Larken is a confident serif. Designed to reflect nature, it creates a sense of natural softness and expressiveness. We pushed the concept into a usability focused direction, to work as a bold tool and beautiful communicator. Larken variable allows fluid design across 7 weights, italics and major latin based languages. True italics advance the aesthetics, bringing energy and making it suitable for modern design. The type family melds organic curves and gentle repetition into powerful and harmonious type. At large point sizes you can appreciate the letter shapes, whilst the same restraint and focus creates an even texture for small point sizes and long reading. The font broadens its use by supplying weights all the way from thin to black. The natural curves, swells and sloping trunks, grow in character as the font gains weight. Whilst the thinner weights have lowered contrast and optical corrections to create a warm and gentle appearance. The Larken character set incorporates additional symbols, stylistic alternates, unique ligatures and case sensitive punctuation - producing a stable workhorse family ready to tackle projects of any size.Check out Jeko which is a great pair for Larken.

The Fluze Fonts This is the 21st font release from CozyFonts Foundry, a California Font Foundry established in 2011 with it’s first Official Release in 2012 with the Aladdin Bold Family. Inspirations for the design of this font family, by California Graphic Designer/Illustrator/Font Designer Tom Nikosey, is based on the wacky, weird & quirky films that have graced the screen with their offbeat styles and characters. Movies that come to mind are Mary Poppins, Beetlejuice, Wizard of Oz, Edward Scissorhands, Alice in Wonderland, Little Shop of Horrors, Addams Family, Labyrinth, Ghostbusters, etc. The absurd, the sublime, the animated, the scary, and the illustrated are all descriptors to define the possibilities Of the many uses and applications of Fluze and Flute Outline as presented in a sampling of the posters here. The intentional crooked hand drawn’ glyphs and extras lend their personalities to create this effect. Whether in black, white & grays or psychedelic color combos, Fluze can be comical, frightening and Downright irreverent. This font works as main titles, end titles, branding, signage, numeric displays and even logotypes and monograms. Have fun and let your inner cartoonist inspire.

The curves are vintage and the serifs are big. They're so big that for years I never had the courage to tackle this intimidating font. But when fellow signmaker Frank Smith laid the groundwork for this intriguing typeface by Frank H. Atkinson, I couldn't pass on the opportunity to take it from paper to keyboard. After all, at over 100 years old, I felt this alphabet had never been given a proper, digital treatment. So how did this face survive the last century? Well, for those who don't know the history, it survived in Atkinson's ubiquitous book, Sign Painting, published first in 1908, the generational standard for anyone interested in sign-related type design. The layouts and lettering treatments in this book have influenced countless designers for more than a hundred years, but most haunting to me was this strange face with the big serifs. Well, I'm haunted no more. The work is done, the kerning is complete, and nothing but a mouse-click separates a very old idea from the modern world. It's wide, it's big, and with those crazy serifs, it is definitely eccentric-!!!

Shocka Family is a confident serif. Designed to reflect nature, it creates a sense of softness and natural expression. We pushed the concept in a usability-focused direction, to work as a bold tool and a beautiful communicator. Variable Shocka enables fluid design in 9 weights, italics and 2 styles with major latin based languages. The right slant advances aesthetics, brings energy and makes it suitable for modern designs. The type family blends organic curves and soft repetition into strong and harmonious types. At large dot sizes you can appreciate the shape of the letters, while the same control and focus creates an even texture for small dot sizes and long reads. Fonts extend their use by giving weights ranging from light to black. The natural curve, a swollen and sloping stem, grows in character as the font gains weight. While the thinner weight has lowered contrast and optical correction to create a warm and soft look. The Shocka Family character set combines additional symbols, style alternatives, unique binding, and case sensitive punctuation - resulting in a stable, hard-working family ready to tackle projects of any size. I can't wait to see what you do with Shocka Family! Feel free to use the #Skinny_Type and #Shocka Family font tags to show what you've done visit my Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/skinny.type/ Thank you!

