Lunatrix is a conceptual type face for futuristic or fantastic treatments. Ideal for suggesting strange new worlds of science-fiction, it can also evoke a land of fantasy or even hint at the occult. In its lighter weights, Lunatrix is well suited for applications such as posters, album covers, video games, and graphic novels, while in its heavier weights, it’s appropriate for titling and more complex type treatments.

Within the pages of “The Essentials of Lettering” by Thomas E. French and Robert Meiklejohn (circa 1912) is an example for creating a sans serif alphabet and numerals. The lesson plate is entitled “Upright Single-Stroke Gothic”; a basic monoline font most useful for architectural and drafting plans because of its easy-to-read properties. This type design is now available as Drafting Class JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Designed at ParaType in 1996-2002 by Tagir Safayev. Inspired by works of Russian Constructivists of the 1920s and 30s: Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir and George Stenberg, Gustav Klutsis and others. A geometrical, caps and small caps only, sans serif design. The glyphs are formed using straight lines only. Totally simplified, this face is perceived as a symbol of Russian Avant Garde. For use in advertising and display typography.

HU SpecialmovieKR is a retro, wide square typeface, characterized by streamlined, narrow stroke ends such as 'ㄴ,ㅅ,ㅈ'. The first consonants are designed to be large with full modules to improve readability. The grapheme 'ㅇ', which is the face of the font, is in the form of a square in harmony with straight lines and curves, expressing a solid and simple feeling overall. HU SpecialmovieKR includes Korean.

Flottenheimer was done with a semi dry pen, that leaves the strokes quite rough. Some letters are more rough than other, giving a very realistic overall look to the text. To add more spice to the realistic look, I have added several versions of each letter. That means that there is 5 different versions of each letter that automatically cycles as you type! Packed with loads of accented characters!

Aldo Novarese designed the Fluidum typeface in 1951. As its name implies, the design is very fluid. This high contrast script face curls and twists across the line. It is sort of a cross between Giambattista Bodoni's cursive letters, and Aldo Novarese's later, heavier designs, like Microgramma, Eurostile, and Sprint. Fludium should be set in very large pint sizes. It is perfect for invitations, greeting cards, and fine logos.

‘Landsdowne Commercial’ is a development of one of our designer’s earlier public domain releases, ‘Landsdowne’. All glyphs have been completely redrawn and refined. An extensive range of stylistic alternates and ligatures have been added, as well as a completely new bold face and several forms of numerals. Landsdowne commercial is ideal for period-inspired design work, such as posters and book covers as well for clear elegant communications.

Designed for ParaType in 2002 by Tagir Safayev. Inspired by the letterforms of Antique No. 8 typeface and other similar fonts of the 19th century (Latin Antique, Wide Latin, Etienne Condensed, Wide Renaissance). A face of so-called Latin type has stout triangular serifs and rather unusual curls on several letters in the lower case. Nevertheless it is eminently suitable for a wide variety of settings in advertising and display typography.

The vikings searched in vain for hundreds of years over much of the northern hemisphere, but their dreams of writing with felt-tip pens went unfulfilled--until now! This is a novelty font containing the 24 runes of the Futhark, but with a modern bent. In addition to regular, bold, oblique, and bold oblique, we have included two outline styles. Also included is a PDF page identifying the characters.

This font is packed with over 1,100 glyphs and gives you vast possibilites to give handwritten feel to your text - be it in English, Íslenska, Russian, Cymraeg or Čeština. Apart from featuring great number of letters there are also dingbats, roman numerals and mathematical operators included. Recommended to use in projects where personalized, legible, cheerful and straightforward look is required. The design is inspired by mature handwriting, unisex in expression.

