Prolific illustrator and veteran typographer Tracy Sabin draws on more than 40 years of multi-disciplinary design experience to bring us Muschamp Pro, a loopy, bouncy, free-form alphabet adaptable for many uses. It embodies the spirit of the massive art nouveau wave that broke out in the late 1950s and ingrained itself in popular culture for about three decades on both sides of the pond. Carefree, playful, rhythmic and versatile, this font evokes plenty of album jackets, children book covers, and cartoon titling from the times that really defined those design expressions and enshrined them as essential pop art. Muschamp Pro comes with plenty of alternates, ligatures of both standard and discretionary varieties, and extended Latin language support, all contained in a glyphset of more than 500 characters. Use this font if you want your design to transmit a message of crafty and joyful activity.

Frederic W. Goudy designed three weights of this friendly-looking sans serif font from 1922-1929 for Lanston Monotype in the United States. Goudy was attempting to impart freedom and personality to the sans serif form at a time when geometric sans serifs, such as Futura, were gaining rapid world-wide popularity. To achieve this challenging goal, he looked to lapidary inscriptions and manuscript writing for inspiration. He included elements such as slight swellings of terminal strokes, slab serifs on a few of the caps, alternate uncial forms, and a few swash strokes. The result is uniquely Goudy: charming, instinctive, and just right for adding warmth to magazine or advertising layouts. The design staff at ITC updated and filled out the family for a total of eight styles in ITC Goudy Sans. ITC Goudy Sans® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Bio Sans is a super neutral sans-serif family for text designed by Ryoichi Tsunekawa and the whole family consists of 6 weights from ExtraLight to ExtraBold and their matching Italics. The basic concept of this family is the same as Bebas Neue which is our most popular free font and used all over the world, that is to say, Neutral, Natural, Minimal, Harmless, Super-flat, Transparent and Legible. The basic skeleton of their letterform was designed geometrically and the sophisticated design gives them universality, neutrality and sense of unity for the use in all media, all purposes and their large x-heights makes this family legible and readable even on small size screen. Bio Sans supports almost all European languages: Western, Central, South Eastern Europeans and afrikaans. And proportional figures, superior figures, inferior figures, denominators, numerators, fractions, ordinals and case-sensitive-forms can be accessed by using OpenType features.

Nobody Home JNL is unusual in nature as it combines two vintage typestyles into one font. Both have been used for home and property identification for decades and still remain popular. Over the years the letters and numbers have been made of cast steel, aluminum, brass and plastic. The alphabet is in a distinctly bold, asymmetrical style, while the numbers almost take on a calligraphic feel. There is just a basic character set - alphabet, numerals and simple punctuation. While the font has been reasonably spaced and kerned, it's best to remember that neither type design was made with digital technology in mind, so it's suggested to adjust your layout manually for optimum results. Nobody Home JNL is best-suited for replicating street addresses, apartment numbers on doors, and homeowner (or apartment house) names on buildings - whether in print design or as plotter-cut vinyl graphics.

Mountain is a digital revival and extension of Teutonia, an old metal typeface released by the Roos & Junge type foundry (Offenbach am Main, Germany) in 1902. Teutonia’s design was popular during both the Art Nouveau and the Constructivist eras, where similar letterforms could be seen as far away as the Soviet Union. Although it slipped under the radar during the 1930s and 40s, this style feels extremely contemporary today. Mountain’s underlying geometric feeling is reminiscent of pixels and grids, suiting it for application with music and art, as well as history. Yet this typeface is not as static as it seems at first glance; playful diagonals—like those seen on the capitals D, L, P, and W—enliven the otherwise stern horizontal and vertical motion. Teutonia was a simple upper and lowercase display type. Mountain adds upon these by adding small caps and obliqued italic companions, rounding out this typographic toolkit.

The Lucyna serif font is a stylish and sophisticated typeface that exudes elegance and refinement. The font's unique design, inspired by the natural beauty and fluidity of the sea, features clean and well-defined serifs that give it a distinctive and timeless character. One of the most popular styles in the Lucyna family is the regular weight, which has a balanced and harmonious look that is easy on the eyes. This makes it perfect for use in long-form text such as books, magazines, and newspapers. The regular style's clean lines and legibility also make it an excellent choice for branding and advertising, where it can add a touch of sophistication and class. With its versatility and expressive nature, the Lucyna regular style is a font that can adapt to a wide range of design needs, while still maintaining its distinctive character and personality.

