Designs of characters that are almost forty years old can be already restored like a historical alphabet – by transferring them exactly into the computer with all their details. But, of course, it would not be Josef Tyfa, if he did not redesign the entire alphabet, and to such an extent that all that has remained from the original was practically the name. Tyfa published a sans-serif alphabet under the title Juvenis already in the second half of the past century. The type face had a large x-height of lower-case letters, a rather economizing design and one-sided serifs which were very daring for their time. In 1979 Tyfa returned to the idea of Juvenis, modified the letter “g” into a one-storey form, narrowed the design of the characters even further and added a bold and an inclined variant. This type face also shows the influence of Jaroslav Benda, evident in the open forms of the crotches of the diagonal strokes. Towards the end of 2001 the author presented a pile of tracing paper with dozens of variants of letter forms, but mainly with a new, more contemporary approach: the design is more open, the details softer, the figures and non-alphabetical characters in the entire set are more integral. The original intention to create a type face for printing children’s books thus became even more emphasized. Nevertheless, Juvenis with its new proportions far exceeds its original purpose. In the summer of 2002 we inserted all of this “into the machine” and designed new italics. The final computer form was completed in November 2002. All the twelve designs are divided into six variants of differing boldness with the corresponding italics. The darkness of the individual sizes does not increase linearly, but follows a curve which rises more steeply towards the boldest extreme. The human eye, on the contrary, perceives the darkening as a more fluent process, and the neighbouring designs are better graded. The x-height of lower-case letters is extraordinarily large, so that the printed type face in the size of nine points is perceived rather as “ten points” and at the same time the line spacing is not too dense. A further ingenious optical trick of Josef Tyfa is the figures, which are designed as moderately non-aligning ones. Thus an imaginary third horizontal is created in the proportional scheme of the entire type face family, which supports legibility and suitably supplements the original intention to create a children’s type face with elements of playfulness. The same applies to the overall soft expression of the alphabet. The serifs are varied; their balancing, however, is well-considered: the ascender of the lower-case “d” has no serif and the letter appears poor, while, for example, the letter “y”, or “x”, looks complicated. The only serif to be found in upper-case letters is in “J”, where it is used exclusively for the purpose of balancing the rounded descender. These anomalies, however, fit perfectly into the structure of any smoothly running text and shift Juvenis towards an original, contemporary expression. Tyfa also offers three alternative lower-case letters *. In the case of the letter “g” the designer follows the one-storey form he had contemplated in the eighties, while in “k” he returns to the Benda inspiration and in “u” adds a lower serif as a reminder of the calligraphic principle. It is above all the italics that are faithful to the tradition of handwritten lettering. The fairly complicated “k” is probably the strongest characteristic feature of Juvenis; all the diagonals in “z”, “v”, “w”, “y” are slightly flamboyant, and this also applies to the upper-case letters A, V, W, Y. Juvenis blends excellently with drawn illustrations, for it itself is modelled in a very creative way. Due to its unmistakable optical effect, however, it will find application not only in children’s literature, but also in orientation systems, on posters, in magazines and long short-stories.

Useful links: TT Supermolot Neue PDF Type Specimen TT Supermolot Neue graphic presentation at Behance Looking for a custom version of TT Supermolot Neue? TT Supermolot Neue is a redesigned, extended and greatly enhanced reincarnation of the popular TT Supermolot and TT Supermolot Condensed font families. During its existence, the hammers (‘molot’ in Russian) managed to get into the spotlight in a huge number of projects, for example, in popular video games, films, and branding. Despite its popularity, the limited composition of old families put boundaries their development, which prompted us to release a completely redesigned and greatly extended version. And while the old families could offer designers only a limited number of tools, in the new version you can already find 54 fonts, and each individual font now consists of more than 620 glyphs. First, we have added a completely new subfamily, TT Supermolot Neue Extended. But this is only the tip of the iceberg—in order to achieve visual harmony between the three subfamilies, we completely revised the distribution of widths among them. As a result of this work, the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Basic subfamily became a bit narrower, and the width of the TT Supermolot Neue Condensed subfamily became even narrower than it was in the old version. Secondly, we’ve increased the number of weights. While in the old versions there were only 5 weights, in the new ones there are 9 in each of the subfamilies. In addition, we gave a facelift to the lowercase and uppercase letters. In TT Supermolot Neue, the design of all controversial grapheme forms was soothed and now the family can also be used in the text set. We have completely redrawn italics. It took us half a year to compensate for all the circles, to transform italic strokes, to work out the position of the diacritics, to make right the spacing, and to finish kerning. Following a good tradition, in the TT Supermolot Neue extensive support for useful OpenType features was added, and hinting was also improved. If we talk about visual features, we recommend paying closer attention to two stylistic sets: the first set (ss01) is designed to make the typeface more humanist, and when you turn on the second set (ss02), the typeface becomes even more technological. In addition, the typeface has more than 26 items of standard and discretionary ligatures. We also have not forgotten about the figures and we added a set of old-style figures to the standard version. In addition, the typeface has case, ordn, frac, sups, sinf, numr, dnom, onum, tnum, lnum, pnum, calt, liga, dlig, salt, ss01, ss02.

