A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul

Smart Sans is a personal tribute to Leslie (Sam) Smart, the first type director to be hired by a major typesetting house in Canada. Smart was a twentieth century design pioneer who raised the standards of Canadian typography. Together with three of his peers, he established the first Type Directors Club in Toronto. After Smart's death in 1998, type designer Rod McDonald decided that something should be done to commemorate Smart's life and achievements. I had first thought of establishing a scholarship in Sam's name, but a typeface design soon replaced this idea," says McDonald. "Once I decided to design a typeface, however, it became a foregone conclusion that it would be a sans serif - for no other reason than that I loved the name Smart Sans." Two typefaces served as inspiration for McDonald's work. "Like thousands of designers, I'm keen on Matthew Carter's Helvetica Compressed series. And, when I was younger, I also loved Fred Lambert's Compacta," says McDonald. "I thought there might be a place for a small range that could take over from these 'old workhorses' and, in the process, bring a fresher look to the genre." McDonald drew three weights for the Smart Sans family, all ideally suited for setting attention-getting headlines and powerful display copy. The two-storied 'g' contributes to the design's lively personality, and the short 'r' helps maintain tight, even spacing. Smart Sans is the perfect homage to a great typographer, because it raises the bar on what to expect from condensed sans serif typefaces. Sam Smart would be pleased."

Adelphi is a geometric sans, redefined for the northern side of the English Channel. Typographic modernism was a late arrival in Britain — due partly to the Second World War and to the strong local type tradition. This delay provided for fruitful divergence, thus modernism was not adored in quite the same way as it had been in Germany and central Europe. It was instead rethought and repurposed against the backdrop of the bleak British weather and postwar social reform – a continental fashion statement reshaped into a more humanist variant. Likewise, when crafting Adelphi, Nick Job reimagined the constraints that defined the geometric sans as a genre. Whereas other typefaces seem overly bound by the rules, Adelphi feels relaxed and approachable. Elementary square and circular shapes are merely implied. A keen observer may notice that the uncomplicated letterforms occasionally reveal a subtle naïveté associated with early Grotesques. Brunel’s bridges and Harry Beck’s tube map spring to mind alongside the Bauhaus and Futura. But Adelphi is by no means nostalgic! It is a contemporary, comprehensive, and durable system with a pragmatic set of features. These include a wide array of weights, ‘uniwidth italics’, and variable extenders that go from tall and flat in Adelphi Text to short and sharp in Adelphi Display, with default Adelphi standing midway between these two extremes. You can set the extenders to your preference in the all-inclusive variable font or use one of the three static fonts that come packed together, priced as a single font. The pan-European support for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts already makes for a vast character set, but Adelphi takes things a step further by including alternate glyphs to satisfy the DIN1450 legibility norm, a range of ordinals that can be used to create specialist compositions in all three scripts and two kinds of fractions and arrows. Play with the alternates or use it as-is. Either way, this understated beauty will carry you through.

“Nusaibah” is the first name of an early convert woman to Islam, and the first female to fight in defense of the Islamic religion. Her full name is Nusaibah bint Kaíab Al-Maziniyyah and she took part in the Battles of Uhud, Hunain, Yamama and the Treaty of Hudaibiyah with Islam’s prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Nusaibah is best known for her brave and heroic feat during the Battle of Uhud - fought on March 19, 625 - when she entered the battle carrying a sword and a shield to protect the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) from the arrows of the enemy, and she accordingly received several wounds while fighting and these wounds were not healed until the following year. The prophet Muhammad (pbuh) mentioned her distinct courage by saying that in whichever direction he turned in the battlefield, he could see her defending and protecting him. "Nusaibah" is a modern, geometric, and headline Arabic display typeface. The main trait of this typeface is the novel symmetrical design of its letters which renders it as one of the modern stylish typefaces used for headlines and titles. This is can be noticed in its letters such as “Theh”, “Jeem”, “Ain”, “Sheen”, and others. Moreover, “Nusaibah” font has a character set which supports Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Latin letters and numerals with a limited range of specific Arabic and Latin ligatures. This font comes in two weights (i.e., regular and bold) with nearly 643 distinctive glyphs. Due to its geometric and linear design, “Nusaibah” typeface is appropriate for heading and titling in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu magazines, posters, and surfaces of different equipment. It is also elegantly suitable for signs, books’ covers, advertisement light boards, products’ and services’ names, and titles of flyers, pamphlets, novels, and books of children. “Nusaibah” typeface is one of the Arabic typefaces that has a novel and modern-day design which can be used in versatile graphic, typographic, and artistic works in different languages for diverse cultures.

Kangaroo FS Joey was the offspring of a project with Rudd Studio to develop a logotype for an online streaming TV service, in 2008. While under wraps, the secret project was code-named Kangaroo. The logotype led to a second project, to design a corporate typeface for the service. It was the first big project Fernando Mello had worked on with Jason Smith. “Like any designer who just joined a team, I was very excited about it, drawing and sketching lots of ideas. I remember Jason and I experimenting with lots of possibilities, for both the logo and the typeface.” Online As the font for a Spotify-style, internet-based service, FS Joey needed to be highly legible on-screen, including at very small sizes. There had to be a range of weights, and they’d have to work well in print, too. It was also important that it felt corporate, not too quirky, while still having a strong character of its own. Quirkiest “We designed three weights specifically for use on the Web,” says Jason Smith. “There was the usual fight between me and my team. I wanted at least one identifiable letter that was a quirk. As always I went straight for the lowercase ‘g’, and it was drawn numerous times with lots of variation. I got the quirkiest one accepted by the client.” But, later in 2009, the Competition Commission blocked Project Kangaroo, and Fontsmith were left with a couple of weights of an as yet unused font. From Kangaroo, Joey was born. A favourite “Straight away, people started to notice the typeface,” says Jason. “I can take the credit for pushing the art direction and standing up for the quirks. But it was Fernando who was the key to pulling it all together and adding his own distinct flavour. Now it’s one of my favourite designs in our library.” Fresh and friendly, geometric and energetic, Joey is available in five weights, all with italics, all finely-tuned for both screen and print.

Kangaroo FS Joey was the offspring of a project with Rudd Studio to develop a logotype for an online streaming TV service, in 2008. While under wraps, the secret project was code-named Kangaroo. The logotype led to a second project, to design a corporate typeface for the service. It was the first big project Fernando Mello had worked on with Jason Smith. “Like any designer who just joined a team, I was very excited about it, drawing and sketching lots of ideas. I remember Jason and I experimenting with lots of possibilities, for both the logo and the typeface.” Online As the font for a Spotify-style, internet-based service, FS Joey needed to be highly legible on-screen, including at very small sizes. There had to be a range of weights, and they’d have to work well in print, too. It was also important that it felt corporate, not too quirky, while still having a strong character of its own. Quirkiest “We designed three weights specifically for use on the Web,” says Jason Smith. “There was the usual fight between me and my team. I wanted at least one identifiable letter that was a quirk. As always I went straight for the lowercase ‘g’, and it was drawn numerous times with lots of variation. I got the quirkiest one accepted by the client.” But, later in 2009, the Competition Commission blocked Project Kangaroo, and Fontsmith were left with a couple of weights of an as yet unused font. From Kangaroo, Joey was born. A favourite “Straight away, people started to notice the typeface,” says Jason. “I can take the credit for pushing the art direction and standing up for the quirks. But it was Fernando who was the key to pulling it all together and adding his own distinct flavour. Now it’s one of my favourite designs in our library.” Fresh and friendly, geometric and energetic, Joey is available in five weights, all with italics, all finely-tuned for both screen and print.

A creative context 2003. Fontsmith was sharing a small, cold, whitewashed studio space in Northburgh Street, Clerkenwell. But things were on the up following prestigious custom type commissions for The Post Office and E4. “Slab serifs were on the brink of another revival, we could feel it,” says Jason Smith. “All we wanted to do was have a play with these slabs, go as far as we could within what was acceptable and readable.” “It wasn’t initially clear what was happening,” recalls Phil Garnham. “We were becoming very influenced by our surroundings, outside the studio space. We absorbed the essence and the designer grime of where we were.” Process Jason began by drawing stems on-screen. “The key aspect of the font is the upward bend of the leading shoulder serif, the way it kind of ramps up and then plummets back down the stem. “The regular and light characters are quite narrow – great for text but the bold is quite wide and chunky – better for headlines. I think ‘y’ is quite different for a slab design. We call it the Fontsmith ‘y’.” Promotion Fontsmith were determined to get FS Clerkenwell noticed. To launch the font, Ian Whalley, a designer friend of Fontsmith, captured words heard on the streets of Clerkenwell, set them in the new font and crafted a small book of typographic conversations. It was a first for Fontsmith. “I think that’s part of why this font has been so successful,” says Phil. “It really does embody the spirit of the area, as a special place for design, arts and crafts. And designers love that.” Contemporary twist FS Clerkenwell, based on influences in and around this part of London with a rich tradition of printing and design, mixes tradition with creation. Old-fashioned values meet new-school trends. Its quirky, contemporary character lends an edge to headlines, logotypes and any large-size text.