German type designers Hannes von Döhren, Christoph Koeberlin and the FontFont Type Department created this sans FontFont in 2013. The family contains 10 weights from Hairline to Black and is ideally suited for film and TV, advertising and packaging, editorial and publishing, logo, branding, music and nightlife, software and gaming, sports as well as web and screen design. FF Mark provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, super- and subscript characters, and stylistic alternates. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. NEW: the new FF Mark W1G versions features a pan-European character set for international communications. The W1G character set supports almost all the popular languages/writing systems in western, eastern, and central Europe based on the Latin alphabet and also several based on Cyrillic and Greek alphabets.

The Keiss type family is our interpretation of the popular nineteen century Scotch Roman typefaces. We intended to keep a very classic approach while introducing a couple of new elements that differentiate this type family from it’s ancestors. This design, with short descenders and ascenders, along with three very distinct optical sizes makes this type family well suited for contemporary newspapers. The Title and Big versions range from Thin to Heavy, with matching italics, in order to be used in big sizes and stand out in the design. The Text ranges from Thin to ExtraBold and is a standalone type family for text usage, with narrow proportions and wider and open italics for improved text setting. The Condensed versions, ranging from Thin to Bold, don’t have italics, although they can be matched with the italics of the Title and Big versions, due to the fact they are very condensed.

Give your documents a sense of history. The study of the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics has been an ongoing fascination by scholars and Egyptology buffs for literally centuries. The discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 provided an incredible breakthrough in deciphering the hieroglyphs, however there continues to be conflicting opinions on the literal translation of both the phonetic and ideographic symbols. As such, the interpretation provided in this manual represents an assembly of the most popular transcriptions. This series contains 62 assorted gods and deities as well as a few well known kings or pharaoh's from the New Dynasty. It is important to note that most of the gods and deities were represented in many different forms throughout the centuries and regions of Ancient Egypt, and these are but some of these representations. NOTE: this font comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

Introduced by Timurtype Studio! White Dandelion is a Qoutable Handwritting Font This font are a captivating and expressive type of font that embodies the essence of handwritten quotes and phrases. These fonts are designed to mimic the natural movement and irregularities of actual handwriting, capturing the charm and authenticity of personal notes or messages. With their unique character and style, quotable handwriting fonts infuse text with a sense of warmth, personality, and familiarity. They are perfect for creating visually appealing quote graphics, social media posts, inspirational designs, and personalized stationery. With their versatility and ability to convey various moods and messages, quotable handwriting fonts have become a popular choice for designers, writers, and anyone seeking to add a touch of handcrafted charm to their words. White Dandelion Font also supports multilingualism. Enhance your designs with our original fonts, feel free to comment or provide feedback, Enjoy the fonts 😊 Thank You

Aviator, also known as Ventura Slim, is based on an old 1930s lettering style popularized by Carl Holmes in his wonderful book on the subject. Angular and at the same time aerodynamic, this low-waisted typeface is great for tight-fitting headlines and other condensed titling situations. You may find it equally useful in developing company logos with a truly retro look. This resurrected digital version of Aviator comes with a convenient and stylish set of alternate characters and small figures. Now enjoy your flight! Aviator is now available in the OpenType Std format. Some new characters have been added to this OpenType version including stylistic alternates and historical forms. These advanced features work in current versions of Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades.

Hebden is a ‘Northern’ font. Inspired by the town Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, the family is a mix of a grotesque and an incised serif. The grot is based on Victorian train station signage and the serif is style that can be spotted in and around the Yorkshire Dales region. Hebden has a nostalgic twist and is ideal for labelling, signage and memorable messages. The grotesque face with its robust angles and warm circular curves recalls the style of traditional English sans-serifs like Caslon’s 2-Line Egyptian. The incised face has strong but sophisticated and natural forms and is based on a wood carved style popular in the early 20th century. The weight of the two faces are are drawn to complement each other creating an evenly balanced combination. Both faces come with caps, lower caps across letters and numerals, and have Western, Central and Eastern European language support.

