The ITC Franklin™ typeface design marks the next phase in the evolution of one of the most important American gothic typefaces. Morris Fuller Benton drew the original design in 1902 for American Type Founders (ATF); it was the first significant modernization of a nineteenth-century grotesque. Named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, the design not only became a best seller, it also served as a model for several other sans serif typefaces that followed it. Originally issued in just one weight, the ATF Franklin Gothic family was expanded over several years to include an italic, a condensed, a condensed shaded, an extra condensed and, finally, a wide. No light or intermediate weights were ever created for the metal type family. In 1980, under license from American Type Founders, ITC commissioned Victor Caruso to create four new weights in roman and italic - book, medium, demi and heavy - while preserving the characteristics of the original ATF design. This series was followed in 1991 by a suite of twelve condensed and compressed designs drawn by David Berlow. ITC Franklin Gothic was originally released as two designs: one for display type and one for text. However, in early digital interpretations, a combined text and display solution meant the same fonts were used to set type in any size, from tiny six-point text to billboard-size letters. The problem was that the typeface design was almost always compromised and this hampered its performance at any size. David Berlow, president of Font Bureau, approached ITC with a proposal to solve this problem that would be mutually beneficial. Font Bureau would rework the ITC Franklin Gothic family, enlarge and separate it into distinct text and display designs, then offer it as part of its library as well. ITC saw the obvious value in the collaboration, and work began in early 2004. The project was supposed to end with the release of new text and display designs the following year. But, like so many design projects, the ITC Franklin venture became more extensive, more complicated and more time consuming than originally intended. The 22-font ITC Franklin Gothic family has now grown to 48 designs and is called simply ITC Franklin. The new designs range from the very willowy Thin to the robust Ultra -- with Light, Medium, Bold and Black weights in between. Each weight is also available in Narrow, Condensed and Compressed variants, and each design has a complementary Italic. In addition to a suite of new biform characters (lowercase characters drawn with the height and weight of capitals), the new ITC Franklin Pro fonts also offer an extended character set that supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages. ITC Franklin Text is currently under development.

Polias is an all-caps uniwidth typeface inspired by an ancient inscription carved on a monoblock stone in hybrid characters — between no-contrast linear sans to low-contrast flared serif. The inspiring inscription is the dedication by Alexander the Great, discovered in the Temple of Athena Polias in the ancient Ionian city of Priene. Stanley Morison mentioned this inscription in one of his lectures: “The distinctive feature of this inscription consists of a consistent thickening towards the ends of perpendiculars and horizontals.” … “We have not the right to say that the serif was invented for Alexander the Great's inscription, only that this is its first datable appearance.” The letter proportions are almost identical to the original, but the stroke features have been reinterpreted and characterized. Serif-like nodes at the end of the strokes are subtle extensions that serve to accentuate rather than break its monoline elegance. With an analogy, they are not flowers, but like blooming buds. Polias is a flared sans typeface which is closer to sans-serif forms on the spectrum between sans and serif. It’s especially light looking by design to convey rather thin and white typographic color of its original monumental look. It comes in eight weights and a variable font, scaled from Thin to Bold. It is multiplexed, so the weights do not affect text lengths. Light weights are closely based on the actual carving of the inscription. Thicker weights can be used on smaller typesettings to compensate for the weight difference of larger letters’ strokes, and to keeping the monoline appearance of the entire text block intact. This method can be used for any purpose, such as setting a hierarchy between the lines or to justify their lengths. Some of the original letterforms have been preserved and stylistic alternatives such as Ionic four-bar Sigma, dotted Theta, palm Y are provided as open type feature. Some of the other ancient forms, such as the three-bar Sigma (S), the pointed U, were also added for both the Greek and Latin scripts. Polias is preferable for big type settings such as logos and headlines as a modern representation of perennial classical forms. Its a fine fit for product branding, movie posters, book covers, packaging materials, and more, which require an epic look to attracting attention with a distinctive elegance. Polias can be considered for distinctiveness wherever Roman Capitals work. As a noun, Polias is one of the epithets of Athena / Minerva, and in this case referring to her role as the protector of the city of Priene. Polias is one of the seven typeface designs in Esintype's ancient scripts of Anatolia project, Tituli Anatolian series.