Superpop is sweet and gentle, a rounded geometric sans with a brushy script twist. Soft and refreshing like a soda, this font gets fizzy when geometric letterforms get mixed with script shapes you wouldn’t expect in a Sans Serif. A display family with two styles ( regular and italic ), 5 weights and an outline version for each style. Opentype Features: https://www.rsztype.com/article/how-to-use-opentype-features-adobe-microsoft-pages

Breakfast Script is an elegant connected script family of three weights. Breakfast Script is equipped with Contextual Alternates that helps to keep connections smooth. Every standard character also has Swash Alternate for more funky letters. In addition there’s 26 ending swooshes placed in a-z that you can access from Stylistic Alternates. Breakfast Script is a great display type that works as a logotype or fancy headline type.

The sans serif Angro was designed in the weights light and bold by Erwin Koch. The figures are based on the form of a rectangle which along with the high xheight and short ascenders and descenders gives the forms a static character. Lines of text in Angro are very compact and close set. Due to the reserved ascenders and descenders Angro can be set with very close line spacing.

Ligione is a multi function font family, consist of uppercase and lowercase with 4 weight and 4 width option making it a big 8 styles in total. This typeface is a modern display sans serif packed with a geometric modular assembly in mind, combine the regular and expanded style for a unique touch on your design. This font is perfect for a big size display, title, body text and even logo.

The 1888 edtion of James Conner's Sons United States Type Foundry specimen book listed this little gem simply as "Antique Light". Its original, rather anemic outlines have been beefed up and its serifs have been rounded, with the result that this face will get noticed wherever it goes. Both versions of this font include the complete Latin 1252 and CE 1250 character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Art Party is a hand-drawn font suitable for headlines of all kinds when you want a handmade look. Prissy Pots owner Erin Solomon drew the playful letters, which include regular and bold versions. Each face also offers an entirely separate set of upper and lowercase letters accessible in your applications' glyphs palettes. With contextual alternates turned on, these extra letters show up automatically, yielding a more natural, random look.

The P22 Bauhaus Set includes three type faces designed by Herbert Bayer, including the famous Universal font most commonly associated with the Bauhaus school. A collection of 72 graphic elements inspired by various Bauhaus works rounds out this collection. This set is authorized by the Herbert Bayer Estate. For more typefaces from the Bauhaus, see our Josef Albers set. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

An online image of a grid page [circa 1930s] showing teachers how they and their students could create cut-out letters and numbers inspired Poster Project JNL. The typeface is available in both regular and oblique versions. A crude, yet charming simplicity to the lettering can help replicate old time school bulletin boards and posters, or simply provide a less formal typographic approach when that is needed for a project.

EKUHOT Racing Font is a font that is designed with a precise shape and has many alternate variations and various ligature styles that make every word beautiful when written, make this font for various titles and text in your special projects so that your project looks beautiful. dignified character, bold and sporty. This font is perfect for headlines as well as others, what are you waiting for, use this font now.

Hebron Hebrew is a font that contains 22 Hebrew letters along with five word ending letters that are automatically activated when used in Applications such as Apple-Pages and MicroSoft-Word. The Hebrew letters do not contain "Niqquds" (Hebrew Vowels) except with the added alternates, if desired. You may also be interested in my NEWMARK Hebrew, YOM TOV Hebrew PAGEANTRY Hebrew, HANAH Hebrew and KOMUNIDAD Hebrew Script FONTS.

Natalya is a flashy and rhythmic script. The script has more space between characters than most for better legibility, and the basis point for the ornate swirls is the golden ratio. This makes for an especially harmonious typeface with timeless appeal. The typeface includes three alternates with variations of the ascenders and descenders. All three fonts include OpenType ligatures, oldstyle figures and ending swashes for an even more elaborate appearance.

Flood was designed by Joachim M�ller-Lanc� and is not just another handwritten face. At smaller point sizes it exhibits the natural, dynamic, and spontaneous flow of felt tip marker writing. At larger sizes Flood is immediate, urgent, and provocative in its stylized detailing, without being overly dramatic. Flood�s energetic rhythm is well suited for informal menus, logos, and brief ad copy, as well as personal correspondence.