The Keiss type family is our interpretation of the popular nineteen century Scotch Roman typefaces. We intended to keep a very classic approach while introducing a couple of new elements that differentiate this type family from it’s ancestors. This design, with short descenders and ascenders, along with three very distinct optical sizes makes this type family well suited for contemporary newspapers. The Title and Big versions range from Thin to Heavy, with matching italics, in order to be used in big sizes and stand out in the design. The Text ranges from Thin to ExtraBold and is a standalone type family for text usage, with narrow proportions and wider and open italics for improved text setting. The Condensed versions, ranging from Thin to Bold, don’t have italics, although they can be matched with the italics of the Title and Big versions, due to the fact they are very condensed.

Fans of Comicraft have made a lot of noise (HELP!) about the availability of ready-to-wear, factory surplus sound effects, not unlike those made available over a decade ago in our extremely popular and raucous ZAP PACK. It may sound impossible (WHA--?!), but Comicraft's Sonic Specialist, John JG Roshell, locked himself away (CLIK) in our top-secret SFX lab forming Onomatopoeia at high speeds (FWOOSH) and extreme temperatures (BBRRR), and sounded out over One Hundred (GASP) of the loudest (BTOOM), most intense (UNNGHH), squawkiest (KRAKK), discordant (SPLANGG), dissonant (SQUTCH) -- as well as dulcet and restrained (THWIPP) -- sound effects ever conceived (WOO HOO!) Helpfully arranged in alphabetical order (YIPPEE!), this Library of Onomatopeia -- the ONOMATOPEDIA, if you will (DING) -- is now available for use by the general public. WARNING: Comicraft Sound Effects may explode on contact with skin (AAAH!); please use protective clothing and eyewear when handling the Onomatopedia.

Woven is a geometrical typeface based on a simple tessellation or tiling pattern. The template for the letters has both vertical and horizontal symmetry and the tiling pattern has four-fold rotational symmetry. Variations of this pattern are popular with quilters and most have a woven look to them. To fit the letters into the template results in some distorted letters but it is the pattern that matters, not the individual elements of that pattern. With proper spacing, a block of text will fit together both horizontally and vertically. Woven is intended to be used with alternating letter sets and the OpenType feature of contextual alternatives does this automatically in applications that support it. The upper-case could be used alone but it unlikely that the lower-case characters could be used by themselves. The typeface is hard to read and would make a challenging font for word-search puzzles.

Special creative products for you, our products will give you an extraordinary experience that will not be forgotten. A popular and professional script font. Modern and elegant, this typeface is made of beautiful creative strokes. This font is perfect for your creative ideas, both formal and informal. It has a modern style with a touch of creative ideas that is very suitable to be applied anywhere that requires creative ideas such as invitation cards, letterheads, website logos, social media, banners, advertisements, brochures, packaging products, leather products, and any product that requires writing. By using this font, all of your products will look luxurious, elegant, and attractive, please try and see the results. This font includes a complete set of beautiful upper and lowercase letters, numbers, a wide variety of punctuation marks, and ligatures. All lowercase letters include a start and end, providing a realistic style. everything you get.

Palatino Sans was designed as part of a group of three font families: Palatino nova, Palatino Sans, and Palatino Sans Informal. Together these three families act as the fulfilment of Herman Zapf’s original Palatino idea. Palatino, which was born as a metal typeface in 1950, proved to be one of the 20th Century’s most popular designs. Not only is Palatino Sans a completely new typeface, it is also a completely new interpretation of the entire sans serif genre. Its letterforms are curved, rounded, and soft, not hard and industrial. The fonts in the Palatino Sans family include several OpenType features, such as an extended character set covering all Latin-based European languages, old style figures, small caps, fractions, ordinals, ligatures, alternates, and ornaments. Palatino Sans can be mixed well with Palatino and Palatino Sans Informal. Palatino® Sans font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

