In 1925, at the request of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, the foundry he worked for, Oswald Bruce Cooper designed a wide selection of "screamers", oversized exclamation points used to grab attention in display advertising. The foundry rushed the screamers into production, much to Cooper's dismay. Cooper was disappointed with the final form of the screamers– they were designed in assorted weights to match the assorted Cooper series of typefaces, as well as in a variety of other formal solutions- squaredoff, incised, wavy, Tuscan, and rounded. Cooper's working design methodology was to re-draw his projects a number of times in order to refine the formal results. However the screamer project was hastily cut by the head of BB&S's matrix engraving room in fourteen sizes from the initial sketches, causing Cooper to fire off a fiery missive stating, "Everything I draw is bum the first half-dozen times I draw it; the trouble with these is that I drew them only once!" This typeface is the result of researching Cooper's original drawings and series of engraved proofs for the screamers, as well as the original Screamer type specimen. Cooper Screamers have never been available before in digital format.

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.

Orkhon inscriptions (Orkhon inscriptions, Orkhon inscriptions, Khöshöö Tsaidam monuments (also known as Khoshoo Tsaidam, Koshu-Tsaidam or Höshöö Caidam) or Kul Tigin steles (simplified Chinese: 阙特勤碑; traditional Chinese: 闕特勤碑; pinyin: Què tèqín bēi )) They are two monumental installations written by the Göktürks in the Old Turkic alphabet in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia at the beginning of the 8th century. They were erected in honor of two Turkish princes Kül Tigin and his brother Bilge Kagan. Both Chinese and Old Turkish inscriptions describe the legendary origins of the Turks, the golden age of their history, their subjugation by the Chinese and their liberation by İlteriş Kağan. According to one source, the inscriptions contain "rhythmic and parallel passages" similar to those of epics. In the Old Turkish Alphabet, 38 letters are accepted academically and this pattern is generally used in the books. But there are more than 38 letters in this alphabet, these special letters are included in this font.

Dorriss girls were the dancing troop at the Moulin Rouge. I had the idea for this font while trying to come up with an alternative to beveling. I thought it would be interesting to create this sort of stepped effect as I've never really seen this treatment on a font before. Then my need to create chaos shows up again with Doriss Girls informal. A hand drawn take on the forms. This seemed like it would appear on an old art nouveau poster by the great Toulouse Lautrec, so there you have the genesis of this font. I've been somewhat compelled by the letterforms so I may expand and create a more normal version of this font someday with a range of weights. That would be the bees knees.

Art into type In 2008, Fontsmith were approached by their friend, Jon Scott, to investigate whether a typeface could assume the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon’s not-for-profit charity, Measure, was organising an event for the artist, Conrad Shawcross, whose giant mechanical installation, entitled Chord, was going on public display in the long-disused Kingsway tram tunnel in Holborn. Chord explores the way we perceive time, as either a line or a cycle. Two enormous machines with dozens of rotating arms and moving in opposite directions, weave rope with almost infinite slowness. An unusual brief Phil Garnham visited Conrad in his Hackney studio to get a feel for his work and ideas. “Conrad is a very clever and philosophical guy. He struggled to see how typeface design had any relevance to him and his art. This was going to be a challenge.” The artist presented the type designer with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and mathematical workings. “This was, in essence, my brief.” Phil developed three concepts, the simplest of which ticked all the boxes. “The idea of the strokes in the letterforms appearing and ending at peaks or points of origin fitted perfectly with Conrad’s idea of time occurring and ending at two ends of the sculpture.” Two versions Phil planned modules for two versions of the typeface: one with five lines in the letterforms and one with seven. He then drew the modules on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is FS Conrad. “This is not a simple headline typeface,” says Phil. “It’s not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, and it’s informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as piece of functioning, harmonious type.”

The Algerian designer Taouffik Semmad created the fonts in 1997. Taouffik Semmad grew up speaking Algerian-Arabic dialect and French, studied Russian, and is now living in Montreal. This could perhaps explain his current passion, to "find a universal writing", which he admits is a Utopian idea. Created with brush and Chinese ink, the characters of ITC Atmosphere came from Semmad's hand but only after they were fully formed in his mind's eye.

