Roundabout is a typeface that is extracted from an ellipse shape. Each and every character started at the same geometrical figure. By cutting it up in sections, twist and rotate the separate characters could be build. The ellipse provides this typeface with evident and smooth looking features. The name Roundabout is misleading, an ellipse is not round. But the word Roundabout has a nice ring to it and it seems to fit this typeface perfectly. The Roundabout as we know it is a place where the traffic circles. Sometimes in the greater metropoles it jams like clotting veins. Various exits are presented for those who know which way to go, for those who don’t it seems an eternal treadmill. Unlike my typeface, that seems rather careless, light weighted and knows her way around. A roundabout in a child’s mind is a playful carrousel or a merry go round. Merry go round has the sweetest sound and a match is found. My Roundabout is a joyful, optimistic and open typeface, which can be used over and over and over again for many or any purposes. ----- Roundabout ist eine Schrift die aus der Form einer Ellipse entstand. So teilen alle einzelnen Zeichen denselben geometrischen Ursprung. Durch das zerteilen, verdrehen und verflechten der elliptischen Grundform konnten die separaten Zeichen so geformt werden, dass sie einen klaren und weichen Charakter erhielten. Der Name Roundabout scheint auf den ersten Blick etwas irreleitend - ist eine Ellipse ja nicht wirklich rund. Er hat aber einen schönen Klang und doch eine tiefe Verbindung zu dieser Schrift. In unseren Gedanken ist Roundabout ein Kreisverkehr: Manchmal, in großen Städten, kann er blockieren, so wie eine verstopfte Ader. Verschiedenste Auswege zeigen sich denen, die ihr Ziel kennen; für alle anderen erscheint dieser Ort wie eine endlose Schlaufe. Dieses Bild widerspricht dem Auftreten meiner Schrift, welche eher sorglos und leichtfüßig ist; sie kennt ihren Weg. In dem Kopf eines Kindes jedoch ist ein Roundabout ein verspieltes Karussell, ein „merry go round“. ,,Merry go round“ klingt bezaubernd und so fiel die Entscheidung. Meine Roundabout ist eine fröhliche, optimistische und offene Schrift, die immer und immer wieder genutzt werden kann, zu jedem erdenklichen Zweck.

In comparison to the powerful and commanding original, Sancoale Gothic is a more sober version of Sancoale. The medium contrast between thick and thin strokes makes for a typeface that stands out with striking clarity in longer texts, yet is very readable. This new addition to the Sancoale family is a perfect alternative if you want to use a different style than the original family. Using the utmost care and restraint, the designer strove to avoid overbearing futurism in favor of a typeface with clean lines and clear forms. Show your customers the world with Sancoale Gothic, a versatile sans with a wide range of styles, from delicate thins to bold, hefty weights that dominate the page and screen with confidence and futuristic flair. A fresh, friendly voice for all kinds of uses, from corporate statements to fashion, Sancoale Gothic is a versatile sans with a wide range of styles, from delicate thins to bold, hefty weights that dominate the page and screen with confidence and futuristic flair. Sancoale Gothic has a distinct personality, which allows you to create a wide range of projects, including posters and websites. The Sancoale Gothic fonts come in many varieties, so you can go with a light or thick weight, depending on what fits your project best. With their sweeping curves, the heavy fonts are meant for huge headings on posters and websites. The Sancoale Gothic family is made up of 48 distinct styles, with 660 glyphs and supports 70 languages, allowing you to communicate with your customers all over the world. Small Capitals and other OpenType features abound! The design is sleek with no stems or spurs in the default character set, but OpenType alternates have alternates with stems. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. The superfamily offers an array of optical sizes, contrasting weights, and contrasting optical sizes to discover the right balance, contrast, and optical size for your design. Prepare to be blown away by Sancoale Gothic’s smooth curves and captivating allure. Sancoale Gothic is perfect for both a contemporary and forward looking style. Sancoale Gothic is both practical and unique, in a standalone capacity or with the companion Sancoale fonts. Use it to make an impact today.