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

Since the 2006 launch of Rennie Mackintosh Glasgow, the world’s first lowercase Mackintosh-style typeface, designer George R. Grant has been pleased with its acceptance by Mackintosh lovers around the world. In fact, “Glasgow” has proved to be as popular as the original “founding” font, the classic Charles Rennie Mackintosh Font. By modifying many of these letterforms, and giving a more “freehand” shaping, George has developed this latest offering. The font has irregular “serifs” at the extremities of each stem - a suggestion of being handwritten. The name “Allan Glens” comes from the high school Mackintosh attended which, coincidentally, George did too. Says George, “As the school no longer exists, I wanted a way to perpetuate the Allan Glen’s name in type. I can think of no better way than associating it with the name of one of the school’s most famous sons. One of the glyphs even features the school logo”.

ITC Flora is the work of Dutch designer Gerard Unger, and is named for his daughter. He started by doing calligraphy experiments with felt-tip and ballpoint pens, and developed these drawings into a formalized script typeface. Swiss typographer Max Caflisch advised the Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell GmbH technology firm to add a new round-nibbed script face to their Digiset type library, and in 1984, Flora was released by Hell. Unger used a chancery cursive skeleton in this design, which imparts grace and movement. Flora was also intentionally designed to be simple and sturdy, and with its minimal variation in thick/thin stroke ratio, it worked well on the early digital typesetting machines. In 1989, the International Typeface Corporation released the font. ITC Flora continues to work well on current printers and typesetters, and it has an enduring popularity for uses that range from short text passages to display headlines.

The Keiss type family is our interpretation of the popular nineteen century Scotch Roman typefaces. We intended to keep a very classic approach while introducing a couple of new elements that differentiate this type family from it’s ancestors. This design, with short descenders and ascenders, along with three very distinct optical sizes makes this type family well suited for contemporary newspapers. The Title and Big versions range from Thin to Heavy, with matching italics, in order to be used in big sizes and stand out in the design. The Text ranges from Thin to ExtraBold and is a standalone type family for text usage, with narrow proportions and wider and open italics for improved text setting. The Condensed versions, ranging from Thin to Bold, don’t have italics, although they can be matched with the italics of the Title and Big versions, due to the fact they are very condensed.

Square Sans Pro is one of Parachute’s most popular typefaces. It has been used by the likes of companies such as Samsung and organizations like the European Commission. Now a new version has been released. Square Sans Condensed Pro is a square-shouldered, modern and self-assured text typeface which lends style to a variety of projects. With its generous x-height, full-bodied counters and uniform stroke weight, it provides high legibility and uniform typographic color at all sizes. This is an exceptionally warm and comprehensive type family -with slightly rounded edges and softened curves- which possesses a robust and friendly appearance. The family consists of 12 fonts -from extrablack to thin- including true italics. It supports opentype features like small caps, fractions, ordinals, etc. and offers multilingual support for all European languages including Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. Download its complehensive PDF Specimen Manual for further details.

Hi. Introducing a new version of my one of the most popular fonts. Now Humblest Pro includes much more characters and has west european multilingual support. This font has a smooth and clean shape without any grain unlike the original one. Almost all of the capital leters has two version, for the begining and for the ending of the word. The final alternative letter will be automatically replaced if you type a big last letter in the word (check out if the "contextual alternates" opentype feature is activated). Decorative swashes are now a part of the font. To use this decorative lines just type an underscore character and the corresponding number from _00 to _39 (make sure that “standard ligatures” opentype feature is activated). Also a lot of ligatures for small letters are available, please check out the previews with all available glyphs. Thank you and have fun!

