We are very happy to announce the release of our first collaboration with master calligrapher, designer and illustrator Gabriel Martínez Meave from México. The first in the series of new designs is Wordless Script, an emotional calligraphic typeface published by Sudtipos. Speechless. Breathless. Wordless. There are letters that transcend simple functionality and sheer legibility, to be recognized instead by their style, their charm, their emotion. It’s like when we don’t remember the exact sentences, but we recall the tone of the voice of a loved one: it just doesn’t matter WHAT he or she said, but HOW he or she said it. Wordless Script is the font of choice for writing those things that go beyond words. Based on the connected-scripts of late 18th-century England, this typeface preserves the irregular finish and gestural strokes of the pointed nib. It is, so to speak, a personal rendition of the English roundhand as originally executed with the bird’s quill. Imbued with a Rococo, neoclassical, romantic spirit, Wordless radiates the gallantry of a time when the celebrated «douceur de vivre» that Talleyrand was so fond of was still alive and well; echoes of which still haunt us in our eclectic 21st-century, which has once again come to appreciate these magnificent styles of old. Wordless features alternate variants of most letters, ligatures and multiple calligraphic endings, ideal for elegant labels, high-end packaging and personalized stationery, as well as compositions for selected brands, exquisite titlings, verses, letters and short texts, like those meant to be read with the eyes only or intended for whispering into someone’s ear.

With the publication of the “Today Sans Now” Elsner+Flake extends its offering of the “Today Sans Serif” type family, developed in 1988 by Volker Küster for Scangraphic, by another cut so that the gradation of the stroke width can now be more finely calibrated. The type complement is available for 72 Latin-based languages as well as Cyrillic. Where available, small caps were integrated, and mathematical symbols as well as fractions were included. In order to make the symbols for text applications in regard to headlines more flexible, the insertions which were formerly added, for technical reasons in order to sharpen the corners, were eliminated, and the optical size adjustments of the vertical and diagonal stem endings (I, v, H, V) to the horizontal bars (z, Z) were scaled back. Already since the end of 1984, Volker Küster experimented with broad sticks of chalk and a broad felt pen in order to develop a new sans serif typeface which, in the interest of easy legibility, would be built on the basic structures and proportions of the Renaissance-Antiqua. Using a normal angle of writing, his experiments lead to the form structure of the characters: a small contrast between bold and light weights, serif-like beginning and end strokes in some of the lower-case characters, and the typical, left-leaning slant of all round lower-case letters and the typical left-leaning axis of all round letter forms. In this way, a rhythmization of a line of type was achieved which created a lively image without being “noisy”. With this concept, Volker Küster has enlarged the Sans Serif by a distinctive, trend-setting form variation.

Dederon Serif has been specifically designed for book setting. Preliminary sketches were drawn in 2004. Its inspiration – particularly its weight and width proportions – can be traced to the Liberta typeface from the TypoArt type foundry in former Eastern Germany. After a careful study of the model, the design of Dederon branched off into its own direction, finding its distinctive voice and becoming a wholly original type family. Dederon Serif kept most of the elements typical for the Old Style Roman lettering, such as the angle of the stress, the medium x-height, and lower contrast. In large sizes, the typical shapes of the letters stand out – the calligraphic feel characteristic for the Czech typefaces by Oldrich Menhart, the unusual serifs hinting at the angle of the pen, the shapes of the stems, or the terminals of dots and ears. Upon finishing the serif version, a Serif-serif variant called Dederon Serif was added. The construction principles are also derived from the Old Style Roman model, which lends the lettering its open, humanist feel. Yet the design also conforms to the rules of the modern Serif serif. Most characteristics of Dederon Serif match the serif version – the weight of individual cuts, the width proportions, x-height, ascenders' and descenders' length, and the slope of the italics. Each version of Dederon Open Type Std contains the standard Western Latin character set and the Central European characters; a number of basic and accented ligatures, small caps; old style, small caps and caps, table, fraction and superscript numerals; expert glyphs and alternative characters. This brings the total to a comfortable 820 glyphs per weight, permitting truly professional use in the most demanding projects.

Dederon Serif has been specifically designed for book setting. Preliminary sketches were drawn in 2004. Its inspiration — particularly its weight and width proportions — can be traced to the Liberta typeface from the TypoArt type foundry in former Eastern Germany. After a careful study of the model, the design of Dederon branched off into its own direction, finding its distinctive voice and becoming a wholly original type family. Dederon Serif kept most of the elements typical for the Old Style Roman lettering, such as the angle of the stress, the medium x-height, and lower contrast. In large sizes, the typical shapes of the letters stand out — the calligraphic feel characteristic for the Czech typefaces by Oldrich Menhart, the unusual serifs hinting at the angle of the pen, the shapes of the stems, or the terminals of dots and ears. Upon finishing the serif version, a sans-serif variant called Dederon Sans was added. The construction principles are also derived from the Old Style Roman model, which lends the lettering its open, humanist feel. Yet the design also conforms to the rules of the modern sans serif. Most characteristics of Dederon Sans match the serif version — the weight of individual cuts, the width proportions, x-height, ascenders' and descenders' length, and the slope of the italics. Each version of Dederon Open Type Std contains the standard Western Latin character set and the Central European characters; a number of basic and accented ligatures, small caps; old style, small caps and caps, table, fraction and superscript numerals; expert glyphs and alternative characters. This brings the total to a comfortable 820 glyphs per weight

