After doing this for so many years, one would think my fascination with the old history of writing would have mellowed out by now. The truth is that alongside being a calligraphy history buff, I'm a pop technology freak. Maybe even keener on the tech thing, since I just can't seem to get enough new gadgets. And after working with type technologies for so many years, I'm starting to think that writing and design technologies as we now know them, being about 2.5 post-computer generations, keep becoming more and more detached from what the very old humanity arts/tasks they essentially want to facilitate. In a world where command-z is a frequently used key combination, it’s difficult to justify expecting a Morris-made book or a Zaner-drawn sentence, but accidental artistic “mutations” become welcome, marketable features. When fluid pens were introduced, their liquid saturation influenced type design to a great extent almost overnight an influence professional designers tend to play down. Now round stroke endings are a common sight, and the saturation is so clean and measured, unlike any liquid-paper relationship possible in reality. Some designers even illustrate their work by overlaying perfect circles at stroke ends, in order to illustrate how “geometric” their work was. Because if it’s measured with precise geometry, it’s got to be meaningful design. And once in a while, by a total freak accident, the now-cherished mutations prove to have existed long before the technology that caused them. Rolling Pen was cued by just such a thing: A rounded, circular, roll-flowing calligraphy from the late nineteenth century seemingly one of those experimental takes on what inspired Business Penmanship, another font of mine. Looking at it now it certainly seems to be friendlier, more legible, and maybe even more practical and easier to execute than the standard business penmanship of those days, but I guess friendliness and simplicity were at odds with the stiff manner business liked to present itself back then, so that kind of thing remained buried in the professional penman’s oddities drawer. It would be quite a few years before all this curviness and rounding were thought of as symbolic of graceful movement, which brought such a flow closer to the idea of fine art. Even though in this case the accidental mutation just happens to not be a mutation after all, the whole technology-transforms-application argument still applies here. I'm almost sure “business” will be the last thing on people’s minds when they use this font today. One extreme example of that level of disconnect between origin and current application is shown here, with the so-called business penmanship strutting around in gloss and neon. Rolling Pen is another cup of mine that runneth over with alternates, swashes, ligatures, and other techy perks. To explore its full potential, please use it in a program that supports OpenType features for advanced typography. Enjoy the new Rolling Pen designed by Ale Paul with Neon’s visual poetry by Tomás García.

Paverify is an all-caps geometric slab serif display face inspired by a particular pavement tile component which is evoking a blocky “I” letter. All other characters were interpreted based on its look and drawn accordingly. There are three uppercase Roman fonts in different weights and widths substantially. With the additional versions, type family consisting of 7 fonts in total. Over 220 Latin, Cyrillic and Greek script languages supported. Each font contains an extensive multilingual support with more than 1600 glyphs and OpenType features, including number forms, fractions, and stylistic alternate sets those provide different looks by the typographic preferences. For the lowercase letters there are small caps variants, i.e., shorter caps. These also have identical glyphs and matching marks to enable “Small Capitals From Capitals” feature. Narrower Medium and Bold styles was produced to accompany the Black first design. Paverify comes with an ornaments font named as “Extras”, which contains geometric graphical elements, i.e., paver stone patterns, banner/sticker background sets, star comps and a collection of catchwords to simplify creating feature rich layouts. As is known as interlocking paver in certain regions — a rectangular shape with the distinctive diagonal tabs — transcribing the simplest letter to draw into the whole alphabet was a challenging task. Not only it was the single thing that can be used as a source, considering its thick form in roughly 1.2:1 proportions compared to the sophistication of letterforms was the challenge. Starting point was keeping design consistent while both avoiding and preserving a particular appearance to achieve a similar texture, basically a repeating pattern on the streets. In contrary of a traditional approach, Paverify tend to have more contrast than the other slab serifs which helps to reduce massive stem weight of the source form. This look contributes to its hand painted sign effect achieved in a certain degree, which may otherwise impractical to transform because the source material is an inorganic, static form by definition. Tight and even spacing of the pavement tiles was inspirational for the kerning balance of the letters. Although the lighter weights have more space between the letter pairs, black weight adjusted as to be close to each other as the original grid. Tight spacing can be ignored by using Capital Spacing OpenType feature for the Outline versions as layer fonts. In one stroke, this gives an extra space between the letters to avoid diagonal armed letter terminals overlap. Black typographic colour and texture gives a sturdy appearance to the lines, it is useful for the projects where a robust display faces preferred for the titling, strong headlines, letter stacks, dropcaps, initials, short names on materials such as advertisements, book covers, posters, logotypes, wordmarks, package designs, and more in print or digital. Paverify can be paired as a complimentary face in a combination with broader type systems, where vintage look compositions and woodcut style fusions requiring an extra stunning texture.