Naïve Inline is a layered serif handwritten font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. We designed three weights to assure a good readability whatever the size. They can be enhanced with five different interior patterns and three shadows to improve your designs and bring a charming and unusual feeling. To do so, you can simply superimpose the layers with a compatible software like Photoshop, the weight above and the pattern(s) below, then choose a color for each. This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif, and a special Art Deco one. Just click on our foundry name to see them all! We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Karlgeorg Hoefer designed Beneta in 1991, inspired by the Littera beneventana, the script of the Benedictine scribes from the 10th to the 12th century. During this time, scribes began to use wider pens and set them at a 45 degree angle to the paper, which caused their scripts to have radical stroke contrasts. This script was mainly used for books and certificates but disappeared by the end of the 13th century. Beneta revives the characteristics of this historic script, changing a line of text into an almost ornamental space. Beneta should be used in middle to larger point sizes for shorter texts and headlines.

One of my dreams as a type-designer was making a good looking chancery cursive. Full of life, like some of the best calligraphers around the world do on their artworks. With Julian Waters, John Stevens and Denis Brown (just to name a few of them) (1) chancery, or italic script, was transformed into a new, exciting and very fresh style of calligraphy mainly at the end of 20th Century. Dream Script may be that dream named above made true. I have been practicing chancery in the way I learnt from those calligraphers for many years now. Making a font out of my ink-sketches was a tough work, since they were closer of -being art- than of -being type-. However, this font rescues many aspects of handmade calligraphy: You have to look at it really close to notice it is actually a font, and that was one of my goals. The secret of a good looking chancery is on its subtle details: pen angle is constantly changing, even on the strokes which seem straight. Capitals and swashes have to be done a little faster than lowercase letters. The rhythm has to be even, in spite of its playful look. The fact that makes Dream look alive is that it has many alternates per glyph. This makes each word look unique like it happens in calligraphy: you will find alternates for the beginning/ending of a word/phrase, some for the middle of it, some interchangeable. Also, to accompany the script, you will find Dream Caps, which was inspired in the eternally beautiful trajan capitals. Place them like I did on the posters and you will have great results for sure. The font works great in small, middle and big sizes and can be a great selection for magazines, wedding invitations, perfumes, and posters. Close your eyes, and Dream with me... TECHNICAL Dream Script Pro is the most complete style, it contains all the alternates and ligatures (OT programmed, better if you use Adobe applications) If you plan to use the font for text, be sure to activate the less decorative capitals, which are placed in the “salt” group of alternates. Dream Script Standard has less glyphs than the Pro one, it contains just some ligatures for a better legibility. (OT programmed, better if you use Adobe applications) NOTES (1) Not only are they great artists, but also good people, who are always willing to share with their students all what they know. I would also like to thank Ricardo Rousselot, whose work inspired me this time to make “The Dream Script” exlibris; and to Alisara Tareekes, a very talented friend which international calligraphy conferences gave me: She kindly helped me with some tips to make this font better.

Rinzler AOE is a revival of a LetterGraphics film type called Caren. A modular, mechanical, sans-serif stencil all rolled up into one retro typeface. It's not an all-purpose typeface, it's not an everyday typeface, but it is a cool typeface for the right design projects. Rinzler AOE carries itself with a bold weighted style, and stencil cutouts that don't follow standard stencil formatting. It might be considered more of a techno stencil (if there is such a thing). It reminded me in a vague way of TRON, hence the main poster graphic styling, although it looks NOTHING like the Tron titling typeface. Nevertheless, it's a fun typeface that needed to be preserved and used again. WHAT'S INCLUDED: Extensive language support. Rinzler has accented and special characters that support the following languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan Cornish, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Indonesian, Italian, Kurdish, Leonese, Luxenbourgish, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Walloon, & Welsh. One of my guilty pleasures is in taking the time to recreate historical typefaces as digital fonts, but a lot of incredible historical typestyles created as wood or metal or film type usually have bare bones character sets and have been lost or only exist as limited specimen proofs in old books. These typefaces may have more niché uses than modern typefaces, but I believe it is important nonetheless to preserve these typefaces for future generations. These typefaces, if nothing else, can often inspire new creations.