Minuet, an informal script with crossover deco elements giving it an unmistakable 1940s flavor, is a revival and expansion of the Rondo family, the last typeface drawn by Stefan Schlesinger before his death. This family was initially supposed to be a typeface based on the strong, flowing script Schlesinger liked to use in the ads he designed, particularly the ones he did for Van Houten’s cocoa products. But for technical reasons the Lettergieterij Amsterdam mandated the face to be made from unattached letters, rather than the original connected script. Schlesinger and Dooijes finished the lowercase and the first drawings of the uppercase just before Schlesinger was sent to a prison camp in 1942. Dooijes completed the design on his own, and drew the bold according to Schlesigner’s instructions. The typeface family was finished in February of 1944, and Schlesinger was killed in October of that same year. Though he did see and approve the final proofs, he never actually saw his letters in use. It took almost four more years for the Lettergieterij Amsterdam to produce the fonts. The typeface was officially announced in November of 1948, and immediately became a bestseller. By 1966, according to a memo from the foundry, the typeface had become “almost too popular”. This digital version of Schlesigner’s and Dooijes’s work greatly expands on the metal fonts. Both weights include a complete set of lowercase alternates — based on Schlesinger’s own drawings, as well as alternative variations for some of the capitals, a few ligatures, and extended language support covering Western, Eastern and Central European languages, plus Baltic, Celtic/Welsh, Esperanto, Maltese and Turkish. Minuet is available in all popular formats. The OpenType version, Minuet Pro, takes advantage of internal font programming to combine the main and alternate fonts into a single file per weight, making all alternates and ligatures automatically available at the push of a button in OpenType supporting programs.

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.

Petrarka may be described as a Condensed, Sans-Serif, Semi-Fatface Roman. Huh? Bear with me on this. The Fatface is a name given to the popular nineteenth-century romans that where characterized by an extremity of contrast between the thick and thin stroke. The earliest example that is generally familiar is Thorowgood, believed to have been designed by Robert Thorne and released by Thorowgood Foundry in 1820 as "Five-line Pica No. 5." Copied by many foundries, it became one of the more popular advertising types of the day. Later, in the period from about 1890 to 1950, you find a number of typeface designs with the thin stroke beefed up a bit, not quite so extreme. What you might call Semi-Fatfaced Romans begin to replace the extreme Fatfaces. Serifed designs like Bauer’s Bernard Roman Extra Bold and ATF’s Bold Antique appear. In addition, we see the development of semi-fatface lineals or Sans-Serif Semi-Fatfaces. Examples include Britannic (Stephenson Blake), Chambord Bold (Olive), Koloss (Ludwig & Mayer), Matthews (ATF) and Radiant Heavy (Ludlow). Petrarka has much in common with this latter group, but is distinguished by two salient features: it is condensed and it shows a strong blackletter influence, as seen in the ‘H’ particularly. Petrark was released about 1900 by the German foundry of Schelter & Giesecke of Leipzig and is one of the designs of the period that attempts to reconcile roman and blackletter traditions. Making a cameo appearance in this Multi-Lingual font is the Anglo-Saxon letter yogh (#729), which, along with the thorn and the eth, is always useful for preparing flyers in Old English. There are still pockets of resistance to the Norman French influence that washed up on England’s shores in 1066. This font stands with King Canute, seeking to hold back the tide (ignoring the fact that Canute was a Dane). Support the fight to preserve Anglo-Saxon culture. Buy Petrarka ML today. Petrarka Initials brings together the Petrarka upper case letters with a very sympatico Art Nouveau rendering of a female face.

Cinema Macabre: Horror Fonts Torn from the Pages of Giallo A Hand-drawn Display Font for Creating the Most Diabolical Horror Titles This loose and inky brush font takes its inspiration from the classic Giallo film posters of the 1960s to 1980s - a cult cinematic subgenre beloved for its stylish visuals, haunting soundtracks and exploitation led marketing. It's a devilishly drawn design that aims to capture the feeling of vintage horror, preserving analogue details of old print while remaining versatile enough to work across a variety of digital designs. The Cinema Macabre font family boasts six fonts, each containing a unique set of uppercase and lowercase characters, as well as numerals, punctuation and language support. Add to this a host of custom ligatures, underlines and graphic elements and you have an essential toolbox for creating truly hand-made looking title designs. Cinema Macabre if a font that rewards experimentation by mixing all the various upper and lowercase alternatives, with interesting combinations waiting to be found and inspire terror across your own movie posters, book covers, albums and editorials. Few other fonts offer the versatility to create such diabolical designs! A Brief Introduction to Giallo: In popular cinema, Giallo is a genre of mystery fiction and thrillers often containing slasher, psychological horror, exploitation, supernatural and erotic elements. The term giallo (meaning yellow) derives from a series of pulp novels published by Mondadori from 1929 taking the name from its trademark yellow covers. The series consisted of Italian translations of mystery novels by well-known authors such as Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler. The popularity of these cheap paperbacks eventually established the word Giallo as a synonym in Italian for a mystery novel. The cinematic Giallo subgenre developed during the 1960-80s and are noted for their vivid cinematography, memorable soundtracks and inventive gore-filled scenarios. Key examples include Dario Argento's Suspiria, Tenebrae and Deep Red - stylish films that at once influenced the American slasher (see Black Christmas and Friday 13th) up to todays horror in Censor and Last Night In Soho.

