Geometric font inspired by shop signs in 4 styles Anisette has sprouted as a way to test some ideas of designs. It has started with a simple line construction (not outlines as usual) that can be easily expanded and condensed in its width in Illustrator. Subsequently, this principle of multiple widths and extreme weights permitted to Jean François Porchez to have a better understanding with the limitations associated with the use of MultipleMaster to create intermediate font weights. Anisette built around the idea of two widths capitals can be described as a geometric sanserif typeface influenced by the 30s and the Art Deco movement. Its design relies on multiple sources, from Banjo through Cassandre posters, but especially lettering of Paul Iribe. In France, at that time, the Art Deco spirit is mainly capitals. Gérard Blanchard has pointed to Jean Francois that Art Nouveau typefaces designed by Bellery-Desfontaines was featured before the Banjo with this principle of two widths capitals. The complementarity between the two typefaces are these wide capitals mixed with narrow capitals for the Anisette while the Anisette Petite – in its latest version proposes capitals on a square proportions, intermediate between the two others sets. Of course, the Anisette Petite fonts also includes lowercases too. Anisette Petite, a geometric font inspired by shop signs in 4 styles So, when Jean François Porchez has decided to create lowercases the story became more complicated. His stylistic references couldn’t be restricted anymore to the French Art-déco period but to the shop signs present in our cities throughout the twentieth century. These signs, lettering pieces aren’t the typical foundry typefaces. Simply because the influences of these painted letters are different, not directly connected to foundry roots which generally follow typography history. The outcome is a palette of slightly strange shapes, without strictly not following geometrical, mechanical and historical principles such as those that typically appear in typefaces marketed by foundries. As an example, the Anisette Petite r starts with a small and visible sort of apex that no other similar glyphs such as n or m feature, but present at the end of the l and y. The famous g loop is actually inspired by Chancery scripts, which has nothing to do with the lettering. The goal is of course to mix forms without direct reports, in order to properly celebrate this lettering spirit. This is why the e almost finishes horizontally as the Rotis – and the top a which must logically follow this principle and is drawn more round-curly. This weird choice seemed so odd to its designer that he shared his doubts and asked for advise to Jeremy Tankard who immediately was reassuring: “Oddly, your new top a is fine, it brings roundness to the typeface, when the previous pushes towards Anisette Petite to unwanted austerity.” The Anisette Petite, since its early days, is a mixture of non-consistent but charming shapes. Anisette, an Art Déco typeface Anisette Petite Club des directeurs artistiques, 46e palmarès Bukva:raz 2001

The Yorkten family of fonts is back with another satisfying addition to its clean style. The rhythmic, new Yorkten Slab expands Yorkten’s basic, contemporary form of geometric and simple lines and adds a level of self-confidence and elegance to your work. Slab's basic structure is compact. It’s more condensed than most slabs, so you can save space yet still have clear, consistent readability. The added serifs create a fresh text color, too, that syncs well with the new font’s inherited features. Like its predecessor, Yorkten Slab offers its natural, simple structure with more than fifty fonts in the family and three different widths - extended, normal or condensed. Each group has eight weights from a lean thin to tough looking black, giving Yorkten Slab plenty of bragging rights among its peers. And like Yorkten, too, Yorkten Slab’s greatest value is the ability of its members to work easily and well together and with a variety of other fonts. Yorkten Slab ensures that you have the necessary tools for any challenge. In combination with its superior functionality and excellent readability, this versatile font can be effectively used for many print and screen operations: e-books, applications, headlines, banners, posters and websites to name a few options. Don’t wait any longer. Start tapping the possibilities that Yorkten Slab offers your work.