Entropic Brush is a striking fat brush font that boasts a wild and rustic charm. Its decorative display style makes it perfect for logotypes, headlines, and other eye-catching design elements. The font's heavy, oak-like strokes and thick brush texture give it a bold and distinctive character. Ideal for projects that require a strong, natural presence, Entropic Brush is a versatile font that adds a sense of raw energy and untamed beauty to your designs. Its unique aesthetic makes it a great choice for branding materials that need to convey a sense of rugged, organic elegance. With hundreds of swashy and decorative alternates, Entropic brush is sure to give you a customized appearance – like a truly hand-drawn paintbrush design. Use characters _ ¤ # after any word to make a swash. Example: Spline_ Sonic¤ Brush# Use multiple _ ¤ # to make swashes of different lengths. Example: Superhuman______ (Download required.) The Entropic Brush font family includes four high-quality styles to suit various design needs: Regular: A bold statement with a natural, rustic appearance Bold: An even heavier presence for more impactful designs Italic: Adds an expressive, dynamic touch to your text Bold Italic: Combines the assertiveness of bold with the energy of italic Built with advanced OpenType functionality, Entropic Brush ensures top-notch quality and provides you with full control and customizability. It includes stylistic alternates, ligatures, and other features to make your designs truly unique. The font is built with advanced OpenType functionality and has a guaranteed top-notch quality, containing stylistic and contextual alternates, ligatures and more features; all to give you full control and customizability. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages, from Northern Europe to South Africa, from America to South-East Asia. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

Cantiqe the rational serif with a circular/ball terminal and strong vertical contrast and fine horizontal hairlines, This makes Cantique a blend of elegant and beautiful. Cantiqe Incredibly versatile is perfect for fashion branding or editorial designs. this font fits a wide pool of designs, elevating them to the highest levels. Add this font to your favourite creative ideas and notice how it makes them come alive! Thank You _xdCreative

Spring has come is a stylish modern handwritten script. It has an unique, striking look which can be used to make any design stand out. Incredibly versatile, this font fits a wide pool of designs, elevating them to the highest levels. Add this font to your favorite creative ideas and notice how it makes them come alive! This font is PUA encoded which means you can access all of the glyphs.

Mesquite is a narrow Tuscan-style typeface designed at Adobe in 1990. Like older Tuscans from the 19th Century, Mesquite has elaborate, creative serif treatments-although the serifs are so unique that it is difficult to call them serifs anymore, they are more like pointy finials. A convex-concave-convex ornamental feature appears on the middle of each vertical and diagonal stroke. Together with the serifs" at the tops and bottoms of each stroke, this feature creates a "tri-band" pattern over text set in Mesquite. Mesquite is not a text face. Aside from its narrowness and decorative qualities, Mesquite has no lowercase. The font's uppercase glyphs have been directly copied and placed in the lowercase range."

Falstaff first appeared with Monotype in 1931, an alphabet in the style of a wide, bold antiqua that was especially popular in the first third of the 19th century. Such typefaces distinguished themselves through their consistent basis in the transitional antiqua style. They are characterized by their extremely fine unflexed serifs with no curve connecting them to the thick strokes. The numerals with their generous curves and ball-like stroke endings and beginnings are particularly decorative. The vertical strokes are dominant and give lines of this typeface a column-like and therefore static look. Falstaff is today often used for book titling, especially for mystery novels. It is best used sparingly in middle and larger point sizes.

Some words from the designer... The bold, playful element is everything in ITC Surfboard. West coast designer Teri Kahan was inspired by California's surfing lifestyle, and the letters of this alphabet dance along the writing line. The vitality of ITC Surfboard comes from the tension between its very free shapes and the precise edges and angles that create them. This all-capital font has deliberately tight spacing and works best in large sizes. Also included are fun, abstract surf/sail graphics.

The origin of this font was a frieze in the RAF Chapel in Westminster Abbey which Michael Harvey was commissioned to design and create. It was comprised of the names of the top brass in wartime Bomber Command, namely Dowding, Harris, Newall, Tedder, Portal and Douglas. The Brief was to cut the letters in bronze and gild them. Instead, they were cut in perspex and gilded. To sit comfortably within the long and narrow vertical space available beneath the chapel’s stained glass window, extended letterforms were used with many vertical serifs omitted and with lengthened horizontal serifs. Some twenty years later, the missing upper-case letters were drawn together with the lowercase letters and Frieze, the font, was born. Subsequently, additional weights and styles were added to create a font family of six styles.

Franko Luin, Marco Polo's designer, on this typeface: Marco Polo is a 'massacrated' oldstyle typeface that can be used in the same way as, e.g., Caslon Antique. I designed it - if the word design is appropriate in this case - to give the users an alternative so that they are not always directed to the same choice. For the same reason I made Marco Polo rounder. The name comes from the famous Venetian globetrotter, who has nothing at all to do with the typeface, since printing and punchcutting were still an invention of the future.