I spend a lot of time following two obsessions: packaging and hand lettering. Alongside a few other minor obsessions, those two have been my major ones for so many years now, I've finally reached the point where I can actually claim them as “obsessions” without getting a dramatic reaction from the little voice in the back of my head. When you spend so much time researching and studying a subject, you become very focused, directionally and objectively. But of course some of the research material you run into turns out to be tangential to whatever your focus happens to be at the time, so you absorb what you can from it, then shelf it — like the celebrity bobblehead that amused you for a while, but is now an almost invisible ornament eating dust and feathers somewhere in your environment. And just like the bobblehead may fall off the shelf one day to remind you of its existence, some of my lettering research material unveiled itself in my head one day for no particular reason. Hand lettering is now mostly perceived as an American art. Someone with my historical knowledge about lettering may be snooty enough to go as far as pointing out the British origins of almost everything American, including lettering — but for the most part, the contemporary perspective associates great lettering with America. The same perspective also associates blackletter, gothics and sans serifs with Germany. So you can imagine my simultaneous surprise and impatience when, in my research for one of my American lettering-based fonts, I ran into a German lettering book from 1953, by an artist called Bentele. It was no use for me because it didn't propel my focus at that particular time, but a few months ago I was marveling at what we take for granted — the sky is blue, blackletter is German, lettering is American — and found myself flipping through the pages of that book again. The lettering in that book is upbeat and casual sign making stuff, but it has a slightly strange and youthful experimentation at its heart. I suppose I find it strange because it deviates a lot from the American stuff I'm used to working with for so long now. To make a long story short, what’s inside that German book served as the semilla, which is Spanish for seed, for the typeface you see all over these pages. With Semilla, my normal routine went out the window. My life for a while was all Bezier all the time. No special analog or digital brushes or pens were used in drawing these forms. They're the product of a true Bezier process, all starting with a point creating a curve to another point, which draws a curve to another point, and so on. It’s a very time-consuming process, but at the end I am satisfied that it can get to pretty much the same results easier and more traditional methods accomplish. And as usual with my fonts, the OpenType is plenty and a lot of fun. Experimenting with substitution and automation is still a great pleasure for me. It is the OpenType that always saves me from the seemingly endless work hours every type designer must inevitably have to face at one point in his career. The artful photos used in this booklet are by French photographer and designer Stéphane Giner. He is very deserving of your patronage, so please keep an eye out for his marvelous work. I hope you like Semilla and enjoy using it. I have a feeling that it marks a transition to a more curious and flexible period in my career, but only time will tell.

