On first impression, Venis is a traditional text typeface: clean, simple and elegant with nice contrast. On closer inspection, you'll notice nuances that add charm and wonder, much like its name (rhymes with "tennis"). Is this font a serif or sans serif? Hmmmm, it never really commits. Further design liberties were taken to create unique qualities in its characters, which are best exemplified by the signature lowercase y. This font family is optimized for print, and has worked beautifully for letterpress projects including wedding invitations and birth announcements. Venis will also work well in newsletters, brochures, proposals, magazines, books, and other text-heavy paper products, bringing creative elegance to your designs.

Mix Somn is the perfect font for adding charm to your children’s products. Its thin, tall, and dainty style is both stylish and legible, making it perfect for labeling baby clothes, toys, and other items. The digitally handwritten sans serif font was created with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, using the Poppy Brush from my Procreate Brush Bundle. Its delicate strokes and sweet, soft appearance make it the perfect choice for any project you might find in your little bundle of joy’s nursery. Mix Somn includes the following characters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789 !@$#%^&*() `~♥M• ÷+=[]:;’”,.\|/?{}<>“”‘’-–—_…©®™«»°¡¿₱¢€£¥ ÁÀÂÄÃÅĂĄÆĆČÇÐÉÈÊËĘÍÌÎÏŁŃÑÓÒÔÖÕØŐŒŚŠȘȚÚÙÛÜŰÝŸŹŽŻÞ áàâäãåăąæćčçðéèêëęíìîïłńñóòôöõøőœśšșțúùûüűýÿźžżþ

Bandalero is a witty display font from British designer Richard Yeend. The letterforms in this poster/display typeface are quite square-ish and geometric. The lowercase letters have short x-heights, and the uppercase letters look dressed for a showdown, with bandoleer-like elements strapped across their tops. Because of this, Bandalero should only be used in large sizes, where it can really stare down its opponent, or reader. This might be the best font yet for a keep out sign! Bandalero was designed in 2003, and is part of the Take Type 5 collection, from Linotype GmbH."

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.

Looking for a font with that certain... umm... special mojo? Mojodelic might just be the niche font that you need to create that unique statement — one that really pops off the page. While this typeface certainly grooves with the 1960s – 1970s vintage psychedelic and pop art look, it's also a perfect fit with retro 1990s party-way-too-hard youth culture graphics. With its ultra-bold reverse-contrast design and whimsical little curlies, this one's got equal parts silliness and swagger. Try it on skateboard graphics, retro message t-shirts, apparel logos, beverage labeling, candy packaging, teen/tweener marketing, greeting cards... you name it. Enjoy.

LTC Athena brings a somewhat “lost” hot-metal typeface back from obscurity into digital Opentype format. In fall 2012, printing historian Rich Hopkins contacted P22 type foundry regarding some inked type drawings he had just uncovered from his acquisition of the Baltimore-based “Baltotype” company some 20 years ago. It is a rare face whose original matrices were destroyed and thought fully lost. The drawings included a full upper and lower case set, numerals, basic punctuation, and alternate forms of some letters. The design is a narrow deco-flavored design from the 1950s with a curious avoidance of straight lines in the stems and main strokes. The face has been expanded to over 340 characters by Miranda Roth and includes ligatures as well as a full Pan-European character set. It is released through the Lanston division of P22 in consideration of its earlier incarnation as a metal typeface.

Based on the popular Girltalk font, cute, cheeky Girlscript, was specially designed for the young-teen market. I felt that it was time for Girltalk to have a "big sister" script font to complete the group. Pretty & feminine, with a large dose of cheek, Girlscript is great for: -- “girl style” stationery -- diary covers -- clothing hang-tags -- party invitations -- greeting cards -- book covers -- movie posters -- CD covers -- game advertising media Girlscript is perfect for hen parties, baby showers, pamper parties and other occasions that bring out the “girl in” women. Think sugar 'n spice, think cute 'n cheeky, add a dash of Girlscript and you're on a winning streak! Girlscript is fully professional, carefully letterspaced and kerned. All upper and lower case characters, punctuation, numerals and accented characters are present.

