Hopeless Diamond is a contemporary display typeface inspired by the sculptural muscle of 19th century carved lettering and the radical forms of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth strike aircraft. The typeface itself contains three different styles, each with an italic and an alternate character set that can be used to generate a number of interesting permutations. The name was taken from the derisive term that test pilots used for Have Blue, a late '70s stealth demonstration aircraft –and early prototype for the F-117— designed and built by Lockheed's Skunkworks division. Due to its unusual shape and departure from received aerodynamic wisdom, Have Blue was referred to as the ‘Hopeless Diamond’.

Jheronimus is a neo-humanistic grotesque. A font with an open aperture. It has straight terminals and a moderated height of the lowercase characters. Jheronimus is a font with a uniform ordered rhythm. Well readable on the screen in small size. Consistent letter proportions. The rounded elements are pill shaped and the font has pronounced connections strokes. Punctuation marks are well decorated. Jheronimus will satisfy the demanding typographer. There are oldstyle figures in the best traditions of humanism. The bright recognizable character is combined with a clear form. This creates a sharp, crystal impression. Jheronimus is suitable for the design of an ambitious, temperamental text. It is stylistically similar to the paintings of the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. From this comes its name.

Linotype Gotharda is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from contestants of Linotype’s International Digital Type Design Contests of 1994 and 1997. This display font started as an experiment of the Croatian-German designer Milo Dominik Ivir. He wanted to design a font with characteristics of both sans serif and Gothic faces. From the Gothic he took the heavy strokes, the narrow letters, the exaggerated overmatter and the high x-height. The modern standard forms of the letters s, a, x and z, the clear capitals and the lack of serifs are the characteristics taken from sans serif faces. The result is a font with a constructed, old German feel. Linotype Gotharda is intended exclusivley for headlines in large point sizes.

Cobbler Sans is a friendly type family in six weights and the humble cousin to Cobbler. With its rounded aspect and proportions of geometric type Cobbler Sans is expressively soft and contemporary. All terminals are shaped organically and even inner corners are rounded. The few remaining straight lines give the typeface the stability of a workhorse while keeping the playfulness that characterizes the entire Cobbler family so much. Additionally there is a pile of OpenType features built in. For example loads of discretionary ligatures that make capital letters interlock left and right. Other features include automatic fractions, case sensitive punctuation and contextual alternates. Cobbler Sans works great for branding, packaging, editorial or any display application – and it comes with an expansive character set that covers over 200 languages. Furthermore Cobbler Sans is manually kerned and auto-hinted for crisp display on screen also in small sizes.

So the lumber was cheap - just a pile of offcuts - and so was the carpenter… And you couldn't say he was exactly lazy, but he was certainly efficient… mostly he would just cut a couple of planks to size, slice off a corner now and then, once in a blue moon hash up a curve… I guess he didn't have a drill, cos there are no holes… and he sure as hell didn't have a ruler… But he did have some kind of an eye, and until it falls off the wall it'll look pretty OK… Ply comes in six styles, offering differing degrees of neatness and adorned or not with fixings… There are money-saving packages too… It’s uppercase only, with variations between upper and lower case, and OpenType types can switch on Stylistic Set 1 to take the effort out of keeping things varied…

Designer Notes Pro solves a design problem. When you are looking for that ‘handwritten’ look? Now you can typeset your handwritten notes using Designer Notes Pro. This font matches the look of a handwritten note, a diary entry, post-it note or sketchbook comment. The letter shapes are based on handwriting created using a Pilot Precise V5RTpen. There’s something special about how it puts ink on paper. This font falls in the script/handwriting font style. Designer Notes Pro Includes 4 versions: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. 4 font family includes Designer Notes Pro regular, italic, bold and bold italic -Mac & Win TrueType (.ttf) -Classification - script/handwriting -Each member of the this font family is a full Latin set of 228 characters/glyphs -Letters A-Z and a-z -Numerals 0-9 -Complete punctuation -Latin language glyphs -Mathematical symbols -Careful spacing and kerning

The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵 ms3nd; modern Arabic: الْمُسْنَد musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the 9th century BCE. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, and Hasaitic, and the Ethiopic language Ge'ez in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the script date to the 9th century BCE in Yemen. There are no letters for vowels, which are marked by matres lectionis. Its mature form was reached around 800 BCE, and its use continued until the 6th century CE, including Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in variants of the alphabet, when it was displaced by the Arabic alphabet In Ethiopia and Eritrea, it evolved later into the Ge'ez script, which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages (including various Semitic, Cushitic, and Nilo-Saharan languages).

