My affection for Slab Serifs began in the early 1960s in Kansas City when Rob Roy Kelly was at the Kansas City Art Institute, teaching and writing his book on American Wood Type. I got to know him just well enough to gain access to his fabulous collection of wood type and wood type catalogs. Later, in the1970s, I tried to re-create a Nebiolo Egiziano for Roger Black at New West magazine. And again for Roger, in the 1980s, I designed a Slab Serif logo for Newsweek Magazine. Finally, in 2003, designed the Sutro Family. There were things I didn't like about it, so, over time, I’ve been adding some things and dressing it up a little. Sutro Shaded has existed for a few years as a one color, outlined, drop-shadowed display font. It seemed like it was just dying for a little color. I added five more fonts: Fill, Gradient, Hatching, Rules and HiLite. These fonts can be used in different combinations to achieve various effects. There is a downloadable SUTRO SHADED USER MANUAL PDF in the Gallery section for this family.

The Scriptuale family, which contains eight styles, is a contemporary upright calligraphic face. Designed by German designer Renate Weise in 2003, this family of typefaces speaks to the present, while at the same time reflecting on a lyrical past. The letterforms of the Scriptuale family are romanticized, they reference German calligraphic styles from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. For instance the design of Scriptuale's uppercase strays from the canon of classical proportion into romantic idealism. While the C and O are drawn according to the ancient quadratic proportions - almost twice as wide, optically, as the E or the L - the letter A is wider than would be expected, and the D narrower. These subtle differences introduce a different rhythm into text set in Scriptuale than Italic styles of calligraphy may offer. Scriptuale's Gs merit special notice: both the upper and lower case G lunge slightly forward, further enhancing the dynamic quality of the text. Also unique in Scriptuale's design is the lowercase width: the letterforms appear slightly condensed; they have large x-heights to compensate for this. In a delightful twist, the number 2's beak has been closed by drawing it full-circle, back into the stem: this references a style of letter design that was practiced, among other places, by artists from the old Klingspor foundry in Offenbach Germany. Typefaces constructed there easily captured the zeitgeist of the romantic period, but are less calligraphic than Scriptuale (e.g., Rudolf Koch's Koch Antiqua). A semi-serif face (like Prof. Hermann Zapf's Optima or Otl Aicher's Rotis Semi), some of Scriptuale's letters have serifs (D), and some do not (A). And although both the B and the E normally have the same "structure" on their left side, Weise has drawn them differently in Scriptuale. These strengthen the calligraphic-like quality of the family. Traces of the pen are easy to see in Scriptuale's design; it is a thoroughly calligraphic face. The eight typefaces in the Scriptuale family include Light, Regular, Semi Bold, and Bold weights. Each weight has a companion italic. Scriptuale is similar to one other contemporary calligraphic family in the Linotype portfolio, Anasdair , from British designer