Raljon is a display typeface created by designer and lettering artist Mark Robinson. It is a collaboration between the Mmarkk and Teen-Beat Graphica visual design studios. This single font was created over a period of five years. Mark took great care in finessing each character and making sure that each character would stand on its own and yet simultaneously, be an integral part of the whole. The typeface is inspired by Gothic letterforms, horror novels, speed metal bands of the 1980s, techno and electronic music of the 1990s, and Washington, DC football teams whose stadiums lie in the Maryland suburbs. While it doesn’t have multiple weights, Raljon does have a deep depth and breadth. It has a seemingly endless amount of alternate characters and ligatures. There are nine letter Ms, eight letter As and Fs, seven Rs and Ts, and the list goes on. Even the figures have alternates.

Say hello to Virmana Script, a retro calligraphy brush stroke font, perfect for use in logotypes and more! This font has a poppy, bold appeal and comes with three styles so you can layer for an incredibly stylish look to your projects. Offering OpenType features, stylistic alternates, ligatures and International support for most Western Languages. You need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Indesign. Perfect to creating modern designs like logos, branding, posters, social media, wedding invitations, headlines, clothing design and more. All lowercase letters include stylistic alternates, beginning and end swashes, which makes the font look fabulous! Virmana Script includes (total 3 styles): Virmana Regular Virmana Extrude One Virmana Extrude Two All styles are coded with PUA Unicode. Mac users can use Font Book and Windows users Character Map to view and copy any of the extra characters to paste into your favorite text editor/app. Thanks and Happy Creating.

In this font from graphic arts veteran Tracy Sabin, his trademark whimsy and playfulness are exhibited in spades. Sabin takes a multitude of influences, from mid-century art nouveau to today’s pleasant dream-pop doodles, and mixes them up into a sweet and animated alphabet that oozes energy, enthusiasm and honest innocence. Alongside the chromatic and colour-play possibilities that come with two layerable fonts, the jumpy, rough and curly elements that make up Schneeberger’s construct make this face a unique and essential tool for display and packaging aimed at catching the eyes of kids and teens. Use it for fantasy flicks, sugar-fix wrapping, and the elaborate backyard birthday party invite where the program is just as appealing for the adults as it is for the children. P22 Schneeberger comes in solid (Black) and outline (Regular) variants, each of which containing more than 400 characters, some very cool built-in stylistic alternates, a bunch of ligatures, and support for the majority of Latin languages.

Chimpsdale name was inspired by the Fairly Odd Parents cartoon series, which tells about the parody world of Planet Of The Apes. Chimpsdale is an alternate version of Dimsdale from the ape-dominated world created by Bippy the Monkey’s wish, after he bit into a magic muffin that allowed him one rule-free wish in Abra-Catastrophe. Chimpsdale is a font that is inspired by the theme of past kingdoms, we wrap it in such a way to make it look suitable for many jobs Especially.You can use it as a logo, badge, insignia, packaging, headline, poster, t-shirt/apparel, greeting card, business card, and wedding invitation and more. The flowing characters are ideal to make an attractive messages to your taste. mix and match with a bunch of alternative characters to fit your project.It will be more interesting if you add swash / alternative swash. The alternative characters in this font were divided into several OpenType features such as Stylistic Alternates, Ligature and Ligature Alternates. Mail support : maculinc@gmail.com Thank you! Maculinc

After a lot of time sitting at my desk, creating fonts and trying to figure out how my new software works, I really like to work out a bit. The only thing that I do not like is the music they play at the gym; it is usually a selection of poppy tunes that appeals to a large audience. But not to me. I prefer my death metal - and eighties music, as it brings back a lot of good memories. So, I bought myself some ear buds and installed a music streaming app on my phone. Yes, I know, I am probably the last person on earth who discovered streaming... One day, during a workout session, I listened to a list of eighties music and one song that I had forgotten about started playing: Rappers Delight by The Sugarhill Gang. When I started working on the font, I had to think about the song and named it Square Beat. Square Beat font, other than the name implies, is a rounded, handmade font, ideally suited for books and magazines aimed at a young audience, toy packaging or posters. It comes with great language support, including Vietnamese.

From the realm of insigne, a new family has risen. By name, Mandrel. Courtly in character and elegant in appearance, the face finds great favor among those with whom it seeks audience. With confident air, Mandrel carries itself gracefully before each pair of eyes, never faltering or stumbling in its refined step. But while dressed with gentility, this elegant family is not faint of heart when challenged. Crafted well for high-impact resistance, Mandrel steps boldly and prominently into the arena of the reader’s eye, boasting its tall x-heights, high contrast, confident bends, and sharp serifs. Skillfully, it wields its sharp serif endings, cutting swiftly through opponents’ crude clutter, which fights for the reader’s attention. From Thin to Black, nine weights and their matching italics make up this noble family. Mandrel furthermore includes an abundant treasury of OpenType variables to adorn your text. Ligatures, old-style figures, and stylistic sets are available to accompany the family’s 500 glyphs and its support for more than 70 languages. Raise your cup to this new Mandrel! With strong serifs and high contrast, you’ll find this champion ready to take up your challenge in many a test ahead.

As if gliding in on the tide, ITC Kahana floats across the page with the pulse and sway of the sacred Hawaiian hula dance. The original drawings for this display typeface were created while designer Teri Kahan lived in the Aloha State, and its bold verticals symbolically convey the power and strength of the Polynesian people. Kahan has spent most of her life working with letters. She discovered Speedball lettering pens in her teens, opened a design studio that specialized in the lettering and calligraphic arts while in her early twenties, and grew her business in California and Hawaii. Today, she embraces new design challenges and digital technology, but letters are still at the core of her work. In ITC Kahana, Kahan created a design that is both distinctive and versatile. Menus, posters, display headlines, packaging and brochures fall easily within this typeface's range. And the word “kahana” is more than just a namesake: in Hawaiian, “kaha” means “to mark, draw, place, turn or surf,” and “na” means “belonging to.” ITC Kahana also includes an enchanting decorated alphabet in the lowercase position that expands this typeface's usefulness to the designer.

A new family has sprung from the world of insigne. Mandrel Didone is his name. The face is well-liked by those with whom it seeks an audience because of its courtly demeanor and exquisite look. Mandrel Didone conducts itself beautifully in front of each set of eyes with a confident attitude, never wavering or tripping in its polished step. But, despite it’s gentility, this exquisite family is not weak in the face of adversity. Mandrel Didone is a powerful and conspicuous typeface that has towering x-heights, great contrast, confident bends, and sharp serifs. It is well-crafted for high-impact resistance. It uses its sharp serif ends deftly, cutting through opponents' clumsy clutter in the battle for the reader's attention. This noble family consists of nine weights and their matching italics, ranging from Thin to Black. Mandrel Didone also comes with a plethora of OpenType options to let you embellish your text. The family's 500 glyphs and support for more than 70 languages are accompanied with ligatures, old-style figures, and stylistic sets. Raise your glass in honor of the new Mandrel Didone! This champion, with its powerful serifs and great contrast, is ready to take on your challenge in many tests to come.

The idea of Limes emerged at the seashore last year in late summer. Getting ready in advance for a dark winter, we've decided to design a special fontfamily which would bring a bit of vitamins and summer sun into the rough everyday routine and help us survive the cold winter. Limes is both a dream of the sun while it’s gone and a refreshing breeze for the time when it finally gets warm! Limes is a completely handwritten fontfamily and consists of 23 typefaces. To create Limes Sans and Limes Slab families, we've used regular watercolor brushes, and to create monolinear Limes Script, as well as for Catchwords and Dingbats, we've used a felt-tip pen with circular section. Limes Sans and Limes Slabs fonts work perfectly together with Limes Script due to the general handwritten idea, as well as due to the widths contrast – despite its width, Limes Script mixes well with narrower opponents and adds a bit of human spontaneity into the general handwritten concept. The Limes collection includes: Limes Sans (Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, Black & italics), Limes Slab (Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, Black & italics), Limes Script, Catchwords and Dingbats. Limes Sans and Limes Slab widely support OT features: tnum, ordn, frac, case, numr, dnom, subs, sups, and Limes Script uses a large number of context alternatives.

