Matthew Carter has been refining his design for Alisal for so long, he says, that when he was asked to complete the design for the Monotype Library, it was almost as if he were doing a historical revival of his own typeface. The illusion even extended to changes in his work process: although he now does all his preliminary and final drawing on screen, the first trial renderings of Alisal were done as pencil renderings. Alisal is best classified as an Italian old style design. Originally created between the late 15th and mid-16th centuries in northern Italy, the true Italian old styles were some of the first roman types. They tend to be the most calligraphic of serifed faces, with the axis of their curved strokes inclined to the left, as if drawn with a flat-tipped pen or brush. These designs offer sturdy, free-flowing and heavily bracketed serifs, short descenders, and a modest contrast in stroke weight. Alisal has nearly all the classic Italian old style character traits, plus a few quirks of its own. It is calligraphic in nature, with more of a pen-drawn quality than faces like Palatino or Goudy Old Style. It is more rough-hewn than either Goudy's Kennerley or Benton's Cloister, and is generally heavier in weight than most of the other Italian old style designs. One place where Alisal makes a clean break with traditional old style designs is in the serifs. While sturdy and clearly reflecting pen-drawn strokes, Alisal's serifs have no bracketing and appear to be straight strokes crossing the main vertical. Like Caslon or Trajanus, Alisal is a handsome design when viewed as a block of copy. Ascenders are tall and elegant, and serve as a counterpoint to the robust strength of the rest of the design. Alisal is available as a small family of roman and bold with a complementary italic for the basic roman weight, providing all that is needed for the majority of text typography. Alisal is not as well-known as some of Carter's other typefaces, but this lovely and long-incubated design was certainly worth the wait.

Typefaces, like most other works of art, provide a small window into the personalities and sensibilities of the artists who create them. ITC Panache not only provides this window, it is also aptly named. Mr. Edward Benguiat the dreator of ITC Panache, has all the dash, verve (and panache) hinted at in the design, Creative, capable and prolific, Ed Benguiat has drawn hundreds of exciting and popular typeface designs. Benguiat's design goal was to create a sans serif typestyle that is versatile, utilitarian - and distinctive. We think he has succeeded admirably. ITC Panache's three weights mix exceptionally well to complement each other or provide emphasis where necessary. Extensive testing at text sizes and design fine-tuning has produced a typeface family which is remarkably homogenous and consistent in color. Text set in ITC Panache is inviting without dissapointment. It is exceptionally easy to read, even in long text blocks of copy or small point sizes. When set in larger sizes or used for headlines, ITC Panache's character traits becomes more apparent and pronounced to the reader. They help to create graphics with distinction and style. Big or small. a little or a lot. it's hard not to use ITC Panache well. If you could pigeonhole ITC Panache, it would probably be classified as a stressed sans", but this would not completely describe, or do justiceto, the design. There is a slight contrast in stroke weight, which becomes more pronounced as the familiy weight increases; but there is a more to distinguish ITC Panache from ather sans serifs. Perhaps most obvious is its high waist and correspondingly slight condensation of the top half of the "round" capitals. Both of these traits link ITC Panache with the sensuous forms of art nouveau creations. In contrast are the typicall old style "e" found in designs like Cloister and ITC Berkeley Old Style, and the two storied "g" common to the early 20th century sans serif designs. The capital "A" even has the cupped top found in Caslon designs. Part of the beauty of ITC Panache is that all of these seemingly unrelated desig traits are melded into a design of exceptional continuity."

Arabetics Symphony is a Sans Serif Latin typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. It is designed with a uniform glyph thickness and weight throughout, using a combination of simplified and clear open lines and curves and plenty of spikes and visual hints to compensate for the missing Latin serifs or traditional cursive Arabic calligraphic influence. This type family is suitable for both text and display applications. Additional Latin spacing is added to match an overall open-looking Arabic and is further maintained by a careful implementation of a typical Latin font kerning process. The design of this font family, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize with other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Symphony fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Symphony includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the “tatweel” key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Symphony includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

Arabetics Latte is a Latin Serif typeface with a comprehensive support for the Arabetic scripts, including Quranic texts. While its seemingly-idiosyncratic Latin design eliminates the excessive usage of serifs and offsets the visual effects of several geometrically-intense glyphs, its Times Romanesque proportions gives a full nod to the beginnings of Latin types and produces an overall stable look-and-feel of a classical Serif style, making it suitable for both text and display applications. Liberal spacing is maintained throughout to match that of the Arabic text and is further supplemented by a careful implementation of a typical Latin kerning. The overall design of this font, including metrics and dimensions, was intended to make its Latin harmonize well with most other Arabetics foundry fonts. Arabetics Latte fully supports MS 1252 Western and 1256 Arabic code pages, in addition to all the transliteration characters required by the ALA-LC Romanization tables. Users can either select an accented character directly or form it by keying the desired combining diacritic mark following an unaccented character. For Arabic, it fully supports Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks. The Arabic design of this font family follows the Mutamathil Taqlidi design style with connected glyphs, emphasizing vertical strokes to bring added harmony, and utilizing slightly varying x-heights to match that found in Latin. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter of the Arabic cursive text. Arabetics Latte includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar high and low levels—top left corner—, to clearly distinguish them from the letters. Tatweel is a zero-width glyph. Keying the tatweel key (shft-j) before Alif-Lam-Lam-Ha will display the Allah ligature. Arabetics Latte includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals, in addition to generous number of punctuation and mathematical symbols. Available in both OpenType and TrueType formats, it includes two weights, regular and bold, each has normal, Italic, and left-slanted styles.

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.

Blue Goblet is a series of fonts and ornaments by Cory Godbey and Jeremy Dooley. This best selling series has now been extended to include a new member, Blue Goblet Serif. Blue Goblet Serif comes with a variety of weights and also an outline version. Blue Goblet is hand-lettered by the artist, Cory Godbey, and is organic, spontaneous and exuberant. Characters bounce and dance above and below the baseline and x-height, making this a whimsical and fun script. Not only is Blue Goblet Serif a excellent choice, it also is a member of a wide family of different fonts. You can use it side by side with the original Blue Goblet, and there are a wide range of ornaments available, totaling over 350 illustrations! These illustrations include frames, florals and other text ornaments that can be inserted into your text and resized at will. This makes the Blue Goblet series a great pick when you want a type system that works very well together for a very unique and consistent look. The Blue Goblet series continues to grow and be expanded, making it a valuable investment. Blue Goblet Serif also includes auto replacing ligatures that make it appear that the script was drawn by the artists own hand, just for you! Blue Goblet Serif also includes a wide variety of alternates that can be accessed in any OpenType enabled application. Blue Goblet includes over 150 OpenType glyphs, and is loaded with features including an even more unique alternate alphabet. Included are swash alternates, style sets, old style figures and small caps. Please see the informative PDF brochure to see these features in action. OpenType enabled applications such as the Adobe suite or Quark can take full advantage of the automatic replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Blue Goblet Serif is great choice for display and short blocks of display text, children's books, packaging, or other unique applications. Fill in the counter spaces with color for a unique look, or alternate the different weights. Use Blue Goblet whenever you want to inject a sense of fun and whimsy to your designs. Give the Blue Goblet series a try today!

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul