Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.

The great enigma There are hidden depths to FS Silas Sans. First impressions are of a functional, multi-purpose typeface with a cool, edgy, angular character. Gaze into its eyes a little longer, though, and you'll detect a more nuanced, colourful personality, with full, open, satisfyingly squarish forms balancing the abruptness of the sharply-angled terminals and ascenders. Authoritative, official and stern on the outside; amiable and welcoming on the inside. You’re so Dane The designers, led by Phil Garnham, were trying to capture something straight-talking, authentic, and a little... Scandinavian. ‘We were thinking about some of the characters in Danish dramas that were on in the early stages of the font’s development, like The Killing and The Bridge,’ says Phil. ‘The police officers, that is, not the psychopathic killers. Smart and a bit cool, but with a warm heart.’ For a good Danish name, we settled on Silas. It was that or Hans-Christian. The finer points Silas Sans rewards close inspection. Study, if you will, its amply squarish forms, the roomy ‘o’ and ‘e’, in particular. Observe the angular ascenders and terminals of, for example, the ‘L’, ‘I’, ‘d’ and ‘i’, inferring the movement and lift of a pen. Consider the cuts to the ‘A’ and ‘v’ that create harmony with adjacent letters. And scrutinise the subtle ink traps set within the ‘A’ and ‘Y’ for reproduction at small sizes. A fine subject, we think you’ll agree, and available in a versatile range of weights to make (with FS Silas Slab) a typographic system with a comprehensive hierarchy.

One day, when I was walking with my daughter Greta, I stopped in front of the windowshop of a bookshop, that caught my attention, but Greta was pretty irritated, as always when it comes to books: she is dyslexic. All things written are basically a nightmare for her!So one thing came to my mind: if the great Louis Braille, with visual impairment, invented an instrument that allowed blind people to read, write and play,there had to be a tool that made it easier for dyslexics to do the same things. So, I proposed to Greta to create together a font to help her and other dyslexics. We worked on it, becoming a bit of graphic designers, inventors and guinea pigs at the same time.We brought some initial changes to the mirror letters "pq bd", based on some examples already available on the market, that improved reading times, strenghtening our willing to go ahead. That's how "GretaDS" is born, a completely new font, from the "handwritten" family, which marks a difference on the mirror letters, making them easily recognizable, as well as the lowercase couple rn (RN) which can be confused with the letter "m", not to mention the capital "I" (vowel i) indistinguishable from the lowercase "l" (L)We hope, that other graphic designers will follow its flow, modify and improve the path, and make the most of its energy, to offer dyslexics a tool that make reading as easy as drinking a glass of water.

Bringing together features from early European grotesques and American gothics, Kostas Bartokas’ Averta (Greek: ‘αβέρτα’ – to act or speak openly, bluntly or without moderation, without hiding) is a new geometric sans serif family with a simple, yet appealing, personality. The purely geometric rounds, open apertures, and its low contrast strokes manage to express an unmoderated, straightforward tone resulting in a modernist, neutral and friendly typeface. Averta is intended for use in a variety of media. The central styles (Light through Bold) are drawn to perform at text sizes, while the extremes are spaced tighter to form more coherent headlines. The dynamism of the true italics adds a complementary touch to the whole family and provides extra versatility, making Averta an EXCELLENT tool for a range of uses, from signage to branding and editorial design. Take advantage of Averta’s extended OpenType features including alternate glyphs, small caps, fractions, case sensitive forms, contextual alternates, oldstyle and lining (proportional and tabular) numerals, small cap numerals, numerators/denominators, superiors/inferiors, and a variety of symbols. Averta comes in eight weights with matching italics and supports over two hundred languages with an extended Latin, Cyrillic (Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian/Macedonian alternates), Greek and Vietnamese character set. It ships in three different packages offering different script coverage according to your needs: Averta PE (Pan-European: Latin, Cyrillic, Greek), Averta CY (Latin and Cyrillic), and Averta (Latin and Greek). Averta's Cyrillic have received the 3rd Prize in the 2017 Granshan Awards in the Cyrillic Category.

Really No. 2 is a redesign and update of Linotype Really, a typeface that Gary Munch first designed in 1999. The new Really No. 2 offers seven weights (Light to Extra Bold), each with an Italic companion. Additionally, Really No. 2 offers significantly expanded language support possibilities. Customers may choose the Really No. 2 W1G fonts, which support a character set that will cover Greek and Cyrillic in addition to virtually all European languages. These are true pan-European fonts, capable of setting texts that will travel between Ireland and Russia, and from Norway to Turkey. Customers who do not require this level of language support may choose from the Really No. 2 Pro fonts (just the Latin script), the Really No. 2 Greek Pro fonts (which include both Latin and Greek), or the Really No. 2 Cyrillic Pro fonts (Latin and Cyrillic). Each weight in the Really No. 2 family includes small capitals and optional oldstyle figures, as well as several other OpenType features. Really No. 2's vertical measurements are slightly different than the old Linotype Really's; customers should not mix fonts from the two families together. As to the design of Really No. 2's letters, like Linotype Really, the characters' moderate-to-strong contrast of its strokes recalls the Transitional and Modern styles of Baskerville and Bodoni. A subtly oblique axis recalls the old-style faces of Caslon. Finally, sturdy serifs complete the typeface's realist sensibility: a clear, readable, no-nonsense text face, whose clean details offer the designer a high-impact selection.

