Gandur is a display textura in three weights, split into two families: Alte — the German word for old — and New . Gandur was inspired by other geometric texturas, specially Max Bittrof’s Element (1933). The design began by adhering to a strict hexagonal grid, but during its development, slowly moved from a purely geometric to a more pen-based design (this is especially true in the heaviest weights). The differences between Alte and New are essentially morphological, with reflections in the character set and OpenType features. Gandur New has a more humanistic, contemporary structure and is more ‘romanized’ then Alte. Gandur New also features small capitals. Gandur Alte, on the other hand, remains truer to historical forms, most notably: S s X x Z z. Gandur Alte also features the long-s, which can be accessed via a Stylistic Set or the glyph palette. (As is historically accurate, a short-s will be used at the end of words automatically when the historical Stylistic Set has been activated).

Shelley Script was designed by Matthew Carter and appeared with Mergenthaler Linotype in 1972. It is based on intricate English scripts of the 18th and 19th centuries. The musical terms Andante, Allegro and Volante were chosen by Carter to describe the mood of the three different cuts of his font. Andante is the most reserved, Allegro has a few more flourishes, and Volante’s capital letters are surrounded with swirling strokes. Perfect for invitations or other cards, Shelley Script, like other fonts of its kind, seems to appeal particularly to America.

The cover of the 1930s-era “Catalog of Artists’ Materials” from Ernst H. Friedrichs, Inc. (New York) has the words “Artists’ Materials” hand lettered in a stylized Art Deco sans serif type style. This unique design is now the digital font Art Materials JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The Metro Office family is designed after the model of the original sans serif family – Metro No.1 – produced by W.A. Dwiggins and Mergenthaler Linotype’s design studio during the late 1920s and 1930s. A distinctly new interpretation of the sans serif idea, Metro was a thoroughly “American” sans serif when it was released. However, over the ensuing decades, it became a favorite the world over. Moreover, it is one of the first “humanist” sans serif typefaces designed. While redesigning Metro in 2006, Linotype’s Type Director Akira Kobayashi drew from his own knowledge of humanistic letterforms. The result is a redefined Metro; a typeface that is finally ready for heavy text setting. The original Linotype Metro No.1 never had italic variants. Kobayashi has created oblique variants, extending its use in document setting. A double-storey a and g, as well as a wider w were features of Dwiggins’ original Metro design that were filtered out by Mergenthaler Linotype in the 1930s. Kobayashi remedied this historical slight, retooling Dwiggins’ original forms and optimizing their legibility. Kobayashi has additionally retooled some of Metro’s more troublesome letters, which has black elements that became too dense. By opening up the troublesome joins (like that on the Q), Kobayashi has given his new Metro a more even color in text, improving its legibility while retaining its original spirit.

Roswell was designed by Jim Parkinson, who acknowledges the 'spacey' ancestry of its name. Yes, Roswell, New Mexico. There was a big anniversary of 'the incident' in the news while I was designing in Roswell. "The incident" is of course the alleged UFO crash in Roswell. "I thought the name was acceptable as a serious font name, while, on another level, having a strangely humorous edge," says Parkinson. Roswell looks great in large sizes on a poster or in a magazine layout. It started out as "a variation on American gothic forms like Railroad Gothic", says the designer, but Roswell is an original design with eccentricities of its own."

This would be a Clarendon if it weren't for the cute serifs, which set it apart. Reads well in copy blocks.

Now here's a font with an unusual backstory. You may recall that a while ago we discovered that Tim Burton was using an outdated version of one of our fonts for the interior titles in his The Corpse Bride. Well, our quest to get hold of him didn't bear any immediate fruit, but in a totally unrelated event we were contacted by the graphic arts company working with the overseas distributors for The Corpse Bride and it turned out that they needed a font based on the main title of the movie so they could keep the same style when they retitled it into other languages. The original title was either hand lettered or a heavily modified font, bearing some resemblance to our Ligeia and Tuscarora fonts, so we had to create a whole font more or less from scratch and extrapolate most of the letters from the very limited sample in the original title by identifying certain consistent characteristics and building new characters around them. It was a lot of work, but the good news is that they didn't want exclusivity, so we've got the font to add to our collection. We ended up calling it Beynkales which means 'Bone Bride' in Yiddish, which makes sense given the context of the movie. So here it is, in all its tattered glory, and bound to end up in our Halloween font selection later this year as well. Beynkales Alternate is a companion font that includes a full set of alternative upper and lower case characters which can be used on their own or in combination with the characters from Beynkales to create a more varied and handwritten look.

