The Ysobel™ typeface family is not only elegant; it is also exceptionally legible and space economical. A collaborative design effort between Robin Nicholas, as lead designer and project director, Delve Withrington and Alice Savoie of Monotype Imaging, the project had the primary design goal of creating a typeface family for setting text in newspapers and periodicals. The result, however, is also ideal for any application that requires quick and easy assimilation of text. According to Nicholas, “The idea for the design started when I was asked to develop a custom version of Century Schoolbook. I wanted to give the design a more contemporary feel, although the client ultimately decided to keep their typeface closer to the original. The project nevertheless gave me ideas for a new design. Since designing Nimrod, some 30 years ago, I had wanted to make a more modern typeface family for newspapers and magazines – this seemed the ideal candidate.” Ysobel (pronounced “Isabel”) has the soft, inviting letter shapes of Century Schoolbook but contrasts these with more incised serifs and terminals. Its capitals are also narrower than those of Century Schoolbook, and care was taken to ensure that they harmonize perfectly with the lowercase. Ysobel’s x-height is full-bodied without disrupting lowercase proportions. In addition, curved terminals, such as those in the “C,” “c” and “e,” were drawn more open as an aid to legibility and readability in text copy. Weight stress is near vertical, and hairlines are robust to ensure character fidelity in small point sizes. Development began with the text version of the family, which has four weights, each with an italic companion. All weights feature lining and old style numerals, fractions, superiors and extended Latin language coverage. Small caps are also available in the Roman Regular design. Ysobel Display is a completely redrawn version of the typeface; it is narrower, and has a slightly smaller x-height, thinner hairlines and subtle design changes to improve its appearance when set at large sizes. The Display Italic received particular attention to make it ideal for setting headlines, subheads and short blocks of copy. Changes include a slightly greater italic angle and more cursive treatment of some letter shapes. Alternative styles of capital “J” and “Q,” to provide variation, are available in all weights.

Some words from the designer, Frantisek Storm... Designed by Josef Tyfa in 1959, digitalized by F. Storm in 1996. This Roman and Italic are well-known perhaps to all Czech graphic artists and typographers ever since their release. Although this type face in some details is under the sway of the period of its rise, its importance is timeless, in contradistinction to other famous types dating from the turn of the sixties which were found, after some time, to be trite. The italics live their own life, only their upper-case letters have the same expression as the basic design. Thin and fragile, they work excellently, emphasizing certain parts in the text by their perfect contrast of expression. When seen from a distance they are a little bit darker than the Roman face. Tyfa Roman was released in 1960 by Grafotechna in Prague for hot setting. Later on, Berthold produced letter matrices - "rulers" for Staromat devices, used for manual photosetting of display alphabets. In the eighties it was available on dry transfers of Transotype and today it is offered also by ITC. The meticulously executed designs of the individual letters in the 288 point size are arranged into a set of signs on a cardboard of about B2 in size. The yellowed paper reveals retouches by white paint on the ink. Blue lines mark the baseline, the capital line, the ascender and descender lines and the central verticals of the letters. With regard to the format of the flat scanner, the designs had to be reduced, with the use of a camera, to the format A4, i.e. to the upper-case letter height of about 30 mm. These were then scanned in 600 dpi resolution and read as a bitmap template to the FontStudio programme. The newly created bold type faces derive from Tyfa's designs of the letters "a", "n", "p", the darkness of which was increased further, approximately by 3%, to enhance their emphasizing function. The text designs have hairstrokes thickened by one third; the contrast between thin and thick strokes has been modified, in order to improve legibility, in sizes under 12 points. We have used electronic interpolation to produce the semi-bold designs. Josef Tyfa himself recommends to choose a somewhat darker design than the basic one for printing of books.

A Venetian serif in 6 styles The Apolline typeface family was created by Jean François Porchez as a means to study the transition from Renaissance writing into the first printing types. Rather than sticking to the method commonly used these days for the creation of revivals of Jenson or Bembo types, it seemed more interesting to try and get in the same mindset as those exceptional designers during this pivotal period in the history of typography. Thus Apolline is an exploration of the design methods used by people like Nicolas Jenson and his contemporaries for adapting handwriting with its multiple occurrences (a, a, a, b, b, b…) into single, unique signs (a, b…). Initially Jean François made drawings modelled after his own calligraphy. They were done at a very small size on tracing paper (2 cm high for the capitals) to preserve the irregularity of human handwriting. Besides emphasising the horizontal parts of the letter forms, the serifs were designed asymmetrically to reinforce the rhythm of the writing. The final drawings were produced at a large size (10 cm high for the capitals) to allow for subtle optimisation of specific details. The very narrow and fluid Apolline italic Influenced by various concepts for an ideal italic by Van Krimpen, Gill, etc. Apolline italic was designed at 8° degrees. Although the structure of the letterforms were informed by chancery scripts, the italic has full serifs like the roman. Very narrow and fluid, its unique design creates a good contrast when used in combination with its upright counterparts. Thanks to the presence of the serifs similar to roman typefaces it sets very neatly in large sizes. The next step was digitising the drawings with Ikarus (the pre-Bézier-curves era) to create the final roman and italic fonts. Two years later, when the family was expanded to six series the same method was used, this time with Fontographer. This was necessary for correcting a few problems caused by the conversion to Bézier outlines, and to add intermediate weights. Before the advent of feature-rich OpenType, quality type families consisted of several separate fonts for each weight to provide users with various sets of numerals, an extended ligature set and alternates, ornaments, and so on. Introducing Apolline Morisawa Awards 1993

TT Fellows useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options There can't be too many universal fonts! Meet TT Fellows, a new workhorse whose functionality allows you to comfortably use the font in a variety of projects. Calm and neutral at first glance, the mood of TT Fellows can change. Working with the typeface, you can reveal its soft and friendly nature, or even the brutal one, for example, by typing the text exclusively in capital letters in the bold style. TT Fellows is easy to use and perfect for setting large text arrays. Thanks to the font's uniwidth and versatility, the font is ideal for use on websites or in periodicals. Bold styles will work harmoniously in headlines or as accents in print or on packaging. TT Fellows is a humanist sans serif with a mechanical touch. With its open shapes, the friendly neutral character of thin weights and an even softer character in bold weights, the new typeface differs in character from the classic TT Norms® and TT Commons sans serifs, while still offering the same functionality. Calm regular styles differ from bold, deliberately display and more expressive ones. By the way, TT Fellows is a unwidth typeface. It was important for us that the user could change the styles, knowing that the layout will not suffer. The typeface features equal width proportions, open apertures, and slightly squared ovals, which associatively brings it closer to other popular modern fonts. Since the idea of the typeface was focused on it being a uniwidth typeface, we needed to fit the bold styles into the regular em squares, which led to interesting graphic solutions that are noticeable, for example, in the k and ж characters, in which the branches are cut directly into the stems. TT Fellows consists of 19 styles: 9 upright, 9 italic and 1 variable, each with over 700 glyphs. The font has 26 useful OpenType features. For example, there is a switch to single-part versions of letters a and y, fractions, tabular characters, case versions of punctuation, and localized versions of characters for different languages. There is a ligature for a combination of two characters of a complex design fl. TT Fellows font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