A handwritten ”font for technicians“ from ca. 1900. Very geometrical, rigid forms borrowed from the typical characteristics of Jugendstil / Art Nouveau. This script is found in an old magazine which was issued sometime in the years shortly before WWI. The original copy, produced by means of a galvanized plate, is just 7 centimeters wide. It served as the model for technical professions in which, at that time, the captions of drawings were still done by hand. ingoFonts has not only digitized this beautiful typeface, we have also extended it to a whole family. In »Maier’s Alte Nr. 8« special attention was given to ensure the ”uneven“ edges, typical of handwritten script, remained effectively noticeable even in the digitized form. As a result, this ”technical“ font retains a handmade touch, while »Maier’s Neue Nr. 8« is the clean version with exact contours. The Art Nouveau forms, which are characteristic for the period of origin around the turn of the century around 1900, look especially pretty. The high degree of abstraction also seems strange in Maier's No. 8, especially when the age of the original is known. It is generally assumed that it was not until the Bauhaus in the late 1920s that such "modern" typefaces were created. Maier's No. 8 is a generation older! So many of today's supposedly "ultramodern" typefaces look quite old in comparison. In addition to the original two weights, Light and Bold, the Maiers Neue Nr. 8 got a regular and a extra-bold weight. Furthermore, the Neue is also available in italics. Although this is only a slanted version, unlike common practice, it is inclined to the left. Maier’s Nr. 8 Pro is suitable for all European languages. It includes ”Latin Extended-A,“ for Central and Eastern Europe incl. Turkish, and even Cyrillic and Greek, too. The font includes several stylistic alternates as well as a number of ligatures.

Madison Street is a font family with 8 fabulously fun typefaces! Eliza Gwendalyn & Jim Lyles of Studioways have teamed up with Spencerian calligrapher Elaina DeBoard to create a classic pointed pen calligraphy font. From its ornamental monograms, to its variety of complimentary text styles, and to its Madison Street Pro, with its elegant stylistic swashes and OpenType goodies, there is a font for every designer. Enjoy the sleek Madison Street Sans, Serif or Script, paired with the Ornaments font, complete with ornate monograms, or use each typeface on its own! Madison Street Pro has all the OpenType bells and whistles. The Ligature feature automatically substitutes beginning and ending letterforms, as well as 100 ligatures. Turn on the Swash feature for elegantly sweeping swash lowercase forms. Enable Stylistic Alternates for even more variations. There are also 10 Style Sets to chose from. And many more OT features! Madison Street is a basic version of the Pro font, intended for users who do not have OpenType savvy applications. Madison Street Stylistic is also a basic version of the Pro font, intended for users who do not have OpenType savvy applications. It has stylistically different ascenders and descenders. Madison Street Swash is intended to be used with the basic fonts, Madison Street and Madison Street Stylistic. It has lowercase beginning and ending swash glyphs and cannot be used to set text by itself. Madison Street Sans, Serif, and Script are text fonts modeled after the handwriting of Elaina. They are intended to be complimentary to any of the script fonts. However, you'll need to set them at a smaller point size (about 1/3 the size) in order to get the preferred scale and weight. Finally, the hairline weight of the Madison Street script fonts is very thin, and at small sizes up to 40 pt, you may notice some breaking up when printing to desktop printers. To remedy this, we recommend outline stroking the text a small amount (.1 -.3 value). this should improve the output without adding to much weight overall.