Back in 2011, Gelato Script was the best-selling brush script font on MyFonts, and has remained popular, appearing on everything from designer handbags to primetime TV shows; from food blogs to wedding invitations; from glossy magazines to (not so imaginatively!) ice cream shops. All these years on, and it struck me that there is much that could be improved on; there are certain glyphs that never quite felt right. So I decided to update Gelato Script, and this is the result, Gelato Luxe. What started as a simple update quickly spiralled into a total overhaul. There is not a single glyph in the new version that’s the same. The entire font has been tweaked and tinkered with and redrawn and respaced and rekerned to get it to this point. While I wanted to maintain the feel of Gelato Script, Gelato Luxe represents a massive leap in sophistication, with new alternates for smoother connections, and a totally new OpenType engine, with no fewer than seventeen stylistic sets. Gelato Luxe is a truly versatile script font. You can effortlessly change the feel by playing with the many OpenType features. Make sure contextual alternates and standard ligatures are switched on, and it will work like a charm right out of the box. See also Gelato Fresco for a further updated version, this time with extra weights!

These Charming letterforms, filled to the brim with the pop sensibility of late sixties je-ne-sais-quoi and the high camp detachment of the early seventies, scream out 'I am THIN and GORGEOUS!' Daring, Sexy, Witty and Subversive, Absolutely Fabulous swings from the pages of Marvel's UNION JACK to provide you with all the handheld wobble you'll need for thrilling titles, taut climaxes and logos that tingle with sartorial sophistication. If you're not thinking of miniskirts, black leather and concealed transmitters in bowler hats when you install this font, you're just not on the right wavelength, baby.

This neat, handwritten font is intended for educators who create teaching resources for children. It is highly legible for new readers and is thin enough to be used for the body of text on student-read documents.

Reverse Gothic JNL is a design based on vintage reverse letterpress type for creating interesting headlines with white-on-black text.

Holy Dooley! It’s a new Ainslie! Based on the inspiration from Mt. Ainslie and the Ainslie suburb outside Canberra, the original Ainslie adds geometric simplicity with a hint of aboriginal flair to the project. And now the muses of Ainslie are back at work, lending their structure as the foundation of Ainslie Slab. Like its big brothers, the new Ainslie Slab puts together a great mix of influences from Oz for a great looking typeface with some ace new shoes. Slab’s spiffy new slab serifs complement the classic frame, making the result a ripper Aussie typeface that can be used in a great number of applications. Take a look at the trendy typeface’s alternates in action, too. You can access these in any OpenType-enabled application. Alternates, swashes and alternate titling caps allow you to customize your look and feel. Capital swash alternates, old style figures, and compact caps are included to add a bit more flexibility to your work as well. OpenType enabled applications can take complete benefit of your automatic replacing ligatures and alternates, and this font also presents the glyphs to help a wide array of languages. View all of these in the PDF brochure. And then try them out. Combine it with the original Ainslie and Ainslie Sans for more flexibility. Whether you need a good slab for the copy or you want a clean, upbeat look for your headline, Ainslie Slab offers you a unique touch of the Outback that’s anything but out of touch.

The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum staff is honored to partner with New York-based graphic designer Louise Fili on her first font release project. The new font, “Mardell,” is named for Hamilton retiree and wood type cutter Mardell Doubek. This is the fourth font to be cut for the museum as part of the Wood Type Legacy Project. "The bold, lively angularity of Italian futurist letterforms made it a natural choice for wood type.” says Fili. This digital version presents Fili’s wood type design for use in web and print applications.