The inspiration for this typeface family came from my childhood experiences at West Monkton, amidst an historic part of the South West of England. Studies of the original incised capitals of the Trajan column in Rome were analysed and polished for this modern version. The lower case letterforms and numerals were then created in sympathy, taking their proportions from the incised letters of local gravestones. Its name honours not only the area where the original alphabet was conceived and drawn, but also the people responsible for fostering my initial interest in letters.

Duddy is a “friendly” sans-serif typography designed by Eleonora Lana and the Letritas team. The shape of Duddy was created based on sketches that looked after carrying the concept of kindness as far as possible, keeping always in mind the readability and functionality of the font. In the stage of brainstorming, the team started listing things that were friendly to the touch or sight, such as a candy gum, or marshmallow, to become acquainted with the intended goal. Although slowly, as the letters were being created, the objects associated with the forms were not satisfactory, since when forming words a special personality of its own appeared. By reconceptualizing everything, the personality of the letter the team wanted to work with had to be redefined. Thus it went from "caramel" to "teddy bear", from "teddy bear" to "puppy" and from "puppy" to "dolphin". And Duddy is the perfect name for a dolphin. Duddy was a sound idea: friendly, intelligent, social. Once the concept was nailed, the design of graceful and “soft” shapes started. Almost chewable, almost huggable, as if composing words was a game. Duddy has a slanted version with "real italics". These italics are slightly more condensed than the regular version, in order to give it a different text texture. The typeface has 9 weights, ranging from “thin” to “heavy”, and two versions: "regular" and "italic". Its 18 files contain 729 characters with ligatures, alternates, small caps, oldstyle and tabular numbers, fractions, case sensitive, and unicase figures. It supports 219 Latin-based languages, spanning through 212 different countries. Duddy supports this languages: Abenaki, Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Amis, Anuta, Aragonese, Aranese, Aromanian, Arrernte, Arvanitic (Latin), Asturian, Atayal, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Bemba, Bikol, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Chickasaw, Cimbrian, Cofán, Corsican Creek,Crimean Tatar (Latin),Croatian, Czech, Dawan, Delaware, Dholuo, Drehu, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian Filipino, Finnish, Folkspraak, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Gikuyu, Gooniyandi, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut)Guadeloupean, Creole, Gwich’in, Haitian, Creole, Hän, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hopi, Hotc?k (Latin), Hungarian, Icelandic, Ido, IgboI, locano, Indonesian, Interglossa, Interlingua, Irish, Istro-Romanian, Italian, Jamaican, Javanese (Latin), Jèrriais, Kala Lagaw Ya, Kapampangan (Latin), Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Karelian (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kiribati, Kirundi, Klingon, Ladin, Latin, Latino sine Flexione, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Manx, M?ori, Marquesan, Megleno-Romanian, Meriam Mir, Mirandese, Mohawk, Moldovan, Montagnais, Montenegrin, Murrinh-Patha, Nagamese Creole, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Ngiyambaa, Niuean, Noongar, Norwegian, Novial, Occidental, Occitan, Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Oshiwambo, Ossetian (Latin), Palauan, Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Potawatomi, Q’eqchi’, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Rotokas, Sami (Inari Sami), Sami (Lule Sami), Sami (Northern Sami), Sami (Southern Sami), Samoan, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Seri, Seychellois Creole, Shawnee, Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Slovio (Latin), Somali, Sorbian (Lower Sorbian), Sorbian (Upper Sorbian), Sotho (Northern), Sotho (Southern), Spanish, Sranan, Sundanese (Latin), Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok Pisin, Tokelauan, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Tzotzil, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Volapük, Võro, Wallisian, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Warlpiri, Wayuu, Welsh, Wik-Mungkan, Wiradjuri, Wolof, Xavante, Xhosa, Yapese, Yindjibarndi, Zapotec, Zulu, Zuni.

