On April 20, 1950, film comedian Jerry Lewis indulged his love of cameras by opening up Jerry Lewis’ Camera Exchange on Vine Street in Hollywood. It closed in 1951. Thanks to an image preserved within newsreel footage of the shop’s grand opening night, a glimpse of the post-Art Deco signage with its unusual, block style lettering inspired a digital version. Highly unusual and best for novelty projects, Shutterbug JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Satampra evokes the spirit of Arabic calligraphy with a hint of something strange and magical. It is an unusual calligraphic font based on an obscure hand lettered style with unique overlapping character strokes. It fits the theme of oriental fantasy and would work well with the fonts in our Arabian Nights Fonts and Art package. Satampra is an upper-case only font, but the lower case positions have alternative versions of the upper case character set.

Thursday Afternoon is like a typewriter that was out in the rain all night - all wobbly and worn, but with the well-known details of a typewriter, just a bit...well a lot...out of the ordinary! Although being awkward, Thursday Afternoon is surprisingly legible. I'd like that the font should be used for labels, toys for kids, candy or any kind of organic product. It even looks really well with headlines or shoutouts in all-caps!

The Adelle Sans font family by José Scaglione and Veronika Burian provides a more clean and spirited take on the traditional grotesque sans. As is typical with TypeTogether typefaces, the most demanding editorial design problems were taken into consideration during its creation. The combination of lively character and unobtrusive appearance inherent to grotesque sans serifs make it an utterly versatile tool for every imaginable situation. Whether for global branding, screens, signage and advertising, or UI, the keyword behind Adelle Sans’s use is flexibility. To save space and keep legibility high, Adelle Sans is available in eight weights with matching italics and includes a condensed width of seven weights with their matching italics. Each of these 30 styles hits the perfect tone as a headline punch or subdued background hum, and the condensed widths are adept at setting short texts while retaining the expected personality. Rooted in the belief that broad language support is crucial to modern global type design, the Latin-matching variants are yet another push in TypeTogether’s ongoing multilingual efforts. The Latin script may have been first, but Adelle Sans has thus far been expanded into an exhaustive nine script family with extensive language support. Careful research and close collaboration with type experts yielded typographic consistency, legibility, and cultural awareness among all scripts, as well as filling the need for quality editorial typefaces in Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Latin Extended, Greek, and Thai, with more planned for the future. In addition to the 30 Latin styles, all other scripts have between seven and fourteen styles, each of which has been engineered to optically match the proportions of its counterparts. And each script comes bundled with the Latin script to ensure an harmonious fit amongst any two or more Adelle Sans families in the same block of text. The full Adelle Sans family delivers consistent, flexible, and personable results in multilingual documents, in apps, and multicultural branding worldwide. Its wide character set includes typographic niceties, small caps, several sets of figures, icons, and support for over 245 Latin-based languages. Be sure to check out the companions for Adelle Sans: Adelle, for a versatile and authoritative slab serif with no shortage of personality; and Adelle Mono, a two-width family flexible enough for developers and graphic designers alike.

IMPORTANT – Please consider the superior Carrig Pro before making a purchase decision. Carrig started its life in 1998. I was working for a design agency in Cork, Ireland and was given a new brand identity project for a lakeside hotel in County Kerry. While visiting the hotel I made various sketches of the surroundings and upon returning to the studio, it was clear that my strongest ideas for the identity would be based on these freehand drawings. I wanted a classic, rough, hand-drawn typeface to complement this style but at that time, the studio didn’t have anything suitable, so I decided to draw my own. I found a Trajan-esque typeface that I really liked the look of in an old calligraphy workbook. I set about drawing my own version and then digitised it. Once the client had seen and approved my design, I began working on creating a complete all caps typeface to use for the hotel’s stationery. With ‘carrig’ being the Gaelic word for ‘rock’, my new typeface was all the more appropriate as it had the appearance of letterforms that had been carved into stone and weathered by time. With the project completed and the client happy, Carrig then sat in my unused fonts folder for several years... but there was always a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I should do something more with it. So, in the autumn of 2014, I finally set about doing just that and created the font family you now find at MyFonts. Carrig’s form and structure was influenced by a hybrid of Classic Roman and Garalde typeface designs. The original calligraphic elements from the 1998 version of Carrig have been retained to add personality—as can be seen in the serifs, strokes, spurs, terminals and open bowls. Perhaps its most distinctive trait is a high x-height combined with relatively short ascenders. I wanted Carrig to immediately resonate with the reader and have designed it to be familiar and friendly. I imagine designers might choose Carrig as an alternative to such typefaces as Trajan, Garamond and Baskerville. I see Carrig as primarily a display typeface for titles/headlines in printed materials. I would also love to see it being used for branding, packaging and promotional material and am keen to hear from designers who use it in their own work.