The same procedure as every year? Again Christmas cards and greetings need to be designed... Sick of the usual Christmas imagery? Finally here is the ultimate typographical solution: 4 Christmas Pattern Fonts for display use. Playfull yet straight, Christmassy yet aesthetically pleasing. Pattern is the new sexy! Practical details: - Use in great display sizes only. The bigger – the better! - Fonts gain kind of "transparency" through the patterns – handy for use on top of images. - Characterset is caps only and supports Central, Eastern and Western European languages. - Entertaining 2 min movie explaining the basic concept and making of the Pattern Fonts. - Combine with "non-Christmassy" Pattern Fonts from the Pattern family. - Also available: a blank version in light, regular and bold.

Font Etruria is based on a real Etruscan inscriptions and realistic accurately simulates the writing of the Etruscans. The idea of the font Etruria is to give an opportunity for anyone to touch the past of mankind! The character of the Etruscan alphabet involves the creation of a font with only uppercase letters. However, I did not limit this font by that. Etruria has not only a lowercase is different from uppercase, but an additional sets of alternative characters. In General, the main characteristic of Etruscan writing is randomness and diversity of characters. Differs from lowercase to uppercase is only the first step on the road to make randomness effect. Next to the aid of the OT features. To recreate the randomness effect, in Etruria there are several OT features (Contextual Alternates, Stylistic Alternates and Stylistic Sets), which built a script to simulate randomness. Additionally, another script creates the effect of random positioning. Together they create incredibly realistic Etruscan inscription. Thus, any of these features can be disabled at will. I also used a small line spacing, because it is characteristic of the Etruscan writing. Actually the Etruscan writings is a mirror of the writings compared with the current European alphabets. I didn't use this feature all the letters, because this would make the font difficult to perceive, but to make the font characteristic of the Etruscan style, Etruria has a few letters in mirror image. However, if for someone it may seem unusual, mirrored letters can be disabled instead of them will appear more familiar to them. Another feature of Etruscan writing is the use instead of a space dotacentered. Font Etruria has this feature, there is a OT feature Stylistic set ss03. Naturally, it also can optionally be disabled. All these features can be used together, separately, or turn it off. The main goal achieved! The text typed in Etruria, creates full impression of these Etruscan inscriptions.

Rooney is based mainly on old-style serif construction principles, such as the angle of stress, the open letterforms and the medium contrast, which lends the typeface a serious feel. Nonetheless Rooney is equipped with rounded shapes and soft curves that add a warm and smooth overall impression. Rooney combines these two different approaches: It has distinctive, original letterforms, but remains very readable and versatile. It includes six weights from Light to Black and Italics. The Rooney family comes with a Pro version, which is intended for professional designers. It contains lots of OpenType features such as small caps, ligatures, different figure sets and alternate glyphs. With around 840 glyphs, Rooney Pro is a powerful tool for any kind of typographical task.

Messenger is a redux of two mid-1970s Markus Low designs: Markus Roman, an upright calligraphic face, and Ingrid, a popular typositor-era script. Through the original film faces were a couple of years apart and carried different names, they essentially had the same kind of Roman/Italic relationship two members of the same typeface family would have. The forms of both faces were reworked and updated to fit in the Ingrid mold, which is the truer-to-calligraphy one. The Messenger package is comprised of two interchangeable fonts that support Western, Eastern and Central European languages, as well as Baltic, Celtic/Welsh and Esperanto. Messenger Pro is a single OpenType font that contains the characters of both Messenger and Messenger Alt, linked by programmed features for stylistic alternates, automatic f-ligatures and class-based kerning.