Montage has played a weighty role in some of the most influential and enduring typography of the past few decades, from book jackets and album covers, to posters and logos…you name it. Exhibiting an uncommon ability to wield immense power while demonstrating extraordinary finesse, Montage’s commanding profile packs a hefty punch which is softened only by its lithe yet durable serifs. Originally designed for Photo-Lettering in the mid-1960s by type legend, Ed Benguiat, the fonts were given a jump start by Jess Collins before ultimately being shaped into five compatible widths by longtime House co-conspirator, Mitja Miklavčič. Under the guidance of Ben Kiel, along with some additional chin-stroking by Ken Barber, Montage has been fully developed into a robust family ready to tackle any challenge you can throw at it. FEATURES LIGATURES: In order to ensure that Montage maintains its bold presence in tricky text settings, we’ve added a handy set of pre-drawn letter combinations. When enabled, the Ligature feature identifies problem pairs like—fl, fi, ff, ffl, and of course, fyi—and substitutes them with glyphs optimized to enhance font performance. ALTERNATES: For fickle typographers, we’ve also added a handful of alternate characters to allow Montage to suit any number of mood Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

Originally published by OurType, Dan Milne’s Tasman has found a new home at Retype. Milne first conceived Tasman as a typeface for newspapers. This influenced the proportions and look of the face considerably: the goal was to keep the personality as warm and playful as possible without losing the credible tone required to deliver all kinds of news. A sturdy, warm type family that is neither mechanical nor fragile. It borrows its name from Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603–1659), a Dutch seafarer, explorer, and merchant who mapped parts of Australia in 1642, including Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania). Tasman’s primary purpose is an unbiased presentation of information; it strives for neutrality over elegance. Its characters are sturdy and unambiguous, sporting strong serifs, punctuation, and diacritics, as well as generously sized small caps and hybrid figures. Rationalized letterforms give the face enough robustness to withstand the stress of screen applications and laser printing. The figures’ three-quarter x-height makes them considerably larger than traditional oldstyle numerals, yet they still integrate with the lowercase much better than lining figures do. Although initially intended for newspapers, Tasman’s somewhat corporate, objective appearance also makes it an excellent candidate for digital and print magazines, websites, annual reports, and corporate identities. Tasman is a suite of feature-rich OpenType fonts fully equipped to tackle complex, professional typography. The character set includes small caps, fractions, case-sensitive forms, bullets, arrows, special quotes, and nine sets of numerals. Besides standard Latin, its extensive character set supports Central European, Baltic, and Turkish languages.

A playful caricature of a midcentury grotesque, Guzzo is a fresh addition to the Monotype Library. Somewhat eccentric and full of surprises, its unmistakable quirk can be found on closer inspection, stemming from details proudly borrowed from brush lettering and calligraphy. The wide range of weights and style can take you through any design space, from the condensed weights squeezing in larger headlines or dense blocks of text with the condensed range, to experimenting with small point sizes, labels or packaging with the extended cut. However, Guzzo’s real charm is probably best expressed through its wonderfully playful shapes, its unusual 'laid-back italics' feature cursive forms and a backslant. The different stylistic sets allow you to decide what you make of Guzzo, with several sets of alternate glyphs steering it in any direction you want. Guzzo is a happy-go-lucky character, and has a warm, humble and painterly quality that - at a glance - may be unrecognizable as a typeface. It can almost pass for hand-lettering. Guzzo pairs exceptionally well with scripts and slab typefaces, and feels most at home in situ with toys, packaging, menus, broadcasting, cartoons and merchandising! Guzzo encourages you to turn up the silliness and is for designers who want to emulate hand-painted and casual motifs. Taking its name from American artist Jeremy Pinc, aka the painter Guzzo Pinc, the typeface channels the quirky, funny and poignant qualities of his paintings - with wacky characters, loosely painted geometric forms and bright colors. For this mid century, authentic, nostalgic typeface - the story is really what you make of it.