Avenir Next Pro is a new take on a classic face—it’s the result of a project whose goal was to take a beautifully designed sans and update it so that its technical standards surpass the status quo, leaving us with a truly superior sans family. This family is not only an update though; in fact it is the expansion of the original concept that takes the Avenir Next design to the next level. In addition to the standard styles ranging from ultralight to heavy, this 32-font collection offers condensed faces that rival any other sans on the market in on and off—screen readability at any size alongside heavy weights that would make excellent display faces in their own right and have the ability to pair well with so many contemporary serif body types. Overall, the family’s design is clean, straightforward and works brilliantly for blocks of copy and headlines alike. Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next Pro to life. It was Akira’s ability to bring his own finesse and ideas for expansion into the project while remaining true to Frutiger’s original intent, that makes this not just a modern typeface, but one ahead of its time. Avenir Next Variables are font files which are featuring two axis, weight and width. They have a preset instance from UltraLight to Heavy and Condensed to Roman width. The preset instances are: Condensed UltraLight, Condensed UltraLight Italic, Condensed Thin, Condensed Thin Italic, Condensed Light, Condensed Light Italic, Condensed, Condensed Italic, Condensed Demi, Condensed Demi Italic, Condensed Medium, Condensed Medium Italic, Condensed Bold, Condensed Bold Italic, Condensed Heavy, Condensed Heavy Italic, UltraLight, UltraLight Italic, Thin, Thin Italic, Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Demi, Demi Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Heavy, Heavy Italic.

Swansbury, Inc. provides handwriting instruction to all ages, accompanied by two exemplar fonts, Barchowsky Fluent Hand.otf and Barchowsky Dot.otf. The basis for the design of the characters is the italic of the Renaissance. With the advantage of contextual alternates, Barchowsky Fluent Hand automatically joins lowercase letters so it can be used in any venue where a clean and elegant appearance of handwriting is desired. The fonts allow maximum instructional flexibility. Aside from their use in lesson plans, educators can customize pages for specific student interests, studies and needs. Included are all math symbols that one typically encounters in school curricula. Nan Jay Barchowsky, designer of this font, believes that children should hone their handwriting skills as they learn all subjects, reading, math, history and foreign languages. Both fonts support all Western European languages and Turkish. Barchowsky Dot is for young children or others who need remediation. The letterforms are identical to those in Barchowsky Fluent Hand. Used at a large point size open dots appear within the lines that form the characters indicating where one should start each stroke in a letter or number. Once formations are learned Barchowsky Fluent Hand can be used with the contextual alternates turned off until students are ready to write in the joined-up manner of a true cursive. Specifications: The technology for fonts that automatically join letters, or allow them to be unjoined is relatively new. At present, both fonts work on Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later (or Vista), using AbiWord, a free word processor (go to abisource.com). They also work well with InDesign 2. Currently there is an unknown factor in later versions of InDesign for Windows that disallows joining. Macs completely support the fonts using InDesign 2 and later, PhotoshopCS and IllustratorCS. If you do not have these applications, there is an inexpensive word processor for Macs.

A tessellation is a pattern in which a shape or tile fits together with copies of itself to fill the plane with no gaps or overlaps. One type of tessellation is formed with sides of center-point rotation, that is, one half of an edge is rotated 180 degrees to form the other half. If a square template is made with sides of identical center-point rotation, there are exactly four shapes that are possible. If these shapes or tiles are fit together not edge to edge but vertex to vertex, the result is a checkerboard-like pattern of tiles and voids. However, the voids have four edges formed by the four possible shapes that the tiles can have, so the voids are limited to the same four shapes that that make up the tiles. The FabFours have 22 tile families that allow a wide variety of fascinating patterns. They form one, two, three, and four tile tessellation. Eleven of the seventeen symmetry groups can be formed with these patterns. In each tile family two of the shapes have two possible orientations, one shape has four possible orientations, and one has eight, for a total of 16 tiles. Each font has two families, one on letters A-P the other on a-p. For some of the families there are also other tiles using the same edge but using triangular and hexagonal templates. To get proper results, the leading must be set equal to the point size of the font. I discovered these fabulous families and their decorative possibilities as I was working on a book about tessellations. I have not been able to find anyone else who has written about these families of four and their decorative possibilities when arranged vertex to vertex.

