Advertisers Gothic is bold and brash, like the city it comes from, Chicago. It was designed by the accomplished German-American matrix engraver, Robert Wiebking, for the Western Type Foundry in 1917. As its name suggests, it was designed for commercial headliner work, much as Publicity Gothic by Sidney Gaunt for BB&S the year before. See our Publicity Headline. Alternate letters ‘A’ & ‘S’ are provided. The most popular ad words “Free!”, “New!” and “Sale” (with both esses) are provided at an angle for dramatic tension. Advertisers Gothic became quite popular because it was effective. It can work equally well for a flyer advertising a non-profit event as for a magazine product ad. This font refuses to be a wimp. Use it boldly. Advertisers Gothic ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. A total of 335 glyphs (compare) with added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, ornm, liga, hist & salt ˜ with total 13 lookups. 3. Added 209 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. The most popular ad words “Free!”, “New!” and “Sale” (with both esses) are provided at an angle for dramatic tension 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.

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.

An open-hearted humanist sans-serif. Playful and friendly. Faible is everybody’s darling. You cannot not like this good-natured humanist typeface. Sure, it’s a typeface for serious work—but all serious work is better when you put a smile on your face and a whistle on your lips. The typeface itself isn’t rooted in calligraphy, but there are quite some details in Faible that reference handwriting and add a friendly, humanist facet to its appearance. Take the bowls of B, P, and R: they are merrily bulged, like balloons about to take off. The curved leg of the R adds to this joyful mood. Faible’s italics are rendered playfully, too: they’re not merely sloped Roman styles. Rather, they were designed independently with an internal dynamic that sets them apart on the page. With its trademark glyphs, the swooshin’ K and k, and its friendly details, Faible will radiate optimism in display sizes, titles, and headlines. That makes it a great choice for book covers, posters, editorial design, branding, corporate design, advertising, and packaging. Nontheless, it’s carefully spaced and equipped with plenty OpenType features—a reliable tool for short texts and body copy, too. The font family consists of six weights (ranging from Thin to Black), each with its corresponding italic style. Faible’s glyph set contains more than 600 characters, allowing you to enhance your layouts with ligatures, different sets of figures, case sensitive forms, arrows, and other necessities for the ambitious typographer. Faible is the typeface that puts “fun” back into “functional”.

German graphic designer Ralf Weissmantel created Boogie in 2003. Boogie is an ironic reference to pop art, and to disco lettering from the 1960s and 70s. Its round forms and outlines evoke the flashing, pulsating lights and music of that era. Shipping with five different, width-compatible fonts, the Boogie typeface has four different components: an outlined letterform is the base element, and forms the first font. Three additional fonts may be layered over top of this base, surrounding the first font with up to three bubble-outlines. In graphics applications like Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator, these elements can each be assigned different colors. There is also a fifth font, which contains the base outlined letterform pre-surrounded by three additional outlines of the same color. Boogie works best in large headline, display and signage applications, where its forms can be clearly seen and enjoyed. When different colored layers are applied, text set in Boogie will gyrate and jive across the page! Weissmantel has worked as an art director for various international advertising agencies, and has led Corporate Design projects for firms such as Grey and MetaDesign. His design work, honored internationally, has been included in the typography collection of the Museum for Art and Trade in Hamburg. He is currently teaching graphic design at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Weissmantel has been an associate of the United Designers Network since August 2002. Boogie received an Honorable Mention in the 2003 International Type Design Contest, sponsored by Linotype GmbH.

