In its characteristics Xtra Sans is a combination of modern grotesks/grotesques and traditional calligraphy. Its upright and compact letterforms generate a sturdy effect as in the early 20th century grotesks Nobel, Kabel or Erbar. On the contrary, dynamic inside forms (counters) give the characters a fluent appearance. As a result, Xtra Sans stands out in large size, while remaining highly legible in small and long text. In 2007 Xtra Sans received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from Type Directors Club, New York. In 2002, still unpublished, it was awarded a bronze prize at the Morisawa Awards, Tokyo.

Compass Next is a third edition of Compass TRF designed in 2002. The first time Compass TRF has been conceived was as a “geometric” Didone – all letters literally were drawn with a ruler and a compass. Second edition (2009) got additional styles – Flourish Initials and Small Caps. This time, the objective was to bring overall extreme geometrical expression closer to traditional letterform style of its “modern style” typeface category (Didone). All glyphs were redrawn including in alternative Decorative style, and additional Bold weight has been added. Typeface is released in OpenType format with extended support for most Latin languages.

French type designer Xavier Dupré created this script FontFont between 2002 and 2007. The family contains 3 weights: Regular, Bold, and Black and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, logo, branding and creative industries as well as sports. FF Tartine Script provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, fractions, super- and subscript characters, and stylistic alternates. It comes with a complete range of figure set options – oldstyle and lining figures, each in tabular and proportional widths. As well as Latin-based languages, the typeface family also supports the Greek writing system.

Sneakers was a typeface that I originally drew all the way back in 2005, with a release in 2006. Its most recent iteration, Sneakers Pro was released in 2009. Since then, the idea of reworking the design has lingered in the back of my head, but I wanted to add additional flexibility and value to anything offered beyond the originals. Sneakers Max does just that and I am happy to see it released and available to everyone. Sneakers Max raises the bar in terms of functionality… incorporating all of the options found in Sneakers Pro (e.g. Small Caps and a biform/unicase located now in Titling Alternates), but it expands the character offering, improves on letter designs (everything was redrawn) and explores more flexible settings by providing 5 distinct counter widths to keep more uniform multi-line settings with mixed letter heights. Special thanks to Potch Auacherdkul for his additions to the original character set and for his engineering skills.

Barracuda has this sharp, sharky look and I do a lot of diving with my best friend. What else is there to say? If you see a shark say hello from me. Yours from under the Red Sea, Gert Wiescher