From the pages of the 1939 French lettering book “Modèles de lettres modernes par Georges Léculier” (“Models of Modern Lettering”) comes an attractive and unusual set of initial drop caps made from square letters adorned with multiple vertical lines. Originally designed as white letters on black backgrounds, an additional set with black letters on white backgrounds comprise Deco Drop Caps JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

Maestrale is a paradigm-breaking new take on calligraphy, built around a compact, serif-style core and outrageously long, flamboyant extenders. At large sizes, its confident, charismatic lettershapes are ideally suited for branding and decorative uses, whereas longer texts at smaller sizes naturally weave themselves into a flowing texture. The font comprises 1299 glyphs, including many stylistic alternates, ligatures, small capitals, and initial, terminal, and linking forms, and offers extensive OpenType programming to support them. The calligraphic form of Maestrale is complemented by a matching text font (Maestrale Text) with short extenders, available in three cuts (a serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic). Maestrale is all about the lowercase; its capitals are deliberately understated so as not to steal the limelight. In fact, the font works very well when set exclusively in lowercase. Maestrale�s small capitals are fitted into the core space of the lowercase, allowing them to be freely interspersed with lowercase characters. Alternately, an OpenType feature is available to replace a and e in small-caps text with their lowercase equivalents for a fresh unicase look. Since alternates and ligatures play such an important role, Maestrale offers three different modes of use. The most straightforward approach is simply to start typing using Maestrale Pro � the extensive OpenType programming will ensure that collisions between extenders are avoided and attractive ligatures are substituted for common glyph combinations. A more interactive approach is provided by the font Maestrale Manual, which allows the user to manually select alternate forms and ligatures even in typographically unsavvy applications, such as PowerPoint (as long as standard ligatures are supported). Stylistic alternates are simply represented as ligatures of their base forms with one or more instances of the rarely-used by easily-accessed characters "~" (ASCII tilde) and "`" (spacing grave accent); linking forms are built with �_� (underscore), multi-character ligatures with "|" (pipe), and initial and terminal forms with the �less than� and �greater than� characters. For instance, the Maestrale wordmark in the posters above was simply typeset with the string (`ma`est|r_a```l```e)| in Maestrale Manual (The parentheses represent �less than� and �greater than� characters here.) Feel free to type this string into the test line below and see what happens! Make sure Standard Ligatures are enabled. An instruction sheet listing all alternate forms and their accessibility is available from the Gallery tab on this page. The third mode of usage is aimed at professional designers, who make use of sophisticated software with extensive OpenType support. These power users are advised to use the font Maestrale Pro again, where all glyphs are accessible as stylistic alternates. Maestrale Text is a less extravagant but more versatile variation on the design of Maestrale, replacing Maestrale�s swashes with efficiently compact extenders. It is intended to serve as a perfectly matching text companion to Maestrale calligraphy, but constitutes a full-fledged typeface in its own right. It is equally at home at display sizes as it is in pull quotes, titles, and high-impact blocks of text. Maestrale Text comes in three complementary faces: A serif-style Roman, an upright Cursive, and a tilted Italic. Maestrale is the Italian word for �masterful�. It is also the traditional Italian name for the northwesterly mediterranean wind, better known by its French name, Mistral. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the helpful souls on the Typophile forums for extensive feedback and encouragement on Maestrale, and to the TypeDrawers forum for feedback on Maestrale Text. This font is dedicated to Simone.