The name Corpid derives from “Corporate Identity” — which is what this family of low-contrast sans-serifs was made for. Corpid was originally commissioned by Studio Dumbar in the Netherlands as a corporate typeface for the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fishing. The font was designed to replace the existing standard typeface (a well-known business-like sans-serif) to provide the organization with a unique and strong identity. Although it was designed to fit strict technical requirements, Corpid has a personality all of its own. This was in part a result of what Luc(as) calls “creating tension” between the inner and outer curves of each character. “I tend to put a little more diagonal contrast into fonts than is the case in most neutral sans serif fonts. This brings a certain humanistic touch to the typeface. Much more subtle here than in Thesis – but although it is almost invisible, it is still palpable.” Corpid was gradually expanded into a five-weight, three-width family. The new Corpid SemiCondensed has double functionality. It is a no-frills, compact headline font that offers optimum legibility in sizes from small to huge. It is also a great space-saving text typeface for magazines, newsletters or annual reports: economic, versatile, and provided with several different numeral sets. In this OpenType type version, all weights come with Small Caps. With its wealth of numeral styles and complete character sets (including Central European) the Corpid family is now well equipped to tackle the most complex of typographic tasks.

Edison, is it Victorian or is it Art Nouveau? While this typeface may be found in Petzendorfer’s Treasury of Art Nouveau Alphabets, I believe the decorative spirals are more Victorian than “New Art.” To me, they looked tacked on, rather than organic -- with the industrial mechanics of a coiled spring, rather than the tendrils of a growing plant as the philosophical wellspring. Originally released by ATF in 1894 as Houghton, this typeface was re-released shortly thereafter by Bauer and Berthold in Germany as EDISON. Please do not make the mistake of thinking the font we offer here is no better than freeware fonts in cheap rip-off collections. This font has a set 218 characters and represents many hours manipulating the bezier curves to produce acceptable results. Available freeware fonts are often little more than raw scans with little accuracy of letterform. The muddy line intersections are a dead give-away. Frequently all you get is the alphabet itself. No numbers, no punctuation and don't even think about diacriticals. The font we offer represents a tremendous value. Considering the hours of work involved, I have no business charging so little. I could make better money cooking hamburgers or bagging groceries. But we want very much to encourage you to purchase and enjoy these fascinating historical typefaces and are making it as easy as possible for you to do so. So please encourage us and order Edison today.

FF Kievit Slab is an industrial strength, do anything, go anywhere, kind of design. Its exceptional legibility and straightforward strength contrasts with a friendly humanistic underpinning. Michael Abbink and Paul van der Laan carefully revised character shapes and stroke contrast of FF Kievit, when they adapted them to FF Kievit Slab. The result is that the striking and powerful FF Kievit Slab easily complements the other members of the FF Kievit super family, that also includes FF Kievit and FF Kievit Serif, and stands on its own in as a multi-talented design. Though created from the sans, FF Kievit Slab is not FF Kievit with slabs serifs tacked on. The family is the fruit of a four-year collaboration between Abbink and Van der Laan, to make the perfect companion to the FF Kievit family. Each glyph was painstakingly adjusted and to achieve proper density, contrast, and balance, while remaining a perfect companion to its sans serif and oldstyle cousins. Its nine weights and italics also harmonize perfectly with the original FF Kievit design. Each of the FF Kievit styles is a typographical all-rounder that is equally at home in headlines as it is in text copy. Together, the three designs of the FF Kievit super family span a wide and deep typographic universe in which they support one another perfectly. These fonts will help you achieve your typographic goals, no matter how lofty. Featured in: Best Fonts for Websites

Drawn by George Ryan and named after Robert Givens, the co-founder and first president of Monotype Imaging, the Givens Antiqua™ typeface speaks with elegance and subtle authority. The design's open proportions, generous x-height and soft serifs lend Givens Antiqua a gracious quality that invites reading. I didn't work from any single design model," Ryan recalls. "The face grew out of my experimenting with several characters from a hand-lettered headline in a magazine. I worked on the shapes and forms for some time before I put the drawings in a drawer." At that point Ryan had finished the basic alphabet in two weights, but had not yet tackled the italics. A new project came along that demanded his full attention, and it was two years before he revisited the drawings. He liked what he saw and decided to finish the job. "The italics were the most problematic designs in the family," says Ryan, "but once I had their basic shapes and proportions, the rest was basically a production project." Another year of sketching, testing, editing and reworking characters ensued before Givens Antiqua was ready for release. The result is a four-weight family of roman designs and small caps, with complementary italics for the lightest three weights and a suite of swash caps for the italic designs. Givens Antiqua and Givens Antiqua Light show a modest stroke weight stress and a light, even text color. Givens Antiqua Bold is an effective emphasizer for text copy and an authoritative communicator at display sizes. The Black weight performs best at large sizes and makes a powerful statement without shouting, while the italic swash capitals possess enough vitality to serve as standalone initial letters."

Hello Everyone.. Introducing a new Font " El Fonte Angelia " Beautiful Serif Type Family is inspired by the serif typefaces used in editorial media in the 70s and 80s.such as the soft and gentle shapes found in Cooper or the fluid, angled strokes in Windsor— mixed into one single design that features familiar, fresh, modern flavors. Designed to reflect nature, it creates a sense of natural softness and expressiveness. We pushed the concept into a usability focused direction, to work as a bold tool and beautiful communicator. El Fonte Angelia variable allows fluid design across 5 weights The font broadens its use by supplying weights all the way from Light to Bold. The natural curves, swells and sloping trunks, grow in character as the font gains weight. Whilst the thinner weights have lowered contrast and optical corrections to create a warm and gentle appearance. El Fonte Angelia character set incorporates additional symbols, stylistic alternates, unique ligatures and case sensitive punctuation - producing a stable workhorse family ready to tackle projects of any size.The type family melds organic curves and gentle repetition into powerful and harmonious type. At large point sizes you can appreciate the letter shapes, whilst the same restraint and focus creates an even texture for small point sizes and long reading. Its variety of weights provide a range of choices that will help you find the best typographic color for your project. Lighter weights are well-suited for body text while heavier ones are ideal for high impact headlines. The available stylistic alternates offer a number of different characters that give your logo or business card a unique look. Check my other Font here : https://gilarstudio.com/ Thank you Regards, Gilar Studio

Cute FS Kitty is the type equivalent of Bagpuss: plump, cute, cuddly and not fond of exercise. So don’t go giving it a run-out on body copy; FS Kitty is an all-caps font made for showing off in posters and headlines, and on products, point-of sale and especially sweets. Blubber Kitty had been quietly curled up in Phil Garnham’s sketchbook for a year before he brought it out to be brushed up. “It was in the mix as a basic form when I started thinking about FS Lola. It was a twisted, bubbly beauty – quite squishable and huggable. The working file was called Blubber. “At that time it was a basic construction of strokes. I created the ‘A’ first, purely as a shape to play with, not as type. I flipped it for ‘V’, and copied that for a ‘W’. I flipped the ‘W’ for an ‘M’... I thought, ‘This looks a bit wacky, but I like it,’ and just carried on. The most tricky characters were the ‘B’ ‘P’ and ‘R’. I must have drawn about 20 kinds of B for this, just to get it to fit.” Variety “When the regular weight of Kitty had been designed,” says Jason Smith, “it just felt like a natural progression to go on and explore how far we could go with it: Light, Solid, Headline, Shadow.” Phil Garnham thinks there’s still more to come. “There are some really individual characters in this font that I think have yet to be exploited: the Greek Omega symbol, the strange face in the ampersand. Like Bagpuss, Kitty has kept a low profile so far. “We know people are using Kitty. In fact, it was the first of any of our fonts that we sold on the day it was released. But I still haven’t seen it out there in the wild. It’s going to be a exciting moment.”

Introducing Cornpile, the corn-tastic slab-serif typeface that will have your message popping off the page like kernels in a popcorn machine! With its quirky cartoon style, Cornpile is perfect for adding a touch of humor and fun to any design project. In OpenType savvy applications, Cornpile’s letters and numerals automatically bounce, adding an extra level of zaniness to your text. And with six wacky weights and italics to choose from, you can mix and match to create a truly unique and eye-catching design. Whether you’re designing a logo for a local corn festival, creating a fun and playful poster for a children’s event, or just looking to add some whimsy to your latest project, Cornpile is the perfect typeface for the job. So why wait? Download Cornpile today and let your creativity pop! Most Latin-based European, Vietnamese, Greek, and most Cyrillic-based writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dungan, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaingang, Khalkha, Kalmyk, Kanuri, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kazakh, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Komi-Permyak, Kurdish, Kurdish (Latin), Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Nahuatl, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Rusyn, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tajik, Tatar, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Uzbek (Latin), Venda, Venetian, Vepsian, Vietnamese, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec, Zarma, Zazaki, Zulu and Zuni.

