive forms, six kinds of figures, automatic fractions, and a character set that covers an extended range of Latin languages. Each of the Lapis Pro fonts contains over 760 glyphs. For more details on the fonts' features, text and display specimens and print tests, consult the Lapis Pro PDF availabe in the Gallery section of this page. 20% of Lapis Pro's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

The history of Aerolite, from Jan Paul: "The Aerolite fonts are essentially stripped down versions of a complex outline typeface I designed for the first Midnight Oil album in 1978, affectionately known as "The Blue Meanie". Many years later I saw the font "powderworks" and asked Brian Kent if he would be interested in digitizing Aerolite. Brian is a font (!) of knowledge and was of invaluable help by getting Aerolite to where it is today. Special care was taken in keeping the distinct character while as Aerolite Regular also providing a legible, thouroughly kerned body type which can be used in all sizes for large volume text." For the Pro version the kerning has been tweaked further, and the character set completed and expanded - and the alternate uppercase A (also with accents) is available as OpenType stylistic alternates. It is now ready for your next international science or sci-fi project. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

Reminiscent of circuitry and wrought iron, Anachrony constructs the forms of an Old English Blackletter with the strokes of a Modern Geometric Sans, and lands in the vicinity of Art Deco. For such an unusual chimera, the Anachrony family is legible and versatile. Its glyphs cover pan-European Latin, Greek, and a wealth of symbols including arrows, zodiac, planets, chess, suits, and circled numbers. It is also packed with Opentype features: Small Capitals: Of similar proportions to the default numerals, tall enough to be a suitable choice in place of regular capitals. All Caps Forms: In addition to the four usual types of numerals, there are numerals and currency symbols that match the capitals. Swash: A leading curly swash on capitals, and fancy looped ascenders in the lowercase that are handled by over a hundred standard ligatures where they would collide. Style Set 01: Romanized forms. Especially recommended for all caps. Plainer A/M/T/V/W/Y, J/Q reined in to the baseline, and alternate g. Style Set 02: Masthead forms. Old-fashioned capitals with descenders and that lower left dealy. Also f/x/z/ß in a more traditional fraktur mode. Style Set 03: Mild embellishments. Tall bifurcated ascenders and descenders. Style Set 04: Extravagant swash descenders. Style Set 05: Final swashes for the end of a word. Style Set 06: Converts capital letters into the corresponding connected Roman numerals. Seemed like it could be useful sometime. Easy swooshes: Standard ligatures allow you to type two to seven commas in a row to append an assortment of sweeping or ending swashes. Catchwords: In Anachrony Royale, turn on Discretionary Ligatures for a variety of decorative articles and prepositions.

Sterling Script was initially meant to a be digitization/reinterpretation of a copperplate script widely used during what effectively became the last decade of metal type: Stephenson Blake's Youthline, from 1952. The years from 1945 to 1960 saw a heightened demand for copperplate faces, due to post-war market optimism, as well as the banking and insurance industries booming like never before, which triggered the need for design elements that express formal elegance and luxury. The name Sterling Script is a tip of our hat to England, the Stephenson Blake foundry's country of origin. It is also a historical hint about copperplate scripts having been used mainly for banking and bonds in the 19th century. Originally we just wanted to resurrect a gorgeous metal type from the ashes of forgotten history. But after the main font was done we saw that the original s really needed an alternate. We made one. But we felt sorry for the original s and didn't want to see it dropped from use altogether, so we saved it by building a set of ligatures that solve the minor connection problem with the s at large sizes. Before the completion of the ligatures, a few different alternates were also drawn, and we were faced by the fact that the single font we set out to do was now a much larger set than we anticipated. While thinking about how to split up our unexpected bundle of large characters, we drew a few more alternates and some swashes. This abundance "problem" reached a certain point where there was no looking back, so we just decided to go all the way with this font. We added many more alternates, swashes, ligatures, and two full sets of each beginning and ending lowercase letter. The result is over 750 characters of sheer elegance. Sterling Script has many features that set it above and beyond other copperplate scripts: - It has 2 beginning and 2 ending alternates for every single lowercase character. The beginning and ending variants on the vowels are also available in accented form in the appropriate cells of the character map. - Sterling Script is the ultimate elegant font choice for luxury design. Very elegant, but not too soft. Its strong and confident shapes convey a message that is real, comforting and assuring. - One of the eventual purposes of expanding Sterling Script this extensively was to create a script that finds the middle ground between formal and informal without compromising either trait, a script where the degree of formality can be gauged, tweaked, cranked up or toned down depending on the layout's needs. Aside from beginnings and endings, there are multiple variations for the majority of the basic characters. This is a formal script on steroids, where twirls and swashes can be set to come out unexpectedly from any place in the word, which is great for reducing the inherent rigidity of words set in copperplate scripts and "humanizing" them whenever needed. This is especially useful for wedding, postcard and invitation design, where not every viewer of the collateral material has something to do with banking or insurance. - With such an extensive character set, a designer can easily set a word or a sentence in 10 or more different ways, and choose the perfect one for the task at hand. This is particularly useful for work where details are of utmost importance, like logos, slogans, or elegant engravings that consist of one to three words. Let those swashes and twirls intertwine for maximum elegance. The Sterling Script complete package consists of 7 fonts: Sterling Script, Alternates, Beginnings, Endings, Swashes, Swash Alternates, and Ligatures. Sterling Script is available in five different purchase options and price ranges. But with such a massive offering of variation, the Sterling Script complete package is definitely the most value-laden set in its class. Once you use Sterling Script, you will never want to go back to other copperplates.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.