CA Capoli is a fine script typeface with a vintage touch. Perfect for illustrative titles or logotypes. It comes in two styles, Regular and Stroke. The inspiration came during our trip to Italy, where we took a short rest in a bar during a hot day. We discovered a simple ceramic ashtray on the table. The word “Nido” was inscribed in a typeface that looked like it dated back to the 1950s. We made some investigations about the word, its meaning and origin but it still remains a big mystery. Was it the name of a hotel or a restaurant or some vintage Italian cigarettes? We don’t know. We were so amazed about the design of the logo that we decided to create a typeface out of it. A sophisticated endeavor because we just had four letters. How could the rest of the letters – if it ever existed – have looked like? Our hypothesis is CA Capoli. A typeface with a full Central European character set and some nice alternative letters to chose from. When we thought about “Nido” and its possible derivation of hotel business, we felt like creating a small side project for this typeface, a brand for a fictional hotel called Hotel Capoli with business cards, letterheads, a reception book, key fobs and embroidered patches for the service dress of the hotel service stuff. The Hotel Capoli is located at the wonderful beach of Cape Arcona on the fictional country of Arcona Islands where our type foundry is located.

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.

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 paneuropean caracter set.

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.

Wonder Brush is a display typographer's guilty pleasure. It's one of very few fonts ever made that can take intense abuse and still look natural. Partly based on a 1969 Friedrich Poppl design called Poppl Stretto, but considerably fused with ideas found in interwar magazine ad lettering and signage, Wonder Brush caters to the idea that most graphic designers would rather use design elements they can enjoy. When you spend your days being "challenged" and "creatively tested" and "communicating the message," you can definitely use a little bit of playtime. And this font gives you just that, playtime on the job. Wonder Brush appears to be a straightforward narrow upright brush script. But it really is made of malleable rubber. Take it into a program like Adobe Illustrator, set something, stretch or squeeze, shear or warp, slant or transform… just play with it like they used to do in the 70s and 80s. You will soon discover that this font really is a big old top hat, and it's up to you and your mischief to pull rabbits or geese out of it. A single font that allows you to emphasize content or manage space mechanically without affecting the integrity of the type setting. And if your playtime includes fiddling with OpenType features, you're in for a bonus treat: Wonder Brush comes with over 800 characters, including a lot of alternates and extended language support. So tweak away until your eyes cry with joy. The only rules are the ones you set, and even those are meant to be broken.

Introducing Zambeza, a modern display font that draws inspiration from vintage posters and combines it with elegant typography styles. With Zambeza, you can create unique letter combinations for lettering with a wide range of options. The font comes with open type features, including alternate glyphs and end swashes, providing you with creative freedom for your lettering designs. Zambeza is perfect for various design applications, such as logotypes, headings, covers, posters, logos, quotes, product packaging, headers, merchandise, social media graphics, greeting cards, and more. Its versatile design makes it suitable for different creative projects, adding a touch of modernity and vintage charm. To access the alternate glyphs, you will need a software program that supports OpenType features, such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe InDesign, or Corel Draw. This allows you to fully utilize the font's design possibilities and create unique compositions. Your zip package will include the Zambeza font files in otf, ttf, and woff formats, providing compatibility for different design projects. The font includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, punctuation, and symbols, giving you all the essential elements for your designs. Zambeza also supports multilanguage characters, making it suitable for designing in various languages. Whether you're creating designs in English, Spanish, French, or any other language, Zambeza has you covered. In summary, Zambeza is a modern display font that combines vintage inspiration with elegant typography styles. With its open type features, multilanguage support, and versatile design applications, Zambeza is a great choice for your creative projects. Thank you for choosing Zambeza from our collection. Happy designing!

Halloween lends itself to graphic images: witches, ghosts, bats, jack-o'lanterns and haunted houses. When we think of a haunted house, we generally think of a large, abandoned, derelict Victorian wood-frame house. The style is usually Second Empire or Queen Anne. There tends to be a lot of decoration. There is usually a porch or two with decorative spindle work. There is probably a tower, either square with a mansard roof such as one might see in Paris or round with a conical roof borrowed from a Loire Valley chateau. These houses were generally built in the United States between 1860 and 1900, products of the exuberance of a time before income tax. It took at least three servants to maintain such a house and was very expensive. Few can afford them today. That is why so many were converted to professional offices, multi-family dwellings or simply abandoned. HAUNTED HOUSE is our typographical contribution to Halloween. Based on our font PETRARKA ML, it features decorative capitol letters that utilize the silhouette of a Second Empire style house complete with a dead tree and a full moon. The font includes 8 ornaments suitable for flyers and party invitations. Revision 2.000 eliminates dual encoding, harmonizes metrics, adds new glyphs, and adds open type features. 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.

