Modesto Open is now a Chromatic Font Family. The old font Modesto Open has been improved, renamed Modesto Open Primary and joined by four new fonts that ornament and augment the Primary font in many different ways. All Caps. Modesto is a loose-knit group of Font Families based on a signpainting lettering style popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It evolved from the lettering I used for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Logo. The Modesto family was not planned. It just happened, a few fonts at a time over about fifteen years. In 2014 seven new Italic fonts and two Chromatic families were added.

In 1994, John Benson designed the typefaces Caliban, Alexa and Balzano, all with similar characteristics. The typefaces are distinguished by their calligraphic style and their closeness to handwritten script. Caliban looks as though it were written with a broad tipped pen, with reserved yet lively figures which retain their legibility. Caliban is a good typefaces to use in short and middle length texts as well as headlines, wherever a personal touch is desired.

Similar in design to Franklin Gothic, News Gothic was one of a number of sans serif faces manufactured by American Type Founders in the early years of the twentieth century. Initially cut as a light sans, heavier versions were made in the 1940s and 50s along with some condensed weights. The News Gothic font family offers an uncomplicated design that is well suited for use in newspapers and magazines for headlines and in advertisements.

Similar in design to Franklin Gothic, News Gothic was one of a number of sans serif faces manufactured by American Type Founders in the early years of the twentieth century. Initially cut as a light sans, heavier versions were made in the 1940s and 50s along with some condensed weights. The News Gothic font family offers an uncomplicated design that is well suited for use in newspapers and magazines for headlines and in advertisements.

Vincenzo is based on a beautiful condensed typeface from the 1920s or earlier; original designer unknown. This is a "Modern" style with fine slab serifs, vertical stress between thick and thins, and high contrast. What is unique about this design is that the triangular serifs (e.g., E, F, L, T, etc.) do not gradually taper as they join the rest of the letter, as would be the case in Bodoni and similar designs. Uppercase only.

The Ornaments of Paris were inspired by a recent trip to Paris. Each tiny Paris icon is distilled from a church, a fence, a doorway, a railing, the Louvre, graphics in a store window, a feeling, a rainy day, a glass of wine... For more of the similar see Fleurons of Paris.

Broken is a grunge font with two interchangeable sets of uppercase. Its forms are in the Egyptian style of the early- to mid-nineteenth century, and the totality of its setting gives off the impression of a most unfortunate letterpress situation, with badly cut punches, uncontrolled ink spread, and metal shards and slivers strewn all about. Available in all mainstream font formats, Broken works very well and has a very unique appearance in design concepts where the overall visual can benefit from harshness, erosion, destruction or weathering.

Spectrum font is based on a design by Jan van Krimpen, who worked on his font from 1941 to 1943 for use in a Bible of the Spectrum publishing house in Utrecht. The bible project was later cancelled but the font was so beautifully formed and universal that the Monotype Corporation in London completed it. Distinctive are the reserved elegance and unmistakeable beauty of form. The italic was kept fine and is a wonderful complement to the other weights, making it perfect for emphasis in text. The form of the lower case italic g is reminiscent of van Krimpen's italic for Lutetia and Romanée. A similar font in form is the Perpetua from Eric Gill. It displays not only similar forms to those of Spectrum, both fonts also have uniquely designed old style figures. The 7 is particularly unusual with its slanted horizontal stroke and marked bend to the left in the lower third of the form. Spectrum is an extremely legible font even in smaller point sizes and is just as suitable for headlines as for long texts.

Nvma is based on Roman letterforms which appeared during the period from the earliest extant examples in the sixth or seventh century BC until the end of the third century BC. For Nvma the J, U and W had to be fantasies as they did not exist until much later, similar to the G, numerals and other non-alphabetic signs in the font. Thus not all of the archaic forms are represented in Nvma. Nvma was designed to work with Magma, as it matches the weights and heights for Magma Thin and Magma Titling Thin.

Linotype Mano is a fresh new font from the Swiss designer Marco Ganz. Urgent and vital, the typeface suggests swift communication or the latest trends: spontaneous and informal, personal and individual. Ganz deliberately gave the characters a marked lean to the right, similar to that of quick handwriting. But Linotype Mano is not only nimble and quick, it also retains its legibility as a text font. Linotype Mano is as dynamic, brisk and casual as modern pop music.

The tale of Pumpkinseed began with a bit of hand-printing I noticed on the dinner menu at a local restaurant. I took a menu home for future reference. Several months later, some similar hand-lettering on another dinner menu caught my eye. I became a sort of connoisseur of hand-done menu lettering. After tweaking and adjusting a few of these menu-inspired (uppercase) characters, I placed them -- along with some other designs -- in an online Type in Progress survey. They won. So I finished the caps, drew out the lower case from scratch, created three weights and oblique styles. The result: Pumpkinseed, a full-featured casual hand-lettering face. Comes in Light, Medium, and Heavy.

German type designer Felix Braden created this sans FontFont in 2012. The family has 16 weights, ranging from Thin to Black (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, poster and billboards, wayfinding and signage as well as web and screen design. FF Scuba 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.In 2013, FF Scuba received the CommArts award and was also selected as one of Typographica’s favorite typefaces of 2012.

M Ellan HK is a soft yet robust typeface that strikes an appropriate balance between vertical and horizontal strokes (豎、橫). Finials of strokes are sharp but gentle, alluding to the appeal of calligraphy. It is elegant as well as contemporary. M Ellan Light features similar thickness in vertical and horizontal strokes (豎、橫) that together make it lucid and appealing, while thickness of strokes in M Ellan Bold are accordingly adjusted to maintain its friendly and graceful character.

Albyona English Nº 1 is ideal for titlings and headings in novels or fairy tales. It has a sentimental flavour of history, memories and the good-old-days feeling. Suitable for children’s books, fantasy literature, crime novels, natural food packaging and poison labeling, for infancy memories, vanitas kitsch items, dungeon museum bar menu cards, introductions to herbalism and witchcraft manuals. Albyona supports every Euro-Latin language. For the choice of a similar font go to Abendschroth.

At first glance, Else may seem to be similar to many of the Century typefaces, with its prominent figures and sturdy alphabet. But when Robert Norton, of Norton Photosetting Ltd., designed Else in 1982, he added a bit of flair to that basic model. Note the bowl of the g, the splayed legs of the M, the sharply curved G and J, as well as the leading strokes of v and w and both of the graceful ampersands.

Kalinga Regular is a new OpenType font with TrueType outlines from Microsoft that supports the Oriya script. Kalinga is a very legible sans serif font. Oriya is structured in a manner similar to Devanagari fonts, and is used to write the Oriya language in the Indian state of Orissa, and minority languages including Khondi and Santali. The Kalinga Regular font, like other Indic fonts, requires an operating system and application program that supports OpenType features for complex scripts.

M Ellan HK is a soft yet robust typeface that strikes an appropriate balance between vertical and horizontal strokes (豎、橫). Finials of strokes are sharp but gentle, alluding to the appeal of calligraphy. It is elegant as well as contemporary. M Ellan Light features similar thickness in vertical and horizontal strokes (豎、橫) that together make it lucid and appealing, while thickness of strokes in M Ellan Bold are accordingly adjusted to maintain its friendly and graceful character.

Basile is the conclusion of a process that began with the learning of italic handwriting in a roballos-Naab studio course. In this workshop I developed a variation of chancery handwriting which had a more pronounced wider than its historical model. While making the digitalization, the forms were modified to obtain a similar spirit to the one in the handwriting, but thinking about the text in small sizes. Also incorporating three sets of forms enlarged the family: italic, swash and extra swash. And the addition of initials and terminals sets.