The Mashq script is the oldest documented Arabic Jazm calligraphy style. It was invented by the early Muslims in the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina, exclusively for writing the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. The Mashq style employed complex ligature and multi-level baseline rules, and therefore it went through a continuous simplification process. Around the time period Mashq was developed, the early Arab Muslims experimented with another short-lived Mashq-like style with heavily slanted vertical stems, which closely resembled the common Ḥijazi style. This style is commonly referred to as the Ma’il (slanted) style. Eventually, the early complex Mashq style was replaced as the main Islamic Arabic script, by a more simplified Mashq-derived calligraphy style that was developed in the city of Kufa, modern day Iraq, which was commonly referred to as Kufi. The Kufic style became the official Arabic script style for centuries before it was replaced by the more developed Naskh, the modern Arabic script style used today. The Mashq font family by Arabetics includes three styles of Mashq. The first is Mashq regular, which closely follows the script style of Musḥaf ‘Uthman (currently displayed in the Topkapi Museum in Turkey) with only the initial and final Haa’ baselines shifting. The second is Mashq Maail, which emphasizes the features of the Ma’il style shared with Mashq. The third is Mashq Kufi, which closely follows the script style in an adequate sample from the Quran manuscripts of the Bergstraesser Archive. All three fonts include two styles, with and without Tashkeel (dots). The Mashq and Mashq Kufi fonts include two more styles, with and without Harakat (soft vowels), and Hamza. Only three soft vowels are implemented along with their Tanween (double) forms. The Sukoon vowel is the default shape before inserting a soft vowel. Hamza was treated as a vowel in the Mashq and early Kufi manuscripts. Kashida is a zero width character. In the Mashq fonts, inserting one Kashida before the final ‘Ayn glyph group will trigger alternative shapes. In the Mashq Kufi fonts, inserting one Kashida (or two) before the final Yaa’, ‘Ayn, and Ḥaa’ glyph groups will trigger alternative shapes. The Mashq font family by Arabetics was designed to be as compatible as possible with the Arabic keyboard and Unicode alphabet used in computers today. Calligraphic variations were implemented only when they marked significant and permanent script features.

Bunyan Pro is the synthesis of Bunyan, the last face Eric Gill designed for hand setting in 1934 and Pilgrim, the machine face based on it, issued by British Linotype in the early 1950s — the most popular Gill text face in Britain from its release until well into the 1980s. Gill’s last face doesn't date itself anywhere near as obviously as Gill’s other serif faces, which were all really products of their time, heavily influenced by the richly ornamental and constantly changing aesthetic trends of the interwar period. When compared to Gill’s previous work, Bunyan seems like a revolution in the way he thought and drew. It’s as if he was shrugging off all heavy burden of what was popular, and going back to the basics of older standards. Bunyan had no bells and whistles, doesn't risk functionality with contrasts that are too high or too low, and didn't venture far outside the comfortable oldstyle rhythm Gill grew up with. By interbellum standards, this was utter austerity, a veritable denial of deco excess. Surprisingly, even without all the cloying trivialities, Bunyan still stood indisputably as an aesthetically pleasing, space saving design that could have been made only by Eric Gill. Bunyan Pro comes in three weights and their italics. The main font is intended for use between 8 and 14 points. The medium and the bold are great for emphasis but also have good merit in larger sizes, so can make effective display types as well. All six fonts include small caps, ligatures, alternates, six sets of figures, and three original Gill manicules. We tried to keep the best features of the handset (Bunyan) and machine (Pilgrim) versions while building a text face that can function in today’s immersive reading media. Deciding on which useful letterpress features to preserve for aesthetic importance was hell on our eyeballs — which lead to complex and painstaking ways of ironing out irregularities and inconsistencies related to metal technologies, in order to provide something with authenticity. The result is a unique typeface based on a Gill design that, to a much greater extent than any of his other faces, works well as a text face that can be used for entire books and magazines. For more information on Bunyan Pro’s character set, features, development process and some print tests, please consult the PDF in the gallery section of this page.