An American Scotch remixed in 27 fonts Mencken has twenty seven styles, divided into three widths, three optical sizes, romans and italics. Generally, optical size typeface families belong to a same common construction. It falls into the same category of type classification, while presenting different x-heights or contrasts. Mencken is unique because it is designed according to different axis and optical sizes. Firstly, Mencken Text is a low-contrast transitional typeface, designed on an oblique axis, asserting horizontal with featuring open counters. Its capitals follow Didots to better harmonize the rest of the family. On the other side of the spectrum, Mencken Head (and narrow variations) is designed on a vertical axis, high contrast, in a contemporary Didot style. The Mencken is therefore a typeface answering to different sorts of uses, whose design is different according to its uses: from oblique axis in small size to vertical axis in large sizes. Vertical proportions (x-height, capitals height, etc.) were calibrated to be compatible with many Typofonderie typeface families. Lucie Lacava and I followed the idea launched by Matthew Carter few years ago for some of his typefaces intended for publications. From Baltimore Sun’s project to Typofonderie’s Mencken It is a bespoke typeface for American newspaper The Baltimore Sun started at the end of 2004 which marks the beginning of this project. The story started with a simple email exchange with Lucie Lacava then in charge of redesigning the American East Coast newspaper. As usual, she was looking for new typeface options in order to distinguish the redesign that she had started. At the time of its implementation, a survey of the newspaper’s readers has revealed that its previous typeface, drawn in the mid-1990s, was unsatisfactory. The Mencken was well received, some reader responses was particularly enjoyable: “It’s easier to read with the new type even though the type is designed by a French.” Why it is called Mencken? The name Mencken is a tribute to H. L. Mencken’s journalistic contributions to The Sun. According to the London Daily Mail, Mencken ventured beyond the typewriter into the world of typography. Because he felt Americans did not recognize irony when they read it, he proposed the creation of a special typeface to be called Ironics, with the text slanting in the opposite direction from italic types, to indicate the author’s humour. Affirming his irreverence, the Mencken typeface does not offer these typographic gadgets. Henry Louis Mencken (1880 — 1956) was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. Known as the “Sage of Baltimore”, he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements. Creative Review Type Annual 2006 Tokyo TDC 2018

Polias Varia is an all-caps uniwidth variable weight typeface inspired by an ancient inscription carved on a monoblock stone in hybrid characters — between no-contrast linear sans to low-contrast flared serif. The inspiring inscription is the dedication by Alexander the Great, discovered in the Temple of Athena Polias in the ancient Ionian city of Priene. Stanley Morison mentioned this inscription in one of his lectures: “The distinctive feature of this inscription consists of a consistent thickening towards the ends of perpendiculars and horizontals.” … “We have not the right to say that the serif was invented for Alexander the Great’s inscription, only that this is its first datable appearance.” In Polias Varia, the letter proportions are almost identical to the original, but the stroke features have been reinterpreted and characterized. Serif-like nodes at the end of the strokes are subtle extensions that serve to accentuate rather than break its monoline elegance. With an analogy, they are not flowers, but like blooming buds. Polias Varia is a flared sans typeface which is closer to sans-serif forms on the spectrum between sans and serif. It’s especially light looking by design to convey rather thin and white typographic color of its original monumental look. It comes in eight weights and a variable font, scaled from Thin to Bold. It is multiplexed, so the weights do not affect text lengths. Light weights are closely based on the actual carving of the inscription. Thicker weights can be used on smaller typesettings to compensate for the weight difference of larger letters’ strokes, and to keeping the monoline appearance of the entire text block intact. This method can be used for any purpose, such as setting a hierarchy between the lines or to justify their lengths. Some of the original letterforms have been preserved and stylistic alternatives such as Ionic four-bar Sigma, dotted Theta, palm Y are provided as open type feature. Some of the other ancient forms, such as the three-bar Sigma (S), the pointed U, were also added for both the Greek and Latin scripts. Polias Varia is preferable for big type settings such as logos and headlines as a modern representation of perennial classical forms. Its a fine fit for product branding, movie posters, book covers, packaging materials, and more, which require an epic look to attracting attention with a distinctive elegance. Polias Varia can be considered for distinctiveness wherever Roman Capitals work. As a noun, Polias is one of the epithets of Athena / Minerva, and in this case referring to her role as the protector of the city of Priene. Polias (family) is one of the seven typeface designs in Esintype’s ancient scripts of Anatolia project, Tituli Anatolian series.

