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

Hi there! Let me introduce Symply – a handwritten signature-style font. Symply is perfect for logos, branding, quotes, blog headlines, magazine and book design, product packaging, web design – or for any text on postcards and your favorite photos. Symply contains: a standard set of characters with wide multilingual support: Western-, Central- and Eastern-European, Baltic, Turkish, Latin-type Africans, and Asian (94 languages in total) 2 additional sets of alternative characters for lowercase letters 8 alternative characters for some initial letters 28 ligatures for double letters and frequent combinations a bonus font with 62 swashes and doodles Symply has two types of embedded auto-replacements: lowercase letters without connecting strokes (for a case of the last character of the word), and ligatures (for a case of two letters that do not pair well together). These features work well in many apps (even simple ones like Notepad/TextEdit), and if you need to customize their application – you could use programs that support OpenType features (for example, Adobe apps or CorelDraw). All these additional glyphs are PUA-encoded, so if your software does not support OpenType — you could access them through Character Map (Windows) or Font Book (Mac) Swashes and doodles come in a bonus font, Symply Swashes. To type them, please press keys with letters A – X, a – x, and numbers 0 – 9 I hope you will like Symply and create great designs with it! And if you have any questions, feel free to contact me via e-mail: triple.hely@gmail.com

"LFT Etica, the moralist type family by Leftloft, began at the end of 2000, but its development is ongoing as it expands to fill the astute designer’s needs. The starting point was the common, cold grotesque sans typefaces — ubiquitous and often badly applied in their everyday visual environment. The challenge was to obtain the same force, versatility, and colour, but with a much warmer feel. LFT Etica resides aesthetically somewhere between a grotesque and a humanist sans serif, resulting from a design of soft strokes with open counters and terminals. LFT Etica successfully combines forcefulness and delicacy, wrapping both with sober charm. Milan-based Leftloft studio teamed up with Octavio Pardo to develop 24 additional styles for the very successful LFT Etica type family. This expansion is a direct response to type users’ requests who found in LFT Etica a de facto choice for web design. The new styles come in two series — 12 condensed widths and 12 compressed ones — and have proven versatile in applications where the ratio between information and space becomes an important challenge. Each letter was scrutinised to ensure durability throughout time and adaptability within circumstance, so LFT Etica meets the challenge of balance head-on. With its wide current range of 40 styles and many OpenType features (four sets of numerals, fractions, arrows, and dingbats, as well as stylistic alternates), LFT Etica is a versatile typeface suitable for corporate or casual use, for printed publications as well as web design. The complete LFT Etica family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses."

TT Autonomous useful links: Specimen PDF | History of creation | Graphic presentation | Customization options Please note! If you need OTF versions of the fonts, just email us at commercial@typetype.org About TT Autonomous: The idea was born in Amsterdam when one of our colleagues took the official electric taxi at the Schiphol airport. At the moment we were thinking about creating a new wide sans-serif, and an interesting question emerged during the trip: what font would be associated with autonomous electric transport. Then we thought it would also be nice to expand this theme visually. This is how the font family TT Autonomous came about. It is a modern brutal technological sans-serif. The basic visual characteristic of the typeface is the noticeable squareness of the characters and angular internal space. In addition, the typeface proportions tend to appear monospaced, but they are not really monospaced. The width of the characters is inspired by automobile logotype proportions, which are mostly rather wide. We could not disregard the fact that code lines in software for autonomous cars are traditionally typed using monospaced fonts and added a special monospaced subfamily to the TT Autonomous typeface. Thanks to the squareness of the characters inherited from the main family and the real monospace properties, the character forms in the subfamily turned out very specific and interesting. This is especially true for oblique monospaced fonts, which are true italics. In addition, we created a couple of outline styles which are great for use in titles and large inscriptions and perfectly match the basic family and the monospaced family. As opposed to outlines that can be created in graphic editors, in TT Autonomous Outline we worked through the narrow and questionable spots, thanks to which the font looks professionally complete and harmonious. As from the very beginning, the font was developed with tomorrow's technologies in mind, we could not miss addressing variability and creating a variable font. TT Autonomous has variable versions for both the basic and the monospaced subfamilies. TT Autonomous is a complex font family that consists of 32 fonts intended to solve a broad range of design tasks. Overall, the font family features 14 regular styles, 6 monospaced styles, 7 reversed styles, 2 outline styles and 3 variable fonts. The number of glyphs varies from 630+ in the monospaced font to 790+ in the basic styles. The basic subfamily has alternates, ligatures, old-style figures, slashed zeroes, and many other useful features. FOLLOW US: Instagram | Facebook | Website TT Autonomous language support: Acehnese, Afar, Albanian, Aleut (lat), Alsatian, Aragonese, Arumanian, Asu, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Banjar, Basque, Belarusian (cyr), Belarusian (lat), Bemba, Bena, Betawi, Bislama, Boholano, Bosnian (cyr), Bosnian (lat), Breton, Bulgarian (cyr), Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chichewa, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Corsican, Cree, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Erzya, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gaelic, Gagauz (lat), Galician, Ganda, German, Gusii, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiri Motu, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Innu-aimun, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Jola-Fonyi, Judaeo-Spanish, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Karachay-Balkar (cyr), Karachay-Balkar (lat), Karaim (lat), Karakalpak (lat), Karelian, Kashubian, Kazakh (lat), Khasi, Khvarshi, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kongo, Kumyk, Kurdish (lat), Ladin, Latvian, Leonese, Lithuanian, Livvi-Karelian, Luba-Kasai, Ludic, Luganda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Macedonian, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Marshallese, Mauritian Creole, Minangkabau, Moldavian (lat), Montenegrin (cyr), Montenegrin (lat), Mordvin-moksha, Morisyen, Nahuatl, Nauruan, Ndebele, Nias, Nogai, Norwegian, Number, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Palauan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rheto-Romance, Rohingya, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Russian, Rusyn, Rwa, Salar, Samburu, Samoan, Sango, Sangu, Sasak, Scots, Sena, Serbian (cyr), Serbian (lat), Seychellois Creole, Shambala, Shona, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Sundanese, Superscripts and Subscripts, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Swiss German, Tagalog, Tahitian, Taita, Talysh (lat), Tatar, Teso, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tsakhur (Azerbaijan), Tsonga, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen (lat), Ukrainian, Uyghur, Valencian, Vastese, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Vunjo, Walloon, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Zaza, Zulu.