The Joanna® Sans Nova family is the only typeface in the Eric Gill Series that was not initially designed by Gill. Created by Monotype Studio designer Terrance Weinzierl over a three-year period with digital applications at the forefront of the design criteria, Joanna Sans Nova is a humanist sans serif based primarily on Gill’s original Joanna. The design comprises 16 fonts, from thin to black, each with a complementary italic. Joanna Sans Nova has a larger x-height to ensure high levels of legibility – even on small digital screens. Due to its inherent humanist proportions, Joanna Sans Nova is surprisingly comfortable for longer form reading. Its low contrast in character stroke weights also improves imaging in a variety of environments. In addition, the calligraphic and fluid details enable the roman and italic designs to shine in headlines and other display uses. Joanna Sans features a robust range of OpenType features for fine typography, including small caps, old style figures, proportional figures, ligatures, superscript and subscript figures and support for fractions. With over 1000 glyphs per font, Joanna Sans supports more than 50 languages – in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. “I've always been a fan of Gill’s work, explains Weinzierl, and found the simple, humanist qualities of Joanna really fitting for a sans serif design. I wanted to make something with Gill flavor, but with more harmony in the extreme weights than Gill Sans – and with my twist on it. I went through six or seven different italic designs before landing on the current direction.” “The original Joanna had a very distinct italic, Weinzierl continues. “It’s very condensed, and has a very shallow angle. I wanted to have an italic that stood out, but in a different way. I took a cursive direction for the italic details, which are wider and slanted more, both improving character legibility.” The Joanna Sans Nova typeface family is part of the new Eric Gill series, drawing on Monotype’s heritage to remaster and expand and revitalize Eric Gill’s body of work, with more weights, more characters and more languages to meet a wide range of design requirements. The series also brings to life new elements inspired by some of Gill’s unreleased work, discovered in Monotype’s archive of original typeface drawings and materials of the last century.

New for 2020 Bodoni Ornamental now has two italics to choose from, one basic italic and a second which is more of a true italic with a few uppercase letters that have been stylized. Only one italic can be style linked to the regular upright version so in the second italic we've added Avanti to the name which means forward in Italian. When purchasing the regular upright and Avanti italic together they will install as two separate families. Bodoni Ornamental is a revival of a very old typeface based on the Poster Bodoni letter shape. Giambattista Bodoni passed away in 1813, this decorative version was created in the 1820’s or 1830’s which was the time period when many of these ultra bold decorated type faces began to appear, the original artist is currently unknown. The original version of this ornate classic was only available as a set of uppercase letters, today over one hundred eighty years later this font is now complete with a new lowercase, numbers and accented characters for Eastern, Central and Western European countries. Due to the ornate detail in Bodoni Ornamental when printing itís recommended to use a laser printer 600dpi or greater, a 1200dpi printer will give you the best results rendering the most detail at the smallest possible point size for this font. Small home user Ink Jet printers are not recommended for Bodoni Ornamental unless you set the font to a very large point size. With Ink Jet printers much of the detail in the letters will bleed together as the ink hits the page, commercial Ink Jet printers such as GiclÈe printers may give good results. When using Bodoni Ornamental for digital images including web site graphics it may help to add a one pixel stroke fill around the letters setting color to white or grey, this may help the web site images display better on some computer's. You will need a photo editing application such as Adobe Photoshop to create your image adding the stroke fill and save as a jpg , png or gif file. I hope you enjoy this old font as much as I did making it. Note: When previewing the Bodoni Ornamental font in the Windows font preview you may notice some letters appearing lighter and some darker, this is a problem with the preview window and some ornate fonts, Bodoni Ornamental will print normal and not with mixed light and dark letters.

Tomato is the digitization and quite elaborate expansion of an early 1970s Franklin Photolettering film type called Viola Flare. This typeface is an obvious child of funk, the audio-visual revolution that swept America and put an end to the art nouveau period we now associate with the hippy era. Funk is of course little more than jazz with a chorus and an emphatic beat. Nevertheless, it became the definition of cool in the 1970s, thanks to blaxploitation movies with excellent soundtracks like Shaft and Superfly. Funk began as a commercial audio experience, then later expanded its signature to cover everything, from design to fashion to the later birth of disco, which is really a further simplification of funk. Funk had very strong and unique typographical elements, particularly a kind of titling with an essentially western, wooden core that suddenly changed and flared in unexpected areas until a very individual brand was achieved. Everything that can be tacked on to the alphabet was used towards that individuality. Things like curls, swirls, swashes, ligatures were always plentiful in funk, sometimes giving the titling a specific gender, sometimes bulging, sometimes speeding, sometimes fading in the distance, sometimes doing nothing but crazily aligning with other design elements, but the result was always a fascinating creature that seemed to invariably want to dance and have fun. Tomato was built in exactly that spirit. The original film type certainly had enough swashes and curls to be an unmistakable funk font in itself, but our further expansion of it cements it and makes it the definite font for the genre. With as many as 12 different possibilities for some letters, the designer's choices for a titling set in Tomato are virtually limitless. The Postscript and True Type versions of Tomato come in five fonts, including two fonts for alternates, one font for ligatures, and one font for swashes. These are split into two affordable packages. The entire family package is also available at an even more affordable price, and includes complimentary Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, and Central European versions of Tomato. A Tomato Pro OpenType version is also available. It is a single font that includes over 650 characters, glued together with extensive programming for convenience of use in OpenType-friendly applications, where you can watch the letters morph and dance as you push the buttons and change the options of your OT palette. Now you know which font will come to mind when someone says the word "funky".