Volta is a robust typeface from the 1950s. A revisit to styles that were en vogue at the turn of the century, Bauer type foundry designers Walter Baum and Konrad Bauer designed this type family in1955. The form of Volta's letters are similar to those in New Transitional Serif typefaces, like Cheltenham and Century. Developed after the Didone (i.e., Bodoni) style types, New Transitional Serifs speak more to the zeitgeist of the late 19th Cntury, and were typographic adaptations to it's newer technologies. Already in the period of mass production, typographers and printers at the dawn of the 20th Century had to cope with larger print runs on cheaper materials. The robust letterforms of New Transitional Serifs were designed to compensate for this, but they were also ingenious little inventions in their own right. Form the beginning, the new, peculiar forms of New Transitional Serif letters were adopted for use by advertisers. Their robustness also allowed them to be used in virtually all sizes. Volta was designed especially with advertising display usage in mind. The x-height of Volta's letters is higher than average for serif faces. It is recommended that Volta be used exclusively for shorter tracks of text, above 12 point. Headlines look dashing set in Volta. Four different font styles are available for the Volta typeface: Regular, Medium, Medium Italic, and Bold."

This font is made based on memories from the past. Where is writing in a diary that tells about everyday stories. Are you ready to write a story with this font? or did you want to make a crafty item, this font will do it too.

The design of Sabon® Next by Jean François Porchez, a revival of a revival, was a double challenge: to try to discern Jan Tschichold´s own schema for the original Sabon, and to interpret the complexity of a design originally made in two versions for different typecasting systems. The first was designed for use on Linotype and Monotype machines, and the second for Stempel hand composition. Because the Stempel version does not have the constraints necessary for types intended for machine composition, it seems closer to a pure interpretation of its Garamond ancestor. Naturally Porchez based Sabon Next on this second version and also referred to original Garamond models, carefully improving the proportions of the existing digital Sabon while matching its alignments. The new family is large and versatile - with Roman and italic in 6 weights from regular to black. Most weights also have small caps, Old style Figures, alternates (swashes, ligatures, etc); and there is one ornament font with many lovely fleurons. The standard versions include revised lining figures that are intentionally designed to be a little smaller than capitals. Featured in: Best Fonts for Resumes, Best Fonts for Websites, Best Fonts for PowerPoints

Adolf Rusch von Ingweiler, was in the 19 th century known mysteriously as the “R'' printer. He was the first printer North of the Alps to introduce the new Roman style of type known now as Antiqua. He was active in the city of Strasbourg from around the early 1460's to 1489. One wonders if the unusual form of “R'' was a personal conceit. This font is, therefore, an Antiqua style font and has over a 1000 defined glyphs with wide support for medieval characters that have since fallen out of use. The baseline was slightly tidied up in order to give the printed text an even cleaner look than the original. The letters are very close approximations of the original type catalogued by the “Veröffentlichungen der Gesellschaft für Typenkunde des 15. Jahrhunderts” as Typ.1:103R GfT1197.

I have upgraded my existing font software and also bought new font software to play around with. It takes some time getting used to working with it; the upgraded software feels similar to what I am used to, but handles things differently and the new software is intuitive, but comes with its own language and ways of doing things. I spend most days reading the handbooks and watching online tutorials, but I did manage to create a font. Steamed is a hand drawn all caps display font that comes with a whole bunch of accented glyphs (even Vietnamese) to play around with.

Winter Garden JNL was modeled from the eccentric sans serif hand lettering with varying line widths found on the sheet music of 1917's "When the Girl You'd Give the World to Win Gives Her Heart to You". (It seems that sheet music from the early 1900s often had song titles that were more than just a few choice words. This particular ditty's title took up fourteen words to make its point.) The font is available in regular and oblique versions and gets its name from both the famed theater in New York and the city located 14 miles West of downtown Orlando, Florida.

This face was designed in 1925 as the Monotype answer to the very popular Cooper Black. Goudy is also quite similar in appearance to Ludlow Black and Pabst Extra Bold, both of which were also done in response to Cooper Black.

My family and I are off to England for a camping holiday this summer. I have booked some small, basic campsites which are close to nature. The kids love to camp, especially since we can have a campfire at night! I was thinking about this when I worked on Camping Holiday font. It is a cute sans serif ‘book cover’ font. That doesn’t mean that you cannot use it for something else; fancy a poster? No problem. Need a font for your website? Go ahead! It’s yours for the taking!