Lumios is a freehand casual marker script that was created using Pilot Sign Pen. It has both extended Latin and basic Cyrillic support that is enhanced with oodles of ligatures (latin as well as cyrillic) and alternates. As a compliment to the script I also created Lumios Design Elements font that can be useful in brand design, greeting cards design etc. Both fonts were carefully traced by hand and have clean edges, hence they are safe to use in all graphic design software (including but not limited to Adobe Suite, Silhouette and Cricut Design, Affinity Designer etc) as well as on websites. The script is fully unicode mapped. To use it in Silhouette and similar applications that do not support OpenType features (yet), you may need to use your default Mac/Windows software such as Font Book or Character Map to select alternates you need. Lumios Marker is a perfect companion to Lumios Typewriter, sharing the same soft curves and clean letter edges.

Drop_it is a redesign of fonts originally created to be recognized by computers using OCR (optical character recognition) softwares. Strangely, human beings fell in love for the stylistic inconsistencies of these fonts made for machines. In small sizes, Drop_it emulates the appearance of fonts in antique operational systems monitors. In large sizes, its structure is composed of capsules and pills allude the universe of medicines, drugs and rave culture. Drop_it Dingbats follow the the same grid of its alphabetic version, and can be used side by side in sign projects. Besides the traditional symbols, it present specific images from the rave culture like DJ (Disc-Jockey) and VJ (Visual-Jockey). Drop_it italic set adds velocity to text compositions using six angle variations. All the fun starts with a very unusual Break version. Fall version is a kind of "anti-italic". Slow version put your text in another rhythm. Swing have a little italic emphasis. Italic is, you know, italic. And Speed version run away.

Cobbler is a friendly type family in six weights. With proportions of geometric type, Cobbler is a contemporary sans on the inside and an ultra soft display typeface on the outside. Not a single sharp corner and only a hand full of straights make Cobbler extra warm and huggable. In fact, the few straight horizontal lines give the typeface the stability of a workhorse while keeping the gooey playfulness that characterizes Cobbler so much. And to make all this even more fun, there is a pile OpenType features built in. For example loads of Discretionary Ligatures that make capital letters interlock left and right – just fun! Or automatic fractions, case sensitive punctuation and contextual alternates – for serious typesetting. Cobbler works great for branding, packaging, editorial or any display application – and it comes with an expansive character set that covers Underware’s Latin Plus and with it over 200 languages. Furthermore Cobbler is manually kerned and auto-hinted for crisp display on screen also in small sizes.

How can we possibly call our line of celebrity fonts the MASTERS OF COMIC BOOK ART if it doesn't include a font based on the remarkable work of comic’s renaissance gentleman, artist/writer/colorist/letterer, Dave Gibbons?! Based on Dave’s easy-on-the-eye hand lettering, this is the font Dave himself uses to letter projects such as STAR WARS: VADER'S QUEST, MARTHA WASHINGTON & BATMAN: BLACK & WHITE. Other guys may imitate him, but the original is still the greatest! Get in with the In Crowd and check out the font created by Mister Fontastic for Dave Gibbons Original Graphic Novel, The, ah, The Originals. Yes, Dave Gibbons now comes in lower case, it’s not just what he does when he gets back from the off license. Be sure and pick up The Originals from Amazon -- now available in paperback, and probably still available as a hard case, much like Dave. After the crack about the beer above, I'm guessing you'll find me with a broken spine in the remainder pile. See the family related to Dave Gibbons: Dave Gibbons Journal & Dave Gibbons Lower .

Newbery Sans is a new contrasted sans serif designed by Alejandro Paul and the Sudtipos team. As Paul has lately found inspiration from different German instructional books, Newbery Sans finds its initial inspirations from the lettering work of E. Nerdinger and invokes the spirit of German designs but is imbued with personality all its own. The idea was to make the letterforms more usable and suitable for everything from corporate branding to editorial. It is an elegant, functional family with contemporary detail that will effortlessly meet the demands of the screen and printed page. From a condensed thin to an expanded black, Newbery Sans provides a usable workhorse system of three widths and seven weights, each with the original design of real italics, a selection of alternate glyphs and a complete set of small caps. Each weight is professionally crafted and includes extended Latin support for Central, East and Western Europe languages. The font’s name nods to its imagined uses in airports and street signage: Jorge Newbery was one of the first Latin American aircraft pilots, Newbery is the street where I live and it is also the name of Buenos Aires’s local airport.

