Herb is based on 16th century cursive broken scripts and printing types. Originally designed by Tim Ahrens in the MA Typeface Design course at the University of Reading, it was further refined and extended in 2010. The idea for Herb was to develop a typeface that has the positive properties of blackletter but does not evoke the same negative connotations – a type that has the complex, humane character of fraktur without looking conservative, aggressive or intolerant.

KONZEPT/BESONDERHEITEN
 Der schludrige und raue handgeschriebene Cha­rak­ter, geben der Schrift eine hohe Wiedererkennung und eine gewisse Einzigartigkeit. Das Motto lautet handgemacht, rau und elegant. EINSATZGEBIETE
 Das dreckige, elegante Aussehen der handgeschriebenen Schrift würde sich über fol­gende Gebiete sehr freuen und sich dort dreckig heimisch füh­len: Logos/Wortmarken aller Art, Flyer für fast jede Party, Plat­ten­Co­ver, Comic-Cover und Gra­phic Novel Let­te­ring, Pla­kat­ De­sign, Movie-Font, als Head­line­schrift für print und digi­tale Maga­zine, Bücher und Web­sei­ten u.v.m. TECHNISCHE INFORMATIONEN Überschriften | Auszeichnungsschrift | dreckige Handschrift »elegant hand script«. OpenType Schrift mit 223 Glyphen & 1 Schriftschnitt (regu­lar). Symbole und Ligaturen (mit dia­kri­ti­schen Zei­chen & €)

The font was inspired by the persistent demands of editors for scripts which actually looked like real handwriting, a lot of historical fiction projects and a love of maps. While making a map for a prequel to Treasure Island I decided to make a font from the lettering of some Caribbean maps of the period. The glyphs are all hand drawn vector outlines which although very legible and consistent in style carry the variation and irregularity you expect from handwriting. This font has been featured on maps for books by authors such as Peter V. Brett, Mark Lawrence and Michael Crichton.

KONZEPT/BESONDERHEITEN
 Der schludrige und raue handgeschriebene Fraktur Cha­rak­ter, geben der Schrift eine hohe Wiedererkennung und eine gewisse Einzigartigkeit. Das Motto lautet handgemacht, rau, Fraktur & modern. EINSATZGEBIETE
 Das dreckige, dicke Aussehen der handgeschriebenen Schrift würde sich über fol­gende Gebiete sehr freuen und sich dort dreckig heimisch füh­len: Logos/Wortmarken aller Art, Flyer für fast jede Party, Plat­ten­Co­ver, Comic-Cover und Gra­phic Novel Let­te­ring, Pla­kat­ De­sign, Movie-Font, als Head­line­schrift für print und digi­tale Maga­zine, Bücher und Web­sei­ten u.v.m. TECHNISCHE INFORMATIONEN Überschriften | Auszeichnungsschrift | Fraktur Handschrift »Modern Hand Fraktur«. OpenType Schrift mit 258 Glyphen & 1 Schriftschnitt (regu­lar). Symbole und Ligaturen (mit dia­kri­ti­schen Zei­chen & €)

Future Bugler Upright is a non-slanted version of Future Bugler, a font based on the second logo created by Harry Warren in early 1975 for his sixth grade class newsletter, The Broadwater Bugler, at Broadwater Academy in Exmore, Virginia, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This font can convey several perspectives or moods. It can suggest a space-age vision of the future, or an art-deco perspective of the future as in the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It also communicates the idea of high performance, or extreme sports, without the grunge. Digitized by John Bomparte.

The light and the bold. The thick and the thin. Laverne and the Shirley. Peanut Butter and the Jelly. Hoban is about contrast. Hoban wants to be noticed, but only after a second glance. A friend of a friend to the didones, it has smaller, tapering serifs, slightly calligraphic traits, and spindly little terminals that go where they please. It’s a headline face. Period. Set it big and bold. Or light and airy. But preferably next to something with flair. Cuff links, canapés, or corvettes–it’s up to you. Distinct ligatures, ornaments, and swashy alternates provide plenty of character to tailor your style.