Periódico (newspaper in Spanish), was originally commissioned by the Spanish daily newspaper ABC. Inspired by old Spanish typographic engravings, mostly from the second half of the 18th Century, we picked out the most relevant details of Spanish typography as the source of that inspiration, and instead of making a revival or an interpretation of these models, we started from scratch to create a truly original font family. The goal was to achieve a very distinctive family, functional and versatile at the same time, and reminiscent of old Spanish typography. Although we have borrowed many details from the old Spanish typography, like the nail, which is present in the letters U, G, or J, which we worked and evolved in order to be applied on other letters, we have also left behind several others. One example is the tilde of the ñ engraved by Gerónimo Gil, a very distinctive element of Spanish typography that was intentionally omitted for being too atypical to be used in a contemporary font.  The letters a and g are probably the most distinctive of the Periódico family. The shape of the bowl in the letter a, with the top arch in diagonal position, is very characteristic of old Spanish types. In Periódico, we emphasized this detail by applying it to many other letters (such as g, j, and t) up to a point that it became the leitmotiv of this family. The formal finish of serifs and terminals is something that gives great personality to any typeface, so we came up with plenty of alternatives in order to find the exact shape we wanted: sober, elegant, and contemporary. Even though the serifs are geometric, the upper terminals have a curve with a dynamic very similar to the arch in the a or the notch in the j. The terminals in the capitals follow the same style, but, in this case, the inspiration comes from Pradell’s Missal, which on the other hand has been influenced by the types engraved by Johann Michael Fleischman in the Netherlands. Eighteenth-Century types were mostly used for printing books. Therefore, they had very generous proportions (large ascendents and descendants) and high contrast, but today, these characteristics do not work well in newspapers because of the worldwide demand for more space-saving fonts. The adaptation of the type’s proportions to be used for a newspaper was one of the most interesting parts of the project, specially the time taken to find the perfect balance between the x height\ and legibility. Periódico is presented in 30 different styles, for a total of 30 fonts—10 for text (from Light to Bold) and 20 for display sizes (from Thin to Ultra Black); this family results in an extensive system capable of solving all the needs of a large publication.

Copihue is the newest font from the foundry of Juan Pablo De Gregorio. A Sans-Serif with some humanist hints, it displays simple and subtle yet sober, vivid strokes. This font’s personality unfolds itself as long as we are reading it. The aim of Copihue is neither to be as neutral as a grotesque font nor to become as predictable as a fully geometric typeface can be. This typography wants to appeal to the likes of designers who prefer all-rounder fonts, the ones who fit well in most layouts. With this purpose in mind, Juan Pablo studied elements of different typefaces and styles to cast them into Copihue, which boasts a personality that makes it a great fit for different compositions and designs. Copihue has a slanted version with "real italics". These italics are slightly more condensed than the regular version, in order to give it a different text texture. The typeface has 9 weights, ranging from “hair” to “black”, and two versions: "regular" and "italic". Its 18 files contain 749 characters with ligatures, alternates, small caps, oldstyle and tabular numbers, fractions, and case sensitive figures. It supports 219 Latin-based languages, spanning through 212 different countries. Copihue supports this languages: Abenaki, Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Amis, Anuta, Aragonese, Aranese, Aromanian, Arrernte, Arvanitic (Latin), Asturian, Atayal, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Bemba, Bikol, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Chickasaw, Cimbrian, Cofán, Corsican Creek,Crimean Tatar (Latin),Croatian, Czech, Dawan, Delaware, Dholuo, Drehu, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian Filipino, Finnish, Folkspraak, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Gooniyandi, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut)Guadeloupean, Creole, Gwich’in, Haitian, Creole, Hän, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hopi, Hotc?k (Latin), Hungarian, Icelandic, Ido, IgboI, locano, Indonesian, Interglossa, Interlingua, Irish, Istro-Romanian, Italian, Jamaican, Javanese (Latin), Jèrriais, Kala Lagaw Ya, Kapampangan (Latin), Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Karelian (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kiribati, Kirundi, Klingon, Ladin, Latin, Latino sine Flexione, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Manx, M?ori, Marquesan, Megleno-Romanian, Meriam Mir, Mirandese, Mohawk, Moldovan, Montagnais, Montenegrin, Murrinh-Patha, Nagamese Creole, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Ngiyambaa, Niuean, Noongar, Norwegian, Novial, Occidental, Occitan, Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Oshiwambo, Ossetian (Latin), Palauan, Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Potawatomi, Q’eqchi’, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Rotokas, Sami (Inari Sami), Sami (Lule Sami), Sami (Northern Sami), Sami (Southern Sami), Samoan, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Seri, Seychellois Creole, Shawnee, Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Slovio (Latin), Somali, Sorbian (Lower Sorbian), Sorbian (Upper Sorbian), Sotho (Northern), Sotho (Southern), Spanish, Sranan, Sundanese (Latin), Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tokelauan, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Tzotzil, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Wallisian, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Warlpiri, Wayuu, Welsh, Wik-Mungkan, Wiradjuri, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Yindjibarndi, Zapotec, Zulu, Zuni.