Heller Sans JNL is based on the main letterforms of an experimental alphabet designed by Steven Heller; noted author of over 170 books on design and visual culture. Some modifications were made in turning his design into a digital font. In his own words, here is the background to this typeface: “I recently recovered this from the junk heap. It is a yellowing photostat of my first and only typeface design (1969-70). Total folly! At the time I was smitten by Art Moderne lettering. I called it “Klaus Boobala Bold” because I liked the K and B. I’ve lost the letters S through Z, which were made. The letters were drawn with compass, Techno pen (that frequently clogged). as well as a triangle and T-square. The inline and outline made no real logical sense. I based the design, in part, on Kabel, Avant Garde and it was a product of whatever I could accomplish with those tools. The caps-only alphabet was photographed and produced as a film negative that was cut in foot-long strips and spliced to fit on a Typositor reel. Sadly, the negatives made for the font were too brittle and the splice snapped apart in the Typositor. I worked on it for well over a month and used the face only once. I realized with this attempt, like so many other times I attempted different challenges, that type design — indeed mechanical drawing — was not my strong suit.” Heller Sans JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Rotis¿ is a comprehensive family group with Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Serif, and Semi Serif styles, for a total of 17 weights including italics. The four families have similar weights, heights and proportions; though the Sans is primarily monotone, the Semi Sans has swelling strokes, the Semi Serif has just a few serifs, and the Serif has serifs and strokes with mostly vertical axes. Designed by Otl Aicher for Agfa in 1989, Rotis has become something of a European zeitgeist. This highly rationalized yet intriguing type is seen everywhere, from book text to billboards. The blending of sans with serif was almost revolutionary when Aicher first started working on the idea. Traditionalists felt that discarding serifs from some forms and giving unusual curves and edges to others might be something new, but not something better. But Rotis was based on those principles, and has proven itself not only highly legible, but also remarkably successful on a wide scale. Rotis is easily identifiable in all its styles by the cap C and lowercase c and e: note the hooked tops, serifless bottoms, and underslung body curves. Aicher is a long-time teacher of design and has many years of practical experience as a graphic designer. He named Rotis after the small village in southern German where he lives. Rotis¿ is suitable for just about any use: book text, documentation, business reports, business correspondence, magazines, newspapers, posters, advertisements, multimedia, and corporate design.Today Rotis ia also available with pan european caracter set.

Marit Otto about C-Nation: The building typeface. Although the 70ties were very liberating and progressive, still girls played mainly with dolls and sweet things and boys with all kinds of challenging stuff. They did all sorts of basic scientific experiments in mini labs and of course built cool things with Meccano building sets. As a girl I was perfectly happy with the toys I had access to. But at the same time I was very curious about all the adventure toys and discoveries my brother did. It also made me wonder why the grown up people thought that our world could be separated so easily by separating our toys in pink and blue sections. At this day of age Meccano is probably hopelessly old fashioned and far to manual. Children of today are fed by fast images and cool animations on screen, they learn, play, communicate and relax in the same space, the digital space. The special feature of Meccano was that even though it was very basic there was the promise you could create anything. It might even contribute to a logical mind. The typeface I designed refers to the Meccano feel. It is a creative typeface. A bit masculine and bold looking perhaps but after the first impression a subtle and refined female touch is revealed. It has links to architecture and associations with metal constructions like ‘The Eiffel Tower’ and (old railway) bridges. I am convinced that we all think of that as very charming man-made objects.

Please note: Acorde webfonts are exclusively available at willerstorfer.com Acorde is a reliable workhorse for large, demanding design projects. It was designed to be perfectly suited to all different sizes, from small continuous text to large headlines and big signage. The typeface’s name is derived from ‘a’ ‘cor’porate ‘de’sign typeface, however Acorde is not only suitable for corporate design programmes but for information design and editorial design purposes as well. Acorde’s inception was in early 2005 as Stefan Willerstorfer’s final project in the Type and Media course at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL). It is a humanist sans serif with noticeable diagonal contrast and shows clear influences of the broad nib pen, especially in the Italics. Acorde’s characterful details give it a distinctive appearance in large sizes and contribute to its high legibility in small sizes. It comes in 14 styles – seven weights in Roman and Italic each. While the proportions of the Regular style were chosen to guarantee optimal legibility without being too space consuming, the heavier the weight gets the more suitable it is for headline purposes. The heavy weights are relatively narrower than the lighter ones, which gives them a strong appearance. The huge character set contains 925 glyphs per font and covers a vast range of latin-based languages. Various accented letters, small caps, eleven figure-sets, superscript and subscript are all included. OpenType features allow for a comfortable use of the large set. Acorde was honored with the 2010 Joseph Binder Bronze award for type design by DesignAustria.