A font face with cyber, spatial, and virtual connotations that offers a decisive futuristic and techno spirit. Inspired by geometric forms from visual tendencies in the early 2000s, it was used once in corporate identity. Originally created in 1998, it remained unpublished by its author until today. It is now offered with many improvements. With one alternate for H and more diacritics and ligatures and extended range glyphs, Conectiva can be used in titles and display text that require a futuristic and dynamic style. Conectiva 2.0 has been arranged and improved with more glyphs and new OpenType features (Fractions, discretional and standard ligatures, slashed zero and more new stylish alternates). This upgrade includes 4 new weight variables (Light, book, bold and extrabold). Recommended for games, presentations, or any graphic pieces that reveal and need futuristic, techno, and/or Sci-fi style.

Canapé is based on the idea of letters with a subtly curved and slightly modulated line. Through this, the typeface has a warm and friendly, almost haptical appearance which brings some kind of cosiness to your communication with type. Designed and crafted with great attention to detail, the type family is usable for copy texts as well as corporate design or display purposes. Canapé (Serif) with its 4 fonts and more than 4,200 characters contains a large amount of features like small capitals, swashes, 10 different figure sets, automated fractions, ordinals, standard and discretionary ligatures, language support for Central and Western Europe and a small sofa building kit. All features are conveniently accessible through OpenType features. Check out the type specimen PDF for more details and a closer look.

Corporative Sans typeface is developed by Latinotype Team. Corporative Sans is the new version of Corporative. This font has a marked personality and distinctive traits, what makes it suitable to be used at large text sizes. Since it is a condensed font, it can also be used in smaller sizes. Corporative comes with the Latinotype’s standard set of 350 characters, making it possible to use the font in 128 different languages. Corporative provides users with a wide range of characters, weights and widths for every project. By combining different variants, designers can achieve the best results. The family consists of 64 fonts: a basic family that includes 8 weights plus italics, an alternative family of 8 weights with matching italics and 2 condensed families, one regular and one alternative, both with italics. Latinotype has added new faces to its team. Latinotype Team now comprises: Rodrigo Fuenzalida, César Araya, Bruno Jara, Luciano Vergara and Daniel Hernández. Corporative was created by Latinotype Team and developed by Javier Quintana, Rodrigo Fuenzalida and César Araya, under the supervision of Luciano Vergara and Daniel Hernández.

This is the digitization and considerable expansion of the cheeky and enormously popular film type Eightball, one of the most widely used faces of the 1970s and 1980s. Round and happy like a bouncy ball, these are letters after a sign maker’s own heart. Seen everywhere in its film version, from bingo and pool hall parlor signs to comic books, now this computer version opens the door for the happy roundness to be used on a much larger scale by anyone who designs layouts on a computer. The original film type included a few alternates. We included them, but we added many more as well. So make sure to check out the various OpenType features in your program while using this font. Eightball is great for a variety of applications, including signage, rubber stamps, poster design, titling, cartoons, comics, and pretty much anything where happy and round fit in.

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul

AlphaBravo was born on a napkin. I was just doodling, playing around with letterforms when the ballpoint glided a little bit too far and suddenly I had my first letter with the dash sticking out on the left of the e’s horizontal line. I quickly checked on how many letters I could let a line stick out! Then I wrote a couple of words that way and letters joined in the most unusual places, creating new closed forms. I gave the font a try and quickly discovered, that I had stumbled onto an interesting new typeface. I didn't know how to call it, so I simply used the first two letters of the alphabet, Alpha and Bravo. Looking forward to Charlie and Delta, your very curious, Gert Wiescher.

Frantic Pace JNL is based on hand lettering found on the lid of a late 1950s or early 1960s edition of the Print Craft alphabet printing set once manufactured by the Superior Marking Equipment Company of Chicago. The free-form spurred serif lettering is fun and casual; giving the impression of movement or action.