American graphic designer William Addison Dwiggins' (W.A.D. for short) first typefaces were the Metro family, designed from 1927 onward. The project grew out of Dwiggins' dissatisfaction with the new European sans serif typefaces of the day, such as Futura, Erbar, and Kabel, a feeling he expressed in his seminal book Layout in Advertising. Urged by Mergenthaler Linotype to create a solution for the problem, Dwiggins began a professional relationship that would span over the next few decades. The first Metro family typeface to be released was Metroblack, brought to market by Linotype in 1929 (Metroblack #2™ the only one of the two versions that Mergenthaler Linotype eventually put into production which is available in digital form). With more of a humanist quality than the geometric styles popular in Europe at the time, Dwiggins drew what he believed to be the ideal sans serif for headlines and advertising copy. Metroblack has a warmer character than the Modernists' achievements, and the type is full of mannered curves and angled terminals (Metroblack also has an astoundingly beautiful Q). The other weights of the Metro family, Metromedium #2™ and Metrolite #2™, were designed by Mergenthaler Linotype's design office under Dwiggins' supervision. Despite having been created more than three-quarters of a century ago, the Metro family types have aged well, and remain a popular sans serif family. Although spec'd less often than other bestsellers, like Futura, Metro continues to find many diverse uses. The typeface has appeared throughout Europe and the North America for decades in newspapers and magazines, and can even help create a great brand image when used in logos and corporate identity. Dwiggins ranks among the most influential graphic designers and typeface designers of the 20th Century. He has several other quality fonts in the Linotype Originals, including the serif text faces Electra™ and New Caledonia™, as well as Caravan™, a font of typographic ornaments."

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that these letter shapes are familiar. They have the unmistakable color and weight of Cooper Black, Oswald Cooper's most famous typeface from 1921. What should be a surprise is that these letters are actually from George Auriol's Robur Noir (or Robur Black), published in France circa 1909 by the Peignot foundry as a bolder, solid counterpart to its popular Auriol typeface (1901). This face precedes Cooper Black by a dozen of years and a whole Great War. Cooper Black has always been a bit of a strange typographical apparition to anyone who tried to explain its original purpose, instant popularity in the 1920s, and major revival in the late 1960s. BB&S and Oswald Cooper PR aside, it is quite evident that the majority of Cooper Black's forms did not evolve from Cooper Old Style, as its originators claimed. And the claim that it collected various Art Nouveau elements is of course too ambiguous to be questioned. But when compared with Robur Noir, the "elements" in question can hardly be debated. The chronology of this "machine age" ad face in metal is amusing and stands as somewhat of a general index of post-Great War global industrial competition: - 1901: Peignot releases Auriol, based on the handwriting of George Auriol (the "quintessential Art Nouveau designer," according to Steven Heller and Louise Fili), and it becomes very popular. - 1909-1912: Peignot releases the Robur family of faces. The eight styles released are Robur Noir and its italic, a condensed version called Robur Noir Allongée (Elongated) and its italic, an outline version called Clair De Lune and its condensed/elongated, a lined/striped version called Robur Tigre, and its condensed/elongated counterpart. - 1914 to 1918: World War One uses up economies on both sides of the Atlantic, claims Georges Peignot with a bullet to the forehead, and non-war industry stalls for 4 years. - 1921: BB&S releases Cooper Black with a lot of hype to hungry publishing, manufacturing and advertising industries. - 1924: Robert Middleton releases Ludlow Black. - 1924: The Stevens Shanks foundry, the British successor to the Figgins legacy, releases its own exact copies of Robur Noir and Robur Noir Allongée, alongside a lined version called Royal Lining. - 1925: Oswald Cooper releases his Cooper Black Condensed, with similar math to Robur Noir Allongée (20% reduction in width and vectical stroke). - 1925: Monotype releases Frederick Goudy's Goudy Heavy, an "answer to Cooper Black". Type historians gravely note it as the "teacher steals from his student" scandal. Goudy Heavy Condensed follows a few years later. - 1928: Linotype releases Chauncey Griffith's Pabst Extra Bold. The condensed counterpart is released in 1931. When type production technologies changed and it was time to retool the old faces for the Typositor age, Cooper Black was a frontrunning candidate, while Robur Noir was all but erased from history. This was mostly due to its commercial revival by flourishing and media-driven music and advertising industries. By the late 1960s variations and spinoffs of Cooper Black were in every typesetting catalog. In the early- to mid-1970s, VGC, wanting to capitalize on the Art Nouveau onslaught, published an uncredited exact copy of Robur Black under the name Skylark. But that also went with the dust of history and PR when digital tech came around, and Cooper Black was once again a prime retooling candidate. The "old fellows stole all of our best ideas" indeed. So almost a hundred years after its initial fizz, Robur is here in digital form, to reclaim its rightful position as the inspiration for, and the best alternative to, Cooper Black. Given that its forms date back to the turn of the century, a time when foundry output had a closer relationship to calligraphic and humanist craft, its shapes are truer to brush strokes and much more idiosyncratic than Cooper Black in their totality's construct. Robur and Robur Italic come in all popular font formats. Language support includes Western, Central and Eastern European character sets, as well as Baltic, Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish, and Celtic/Welsh languages. A range of complementary f-ligatures and a few alternates letters are included within the fonts.