Morris is a four-font family produced by HiH Retrofonts and based on the work of the very English William Morris. William Morris wanted a gothic type drawn from the 14th century blackletter tradition that he admired both stylistically and philosophically. He drew from several sources. His principal inspiration for his lower case was the 1462 Bible by Peter Schoeffer of Mainz; particularly notable for the first appearance of the ‘ear’ on the g. The upper case was Morris’s amalgam of the Italian cursive closed caps popular throughout the 12th through 15th centuries, a modern example of which is Goudy’s Lombardic Capitals. The gothic that Morris designed was first used by his Kelmscott Press for the publication of the Historyes Of Troye in 1892. It was called “Troy Type” and was cut at 18 points by Edward Prince. It was also used for The Tale of Beowulf. The typeface was re-cut in at 12 points and called “Chaucer Type” for use in The Order of Chivalry and The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Morris' objective is designing his gothic was not only to preserve the color and presence of his sources, but to create letters that were more readable to the English eye. ATF copied Troy and called it Satanick. Not only was the ATF version popular in the United States; but, interestingly, sold very well in Germany. There was great interest in that country in finding a middle ground between blackletter and roman styles -- one that was comfortable for a wider readership. The Morris design was considered one of the more successful solutions. Our interpretation, which we call Morris Gothic, substantially follows the Petzendorfer model used by other versions we have seen, with the following exceptions: 1) a larger fillet radius on the upper arm of the H, 2) a more typically broadpen stroke in place of the foxtail on the Q, which I do not like, 3) inclusion of the aforementioned ear on the g and 4) a slightly shorter descender on the y. We have included five ornaments, at positions 0135, 0137, 0167, 0172 and 0177. The German ligatures ‘ch’ & ‘ck’ can be accessed using the left and right brace keys (0123 & 0125). Morris Initials One and Morris Initials Two are two of several different styles of decorative initial letters that Morris designed for use with his type. He drew from a variety of 15th century sources, among which were Peter Schoeffer’s 1462 Mainz Bible and the lily-of-the-valley alphabet by Gunther Zainer of Augsburg. Each of the two initial fonts is paired with the Morris Gothic lower case. Morris Ornaments is a collection of both text ornaments and forms from the surrounding page-border decorations.

Neue Haas Unica by Toshi Omagari: The original purpose behind the creation of the typeface Haas Unica was to provide a sympathetic update of Helvetica. But now the font designer Toshi Omagari has decided to make this typeface his own and has thus significantly supplemented and extended it. In the late 1970s, at the same time at which hot metal typesetting was being replaced by phototypesetting, the Haas Type Foundry commissioned a group of specialists known as "Team '77" consists of Andre Gurtler, Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind to adapt Max Miedinger's font The characters of Haas Unica are somewhat narrower than those of Helvetica so that the larger bowls, such as those of the "b" and "d", appear more delicate and have a slightly more pleasing effect. In general, the spacing of Haas Unica was increased to provide for improved kerning and thus enhance the legibility of the typeface in smaller point sizes. Major changes were made to the lowercase "a", in that the curve of the upper bowl became rounder and its spur was eliminated. The form of the "k" was additionally modified to remove the offset leg so that both diagonals originate from the main stem. The outstroke of the uppercase "J" was also significantly curtailed. In addition to many minor alterations, such as to the length of the horizontal bars of the "E", "F" and "G" and to the angle of the tail of the "Q", the leg of the "R" was extended and made more diagonal. In the case of the numerals, the upper curve of the "2" was reduced and the lower loops of the "5" and "6" were correspondingly adapted. The sweep of the diagonal of the "7" was also reduced. Several decades later, Toshi Omagari returned to the original sketches with the objective of reinvigorating this almost totally forgotten typeface. First, however, he needed to revise the drafts prepared by Team '77 to adapt them for digital typesetting. So Omagari carefully adjusted the proportions of the glyphs, achieving a more uniform overall effect across all line weights and removed details that had become redundant for contemporary typefaces. It was also apparent from the old drafts that it had been the case that the original plan was to create more than the four weights that were published. Omagari has added five additional styles, giving his Neue Haas Unica? a total of nine weights, from Ultra Light to Extra Black. He has also greatly extended the range of glyphs. Providing as it does typographic support for Central and European languages, Greek and Cyrillic texts, Neue Haas Unica is now ready to be used for major international projects. In addition, it has been supplied with small caps and various sets of numerals. With its resolute clarity and excellent typographic support, Neue Haas Unica is suitable for use in a wide range of new contexts. The light and elegant characters can be employed in the large point sizes to create, for example, titling and logos while the very bold styles come into their own where the typography needs to be powerful and expressive. The medium weights can be used anywhere, for setting block text and headlines.