Hello! Let me introduce Cohen – a handwritten font named in memory of the great poet and singer Leonard Cohen. On the day he passed away I did my routine calligraphy practice and wrote a part of his song 'Night Comes On'. You may see this work in presentation pictures, and after time I designed a font based on this calligraphy. Cohen signature font is perfect for logos, branding, web, blog headlines, invitations, magazine and book design, product packaging – or for any text on postcards and on your favorite photos. Cohen includes: a standard set of characters with wide multilingual support: Western-, Central- and Eastern-European, Baltic, Turkish, Latin-type Africans, and Asian (94 languages in total) two additional character sets: lowercase letters with alternates shapes and lowercase letters with a little end-swash - for the position at the end of a word 39 ligatures for double letters and frequent combinations Cohen has a large number of embedded context-dependent auto-replacement features that give the text a natural, handwritten look and correct inharmonious combinations of letters. These features work well in many apps (even simple ones like Notepad/TextEdit), and if you need to customize their application – you could use programs that support OpenType features (for example, Adobe apps or CorelDraw). All these additional glyphs are PUA-encoded, so if your software does not support OpenType — you could access them through Character Map (Windows) or Font Book (Mac). I hope you will like Cohen and create great designs with it! And if you have any questions, feel free to contact me via e-mail: triple.hely@gmail.com

After months of testing and development, we have managed to put together the Brandogram Typeface, an ultimate tool for monogram design. With the help of this typeface you can easily create a monogram in less than a minute. Thanks to the way we have created and optimised Brandogram, the uppercase letters effortlessly fit together with the small caps that are activated by the lowercase letters. Using the Brandogram typeface you can create unlimited monogram combos with 2, 3 or even 4 letters in some cases. And these are all possible thanks to features like: Multiple letter widths, from condensed to wide; Both sans serif and slab serif letter designs; Up to 24 different designs per letter; All letter variations are available as alternates so you can easily choose your favorite; Accents are available for each letter alternate; Uppercase and lowercase activated letters are constructed to perfectly center and middle align; There are 5 solid ready-made weights; There are another 2 stencil weights that can bring a new touch to your designs. The 7 weights of Brandogram Monogram Typeface: Thin Light Regular Medium Bold Stencil One Stencil Two Each of these weights are thought to express different levels of heaviness. The thicker the weight of the font gets, the less white space will be left between the letters when they are combined, therefore your design gets heavier. The role of the stencil weights is to create depth in the monogram designs. With those you can easily delete the extra overlapping shapes of the letters and create passages between the letters and give an interlocking impression. This typeface combined with your creativity can have no limits!