Alf R. Becker was a noted sign painter, designer and the creator of hundreds of unique alphabets which were published in the trade magazine Signs of the Times during the 1930s through the 1950s. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media [and who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati], Jeff Levine received some reference material on Becker's work. Becker displayed many of his type styles within decorative panels—a popular trend in the days when signs were hand-lettered. Using the reference material as a guide, Jeff has re-drawn twenty-six sign panels for adaptation to digital print work. While the designs in themselves are not thoroughly unique to Alf Becker, he has left behind some tangible examples of how sign painters embellished their lettering work. With the use of complementary colors and tones, these panels—joined with vintage lettering - classically recreate the warm and attractive advertising of years ago.

Blackletter fonts are timelessly beautiful and still very popular. At some point, it seems that every type designer discovers the beauty of these forms and the great pleasure in creating blackletter characters. Like also Dutch designer Coen Hofmann who, after designing Caxtonian Gothic, has designed yet another Blackletter font: Holland Gothic. Holland Gothic reminds of the 18th century »Duytsch« typefaces of Joan Michael Fleischmann and Christoffel Van Dyck. But Hofmann was mainly inspired by the Dutch calligraphers from the 17th and 18th century. Holland Gothic develops its full charm and beauty at larger sizes because of the hairlines in the upper case characters. To enable users composing texts in the style of our ancestors, Coen Hofmann added a series of pre-composed ligatures, also in combination with the long s, plus an alternate form for the lower case r which was used in combination with letters b, d, g, o, p, v, and w.

Crypton is a modern geometric design by Alex Kaczun. It’s an alternate style variation based on his popular Contax Pro family of fonts. The look is clean, smart and sophisticated—the chiseled end strokes reflect the rage of the 1980s; lettering that represented something to do with electronics, computers and outer space. It’s a futuristic sans-serif exploration of shape and form. This display font is not intended for text use. It was designed specifically for display headlines, logotype, branding and similar applications. The entire font has an original look which is strong and dynamic—it can be widely used in publications and advertising. Crypton is a futuristic, techno-looking and expressive typeface with the appearance of machined-like parts—round geometric shapes and sharp edges. This attractive display comes in roman with lower case and lining figures. The large Pro font character set supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages.

