Patrick Griffin's sister is a really annoying individual sometimes. Not only is she into theater, but she thinks everyone else in the universe is into it as well. So once in a while tickets to local or provincial Shakespearean plays get delivered to the mailbox or dropped off on the living room's table. And once in a while the tickets just cannot be "lost" or ignored. Three or four times a year, Patrick must be subjected to Olde Englishe Speake, umbrella dresses and squeezetops, featherhats and men in leggings, rhyme and treason, mortality and immorality, drama inflicted by some mama, and it never ends. Last June it was Hamlet. Again. Someone's (wink wink) idea of a good time. There he goes, the Prince of Denmark, holding that skull with the tips of his fingers like it's an alien egg. Alas, poor Yorick! Yadda yadda boop-bop-a-loo-bop. And so the idea of a font made of skulls was born. And what can we possibly be but conduits for such abhorring ideas? Where be our gibes, our songs, our flashes of merriment? Skullbats has more skulls than you'll ever see in your lifetime. At least we hope so. Scary skulls, funny skulls, evil skulls, strange skulls, pixel skulls, fiery skulls, surprised skulls, happy skulls, sad skulls, cow skulls, sketched skulls, profiled skulls, light bulb skulls, cartoon skulls, techno skulls, alien skulls, expressionist skulls, pirate skulls, horned skulls, and skulls with whacky headgear. You name it, it's there. There's even a disco skull there for you. We lost count at 90 skulls, but there's a few more in there. For a complete showing of the skulls in the font, consult the image in the MyFonts gallery. Patrick's sister didn't turn out to be so bad after all. After making this font, he couldn't help but notice that her skull was a bit small compared to his. So now he takes every opportunity to remind her that the size of the cranium is relative to what it houses. Her upcoming halloween present will be a shirt with guess-what on it. Shirts, now there's putting Skullbats to good use!

Louisa Fröhlich’s Lisbeth is the charming all-italic trailblazer that handles branding and text with internal vividness. With no roman style, it’s an italic-only family whose creation was guided by imagination instead of restrictive writing tools. Some type families aren’t sure what they want. Lisbeth proceeds with the utmost confidence on its own terms — it’s a feisty three-dimensional thespian amidst the cast of strait-laced characters you’re used to. With branding and magazine usage in mind, Lisbeth addresses the distinct challenges of text and display in a characterful way. The curves of the text weights show a soft angularity, emphasising the handwritten quality and the subtle twist inside the letters. The stroke’s carefully balanced contrast is more pronounced in the vibrant heavier weights but almost absent in the graceful structure of the thin weight. The angle of the letters is almost upright and the x-height is relatively large, so longer texts can be read comfortably and without effort. Lisbeth is slightly condensed and so uses a smaller area to efficiently impart much information. So if a type design can be thought of as the clothing letters wear, then Lisbeth is an energetic, freely flowing stroke wrapped around practical and efficient letter proportions. Another highlight of the family is the quirky high-contrast display style, easily catching every eye. The design concept of the twisted stroke shows at the extreme here and makes the letters dance a little on the page. Even though the shapes behave wildly, every letter is carefully balanced in itself so that the rhythmic repetition of the lettershapes results in an even and harmonic total picture. Lisbeth’s five text weights (from thin to bold) perform excellently in text settings, and its funky display style amps up the internal shimmer within each glyph. It supports numerous languages (Latin-A extended) and comes with ligatures and contextual alternates to produce beautiful typography. The character set contains proportional lining and oldstyle figures, tabular figures, subscripts, superscripts, and fractions. The complete Lisbeth family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Rabenau (formerly Lucinde), the distinctly warm and legible type family For 30 years the graphic designer Axel Bertram worked at creating his typefaces: He developed complete new alphabets for magazines and typewriters as well as for the constant demand for typefaces for use by commercial artists. He has developed wall charts the size of advertising posters as teaching aids for training commercial and graphic artists to write in a clean, classic cursive script. In the eighties he used the American Chyron computer to design a screen font for television. In the mid-nineties he discovered for himself the fabulous possibilities offered by the Fontographer font software program and explored them playfully. From the results of these experiments, Axel Bertram selected a design for further development. From 2003 onwards the calligrapher and type designer Andreas Frohloff collaborated with him on the further development and production of the 16 fonts of the Rabenau™ typeface family.The Rabenau font was inspired by many factors: From the fonts used as book covers to typewriter fonts and even printed material from England dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century (e.g. those used by the skilled printer William Bulmer), Rabenau's relatively high contrast is offset by some organic tapers, subtley rounded bracketed serifs, and a fairly generous x-height. This makes for a typeface that looks especially good in print. Its broad repertoire of weights and styles - Condensed, Poster, and Shadow - give it added versatility, and make it ideal for setting both display and text in the same typeface. Throughout the heavier weights, the contrast is maintained. The Poster Italic sparkles, and will make a fine display type for dynamic headlines, or logotypes. This family of sixteen fonts works beautifully together. All Rabenau font styles have a large set of ligatures and thus cover typical letter combinations in many European languages. Besides the standard ligatures for ff, fi and fl, letter connections are also available for tt, th and fj or ffi, ffl and ffk. The range is completed with lovely arched transitions for the characters st, ck or ct. The latter gives the font that certain something, both in continuous text and above all in headlines.

LTC Italian Old Style is not to be confused with the English Monotype font also called Italian Old Style, which is an earlier design from 1911 based on William Morris’s Golden Type that is based on Nicholas Jenson’s Roman face. Goudy went back to Jenson’s original Roman and other Renaissance Roman faces for his inspiration and the result is what many consider to be the best Renaissance face adapted for modern use. Bruce Rogers was one of the biggest admirers of Italian Old Style and designed the original specimen book for Italian Old Style in 1924 using his trademark ornament arrangement. These ornaments are now contained in the pro versions of the Roman styles—Regular Pro and Light Pro. With most digitizations of old metal typefaces, one source size is often used as reference (as was Goudy’s method for his own cuttings of his Village foundry types) so that all sizes refer to one set of original artwork. The original hot metal fonts made by Lanston Monotype (from Goudy’s drawings) and other manufacturers used two or three masters for different size ranges to have optimal relative weights—smaller type sizes would need proportionally thicker lines to not appear thin and larger sizes would require thinner lines to not appear to bulky. The variations in size ranges can also be affected by the size of the cutter head in making the master patterns. The light weights of LTC Italian Old Style were digitized from larger display sizes (14, 18, 24, 30, 36 pt) and the regular weights were digitized from smaller composition sizes (8,10,12 pt). The fitting for the regular weights is noticeably looser to allow for better setting at small sizes. Very few font revivals take this approach. Italian Old Style, originally designed by Frederic Goudy in 1924, was digitized by Paul Hunt in 2007. In 2013, it has been updated by James Grieshaber and is now offered as a Pro font. The newly expanded Pro font includes all of the original ligatures, plus small caps and expanded language coverage in all 4 Pro styles.