Father's Day, or June 17 of this year, is in the middle of Argentinian winter. And like people do on wintery Sunday mornings, I was bundled up in bed with too many covers, pillows and comforters. Feeling good and not thinking about anything in particular, Father's Day was nowhere in the vicinity of my mind. My eleven year old son, Matías, came into the room with a handmade present for me. Up to this point, my Father's Day gift history was nothing unusual. Books, socks, hand-painted wooden spoons, the kind of thing any father would expect from his pre-teen son. So you can understand when I say I was bracing myself to fake excitement at my son's present. But this Father's Day was special. I didn't have to fake excitement. I was in fact excited beyond my own belief. Matí's handmade present was a complete alphabet drawn on an A4 paper. Grungy, childish, and sweeter than a ton of honey. He'd spent days making it, three-dimensioning the letters, wiggle-shadowing them. Incredible. A common annoyance for graphic designers is explaining to people, even those close to them, what they do for a living. You have to somehow make it understandable that you are a visual communicator, not an artist. Part of the problem is the fact that "graphic designer" and "visual communicator" are just not in the dictionary of standard professions out there. If you're a plumber, you can wrap all the duties of your job with 3.5 words: I'm a plumber. If you're a graphic designer, no wrapper, 3.5 or 300 words, will ever cover it. I've spent many hours throughout the years explaining to my own family and friends what I do for a living, but most of them still come back and ask what it is exactly that I do for dough. When you're a type designer, that problem magnifies itself considerably. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you start looking for the nearest exit, but none of the ones you can find is any good. All the one-line descriptions are vague, and every single one of them queues a long, one-sided conversation that usually ends with someone getting too drunk listening, or too tired of talking. Now imagine being a type designer, with a curious eleven year old son. The kid is curious as to why daddy keeps writing huge letters on the computer screen. Let's go play some ball, dad. As soon as I finish working, son. He looks over my shoulder and sees a big twirly H on the screen. To him it looks like a game, like I'm not working. And I have to explain it to him again. This Father's Day, my son gave me the one present that tells me he finally understands what I do for a living. Perhaps he is even comfortable with it, or curious enough about that he wants to try it out himself. Either way, it was the happiest Father's Day I've ever had, and I'm prouder of my son than of everything else I've done in my life. This is Matí's font. I hope you find it useful.