A revival and major expansion of a 1926 Ludwig Wagner Schriftgiesserei typeface called Titanic, Lexington is the ultimate art deco expression of the high times of signage and theater during the first half of the twentieth century. Big feminine caps and cozy direct minuscules make for a unique combination rarely found in other deco faces. Topped off with the humorous and quite suave tall and pointy ascenders and descenders of the alternates, Lexington makes for a versatile and uniquely eye-catching display face beneficial to poster art, book covers, classy menus, product packaging and music paraphernalia. The original specimen Hans van Maanen worked from showed the majuscules, minuscules, figures, and 4 alternates of some ascending minuscules. This new digital version includes all of the above, plus many more additions: - Plenty more alternates, for some caps as well as for all the ascending and descending lowercase. - Three different size variations for the comma and the period. - Oldstyle figures. - A full complement of accented characters to support more Latin-based languages than ever, including Baltic, Celtic, Turkish, and Central/Eastern European languages. - A Handtooled style variation that covers both the main character set and the alternates. Lexington was named after Manhattan's Lexington Avenue, home of the some of the most famous and polished art deco architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. Lexington and Lexington Handtooled come in all popular font formats. The OpenType versions combine their respective alternates with the main character sets, for ease of use within OpenType-savvy applications.

The ideal typeface for cartography The Swiss designer/typographer Felix Arnold designed Cisalpin during the late 1990s, after he had challenged himself to create a contemporary typeface that could be used for cartographic uses. Arnold came to the subject of cartographic typefaces after analyzing many maps and atlases, and discovering that there was no standard typeface for these types of documents. Like any good cartographic type, Cisalpin is very legible at small sizes. While he was drawing this typeface on his computer, Arnold used a reduction glass to refine his design, making it work in these situations. Cisalpin is a linear sans serif face, with slight resemblance to renaissance serif types. The various weights are all clearly differentiated from one another. And because space is often a premium on maps, Cisalpin runs narrow. Words close in around themselves to help them become more identifiable. The letterforms in Cisalpin are durable, and can maintain their readability when placed over complex backgrounds. They have open interior forms, flattened curves, tall x-heights, and a capital height that almost reaches the tops of the ascenders. Cisalpin also has pronounced Italics, with a very clear angle of inclination. Each letterform in the family has been optimized so that they cannot be easily mistaken for another. This again helps minimize the misunderstandings that often occur because of illegibility. Although Cisalpin was developed for use in cartography, it may be used for countless other purposes; any font that can work well in small sizes on a map could be used almost anywhere else!

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 paneuropean caracter set.

Stubble is a distressed grunge font with many useful variations that make things easy. It comes in both a Regular and Bold version, and a Smudged version as if the print block has slipped a little bit just at the vital moment. Also there’s 2 jumbled versions with the letters and numbers, and some punctuation, at odd angles and slightly off-whack; there’s 2 versions with little bits of overprint on most of the main characters (as if the corners of the block or stamp have just caught the paper); a couple of Caps Only versions; plus condensed and expanded versions of the main faces. The Bold version is not an exact expanded version of the Regular version, please note, the characters are different (i.e. the misprinting is different) in the two weights. Western and Central European accented characters are included, and there’s a set of replacements for double-letter combinations such as bb, dd and OO, TT, so that 2 different letters will appear - which avoids having exactly the same grunge letter appearing twice in succession (20 or more pairings for each case, all the pairings that reasonably exist) which work as ligature replacements. The whole family constitutes a comprehensive package that offers a great variety of ways of presenting a grunge typeface for display, headlines and posters, while maintaining the thread of the same sans-serif style. The zip package contains both the TTF and OTF versions of the font. Install only one version on the same machine, installing both versions may produce all sorts of erratic behavior.