Max Joseph Gradl designed Art Nouveau jewelry in Germany. At least some of his designs were produced by Theodor Fahrner of Pforzheim, Germany -- one of the leading manufacturers of fine art jewelry on the Continent from 1855 to 1979. I don't know if he designed for Fahrner exclusively, but every example I found was produced by that firm. I assume it was also the same M.J, who edited a book, Authentic Art Nouveau Stained Glass which was reissued by Dover and is still available. For an artist as accomplished as Gradl was, he is very tough to research. There just does not seem to have been much written about him. The jeweler is visible in most of his typeface designs. They exhibit a sculptural quality as if they were modeled in clay (or gold) rather than drawn on paper. His monograms, especially, reflect that quality. Those shown in plates 112 through 116 in Petzendorfer actually appear to have been designed specifically for fabricating in the form of gold or silver pendents. Of the initial letters that came out of Germany during this period, these by Gradl seem unusually open and lyrical. They seem to be dancing on the page, rather than sitting. Please note that Gradl designed only the decorated initials. All other characters supplied were extrapolated by HiH, including the accented initials. Orn.1 (unicode E004) is based on a jeweled gold clasp designed by Gradl (please check out Gallery Image on Myfonts.com). Also included are an art nouveau girl’s face, a swan and the face from Munch’s “Scream”, from scans of old printer’s ornaments. Gradl Initialen M represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 341 glyphs. Both upper & lower case provided with appropriate accents. 2. 558 Kerning Pairs. 3. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: salt, dlig, ornm and kern. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Refined various glyph outlines. 6. Alternative characters: 16 upper case letters (with gaps in surrounding decorations for accents above letter). 8. Four Ornaments: face1, face2, swan and orn1 (silhouette of Gradl clasp) The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Jugendstil Initials were designed by Heinrich Vogeler around 1905, based on the German blackletter tradition. A similar set of initials by Vogeler, but based on roman letters was released by Rudhardsche Geisserei of Offenbach at about this time. I believe the originals were woodcuts. The backgrounds to the letterforms may be seen as examples of Heimatkunst, an art movement within Germany that drew deliberate inspiration from the rural countryside. Like the Arts and Crafts Movement in England a little earlier, Heimatkunst may be seen, in part, as a romantic rejection of urban industrialization, while at the same time representing a back-to-roots nationalism. Like any river, it was fed by many streams. Jugendstil Initials is an experiment with which I am most pleased. It is far and away the most complex font HiH has produced and I was uncertain whether or not it could be done successfully. To oversimplify, a font is produced by creating outlines of each character, using points along the outline to define the contour. A simple sans-serif letter A with crossbar can be created using as few as 10 points. We decided to make a comparison of the number of points we used to define the uppercase A in various fonts. Cori, Gaiety Girl and Page No 508 all use 12 points. Patent Reclame uses 39 and Publicity Headline uses 43. All the rest of the A’s, except the decorative initials, fall somewhere in between. The initial letters run from 48 points for Schnorr Initials to 255 for Morris Initials Two, with 150 being about average. Then there is a jump to 418 points for Morris Initials One and, finally, to 1626 points for Jugendstil Initials. And this was only after we selectively simplified the designs so our font creation software (Fontographer) could render them. The average was 1678, not including X and Y. There was no X and Y in the original design and we have provided simple stand-ins to fill out the alphabet, without trying to imitate the style of the orginal design. We did a lot of looking to find a compatible lower case. We decided that Morris Gothic from the same period was the best match in color, design and historical context. We felt so strongly about the choice that we decided to produce our Morris Gothic font for the purpose of providing a lower case for Jugendstil Initials. The long s, as well as the ligatures ch and ck are provided. at 181, 123 (leftbrace) and 125 (rightbrace) respectively. This font was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it. I hope you agree.