A Vintage Script for Romance Novels. Lorette began as a digitization of a film typeface from LetterGraphics known as "Laurel". The original specimen included standard Capitals, Lowercase, Numerals, and minimal punctuation, for a bare bones character set. We've fleshed out Lorette to include a full standard character set, an extended international set, Stylistic Alternates, Ligatures, Swash Capitals, etc. so it can be a powerhouse script typestyle. See the 5th graphic for a comprehensive character map preview. Opentype features include: - Full set of Inferiors and Superiors for limitless fractions. - Tabular, Proportional, and OldStyle figure sets. - A collection of Ligatures mainly revolving around the f character. - Discretionary Ligatures for ct and st combinations. - 3 Stylistic Alternates for variations of some of the lowercase characters. - a Swash feature for swash alternates of the Capital letters. Approx. 993 Character Glyph Set: Lorette comes with a glyphset that includes standard & punctuation, international language support, and additional features.

Future Bugler Soft is a soft version of Future Bugler, a font based on the second logo created by Harry Warren in early 1975 for his sixth grade class newsletter, The Broadwater Bugler, at Broadwater Academy in Exmore, Virginia, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This font can convey several perspectives or moods. It can suggest a space-age vision of the future, or an art-deco perspective of the future as in the movie “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”. It also communicates the idea of high performance, or extreme sports, without the grunge. Also check out its siblings, the original Future Bugler, and Future Bugler Upright. Digitized by John Bomparte.

Ravenstonedale is a village in Cumbria, England. There’s not much to see in this quaint village, but the landscape surrounding it is beautiful. This font was sort of based on a number of handwritten letters by English author D.H. Lawrence. It is not a true reflection of the man’s handwriting, though, as I had to design a lot of missing glyphs myself; it was merely an inspiration. Ravenstonedale comes in a slightly slanted ‘regular’ version and a more slanted ‘Italic’ version. In order to stay true to the handwritten nature of this script, I have added a lot of ligatures, plus all the diacritics you could hope for.

Ivory is inspired by a beautiful typeface used in an illustrated compendium about pomology from 1882. We separated the elegant “Swashes” from the letters – use it together with “NoSwashes” to get two-colored initials. Please note that the kerning of NoSwashes works only together with Swashes. To achieve the two tone effect shown in the samples, you need to use an application that supports layers. For example, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe PhotoShop, CorelDRAW, and Quark. Some of the preview images were made by Arina Karen Renata Palilingan.

Welcome to my hand-drawn garden! Enjoy the sunshine, surrounded by my line illustrations of flowers, leaves, birds, hearts, arrows, snowflakes and various ornaments. Sungarden is a bouquet of about 400 handmade pics and floral ornaments, created to get along well with my collection of 12 playful sans serifs and a cute script. Sungarden Script is packed with ligatures and automatic initial and terminal forms accessed through contextual altrenates. All the fonts have an extended character set to support Western and Central European languages. The Sungarden family is well-suited for nature cosmetics, organic food, handmade-style products, wedding and greeting cards, invitations, labels, packaging, menus, books or apparel. You can download the instruction PDF here.

Future Bugler is a font based on the second logo created by Harry Warren in early 1975 for his sixth grade class newsletter, The Broadwater Bugler, at Broadwater Academy in Exmore, Virginia, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This font can convey several perspectives or moods. It can suggest a space-age vision of the future, or an art-deco perspective of the future as in the movie “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”. It also communicates the idea of high performance, or extreme sports, without the grunge. Also be sure to check out the upright version of this font, Future Bugler Upright, available separately. Digitized by John Bomparte. Additional tags: NFL, NFL Network, NFLN

Ballet Mechanique is a custom designed font for musician Jeroen Borrenbergs, aka Ballet Mechanique. For his upcoming record releases Jeroen asked me to create a special font for him. As co-founder and graphic designer at Stoere Binken Design he creates his own artwork and therefor had very specific wishes. The font should be warm, soft and have soul. He gave me some sketches for his logo that I should use as a starting point. The result is a very narrow, kind of techno, monocased font called "Ballet Mechanique" (what else). After having served his purpose, Jeroen Borrenbergs allowed his font to be sold publicly. Jeroen Borrenberg’s debut work, in 1996, received hugely praising reviews. Muzik Magazine made Evolutionary Entities techno single of the month, Laurent Garnier and Mister C constantly played it in their sets and Morgan Geist just said “I won’t do a review here - let me just encourage all of y’all to listen to and/or pick up the new Eevolute 12″. Beautiful stuff - complex, melodic, soaked in just enough reverb to take it to another room. Check or regret.”