ITC Legacy¿ was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and character. As Jenson did not include a companion italic, Arnholm turned to the sixteenth-century types of Claude Garamond for inspiration for the italics of ITC Legacy. Arnholm was so taken by the strength and integrity of these oldstyle seriffed forms that he used their essential skeletal structures to develop a full set of sans serif faces. ITC Legacy includes a complete family of weights from book to ultra, with Old style Figures and small caps, making this a good choice for detailed book typography or multi-faceted graphic design projects. In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e."" Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos

Update November 2022: ULGA Grid now features an oblique variant. It’s also been expanded into a family of different but related designs with the addition of ULGA Grid Solid and ULGA Grid Rounded typeface families. All variants and new designs are monospaced, sharing the same width as the original ULGA Grid font and matching character sets. The character set has also been enlarged and now supports Western Europe, Vietnamese, Central/Eastern Europe, Baltic, Turkish and Romanian. ULGA Grid is a modular, monospaced typeface reminiscent of the old Letraset LCD & Quartz typefaces from the 1970/80s with lots of alternative characters and ornaments to bring a fresh twist to the genre. The idea’s seed germinated while I was going through a phase of binge watching my favourite 1980/90s sci-fi movies (classics such as Terminator, Total Recall and RoboCop). However, perception and reality don’t always align. Thirty years later, when compared to today’s technology, some visual elements look kind of outdated, almost Retro Futuristic. The initial design process started out in Adobe Illustrator when I constructed letters from a few geometric shapes within a square block. Just playing around with different shapes was so engrossing that it wasn’t long before there were enough characters for a basic typeface. The project grew again as I experimented with designs within the shapes and set paragraphs of text in patterns, resulting in over a hundred alternative characters and ornaments, some of which double up as border designs. This typeface may be square but it’s anything but boring. What it lacks in legibility ULGA Grid makes up for in style and the end result is a surprisingly versatile typeface that you'll have fun using for a wide range of display purposes including CD covers, posters, packaging, advertising, brochures and film titles. Ironically, the fixed grid structure frees the characters to create patterns of text not possible with variable widths.

ITC Legacy¿ was designed by American Ronald Arnholm, who was first inspired to develop the typeface when he was a graduate student at Yale. In a type history class, he studied the 1470 book by Eusebius that was printed in the roman type of Nicolas Jenson. Arnholm worked for years to create his own interpretation of the Jenson roman, and he succeeded in capturing much of its beauty and character. As Jenson did not include a companion italic, Arnholm turned to the sixteenth-century types of Claude Garamond for inspiration for the italics of ITC Legacy. Arnholm was so taken by the strength and integrity of these oldstyle seriffed forms that he used their essential skeletal structures to develop a full set of sans serif faces. ITC Legacy includes a complete family of weights from book to ultra, with Old style Figures and small caps, making this a good choice for detailed book typography or multi-faceted graphic design projects. In 1458, Charles VII sent the Frenchman Nicolas Jenson to learn the craft of movable type in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg was working. Jenson was supposed to return to France with his newly learned skills, but instead he traveled to Italy, as did other itinerant printers of the time. From 1468 on, he was in Venice, where he flourished as a punchcutter, printer and publisher. He was probably the first non-German printer of movable type, and he produced about 150 editions. Though his punches have vanished, his books have not, and those produced from about 1470 until his death in 1480 have served as a source of inspiration for type designers over centuries. His Roman type is often called the first true Roman." Notable in almost all Jensonian Romans is the angled crossbar on the lowercase e, which is known as the "Venetian Oldstyle e."" ITC Legacy® Sans font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

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.”

PF Champion Script Pro is perhaps the most advanced and powerful calligraphic family ever made. It received an award for Excellence in Type Design from the International Type Design Competition ‘Modern Cyrillic 2009’ which was held in Moscow. Most recently, it received another award from the 3rd International Eastern Type Design Competition - Granshan Awards 2010. This typeface was first presented in June 2007 at the 3rd International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication (ICTVC) and was met with rave reviews. It is based mainly on the manuscripts of the 18th century English calligrapher Joseph Champion. Developed over a period of two and a half years, each one of the 2 weights is loaded with 4300 glyphs(!), offering simultaneous support for all European languages based on the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. Furthermore, a wide selection of alternate forms and ligatures is included for all languages, in order to accommodate diverse design aesthetics. These alternates are either applied automatically through an advanced programming scheme, or manually through several OpenType features. An attempt was made to design a contemporary script typeface with classic roots, by following certain guidelines, i.e. lowercase characters were designed so they are less inclined, have a higher x-height and are less condensed than the original. Several characters were stripped-off their connecting lines in order to enhance legibility. Four sets of alternate swashed capitals as well as a plethora of ornaments and frames (117) was included. Small caps and their alternate forms were designed to replace the capitals which disrupt the flow of text within a sentence with their extravagant swashes. All characters were carefully designed with the proper weight in order to sustain harsh printing conditions (on special papers), a situation which affects mainly the light connecting parts of calligraphic typefaces. Finally, it was programmed in such a way as to preserve handwriting qualities, by designing an extensive array of ligatures and alternate glyphs in all languages, never before released or incorporated within the same font.