This font is based on the Latin-based font for Linear B syllable writing. It contains all the characters. To see some full characters, you can use Turkish characters by selecting the font from the add character section of the word program. Linear B was a syllabic script that was used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from the older Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, as is the later Cypriot syllabary, which also recorded Greek. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Cydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing. Linear B, deciphered by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober[5] is the only Bronze Age Aegean script to have thus far been deciphered.

Kornelis de Vries, a headmaster from the Dutch province of Friesland, cultivated new potato breeds that he named after pupils in his school. In the early 1900s he came up with the tasty Bintje (a Frisian girl’s name) and it became a big success – in Belgium and France it has remained the most popular potato for french fries to this day, more than a century since its introduction. Donald Roos took 10 kilos of fresh Bintje potatoes and cut the Bint typeface by hand with a short, sharp knife. He then inked each character once and printed it twice; the second, lighter printing is accommodated in the lower case alphabet. The Bint family offers a script to make the letters bounce up and down the baseline; with OpenType functionality the font randomly chooses each character from the upper- or lowercase alphabet. ‘Tabular lining figures’ will activate a series of negative numerals in boxes; ‘Discretionary ligatures’ activates specially designed letter combinations like ‘www’ as well as arrows and stars. Bint has a distinct, slightly rough handmade appearance, making it useful for a wide range of designs.

Rodia is an Oddball Geometric Sans Typeface consisting of nine weights in both roman and oblique. It’s a geometric sans with a twist that’s perfect for branding and identity projects – it will also give your body text a unique voice. Inspiration came from the iconic “RADIO” signage that was once in place at 5041, Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles in 1985 (documented at https://tinyurl.com/y2krt2ox). With its distinctive leg, the /R/ provides a personality trait to define the style of the character set. You can clearly see how this characteristic separates Rodia from other geometric sans families – the /k/v/w/x/y/K/R/V/W/X/Y/ glyphs all display the distinctive ‘feet’ and ‘hands’ as terminals to legs and arms. Then there is the /A/ with its triangular crossbar – this triangular motif has been used to embellish alternates in Stylistic Set 1 for /A/E/F/G/H/Q/S/ glyphs. These will add another layer of versatility for your typographic projects. Rodia features an extensive character set covering all Latin European languages. Key features: 9 weights in Roman and Oblique Full European character set (Latin only) 400+ glyphs per font.

Tambau is a display typeface crafted by Matheus “Fio” Gonçalves, a Brazilian design student, still in college, inspired by Brazilian concert urban posters and wood type that I saw at the Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo. The font was first made for a magazine project in design school, making it beautiful on giant pages headlines, billboards, signs, etc. There’s no lowercase, the character set is dramatic and objective. The uppercase is actually expanded letterforms causing some eyes and breathing paths to the very condensed and very modular glyphs, which creates a quite interesting striped texture between form, counterform and spacing. The lots of ligatures come to give it more closure between the letters, when they try to form blank spaces. So do the diacritics, fitting in the space given to them by the dynamic letterforms, making dense rectangular blocks. You may use Tambau as big as you can or do a high tracking to it and still it will be pretty. The titles can be dynamic, just condensed or just large. It’s on your own. Don’t be afraid to play with Tambau, it’s an alive typography. Curiosity: For the magazine in design school, the pilot project of Tambau was cut in a MDF board, to print it with texture and paint. Later was added more characters, languages and special glyphs to it. Set: Tambau is a singular font typeface, with extended and condensed characters, numbers, ligatures, punctuation and symbols for Basic, Western, Central and South Eastern Latin languages.