Sabine is an Arabetic type design with a calligraphic flavor. It follows the guidelines of the Mutamathil Taqlidi type style with one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined in Unicode Standards version 5.1, and one additional, final-position, glyph for each Arabic letter that is normally connected with other letters from both sides in traditional cursive Arabic strings. Sabine employs variable x-height values. It includes all required Lam-Alif ligatures and uses ligature substitutions and selected marks positioning but it does not use any other glyph substitutions or forming. Text strings composed using types of this family are non-cursive with stand-alone isolated glyphs. Tatweel (or Kashida) glyph is a zero width space. Keying it before any glyph will display that glyph isolated form. In Sabine Kashidah, Irsal, and Tasmim keying Tatweel (shift J) after certain glyphs will replace it with a long stroke glyph. In Sabine Tasmim, keying it a second time will replace glyph with a final form swash (Irsal) glyph. In Sabine Irsal all final forms are swash glyphs. Keying Tatweel before Alif Lam Lam Ha will display the Allah ligature. Sabine family includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals; all required diacritic marks, Allah ligature, in addition to standard English keyboard punctuations and major currency symbols. Fonts are available in regular and italic styles.

Sada is a text font designed with hand held devices and ebooks in mind. Glyphs are designed to be larger than usual and very clear with soft visual characteristics and many traditional Arabic calligraphic transitional features incorporated to improve legibility. The word “sada” means “echo” in Arabic. Even though Sada is a cursive style font it offers clearly distinguished and visually unified letter shapes in every position of a word. Sada supports all Arabetic scripts covered by Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks, including support for Quranic texts. It comes with three weights, regular, bold, and ultra-light. Each weight has normal and left-slanted “italic” styles. The script design of this font family follows the Arabetics Mutamathil Taqlidi style and utilizes varying x-heights. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph per every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter in an Arabic text. Sada includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Sada’s soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are only selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar lower or upper positions to emphasize they are not part of letters. Kashida is zero width glyph.

‘Skiart Serif Mini’ is now available online. Originally inspired by the san serif font ‘Skia’ by Mathew Carter for Apple. ‘Skiart’ was designed to feel more like a serifed font, but without any serifs. It took a step between sans serif and serif fonts. Next on the path towards a serif font comes Skiart Serif Mini, with tiny serifs added. This is a true serif font, all be it on the small side. It remains fully readable and feels as clean and normal as any of the best body copy serifs, and yet still has the strong solid bones of all the other Skiart font familys. If compared to one of the more commonly used serifs like ‘Times New Roman’, the ‘Skiart Serif Mini’ lowercase is more open with a taller x-height, increasing its readability and friendliness. The serifs are smaller and less distracting. They are not pretending to be ligatures. Where ‘Times’ makes its p q b d forms out of a barely touching oval and stem, the ‘Serif Mini’ forms are much more firmly attached, appearing clearly as single letters. The standard setting for the g’s are round single storied, (the italic a’s are also), feeling warmer and more inviting in the ‘Serif Mini’ font. Much more friendly than the stuffy double storied versions in fonts such as ‘Times’ etc.

ION A is a part of the ION superfamily, which consists of 3 families: condensed (ION A), normal (ION B) and wide (ION C), each having a compelling range of 10 weights. Styles Thin to Black have 436 glyphs supporting more than 70 Latin-based languages and the three heaviest weights, named U1, U2 and U3 have 94 basic glyphs. ION glyphs are based on the classic 7-segment display, but for readability and aesthetic reasons, some alphabetic characters don't follow this matrix strictly. In case you like things in order, don't worry, there's a stylistic set that replaces all characters with their strict alternatives. The special characters, such as #, @ or % are composed of special segments, but are designed to fit seamlessly within the whole character set. ION was designed with the needs of contemporary graphic design in mind. There are alternative characters, discretionary ligatures, slashed zero, superior & inferior numbers, fractions, ordinals and three handy stylistic sets. The ten styles of ION A are accompanied with a special 11th style called Cells, allowing you to design a special underlying layer of black or outlined cells. This way you can create various containers and boxes for your text, highlight what's important or go wild and draw a space invader, using the cells as building blocks. Learn more about the OpenType features and Cells at www.urtd.net/ion.