Comenia Sans was designed in the framework of a unique typographic project for all types of schools. It is a complementary face for Comenia Serif, released by our friends at Storm Type Foundry. Comenia Sans has a lot in common with its serif sister: the height of both upper and lower case, the length of ascenders and descenders, and the general weight. This makes the two perfect partners which work well even when set side by side in a single line of text. Comenia Sans does, however, lack all serifs, ornamental elements and stroke stress variation. All these elements freshen up the feel of long texts, but for shorter texts use, they are not necessary. Despite that, Comenia Sans retains the soft, friendly character of its big sister, as well as a few tiny details which lend it its unique character without compromising legibility or utility. Open counters give all letters an airy feel and permit enough variation in construction. This is why the face works well even in multiple-page texts. All its letters are easily distinguished from each other, so the reader's eyes are not strained. Diacritics and punctuation harmonize with both upper and lower case. As usually, all diacritical marks fully respect conventional shapes of accents and they are perfectly suitable for Czech, Slovak, Polish and other Central European languages, where a lot of diacritics abounds. Similarly to the renaissance italics which refers to the cursive forms, Comenia Sans introduces novel shapes of some characters drawing from the hand-written heritage. This is most apparent in the single-bellied a, the simplified g, and the stem of f which crosses the baseline and ends with a distinct terminal. In the text, emphasized words are thus distinguished not only by the slant of letters, but also by the shapes of the letters themselves. All twelve styles contain set of small caps, suitable for the names, in the indexes or the headlines in longer texts. Legibility in small sizes under 10 points was at the center of designers' attention, too. This is why the counters of a, e and g are large enough to prevent ink spread in small sizes, both on-screen and in print. After all, the font was specifically optimized for screen use: its sober, simple forms are perfectly fit to be displayed on the computer screen and in other low-resolution devices. When used in the context of architecture, the smoothness of all contours stands out, permitting to enlarge the letters almost without limit. A standard at the Suitcase Type Foundry, each style of Comenia Sans boasts a number of ligatures, an automatic replacement of small caps and caps punctuation, a collection of mathematical symbols, and several types of numerals which make it easy to set academic and other texts in an organised, well-arranged way. For the same purpose, fractions may come in handy, too. Apart from the standard emphasis styles, the family also contains six condensed cuts (each set has the same number of characters), designated for situations where space is limited or the need for striking, poster-like effect arises. Comenia Sans is the ideal choice for the setting of magazines, picture books, and navigation systems alike. Its excellent legibility and soft, fine details will be appreciated both in micro-typography and in poster sizes. Although it was designed as a member of a compact system, it will work equally well on its own or in combination with other high-quality typefaces.

For everyone wishing for a modern serif that’s as clear and readable as a sans in restrictive digital environments, meet Portada by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione. Sans serifs are commonly used on small screens to save space and carry a modern tone. Serifs may appear fickle and unsteady, pixel grids change from one product to another, and space is at a premium. Portada now provides a serif option for these restrictive digital environments, putting that old trope to rest. The screen has met its serif match. Portada was created from and for the digital world — from e-ink or harsh grids to Retina capability — making it one of the few serifs of its kind. Portada’s text and titling styles were engineered for superlative performance, making great use of sturdy serifs, wide proportions, ample x-height, clear interior negative space, and its subservient personality. After all, words always take priority in text. It’s not all business, though. Portada’s italics contain an artefact of calligraphy in which the directionality of the instrokes and the returning curves of the outstrokes give the family a little unexpected brio. Yet even the terminals are stopped short of flourished self-absorption to retain their digital clarity. When printed these details are downright comforting. Portada’s titling styles enact slight changes while reducing the individual width of each character and keeping the internal space clear. Titling italics have increased expressiveness across a few characters rather than maxing out the personality in each individual glyph. Digital magazines, newspapers, your favourite novel, and all forms of continuous screen reading benefit from Portada’s features. This family can also cover many of the needs developers have: user interface, showing data intensive apps on screen, even one-word directives and dialogs. And, as a free download, an exhaustive set of dark and light icons is included to maintain Portada’s consistent presence, whether as a word or an image. The complete Portada family (eight text styles, ten titling styles, and one icon set) is designed for extensive, clear screen use — a rare serif on equal footing with a sans.