Floro is a typographic family with 3 members designed by Carlos Fabian Camargo. Its idea combines medieval ideas, grotesque, stencil and grunge for T-shirts, stickers, advertising material design. More specifically the concept of Floro join several DNAís coordinating X height, ascendant, descendant and wide, in which proportions and adaptive optics were determined to inject great visual impact when composing titles. Its forms and counter forms have imperfections controlled with vitality and consistency. Floro is useful for ranking words and phrases with corroded edges and creases between the lines of his letters. In that vein, Floro refers to improvised design, deletion and copying. For that reason, its determinants seem stencil patterns that attract the attention of the reader. Its inaccurate decisions were planned that way, in which the type of contrast seems made with a flat tip and the amount of contrast between thick and thin is medium. Its sizes, regular and italic shine by their systematic wear and terminations sometimes in pointed forms resembling medieval darkness. In short, we can say that Floro comes from the miscegenation of Gothic calligraphy texture, foundational calligraphy and some refinements of gothic writings with italic sans-serif ideas of late 19th century. Even with the blur appearance, floro has ideal proportions to pile for horizontal and vertical areas when composing titles with striking looks and robust. And finally, floro dingbats are related shields and stamps, to accompany the written resulting useful at the level of visual support and hierarchical.

Deva Ideal was inspired by women’s beauty. It didn’t come only from the desire to create a new typeface. It also seeks to materialize beauty in a visual form. Instead of imitating the shapes of the female body or other formal attributes, Deva Ideal is an abstract expression of the women’s beauty. The unique character of the typeface is achieved by the use of soft, almost invisibly bent strokes, since one of the priorities of the typeface is not to disturb the eye of the reader with odd design details. Deva Ideal excels in her cold beauty and shows her sex appeal. The soft curves present in Deva Ideal differ from the masculine and technical shapes used in most contemporary typefaces. Deva Ideal has ideal proportions (90 / 60 / 90) and its shapes are essential and simple. Because of this, it is ideal for setting text in all kinds of printed matter: catalogues, books and magazines. The letter forms are wide and open, so text can be set in small sizes and thus space can be saved, while keeping the same degree of readability. The author wishes to acknowledge František Štorm for his invaluable opinions. Also to Palo Bálik and Peter Bilak for their contributions. I am specially grateful to all the devas (archaic expression for beautiful young girl), who inspired me to design this typeface. This is dedicated to Janka Ráczová, Jarka Krajčiová, Mariana Felgueiras and obviously to Martinka Filípková! Every use of Deva Ideal is a little homage to these interesting women.

Art into type In 2008, Fontsmith were approached by their friend, Jon Scott, to investigate whether a typeface could assume the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon’s not-for-profit charity, Measure, was organising an event for the artist, Conrad Shawcross, whose giant mechanical installation, entitled Chord, was going on public display in the long-disused Kingsway tram tunnel in Holborn. Chord explores the way we perceive time, as either a line or a cycle. Two enormous machines with dozens of rotating arms and moving in opposite directions, weave rope with almost infinite slowness. An unusual brief Phil Garnham visited Conrad in his Hackney studio to get a feel for his work and ideas. “Conrad is a very clever and philosophical guy. He struggled to see how typeface design had any relevance to him and his art. This was going to be a challenge.” The artist presented the type designer with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and mathematical workings. “This was, in essence, my brief.” Phil developed three concepts, the simplest of which ticked all the boxes. “The idea of the strokes in the letterforms appearing and ending at peaks or points of origin fitted perfectly with Conrad’s idea of time occurring and ending at two ends of the sculpture.” Two versions Phil planned modules for two versions of the typeface: one with five lines in the letterforms and one with seven. He then drew the modules on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is FS Conrad. “This is not a simple headline typeface,” says Phil. “It’s not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, and it’s informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as piece of functioning, harmonious type.”

In the history of 20th century graphic arts, the evolution of the informal sans serif has been a uniquely American phenomenon. The ongoing saga of this (still as popular as ever) sub-genre dates back to the maturity of the Industrial Age and early Hollywood film titling, runs through the prosperous times of interwar print publications, sees mass flourishing during the various media propagations of the film type era, and solidifies itself as arguably the most common design element in the latter years of the century. Fun, bouncy, playful, and highly exciting, the casual sans serif is now all over game packaging, film and animation titles, book covers, food boxes, concert posters, and pretty much everywhere design aims to induce excitement about a product or an event. The casual sans is the natural high pill of typesetting. We figured it was high time for the casual sans to adapt to 21st century technology, gain more versatility, and become as much fun to use as the emotions it triggers. So we’re quite excited to issue Bananas, a fun sans serif family in 6 weights and 3 widths that can be used anywhere your designer’s imagination can take you. Rather than being based on a single design, Bananas was sourced from multiple American film era faces, all from 1950s and 1960s, when the casual sans genre was at its popular peak. Headliners’ Catalina and its very similar cousin, Letter Graphics’ Carmel, served as initial study points. Then a few Dave West designs informed the design development and weighting process, before narrow and wide takes were sketched out and included in the family. The entire development process happened in a highly precise interpolative environment. All Bananas fonts come with a full glyph complement supporting the majority of Latin languages, as well as five sets of figures, automatic fractions, quite a few ligatures, biform/unicase shapes and other stylistic alternates.