Van den Velde Script Pro is the definitive edition of the original Van den Velde Script, by Intellecta Design, a free interpretation of the work of the famous master penman Jan van den Velde, to be found in the “Spieghel der schrijfkonste, in den welcken ghesien worden veelderhande gheschrifften met hare fondementen ende onderrichtinghe. ” (Haarlen, 1605). This font has evocative ancient ligature forms from the XVII Century Dutch master penman Jan van den Velde. Your indescritible writing-book was important not only with regard to the specific period it represents, but also in relationship to the entire history of calligraphy as an art: Van den Velde is rightly credited with having introduced and perfected a new trend in Dutch calligraphy. Our font, Van den Velde Script, merges modern necessities or better legibility without loosing the taste of his archaic origins. This enhanced OpenType version is a complete solution for producing documents and artworks whith an evocative and voluptuous style of calligraphic script: Van den Velde Script PRO has - more glyphs than the original Van den Velde Script. We created hundred of new glyphs, deactivated old non-representative glyphs and redesign the remaining library of original glyphs. Van den Velde Pro is more functional, soft and beauty than the original. - to keep the powerful of this unusual kind of script we make a tour-de-force kerning work: 771 glyphs in this font was adjusted in 5400 kerning pairs handly. - hundreds of contextual alternates combinations, some of them with three or more letters, - historical ornaments and fleurons in the typical style (and motifs) from the XVII century at the Lower Countryes accessed with the glyph palette using the Ornaments feature); - an extensive set of ligatures (100s of contextual alternates plus discretionary ligatures) providing letterform variations that make your designs really special, resembling real handwriting on the page; .... and, much better, Van den Velde Scriopt PRO is plus cheap than the original font !!! In non-OpenType-savvy applications it works well as an unusual and beautiful script style font. Because of its high number of alternate letters and combinations (over 700 glyphs), we suggest the use of the glyph palette to find ideal solutions to specific designs. The sample illustrations will give you an idea of the possibilities. You have full access to this amazing stuff using InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXpress and similar software. However, we still recommend exploring what this font has to offer using the glyphs palette: principally to get all the power of the Contextual Alternates feature. Van den Velde Script PRO has original letters designed by Iza W and overall creative direction plus core programming by Paulo W.

Norwich Aldine ML is a all-cap typeface with enlarged serifs, designed and produced in wood by William Hamilton Page of Norwich, Connecticut in 1872. Norwich Aldine ML is a fine example of the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for a simple, visually strong typeface. Although about 14 miles inland, Norwich, Connecticut lies at the head of the Thames River. The river is both wide and deep, and therefore was not bridged in the early 20th century. Until then, if you wanted to get from Groton on the west bank to the whaling port of New London on the east bank by land, you had to go by way of Norwich. Because of its size, the Thames is navigable all the way from Norwich to New London. Docks were built in Norwich around 1685 and the city became Connecticut’s 2nd largest port by 1800. With the construction of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad in 1835, Page could easily ship his wood type north by rail or south by coastal schooner. Included with our font, Norwich Aldine ML, are two 19th century printer’s ornaments of sailing ships similar to those that sailed up the Thames to Norwich. Reference: Moon’s Handbooks, Connecticut 2nd Edition (Emeryville CA 2004) The family has expanded from one to four fonts: 1. Norwich Aldine ML: the concept font, computer-sharp corners and smooth curves, as we imagine it was designed. 336 Glyphs including some reduced-width alternatives for better letter spacing. 2. Norwich Aldine Worn ML: the way actual wooden type would look after have been used for a while. 332 Glyphs 3. Norwich Aldine Distressed ML: the way the wooden type would look after it had really been used, perhaps abused. Alternatives to the more popular letters reflect the damage that typically occurs on a well-wormn font, with nicks, cuts and scratches and the overall wear that reduces the overall height and leads to uneven inking due to varying heights in the chase. A couple of bullets look like bullet holes. 345 glyphs. 4. Norwich Aldine Cyrillic: Cyrillic includes alll English and Cyrillic letters for MS Windows Code Page 1251, ISO 8859-5 and MacOS Cyrillic. 235 glyphs. We did Cyrillic because is was fun and we felt the basic design cried out for Cyrillic. While obviously subjective, we hope you will agree.