VAG Rounded Next brings a classic 1970s typeface up to date, keeping all of its easy going, approachable personality but adding some much-needed versatility and language support. Originally commissioned by Volkswagen, VAG Rounded remained in use by the company until the early 90s and has also been used by Apple, Skype and Myspace. Its enduring appeal lies in its appealingly rounded terminals, and its immediate, informal tone of voice. “When you look at the Volkswagen Beetle it has these curves that are timeless and legendary,” says Steve Matteson, who led the creation of VAG Rounded Next. “I think that's what stands out in this design – that friendly aesthetic, and the simple line and circle.” This new version offers 700 glyphs with pan European language support (including Greek and Cyrllic), as well as 10 weights of upright and italic styles. New display weights Shine and Rough – which create “chocolate popsicle” and “rust” effects – are begging to be used in branding, packaging and editorial projects, while the lighter weights are well suited for text. VAG Rounded Next Variables are font files which are featuring one axis and have a preset instance from Thin to Black.

There's nothing really disastrous (impending or not) going on in my life right now, but I have always liked the expression. I thought about it when I watched a news item about the recent storm we had in Europe. The news showed footage of a person narrowly escaping a huge falling tree. Impending Disaster font is certainly no disaster. I created it using my fantastic Chinese ink and a broken tapas skewer (I seemed to have run out of my regular satay skewers). The result is a slightly rough, comic book kinda font. It comes with two sets of alternates for the lower case letters (which cycle as you type), one set of stylistic alternates for the 'O' glyph (and all accented O's), an alternate ampersand, asterisk, question mark and exclamation mark and a set of alternate numerals. Impending Disaster comes with extensive language support, including Vietnamese, Greek and Sami - so don't come running and say you didn't have any options! ;-)

Emporia JNL is a wonderfully decorative and vintage wood type named for a city in Kansas, and modeled from just a dozen images of individual type blocks spotted for auction online. The release of this typeface is also a milestone for Jeff Levine Fonts. The foundry started in January, 2006 with only ten releases, and has now grown to be an impressive library of unique lettering designs from the past. The collection also contains numerous original and novelty creations. Emporia JNL is proudly released as the 500th font design to join this extensive library.

Cortada is the name we gave to this display font that replaces Cortada Classic. After long discussions, Laura Meseguer gave birth to this brand new form. Cortada comes now in OpenType format in order to allow a wider range of characters, including Central European character set.

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.

Italian type design master Aldo Novarese was not famous for making calligraphic designs, nor had he any interest in them. He is much better known for his text faces, and quite innovative sans serif and decorative designs which became the definition of what we now know as techno and modern. But in 1968, Novarese surprised everyone with a fantastic flowing deco script entitled Elite. Novarese's formula of simple soft curves and toned-down swashes makes for one of the most unique alphabets ever seen, not to mention one of the best flowing and most legible scripts. This is now its digital incarnation, named Fontella. Fontella's applications are virtually limitless. This is the sort of script that can feel at home pretty much anywhere; a sign, a fridge magnet, a bumper sticker, a greeting card, a movie poster, a book cover, music artwork, magazine ads, newsletter headlines, etc. Digitized from original specimen and expanded with a few built-in alternates and ligatures by Rebecca Alaccari, the font was named after the famed jazz singer Fontella Bass. These letters are just so sweet they had to be called Fontella.

Original type work designed in unconventional technique by type and graphic designer Yuri Gulitov. The shapes of signs were built up in a very specific routine. At the first stage signs were drawn on the black sheets of paper by the PVA adhesive, then a white sheets was placed above, and finally after some time the white sheets were torn off. The scraps of white paper presented the signs. Inverse style shows hypothetic result of tearing off the black sheets. The style together or separately can be used in display and advertizing works for demonstration of fight between the forces of good and evil or vice versa. Analog version of the font was awarded by diploma on Third International Biennale of Graphic Design “Golden Bee”. Digital version was released by ParaType in 2008.