Ballet Mechanique is a custom designed font for musician Jeroen Borrenbergs, aka Ballet Mechanique. For his upcoming record releases Jeroen asked me to create a special font for him. As co-founder and graphic designer at Stoere Binken Design he creates his own artwork and therefor had very specific wishes. The font should be warm, soft and have soul. He gave me some sketches for his logo that I should use as a starting point. The result is a very narrow, kind of techno, monocased font called "Ballet Mechanique" (what else). After having served his purpose, Jeroen Borrenbergs allowed his font to be sold publicly. Jeroen Borrenberg’s debut work, in 1996, received hugely praising reviews. Muzik Magazine made Evolutionary Entities techno single of the month, Laurent Garnier and Mister C constantly played it in their sets and Morgan Geist just said “I won’t do a review here - let me just encourage all of y’all to listen to and/or pick up the new Eevolute 12″. Beautiful stuff - complex, melodic, soaked in just enough reverb to take it to another room. Check or regret.”

Rusticana is a part of the 1990 program Type before Gutenberg, which included the work of twelve contemporary font designers and represented styles from across the ages. Linotype offers a package including all these fonts on its web page, www.fonts.de. Rusticana was designed by Adrian Frutiger and appeared with Linotype in 1993. Its historical roots go back to the Roman Capitalis, the all caps engraved writing of ancient Rome which reached its peak in the first century. From this style evolved other Roman forms, and one, Rustica, proved particularly good for text on bronze, as opposed to in stone. The Rusticana of Frutiger has open, seemingly irregular forms which lend a distinctive rhythm to text.

Roadblock JNL is the solidified and slanted version of Patriotica JNL --a stars and stripes font based on lettering by the late Alf R. Becker as commissioned by Signs of the Times® magazine. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Publications, Inc. and the American Sign Museum in Cincinati, Ohio for providing source material for use as a work model.

This sometimes-top-heavy, sometime-bottom-heavy, sometimes-centered typecase is based on an old Photolettering face designed by the irrepressible Dave West, originally called "Nickelodeon". That name was already taken, so I chose another with a nod to the 1953 film starring Leslie Caron. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

Since my first contact with blackletters in 1999, I became more and more fascinated by these artistic looking typefaces. It all started in the USA at the age of 16, when I took an art class. I decided to trace some blackletter typefaces because they looked very interesting. From this point on I was intrigued by blackletter fonts from all over the world. I studied their different body structures and their cultural background as well as the type designers behind it. Full of information and inspiration I started to draw my own blackletter typeface in 2006. While studying in Hamburg I got in touch with the studio of URW++, where I got skilled in type software and development. Creating a type takes an eye for detail and patience but also lots of time and so it took almost 4 years until the project was finished. And so Ruca was born. Ruca is a refined and expanded typeface. When you look at the spines, the tails or the flags you can see the detailed drawing, which makes the font also extremely good looking in very tall letters. The full character set contains over 400 characters, many ligatures, two number sets and all important currency symbols. Over 300 kerning pairs and many OTF-features make the font easy in use for professional type applications. The typeface is very well applicable for strong headlines and mastheads. Because of its unique appearance, Ruca is perfectly suitable professional graphic applications such as fashion design or branding.

Youbee is a casual serifed font that is highly legible. It has a bit of contrast, but not much. It could be used as book text, but is better suited for less formal uses such as newsletters and pamphlets. Youbee gets its name from it origin, the Ultimate Blend (UB) of four very different typefaces: Euroika, Ingriana, BetterTypeRight, and KampFriendship. The earliest members of the family were constructed in 1996, with a shadow version added in 2011, extra weights in 1999, and two different widths in 2022.