DESCRIPTION Now my feelings about didones are more than evident. After some years of roman-abstinence (1) I present Heroe, an interesting combination of elegance and sensuality. Heroe, spanish for hero, takes some aspects of roman typefaces to the extreme like my main inspiration, the great Herb Lubalin, did in the majority of his works: Thins turned into hairlines, altered proportions (for display purposes), unique ball terminals, poetic curves and a graceful way of placing them together on a layout. Its classy style makes the font perfect for a wide range of uses. Imagine Heroe Inline (my favorite) dancing over a bottle of perfume; printed on the cover of a fashion magazine; lighting wedding invitations up. Its partner, Heroe Monoline, may help you to make more elaborated pieces of design. Just combine it with Heroe, or Heroe Inline and see how perfect they match. TECHNICAL The difference between Pro and Std styles is the quantity of glyphs. While Pro styles have all the decorative characters available, Standard ones have only the basic set of them. Heroe Monoline Big and Heroe Monoline Small were made for better printing purposes. If you need to print the font in small sizes, then your choice should be Small. Heroe Monoline has the same alternates (and open-type code) as Heroe Pro and Inline, plus some decorative ligatures. NOTES (1) After fonts like Breathe , Aire , and the award winning Reina , I started experimenting with scripts a little more. Erotica , Bird Script and Dream Script are examples of that.

Juxta Sans Mono is an experimental monospace sans, an extension of the Juxta superfamily. During the creation of the Juxta script, I felt that the aesthetics and the main idea of the font had promising potential and I started thinking about a pair for it. So the idea of Juxta Sans Mono was formulated. Juxta has several style-forming elements: 45° beveled or cross out bowls, squared m and w arcs and other unobvious letter structures. Despite its unusual and sometimes odd (f, g, m) letterforms, Juxta Sans is fairly easy to read due to its monospace font nature and wide spacing. Juxta Sans Mono offers great customization potential. It has two sets of stylistic alternates — [salt] makes a letter underscored, but keep it in line, [ss01] replaces some of the glyphs with different letterforms. The [case] function automatically adjusts the height of the punctuation marks to the neighbor letter and [onum] is a set of old style numbers. Juxta Sans Mono also has subscript and superscript features, but they are utilized a bit unconventionally — if you want to customize your logo or headline, you can make a glyph superscript and the one next to it subscript and they automatically kern into one letter width. You can see examples of using these features in the presentation. Juxta Sans Mono is available in 8 weights, including Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold, ExtraBold and Black. It extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Pan African Latin, Afrikaans, and Basic Cyrillic.

Really No. 2 is a redesign and update of Linotype Really, a typeface that Gary Munch first designed in 1999. The new Really No. 2 offers seven weights (Light to Extra Bold), each with an Italic companion. Additionally, Really No. 2 offers significantly expanded language support possibilities. Customers may choose the Really No. 2 W1G fonts, which support a character set that will cover Greek and Cyrillic in addition to virtually all European languages. These are true pan-European fonts, capable of setting texts that will travel between Ireland and Russia, and from Norway to Turkey. Customers who do not require this level of language support may choose from the Really No. 2 Pro fonts (just the Latin script), the Really No. 2 Greek Pro fonts (which include both Latin and Greek), or the Really No. 2 Cyrillic Pro fonts (Latin and Cyrillic). Each weight in the Really No. 2 family includes small capitals and optional oldstyle figures, as well as several other OpenType features. Really No. 2's vertical measurements are slightly different than the old Linotype Really's; customers should not mix fonts from the two families together. As to the design of Really No. 2's letters, like Linotype Really, the characters' moderate-to-strong contrast of its strokes recalls the Transitional and Modern styles of Baskerville and Bodoni. A subtly oblique axis recalls the old-style faces of Caslon. Finally, sturdy serifs complete the typeface's realist sensibility: a clear, readable, no-nonsense text face, whose clean details offer the designer a high-impact selection.