Here is a "Decorative Braille font". The initial design was indeed drawn on a K.I.S.S digital sketchpad, the Windows default drawing tool (Microsoft Paint, classic version). A. Glyph Concept The Braille 2x3 dot matrix is weaved around a diamond-shape. a.1. Each "dot" is represented by a "right-angle isocel triangle". a.2. Braille dots in Diamond Braille a.2.I. "Dots" are outside the diamond for first Braille row (Braille dots 1, 4) and third Braille row (Braille dots 3, 6). a.2.II. "Dots" are inside the diamond for second Braillle row (Braille dots 2, 5). a.3. Diamond lattice Glyphs are connected horizontally (to/bottom diamond's corners) and vertically (left/right corners) to each other (see poster 5). a.4. Special Glyphs - Space: its is either empty ("Empty cell") or a "non Braille shape" { _, ° } depending on your display needs (as explained in b.3.II) - 6 dots: { £, =, û } - 6 empty dots: { ç, ¥ } B. Font user guide b.1. Lowercase glyphs { A..Z } In these glyphs the "dots" are represented as a white right-angle isocel triangle filled with a smaller black triangle. b.2. Uppercase glyphs { a..z } In these glyphs, the "dots" are represented as an empty triangle (this is an "empty dot"). b.3. 'Space' vs 'Empty Cell' b.3.I. 'Space' - 'Space' glyph is an empty shape - '¶' glyph (at the end of each line in Microsoft Word) is also an empty shape b.3.II. 'Empty cell' glyphs: _ (underscore), ° (degree). In these glyphs there are 2 "empty dots" at top and bottom corners of the diamond, which differentiates them from regular Braille glyphs (which dont have a "dot in the middle"). b.4. Diamond Lattice To display text as a 'diamond lattice', replace each 'Space' by an 'Empty cell' (as explained in b.3.II, see poster 5) b.5. Connectors The connector glyphs allow the creation of "circuit like" designs (see poster 1). Here are the connector glyphs: { µ, à, â, ä, ã, è, é, ê, ë, î, ï } b.6. Domino feature Some Glyphs represent numbers 1..6 in a way which is similar than on dominos (see poster 6) C. Posters Poster 1: the "Font Logo", it displays "Diamond Braille" text together with the Connectors feature. Poster 2: a pangram which is published on pangra.me ( "Adept quick jog over frozen blue whisky mix" ). Poster 3: an illustration of the Domino feature. Poster 4: a DiamondBraille version of the Periodic table. Poster 5: illustration of the Diamond lattice using only 6 dots ( û ) and 6 empty dots ( ç ) glyphs.

