In the world of journalism, headlines are the lifeblood of a publication. They need to be compact, sturdy, and project a voice that exudes trust and neutrality. Enter Built, the font family designed specifically for creating striking headlines that grab the reader’s attention. With its wraparound curves and subtle curls, Built evokes a feel of a bygone newspaper era without being too old-fashioned. The font family is available in five weights, ranging from Extra-Light to Bold, each with its own unique character and style. But what sets Built apart from other fonts is its ability to scale up without sacrificing readability. Lighter typefaces may look great on paper, but on-screen, they can quickly become unreadable if not properly designed. With Built, however, the font becomes narrower as it becomes lighter, allowing designers to set oversized page titles without worrying about copyfitting. In addition to its unique scaling capabilities, Built also offers a simple solution to the problem of aligning numbers in headlines. By disabling kerning, Built ensures that all numerals, monetary symbols, and most math symbols will line up perfectly, saving designers time and frustration. Built also includes a range of other typographical features, such as fractions, primes, ordinals, and vertically compact accents. And as the font becomes lighter, the asterisk grows more legs, allowing it to appear tonally even in Extra-Light. So whether you’re designing a front page for a major newspaper or simply need to create eye-catching headlines for your blog, Built is the font family that can deliver the perfect balance of style and readability. With its range of weights and styles, it’s the perfect choice for any journalist or designer looking to make a bold statement on-screen. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.

Saral, meaning simple in Hindi, is a monolinear design supporting most Devanagari based languages. Derived from the older Linotype typeface Rohini, it has been greatly expanded into three weights and a wide character set. Saral Light, Regular, and Bold are made to coordinate with the respective weights of Helvetica. This design works well in many environments, such as corporate designs, advertising, packaging, signage, and especially for bi-lingual texts. The OpenType font format accommodates hundreds of pre-composed conjuncts, accurate placement of vowel signs, and supports varying length matras. Saral's Unicode encoding guarantees your text is rendered correctly and is compatible across different software and computer platforms. Please note that due to current operating system and application limitations the OpenType features in complex scripts such as Davanagari are not universally supported. Saral is designed to be rendered correctly in Microsoft Word on Windows running the latest version of Uniscribe. If using a Mac or Adobe products such as InDesign then many features may not function as expected. This is including glyph reordering, substitutions, and mark positioning. In the case of small passages of text, alternate input methods can be employed. Apple's character palette and Adobe's glyph palettes are two readily available options that can be used to manually insert glyphs as needed."

While searching through microfilm of an old, 1932 newspaper, I stumbled on the word "Poultry" written with trapezoidal letters. I did not recall seeing lettering like this and it inspired me to design a typeface that could produce a similar result. Poultry Sign has two widths each with three weights giving the family six styles. It is monoline, monospaced, and all caps. The letters on the lower-case keys reverse the trapezoid of those on the upper-case keys. The designer's expectation is that the most common use for this typeface will alternate upper-case and lower-case keys, and to make this effect easy, included in the font is a contextual alternatives (calt) OpenType feature that automatically produces this result if your word processor supports this feature. To get text with all letters with big bottoms or all letters with with big tops, this feature must be turned off. The spacing of the letters is identical within each width so the styles can be layered to produce bi-colored or tri-colored letters. There is a second set of numbers that can be accessed with an OpenType stylistic alternative. Also accessible with OpenType stylistic alternatives are variations of letters T, N, L, Y, and V.