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.”

Here is another design by jewelry designer Max Joseph Gradl. Zier is a verb, meaning to decorate, adorn or ornament; zierlich means decorative, elegant, fine, neat. Schrift means type. Zierschrift, therefore, means decorative type. Gradl Zierschriften is a decorative type in the Art Nouveau style, rather than the more ornate Victorian style. Very modern, very young, with an elegant simplicity of form. Maria Makela, in her book The Munich Secession (Princeton 1990) suggests that the frequent use of simple, flowing, organic forms that was so characteristic of Art Nouveau was a reaction against the growing complexity and rapid urbanization that resulted from 19th century industrialization. In keeping with that reaction is the hand-drawn quality that intentionally rejects a mechanistic mathematic precision of line rendering. Gradl Zierschriften preserves that hand-drawn quality. Designed with upper case only, this face was obviously intended for short headlines only and is best set at 18 points or larger. However, I don't think you really get to experience the grace of this design until you get to 36 points or more. In the larger sizes, it is simply stunning. Please note that while most of the uppercase letterforms are repeated in the lower case for convenience, the ‘F’,‘L’ and ‘T’ are rendered a little narrower than in the uppercase to provide for visual variety. The font also includes a generous supply of ligatures for just the right fit ... and just for the fun of using them. Three common ways of inserting a ligature, accented letter or other special character are: 1) Key in “ALT”+“0”+[ascii #]; for example ALT+0233 for the e-acute, 2) From within your application program, go to the INSERT menu and look for something like “Insert Symbol,” (this function is NOT available in all application programs) & 3) Cut & Paste from the CHARACTER MAP display that has been supplied by every generation of Windows Operating System that I can recall (All Programs>Accessories>System Tools). Isn't it amazing what you can do? Don't be afraid to experiment. If you back up your work, you have very little to lose and a lot to gain. Not only do you acquire a new tool, but by the very process you have learned how to continually expand your knowledge and skill base.

A comprehensive and faithful rendition of one of the finest metal typefaces of the 20th century. Rudolf Koch designed Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift (initially conceived as “Missal Schrift”, and later referred to also as “Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch”) between 1919 and 1925 for the Gebr. Klingspor Type Foundry in Offenbach am Main. It is an impressive textura typeface, being sharp, elegant, spiky, sensitive and noble at the same time. Some of its most notable features have to do with the delicate decorations, the thin but subtly swelling lines that parallel or bridge strokes in the capitals, the hairline endings that terminate each stroke in both the capitals and the lowercase letters, the subtle joining of hairlines to thicker strokes, and the tension of some of the transitional curves. Koch’s original design included two sets of capitals (normal and condensed); alternates for a, d, e, r, s and z, plus long s; short and long flourished finial forms for f and t; thirty-five ligatures; and eighteen decorative pieces (Zierstücke). All of these features, plus several additional ones for modern use (including the usual standard characters for typesetting in modern Western languages, additional alternates and ligatures, plus carefully coded Opentype features), have been thoroughly implemented to the highest and most lively level of detail in the present font, in the hope that the past greatness of Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift will finally step into the modern OpenType realm. The main sources used during the font design process were several pages from a specimen book issued by the Gebr. Klingspor Type Foundry in 1927. Other sources were as follows: Bain, P., and Shaw, P. (Eds.) (1998), Blackletter: Type and National Identity, New York: Princeton Architectural Press (p. 43); Hendlmeier, W. (1994), Kunstwerke der Schrift, Hannover: Bund für Deutsche Schrift und Sprache (pp. 56-7); Kapr, A. (1983), Schriftkunst, Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst (p. 453); Kapr, A. (1993), Fraktur - Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften, Mainz: Verlag Hermann Schmidt (pp. 124-5); and Klingspor, K. (1949), Über Schönheit von Schrift und Druck, Frankfurt am Main: Georg Kurt Schauer (pp. 136-7). Some public and private comments by renowned designer and design historian Paul Shaw have also influenced both the design and the description of the present font. Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Oldtype “Wilhelm Klingspor Schrift” Font Page.