Prossima Moda is a font that radiates modernity and fashion-forward style. Its sleek and contemporary design evokes a sense of sophistication and elegance, while its contrasting lines add a touch of visual interest and intrigue. The font exudes a cool and sweet vibe, creating a captivating and alluring atmosphere. With Prossima Moda, each letter is meticulously crafted to showcase its unique beauty, creating a harmonious blend of form and function. The font's smooth curves and clean lines give it a polished and refined look, reflecting the precision and attention to detail that are synonymous with the fashion industry. This font not only captures the spirit of the latest fashion trends, but it also embodies a sense of individuality and self-expression. It is a font that speaks to the modern individual who seeks to make a statement and stand out from the crowd. The font is built with advanced OpenType functionality and has a guaranteed top-notch quality, containing stylistic and contextual alternates, ligatures, and more features; all to give you full control and customizability. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages, from Northern Europe to South Africa, from America to South-East Asia. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers. Mans Greback is the innovative designer behind the captivating Prossima Moda font. Hailing from Sweden, Mans has established himself as a prominent figure in the world of typeface design, renowned for his diverse and versatile portfolio.

Arabetics Harfi is a Latin Serif typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. Careful spacing and kerning was used to enhance resulting text legibility both scripts. Arabetics Harfi fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi type style with connected glyphs, but it emphasizes a horizontal look and feel rather than verticalone, utilizing slightly varying x-heights. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph per every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Harfi includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Arabetics Harfi includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. It includes two weights, regular and bold, each of which has normal, right slanted Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Pietro Aretino (1492 – 1556) Was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist and blackmailer, who wielded influence on contemporary art and politics. The most vigorous and versatile vernacular writer of the 16th century He was a very versatile writer, famous for his Lascivious Sonnets – which caused great scandal at the time – but also for his satirical verses, addressed to all the powerful people in Italy, without forgetting the many plays that he wrote for the theatre. Part of the charm of his letters is that through them you may know the whole of Venetian society from the top to the bottom. The little-known church of San Luca in Venice (in St Mark's district) has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries for people who are decidedly not devout: journalists, writers, free thinkers. In 1556 Pietro Aretino, a unique character of the Italian and Venetian Renaissance period was buried there. Such strong of personality, has contributed to generate the powerful wind of change that emerged from the italian renaissance. We have inspired on that talent searching for a new sight the famous Venetian typefaces. Probably looking for more vigour and contemporary digital style. This typeface is slightly condensed, lighter and has more contrast between the thick and thin letter-strokes, it has concave bracketed serif. Their ascender and descenders strokes are very shorts. Aretino family is completed by four weigh: Regular, SemiBold, Bold and ExtraBold, while Italics has three weighs. These fonts came with a full OpenType features and CE languages.

Bex Script is a riff on traditional French script forms: the Bâtarde, the Ronde, and the Coulée. It has two versions: First, there’s La Belle, a straightforward, lovely interpretation of the script form, suitable for things like invitations, poetry and branding. La Belle’s evil twin is La Bête, a more whimsical (and considerably more hairy) version, great for anything that requires an elegant-but-beastly feel. Bex is surprisingly versatile! With three optional capital forms (Swash, Caps, and Small Caps) all taller than the x-height, Bex has a variety of voices. A full small cap set and a full set of Swash Caps, plus a large complement of alternates, initial forms, terminal forms, and ligatures makes it customizable and… well, FANCY! Additionally, both versions of Bex Script have a set of ten ornament glyphs. La Belle has a combination of fleurons on a culinary theme and symbols of France. La Bête has ten pseudoheraldic beasts that would feel at home at the top center of any whimsical letterhead. NOTE: A few years ago in Paris, I was lucky enough to stop at the Librairie Paul Jammes in St Germain-des-Prés, where I bought a turn-of-the-19th-century signature from a Type Specimen of the printer Joseph Gaspard Gillé. The irregularity of his script types — particularly the ones at smaller sizes, like the Cicéro — was very intriguing. They seemed to blend the Ronde with some elements of the Bâtarde and Coulée. And they, along with the work of French master penman Louis Rossignol, gave Bex Script its initial form.