Casagrande Collection has been designed in 2020 by the Italiantype Team (Manuel Alvaro, Valentino Coppi and Mario De Libero), working in close collaboration with Italian lettering artist, illustrator and calligrapher Alberto Casagrande, with help from the Zetafonts Team (Francesco Canovaro, Andrea Tartarelli and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini). The goal of the project was to use as inspiration Alberto's colorful, vintage themed digital illustration style to develop a suite of closely related typefaces that, used together, would allow designers to replicate the nostalgic charme of Italian poster and product design from the thirties and the forties. Two color overprints, coarse dithering, handmade calligraphy, reminiscences of art deco, hints of modernism and pop culture references: all this and more mixed in a exuberant and playful collection, created with illustrators, poster artists and book cover designers in mind. The final product is 24-font package with six display families with styles varying from the thirties-inspired Antifascista (3 weights + 3 dithering weights) and Deco (3 weights + 3 inline weights), to the modernist Casabau (5 weights), to the geometric Grind (4 widths), to the vintage elegance of the two script families, Reclame and Casatiello. The collection is complemented by a two-color icon set font, Casagrande Ornaments, allowing any designer to easily explore the creative possibilities of this incredibly powerful creative collection. Please Note: Casagrande Antifascista Ombra simulates fine dithering and may be processor intensive for some older computers. Use Casagrande Antifascista if it slows down your system.

Hollywood Stars (Volume 1) is a unique collection of signatures of 92 famous Hollywood stars in a high-quality font. A must-have for autograph collectors, desktop publishers, lovers of the arts, history, movie buffs, fans, or anyone who has ever dreamed of sending a letter, card, or e-mail "signed" as if by one of these famous Hollywood celebrities. This font includes signatures from the following Hollywood personalities: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Ben Stiller, Kate Beckinsale, Steve Buscemi, Mel Gibson, Helen Hunt, Paul Reiser, Angelina Jolie, George Kennedy, Larry King, Edward Norton, Mira Sorvino, Steven Spielberg, Kate Winslet, Daniel Day Lewis, Laura San Giacomo, Holly Hunter, Jane Fonda, Alan Alda, Robbin, Williams, Alan Rickman, Al Pacino, Drew Barrymore, Bob Newhart, Brooke Shields, Burt Reynolds, Keira Knightley, Cheryl Ladd, Basil Rathbone, Minnie Driver, Debra Messing, David Schwimmer, Clint Eastwood, David Hyde Pierce, Burgess Meredith, Donald Trump, Linda Evans, Tony Danza, Gene Wilder, Cameron Diaz, Judi Dench, George Clooney, Nicolas Cage, Timothy Hutton, Jennifer Garner, Jay Leno, Tony Curtis, Suzanne Somers, Connie Selleca, Donald Sutherland, Jack Klugman, Tony Randall, Matthew Perry, Jenna Elfman, Morgan Fairchild, Jack Nicholson, Chazz Palminteri, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Hopkins, Walter Matthau, Larry Hagman, Lisa Kudrow, Bill Cosby, John Mahoney, Ray Liotta, Jon Voight, Christian Slater, Chris Cooper, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Drew Carey, Eli Wallach, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Amanda Seyfried, Danny DeVito, Gary Sinise, Mary Tyler Moore, Edward Asner, Will Rogers, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bela Lugosi, Charles Grodin, Victoria Principal, Winona Ryder, Tea Leoni, Matt Damon, Loni Anderson, Emma Thompson, Ed O'Neill, Karl Malden. This font behaves exactly like any other font. Each signature is mapped to a regular character on your keyboard. Open any Windows application, select the installed font, and type a letter, and the signature will appear at that point on the page. Painstaking craftsmanship and an incredible collection of hard-to-find signatures go into this one-of-a-kind font. Comes with a character map.