Geometric/Technical style logotypes have been developed for car chrome labels since the early 1980’s, but automobile companies don't monopolize the style by any means. Shoe companies have a foothold in the geometric sans serif styles as well, and range from straightforward to full of techno styled play. Nonetheless, these logotypes all lack an expansive family which shows off all the logotypes are and what they "could" be and do. And that's where we come in. The Midsole SC Family finds its origin of inspiration in the CONVERSE shoe company logo, or an older version of their logo, and from there we expanded it into a 40 font family of weights, widths, and obliques. Midsole pays homage to the styling of the earlier logotype, including unicase variations to match the original look, while further evolving beyond the brand inspiration to yield a family that pulls on modern and historical styles. It adopts a sturdy yet approachable and recognizable style with its uniform stroke forms and curves, and goes on to include smallcaps, numerals, and a comprehensive range of weights, creating a straightforward, uncompromising collection of typefaces that lend a solid foundation and a broad range of expression for designers. Here’s what’s included with the Midsole SC Family bundle: 489 glyphs per style - including Capitals, SmallCaps, Numerals, Punctuation and an extensive character set that covers multilingual support of latin based languages. (see the 10th graphic for a preview of the characters included) Stylistic Alternates - alternate characters and unicase variants for a less standardized text look. 4 weights in the family: Light, Regular, Medium & Bold. 4 obliques in the family, one for each weight: Light, Regular, Medium & Bold. Here’s why the Midsole SC Family is for you: - You’re in need of stylish sans font family with a range of weights and obliques. - You’re love that older CONVERSE letter styling, and want to design anything within that genre. - You’re looking for an alternative to Eurostile & Handel Gothic. - You’re looking for a clean techno typeface for your rave poster designs. - You just like to collect quality fonts to add to your design arsenal.

Useful links: Using the variable font in Illustrator Working with a variable font in Photoshop TT Frantz is an experimental variable font, distinguished by its slimness and lightness. The variation in the font affects the change in the height of the mean line - by moving the axis adjustment slider you can easily raise or lower the mean line of the font. In TT Frantz, you can find small references to the art deco aesthetics, which are expressed in significantly lowered or, conversely, heightened waist of the letters. In addition, depending on the position of the axis adjustment slider, the closedness of the aperture changes for some letters. In order to preserve the main feature of the font—the change in the height of the main line—we made lowercase characters as tall as uppercase ones, but at the same time we kept small kerns. An interesting fact is that in Cyrillic letters з с а е, the variability of the aperture follows a different scenario in comparison with their Latin sisters. When working on TT Frantz, we tried to make it so that when changing the variability, the width of the characters would not change, and the font would remain monospaced. And in order to avoid holes in the set, we made contextual alternates and several ligatures. Frantz consists of 470 glyphs, and in addition to broad language support (Latin and Cyrillic) it can offer standard and old-style figures, including their tubular versions, as well as ligatures. Important clarification regarding variable fonts. At the moment, not all graphic editors, programs and browsers support variable fonts. You can check the status of support for the variability of your software here: v-fonts.com/support/ But do not despair—even if you do not have access to the necessary software, you still have the opportunity to use TT Frantz in your projects. Especially for you, we have prepared three separate non-variable styles (Frantz A, Frantz B, Frantz C), each of which is responsible for a certain location of the mean line of the font and where this line is already fixed in a certain position (high, medium and low).

Rabenau (formerly Lucinde), the distinctly warm and legible type family For 30 years the graphic designer Axel Bertram worked at creating his typefaces: He developed complete new alphabets for magazines and typewriters as well as for the constant demand for typefaces for use by commercial artists. He has developed wall charts the size of advertising posters as teaching aids for training commercial and graphic artists to write in a clean, classic cursive script. In the eighties he used the American Chyron computer to design a screen font for television. In the mid-nineties he discovered for himself the fabulous possibilities offered by the Fontographer font software program and explored them playfully. From the results of these experiments, Axel Bertram selected a design for further development. From 2003 onwards the calligrapher and type designer Andreas Frohloff collaborated with him on the further development and production of the 16 fonts of the Rabenau™ typeface family.The Rabenau font was inspired by many factors: From the fonts used as book covers to typewriter fonts and even printed material from England dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century (e.g. those used by the skilled printer William Bulmer), Rabenau's relatively high contrast is offset by some organic tapers, subtley rounded bracketed serifs, and a fairly generous x-height. This makes for a typeface that looks especially good in print. Its broad repertoire of weights and styles - Condensed, Poster, and Shadow - give it added versatility, and make it ideal for setting both display and text in the same typeface. Throughout the heavier weights, the contrast is maintained. The Poster Italic sparkles, and will make a fine display type for dynamic headlines, or logotypes. This family of sixteen fonts works beautifully together. All Rabenau font styles have a large set of ligatures and thus cover typical letter combinations in many European languages. Besides the standard ligatures for ff, fi and fl, letter connections are also available for tt, th and fj or ffi, ffl and ffk. The range is completed with lovely arched transitions for the characters st, ck or ct. The latter gives the font that certain something, both in continuous text and above all in headlines.

