With the clear, simple elegance of its sans serif forms and the warmly human touches of its tapering stems, the Optima family has proved popular around the world. In 2002, when it was finally possible to produce digital alphabets without technical limitations and compromises, and more than fifty years after the first sketches, an expansion and redesign of the Optima family was completed and released as Optima nova. Hermann Zapf and Japanese type designer, Akira Kobayashi, collaborated on the project, which included re-working of the existing weights and the addition of several new weights: small caps, old style figures, light, heavy, and condensed. The original Optima was never manufactured with a real italic, only an oblique version of the roman. Optima nova has a complete range of beautifully designed real italics; the new italic forms, of the e, f and g are especially notable. The titling face includes capital letters with special and unusual letter combinations and ligatures, making it an excellent choice for headlines, logos and advertising purposes. Optima continues to be an all-purpose typeface; and Optima nova works for just about anything from book text to signage. Optima Nova® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Rasteroids Monospace is a typographic flashback to computing of the mid 1980s, when 9-pin dot-matrix printers were the state of the art, and most home computer displays were TVs hooked up to RF modulators. Rasteroids not only captures the dot-matrix printer look, but recreates the rasterized appearance of text on those lower-resolution monitors. Because of its fixed character width, Rasteroids Monospace is intended for use in accents or small areas of copy rather than long documents.

Aphrosine is a font based on pointed pen script. A huge lot of alternatives and smart OpenType features allow it to look almost indistinguishable from real live handwriting. Aphrosine is something between handwriting and calligraphy: it took too much effort for being “just handwriting” but lacks seriousness and regularity comparing to true calligraphic fonts. That’s why it was called after a peculiar character from a children’s book: a witch who was very fond of dressing, makeup and writing letters. Aphrosine has three faces. But unlike most other type families, the glyphs from one face do not match exactly the glyphs from another one. The faces are based on writing with different nibs but by the same hand. The type is designed by Alexandra Korolkova and Alexander Lubovenko and released by ParaType in 2015.