Babylon was a civilisation that stretched from Bagdad to the Persian Gulf. There is an Old and new Babylonia, the era of Babylon civilization and the biblical Babylon. The oldest scriptures to be found since the rise of civilisation are Babylonic. The Christian, the Jewish and the Arabic culture find its origin in the Middle East. And share more or less the same history, the same roots and DNA. One people, but in reality a melting pot of close related cultures whom could not be more far apart, hostile and suspicious towards each other. An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. One could say this disagreement is still alive today and has deeply infected all of our systems. Beyond Babylon is sculpted after Hebrew, Arabic character style elements in a European writing. It questions what happened after the great Babylonic confusion. Did the words finally come across? Did they realize the distant and gap was maybe smaller than expected. This typeface is related to my former character Eurabia. As an artist I like to play with contradictions. Use opposite elements and mould them in to one understandable piece and in addition a thought to chew on. Otherwise the experimental ore shape lovin' typeface user could be very happy with an addition feature to the existing characters. One option more to express your selves in writing. Also this typeface is really suitable for theme writing or advertising. ----------- Babylon war eine Zivilisation die sich von Bagdad bis zum Persischen Golf erstreckte. Es gibt das alte und das neue Babylon, die Ära der Babylon Zivilisation und das biblische Babylon. Die ältesten Schriften, welche seit dem Aufstieg der Zivilisation gefunden wurden, sind babylonisch. Die Christen, die Juden und die arabische Kultur finden ihren Ursprung im Mittleren Osten. Sie teilen mehr oder weniger die gleiche Geschichte, die gleichen Wurzeln und DNA: Ein Volk. Aber in Wirklichkeit waren sie ein Schmelztiegel aus eng verwandten Kulturen, welche sich nicht ferner sein könnten: feindselig und misstrauisch zueinander. Auge um Auge, Zahn um Zahn. Man könnte behaupten, diese Unstimmigkeit bestehe noch heute und hätte all unsere Systeme stark infiziert. Beyond Babylon ist eine europäische Schrift, geformt nach hebräischen und arabischen Stilelementen der Zeichen. Sie hinterfragt die Geschehnisse nach der der Babylonischen Sprachverwirrung. Kamen die Worte endlich an? Haben sie realisiert, dass die Weite des Spalts zwischen ihnen vielleicht geringer war als erwartet. Diese Schrift ist verwandt mit meinen vorigen Zeichen der Eurabia. Als Künstlerin mag ich es mit Widersprüchen zu spielen, gegensätzliche Elemente zu einem vernehmbaren Ganzen zu verschmelzen und einen kniffligen Gedanken zu erzeugen. Andererseits könnte der experimentelle oder formenverliebte Nutzer sehr glücklich über eine zusätzliche Funktion der bestehenden Zeichen sein. Eine weite Möglichkeit sich im Schreiben auszudrücken. Diese Schrift ist auch für Werbung sehr geeignet.

Erik Spiekermann, working in collaboration with Ole Schäfer, originally designed FF Info® Display for use in the context of wayfinding systems. The variants FF Info™ Text and FF Info™ Correspondence were developed later for text setting and office communication. FF Info Display The sober and clear forms of the sans serif FF Info Display have been deliberately molded to make them perfect for use on wayfinding systems. The font by Ole Schäfer and Erik Spiekermann not only takes the problem of lack of space into account - it is some 15% narrower than comparable typefaces - the characters have also been designed to ensure they remain legible even in adverse conditions for reading. As text on signs often contains words with which readers are unfamiliar and which are thus deciphered letter for letter rather than perceived as whole words, it is essential to provide for a clear differentiation between glyphs. Additional serifs on the lowercase "i" and uppercase "I" and a small arch on the terminal of the lowercase "l" ensure that it is possible to readily discriminate between these particularly problematic letters. Moreover, sharp corners on glyphs can also make it difficult to read signs with backlighting or when driving past. The rounded corners of FF Info Display counteract this effect and make sure that the character forms remain well defined.FF Info Display is available in five carefully coordinated weights, from Regular to Bold. In the corresponding italic variants, the letters appear overall more rounded while the lowercase "a" has a closed form and the "f" has a descender. Also included among the glyphs of FF Info Display are several ligatures and arrow symbols. Pictograms with different themes that complement the typeface are also available in four weights. FF Info Text Thanks to his know-how gained through designing other typefaces, Erik Spiekermann became aware that fonts created for use in problematic environments can be used in many different situations. In smaller point sizes, FF Info Display cuts a fine figure when used to set longer texts. So Spiekermann carefully reworked FF Info Display to produce FF Info Text, a font perfected for use in this context. Not only can the characters be more generously proportioned, certain features, such as additional serifs to aid with the differentiation of problematic letters, are also no longer necessary in textual surroundings. The upright styles have a double-story "g" while Spiekermann has added oldstyle figures and small caps. FF Info Correspondence FF Info Correspondence has also been designed for setting block text although it recalls the style of old typewriter characters and is specifically intended for use in office communication. The characters of this third member of the family are thus more formal, without rounded terminals but with rectangular punctuation marks. The narrower letters are provided with large serifs to give them more space although, at the same time, this reduces the differences in terms of letter width among the alphabet. In contrast with its two siblings, FF Info Correspondence has only three weights, each with corresponding italic.The three styles of the FF Info super family cover an extensive range of potential applications. If the different kerning is adjusted manually, the three styles harmonize happily with each other and can be readily used in combination to set, for example, headlines and texts and also creative display options.