Helvetica Now Variable Helvetica Now 2.0 builds on the groundbreaking work of 2019’s Helvetica Now release—all of the clarity, simplicity, and neutrality of classic Helvetica with everything 21st-century designers need. In this 2021 release, we introduce Helvetica Now Variable and add condensed weights to the Helvetica Now static fonts. Helvetica Now 2.0 includes 96 fonts in three distinct optical sizes (Micro, Text, and Display), now with 48 new condensed weights. The Helvetica Now Variable fonts include even more: 144 instances—48 normal, 48 condensed, and 48 compressed. Helvetica Now Variable gives you over a million new Helvetica styles in one state-of-the-art font file (over two-and-a-half million with italics!). Use it as an extension of the Helvetica Now family or make custom-blends from its weights (Hairline to ExtraBlack), optical sizes (four point to infinity), and new Compressed and Condensed widths. Create infinite shades of expression, incredible typographic animations, and ultra-refined typography. Its single font file makes it easier to use and wickedly fast. Load one file and access a million fonts—in a fraction of the size of a traditional font family. More freedom. More expression. More power. More. Helvetica. Now. Each one of the Helvetica Now static fonts has been carefully tailored to the demands of its size. The larger Display versions are drawn to show off the subtlety of Helvetica and spaced with headlines in mind, while the Text sizes focus on legibility, using robust strokes and comfortably loose spaces. Helvetica Now's Micro designs are simplified and exaggerated to maintain the impression of Helvetica in tiny type. There's also an extensive set of alternates, which allow designers the opportunity to experiment with and adapt Helvetica's tone of voice. The new Condensed weights put more type into smaller spaces—for intense emphasis, sophisticated contrast, or just everyday space-fitting. Helvetica Now 2.0 is, quite simply, more: more versatility; more power; and more creative possibilities. “For more than six decades, Helvetica has been the essential typeface,” says Monotype Type Director Charles Nix. “The release of Helvetica Now insures that it will be a typographic force for decades to come.”

This font is an adorable hand-made typeface with a lot of personality. With cute doodles icons in PUA encoding, this typeface can be a mighty companion to your next graphic design project. From “hand-written” quotes to product packaging, merchandise, and branding projects, this font is so versatile that it can cover them all. What is included? Latin Characters Greek Characters Numerals + 30 icon doodles in PUA

Alyesina is a very luxurious elegant calligraphy font for your classy projects that is complemented by a pretty and stylish alternative. This font includes alternatives, style sets, ligatures, swashes and multilingual support with the Pua encode opentype feature. In some glyphs it has a pretty stylistic alternative. Perfect for startup projects, wedding invitations, logos, packaging, quotes, branding, web, blogs, etc. FEATURES : Uppercase Lowercase Number Punctuation Multilingual PUA Encode Opentype Stylistic Alternate

After 13 months of hard work, Iza W and Intellecta Design are proud to announce Penabico. This is a free interpretation of the copperplate script styles to be found in the Universal Penman . London, 1741 , the monumental publication of engraved work by George Bickham (along with collaborators Joseph Champion, Wellington Clark, Nathaniel Dove, Gabriel Brooks, William Leckey and many others). This enhanced OpenType version is a complete solution for producing documents and artworks which need this kind of calligraphic script: 100s of stylistic alternates for each letter (upper- and lowercase), accessed with the glyph palette; 250 ornaments and fleurons (mostly in the copperplate roundhand renaissance style) encoded in the dingbats range and accessed with the glyph palette (plus a special set with over 50 of these ornaments accessed with the ornaments feature); an extensive set of ligatures (100s of stylistic and contextual alternates plus discretionary ligatures) providing letterform variations that make your designs really special, resembling real handwriting on the page; complete, intricate, ready-made calligraphic words; abbreviations (in many languages). The principal font contains the complete Latin alphabet, including Central European, Vietnamese, Baltic and Turkish with all diacritic signs, punctuation marks (including interrobang ). The German ‘ß’ (germandbls, eszett, sharp s) even has over six different alternate forms. And we don't forget to add the unconventional germandbls uppercase. In non-OpenType-savvy applications it works well as an English commercial script style font. Because of its high number of alternate letters and combinations (over 1500 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. Two last things — we have placed some of the ornaments, catch-words and other material in supplementary fonts, for easier access in non-OpenType-savvy programs. They are: Penabico Words (see the pdf user guide in “Gallery”), Penabico Abbreviations (free font), and Penabico Extras (free font). And, when buying Penabico you get the 'Penabico EPS Bonus Set", a gift pack containing various highly intrincated frames in EPS format, easy and ready to work with your preferred vector design software like Corel or Illustrator (see the pdf in the Gallery). Know too our other superscript font : Van den Velde Script at http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/intellecta/van-den-velde-script/

