Youthful Fontsmith received a brief to develop a font that would form part of the broadcast identity for the UK’s first digital Freeview channel – E4. It needed to work seamlessly in text and display, both in print and on-screen, and please the eye of the target audience, 18-34-year-olds. So, young, fresh and informal. No problem. Except for one thing: the timing. Daughter As he worked on FS Maja, Jason Smith was occupied by another imminent deadline: the birth of his third child. The pressure was mounting, but rather than let it get to him, Jason embraced the challenge and made light of the tension, fashioning a bright, bubbly, entertaining type with a personality made for memorable headlines. Beautifully random FS Maja’s soft, rounded shapes and assured, fluent lines encompass lots of notable features that contribute to its warm, fun-loving personality, including: a very large x-height; a short, rounded serif to allow for close spacing and give texture to body text; a slight convexity, or bulge, in the stroke terminals; a calligraphic fluidity in the entry to the down-stroke of most lowercase letters; open, generous curves, especially in the “B”, “P” and “R”; and a “w” made of two “u”s.

Bill Corporate is a geometric typeface with generous capitals. A modern classic, based on Max Bill’s lettering work, its straightforward and uncompromising construction can be both edgy and sublime. With minimalist letterforms, pointy apexes instead of flat ones, and archetypal proportions, this font family doesn’t follow any trends but strives to achieve a timeless formal vocabulary. The skeleton of its letters is based heavily on the famous primary shapes of the Bauhaus: square, circle, and triangle. This makes for quite wide uppercase and much narrower lowercase letters. The contrast between uppercase and lowercase benefits inexperienced users, who will be able to get appealing results quickly. At the same time, it’s a powerful tool for seasoned designers, who can employ either case selectively to set the desired typographic course. Bill Corporate Medium’s 16 styles (including a set of eight lighter-than-light fonts from “Two” to “ExtraLight”) are an excellent choice for editorial design, branding, headlines, and even short to mid-length copy in a wide range of applications and industries. The uppercase letters in particular—with their varied widths and lavish dimensions—are suitable for cosmopolitan and stylish logotypes and wordmarks. Whenever a timeless, staid, and classy look is demanded, choose Bill Corporate.

Bengala is a font based on Calligraphy & Geometry designed by Carlos Fabián Camargo. Its purpose is to be an innovative typographic system combining Script letters with geometric and hard Caps letters. The contradictory styles are ideal for designing covers, posters, branding and packaging. Its smooth calligraphic look meticulously incorporates characters to design logos and phrases that communicate dynamism and strategy. Bengala Script was inspired by Mistral by R. Excoffon. Bengala Script provides violent and unstable lines with generous spacing between the letters and tight horizontal proportions, producing showy upper and lower case italics inspired by French Gothic calligraphy late fifteenth century. For this reason, Bengala Script retains some uninterrupted calligraphic logic, up and down sometimes higher or shorter than the height of the lowercase, creating dynamism through a variable amount of contrast between thick and thin strokes. Bengala Dingbats has 62 drawings designed to accompany the designs. Script and Caps Bengala have different gender and the similar X height produces more visual appeal. This way Bengala Caps - inspired by the Porshe logo, due to its geometric uppercase Roman construction, extended horizontal proportions, light caliber, rounded strokes terminations and generous spacing between letters. Special thanks to John Moore and Manuel Corradine for their help with Open Type.

Meet Bjorn. A super usable, digital-device ready type design, refreshingly unburdened by today’s pre-conceived notions of ‘digital neutrality’. This is a typeface driven by the notion that today’s ‘digital’ shouldn’t automatically mean the devolution of typographic personality, Bjorn brings a softer-side to the idea of pixel perfect brand comms. Solid digital typography can also convey a warm tone of voice, radiate a softness, a human emotive charm whilst still maintaining all of the functional on-screen requirements of crisp easy reading fonts across viewports. Bjorn is a distinctive type design that combines a unique blend of flattened round stems (to take the edge-off), levelled inner terminals (pixel friendly) and pointed ears and feet (creating an distinct rhythm and dynamic with bowled letters). Bjorn is not a typeface following a tried and tested pattern, it’s a typeface designed to make digital brands feel special, enabling speech in a voice that brings viewers closer to their words. Bjorn is warm, yet clinical, flat and curved, elliptical and pointy. The font’s strong sense of ‘straightness’, the letter proportions and features build up its versatility across digital environments, not too wide, not too narrow, not too pointy, not too round — just right. Bjorn is available in 4 Roman styles — Light, Regular, Medium and Bold.

Fazeta Sans is a perfect companion to serif typeface Fazeta. Two light weights were added, so the complete typeface consist of 14 fonts (7 weights + matching italics). The fine gradation lets you choose perfect weight for any type of project. Every font have 1140 glyphs – just like the serif version and contains the same features, so use and combining of whole typeface is very comfortable. Also fixed kerning allows better comfort for eyes by reading and shortens the length of the text. I tried to preserve sharp and cold impression from serif version, but some straight lines had to be curved due to the natural limitation of sans typefaces (for example the upper arch of “f” is shaped more smooth). However it keeps extremely open form. A little playfulness was left at the end of letters “k, K, and R”, but if you want, this can be eliminated by using a rigorous SS01 feature. Serifs were here transformed into a small yaw from main stroke and so enlive the monotony of sans kind of types. Also slight cutting the top of the letters helping to surprisingly vivid final impression. Fazeta Sans is therefore suitable for wide range of type sizes – from small marginalies to huge poster sizes. To see more please check the PDF specimen.

