Pirouette is based on a logo that Japanese designer Ryuichi Tateno created for a packaging design project in 1999 (a shampoo container!). Tateno's logo experimented with complex, overlapped swash letterforms. He continued to develop these outside of the initial packaging project, until they took on a life of their own. Eventually, Tateno designed a full typeface out of the logo, Pirouette, which was the first place display face in Linotype's 2003 International Type Design Contest. The Pirouette typeface contains six different fonts. The basic font is Pirouette Regular. This is an engraver's italic lowercase paired with elaborate swash capitals. The swash capitals have two visual elements in their forms: thick strokes and thin strokes. Pirouette Text includes the same lowercase as Pirouette Regular, but the uppercase letters are much shorter and simpler. This "text" font can be used to set longer amounts of copy. Pirouette Alternate contains different lowercase glyphs and additional ligatures, which can be used as substitutes for the lowercase forms in the Pirouette Regular and Pirouette Text fonts. Pirouette Ornaments contains swashes and other knick-knacks that can either be added onto the end of a letter, or used as separate decorative elements or swooshes (accolades) on a page. Pirouette Separate 1 and Pirouette Separate 2 are two fonts that can be layered over top of one another in software applications that support layering (e.g., most Adobe and Macromedia applications, as well as QuarkXPress). Pirouette Separate 1 contains the thick stroke elements from Pirouette Regular's uppercase letters, as well as the same lowercase glyphs that can be found in Pirouette Regular and Pirouette Text. Pirouette Separate 2 contains only the thin stroke elements from Pirouette Regular's uppercase letters. By layering Pirouette Separate 1 and Pirouette Separate 2 over one another, you can give the uppercase letter's thick and thin stroke elements different colors and create unique, more calligraphic designs. The Pirouette family, Tanteno's first commercial typeface, was greatly influenced by the calligraphic and typographic work of the master German designer, Prof. Hermann Zapf, especially his Zapfino typeface.

MVB Solano Gothic Bold was originally designed as a display face for the City of Albany, California (located on the San Francisco Bay facing the Golden Gate Bridge and bordering Berkeley). Named for the City’s main street, the typeface needed to work on signage in proximity to early 20th Century buildings, and in contemporary settings. Rather than creating a neutered design to cover all bases, Mark van Bronkhorst chose to develop a simple, strong, condensed face that would offer flexibility of style by providing both retro and more contemporary forms. Solano Gothic has since been expanded to a family offering five weights from Light to Bold. The basic fonts provide upper- and lowercase forms, with figures designed to harmonize within upper- and lowercase settings (the standard figures are not full cap height). The same figures are provided with Small Caps, and align to small cap height. For all-cap settings requiring figures and monetary symbols of full-cap height, there are the “Cap” fonts. An alternate tabular “1” is provided in all fonts so that both fitted and tabular settings of figures are possible (access to alternate characters subject to system or application support).

Introducing “Lovingly Friends” - a community of fonts that get along together as good as best friends do. All of the fonts - Sans, Serif, Notes, Script and Extras are packed with stylistic alternates and ligatures, you can combine them the way you like - they will look balanced together as well as individually. Script and Engraved fonts also have a Shadow style - to add more personality to your designs. You can download the Specimen & Instructions pdf here http://bit.ly/2x975US Since the Christmas is not that far away (time flies!), the Extras font has a set of Winter Holidays elements - so you could create and send your best wishes to your friends in no time. While all the fonts are fully unicode mapped so you can use them in ANY application, they are still best used in an OpenType aware application. If the application you are using doesn’t support OpenType features, you can use Character Map (Windows) or Font Book (Mac) to select the glyphs you need. Hope you enjoy the fonts as much as I enjoyed creating them! P.S. The flowers used in the preview images are from Liza Glanz 4 in 1 Elegant Watercolor Collection https://crmrkt.com/do4Wpb

VLNL Beatbox is a solid tech heavy straight stencil-face with a lot of character. It was originally designed as a logo for dj Markus Schultz back in 2004, who rejected it. His management couldn't read it, or thought people wouldn’t be able to read it. But Chef Donald DBXL found the concept interesting enough to finish it and has used it in many projects since. It was the identity font for the Battle of Amsterdam, a talent showcase in beat boxing and other skills. Beatboxing is a style of hiphop music (beats) made with the mouth and a microphone. A box is a handy container to store stuff. Like food, or fonts. We use a lot of boxes at the VetteLetters office. VLNL Beatbox is best deployed big, like in logos or headlines. Or flyers, album covers, posters and signage. As a display and headline typeface it’s got a lot of character. We could definitely see it painted on the side of a tank, or an airplane. It’s heavy, but not at all dangerous. Use it without risk. VLNL Beatbox comes in two variations; Regular and Small (smallcaps)