Danah” is the first name of a very close and cherished classmate, friend, and peer. Danah is a Palestinian woman who used to study with me in the same university where I was honorably introduced to her several years ago. In fact, I decided to dedicate this typeface wholly to her in return for all the years of friendship that we had spent together as classmates during the late 1990s. She was—and absolutely still—a source of support and inspiration for me in life due to her brilliant, big-hearted, and philanthropic personality. Danah likes different things in life and among them the sea, horses, reading, and also travelling. She lives and works now in Palestine, and yearns for being granted a new life—like many other free Palestinians—full of freedom, peace, and happyness. Danah® is a handwriting and scribbly Arabic display typeface. The main trait of this typeface is the realistic handwriting design of its letters and ligatures. This feature renders it as one of the stylish typefaces used for headlines and also texts. Among the distinguished letters of Danah® typeface are the “Qaaf”, “Kaaf”, “Meem”, “Noon”, and others. Moreover, Danah® typeface has a character set which supports Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Latin letters/numerals with a limited range of specific Arabic and Latin ligatures. This font comes in a single weight (i.e., regular) with exactly 639 distinctive glyphs. Due to its free and streamlined design, Danah® typeface is appropriate for heading and text in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It can be graphically and visually exploited in magazines, posters, and interfaces of different things such as clothes and equipment. Moreover, it can be pleasingly used in writing personal, friendly, and unofficial letters, messages, documents, invoices, notes, dispatches and menus which require a smoothed handwritten touch and trend. It is also elegantly suitable for signs, books’ covers, advertisement light boards, and titles of flyers, pamphlets, novels, and books of children and adults. In brief, Danah® typeface is one of the new hand-drawn typefaces which can be brought into play efficiently in diverse graphic, typographic, calligraphic, and artistic works in different languages and cultures. 2018-09-13 00:00:00.000 10.0000 F25946-S114426 10913 Timeless URW Type Foundry https://www.myfonts.com/collections/timeless-duplicate-font-urw NULL NULL 2016-01-08 00:00:00.000 89.9900 F10913-S42560 54569 Jellofries Maulana Creative https://www.myfonts.com/collections/jellofries-font-maulana-creative https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10000/JtHgrbkPi7YU282OWix69Tqb_97b690350e4b3ed453d7c27fe0eb6664.png Jellofries is a fancy brush script font. With brush bold contrast stroke, fun character with a bit of ligatures and alternates. To give you an extra creative work. Jellofries font support multilingual more than 100+ language. This font is good for logo design, Social media, Movie Titles, Books Titles, a short text even a long text letter and good for your secondary text font with sans or serif. Make a stunning work with Jellofries font. Cheers, Maulana Creative 2022-05-06 00:00:00.000 12.0000 F54569-S252887 38361 Alt Moav ALT https://www.myfonts.com/collections/alt-moav-font-andreas-leonidou https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10000/70046_aa489c02cd589f8f924b405c901a8014.png Moav is a geometric experimental display typeface for use on logos,posters etc. 2011-12-13 00:00:00.000 15.0000 F38361-S179452 42255 M Elle HK Monotype HK https://www.myfonts.com/collections/m-elle-hk-font-monotype-hk NULL HK series fonts are in Unicode encoding and consists of BIG 5 character set and HKSCS characters. The character glyphs are based on the regular Traditional Chinese writing form and style. It is generally used in Taiwan ROC, Hong Kong and Macau. 2011-05-11 00:00:00.000 523.9900 F42255-S193845 71839 Kaerobi Kulokale https://www.myfonts.com/collections/kaerobi-font-kulokale https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10004/ieVtB18gl4EgKrVVDIPLtX8b_33d93ffd2cd339b2544feb3d7a0a3121.png Kaerobi is an condensed display font, and with a style that is very different from the others. This font comes in four styles, Regular, Oblique, Rough, and Outline Version. Kaerobi is well-suited for posters, social media, headlines, magazine titles, clothing, large print formats - and wherever you want to be seen. Inspired by the style of design that is currently popular, and this is the answer to all the needs of every idea that you will pour in this modern era. We highly recommend using a program that supports OpenType features and Glyphs panels such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe InDesign, or CorelDraw, so you can see and access all Glyph variations. This font is encoded with Unicode PUA, which allows full access to all additional characters without having special design software. Mac users can use Font Book, and Windows users can use Character Map to view and copy one of the extra characters to paste into your favorite text editor / application. Thank