Hughetta is the font of choice for writing things beyond words. This typeface is designed with great detail to convey stylish elegance. So, it can be said, the character of the transformation is very beautiful, a kind of classic ornamental copper script. Hughetta provides alternative variants of most fonts, binders and many calligraphy tips, ideal for elegant labels, high-end packaging, stationery and composition for select brands, beautiful titles, paragraphs, fonts and short text, meant to be read only with eyes or meant to whisper into someone's ear. Hughetta has 368 , including multiple language support. It features OpenType with alternative styles and elegant binding. The OpenType features don't work automatically, but you can access them manually and for best results your creativity will be required in combining variations of these Glyphs. And also a touch of ornament makes this font look elegant. 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. (Windows), Font Book (Mac) or a software program such as PopChar (for Windows and Mac). How to access all alternative characters using Adobe Illustrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzwjMkbB-wQ How to use the font style set in Microsoft Word 2010 or later versions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVJlZQ3EZU0 There are additional ways to access alternatives/swashes, using the Character Map (Windows), Nexus Font (Windows) Font Book (Mac) or a software program such as PopChar (for Windows and Mac). How to access all alternative characters, using the Windows Character Map with Photoshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go9vacoYmBw If you need help or advice, please contact me by email Thank you for watching!

Jantar Flow is a humanist sanserif type family tailored for continuous reading for both printing and screen. With its large x-height and low contrast it also performs very well in captions, side notes, and short paragraphs set in small sizes. Jantar Flow Italic is distinct and readable. Following a proper italic construction, it shows the fun side of the family yet keeps the features of the upright. Jantar Flow – as well as its teammate Jantar Sharp – comes in seven weights from ExtraLight to Heavy, each with accompanying italics. It has a tabular and proportional set of figures in both old style and lining options, and also a special set of hybrid figures sitting between x-height and capitals. Superscripts and subscripts are provided together with a vast collection of diacritics covering all European languages as well as a set of case-sensitive characters. Jantar, the pairing superfamily. ‘Jantar’ is an old Polish name for ‘amber’, a fossilised resin – a substance that is robust and organic at the same time. These qualities somehow reflect the feeling behind the Jantar families, ‘Flow’ and ‘Sharp’. Jantar Flow was designed along with Jantar Sharp. As part of the Jantar superfamily these two faces are perfectly paired: though not based on the same skeleton, they share the same design parameters and the same character set, but each one works independently with its peculiar features. Designed for publishing for print and web, as well as for branding, the Jantar superfamily was inspired by common font pairings of the digital age like Helvetica/Times or Verdana/Georgia. Jantar Flow and Jantar Sharp communicate with individual yet complementing voices, just like two trained acrobats can perform alone but also know well how to perform together.

Avenir Next Pro is a new take on a classic face—it’s the result of a project whose goal was to take a beautifully designed sans and update it so that its technical standards surpass the status quo, leaving us with a truly superior sans family. This family is not only an update though; in fact it is the expansion of the original concept that takes the Avenir Next design to the next level. In addition to the standard styles ranging from ultralight to heavy, this 32-font collection offers condensed faces that rival any other sans on the market in on and off—screen readability at any size alongside heavy weights that would make excellent display faces in their own right and have the ability to pair well with so many contemporary serif body types. Overall, the family’s design is clean, straightforward and works brilliantly for blocks of copy and headlines alike. Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next Pro to life. It was Akira’s ability to bring his own finesse and ideas for expansion into the project while remaining true to Frutiger’s original intent, that makes this not just a modern typeface, but one ahead of its time. Avenir Next Variables are font files which are featuring two axis, weight and width. They have a preset instance from UltraLight to Heavy and Condensed to Roman width. The preset instances are: Condensed UltraLight, Condensed UltraLight Italic, Condensed Thin, Condensed Thin Italic, Condensed Light, Condensed Light Italic, Condensed, Condensed Italic, Condensed Demi, Condensed Demi Italic, Condensed Medium, Condensed Medium Italic, Condensed Bold, Condensed Bold Italic, Condensed Heavy, Condensed Heavy Italic, UltraLight, UltraLight Italic, Thin, Thin Italic, Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Demi, Demi Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Heavy, Heavy Italic.