The Schneidler Latein is a sharp and elegant Antiqua based on the ductus of the broad edged pen with a strong character. Running perfectly in paragraph text giving it something quite special and being effortlessly legible at the same time, Schneidler Latein works great in headings as well. Each glyph is a piece of art ready to be used in branding and blowup combining beauty and personality in a kick-ass blend. It is absolutely new to the digital world as it never has been digitized before. This new version digitized, further developed and extended by artist and graphic designer Lena Schmidt comes in nine styles from which there are four application-related ones like Subtext and Display and five weight-related ones like Bold and Heavy. Each style contains 948 glyphs, variations of numbers, three stylistic sets one preserving the historic forms of changed characters, small caps, open type features and superior and inferior characters. Designed by F. H. Ernst Schneidler the Schneidler Latein was released in 1916, the bold version in 1920 and the italics in 1921. Schneidler was born in 1882 in Berlin. He studied at the school for applied arts in Düsseldorf with professor F. H. Ehmcke and P. Behrens. He was as a painter, graphic designer and illustrator. In 1920 he was appointed as teacher in the school for applied arts Stuttgart. His students were Albert Kapr, Imre Reiner and Lilo Rasch-Naegele among others. Further well-known fonts from his hands are for example Legende, Amalthea, Schneidler Mediävel and Schneidler Antiqua. Lena Schmidt was born 1981 in Bremen. She is a german painter, graphic designer and illustrator mostly known for her huge wood carving paintings. From 2003 to 2011 she studied Fine Arts in Hamburg with professor Matt Mullican. From 2015 to 2019 she studied graphic design with a focus on type design at HAW Hamburg Department Design with professor Jovica Veljović. She lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.

Sublime45-Regular Sublime Revised for 2021. One font in Opentype format as Sublime45. Families and all TT Truetype versions eliminated in this wonderful stand alone. The Spring 1997 original release of Sublime —borne an organic creature of black water soluble ink & digitized by Coniglio Type. Sublime is a fun font to use in commercial layouts. It is soft and fluid as ink. Like the wrinkles of time, it is imperfect. That in itself makes it incredibly attractive, warm and “human factor”. Sublime offers legibility so sorely missed in the current recreational font market. Sublime was inspired by World War II US fighter pilot Donald Alling. He flew missions over Nazi Germany. His squadron also dropped food, medicine and relief supplies over the Netherlands. Known as “the Colonel” to his friends. Don as a civic engineer ruled literally miles of ink letter callout’s with a template device called a LeRoy in peacetime on vellum and mylar across his career as a technical illustrator. You didn't want to screw up inking into a template with wet black permanent ink. You really had to have a steady hand and it was all done by hand. You can say Don worked “unplugged”. And that is cool! He was part of the broad stroke of postwar industrial expansion that helped keep America strong, rendering exploded views on top secret projects. Many of us were not even born yet when all this was going on. Today at over 80 years young Don is like a national treasure, savvy and bright—and the ladies love him! The Colonel remains a dedicated master airbrush man, stand–up man, caricature artist and letterman all without use of a computer! He was lucky enough to retire before a desktop cathode tube was put in his face. Today the Colonel enjoys restoring VW’s, flying and freelance consulting when not being called to supper by his lovely wife Rea.