Oktah is a geometric grotesk that comes both as a variable font and 22 static fonts: 11 uprights and 11 matching italics, which make it a great tool for those seeking a versatile font with a strong character and high legibility. Throw in a very pleasing look, elegant curves and a wide range of weights, and you'd get what Oktah aspires to be: a perfect typographic tool for every need.In Oktah, elegant geometric curves meet bold strokes and wide apertures. Round letters are nearly circular, but, to boost readability, slight changes were introduced for optical compensation. Oktah is also equipped with amazing OpenType features: case sensitive punctuation, ligatures, fractions, superscript and subscript figures, two kinds of circular figures, stylistic & contextual alternatives and much more! Oktah supports all major European languages, as well as Vietnamese and some dozens of foreign languages that you may encounter in your designs. We've got all that covered. The glyph count for each of the styles is 800+ characters. Two styles (Extra Light and Bold Italic) are free to try and experiment with. If you need wide language support and more extensive OpenType features, consider taking a look at Oktah Neue, a bigger version of the classic Oktah.

Eight designers present a set of icons that indicate the fun and fantastic world of signage. Each collaborator's solution represents a completely different interpretations on signage vernacular. Akira Kobayashi's "Subsumption", obscured by foliage, offers a perspective that signs on Japanese roads can be vague and beautiful. M.A.D.'s "People Signs" is a graphical association of people signage with a variety of well known situation symbols. Cynthia Jacquette's "Honest Arrows" are a series of arrows that attempts to honestly tell you how to get from point A to Point B in a big, confusing city. Mike Kohnke's "Road Kill" and the "Bump & Bruise" highlight how signs make for perfect targets when unloading a round of buckshot, and the licking a contruction barrier often endures. Joachim Muller-Lance's "Traffic Blends" places faces on things! Hey, didn't you give your first car a nickname? Cars are alive, you know - they guzzle and smoke all day. Jean-Benoît Lévy's "Inner-State" was inspired while reading the California driver handbook to pass a driver's test. Kevin Roberson's "Tail Lighting" reminds us to drive carefully and not to forget to signal. Diana Stoen's "Drivers Out There" shows us "driver personality archetypes", including the lil'ol lady that everyone tries to avoid.

Multicolored Fonts Many years ago, when Xerox Corporation still had its own font department, I came to Los Angeles in 1985 to train the IKARUS program. One day Bill Kienzel, head of the Xerox font department at the time, said we should go to the Hollywood Hills together; he knew people there who were experimenting with multicolored fonts. After a little wandering through the winding streets of the many hills, we reached a somewhat overgrown, simple family house standing under trees. A group of very inspired designers were waiting for us there. They immediately showed us the works they created using photomechanical tricks. They were fascinating. The American colors and the whole look seemed noble and enchanting. The problem was that this process was very difficult to implement and required a lot of effort on individual letters. They dreamed of a colored font that could be used for normal typesetting. We thought back and forth about how to save the individually colored letters in a common font, but soon gave up because we didn't see a technical option. So this idea and the memory of the time in Hollywood lay dormant in the back of my mind for many years, until at the beginning of this year 2023 I received an order to produce an outline typeface and the story came back to me. Suddenly I knew how to solve the problem from back then: if only the areas that should have the same color in all letters were saved in their own separate fonts, they could be colored independently of each other and later placed on top of each other. I implemented this in the 5 fonts that are now available with the 3 variants “Outside”, “Middle” and “Inside”. Together with the background, 4 colors can be combined with each other. This method works in text programs such as Word or InDesign. In Photoshop or Illustrator, the individual surfaces can also be colored by converting them into paths if the additional “Complete” variants (which contain all 3 contours) are used. There is also a “Basic” variant that can be used to achieve special effects such as overlay, bleed, etc. The first 5 fonts in this series are all based on the principle of contouring. Anyone who claims that you don't need any special fonts because they can be created automatically from any font using common programs is wrong or is only telling only half the truth. Anyone who has ever dealt with this knows that many individual adjustments to the design are necessary after contouring. This has happened in the 5 fonts that are now available and have very different styles. The dream from back then has come true. The user can set any text, long or short, in multiple colors, freely design the color scheme and apply all the usual typographic settings. Volker Schnebel, November 2023

East is a simple and confident typeface. It is timeless and current, but with a subtle nostalgia of vintage Jazz albums, film credits, newspapers, and signage. The light weight has excellent legibility at small sizes. The Extra Bold weight will capture attention. Its condensed width allows a lot of text in little space. East is versatile, but would be a good choice for film titles, labels + packages, posters, publications or any design where space is limited. It has six weights between Light and Extra Bold. A variable font with weight and slant axes is available and included in a full family purchase. The OpenType features include; stylistic sets, a one story ‘a’, hooked letters, seriffed uppercase I and 1, a slashed zero, raised colon and punctuation (Spanish), several German eszetts, ligatures, diverse bullets, and vertically stacked pre-built fractions. It will support western and central European languages as well as other Latin-based written languages. Read on if you are not familiar with variable fonts. What makes a variable font special is that all font weights are inside of one file and you can incrementally control the width and italic slant between Light (300) and ExtraBold (800). These changes are commonly made with slide controls in the font/type palette of the software. Variable fonts are also smaller in file size, which benefit both web and software performance. Currently variable fonts are supported by Adobe, Sketch, Corel Draw, and most web browsers. Check for your software support here: www.v-fonts.com/support.