Patmos Sans is a carefuly hand crafted sans serif font, inspired by the art of the cyrillic calligraphy, as well as the script of the Greek Orthodox art. The font contains Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and supports Central, Eastern, Western European, Baltic, Turkish, Greek and Russian languages. Patmos Sans has a variety of stylistic alternates and classes, titling altrenates, discretionary and standard ligatures and it is fully unicode-mapped (PUA encoded). The standard ligatures of the font, are 4 decorative ornaments, that you may add at the end of a word and they fit perfectly with the titling alternates. All you have to do is to make sure that ‘standard ligatures’ are activated in your application, then type "d" and a number from 1 to 4.

Papercute Inline is a cute layered hand-drawn font designed by Fanny Coulez & Julien Saurin in Paris. Inspired by paper cutting, this font is easy to read, and easy to play with 8 different styles, including 3D, outline, full or dotted line, that you can use alone or together. To do so, you can simply superimpose them with a compatible software like Photoshop, then choose a color for each, making your works charming and unique. This font, finely designed for cards, book titles, headlines or any artworks is the Inline version of Papercute . Just click on our foundry name to see it! You could follow us on our Instagram: instagram.com/sc.type We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Naïve is a serif handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. The three weights of this subtle Parisian hand-drawn font can be enhanced with two alternates fancy glyphs for each letter, the “Fantaisies”, to improve your designs and bring a more poetic and unusual feeling. We hope you will enjoy our work :) You could follow us on our Instagram: instagram.com/sc.type Merci beaucoup! Note: This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif, and a special Art Deco one. Just click on our foundry name to see them all!

A 1916 book entitled “Lettering” by Thomas Woods Stevens features a number of hand lettered alphabets; some plain, others unique. One of the more novel examples was designed by Harry Lawrence Gage and featured letters and numbers with a crude, wavy style described in the book as “adapted to wood block and linoleum cutting”. To keep the design as close to the original as possible, the image from the book page was auto-traced, with each character given just enough of a clean-up as to retain its own quirkiness while smoothing out any jagged lines and fixing some curves. From there, other necessary characters were created for the digital font, and the end result is Tenement JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Warren Chappell was the original designer of this handsome pen-formed roman typeface introduced by the Stempel Foundry in 1939. It was cast in Germany as Trajanus and named after the Roman emperor whose accomplishments are preserved on the Trajan Column in Rome. This version, Tribunus, retains the same rugged but handsome quality of the oldstyle original. A set of italic oldstyle figures are included with the italic roman. Tribunus is also available in the OpenType Std format. Some new characters have been added to this OpenType version. Advanced features currently work in Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress 7. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades.

Analogia is a digital interpretation of types used in the mid-18th century in books printed at Leuven by Martin van Overbeke. It is intended primarily for use in running text. The roman is businesslike, yet with a distinct personality; it has a generous x-height and is slightly condensed, though without appearing cramped. It is complemented by a more lively italic, which retains some irregularities in the angle of slant that are characteristic of the original. Analogia provides wide support for west, central, and east European languages that use the roman alphabet. Among its OpenType features are ligatures, small caps, several sets of numerals, contextual alternates, intelligent implementation of long ‘s’, and fractions. For more detail, please see the pdf available in the Gallery.

Birmingham New Street is the latest updated development of a typeface family inspired by the hand lettered title on a 19th century railway map. The map, prepared by the London and North Western Railway was headed "Birmingham and environs". New Street, meanwhile is the great 19th century commercial road linking the city centre of Birmingham with the train station of the same name. So, in a spirit of 19th century enterprise, we present "Birmingham New Street", a fun family of three display faces, laden with open type features and late Victorian charm, ideal for posters, book covers and any other high flown design you might have in mind.

Here at Comicraft we have seen the signs on the headline news, we have read the portents of things to come... yes, just as thunder is a sign of storm, just as pumpkins outside Ralph's on November the 1st are sure to be on sale, just as fresh produce becomes rotten, as sure as night turns to day, dark turns to gray, winter turns to spring and milk turns sour if you leave it out on the kitchen table overnight... Yes, here at Comicraft we know there's a signpost up ahead... a sign heading not into the twilight zone, but down a road of hope and hard work, a banner year, a red letter day, we know it's time to knuckle down, soldier on and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Well, we should probably pull ourselves up by our bootstraps BEFORE we soldier on, NEVERTHELESS, here it is -- not a soundbite, not an unfulfilled campaign promise -- SignLanguage is a font that makes the impossible possible, a font that cuts the taxes for 95% of American families, a font that closes down Gitmo and brings our troops home from Iraq. Senator Joe "Six Pack" Biden has described SignLanguage as articulate and bright and clean -- and a nice-looking font. In conclusion, Comicraft recommends you elect Sign Language.