Elegant and round Having harboured a desire for a rounded font within the Fontsmith library for some time, Phil Garnham recognised that FS Emeric offered the perfect skeleton around which to design it. Most new rounded fonts rely on scripts or other in-app automation to form their characters. For all their warmth and approachability, they too often conjure images of jelly sweets and sausages. Not so FS Aldrin, where every curve and transition has been crafted by hand, giving a distinctive look and elegant feel. Design highlights FS Aldrin enjoys wide-open ‘lunar’ counters and soft, tube-like terminals. These improve legibility, especially on backlit signage and screens. The open proportions and circular strokes are juxtaposed against a more serious technical aspect that exists within each counter shape. The lighter weights feel precise and efficient, perfect for notes on blueprints or technical drawings. The heavy weights are equally crafted but more playful by their rotund nature, and are perfect for strong headlines or packaging projects. UI icons A suite of 268 icons complement the typeface beautifully and extend the design language in all directions. They cover a range of commonly used applications and themes ranging from ecommerce to weather, and also serve as a solid starting point for a bespoke brand icon set or UI. In addition, born of FS Aldrin’s astronomical theme and playful nature is a special collection of space-themed icons, including rockets, shuttles and lunar modules (hint: if you type the word BUZZ with ligatures enabled, an astronaut appears). Earth to Buzz Buzz Aldrin was the pilot of Apollo 11’s lunar module, the one that put man on The Moon for the very first time. Early on in the project’s life, FS Aldrin emerged as the ideal hook on which to hang the font’s space helmet (hardly surprising given Phil’s fascination with space travel and astronomy). An approach was made to Buzz’s management to see if he would sanction the association. Not only was the great man himself happy to see his name on a typeface, he also asked to use it in his upcoming keynote talks, book launches and online projects.

First, the important information…Nori is a hand-lettered typeface that contains over 1100 glyphs, 250 ligatures, 487 alternate characters, 125+ swash and titling alternates, lining and old style numerals. To make sure it is perfectly clear—Nori is the result of brush and ink on paper. The textures produced in each glyph are real and the imperfections are intentional and add to the sincerity of the letters. I say this to be as blunt as possible in order to avoid confusion and to frame what this typeface represents—calligraphic, handwritten letters captured digitally for their warmth and poetic variation for print and screen. Like my handwritten, calligraphic or brush-driven faces before it (the Baka series and the TDC2 2010 winning typeface, Fugu), Nori is a product of my analog and digital hand. To view the words and sentences formed by this typeface is to look at how my hands, yes hands, make letters. The fluidity, as well as the irregularity, is human, honest and intentional—to do so lets the brush I am holding breathe life into each letter. Once digital, any number of points and repetitive processes can’t mask its influences—and I like that. The brush, a simple instrument, my tool, my friend designed to emulate traditional Japanese sumi-e brushes... the Pilot Japan Kanji Fude brush pen. Each letter, each variation was written over and over again until I found the right combination. From there, each was scanned, digitized and optimized. Points were removed in order to ‘clean’ the glyphs up some but I did not want to compromise the integrity of the actual brush stroke. Once this base set of characters (about 350) were completed, the thoughtful manipulation of the glyphs, their gestures and forms were further expanded to solidify the embellishments used within the ligatures, alternates, swashes and additional features. This process was admittedly self-indulgent to an extent. I wanted the words created with this typeface to have the flexibility of variation and cohesiveness of movement that someone fluidly producing these letters by hand might have.  I hope you enjoy this typeface as much as I did during the six months working on it. A specimen and style guide is included with the purchased of Nori.