The Eskapade font family is the result of Alisa Nowak’s research into Roman and German blackletter forms, mainly Fraktur letters. The idea was to adapt these broken forms into a contemporary family instead of creating a faithful revival of a historical typeface. On one hand, the ten normal Eskapade styles are conceived for continuous text in books and magazines with good legibility in smaller sizes. On the other hand, the six angled Eskapade Fraktur styles capture the reader’s attention in headlines with its mixture of round and straight forms as seen in ‘e’, ‘g’, and ‘o’. Eskapade works exceptionally well for branding, logotypes, and visual identities, for editorials like magazines, fanzines, or posters, and for packaging. Eskapade roman adopts a humanist structure, but is more condensed than other oldstyle serifs. The reason behind this stems from the goal of closely resembling the Fraktur style to create harmony in mixed text settings. Legibility is enhanced by its low contrast between thick and thin strokes and its tall x-height. Eskapade offers an airy and light typographic colour with its smooth design. Eskapade italic is based on the Cancellaresca script and shows some particularities in its condensed and round forms. This structure also provided the base for Eskapade Fraktur italic. Eskapade Fraktur is more contrasted and slightly bolder than the usual darkness of a regular weight. The innovative Eskapade Fraktur italic, equally based on the Cancellaresca script previously mentioned, is secondarily influenced by the Sütterlin forms — an unique script practiced in Germany in the vanishingly short period between 1915 and 1941. The new ornaments are also hybrid Sütterlin forms to fit with the smooth roman styles. Although there are many Fraktur-style typefaces available today, they usually lack italics, and their italics are usually slanted uprights rather than proper italics. This motivated extensive experimentation with the italic Fraktur shapes and resulted in Eskapade Fraktur’s unusual and interesting solutions. In addition to standard capitals, it offers a second set of more decorative capitals with double-stroke lines to intensify creative application and encourage experimental use. The Thin and Black Fraktur styles are meant for display sizes (headlines, posters, branding, and signage). A typeface with this much tension needs to keep a good harmony between strokes and counters, so Eskapade Black has amplified inktraps and a more dynamic structure seen in the contrast between straight and round forms. These qualities make the family bolder and more enticing, especially with the included uppercase alternates. The Fraktur’s black weights are strident, refusing to let the white of the paper win the tug-of-war. It also won’t give away its secrets: Is it modern or historic, edgy or amicable, beguiling ornamentation or brutish presentation? That all depends on how the radically expanded Eskapade family is used, but its 16 fonts certainly aren’t tame.

This handmade looking brush font is inspired by the titles of the 1959 movie, Imitation of Life, by prolific film titles artist, Wayne Fitzgerald. The 'pastiche' of the font's name derives from the 'imitation' of the film's title, and from the imitation of the brush. OpenType enabled software can make Pastiche Brush feel even more handmade. There are alternates for every letter and number, and most punctation marks and symbols. Every letter has at least one alternate glyph, and more commonly used (in English at least) letters have up to three, so when contextual alternates are enabled, the font automatically cycles through glyphs in a pseudo-random manner. This means no double letter combination will ever contain two identical glyphs. Not only this, but it's highly likely the same word will look different elsewhere in the sentence. The contextual alternates feature also takes care of start and end forms of letters, for an even more handmade feel. This is a great font for headlines in fashion glossies, food packaging where an organic look is desirable, posters, perfume bottles, wine bottles... the list goes on. And with extensive language support, it's going to be a very usable addition to your display font repertoire.

Stancilo is a type of serif font that offers uniqueness in its form. With a distinctive design and superior aesthetics, this font gives each character an elegant and modern touch. Stancilo font has nine different thicknesses, ranging from thin to bold, providing flexibility and variation. Thus, this font can be used for various design purposes, from main headings to body text, with the ability to adjust the desired intensity and emphasis. One of the advantages of Stancilo is the presence of alternate letters and ligatures that provide character variations for each letter. Allows users to combine alternate letters or use special ligatures to create more harmonious combinations and relationships between characters within words. This feature adds a sense of personalization and additional creativity to the design. Furthermore, Stancilo font also supports multiple languages, making it suitable for multilingual design projects. With the support of diverse languages, this font enables effective and comprehensive visual communication in various cultural contexts. Stancilo is a prominent serif font with a unique form, providing nine different thicknesses, alternate letters, and ligatures. These advantages make it suitable for elegant, modern designs and allow for creative exploration in using its letters. With support for multiple languages, this font becomes a versatile and inclusive choice for diverse design projects.