An unadorned Grotesque with a refreshingly personal touch. If “Grotesque” mainly means “industrial, mechanical, anonymous typeface” to you, Klainy might redefine your image of the genre. Yes, it’s a Grotesque—but with a contemporary look and a lot of personality. Klainy’s apertures are more closed at the top and more open at the bottom, creating an informal rhythm that sets Klainy apart: a confident, optimistic voice with a clean appearance. Terminals are subtly back-bent: these quaint “hooks” make Klainy a bit more personal, a bit friendlier. (You can find them in the a, c, f, and r.) Just like its old-style Grotesque ancestors, Klainy is optimized for display sizes and short texts. There, its unobtrusive quirks can be wholly appreciated. However, the familiar Grotesque appearance makes sure that the typeface is comfortable to read in smaller sizes, as well. Use Klainy whenever a basically classic sans-serif typeface with a modern and individual twist is called for. This font family comes in eight weights ranging from Thin to Black, each with a matching italic style. More than 500 glyphs and a bunch of Open Type Features make it a reliable companion for all of your projects. You can fine-tune the flavor of Klainy with Stylistic Alternates such as a one-story a and a two-story g. Their simple construction blends perfectly with the design concept of this typeface. Klainy is a seasoned blue-collar worker that surprises you with wit and team spirit. It’ll be a great addition to your font library.

A gentle breeze on a warm summer's day. A cozy gathering of friends and family around a crackling fire. The sweet aroma of freshly baked cinnamon bread. A slow walk in the autumn woods, light sparkling down through the multi-colored leaves. Billowing white clouds against a stark azur sky, leisurely floating past the tops of palm trees. What do these idyllic scenes all have in common? A: Most people can never find the time to enjoy any of them. B: These are just some of the things you would never try to describe using a crankish font like Spleeny Decaf GD. Just as ITC Fontoon was designed to be used with the many critters that populate the "Toonie" series of fonts, Spleeny Decaf GD was created by Steve Zafarana for use in the balloned dialogue portions of a new panel cartoon feature currently under development. Spleeny Decaf GD is the first completed font in a family that ranges from the jittery san serif Spleeny Espresso GD to the sedate and serifed Spleeny Asleep GD. Each font in the series appears a little more relaxed and staid than its predecessor. None of them however, will find themselves being used for the text of any legal documents. Spleeny Decaf GD is the perfect font to use when the weight of the message is leaning towards the light and jocular side of things. So remember, if your documents are starting to put you on edge, it may be time to switch to decaf. Spleeny Decaf GD that is.

Over the past few years, every designer has seen the surprising outbreak of blackletter types in marketing campaigns for major sports clothing manufacturers, a few phone companies, soft drink makers, and more recently on entertainment and music products. In such campaigns, blackletter type combined with photos of usual daily activity simply adds a level of strength and mystique to things we see and do on a regular basis. But we couldn't help noticing that the typography was very odd in such campaigns, where the type overpowers all the other design elements. This is because almost all blackletter fonts ever made express too much strength and time-stamp themselves in a definite manner, thereby eliminating themselves as possible type choices for a variety of common contemporary design approaches, such as minimal, geometric, modular, etc. So extending the idea of using blackletter in modern design was a bit of a wild goose chase for us. But we finally found the face that completes the equation no other blackletter could fit into: Leather is a digitization and major expansion of Imre Reiner's forgotten but excellent 1933 Gotika design, which was very much ahead of its time. In its own time this design saw very little use because it caused problems to printers, where the thin serifs and inner bars were too fragile and broke off too easily when used in metal. But now, more than seventy years later, it seems like it was made for current technologies, and it is nothing short of being the perfect candidate for using blackletter in grid-based settings. Leather has three features usually not found in other blackletter fonts: - Grid-based geometric strokes and curves: In the early 1930s, blackletter design had already begun interacting back with the modern sans serif it birthed at the turn of the century. This design is one of the very few manifestations of such interaction. - Fragile, Boboni-like serifs, sprout from mostly expected places in the minuscules, but are sprinkled very aesthetically on some of the majuscules. The overall result is magnificently modern. - The usual complexity of blackletter uppercase's inner bars is rendered simple, geometric and very visually appealing. The contrast between the inner bars and thick outer strokes creates a surprising circuitry-like effect on some of the letters (D, O, Q), wonderfully plays with the idea of fragile balances on some others (M, N and P), and boldly introduces new concepts on others (B, F, K, L, R). Our research seems to suggest that the original numerals used with this design in the 1930s were adopted from a previous Imre Reiner typeface. They didn't really fit with the idea of this font, so we created brand new numerals for Leather. We also expanded the character set to cover all Western Latin-based languages, and scattered plenty of alternates and ligatures throughout the map. The name, Leather, was derived from a humorous attempt at naming a font. Initially we wanted to call it Black Leather (blackletter...blackleather), but the closer we came to finishing it, the more respect we developed for its attempt to introduce a plausible convergence between two entirely different type categories. Sadly for the art, this idea of convergence didn't go much further back then, due to technological limitations and the eventual war a few years later. We're hoping this revival would encourage people to look at blackletter under a new light in these modern times of multiple design influences.