In Adrian Frutiger, the discipline of a mathematically exact mind is joined with an unmistakable artistic sense. His independent work possesses the controllable language of letterforms. Personal and intensive, this work is the manifestation of his expressive will. Frutiger's precise sense of outline reveals itself two- or three-dimensionally in wood, stone, or bronze, on printing plates and in the form of reliefs. However, even his independent work can be understood as objectivized signs; in their symbolism, they are embedded in the fundamental questions of human existance. They might have developed in the spirit of playfulness, but their nature is always conceptual, directed towards a complex, yet harmonic, whole. Following function, form also necessarily follows the content of the language. The entire spiritual world becomes readable through letters. Essentially, Adrian Frutiger attempts to fathom the basic, central truth which defines our lives: change, growth, division - beginning and end. In a virtual synthesis, he seems to close the circle in which the world reflects itself in symbolic forms. Frutiger Stones is for Adrian Frutiger the example of his formal artistic sensibility par excellence. Searching for the fundamental elements in nature, he has discovered the pebble, rounded and polished over innumerable years by gently flowing water. And out of this, he has created his complete system, a ruralistic typeface of letters and symbols. It depicts animals and plants, as well as astrological and mythical signs. Because of its unique aura, Frutiger Stones is particularly well-suited to different purposes - in headlines and prominent pictograms, as symbol faces, illustrations, and more.

This typeface was designed specifically for producing movie posters, as well as VHS and DVD packaging for them. The uppercase letters are ultracondensed, and the lowercase letters are small caps, approximately a third the size of the uppercase. Also included are various logos and symbols suitable for the intended use, including those for MPAA ratings, and various audio and video formats. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

This growing family of friendly faces is based on the typeface Bravour, designed in 1913 by Martin Jacoby-Boy for the D. Stempel AG foundry in Frankfurt am Main. The wide stance and very large x-height shared by the family members makes them warm and inviting, and equally suitable for use in headlines or text blocks. All versions of this font include the Unicode 1250 Central European character set in addition to the standard Unicode 1252 Latin set.

Calligrapher Margaret Layson works in partnership with Australian typographer Harry Pears, bringing designs such as the wonderful Lindisfarne Nova family to life. They both work on the digital incarnation in a true collaboration. Originally from the UK, Margaret began her professional career as a geophysicist. After arriving in Australia in 1968, she began to work as a freelance calligrapher. Over the years she has maintained an interest in the history of writing, particularly the scripts and decorations in manuscripts.

Stuffed Shirt JNL acquires its name from a term popularized during the years when the Art Deco period flourished. The Great Depression further widened the gap between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. Occasionally, some of those that 'had' (and some who pretended they did) came off as standoffish, egotistical and pompously arrogant. Such individuals were referred to as a "stuffed shirt"; a blowhard who thought he was better than others. In this case, Stuffed Shirt JNL is no more than a dual-line adaptation of Playwright JNL, itself an interpretation of the classic Broadway type design in a way that emulates the hand lettering of old-time sign painters.

The name Type Warmers JNL traces its lineage to small catalog booklets issued by Indianapolis' Cobb Shinn for his line of letterpress cuts; of which a few can be found included within this typeface. Presumably type could "warm up to" these stock illustrations and work hand-in-hand to deliver the message, hence the "Type Warmers" sobriquet. Originally known for illustrating many attractive and comical postcards of the early 1900s, Shinn moved into the field of purchasing stock art and redistributing them as electrotypes or "cuts", the predecessor to today's digital clip art. A number of the cartoons he sold can be found in the Shinn Kickers JNL font.

In 1952, Charles Peignot made a bold and fortuitous move: he invited a young Swiss designer to Paris to be the art director of the Deberny & Peignot type foundry. This started the professional type design career of Adrian Frutiger; and since then he has designed an astonishing range of masterful typefaces. One of the earliest for Deberny & Peignot was Président, a sharp-seriffed Latin titling face. Latin" is a typographic designation for roman typefaces with wedge or triangular-shaped serifs, a stylistic form that Frutiger would return to later with his beautiful typeface Méridien. Président™ has wide, solid shapes; very little contrast between thick and thin strokes; and an air of assurance. Use this titling font for business cards, announcements, or artistic signage."

The Vinča script is a cache of symbols found belonging to the Vinča culture of the central Balkans over 7000 years ago. The symbols have been a topic of debate amongst historians. The Tărtăria tablets are three tablets discovered in 1961 in the village of Tărtăria(Hungarian: Alsótatárlaka). This is about 30 km (19 mi) from Alba Iulia in Romania.The tablets, dated to around 5300 BC, have symbols inclay: the Vinča symbols. Some claim they are a yet undeciphered language. If this is so, they would be the earliest known form of writing. In 1908 similar symbols were found during excavations, by Miloje Vasić (1869–1956) in Vinča. This is a suburb of Belgrade (Serbia), some 300 km from Turdaș. Later, more were found in another part of Belgrade. Since 1875 over one hundred and fifty Vinča sites have been found in Serbia alone. Many, including Vinča itself, have not been fully excavated. The culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture. Although some of these symbols look exactly the same as some letters in Etruscan, Greek, and Aramaic, they are generally regarded as a an original, independent development.