K-Type’s ‘Banks & Miles’ fonts are inspired by the geometric monoline lettering created for the British Post Office in 1970 by London design company Banks & Miles, a project initiated and supervised by partner John Miles, and which included ‘Double Line’ and ‘Single Line’ alphabets. The new digital typeface is a reworking and extension of both alphabets. Banks & Miles Double Line is provided in three weights – Light, Regular and Dark – variations achieved by adjusting the width of the inline. Banks & Miles Single Line develops the less used companion sans into a three weight family – Regular, Medium and Bold – each with an optically corrected oblique. Although the ‘Banks & Miles Double Line’ and ‘Banks & Miles Single Line’ fonts are based on the original Post Office letterforms, glyphs have been drawn from scratch and include numerous adjustments and impertinent alterations, such as narrowing the overly wide Z and shortening the leg of the K. Several disparities exist between the Post Office Double and Single Line styles, and K-Type has attempted to secure greater consistency between the two. For instance, a wide apex on the Double Line’s lowercase w is made pointed to match the uppercase W and the Single Line’s W/w. Also, the gently sloping hook of Single Line’s lowercase j is adopted for both families. The original Single Line’s R and k, which were incongruously simplified, are drawn in their more remarkable Double Line forms, and whilst the new Single Line fonts are modestly condensed where appropriate, rounded letters retain the essentially circular form of the Double Line. Many characters that were not part of the original project, such as @, ß, #, and currency symbols, have been designed afresh, and a full set of Latin Extended-A characters is included. The new fonts are a celebration of distinctive features like the delightful teardrop-shaped bowl of a,b,d,g,p and q, and a general level of elegance not always achieved by inline typefaces. The Post Office Double Line alphabet was used from the early 1970s, in different colours to denote the various parts of the Post Office business which included telecommunications, counter services and the Royal Mail. Even after the Post Office was split into separate businesses in the 1980s, Post Office Counters and Royal Mail continued use of the lettering, and a version can still be seen within the Royal Mail cruciform logo.

In the late 1930s, old Egyptiennes (or Italiennes) returned to the collective consciousness of European printers and type houses — perhaps because political news were front a centre, especially in France where Le Figaro newspaper was seeing record circulation numbers. In 1939 both Monotype and Lettergieterij Amsterdam thought of the same idea: Make a new typeface similar to the reverse stress slab shapes that make up the titles of newspapers like Le Figaro and Le Frondeur. Both foundries intended to call their new type Figaro. Monotype finished theirs first, so they ended up with the name, and their type was already published when Stefan Schlesinger finished his take for the Amsterdam foundry. Schlesinger’s type was renamed Hidalgo (Spanish for a lower nobleman, ‘son of something’) and published in 1940 as ‘a very happy variation on an old motif’. Although it wasn’t a commercial success at the time, it was well received and considered subtler and more refined than the similar types available, Figaro and Playbill. In the Second World War, the Germans banned the use of the type, and Hidalgo never really recovered. Upon closer inspection, Schlesinger’s work on Hidalgo was much more Euro-sophisticated and ahead of its time than the too-wooden cut of Figaro and the thick tightness of Playbill. It has a modern high contrast, a squarer skeleton, contour cuts that work similarly outside and inside, and airy and minimal solutions to the more complicated shapes like G, K, M, N, Q and W. It is also much more aware of, and more accommodating to, the picket-fence effect the thick top slabs create in setting. Basilio (named after the signing teacher in Mozart’s Figaro) is the digital revival and major expansion of Hidalgo. With nearly 600 glyphs, it boasts Pan-European language support (most Latin languages, as well as Cyrillic and Greek), and a few OpenType tricks that gel it all together to make a very useful design tool. Stefan Schlesigner was born in Vienna in 1896. He moved to the Netherlands in 1925, where he worked for Van Houten’s chocolate, Metz department store, printing firm Trio and many other clients. He died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944. Digital revivals and expansions of two of his other designs, Minuet and Serena, have also been published by Canada Type.