Classic Grotesque by Rod McDonald: a traditional font with a modern face. The growing popularity of grotesque typefaces meant that many new sans serif analogues were published in the early 20th century. Setting machines were not compatible with each other but all foundries wanted to offer up-to-date fonts, and as a result numerous different typeface families appeared that seem almost identical at first glance and yet go their separate ways with regard to details. One of the first fonts created with automatic typesetting in mind was Monotype Grotesque®. Although this typeface that was designed and published by Frank Hinman Pierpont in 1926 has since been digitalised, it has never achieved the status of other grotesque fonts of this period. But Monotype Grotesque was always one of designer Rod McDonald’s favourites, and he was overjoyed when he finally got the go-ahead from Monotype in 2008 to update this “hidden treasure”. The design process lasted four years, with regular interruptions due to the need to complete projects for other clients. In retrospect, McDonald admits that he had no idea at the beginning of just how challenging and complex a task it would be to create Classic Grotesque™. It took him considerable time before he found the right approach. In his initial drafts, he tried to develop Monotype Grotesque only to find that the result was almost identical with Arial®, a typeface that is also derived in many respects from Monotype Grotesque. It was only when he went back a stage, and incorporated elements of Bauer Font’s Venus™ and Ideal Grotesk by the Julius Klinkhardt foundry into the design process, that he found the way forward. Both these typefaces had served as the original inspiration for Monotype Grotesque. The name says it all: Classic Grotesque has all the attributes of the early grotesque fonts of the 20th century: The slightly artificial nature gives the characters a formal appearance. There are very few and only minor variations in line width. The tittles of the ‘i’ and ‘j’, the umlaut diacritic and other diacritic marks are rectangular. Interestingly, it is among the uppercase letters that certain variations from the standard pattern can be found, and it is these that enliven the typeface. Hence the horizontal bars of the “E”, “F” and “L” have bevelled terminals. The chamfered terminal of the bow of the “J” has a particular flamboyance, while the slightly curved descender of the “Q” provides for additional dynamism. The character alternatives available through the OpenType option provide the designer with a wealth of opportunities. These include a closed “a”, a double-counter “g” and an “e” in which the transverse bar deviates slightly from the horizontal. The seven different weights also extend the scope of uses of Classic Grotesque. These range from the delicate Light to the super thick Extrabold. There are genuine italic versions of each weight; these are not only slightly narrower than their counterparts, but also have variant shapes. The “a” is closed, the “f” has a semi-descender while the “e” is rounded. Its neutral appearance and excellent features mean that Classic Grotesque is suitable for use in nearly all imaginable applications. Even during the design phase, McDonald used his new font to set books and in promotional projects. However, he would be pleased to learn of possible applications that he himself has not yet considered. Classic Grotesque, which has its own individual character despite its neutral and restrained appearance, is the ideal partner for your print and web project.