Cute FS Kitty is the type equivalent of Bagpuss: plump, cute, cuddly and not fond of exercise. So don’t go giving it a run-out on body copy; FS Kitty is an all-caps font made for showing off in posters and headlines, and on products, point-of sale and especially sweets. Blubber Kitty had been quietly curled up in Phil Garnham’s sketchbook for a year before he brought it out to be brushed up. “It was in the mix as a basic form when I started thinking about FS Lola. It was a twisted, bubbly beauty – quite squishable and huggable. The working file was called Blubber. “At that time it was a basic construction of strokes. I created the ‘A’ first, purely as a shape to play with, not as type. I flipped it for ‘V’, and copied that for a ‘W’. I flipped the ‘W’ for an ‘M’... I thought, ‘This looks a bit wacky, but I like it,’ and just carried on. The most tricky characters were the ‘B’ ‘P’ and ‘R’. I must have drawn about 20 kinds of B for this, just to get it to fit.” Variety “When the regular weight of Kitty had been designed,” says Jason Smith, “it just felt like a natural progression to go on and explore how far we could go with it: Light, Solid, Headline, Shadow.” Phil Garnham thinks there’s still more to come. “There are some really individual characters in this font that I think have yet to be exploited: the Greek Omega symbol, the strange face in the ampersand. Like Bagpuss, Kitty has kept a low profile so far. “We know people are using Kitty. In fact, it was the first of any of our fonts that we sold on the day it was released. But I still haven’t seen it out there in the wild. It’s going to be a exciting moment.”

Mundo Sans, by Carl Crossgrove for the Monotype Studio, is distinctive, approachable – and ready to tackle jobs both big and small. Its open counters and large x-height, which give the design a straight-forward no-nonsense mien, are softened by inviting calligraphic undertones. With 10 weights and a complementary suite of cursive italics, there is little outside the range of the Mundo Sans family. The light weights are elegant in packaging and brochure design, the medium are easy readers in digital blogs and print periodicals and the bold command attention in banners and headlines. Mundo Sans is at home in a wide range of sizes, and comfortable in everything from wayfinding to mobile apps. Mundo Sans takes on complicated branding projects with efficient grace. The family enables companies and products to express their brand seamlessly in websites, advertising, corporate messaging, packaging – virtually everywhere visible engagement is possible. A large international character set, that includes support for most Central European and many Eastern European languages, ensures ease of localization. Mundo Sans was originally released with seven weights. The family was updated with three new roman weights and their italics in 2019 that extend and diversify its range of use: a fine hairline weight, a book weight, slightly lighter than regular, and a demi that is subtly lighter than the medium. The design is also is a good mixer. It easily pairs with everything from refined Didones to stalwart slab serif designs. And if you need a more harmonious palette, look no further than Mundo Sans’ relative, Mundo Serif. The two designs harmonize with each other perfectly in weight, typographic color and proportion. Mundo Sans’ italics are true cursive designs, with fluid strokes and obvious calligraphic overtones. The flick of the down-stroke in the ‘a,’ the descending stroke of the ‘f’ and baseline curve of the ‘z’ add grace to the design and distinguish it from more mechanistic styles. Mundo Sans is a design with deep roots. It was originally drawn to pair with classic Renaissance book typefaces like Bembo® and ITC Galliard®. With a hint of diagonal stroke contrast and gentle flaring of strokes, Mundo Sans complements these designs with warmth and grace. Crossgrove says that Mundo isn’t meant to be showy or distinctive. It is intended to follow the tradition of sans serif designs that have a wide range of uses, enabling comfortable reading and clear expression. Crossgrove has designed a variety of typefaces ranging from the futuristic and organic Biome™ to the text designs of Monotype’s elegant Walbaum™ revival. His work for Monotype also often takes Crossgrove into the realm of custom fronts for branding and non-Latin scripts.