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.

The master of the dancing brush, Angel Koziupa, and the node-obsessed perfectionist, Alejandro Paul, offer up another bucket of fun with Malambo. This time Koziupa allows his brush to jitter one whole millimeter, and Paul digitizes with two eyes instead of his usual three. Follow your heart, but consume an ounce of peroxide first. Full of energy and cheeky mischief, Malambo tells the eye amusing stories of mirrorless shaving accidents, wine mistakenly poured over the morning cereal, and someone who trips over his own shadow on the dance floor, yet keeps on dancing. And dancing is what this typeface is all about. Malambo is a traditional Argentine dance performed by the gauchos (the Argentine equivalent of 19th century North American cowboys?). The gauchos are still around in the less than touristic areas of Argentina. And although they dance quite passionately and make the heartiest parrillas, most of them probably don't know what a font is. But you know, and we know. And that's something. Malambo was selected as the Best in show display font at the Biennial Letras Latinas.

Isabel Condensed and Isabel were made out of necessity to create a new font for children and teenagers, that could be enough friendly and versatile for text in words or even easy-to-read long texts. The purpose of Isabel is to combine all the nice and friendly features of the simple letters that the teachers teach to the pupils at primary school, as they starting to learn to read, together with the normal editorial fonts we read every day. In this way it generates a very joyful serif font, or even friendly font, with some conservative aspects. In other words, Isabel is a font that, despite of being a “classic features” typography, is proud to show its innocent and ingenuous elements, this gives to the font a new point of view. The family is composed of 3 parts: the regular version, the italic version and the unicase version. Each one of them has 5 weights. The italic version has 825 characters; the regular and unicase have 739 and are composed for 220 latin languages, plus cyrilic.

Isabel SemiCondensed, together with Isabel condensed and Isabel were made out of necessity to create a new font for children and teenagers, that could be enough friendly and versatile for text in words or even easy-to- read long texts. The purpose of Isabel is to combine all the nice and friendly features of the simple letters that the teachers teach to the pupils at primary school, as they starting to learn to read, together with the normal editorial fonts we read every day. In this way it generates a very joyful serif font, or even friendly font, with some conservative aspects. In other words, Isabel is a font that, despite of being a “classic features” typography, is proud to show its innocent and ingenuous elements, this gives to the font a new point of view. The family is composed of 3 parts: the regular version, the italic version and the unicase version. Each one of them has 5 weights. The italic version has 825 characters; the regular and unicase have 739 and are composed for 220 latin languages, plus cyrilic.

This set of letters and ornaments is loosely based on on a typeface that was offered by the DeVinne Press at the turn of the century. We can speculate from its name that this type was used as a display font to try to equate the look of letters on 15th and ­16th century heraldic cartouches, seals, stamps, medals and other inscriptional lettering. The sample was digitized with an “antiqued” outline to further enhance this ancient inscriptional theme. The letters were then grouped in the font with the more traditional Roman letters as the capitals and the Lombardic forms as the miniscules. The original type sample contained some unusual 15th century inscriptional numbers which have been included as extras in the font so the user the has the option to create an authentic looking design.

Signsurfer is a unique retro font - a signpainter font, handwritten by me. Inspired by the golden ages of handlettering, this script font highlights: - a bouncy baseline - tight spacing - and full Latin support --- Lots of really cool catchwords & shapes (you will get all the catchwords & shapes seen in the preview pics), five alternates and 37 ligatures help you to really get creative with this one. --- What you can use it for: - branding - logotype - poster - t-shirt designs - all kind of labels - greeting cards - wedding invitations ...and so much more --- This font also works great as a running text, too. = ) --- Process behind it: first I drew all of those fancy letters & catchwords with a brush on paper. I then carefully traced all of those letters & catchwords in Illustrator and transferred them into my Font Creator program. This helped getting the unique sign painters flow. --- Note: You will a need program that support OpenType Features for accessing the alternative glyphs.