Gérard Mariscalchi is a self-made designer. Born in Southern France of a Spanish mother and an Italian father, he has worked as a mechanic, salesman, pilot, college teacher – even a poet (with poetry being the worst-paying of these professions, he reports.) “Throughout all this, the backbone of my career has always been design,” Mariscalchi says. “I’ve been drawing since I was five, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I learned that my hobby could also help me earn a living.” It was about this same time that Mariscalchi fell in love with type. He studied the designs of masters like Excoffon, Usherwood and Frutiger, as well as the work of calligraphers and type designers such as Plantin, Cochin and Dürer. With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise that Mariscalchi’s typeface designs are inspired by many sources. Baylac and Evita reflect the style of the art nouveau and art deco periods, while Marnie was created as an homage to the great Lithuanian calligrapher Villu Toots. However, the touch of French elegance and distinction Mariscalchi brings to his work is all his own. Baylac Who says thirteen is an unlucky number? Three capitals and ten lowercase letters from a poster by L. Baylac, a relatively obscure Art Nouveau designer, served as the foundation for this typeface. The finished design has lush curves that give the face drama without diminishing its versatility. On the practical side, Baylac’s condensed proportions make it perfect for those situations where there’s a lot to say and not much room in which to say it Evita Mariscalchi based the design of Evita on hand lettering he found in a restaurant menu, and considers this typeface one of his most difficult design challenges. “The main problem was to render the big weight difference between the thin and the thick strokes without creating printing problems at small point sizes,” he says. Unlike most scripts, Evita is upright, with the design characteristics of a serif typeface. Mariscalchi named the face for a close friend. The end result is a charming design that is light, airy, and slightly sassy. Marnie Based on Art Nouveau calligraphic lettering, Marnie is elegant, inviting, and absolutely charming. Mariscalchi paid special attention to letter shapes and proportions to guarantee high levels of character legibility. He also kept weight transition in character strokes to modest levels, enabling the face to be used at relatively small sizes – an unusual asset for a formal script. Marnie’s capital letters are expansive designs with flowing swash strokes that wrap affectionately around adjoining lowercase letters. The design easily captures the spontaneous qualities of hand-rendered brush lettering.

Gérard Mariscalchi is a self-made designer. Born in Southern France of a Spanish mother and an Italian father, he has worked as a mechanic, salesman, pilot, college teacher – even a poet (with poetry being the worst-paying of these professions, he reports.) “Throughout all this, the backbone of my career has always been design,” Mariscalchi says. “I’ve been drawing since I was five, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I learned that my hobby could also help me earn a living.” It was about this same time that Mariscalchi fell in love with type. He studied the designs of masters like Excoffon, Usherwood and Frutiger, as well as the work of calligraphers and type designers such as Plantin, Cochin and Dürer. With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise that Mariscalchi’s typeface designs are inspired by many sources. Baylac and Evita reflect the style of the art nouveau and art deco periods, while Marnie was created as an homage to the great Lithuanian calligrapher Villu Toots. However, the touch of French elegance and distinction Mariscalchi brings to his work is all his own. Baylac Who says thirteen is an unlucky number? Three capitals and ten lowercase letters from a poster by L. Baylac, a relatively obscure Art Nouveau designer, served as the foundation for this typeface. The finished design has lush curves that give the face drama without diminishing its versatility. On the practical side, Baylac’s condensed proportions make it perfect for those situations where there’s a lot to say and not much room in which to say it Evita Mariscalchi based the design of Evita on hand lettering he found in a restaurant menu, and considers this typeface one of his most difficult design challenges. “The main problem was to render the big weight difference between the thin and the thick strokes without creating printing problems at small point sizes,” he says. Unlike most scripts, Evita is upright, with the design characteristics of a serif typeface. Mariscalchi named the face for a close friend. The end result is a charming design that is light, airy, and slightly sassy. Marnie Based on Art Nouveau calligraphic lettering, Marnie is elegant, inviting, and absolutely charming. Mariscalchi paid special attention to letter shapes and proportions to guarantee high levels of character legibility. He also kept weight transition in character strokes to modest levels, enabling the face to be used at relatively small sizes – an unusual asset for a formal script. Marnie’s capital letters are expansive designs with flowing swash strokes that wrap affectionately around adjoining lowercase letters. The design easily captures the spontaneous qualities of hand-rendered brush lettering.