You. 2022-08-16 00:00:00.000 17.0000 F71839-S298671 52588 The Heather Romie Creative https://www.myfonts.com/collections/the-heather-font-romie-creative https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10000/Lc4estBSB0wCiDunz9GNDUcb_097035319875b31f0a18a4bb2e8e675b.png The Heather Script is a formal calligraphy design, including Regular. This font is casual and pretty with a stroke. Can be used for various purposes. such as logos, product packaging, wedding invitations, branding, headlines, signage, labels, signatures, book covers, posters, quotes and much more. Heather Script featuring OpenType style alternatives, ligatures and International support for most Western Languages ​​is included. To enable the OpenType Stylistic alternative, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7, Microsoft Word 2010 or a later version. How to access all alternative characters using Adobe Illustrator: *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzwjMkbB-wQ Heather Script is coded with PUA Unicode, which allows full access to all additional characters without having to design special software. Mac users can use Font Book , and Windows users can use Character Map to view and copy any additional characters to paste into your favorite text editor/application. How to access all alternative characters, using the Windows Character Map with Photoshop: *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go9vacoYmBw 2022-02-23 00:00:00.000 19.0000 F52588-S242949 16709 Pastina Lebbad Design https://www.myfonts.com/collections/pastina-font-lebbad-design https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10000/220264_a574aa9e49d2f9f1da3950f1fef09123.png Pastina is an elegant serif font consisting of caps, lower case, and alternate characters. Soft serifs and the graceful flow of each character add to the classic feel of this font. 2008-07-31 00:00:00.000 24.9500 F16709-S66588 2367 Munira Script Picatype https://www.myfonts.com/collections/munira-script-font-picatype https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10000/309621_5c93006e7517281c082dc7c75bfd1c2b.png Munira Script is a modern calligraphy design. This font is casual and pretty with swashes. It can be used for various purposes. such as logos, product packaging, wedding invitations, branding, headlines, signage, labels, signature, book covers, posters, quotes and more. Munira Script features OpenType stylistic alternates, ligatures and International support for most Western Languages. To enable the OpenType Stylistic alternates, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7, Microsoft Word 2010 or later versions. How to access all alternative characters using Adobe Illustrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzwjMkbB-wQ How to access all alternative characters, using Windows Character Map with Photoshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go9vacoYmBw Munira Script is coded with PUA Unicode, which allows full access to all the extra characters without having special designing software. Mac users can use Font Book , and Windows users can use Character Map to view and copy any of the extra characters to paste into your favourite text editor/app. If you need help or have any questions, please let me know. I'm happy to help :) Thanks & Happy Designing! 2019-07-05 00:00:00.000 10.0000 F2367-S10062 27004 Ketimun Hanoded https://www.myfonts.com/collections/ketimun-font-hanoded https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10000/306179_8517cd9a57ccc15cff68737e17de4e85.png Ketimun means ‘cucumber’ in Bahasa Indonesia. At home we eat a lot (A LOT) of Indonesian food, which often includes Acar Ketimun (Sweet/sour cucumber salad). I usually make the simple version, but sometimes I go for the more elaborate cucumber salad (the recipe of which you’ll find on poster 2). Ketimun font is a rather delicious script font; uneven, organic and full of life. Comes with a fresh taste and lots of diacritics. 2019-06-06 00:00:00.000 15.0000 F27004-S120951 38675 Psalterium Alter Littera https://www.myfonts.com/collections/psalterium-font-alter-littera https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10000/204202_94b78204200645ccd1daa5d5f1a63916.png A clean, smooth adaptation of the magnificent gothic types used by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer in their famous Mainz Psalter (Psalterium Moguntinum) of 1457, also used in their Canon of the Mass (Canon Missae) of 1458, and in their Benedictine Psalter (Psalterium Benedictinum) of 1459. [Although these works were published after Gutenberg’s break with Fust, it is generally agreed that Gutenberg was working along with Fust and Schöffer on the Mainz Psalter while the 42-line Bible was still being printed.] In addition to the usual standard characters for typesetting modern texts, the font includes a comprehensive set of special characters, uncial initials (adapted from both the Mainz Psalter and early sixteenth-century Dutch types by Henric Pieterszoon), alternates and ligatures, plus Opentype features, that can be used for typesetting (almost) exactly as in the Mainz Psalter and later incunabula. The main historical sources used during the font design process were high-resolution scans from the copy of the Mainz Psalter preserved at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (the only copy whose colophon includes the famous printer’s mark of Fust and Schöffer). Other sources were as follows: Masson, I. (1954), The Mainz Psalters and Canon Missae, 1457-59, London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society; Kapr, A. (1996), Johann Gutenberg - The Man and his Invention, Aldershot: Scolar Press (ch. 8); Füssel, S. (2005), Gutenberg and the impact of printing, Burlington: Ashgate (ch. 1); and Man, J. (2009), The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Bantam (ch. 8). Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Oldtype “Psalterium” Font Page. Note: Several uncial initials in The Oldtype “Psalterium” Font have been derived from corresponding characters in The Initials “Gothic C” Font, adjusting them to cope with the special (large) x-height and letter spacing of the Psalterium font (so the two sets of initials are not directly interchangeable). 2012-07-06 00:00:00.000 25.0000 F38675-S178340 23791 VLNL Donuts VetteLetters https://www.myfonts.com/collections/vlnl-donuts-font-vetteletters https://cdn.myfonts.net/cdn-cgi/image/width=417,height=208,fit=contain,format=auto/images/pim/10001/190114_ca5047d6d6754375933067862f9328a8.png VLNL Donuts’ first incarnation was designed already in 2005 by DBXL as a logo for Dutch funky house music outfit Hardsoul, and since then has been used for lots of music related projects. Donuts is heavily infused by hip 1970s geometric fonts like Blippo, Pump and ITC Bauhaus, but nonetheless has both feet in this modern day and age. Meticulously designed and tightly spaced, VLNL Donuts is very suitable for logos, headlines and music artwork. We especially recommend using it on big 12 album covers. Oh, and it got its name for obvious reasons (“the O looks like one...’) VLNL Donuts is deep fried, glazed and can be covered in a variety of sweetness: sprinkles, cinnamon, coconut, chopped peanuts, powdered sugar or maple syrup. They also can be filled with cream, custard or jam. As a very sweet and saturated snack should, VLNL Donuts is fitted with a full set of alternate swoosh caps that can be deployed to liven up your already ‘out there’ designs.

TT Ricordi useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options The TT Ricordi font family is a collection of three display heading serifs designed to significantly diversify the traditional font palette. Each font from the TT Ricordi family was drawn by a separate designer and has its own story. With that, all three fonts are close in thickness and similar in their character compositions and are featured in the uppercase set and the small capitals set, which replaces lowercase characters. The fonts have the broad support of Latin languages and support basic Cyrillic. The project originates from the pre-coronavirus tourist trips to Italy, during which our art director Yulia Gonina has accumulated many photographs of historical inscriptions and tablets. Many of these inscriptions had interesting character or unusual character shapes. We wanted to work with them, to try to reinterpret them, and, if possible, make them ultramodern and accessible to the modern font user. The fonts from the TT Ricordi typeface turned out to be quite display and contemporary, but at the same time, they retained subtle references to historic inscriptions. The fonts fit perfectly both on the covers of book classics and in glossy magazine layouts. They can also be used in posters and packaging, or as the main expressive element of company branding. In addition, all three serifs from the TT Ricordi font family go well with functional sans-serifs such as TT Norms Pro or TT Commons. TT Ricordi Nobili is a display serif with a rich Roman ancestry and contemporary world views. It stands out from the crowd with its subtlety and elegance. The font was drawn by Anna Tikhonova and was inspired by an inscription carved into the stone floor of a cathedral in Florence. Because people walked over the inscription, some of the letters got thinner and worn out over time. It is this feeling of disappearing or flickering elements that we wanted to capture and implement in the project. The TT Ricordi Nobili has high contrast, even though the font itself is quite thin. The serifs in the font are not massive at all, but at the same time, they are display serifs. There is a certain tension in TT Ricordi Nobili, and the viewer perceives this tension. We can say that behind the external classic facade lies a rather modern plot. The font has a large set of discrete ligatures which allow to create interesting combinations and expand the capabilities of the font. There are 709 glyphs in the TT Ricordi Nobili font, and a whole set of useful features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, numr, ordn, tnum, pnum, case, dlig, ss01, ss02, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, calt. TT Ricordi Todi is a