Pilar and Ferran based Arlette on the fast stroke of one letter from a Roger Excoffon family, but along the way they abandoned that starting point in favour of experimentation. Many sans serifs are like a svelte black dress: functional, beautiful, and the unfussy outfit for a nice evening get together. The Arlette family isn’t like this. It’s a stunner — an incandescent reimagining of what defines a sans and how it can look. Arlette explores the boundaries of the sans serif landscape and returns with forms developed from gestural vigour. Thinking of it as “painterly” may at first seem to fit, but it underestimates Arlette’s ability to master an unseen world of countless emotions and physical applications: magazines, branding, editorial, teen and young adult works, book covers, and a host of products and packaging whose content will be amplified with Arlette’s voice. Not only does Arlette use its eight weights plus italics to speak in Latin-based scripts, it is also fluent in Thai and has six weights (hairline through bold) with which it meets that challenge, whether in text or display. Arlette Thai’s modern nature is seen in two features for the script. One is the decorative Thai characters that are based on original palm leaf manuscripts. Another is a version of the Latin numerals adapted to the height of the script due to their wide use in Thailand. Arlette Thai has been meticulously developed, including contextual kerning to avoid mark clashes. Arlette’s OpenType capabilities include mathematic and scientific figures, positional forms, pointers, arrows, and oldstyle, lining, and tabular lining numerals. In addition to all this, it’s packed with swashes and swash ligatures in both scripts for enthusiastic typesetting. Because it pushes experimentation without compromising readability, both Arlette Thai and Latin are surprisingly legible in small sizes and arrestingly beautiful when their details can be seen.

ZX Spectrum In 1982, a home computer came on the market that would launch the UK IT industry. The ZX Spectrum sold five million units and spawned thousands of software titles. It was the must-have gadget for every teen. FS Sinclair is inspired by the memory of Sir Clive Sinclair’s greatest creation: the experience of entering its clunky command codes and reading its simple, grid-placed type. Smart, switched-on, great in text and display, FS Sinclair is a modern grid-based font, drawn with the Spectrum in mind and brought to life by well thought-out design. Formula Having completed the font for Channel 4’s brand update, the Fontsmith team defined the formula for its next font: the creative essence of the C4 work but with more structural discipline, more rigid form and a little more seriousness. The new font wouldn’t look self-consciously retro but it would reference the past and, it was hoped, influence the future. Readability Like the ZX Spectrum, it took a while for the new font to do exactly what it was meant to do. Many of the early concepts by Phil Garnham and Jason Smith were too jagged – the result of an awareness of getting too close to existing fonts of the same ilk, such as Wim Crouwel’s Gridnik. Eventually, FS Sinclair evolved into a more readable, functional grid-based type design that answered Phil and Jason’s original, self-set brief. Idiosyncratic There’s a technological, systems feel to FS Sinclair but ultimately, humans are in charge. The lowercase “a”, “n”, “m” and “r” have clean-cut “ears”, and the square-ish design is softened by round joins on the inside of the letterforms. The idiosyncratic design of letters such as “g”, “j”, “k”, “v”, “w” and “y” bring the design up to date. This is a modular font with character, and a range of weights that allow varied application.