Alt-Gotisch Verzierte is a typeface of decorative initials that is Victorian in style and bears a close family resemblance to the many ornamental tuscans cut throughout the nineteenth century by British foundries. Instead of the bifurcated terminals of the archetypical tuscan (see Figgins Tuscan by HiH or Stereopticon by Dan X. Solo), these letters display what Nicolete Gray might call a “wedge and bite” design -- as if they started with the wedge serif of a latin form and someone came along and took a perfectly round bite out of the wedge. We need not dwell on the lack of teeth marks. The calligraphic curls and flourishes are often graceful, sometimes a bit contrived, but always complex. There is a busyness that marks the style of the period. If you ever see an old photograph of a well-appointed Victorian parlor, you will recognize that same quality of busyness. Overdone is a word that frequently comes to mind. Alt-Gotisch Verzierte means “adorned or decorated old gothic.” The typeface is attributed by Alexander Nesbitt to an unidentified German foundry of the nineteenth century (Decorative Alphabets and Initials, Dover, New York 1987, plate 92). The designer is unknown. Our font is supplied with a lower case that is similar to the upper case, but is 15% shorter and is simplified by the omission of the decorative vines. For the lower case, alternate letters A, E, & T; and ligatures LE, OT & LY have been supplied. In addition, a few small decorative vines were planted here and there for optional use. An accented upper case is not part of the original design and is not here supplied. This design is also seen under the name “Sentinel” -- as always, it is worthwhile to compare the completeness of the character set and the faithfulness of the rendering. We believe you will agree that we provide a balance of quality and value that is unmatched in the contemporary marketplace. Alt-Gotisch Einfach is a simplified version of Alt-Gotisch Verzierte. The vine-less lower case of the Verzierte font is the upper case in Einfach. For a lower case for Einfach, the letters were further simplified by stripping away the three-dimensional outline, down to the bare bones and bites, as it were. Einfach, in fact, means “simple” or “plain.” It is interesting to note that this bare bones & bite lower case bears (I have a special license to use two homonyms in the same sentence) a striking resemblance to the 15th & 16th century ornamental letters from Westminster Abbey shown in Plate 47 of Alexander Nesbitt’s Decorative Alphabets and Initials (Dover, New York 1987).

Pompeian Cursive is a calligraphically-inspired display typeface featuring a limited number of alternate characters and a handful of graceful ligatures. A lively set of non-lining numerals accompanies, as well as a few calligraphically-inspired flourishes for ornament. The history of this typeface: Oswald Cooper’s relationship with the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry was one instigated under the auspices of creating new styles of type in lieu of following stylistic trends. In 1927, BB&S requested that Cooper create a script-like cursive typeface design in step with Lucien Bernhard’s Schoenschrift and ATF’s similarly-styled Liberty typeface. In response to BB&S’s desire to emulate instead of innovate, Cooper wrote to Mcarthur, “I am desolated to see Barnhart’s hoist the black flag. Your own efforts through the years to boost the foundry into a place in the sun as an originator seem wasted.” Still, Cooper took up the task at hand, creating a delicate, sophisticated type design which he named Pompeian Cursive. The typeface featured a limited number of alternate characters and a handful of graceful ligatures. A lively set of non-lining numerals accompanied, as well as a few calligraphically-inspired flourishes for ornamenting the end of lines of type accompanied the typeface, as well. By reviewing the few remaining original drawings for the type, as well as copious samples of Pompeian Cursive from both Cooper & BB&S' proofing process and period-specific type specimens, Wordshape presents the first digital version of this classic hybrid script/sans typeface, complete with all original alternate characters and ornaments. Pompeian Cursive has been intensively spaced and kerned for the finest setting for weddings, announcements, and general display work. - What was the inspiration for designing the font? While researching a biographic essay for Japan’s IDEA Magazine, I came across the original proofs and drawings for Pompeian Cursive. While a number of foundries have released interpretations of Cooper’s assorted typefaces, they stray from the original rather dramatically in parts. Cooper is without a doubt my favorite type and lettering designer, and to bring a refined return to his original intentions is an immense gift. - What are its main characteristics and features? Pompeian Cursive is a typeface which functions as both a display face and a limited text face. It features classy, thoughtful, and delicate swash capitals and rugged lowercase characters with a low x-height and gracefully long ascenders and descenders. - Usage recommendations: Display type or text-setting. Perfect for newspaper work, editorial design, materials intended to invoke an "old-timey" flavor, or just about anything in need of personality.