Geometric/Technical style logotypes have been developed for car chrome labels since the early 1980’s, but automobile companies don't monopolize the style by any means. Shoe companies have a foothold in the geometric sans serif styles as well, and range from straightforward to full of techno styled play. Nonetheless, these logotypes all lack an expansive family which shows off all the logotypes are and what they "could" be and do. And that's where we come in. The Midsole Family finds its origin of inspiration in the CONVERSE shoe company logo, or an older version fo their logo, and from there expanded it into a 40 font family of weights, widths, and obliques. Midsole pays homage to the styling of the earlier logotype, including unicase variations to match the original look, while further evolving beyond the brand inspiration to yield a family that pulls on modern and historical styles. It adopts a sturdy yet approachable and recognizable style with its uniform stroke forms and curves, and goes on to include a lowercase, numerals, and a comprehensive range of weights, creating a straightforward, uncompromising collection of typefaces that lend a solid foundation and a broad range of expression for designers. Here’s what’s included with the Midsole Family bundle: 489 glyphs per style - including Capitals, Lowercase, Numerals, Punctuation and an extensive character set that covers multilingual support of latin based languages. (see the 10th graphic for a preview of the characters included) Stylistic Alternates - alternate characters and unicase variants for a less standardized text look. 4 weights in the family: Light, Regular, Medium & Bold. 4 obliques in the family, one for each weight: Light, Regular, Medium & Bold. Here’s why the Midsole Family is for you: - You’re in need of stylish sans font family with a range of weights and obliques. - You’re love that older CONVERSE letter styling, and want to design anything within that genre. - You’re looking for an alternative to Eurostile & Handel Gothic. - You’re looking for a clean techno typeface for your rave poster designs. - You just like to collect quality fonts to add to your design arsenal.

Based on Element by Max Bittrof, Stamm takes the next step in adaptation to modern environment. Using it's own construction logic it makes the design far more consistent and considerably expands the character set, supporting hundreds of languages, including Vietnamese and extended Cyrillic. Generous amount of OpenType features allows various localization options, automatic fractions, super- and subscripts, oldstyle and tabular figures, small caps and ligatures to suit almost every need. There are 15 Stylistic Sets available to customize the font (some of them duplicate locl-features in case they're not supported by applications): ss01 (Traditional glyphs): changes modern shapes used by default to old-style forms; ss02 (Alternate historical glyphs): changes the shape of several characters to a more obscure historical form; ss03 (Catalan middle dot): replaces middle dot between two l's by Catalan variant for better spacing; ss04 (German ligatures): activates historical ch, ck and tz ligatures used in German blackletter typesetting; ss05 (Dutch IJ-acute): replaces j after i-acute with j-acute; ss06 (Marshallese cedilla): replaces commas under certain letters with cedillas; ss07 (Romanian/Moldovan comma): changes cedilla-glyphs to comma-glyphs; ss08 (Turkish i): replaces regular i with dotted Turkish variant; ss09 (Cyrillic alternates): changes several Cyrillic glyphs to alternate variants; ss10 (Bulgarian Cyrillic): activates Bulgarian shapes; ss11 (Serbo-Macedonian Cyrillic): activates Serbo-Macedonian shapes; ss12 (Double-story a): replaces default glyph with it's double-story variant; ss13 (Alternate asterisk): replaces default asterisk with 5-pointed shape; ss14 (Enclosed figures): replaces standard figures with enclosed variants; ss15 (Slashed zero): replaces default zero with slashed variant.