Rossaline Handwritten is a lovely script font of which characteristics are the connections between letters to look like a naturally connected handwriting that leaves the impression of this font being organically, spontaneously written in order to add a firm personal touch. This font has various line thicknesses to show high letter contrasts to strengthen the font’s firm, clear impressions. Besides, the letters’ height variety, meaning that some of the letters are higher than the others, makes Rossaline Handwritten more interesting and dynamic. However, the connected letters can cause difficulty to read in small text sizes, so that you need to be more careful to use this font by adjusting it to your needs. In addition, you may enjoy the available features here as well. Features: Ligatures Multilingual Supports PUA Encoded Numerals and Punctuations Rossaline Handwritten fits best for various design projects, such as brandings, quotes, invitations, name cards, greeting cards, printed products, merchandise, social media, etc. Find out more ways to use this font by taking a look at the font preview. Thanks for purchasing our fonts. Hopefully, you have a great time using our font. Feel free to contact us anytime for further information or when you have trouble with the font. Thanks a lot and happy designing.

Compendium is a sequel to my Burgues font from 2007. Actually it is more like a prequel to Burgues. Before Louis Madarasz awed the American Southeast with his disciplined corners and wild hairlines, Platt Rogers Spencer, up in Ohio, had laid down a style all his own, a style that would eventually become the groundwork for the veering calligraphic method that was later defined and developed by Madarasz. After I wrote the above paragraph, I was so surprised by it, particularly by the first two sentences, that I stopped and had to think about it for a week. Why a sequel/prequel? Am I subconsciously joining the ranks of typeface-as-brand designers? Are the tools I build finally taking control of me? Am I having to resort to “milking it” now? Not exactly. Even though the current trend of extending older popular typefaces can play tricks with a type designer’s mind, and maybe even send him into strange directions of planning, my purpose is not the extension of something popular. My purpose is presenting a more comprehensive picture as I keep coming to terms with my obsession with 19th century American penmanship. Those who already know my work probably have an idea about how obsessive I can be about presenting a complete and detailed image of the past through today’s eyes. So it is not hard to understand my need to expand on the Burgues concept in order to reach a fuller picture of how American calligraphy evolved in the 19th century. Burgues was really all about Madarasz, so much so that it bypasses the genius of those who came before him. Compendium seeks to put Madarasz’s work in a better chronological perspective, to show the rounds that led to the sharps, so to speak. And it is nearly criminal to ignore Spencer’s work, simply because it had a much wider influence on the scope of calligraphy in general. While Madarasz’s work managed to survive only through a handful of his students, Spencer’s work was disseminated throughout America by his children after he died in 1867. The Spencer sons were taught by their father and were great calligraphers themselves. They would pass the elegant Spencerian method on to thousands of American penmen and sign painters. Though Compendium has a naturally more normalized, Spencerian flow, its elegance, expressiveness, movement and precision are no less adventurous than Burgues. Nearing 700 glyphs, its character set contains plenty of variation in each letter, and many ornaments for letter beginnings, endings, and some that can even serve to envelope entire words with swashy calligraphic wonder. Those who love to explore typefaces in detail will be rewarded, thanks to OpenType. I am so in love with the technology now that it’s becoming harder for me to let go of a typeface and call it finished. You probably have noticed by now that my fascination with old calligraphy has not excluded my being influenced by modern design trends. This booklet is an example of this fusion of influences. I am living 150 years after the Spencers, so different contextualization and usage perspectives are inevitable. Here the photography of Gonzalo Aguilar join the digital branchings of Compendium to form visuals that dance and wave like the arms of humanity have been doing since time eternal. I hope you like Compendium and find it useful. I'm all Spencered out for now, but at one point, for history’s sake, I will make this a trilogy. When the hairline-and-swash bug visits me again, you will be the first to know. The PDF specimen was designed with the wonderful photography of Gonzalo Aguilar from Mexico. Please download it here http://new.myfonts.com/artwork?id=47049&subdir=original