Tomato is the digitization and quite elaborate expansion of an early 1970s Franklin Photolettering film type called Viola Flare. This typeface is an obvious child of funk, the audio-visual revolution that swept America and put an end to the art nouveau period we now associate with the hippy era. Funk is of course little more than jazz with a chorus and an emphatic beat. Nevertheless, it became the definition of cool in the 1970s, thanks to blaxploitation movies with excellent soundtracks like Shaft and Superfly. Funk began as a commercial audio experience, then later expanded its signature to cover everything, from design to fashion to the later birth of disco, which is really a further simplification of funk. Funk had very strong and unique typographical elements, particularly a kind of titling with an essentially western, wooden core that suddenly changed and flared in unexpected areas until a very individual brand was achieved. Everything that can be tacked on to the alphabet was used towards that individuality. Things like curls, swirls, swashes, ligatures were always plentiful in funk, sometimes giving the titling a specific gender, sometimes bulging, sometimes speeding, sometimes fading in the distance, sometimes doing nothing but crazily aligning with other design elements, but the result was always a fascinating creature that seemed to invariably want to dance and have fun. Tomato was built in exactly that spirit. The original film type certainly had enough swashes and curls to be an unmistakable funk font in itself, but our further expansion of it cements it and makes it the definite font for the genre. With as many as 12 different possibilities for some letters, the designer's choices for a titling set in Tomato are virtually limitless. The Postscript and True Type versions of Tomato come in five fonts, including two fonts for alternates, one font for ligatures, and one font for swashes. These are split into two affordable packages. The entire family package is also available at an even more affordable price, and includes complimentary Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, and Central European versions of Tomato. A Tomato Pro OpenType version is also available. It is a single font that includes over 650 characters, glued together with extensive programming for convenience of use in OpenType-friendly applications, where you can watch the letters morph and dance as you push the buttons and change the options of your OT palette. Now you know which font will come to mind when someone says the word "funky".

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.

Pure and not-so-simple Maybe it’s the air of purity, openness and transparency that they transmit, but geometric typefaces are more popular than ever among leading brands. Based on near-perfect circles, triangles and squares, geometric letterforms look uncomplicated, even though making them readable is anything but – something the designers of the first wave of geometric fonts discovered nearly a century ago. Many of the world’s most recognisable brands in technology, retail, travel, food, manufacturing and other industries continue to be drawn to the straightforward, honest character that geometric fonts convey. Fontsmith set out in 2015 to develop a typeface in the same tradition, but optimised for the demands of modern brands – online and offline usage, readability and accessibility. And, of course, with the all-important Fontsmith x-factor built in. FS Lucas is the bold and deceptively simple result. Handle with care The letterforms of FS Lucas are round and generous, along the lines of Trajan Column lettering stripped of its serifs. But beware their thorns. Their designer, Stuart de Rozario, who also crafted the award-winning FS Millbank, wanted a contrast between spiky and soft, giving sharp apexes to the more angular letterforms, such as A, M, N, v, w and z. Among his inspirations were the colourful, geometric compositions of Frank Stella, the 1920s art deco poster designs of AM Cassandre, and the triangular cosmic element symbol, which led him to tackle the capital A first, instead of the usual H. The proportions and angles of the triangular form would set the template for many of the other characters. It was this form, and the light-scattering effects of triangular prisms, that lit the path to a name for the typeface: Lucas is derived from lux, the Latin word for light. Recommended reading Early geometric typefaces were accused of putting mathematical integrity before readability. FS Lucas achieves the trick of appearing geometric, while taking the edge off elements that make reading difficult. Perfectly circlular shapes don’t read well. The way around that is to slightly thicken the vertical strokes, and pull out the curves at the corners to compensate; the O and o of FS Lucas are optical illusions. Pointed apexes aren’t as sharp as they look; the flattened tips are an essential design feature. And distinctive details such as the open terminals of the c, e, f, g, j, r and s, and the x-height bar on the i and j, aid legibility, especially on-screen. These and many other features, the product of sketching the letterforms in the first instance by hand rather than mapping them out mechanically by computer, give FS Lucas the built-in humanity and character that make it a better, easier read all-round. Marks of distinction Unlike some of its more buttoned-up geometric bedfellows, FS Lucas can’t contain its natural personality and quirks: the flick of the foot of the l, for example, and the flattish tail on the g and j. The unusual bar on the J improves character recognition, and the G is circular, without a straight stem. There’s a touch of Fontsmith about the t, too, with the curve across the left cross section in the lighter weights, and the ampersand is one of a kind. There’s a lot to like about Lucas. With its 9 weights, perfect proportions and soft but spiky take on the classic geometric font, it’s a typeface that could light up any brand.