Naïve Deco Sans is a layered sans serif handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. It is available in two versions: double or triple lines. The font is also decomposed in three different parts that you can use to improve your designs with multiple colors, giving to the font a deco touch. To do so, you can simply superimpose the parts with a compatible software like Photoshop and choose a color for each. This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif... Just click on our foundry name to see them all! We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Majorelle is a textured script font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. This finely balanced font was designed to be easy to read, and because it’s just as important, easy to use. Majorelle includes alternates and OpenType ligatures that you can use to improve your designs and make them look natural and friendly. With a lot of extras like swashes, keywords, or splatters, this organic script could be used for any project that needs a warm and informal touch. We hope you will enjoy our work :) You could follow us on our Instagram: instagram.com/sc.type Merci beaucoup! Note: You could perfectly combine Majorelle with other S&C Type’s fonts, such as Naïve or The Hand for example. Just click on our foundry name to check them out!

Dorriss girls were the dancing troop at the Moulin Rouge. I had the idea for this font while trying to come up with an alternative to beveling. I thought it would be interesting to create this sort of stepped effect as I've never really seen this treatment on a font before. Then my need to create chaos shows up again with Doriss Girls informal. A hand drawn take on the forms. This seemed like it would appear on an old art nouveau poster by the great Toulouse Lautrec, so there you have the genesis of this font. I've been somewhat compelled by the letterforms so I may expand and create a more normal version of this font someday with a range of weights. That would be the bees knees.

This font family based on vintage German book called “Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung.” by Merian, Maria Sibylla and printed in Frankfurt am Mayn in 1683. I manually redesign initials and regular style fonts from this folio. Also, I’ve added some modern symbols. I'm happy to present to you my new font family. Blumen font family has Initials and Regular styles. It's all you need to precisely imitate medieval style text. Use Drop cap style as a decorative element at the beginning of a paragraph or section, other part of the paragraph should be in Regular style. You’ll get: * Initials & Regular styles * Uppercase and lowercase * Multilingual support * Numbers * Symbols * Punctuation * Ligatures Please feel free to request any help you need: kaer.pro@gmail.com Best, Roman. Thank you!

Patmos Serif is a hand drawn serif font, inspired by the art of the cyrillic calligraphy, as well as the script of the Greek Orthodox art. The font contains Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and it is delivered in Opentype and Truetype format. It supports Central, Eastern, Western European, Baltic, Turkish, Greek and Russian languages. Patmos Serif has a variety of stylistic alternates and classes, titling altrenates, discretionary and standard ligatures and it is fully unicode-mapped (PUA encoded). The standard ligatures of the font are 4 decorative ornaments, that you may add at the end of a word and they match perfectly with the titling alternates. All you have to do is to make sure that ‘standard ligatures’ are activated in your application and then type "d" and a number from 1 to 4.

Naïve Inline is a layered serif handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. We designed three weights to assure a good readability whatever the size. They can be enhanced with five different interior patterns and three shadows to improve your designs and bring a charming and unusual feeling. To do so, you can simply superimpose the layers with a compatible software like Photoshop, the weight above and the pattern(s) below, then choose a color for each. This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif, and a special Art Deco one. Just click on our foundry name to see them all! We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Avaline is a super smart script font that was 100% handmade. Inspired by hand lettering doodles, the font family combines a mischievous spirit and cheerful style. Its playful letterforms come in Light, Regular, Bold and Sketch, and it comes with tons of language support and fun alternatives. Packed with OpenType features, Avaline comes together to make a truly authentic hand script family package. Its imperfect hand-drawn style is utilized by contextual alternatives – giving each character 3 subtle variations as well as special styles that appear automatically based on where they appear in a line of text. Stylistic alternatives offer completely different styles for all capital and some lowercase letters. Swashes provide numerous flourish options for ascending & descending letters as well as characters that start or end text lines. Small caps and titling alternatives provide great secondary text options, converting the script letterforms to more proportional small cap ones. Avaline also comes with a massive set of extras, including catchwords, swashes & flourishes, arrows, borders, line breaks, laurels and frames. Together they make for a truly organic script font bundle. Avaline seriously comes with hundreds of alternative options, to see everything you can do with the family and to learn how to access them, please visit http://tinyurl.com/htwhetr