Cities often have their own voice, a voice that can be read... in each location and each business, voice portraying a cultural fabric with an array of manifestations. Balneario Script is a small tribute to a coastal port and tourist city. Through the Sign Painters, in its golden age, a clear, friendly, practical, and functional way of making itself heard evolved. Far from wanting to be perfect, a typeface seeks to be close, warm, and casual. Inspired by the gestures of the brush, Balneario Script reverts to the use of “Casual Letters” so used by Sign Painters. In this adaptation, we sought to adjust its morphology to optimize its performance in small formats and extend the system to include lower case letters as part of the set. The set of fonts has two script weights in addition to an all caps version. The design emphasizes creating a harmonious morphological criterion. Friendly, rhythmic, and with a firm stroke Balneario Script is unique, ideal for headlines and short texts that need to be gestural but simple and highly functional. This typeface was designed to be used in promotional posters or for relaxed and fun Packagings. Balneario Script goes beyond constructive or functional aspects. It seeks to capture the smell of the sea, the warm summer breeze and the nostalgic feeling of a city that from its daily life, knew how to forge a unique personality. This atmosphere allows it to host millions of tourists year after year, and with them reinforce their spirit each summer.

Lens Grotesk is a Neo-grotesque type family of 16 fonts born as a result of a very conscious research in the field of the neutral Swiss aesthetic. There's a reason for all the prominent examples of this design like Helvetica and Univers to be used on a daily basis for more than 70 years and it's a simple one - they just work. The closed terminals, the low contrast, uniform widths and proportions makes the Neo-grotesques feel just right. Although very often branded as stiff, the neutral Neo grotesques are here to stay and Lens Grotesk is our own reading of the popular style. Lens Grotesk takes the Neo-grotesk model one step further adding a pinch of Geometric sans-serif to the mix thus creating a way more modern and contemporary looking design. Characterized with more generous oval proportions and slightly more open terminals, Lens Grotesk keeps the modulation and rhythm needed for a slightly longer texts while visibly keeping everything in order. Zooming in you'll find traces of the Geometric aesthetic - the robust almost right angled approach of the arches and tails (look t, f, j, y) and the way more circular rounded shapes. Like all our fonts, Lens Grotesk is equipped with a range of OpenType features, stylistic alternatives and of course Cyrillic support. It comes in a pack of 16 fonts with 8 styles and their matching italics or one variable font file available with all full family purchases. Live Tester | Download Demo Fonts | Subscribe

Heller Sans JNL is based on the main letterforms of an experimental alphabet designed by Steven Heller; noted author of over 170 books on design and visual culture. Some modifications were made in turning his design into a digital font. In his own words, here is the background to this typeface: “I recently recovered this from the junk heap. It is a yellowing photostat of my first and only typeface design (1969-70). Total folly! At the time I was smitten by Art Moderne lettering. I called it “Klaus Boobala Bold” because I liked the K and B. I’ve lost the letters S through Z, which were made. The letters were drawn with compass, Techno pen (that frequently clogged). as well as a triangle and T-square. The inline and outline made no real logical sense. I based the design, in part, on Kabel, Avant Garde and it was a product of whatever I could accomplish with those tools. The caps-only alphabet was photographed and produced as a film negative that was cut in foot-long strips and spliced to fit on a Typositor reel. Sadly, the negatives made for the font were too brittle and the splice snapped apart in the Typositor. I worked on it for well over a month and used the face only once. I realized with this attempt, like so many other times I attempted different challenges, that type design — indeed mechanical drawing — was not my strong suit.” Heller Sans JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

ATF Alternate Gothic is a new, significant digital expansion of Morris Fuller Benton’s classic 1903 type design. Originally available in one bold weight, the metal typeface came in three slightly different widths for flexibility in copy-fitting layouts.  ATF Alternate Gothic has impact at any size. Its letterforms are instantly familiar: Benton’s original metal type family was used throughout the 20th century in newspapers, magazines, and advertising, providing “strong and effective display” in a compact space. Monotype issued its own metal version for machine typesetting, and Alternate Gothic likely served as inspiration for Linotype’s ubiquitous Trade Gothic® Bold and Bold Condensed. ATF Alternate Gothic expands on the characteristics that perhaps made Trade Gothic so popular, providing a wider range of weights and widths to address the needs of today’s designers and technologies. The space-saving clarity of ATF Alternate Gothic brings readability to the world of advertising typefaces. With its finely graded range of ten weights, with four widths of each weight (40 fonts total), this extensive type family can be used to pack a lot into a narrow space, and the range makes it easy to create variations of an advertisement or announcement for different formats and media. The tall x-height and narrow proportions, combined with a relatively low waist and springy, tension-filled forms, make ATF Alternate Gothic strong and effective in display. All ten weights have been carefully spaced for readability, caps and lowercase work well together, while attention-grabbing all-caps settings are clear and never crowded, no matter how narrow.