Rotis¿ is a comprehensive family group with Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Serif, and Semi Serif styles, for a total of 17 weights including italics. The four families have similar weights, heights and proportions; though the Sans is primarily monotone, the Semi Sans has swelling strokes, the Semi Serif has just a few serifs, and the Serif has serifs and strokes with mostly vertical axes. Designed by Otl Aicher for Agfa in 1989, Rotis has become something of a European zeitgeist. This highly rationalized yet intriguing type is seen everywhere, from book text to billboards. The blending of sans with serif was almost revolutionary when Aicher first started working on the idea. Traditionalists felt that discarding serifs from some forms and giving unusual curves and edges to others might be something new, but not something better. But Rotis was based on those principles, and has proven itself not only highly legible, but also remarkably successful on a wide scale. Rotis is easily identifiable in all its styles by the cap C and lowercase c and e: note the hooked tops, serifless bottoms, and underslung body curves. Aicher is a long-time teacher of design and has many years of practical experience as a graphic designer. He named Rotis after the small village in southern German where he lives. Rotis¿ is suitable for just about any use: book text, documentation, business reports, business correspondence, magazines, newspapers, posters, advertisements, multimedia, and corporate design.Today Rotis ia also available with pan european caracter set.

My brother is an architect, and I have always loved his lettering, you know, the style of writing that can be found on architectural drawings. There is a common thread to it, yet each architect or engineer brings their own personality to it. I have seen a similar style being used by some hand-letterers for invitations, place cards and signage. Inspired, I set out to create my own, and the result is my new typeface, Robard! I wanted something compact, somewhat modular, done quickly but with control, and sourced from hand-lettering. Starting out with a handful of pigment ink pens, I settled on a 0.1mm Copic Multi-Liner, and using a light table with a grid underneath the paper, I cranked out grouping after grouping, letter after letter, numbers, punctuation, accents, just trying to zero in on the feeling and the look I was after. There were some ideas that didn't work, like unicase (there would be no regular lowercase), or swash alternates. Ultimately, I ended up with a decent array of glyphs to choose from, and alternates like oldstyle numbers, and an alternate set of caps for the lowercase slots, and even alternative figures so doubles like 88 would be different. In the font, the OpenType ligature code automatically alternates the cap and lowercase (alternate cap) letters, and numbers as you type, lending Robard that hand-lettered look in a digital typeface that I was hoping for. There are also oldstyle figures, and unlimited fractions, ordinals, and a few alternate letters. I hope you like Robard!

Here in the heart of Santa Monica, in the disused 1940s aircraft hangar we like to call the Comicraft Studios, we know that times are tough. As we were driving to “work” in the back of our chauffeur driven Humvee limo, sipping martinis out of the navels of Playboy bunnies and wondering what font we should release next, we decided it was time to reach out to the poor people. Yes, we felt it was time to create a font for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, for the wretched refuse of our teeming shores. A font, if you will, for the tempest-tossed. It’s a little skinny and might be described as pinched and starved, but it’s guaranteed to see you through this current economic crisis as only the 26 letters of the alphabet can. It was a tall order, but Jazzy JG Roshell created this one while he was in line at the bank, waiting for his personal bailout. Meticulously crafted using one of those ballpoint pens attached to the cashier’s station by elastic, Credit Crunch is the Hamburger Helper of comic book fonts. It’s kind of a hybrid -- just like the Priuses our trophy wives drive to their personal plastic surgeons -- and it’s solar powered and also comes with a tank full of good old fashioned Biro ink. The Recession, Climate Change AND Global Hunger will probably end mere minutes after you crack open your life’s savings to buy this font. How can you afford NOT to...? See the families related to Credit Crunch: Credit Extension.

Disruptor's Script is the alter ego of our previous project Gentlemen's Script. Unlike the Gentlemen's Script, the new font is an elegant rebel and defies traditions. The font is painted with a brush pen, which is especially noticeable in the characteristic shabbiness and different thicknesses of the strokes. While the Gentlemen's Script is an embodiment of a classic costume, dress shoes and an expensive watch, Disruptor's Script is a fashionable suit, sneakers, an iWatch and a tattoo that peeks from under the shirt. The font retained the incline, speed and overall sense of dynamics inherent in Gentlemen's Script, but got a bit more chaotic and unpredictable. This is especially noticeable in the newly added shabbiness, elongated extenders, a large number of contextual alternates and different ligatures. For some high-frequency letters (10 for the Latin alphabet and 10 for the Cyrillic alphabet), we painted alternative versions that are substituted in the word instead of the standard characters when following our preceding certain groups of letters. In addition, in the Disruptor's Script you can find functional ligatures, including some of the frequently occurring two- and three-letter combinations. All these solutions dilute the monotonous line of the set, add a bit of unpredictability to the font and a touch of chaos to inscriptions. To fully enjoy usage of the font, we recommend that you always keep the features contextual alternates (calt) and standard ligatures (liga) turned on. If you do not have access to applications that support OpenType features, it does not matter—even without these features you can use and enjoy our font!