Gérard Mariscalchi is a self-made designer. Born in Southern France of a Spanish mother and an Italian father, he has worked as a mechanic, salesman, pilot, college teacher – even a poet (with poetry being the worst-paying of these professions, he reports.) “Throughout all this, the backbone of my career has always been design,” Mariscalchi says. “I’ve been drawing since I was five, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I learned that my hobby could also help me earn a living.” It was about this same time that Mariscalchi fell in love with type. He studied the designs of masters like Excoffon, Usherwood and Frutiger, as well as the work of calligraphers and type designers such as Plantin, Cochin and Dürer. With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise that Mariscalchi’s typeface designs are inspired by many sources. Baylac and Evita reflect the style of the art nouveau and art deco periods, while Marnie was created as an homage to the great Lithuanian calligrapher Villu Toots. However, the touch of French elegance and distinction Mariscalchi brings to his work is all his own. Baylac Who says thirteen is an unlucky number? Three capitals and ten lowercase letters from a poster by L. Baylac, a relatively obscure Art Nouveau designer, served as the foundation for this typeface. The finished design has lush curves that give the face drama without diminishing its versatility. On the practical side, Baylac’s condensed proportions make it perfect for those situations where there’s a lot to say and not much room in which to say it Evita Mariscalchi based the design of Evita on hand lettering he found in a restaurant menu, and considers this typeface one of his most difficult design challenges. “The main problem was to render the big weight difference between the thin and the thick strokes without creating printing problems at small point sizes,” he says. Unlike most scripts, Evita is upright, with the design characteristics of a serif typeface. Mariscalchi named the face for a close friend. The end result is a charming design that is light, airy, and slightly sassy. Marnie Based on Art Nouveau calligraphic lettering, Marnie is elegant, inviting, and absolutely charming. Mariscalchi paid special attention to letter shapes and proportions to guarantee high levels of character legibility. He also kept weight transition in character strokes to modest levels, enabling the face to be used at relatively small sizes – an unusual asset for a formal script. Marnie’s capital letters are expansive designs with flowing swash strokes that wrap affectionately around adjoining lowercase letters. The design easily captures the spontaneous qualities of hand-rendered brush lettering.

Designs of characters that are almost forty years old can be already restored like a historical alphabet – by transferring them exactly into the computer with all their details. But, of course, it would not be Josef Tyfa, if he did not redesign the entire alphabet, and to such an extent that all that has remained from the original was practically the name. Tyfa published a sans-serif alphabet under the title Juvenis already in the second half of the past century. The type face had a large x-height of lower-case letters, a rather economizing design and one-sided serifs which were very daring for their time. In 1979 Tyfa returned to the idea of Juvenis, modified the letter “g” into a one-storey form, narrowed the design of the characters even further and added a bold and an inclined variant. This type face also shows the influence of Jaroslav Benda, evident in the open forms of the crotches of the diagonal strokes. Towards the end of 2001 the author presented a pile of tracing paper with dozens of variants of letter forms, but mainly with a new, more contemporary approach: the design is more open, the details softer, the figures and non-alphabetical characters in the entire set are more integral. The original intention to create a type face for printing children’s books thus became even more emphasized. Nevertheless, Juvenis with its new proportions far exceeds its original purpose. In the summer of 2002 we inserted all of this “into the machine” and designed new italics. The final computer form was completed in November 2002. All the twelve designs are divided into six variants of differing boldness with the corresponding italics. The darkness of the individual sizes does not increase linearly, but follows a curve which rises more steeply towards the boldest extreme. The human eye, on the contrary, perceives the darkening as a more fluent process, and the neighbouring designs are better graded. The x-height of lower-case letters is extraordinarily large, so that the printed type face in the size of nine points is perceived rather as “ten points” and at the same time the line spacing is not too dense. A further ingenious optical trick of Josef Tyfa is the figures, which are designed as moderately non-aligning ones. Thus an imaginary third horizontal is created in the proportional scheme of the entire type face family, which supports legibility and suitably supplements the original intention to create a children’s type face with elements of playfulness. The same applies to the overall soft expression of the alphabet. The serifs are varied; their balancing, however, is well-considered: the ascender of the lower-case “d” has no serif and the letter appears poor, while, for example, the letter “y”, or “x”, looks complicated. The only serif to be found in upper-case letters is in “J”, where it is used exclusively for the purpose of balancing the rounded descender. These anomalies, however, fit perfectly into the structure of any smoothly running text and shift Juvenis towards an original, contemporary expression. Tyfa also offers three alternative lower-case letters *. In the case of the letter “g” the designer follows the one-storey form he had contemplated in the eighties, while in “k” he returns to the Benda inspiration and in “u” adds a lower serif as a reminder of the calligraphic principle. It is above all the italics that are faithful to the tradition of handwritten lettering. The fairly complicated “k” is probably the strongest characteristic feature of Juvenis; all the diagonals in “z”, “v”, “w”, “y” are slightly flamboyant, and this also applies to the upper-case letters A, V, W, Y. Juvenis blends excellently with drawn illustrations, for it itself is modelled in a very creative way. Due to its unmistakable optical effect, however, it will find application not only in children’s literature, but also in orientation systems, on posters, in magazines and long short-stories.