Comenia Sans was designed in the framework of a unique typographic project for all types of schools. It is a complementary face for Comenia Serif, released by our friends at Storm Type Foundry. Comenia Sans has a lot in common with its serif sister: the height of both upper and lower case, the length of ascenders and descenders, and the general weight. This makes the two perfect partners which work well even when set side by side in a single line of text. Comenia Sans does, however, lack all serifs, ornamental elements and stroke stress variation. All these elements freshen up the feel of long texts, but for shorter texts use, they are not necessary. Despite that, Comenia Sans retains the soft, friendly character of its big sister, as well as a few tiny details which lend it its unique character without compromising legibility or utility. Open counters give all letters an airy feel and permit enough variation in construction. This is why the face works well even in multiple-page texts. All its letters are easily distinguished from each other, so the reader's eyes are not strained. Diacritics and punctuation harmonize with both upper and lower case. As usually, all diacritical marks fully respect conventional shapes of accents and they are perfectly suitable for Czech, Slovak, Polish and other Central European languages, where a lot of diacritics abounds. Similarly to the renaissance italics which refers to the cursive forms, Comenia Sans introduces novel shapes of some characters drawing from the hand-written heritage. This is most apparent in the single-bellied a, the simplified g, and the stem of f which crosses the baseline and ends with a distinct terminal. In the text, emphasized words are thus distinguished not only by the slant of letters, but also by the shapes of the letters themselves. All twelve styles contain set of small caps, suitable for the names, in the indexes or the headlines in longer texts. Legibility in small sizes under 10 points was at the center of designers' attention, too. This is why the counters of a, e and g are large enough to prevent ink spread in small sizes, both on-screen and in print. After all, the font was specifically optimized for screen use: its sober, simple forms are perfectly fit to be displayed on the computer screen and in other low-resolution devices. When used in the context of architecture, the smoothness of all contours stands out, permitting to enlarge the letters almost without limit. A standard at the Suitcase Type Foundry, each style of Comenia Sans boasts a number of ligatures, an automatic replacement of small caps and caps punctuation, a collection of mathematical symbols, and several types of numerals which make it easy to set academic and other texts in an organised, well-arranged way. For the same purpose, fractions may come in handy, too. Apart from the standard emphasis styles, the family also contains six condensed cuts (each set has the same number of characters), designated for situations where space is limited or the need for striking, poster-like effect arises. Comenia Sans is the ideal choice for the setting of magazines, picture books, and navigation systems alike. Its excellent legibility and soft, fine details will be appreciated both in micro-typography and in poster sizes. Although it was designed as a member of a compact system, it will work equally well on its own or in combination with other high-quality typefaces.

Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.