ITC Christoph's Quill is just about everything you could want in a typeface: it's distinctive, beautiful, and exceptionally versatile. According to designer Russell Bean, ITC Christoph's Quill is the culmination of experimentation with a graphics tablet that spanned several years. Then one day, as if by magic, it all just fell into place. The design seemed to flow from my pen." Bean was born in Australia and, except for a brief stint with a photo-lettering firm in Southern California, has spent most of his career working down under. "I can recall a deep fascination for the written word," he says. "Even before learning to spell, read or write, I think I recognized that this was a means of visual communication." Bean's first job was in a small ad agency as a trainee in the production department, where he learned art techniques and how to handle print, as well as "the value of visual impressions," he says. His career path meandered from one design job to another, but always in the general direction of fonts and typefaces. Today, his workload consists of logo design commissions, font editing, typography and print production consultation to a select group of loyal clients - still leaving time, notes Bean, "to pursue my type design ambitions." ITC Christoph's Quill began life as a simple, visually striking font of caps, lowercase, punctuation and numerals. To this Bean added a bold weight, for when a little more strength is desirable. Next came a flock of alternate characters. Finally, Bean drew a set of decorative caps, a suite of logos, and a sprinkling of beginning and ending swashes. The net result is a type family that can add a signature flourish to a vast range of projects: from invitations and menus to logos, signage, packaging and more."

The idea for the Generis type system came to Erik Faulhaber while he was traveling in the USA. Seeing typefaces mixed together in a business district motivated him to create a new type system with interrelated forms. The first design scheme came about in 1997, following the space saving model of these American Gothics. Faulhaber then examined the demands of legibility and various communications media before finally developing the plan behind this type system. Generis’s design includes two individually designed styles; each of with is available with and without serifs, giving the type system four separate families. Each includes at least four basic weights: Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold. Further weights, small caps, old style figures, and true italics were added to each family where needed. The Generis type system is designed to meet both optical criteria and the highest possible measure of technical precision. Harmony, rhythm, legibility, and formal restraint make up the foreground. Generis combines aesthetic, technical, and economic advantages, which purposefully and efficiently cover the whole range of corporate communication needs. The unified basic form and the individual peculiarity of the styles lead to Generis’ systematic, total-package concept. The clear formal language of the Generis type system resides beneath the information, bringing appropriate typographic expression to high-level corporate identity systems, both in print and on screen. The condensed and aspiring nature of the letterforms allows for the efficient setting of body copy, and the economic use of the page. A range of accented characters allows text to be set in 48 Latin-based languages, offering maximal typographic free range. This previously unknown level of technical and design execution helps create higher quality typography in all areas of corporate communication. Optimal combinations within the type system: Generis Serif or Generis Slab with Generis Sans or Generis Simple.

Circe Rounded is an extension for a popular Circe typeface, with rounded terminals. Bold and ExtraBold faces have two variants with different radius of the roundings. Circe Rounded is even more friendly than the original Circe. The typeface is designed by Alexandra Korolkova and Alexander Lubovenko and released by ParaType in 2015. It is known that the Circe typeface is distinguished by mild and humanist nature being formally a geometric sans-serif. However, as an experiment we decided to make it even softer: Circe now has a version with rounded terminals — Circe Rounded. Rounding is generally regarded as a mechanical operation, but in this case a lot of manual adjustment was needed because of the humanist nature and peculiarities of type design. Moreover, the two bold styles now have two options: a basic one is slightly rounded and an alternate one is fully rounded. In Circe Rounded we decided to dismiss characters with swashes that are rather inappropriate in such a rounded font, but the stylistic sets and alternate characters are remaining. Rounded terminals make an open and friendly typeface even more childish. For example, in quite large point sizes (because the x-height is still not big) it can be used as a body type in infant books. Circe Rounded, similar to Circe, has alternative forms of lowercase characters, which are called “infant” and are used in publications for children’s reading. However, a humanist basis is preserved alongside with its softness and it does not allow it to be as “plasticine” as many other rounded fonts. Two of the most obvious areas of possible application of Circe Rounded are everything for children and everything edible, especially all that is sweet and puff. However, we believe that there are other options.