The Vernacular trilogy was designed by Swiss designer Hans-Jürg Hunziker, who had worked for Adrian Frutiger in Paris for many years. Based on the concept of a transitional Linear Antiqua, he has developed a colorful bouquet of typefaces that contain the entire spectrum of typefaces for book design and corporate identity. Thanks to his "Swiss school" and his outstanding skills, he has succeeded in giving the typefaces a particularly noble and sympathetic expression. In addition to the Sans family, there is a Serif family and a Clarendon family, each of which, including the separately drawn italics, is equipped with 12 font weights that are finely tuned to one another. Each of the 3 font styles develops its own character, but thanks to a concept that brings the different font styles closer together, they also work well together and complement each other perfectly. Sans and Clarendon have a vertical axis and similar endings in contrast to the Serif, which has a traditional diagonal axis and horizontal endings. The straight stems and the proportions are used as an element to stress the closeness of the typeface-trilogy. They thus share a comon feature. All fonts contain tabular and proportional figures as well as old style figures. Small caps and small cap figures are also available in all fonts. In addition, some fonts have alternative characters available via style set, such as «g», which can be used to further vary the typeface. Vernacular offers all the options for well-kept typesetting for print and web - for small and large orders.

ITC Astro is the typeface that proves you can get your work done while watching cartoons. “It all started as a series of doodles while I was watching The Jetsons,” recalls Sasa Petricic. “The show's impossibly simplistic vision of the twenty-first century cried out for a font that fit into that world -- a world where everyday objects can carry far more fun and personality than they should.” ITC Astro is the first commercial typeface design from Petricic, whose “day job” is working as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Petricic has filed stories from across Canada and around the world for CBC's flagship evening newscast, The National. His reports have also appeared on CNN and BBC Television. Petricic's work as a correspondent and video journalist have taken him to six continents, covering everything from famine and genocide in Africa to the war in Iraq. With such serious matters filling the hours of Petricic's day as a journalist, it's not hard to see why he conceived Astro as a welcome blast of whimsy. “As I began to draw the design,” he says, “I decided that every part of Astro should be a cartoon character unto itself.” Each character has its own baseline shadow (or coaster, or circular antigravity generator, depending on how you look at things). The angular caps dance jauntily, rocking from left to right, while a suite of companion small caps provide backup. The end result is a design quite unlike any other, with surprising charm and versatility. ITC Astro comes in a two-weight family of White and Black.

Now available as Opentype font with extended character set, Coranto 2. It is originally based on Unger’s typeface Paradox, and arose from a desire to transfer the elegance and refinement of that type to newsprint. Coranto 2 has a larger x-height and in many places has been made more robust. Over the past 25 years newspaper production has seen spectacular improvements in paper and print quality, the introduction of colour printing, and vastly better register. Newspaper production still demands a lot of letter forms, but advanced printing brings out details better and makes typography more appealing to readers. For text type the newspaper is no longer an environment in which survival is the chief assignment. Today, newspapers are not merely a matter of cheap grey paper, thin ink and super-fast rotary printing, and type design no longer has to focus on surviving the mechanical technology and providing elementary legibility. Now there is also room to create an ambience, to give a paper a clearer identity of its own; there is scope for precision and refinement. One consequence of this is that newspaper designers can now look beyond the traditional group of newsfaces. Conversely, a newsface can be used outside the newspaper — not an uncommon occurrence. The update to this beautiful font family, Coranto 2, includes the addition of over 250 glyphs featuring full Latin A language support, new ligatures, 4 sets of numerals, arbitrary fractions and superiors/inferiors. Furthermore, kerning was added and fine tuned for better performance.