To design a text typeface "at the top with, at the bottom without" serifs was an idea which crossed my mind at the end of the sixties. I started from the fact that what one reads in the Latin alphabet is mainly the upper half of the letters, where good distinguishableness of the individual signs, and therefore, also good legibility, is aided by serifs. The first tests of the design, by which I checked up whether the basic principle could be used also for the then current technology of setting - for double-sign matrices -, were carried out in 1970. During the first half of the seventies I created first the basic design, then also the slanted Roman and the medium types. These drawings were not very successful. My greatest concern during this initial phase was the upper case A. I had to design it in such a way that the basic principle should be adhered to and the new alphabet, at the same time, should not look too complicated. The necessary prerequisite for a design of a new alphabet for double-sign matrices, i.e. to draw each letter of all the three fonts to the same width, did not agree with this typeface. What came to the greatest harm were the two styles used for emphasis: the italics even more than the medium type. That is why I fundamentally remodelled the basic design in 1980. In the course of this work I tried to forget about the previous technological limitations and to respect only the requirements then placed on typefaces intended for photosetting. As a matter of fact, this was not very difficult; this typeface was from the very beginning conceived in such a way as to have a large x-height of lower-case letters and upper serifs that could be joined without any problems in condensed setting. I gave much more thought to the proportional relations of the individual letters, the continuity of their outer and inner silhouettes, than to the requirements of their production. The greatest number of problems arose in the colour balancing of the individual signs, as it was necessary to achieve that the upper half of each letter should have a visual counterbalance in its lower, simpler half. Specifically, this meant to find the correct shape and degree of thickening of the lower parts of the letters. These had to counterbalance the upper parts of the letters emphasized by serifs, yet they should not look too romantic or decorative, for otherwise the typeface might lose its sober character. Also the shape, length and thickness of the upper serifs had to be resolved differently than in the previous design. In the seventies and at the beginning of the eighties a typeface conceived in this way, let alone one intended for setting of common texts in magazines and books, was to all intents and purposes an experiment with an uncertain end. At this time, before typographic postmodernism, it was not the custom to abandon in such typefaces the clear-cut formal categories, let alone to attempt to combine the serif and sans serif principles in a single design. I had already designed the basic, starting, alphabets of lower case and upper case letters with the intention to derive further styles from them, differing in colour and proportions. These fonts were not to serve merely for emphasis in the context of the basic design, but were to function, especially the bold versions, also as independent display alphabets. At this stage of my work it was, for a change, the upper case L that presented the greatest problem. Its lower left part had to counterbalance the symmetrical two-sided serif in the upper half of the letter. The ITC Company submitted this design to text tests, which, in their view, were successful. The director of this company Aaron Burns then invited me to add further styles, in order to create an entire, extensive typeface family. At that time, without the possibility to use a computer and given my other considerable workload, this was a task I could not manage. I tried to come back to this, by then already very large project, several times, but every time some other, at the moment very urgent, work diverted me from it. At the beginning of the nineties several alphabets appeared which were based on the same principle. It seemed to me that to continue working on my semi-finished designs was pointless. They were, therefore, abandoned until the spring of 2005, when František Štorm digitalized the basic design. František gave the typeface the working title Areplos and this name stuck. Then he made me add small capitals and the entire bold type, inducing me at the same time to consider what to do with the italics in order that they might be at least a little italic in character, and not merely slanted Roman alphabets, as was my original intention. In the course of the subsequent summer holidays, when the weather was bad, we met in his little cottage in South Bohemia, between two ponds, and resuscitated this more than twenty-five-years-old typeface. It was like this: We were drinking good tea, František worked on the computer, added accents and some remaining signs, inclined and interpolated, while I was looking over his shoulder. There is hardly any typeface that originated in a more harmonious setting. Solpera, summer 2005 I first encountered this typeface at the exhibition of Contemporary Czech Type Design in 1982. It was there, in the Portheim Summer Palace in Prague, that I, at the age of sixteen, decided to become a typographer. Having no knowledge about the technologies, the rules of construction of an alphabet or about cultural connections, I perceived Jan Solpera's typeface as the acme of excellence. Now, many years after, replete with experience of revitalization of typefaces of both living and deceased Czech type designers, I am able to compare their differing approaches. Jan Solpera put up a fight against the digital technology and exerted creative pressure to counteract my rather loose approach. Jan prepared dozens of fresh pencil drawings on thin sketching paper in which he elaborated in detail all the style-creating elements of the alphabet. I can say with full responsibility that I have never worked on anything as meticulous as the design of the Areplos typeface. I did not invent this name; it is the name of Jan Solpera's miniature publishing house, in which he issued for example an enchanting series of memoirs of a certain shopkeeper of Jindrichuv Hradec. The idea that the publishing house and the typeface might have the same name crossed my mind instinctively as a symbol of the original designation of Areplos - to serve for text setting. What you can see here originated in Trebon and in a cottage outside the village of Domanín - I even wanted to rename my firm to The Trebon Type Foundry. When mists enfold the pond and gloom pervades one's soul, the so-called typographic weather sets in - the time to sit, peer at the monitor and click the mouse, as also our students who were present would attest. Areplos is reminiscent of the essential inspirational period of a whole generation of Czech type designers - of the seventies and eighties, which were, however, at the same time the incubation period of my generation. I believe that this typeface will be received favourably, for it represents the better aspect of the eighties. Today, at the time when the infection by ITC typefaces has not been quite cured yet, it does absolutely no harm to remind ourselves of the high quality and timeless typefaces designed then in this country.In technical terms, this family consists of two times four OpenType designs, with five types of figures, ligatures and small capitals as well as an extensive assortment of both eastern and western diacritics. I can see as a basic text typeface of smaller periodicals and informative job-prints, a typeface usable for posters and programmes of various events, but also for corporate identity. Štorm, summer 2005