Bourton Text is a modern sans-serif typeface family perfect for both text type settings and display purposes. While it’s not a layering type family like its brother, Bourton, it come packed with features, extras and over 2,000 characters that make it stand on its own. HISTORY Bourton Text is a new take of the Bourton family that was one of the best-selling and favorite fonts of 2016. After countless requests for lowercase alphabet, or suggestions for a font pairing with Bourton, this new text setting family is based on the original shapes of Bourton. DESIGN & CREATION In taking Bourton Base was the starting point as they narrowest width and boldest weight. From there, lowercase shapes were designed that matched the aesthetic and details of the popular capitals. As Bourton was a heavy display font, some small tweaks were done to make it more fitting for smaller text settings, including reducing the letter-spacing and reworking some counters. Some areas needed complete reconstruction, such as the figures. The design of those began anew with a style that worked with the capitals and lowercase but also as a standalone set. Currency shapes were updated to match the numerals. Punctuation was also reimagined to work better in smaller type settings. Diacritics and extended language support was also updated and expanded to include full Latin plus language support for 219 latin based language spoken in 212 countries. Once the basic alphabet for Bourton Text Bold Narrow was formed, the font was expanded in both weight and width. Taking the weight from Bold down to Hairline, it allowed for more range in use. The typeface needed to be expanded in order to reach better as a book weight and width, in addition to a regular width, a wider version was create as well. FEATURES Once the extremes were set in place, small capital forms were designed for text and display purposes. These also allow for nested capital letters, lifted small caps and other display features offered in the typeface. One of the most popular fonts in the Bourton layering font family is Bourton Line. This led to an experimentation with rounded Bourton Text completely and thus a complete set of duplicated characters with rounded terminals. By using the Opentype Panel, a rounded font is a single click away. Every feature has been carefully thought out and updated across the entire font. In total, Bourton boasts over 2,300 glyphs, 42 font files with 3 widths and 7 weights in upright and italic.

Early in the 19th century, foundries began releasing a variety of decorated ornamental letters based on the Tuscan letterform. Fancy Tuscan letters quickly became so popular, they eventually came to represent the cluttered extremes of Victorian design. Foundries competed with each other to produce most extravagantly decorated letterforms. As often happens, success turned to excess. What is often overlooked is the long history of the Tuscan style. Early examples have been traced back to ancient Rome. Indeed, the characteristic bifurcation may have represented a fishtail to the early Christians, thus sharing in the roll of symbolic identification played by the simple drawing of a fish as a whole. Later. trifurcation was developed as an alternate termination, followed by loops, full fishtails, curls, hooks and other fancy variations. Nicolete Gray provides an extensive history in her Appendix One of NINETEENTH CENTURY ORNAMENTED TYPEFACES. According to Gray, the first metal typeface based on the Tuscan form was the Ornamented of 1817 by Vincent Figgins of London. Thorowgood followed suit in 1821, Fry in 1824 and Caslon in 1830. Each was to re-visit the form many times during the Victorian era. Here we present our interpretation of what Figgins might have produced in a basic, plain Tuscan form - free of the decorative additions. We are pretty safe here because Figgins was very creative. He explored many of the terminal variations listed above and combined them with different decorative devices to produce a constant stream of new faces to meet the demands of the marketplace. Figgins Tuscan ML 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. There are also a few glyphs for Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic and Old Gaelic. Total of 355 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: aalt, ornm and liga ˜ with total 34 lookups. 3. Added 351 kerning pairs. 4. Redesigned several glyphs: the comma, quotes, brackets, braces, acute accent, and grave accent. 5. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). 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.

