Selected as one of “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2013” by Typographica.org, Dark Angel is the first completely new take in decades on the traditional “blackletter” font style. It began its journey towards the light years ago when this style was born as a sketch for a new logo for the California Angels baseball team (renamed shortly thereafter the Anaheim Angels). The Angels logo never happened, but that sketch has risen from the dead and become the basis for this brand new font design—and was also the source for the name. It’s kind of blackletter in feel, but as a display font it’s so much more. It is far more legible than most “Old English” or “Gothic Script” styles, and incorporates many features never before seen in them, such as swashes, tails and a plethora of ligatures. Dark Angel can be purchased in its regular solid form, or as Dark Angel Underlight—a handtooled font. If these two fonts are purchased together, the Family package will contain a third font—Dark Angel Highlight. With this font layered over the basic font, you can achieve two–color typesetting when the highlight and the base font are assigned two different colors. Dark Angel has enough language support to make the builders of Babel envious—its 1,163 glyphs can be used to set copy in 59 different languages. From A to Z: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bemba, Bosnian, Catalan, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Ganda, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kalaallisut, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Lithuanian, Luo, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romansh, Sango, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Turkish, Welsh, and last (but not least) Zulu. PLEASE NOTE: Dark Angel is a cross-platform font which depends to some extent on certain advanced OpenType features, therefore it can be used to its full potential only with programs that support those features. ADDITIONALLY: When setting Dark Angel one should ALWAYS select the “Standard Ligatures" and “Contextual Alternates” buttons in your OpenType palette. Please see the “Read–Me–First!” file in the Gallery section.

Patrick Griffin's sister is a really annoying individual sometimes. Not only is she into theater, but she thinks everyone else in the universe is into it as well. So once in a while tickets to local or provincial Shakespearean plays get delivered to the mailbox or dropped off on the living room's table. And once in a while the tickets just cannot be "lost" or ignored. Three or four times a year, Patrick must be subjected to Olde Englishe Speake, umbrella dresses and squeezetops, featherhats and men in leggings, rhyme and treason, mortality and immorality, drama inflicted by some mama, and it never ends. Last June it was Hamlet. Again. Someone's (wink wink) idea of a good time. There he goes, the Prince of Denmark, holding that skull with the tips of his fingers like it's an alien egg. Alas, poor Yorick! Yadda yadda boop-bop-a-loo-bop. And so the idea of a font made of skulls was born. And what can we possibly be but conduits for such abhorring ideas? Where be our gibes, our songs, our flashes of merriment? Skullbats has more skulls than you'll ever see in your lifetime. At least we hope so. Scary skulls, funny skulls, evil skulls, strange skulls, pixel skulls, fiery skulls, surprised skulls, happy skulls, sad skulls, cow skulls, sketched skulls, profiled skulls, light bulb skulls, cartoon skulls, techno skulls, alien skulls, expressionist skulls, pirate skulls, horned skulls, and skulls with whacky headgear. You name it, it's there. There's even a disco skull there for you. We lost count at 90 skulls, but there's a few more in there. For a complete showing of the skulls in the font, consult the image in the MyFonts gallery. Patrick's sister didn't turn out to be so bad after all. After making this font, he couldn't help but notice that her skull was a bit small compared to his. So now he takes every opportunity to remind her that the size of the cranium is relative to what it houses. Her upcoming halloween present will be a shirt with guess-what on it. Shirts, now there's putting Skullbats to good use!

Many typefaces are distinctive or attractive at the expense of legibility and versatility. Not so the Optima® family. Simultaneously standing out and fitting in, there are few projects or imaging environments outside of its range. Although Optima is almost always grouped with sans serif typefaces, it should be considered a serifless roman. True to its Roman heritage, Optima has wide, full-bodied characters – especially in the capitals. Only the E, F and L deviate with narrow forms. Consistent with other Zapf designs, the cap S in Optima appears slightly top-heavy with a slight tilt to the right. The M is splayed, and the N, like a serif design, has light vertical strokes. The lowercase a and g in Optima are high-legibility two-storied designs. Optima can be set within a wide choice of line spacing values – from very tight to very open. In fact, there are few limits to the amount of white space that can be added between lines of text. Optima also benefits from a wide range of letter spacing capability. It can be set quite tight, or even slightly open – especially the capitals. If there are any guidelines, Optima should be set more open than tight. It’s not that readability is affected that much when Optima is set on the snug side; it’s just that the unhurried elegance and light gray typographic color created by the face are disrupted when letters are set too tight. Optima is also about as gregarious as a typeface can be. It mixes well with virtually any serif design and a surprisingly large number of sans serif faces. The Optima family is available in six weights, from roman to extra black, each with an italic counterpart. In addition, the family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts, providing for the automatic insertion of small caps, ligatures and alternate characters, in addition to offering an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. When you’re ready to find its perfect pairing, browse these fantastic matches: Monotype Century Old Style™, Dante®, Frutiger® Serif, Joanna® Nova, Malabar™, and Soho®.

Coolvetica is a sans-serif typeface, inspired by logotypes from the 1970s. This was an era where everyone was modifying Helvetica—not only logo designers but even font designers were into outlandish Helvetica mods. Phototype catalogs were loaded with playful variations of the already ubiquitous typeface. Coolvetica recreates that retro custom display lettering style with extra-tight kerning and funky curls. But don’t let the vintage feel fool you—Coolvetica is a true display typeface that’s ready to make a statement. Condensed, compressed, and crammed styles all use a flat-sided approach, an old-school strategy that’s rarely seen today. And with mathematical symbols, OpenType fractions, and numeric ordinals, this typeface is as versatile as it is stylish. So why settle for a dull typeface when you can stand out with Coolvetica? Try it out for your next project and see the difference a little typographical flair can make. Most Latin-based European, Vietnamese, Greek, and most Cyrillic-based writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dungan, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaingang, Khalkha, Kalmyk, Kanuri, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kazakh, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Komi-Permyak, Kurdish, Kurdish (Latin), Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Nahuatl, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Rusyn, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tajik, Tatar, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Uzbek (Latin), Venda, Venetian, Vepsian, Vietnamese, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec, Zarma, Zazaki, Zulu and Zuni.

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.