The Verdana typeface family was designed specifically to address the challenges of on-screen display. Verdana was originally designed by world-renowned type designer Matthew Carter, and tuned for screen display by the leading TrueType hinting expert, Tom Rickner. The Verdana fonts are unique examples of type designed specifically for the computer screen.The Verdana family received a major update in 2011 as a collaboration between The Font Bureau, Monotype Imaging and Matthew Carter. The original Verdana family included only four fonts: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. The new and expanded Verdana Pro family contains 20 fonts in total. The Verdana Pro and Verdana Pro Condensed families each contain 10 fonts: Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold and Black (each with matching italic styles).Verdana exhibits characteristics derived from the pixel rather than the pen, the brush or the chisel. The balance between straight, curve and diagonal were meticulously tuned to ensure that the pixel patterns at small sizes are pleasing, clear and legible. Commonly confused characters, such as the lowercase i j l, the uppercase I J L and the number 1, have been carefully drawn for maximum individuality - an important characteristic of fonts designed for on-screen use. Another reason for the legibility of the Verdana fonts on the screen is their generous width and spacing.Designed by David Berlow and David Johnathan Ross of the Font Bureau, with typographic consultation by Matthew Carter, the new Verdana Pro includes a variety of advanced typographic features including true small capitals, ligatures, fractions, old style figures, lining tabular figures and lining proportional figures. An OpenType-savvy application is required to access these typographic features. The expanded weights and completely new condensed range of fonts provide designers with an expanded palette of typographic options for use in print and on-screen, in both small text sizes and headlines.

Though there are many thousands of digital typefaces available, none seem to be made exclusively of letters that tessellate, a complete tessellating alphabet. This void is now filled with not one typeface, but a group of typefaces, the Tescellations kinship group. Even though I am aware of only one use for this typeface--writing about tessellations--that does not mean there are not hundreds or perhaps thousands of other uses. These typefaces are a byproduct of two maze books I designed, Puzzling Typography and Puzzling Typography A Sequel. I found the challenge of making mazes from tessellations, including letter tessellations, intriguing and these typefaces are a byproduct that endeavor. There are seven members of this typeface kinship group. I tried to select the the glyphs that fit together best to form Tescellations; it is the most readable of the lot. The reason for an Italics version is that I needed one for the maze project. In constructing it, I tried to include as many different lower-case glyphs as I could rather than just skew the regular version. A purist might insist that the tessellation deal with the counters. My approach was to worry only about the exterior of any letter that has an interior, but for anyone who who might object to the counters, versions with filled counters are included. What did not fit into Tescellations was dumped into Tescellations Two, which is somewhat of a ransom-note type of face. It comes in two styles, a regular version and a version in which the counters are removed. TescellationPatterns shows how many of the characters in these typefaces tessellate. It has over 100 tessellation patterns, each on only one character. Simply type several lines with any character and make sure the leading is the same as the font size, and you have an instant tessellation pattern of a letter.

The original Avenir typeface was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, after years of having an interest in sans serif typefaces. The word Avenir means “future” in French and hints that the typeface owes some of its interpretation to Futura. But unlike Futura, Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an “o” that is not a perfect circle, and shortened ascenders. These nuances aid in legibility and give Avenir a harmonious and sensible appearance for both texts and headlines. In 2012, Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next to life, as a new take on the classic Avenir. The goal of the project was to take a beautifully designed sans and update it so that its technical standards surpass the status quo, leaving us with a truly superior sans family. Since then, Monotype expanded the typeface to accommodate more languages. Akira’s deep familiarity with existing iterations of the Frutiger designs, along with his understanding of the design philosophy of the man himself, made him uniquely suited to lead the creation of different language fonts. Avenir Next World family, the most recent release from Monotype, is an expansive family of fonts that offers support for more than 150 languages and scripts that include Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Thai. Avenir Next World contains 10 weights, from UltraLight to Heavy. The respective 10 Italic styles do not support Arabic, Georgian and Thai, since Italic styles are unfamiliar in these scripts/languages. Separate Non-Latin products to support just the Arabic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Hebrew and Thai script are also available for those who do not need the full language support.

The original Avenir typeface was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, after years of having an interest in sans serif typefaces. The word Avenir means “future” in French and hints that the typeface owes some of its interpretation to Futura. But unlike Futura, Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an “o” that is not a perfect circle, and shortened ascenders. These nuances aid in legibility and give Avenir a harmonious and sensible appearance for both texts and headlines. In 2012, Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next to life, as a new take on the classic Avenir. The goal of the project was to take a beautifully designed sans and update it so that its technical standards surpass the status quo, leaving us with a truly superior sans family. Since then, Monotype expanded the typeface to accommodate more languages. Akira’s deep familiarity with existing iterations of the Frutiger designs, along with his understanding of the design philosophy of the man himself, made him uniquely suited to lead the creation of different language fonts. Avenir Next World family, the most recent release from Monotype, is an expansive family of fonts that offers support for more than 150 languages and scripts that include Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Thai. Avenir Next World contains 10 weights, from UltraLight to Heavy. The respective 10 Italic styles do not support Arabic, Georgian and Thai, since Italic styles are unfamiliar in these scripts/languages. Separate Non-Latin products to support just the Arabic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Hebrew and Thai script are also available for those who do not need the full language support.