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

Father's Day, or June 17 of this year, is in the middle of Argentinian winter. And like people do on wintery Sunday mornings, I was bundled up in bed with too many covers, pillows and comforters. Feeling good and not thinking about anything in particular, Father's Day was nowhere in the vicinity of my mind. My eleven year old son, Matías, came into the room with a handmade present for me. Up to this point, my Father's Day gift history was nothing unusual. Books, socks, hand-painted wooden spoons, the kind of thing any father would expect from his pre-teen son. So you can understand when I say I was bracing myself to fake excitement at my son's present. But this Father's Day was special. I didn't have to fake excitement. I was in fact excited beyond my own belief. Matí's handmade present was a complete alphabet drawn on an A4 paper. Grungy, childish, and sweeter than a ton of honey. He'd spent days making it, three-dimensioning the letters, wiggle-shadowing them. Incredible. A common annoyance for graphic designers is explaining to people, even those close to them, what they do for a living. You have to somehow make it understandable that you are a visual communicator, not an artist. Part of the problem is the fact that "graphic designer" and "visual communicator" are just not in the dictionary of standard professions out there. If you're a plumber, you can wrap all the duties of your job with 3.5 words: I'm a plumber. If you're a graphic designer, no wrapper, 3.5 or 300 words, will ever cover it. I've spent many hours throughout the years explaining to my own family and friends what I do for a living, but most of them still come back and ask what it is exactly that I do for dough. When you're a type designer, that problem magnifies itself considerably. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you start looking for the nearest exit, but none of the ones you can find is any good. All the one-line descriptions are vague, and every single one of them queues a long, one-sided conversation that usually ends with someone getting too drunk listening, or too tired of talking. Now imagine being a type designer, with a curious eleven year old son. The kid is curious as to why daddy keeps writing huge letters on the computer screen. Let's go play some ball, dad. As soon as I finish working, son. He looks over my shoulder and sees a big twirly H on the screen. To him it looks like a game, like I'm not working. And I have to explain it to him again. This Father's Day, my son gave me the one present that tells me he finally understands what I do for a living. Perhaps he is even comfortable with it, or curious enough about that he wants to try it out himself. Either way, it was the happiest Father's Day I've ever had, and I'm prouder of my son than of everything else I've done in my life. This is Matí's font. I hope you find it useful.

There is plenty of lyric and literature about looking over one's shoulder in contemplation. What would you have done differently if you knew then what you know now? This is the kind of question that comes out of nowhere. When it does and whether its context is personal or professional make very little difference. It's a question that can cause emotions to rise and passions to run hot. It can trigger priority shifts and identity crises. It's never easy to answer. Three years ago, I published a font called Semilla. My aim with that was to distill the work of Bentele, a lettering artist from early 1950s Germany. Picking such an obscure figure back then was my way of pondering the meaning and efficiency of objectivity in a world where real human events and existences are inevitably filtered through decades of unavoidably subjective written, printed and oral history. And maybe to pat myself on the back for surviving surprises mild and pleasant. Having been fortunate enough to follow my professional whims for quite some time now, I took another, longer look at my idea of distilling Bentele's work again. I suppose the concepts of established history and objectivity can become quite malleable when personal experience is added to the mix. I say that because there I was, three years later, second-guessing myself and opining that Bentele's work can be distilled differently, in a manner more suited to current cultural angles. So I embarked on that mission, and Bowling Script is the result. I realize that it's difficult to reconcile this soft and happy calligraphic outcome with the introspection I've blathered about so far, but it is what is. I guess even self-created first world problems need to be resolved somehow, and the resolution can happen in mysterious ways. Bowling Script is what people who like my work would expect from me. It's yet another script loaded with all kinds of alternation, swashing and over-the-top stuff. All of that is in here. These days I think I just do all that stuff without even blinking. But there are two additional twists. The more noticeable one is ornamental: The stroke endings in the main font are of the typical sharp and curly variety found in sign painting, while the other font complements that with ball endings, sometimes with an added-on-afterwards impression rather than an extension of the actual stroke. In the philosophical terms I was mumbling earlier, this is the equivalent of alternate realities in a world of historical reduxes that by their very nature can never properly translate original fact. The second twist has to do with the disruption of angular rhythm in calligraphic alphabets. Of course, this is the kind of lettering where the very concept of rhythm can be quite flexible, but it still counts for something, and experimenting with angular white space in a project of a very dense footprint was irresistible. After playing for a bit, I decided that it would interesting to include the option of using optically back-slanted forms in the fonts. Most scripts out there, including mine, have a rhythm sonically comparable to four-to-the-floor club beats. So the weirdly angled stuff here is your chance to do the occasional drumroll. Everyone knows we need one of those sometimes. Bowling Script and Bowling Script Balls fonts comes with 1600 characters and features extended Latin-based language support. There are also a basic version of both fonts without all the alternates and extra OpenType features. Bowling family ships in cross-platform OpenType format. We also want to present “Mute”, a visual essay narated by Tomás García and Valentín Muro, about digital life created specially to introduce Bowling Script.