Youthful Fontsmith received a brief to develop a font that would form part of the broadcast identity for the UK’s first digital Freeview channel – E4. It needed to work seamlessly in text and display, both in print and on-screen, and please the eye of the target audience, 18-34-year-olds. So, young, fresh and informal. No problem. Except for one thing: the timing. Daughter As he worked on FS Maja, Jason Smith was occupied by another imminent deadline: the birth of his third child. The pressure was mounting, but rather than let it get to him, Jason embraced the challenge and made light of the tension, fashioning a bright, bubbly, entertaining type with a personality made for memorable headlines. Beautifully random FS Maja’s soft, rounded shapes and assured, fluent lines encompass lots of notable features that contribute to its warm, fun-loving personality, including: a very large x-height; a short, rounded serif to allow for close spacing and give texture to body text; a slight convexity, or bulge, in the stroke terminals; a calligraphic fluidity in the entry to the down-stroke of most lowercase letters; open, generous curves, especially in the “B”, “P” and “R”; and a “w” made of two “u”s.

This handmade looking brush font is inspired by the titles of the 1959 movie, Imitation of Life, by prolific film titles artist, Wayne Fitzgerald. The 'pastiche' of the font's name derives from the 'imitation' of the film's title, and from the imitation of the brush. OpenType enabled software can make Pastiche Brush feel even more handmade. There are alternates for every letter and number, and most punctation marks and symbols. Every letter has at least one alternate glyph, and more commonly used (in English at least) letters have up to three, so when contextual alternates are enabled, the font automatically cycles through glyphs in a pseudo-random manner. This means no double letter combination will ever contain two identical glyphs. Not only this, but it's highly likely the same word will look different elsewhere in the sentence. The contextual alternates feature also takes care of start and end forms of letters, for an even more handmade feel. This is a great font for headlines in fashion glossies, food packaging where an organic look is desirable, posters, perfume bottles, wine bottles... the list goes on. And with extensive language support, it's going to be a very usable addition to your display font repertoire.

In parts of Africa, in the poorer, rural and peri-urban areas there are many small shops or convenience stores which are called "Spaza" shops. The owners of these shops often don't have access to commercial signwriting and write their signs themselves. The font "Spaza" is based on these hand-lettered signs. This lettering has a refreshing simplicity and spontaneity, yet retains great legibility. In the font "Spaza", there are three styles: - Spaza Regular - with normal upper and lower case; - Spaza Small Caps - in which the lower case is a true "small caps" and not a shrunken version of the upper case (generated by the operating system); - Spaza Double Caps - in which the lower case characters have been replaced by an alternate set of capital letters. The font thus contains two sets of differing upper case characters. You can use characters from both these sets to give a true feeling of randomness because if the same character occurs twice in a word, different versions of the character can be used. Spaza can be used with great effect in a great variety of applications such as advertisements, flyers, posters and in magazine pages. Spaza contains a full character set and has been carefully spaced and kerned.

Mr Orange is a typeface based on our handwritten letters which we used in some of our books H.O.U.S.E, D.E.S.I.G.N and Who Eats Whom. It has up to three alternate glyphs for each character, even for every diacritic letter. We do use our fonts in our books so we know that switching alternate glyphs can be a pain in the ass. Thats why we’ve created a very cool Contextual Alternates feature. It automatically sets alternate glyphs depending on frequency of appearance of the same character. The script doesn’t throw random glyphs. It’s checks if lets say letter “A” appears more then once in a sequence of characters. For example in the word “ANAKONDA”, the third “A” and the second “N” would be changed to glyphs from first stylistic set, the second “A” would also be changed but to glyph from second stylistic set. We’ve designed different rules for basic characters and different for diacritics and punctation. It really works great but of course you can always fine tune it by hand. This option has one obvious advantage for web fonts. Browsers that support OpenType calt feature will be able to display alternate characters. And since you can’t put by hand alternate glyphs on your website this is the only way to use them.