Based on a specimen of an obscure and uncredited old face called Kitterland, Hamlet is one of those curiosities hardly ever noticed in the world of modern fonts, the kind that infuses a variety of historic Blackletter and calligraphy traits in an otherwise Roman alphabet. Such typefaces, what few of them exist, are almost always classified by typophiles as traditional decorative Roman alphabets. We beg to differ. We think such hybrids are fascinating enough to deserve a classification of their own. And we think today's aspiring letterers and type designers would benefit from paying special attention to this kind of hybrid alphabet, not only because it has much more hand than machine in it, but also because it is a prime example of how to succeed in mixing different lettering techniques into one self-contained and distinctly functional alphabet. As in any efficient mixture of lettering methods, Hamlet ended up with characters that are uniquely its own, such as the cupped A, M, V, W and Y, the very luscious and inviting curves on the arms of E, F, L and T, both single- and double-story forms of the a, and the humblest, friendliest g and y ever. A dozen alternate characters are sprinkled throughout the character set, so check out the map for a few pleasant surprises. We also made the Handtooled and Headstone styles because we thought these friendly forms were just crying out for such treatments. The Handtooled version turned out quite lovely, if we may say so ourselves, perhaps even better than the main font. The Headstone version is available as a free bonus to those who purchase the complete Hamlet package. All Hamlet styles come with lining figures as well as old style ones. Hamlet comes in all popular font formats. The OpenType fonts contain push-button swapping alternates and figures, which come in handy in software programs that support this kind of thing.

Classic Grotesque by Rod McDonald: a traditional font with a modern face. The growing popularity of grotesque typefaces meant that many new sans serif analogues were published in the early 20th century. Setting machines were not compatible with each other but all foundries wanted to offer up-to-date fonts, and as a result numerous different typeface families appeared that seem almost identical at first glance and yet go their separate ways with regard to details. One of the first fonts created with automatic typesetting in mind was Monotype Grotesque®. Although this typeface that was designed and published by Frank Hinman Pierpont in 1926 has since been digitalised, it has never achieved the status of other grotesque fonts of this period. But Monotype Grotesque was always one of designer Rod McDonald’s favourites, and he was overjoyed when he finally got the go-ahead from Monotype in 2008 to update this “hidden treasure”. The design process lasted four years, with regular interruptions due to the need to complete projects for other clients. In retrospect, McDonald admits that he had no idea at the beginning of just how challenging and complex a task it would be to create Classic Grotesque™. It took him considerable time before he found the right approach. In his initial drafts, he tried to develop Monotype Grotesque only to find that the result was almost identical with Arial®, a typeface that is also derived in many respects from Monotype Grotesque. It was only when he went back a stage, and incorporated elements of Bauer Font’s Venus™ and Ideal Grotesk by the Julius Klinkhardt foundry into the design process, that he found the way forward. Both these typefaces had served as the original inspiration for Monotype Grotesque. The name says it all: Classic Grotesque has all the attributes of the early grotesque fonts of the 20th century: The slightly artificial nature gives the characters a formal appearance. There are very few and only minor variations in line width. The tittles of the ‘i’ and ‘j’, the umlaut diacritic and other diacritic marks are rectangular. Interestingly, it is among the uppercase letters that certain variations from the standard pattern can be found, and it is these that enliven the typeface. Hence the horizontal bars of the “E”, “F” and “L” have bevelled terminals. The chamfered terminal of the bow of the “J” has a particular flamboyance, while the slightly curved descender of the “Q” provides for additional dynamism. The character alternatives available through the OpenType option provide the designer with a wealth of opportunities. These include a closed “a”, a double-counter “g” and an “e” in which the transverse bar deviates slightly from the horizontal. The seven different weights also extend the scope of uses of Classic Grotesque. These range from the delicate Light to the super thick Extrabold. There are genuine italic versions of each weight; these are not only slightly narrower than their counterparts, but also have variant shapes. The “a” is closed, the “f” has a semi-descender while the “e” is rounded. Its neutral appearance and excellent features mean that Classic Grotesque is suitable for use in nearly all imaginable applications. Even during the design phase, McDonald used his new font to set books and in promotional projects. However, he would be pleased to learn of possible applications that he himself has not yet considered. Classic Grotesque, which has its own individual character despite its neutral and restrained appearance, is the ideal partner for your print and web project.