wide serif with a classic base and a contemporary nature. The font turned out to be refined yet sharp, and in places even pushy and aggressive. The font was drawn by Yulia Gonina, and the project was based on plaques with engraved street names from the small Italian town of Todi. The main challenge was to decipher the characteristic features of the signs and emphasize them in a modern way. In addition, it was necessary to draw a Cyrillic alphabet that would not be inferior to the Latin alphabet in its expressiveness. The TT Ricordi Todi has fairly wide character proportions, and there is practically no contrast in them. The main feature of the font is the combination of smooth round shapes with deliberately squared shapes. In addition, the font is characterized by crisp and sharp character details, exaggerated ascenders and descenders, and muted contrast. Among the interesting font peculiarities, you can choose between the characteristic long descenders and ascenders and their more tempered versions, you can find a stylistic set with triangular dots, alternative versions of the EF characters and two letter ? shapes, round and squared. There are 876 glyphs in the TT Ricordi Todi font, and a whole set of useful features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, numr, ordn, tnum, pnum, case, dlig, salt, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, calt. TT Ricordi Fulmini is a fashionable contemporary serif firmly holding on to its historic roots. The font turned out to be like a thistle flower: bright and catchy, but still subtle and delicate. TT Ricordi Fulmini was drawn by Marina Khodak, and the initial inspiration for the project was the inscription on the altar from the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. As the font was pulled into “contemporaneity”, it was completely transformed and revealed its new side. The main catchy detail in the TT Ricordi Fulmini is the aggressive and rather sharp diagonal serifs. In addition, in the process of working on the font, several graphic solutions emerged, for example, the mono-serifs and the very calligraphic connections of diagonal strokes with their historic spirit. We wanted to keep them, and thus 4 thematic stylistic sets appeared in the font, thanks to which we can greatly change the perception of TT Ricordi Fulmini. In addition, the font has a set of interesting discrete ligatures. There are 793 glyphs in the TT Ricordi Fulmini font, and a whole set of useful features, such as: aalt, ccmp, locl, numr, ordn, tnum, pnum, case, dlig, ss01, ss02, ss03, ss04, ss05, ss06, ss07, ss08, ss09, ss10, calt. TT Ricordi supports more than 180+ languages, such as: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian+, Aleut (lat), Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian+, Asu, Aymara, Azerbaijani +, Banjar, Basque +, Belarusian (lat), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama+, Boholano+, Chamorro+, Chichewa, Chiga, Colognian+, Cornish, Corsican +, Cree, Croatian, Czech+, Danish, Dutch+, Embu, English+, Esperanto, Estonian+, Faroese+, Fijian, Filipino+, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian+, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician+, Ganda, German+, Gusii, Haitianm, Creole, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Hungarian+, Icelandic+, Ilocano, Indonesian+, Innu-aimun, Interlingua, Irish, Italian+, Javanese, Jola-Fonyi, Judaeo-Spanish, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karaim (lat), Karakalpak (lat), Karelian, Kashubian, Kazakh (lat), Khasi, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Kurdish (lat), Ladin, Latvian, Leonese, Lithuanian, Livvi-Karelian, Luba-Kasai, Ludic, Luganda+, Luo, Luxembourgish+, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay+, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Marshallese, Mauritian Creole, Minangkabau+, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (lat), Morisyen, Nahuatl, Nauruan, Ndebele, Nias, Norwegian, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Palauan, Polish+, Portuguese+, Quechua+, Rheto-Romance, Rohingya, Romanian +, Romansh+, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Salar, Samburu, Samoan, Sango, Sangu, Sasak, Scots, Sena, Serbian (lat)+, Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Silesian, Slovak+, Slovenian+, Soga, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho+, Spanish+, Sundanese, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish+, Swiss German +, Tagalog+, Tahitian, Taita, Talysh (lat), Tatar+, Teso, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan+, Tsakhur (Azerbaijan), Tsonga, Tswana +, Turkish+, Turkmen (lat), Uyghur, Valencian+, Vastese, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Vunjo, Walloon, Welsh+, Wolof, Xhosa, Zaza, Zulu+, Belarusian (cyr), Bosnian (cyr), Bulgarian (cyr), Erzya, Karachay-Balkar (cyr), Khvarshi, Kumyk, Macedonian+, Montenegrin (cyr), Mordvin-moksha, Nogai, Russian+, Rusyn, Serbian (cyr)+, Ukrainian.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.

Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.