Naïve Sans is a sans serif handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. We drew five finely balanced weights to assure a good readability whatever the size, with contrasting upstrokes and downstrokes to add an unusual, fancy touch. We also designed five shaked versions with different lowercases and uppercases, to improve your designs and bring a more organic and playful feeling. Mixed or not, both styles can be used for various purposes, such as headings, logos, posters, wedding invitations... This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif, and a special Art Deco one. Just click on our foundry name to see them all! We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Naïve Inline Sans is a layered sans serif handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. We designed three weights to assure a good readability whatever the size. They can be enhanced with five different interior patterns and three shadows to improve your designs and bring a charming and unusual feeling. To do so, you can simply superimpose the layers with a compatible software like Photoshop, the weight above and the pattern(s) below, then choose a color for each. This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif, and a special Art Deco one. Just click on our foundry name to see them all! We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Neon Bugler is a font based on the third logo created by Harry Warren in early 1975 for his sixth grade class newsletter, The Broadwater Bugler, at Broadwater Academy in Exmore, Virginia, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This font design has these principles as its parameters: The letters generally follow what would be natural stroke directions; no sharp corners, all gentle turns; no lines back up over each other, cross each other, or run into each other. All of this civility between the lines produces an unintentional but welcome neon quality about it. This font can have a variety of vibes depending on its context--it has a certain nostalgia to it, yet it also has a slick, clean, futuristic look. It can even be used in a semi-grunge setting. This is a very versatile font! And if you like this font, check out the new boxy version of it, Neon Bugler Squared! Digitized by John Bomparte.

Neon Bugler Squared is a soft, boxy version of Neon Bugler, which is a font based on the third logo created by Harry Warren in early 1975 for his sixth grade class newsletter, The Broadwater Bugler, at Broadwater Academy in Exmore, Virginia, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This font design has these principles as its parameters: The letters generally follow what would be natural stroke directions; no sharp corners, all gentle turns; no lines back up over each other, cross each other, or run into each other. All of this civility between the lines produces an unintentional but welcome neon quality about it. This font can have a variety of vibes depending on its context-it has a certain nostalgia to it, yet it also has a slick, clean, futuristic, sci-fi look. It can even be used in a semi-grunge setting. This is a very versatile font! Digitized by John Bomparte.

This is the Viking font that I developed based on the letters in the Irk Bitig book, which is written with the brush line of the old Turkish runic alphabet, the information below. It was interesting work. Irk Bitig or Irq Bitig (Old Turkic: 𐰃𐰺𐰴 𐰋𐰃𐱅𐰃𐰏‎), known as the Book of Omens or Book of Divination in English, is a 9th-century manuscript book on divination that was discovered in the "Library Cave" of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China, by Aurel Stein in 1907, and is now in the collection of the British Library in London, England. The book is written in Old Turkic using the Old Turkic script (also known as "Orkhon" or "Turkic runes"); it is the only known complete manuscript text written in the Old Turkic script. It is also an important source for early Turkic mythology.

Lapture is based on the Leipziger Antiqua by Albert Kapr, released in 1971 by the East German foundry Typoart. It has been extended and carefully redesigned by Tim Ahrens in 2002-05. The strong calligraphic characteristics are a result of the design process: "The size of the counters and the width of individual characters at small optical sizes were analysed with a steel pen while the letter shapes were designed in larger size with a specially trimmed reed pen. Sometimes the hand is more innovative than the head alone," says Kapr. A unique feature of this font is the introduction of gothic shapes into a latin typeface. "The basic concept is to string together narrow white hexagons as counters and inter-letter spaces, defined by vertical stems and triangular serifs. The interior spaces are at least as important as the strokes that make up the characters." Lapture is an ideal choice if a reference to gothic style is desired, as true black letter types are often too eye-catching and not as legible as latin fonts for unfamiliar readers. "The last few years have seen a number of very elegant typefaces based on the mellow and feminine renaissance model. However, sometimes we require a font that is strong and robust, harmonic yet rigid," says designer Tim Ahrens. JAF Lapture is provided in OpenType format. Each font contains more than 600 glyphs, including true small caps, nine sorts of figures, contextual and stylistic alternates and accented characters. This means that you only need to purchase one font whereas in other families you would have to buy two or three fonts in order to get the same. Technically, they follow the Adobe Pro fonts and provide the same glyph set and OpenType functionality. JAF Lapture Basic is provided in OpenType format. Each font contains the standard sets of both MacOS and Windows. In contrast to JAF Lapture they do not provide any advanced OpenType features and no extended glyph set.

FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style from between 1998 and 1908, but with much more warmth and improved legibility as well as a hint towards the warmer American grotesques. Later on, not just slanted styles, but a “proper” italic version was added inspired by the way Roman and Italic are distinguished in traditional serif faces. NEW: a specially created set of obliques were added in 2018 to give designers more design flexibility, for those looking for a less calligraphic look. In 2020 the family was extended with matching condensed weights. FF Real was originally conceived by Erik Spiekermann as one text weight and one headline weight to be used as the only faces in his biography ‘Hello I am Erik’, edited by Johannes Erler, published in 2014. While Spiekermann drew the alphabets, he passed on the font data to Ralph du Carrois and Anja Meiners who cleaned it up and completed it. In the meantime, FF Real has been extended to a family of two styles and 65 weights each. The design of FF Real is rooted in early static grotesques from the turn of the century. Several German type foundries – among them the Berlin-based foundries Theinhardt and H. Berthold AG – released such designs between 1898 and 1908. The semi-bold weight of a poster-size typeface that was lighter than most of the according semi-bolds in metal type at the time, gave the impetus to FF Real’s regular weight. In the words of Spiekermann, the historical example is “the real, non-fake version, as it were, the royal sans serif face“, thus giving his new typeface the name “Real” (which is also in keeping with his four-letter names, i.e. FF Meta, FF Unit). FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style, but with much more warmth and improved legibility. With a hint towards the warmer American grotesques, Spiekermann added those typical Anglo-American features such as a three-story ‘g’ and an ‘8’ with a more defined loop. To better distinguish characters in small text sizes, FF Real Text comes in old style figures, ‘f’ and ‘t’ are wider, the capital ‘I’ is equipped with serifs, as is the lowercase ‘l’. What’s more, i-dots and all punctuation are round.

FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style from between 1998 and 1908, but with much more warmth and improved legibility as well as a hint towards the warmer American grotesques. Later on, not just slanted styles, but a “proper” italic version was added inspired by the way Roman and Italic are distinguished in traditional serif faces. NEW: a specially created set of obliques were added in 2018 to give designers more design flexibility, for those looking for a less calligraphic look. In 2020 the family was extended with matching condensed weights. FF Real was originally conceived by Erik Spiekermann as one text weight and one headline weight to be used as the only faces in his biography ‘Hello I am Erik’, edited by Johannes Erler, published in 2014. While Spiekermann drew the alphabets, he passed on the font data to Ralph du Carrois and Anja Meiners who cleaned it up and completed it. In the meantime, FF Real has been extended to a family of two styles and 65 weights each. The design of FF Real is rooted in early static grotesques from the turn of the century. Several German type foundries – among them the Berlin-based foundries Theinhardt and H. Berthold AG – released such designs between 1898 and 1908. The semi-bold weight of a poster-size typeface that was lighter than most of the according semi-bolds in metal type at the time, gave the impetus to FF Real’s regular weight. In the words of Spiekermann, the historical example is “the real, non-fake version, as it were, the royal sans serif face“, thus giving his new typeface the name “Real” (which is also in keeping with his four-letter names, i.e. FF Meta, FF Unit). FF Real is a convincing re-interpretation of the German grotesque style, but with much more warmth and improved legibility. With a hint towards the warmer American grotesques, Spiekermann added those typical Anglo-American features such as a three-story ‘g’ and an ‘8’ with a more defined loop. To better distinguish characters in small text sizes, FF Real Text comes in old style figures, ‘f’ and ‘t’ are wider, the capital ‘I’ is equipped with serifs, as is the lowercase ‘l’. What’s more, i-dots and all punctuation are round.