Designed by Jochen Hasinger of Frankfurt, Germany, Covent BT is an unconventional geometric sans serif typeface, featuring rounded terminal ends and a stencil-like break of the contour in some glyphs. At first glance you might think of it as a display typeface, but the generous x-height and openness of the lowercase makes Covent BT very legible at text sizes. Central Europe and Cyrillic is supported in the extended glyph set. Each weight contains 485 glyphs and includes some alternate figures, some upper and lowercase alternates, as well as others, all accessible via OpenType features. Covent BT Symbols is a stylized geometric symbol font, intended to stand alone or used as a companion to the Covent BT typefaces. The array of glyphs covers many of the more popular icons of the day including symbols for web use, numbers, sports, travel and astrology, to name a few, each with its own unique stylized interpretation.

The Artimas family is the new book design font family developed out of Aramus. These new serif typefaces are readable and graceful — part of my development of a series of book families. Aramus was very popular for a single font release of a text font. This new book font family retains the looseness of the original with radically different font metrics and many shape “corrections”. In fact, Artimas continues a genuine new path for this foundry This new font family for book design continues a turn toward more “traditional” x-heights of around a third of the point size.The Artimas print production font family is six new OpenType Pro fonts with Caps, lowercase, small caps, & figures to go with each of those character sets. There are many ligatures, a few swashes, fractions, numerators, denominators, and ordinals to infinity. This family of fonts is a joy to read and easy to use for text or display.

In 1905 the Parisian typefounders Peignot & Cie. issued their Série 16. This clear roman with a large x-height and an italics soon enjoyed a great popularity. Coen Hofmann’s drawings made for the Seizième follow the original Peignot Série 16 as close as possible. The regular font has the original small caps, while all members of the family are enhanced, next to the ranging ones, with old style figures. Also superior and inferior figures are available. The original series did not have a bold version. This was, however, carefully drawn for this digital rendition. The Série 16 and its versions for the composing machines were much used for the type setting of scientific publications. That is why a comprehensive set of mathematical and sundry characters are added to the Seizième fonts. Next to the accented characters for the several West and East European languages the Seizième was also enhanced with a Cyrillic, also available in regular, italic and bold versions.

When ITC Officina was first released in 1990, as a paired family of serif and sans serif faces in two weights with italics, it was intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina's designer: Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote 'coolness,' it had lost its innocence. No pretending anymore that it only needed two weights for office correspondence. As a face used in magazines and advertising, it needed proper headline weights and one more weight in between the original Book and Bold."" To add the new weights and small caps, Spiekermann collaborated with Ole Schaefer, director of typography and type design at MetaDesign. The extended ITC Officina family now includes Medium, Extra Bold, and Black weights with matching italics-all in both Sans and Serif -- as well as new small caps fonts for the original Book and Bold weights.

Virginia Neo is more than an update to the original Virginia family, designed in 1970 and strongly influenced by the popularity of Futura and Kabel in that era. Virginia Neo is a completely redrawn version based on the original design which won its designer first place ahead of 5,000 other submissions to the Lettergraphics International Typeface Design Competition in the same year. The original typeface family comprised 5 weights, the lightest of which was omitted from the initial 2008 digital offering but has now been included in the Neo version, along with a new Heavy weight rounding out a family of 6. Each typeface includes more than 450 glyphs, enough to satisfy more than 80 languages plus a smattering of ligatures, useful geometric ornaments and arrows. Virginia Neo fits the compact, comfortable-tightness of seventies-retro typography currently re-emerging in today’s advertising. Its high readability, femininity and elegance makes it suitable for subheads, headlines, posters, branding and the web.

Re-introducing the classic mid-1500s Garamond forms for the twenty-first century is never an easy task. But Hans van Maanen makes a fine attempt at just that by remodeling the traditional shapes through a modern lens with stunning results. Aragon is a workhorse family that performs very well in a variety of text sizes, from footnotes and legal copy to lengthy body sets. Its combination of wedge serifs with uniquely tapered stems offers a sturdy Dutch touch that improves legibility altogether, while at the same time the slight stress shift to the top half of the characters makes the immersive reading experience very open and comfortable. The Aragon family comes in a standard two-weight set with corresponding italics, a roman small caps font with its own italics, and very attractive initials for display uses. All fonts come in the usual popular formats, and include a glyph repertoire that covers Western, Central and Eastern European languages, as well as Turkish and Welsh/Celtic.