Khaleefa is a classic, elegant and timeless calligraphy font with a bold twist. Get inspired by its modern feel. Ligature Multilingual PUA encoded

An inline adaptation of a distinctive slab serif, Cesium is an unusually responsive display face that maintains its high energy across a range of different moods. The Cesium typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2020. An energetic inline adaptation of Hoefler’s broad-shouldered Vitesse Black typeface (2000), Cesium is named for the fifty-fifth member of the periodic table of the elements, a volatile liquid metal that presents as a scintillating quicksilver. From the desk of the designer, Jonathan Hoefler: I always felt that our Vitesse typeface, an unusual species of slab serif, would take well to an inline. Vitesse is based not on the circle or the ellipse, but on a less familiar shape that has no common name, a variation on the ‘stadium’ that has two opposing flat edges, and two gently rounded sides. In place of sharp corners, Vitesse uses a continuously flowing stroke to manage the transition between upright and diagonal lines, most apparent on letters like M and N. A year of making this gesture with my wrist, both when drawing letterforms and miming their intentions during design critiques, left me thinking about a reduced version of the typeface, in which letters would be defined not by inside and outside contours, but by a single, fluid raceway. Like most straightforward ideas, this one proved challenging to execute, but its puzzles were immensely satisfying to solve. Adding an inline to a typeface is the quickest way to reveal its secrets. All the furtive adjustments in weight and size that a type designer makes — relieving congestion by thinning the center arm of a bold E, or lightening the intersecting strokes of a W — are instantly exposed with the addition of a centerline. Adapting an existing alphabet to accommodate this inline called for renovating every single character (down to the capital I, the period, and even the space), in some cases making small adjustments to reallocate weight, at other times redesigning whole parts of the character set. The longer we worked on the typeface, the more we discovered opportunities to turn these constraints into advantages, solving stubbornly complex characters like € and § by redefining how an inline should behave, and using these new patterns to reshape the rest of the alphabet. The New Typeface The outcome is a typeface we’re calling Cesium. It shares many of Vitesse’s qualities, its heartbeat an energetic thrum of motorsports and industry, and it will doubtless be welcome in both hardware stores and Hollywood. But we’ve been surprised by Cesium’s more reflective moods, its ability to be alert and softspoken at the same time. Much in the way that vibrant colors can animate a typeface, we’ve found that Cesium’s sensitivity to spacing most effectively changes its voice. Tighter leading and tracking turns up the heat, heightening Cesium’s sporty, high-tech associations, but with the addition of letterspacing it achieves an almost literary repose. This range of voices recommends Cesium not only to logos, book covers, and title sequences, but to projects that regularly must adjust their volume, such as identities, packaging, and editorial design. Read more about how to use Cesium. About the Name Cesium is a chemical element, one of only five metals that’s liquid at room temperature. Resembling quicksilver, cesium is typically stored in a glass ampule, where the tension between a sturdy outer vessel and its volatile contents is scintillating. The Cesium typeface hopes to capture this quality, its bright and insistent inline restrained by a strong and sinuous container. Cesium is one of only three H&Co typefaces whose name comes from the periodic table, a distinction it shares with Mercury and Tungsten. At a time when I considered a more sci-fi name for the typeface, I learned that these three elements have an unusual connection: they’re used together in the propulsion system of nasa’s Deep Space 1, the first interplanetary spacecraft powered by an ion drive. I found the association compelling, and adopted the name at once, with the hope that designers might employ the typeface in the same spirit of discovery, optimism, and invention. —JH Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos