It's clear, fat and juicy - it's my Solo Beats font! It has got that organic feeling of something handmade...and that is exactly what it is. Even though I digitally removed some inkblobs here and there, the handmade look is quite clear!

Montello started out as an Illustrator exercise (a skill I am still learning). I made a couple of glyphs for fun, then realised it would make a nice font. The result is Montello. Montello is a classic connected script font, very neat and (in my humble opinion) not an eye-sore either. Montello comes with a whole bunch of ligatures for letters that just won’t connect nicely.

Acton is a deceptively simple, grid-based design. Though derived from a 2 by 3 arrangement of blocks, it uses white spaces to allow for more complex shapes – for example as the R – where the underlying 3 by 5 arrangement is apparent. It also departs from this strict grid-based logic for characters such as the the T, L, f and r, whose cross-bars are shorter than they would otherwise be in order to promote optical evenness. No elegant solution could be found for the V, which in geometric fonts can appear very similar to the U, lacking as it does the cross-bar that can differentiate a square A from the capital form of the n. However, the resultant diagonal retroactively proved useful on the lower-case e and a, characters that otherwise would have more uninteresting design solutions.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it - Confucius Fully realize your boldness and show your lavish side with the Pathita Script. The Pathita Script will be the perfect addition to aid you in your journey to be who you really are. Let the world see you and your beauty, bring it out through your handiwork and give your viewers a new perspective!

ORIGRAM PRO is the full version of ORIGRAM Free Font, a font with over 100k downloads, and counting! This font was already featured in dozens of websites and Design Blogs. I decided to remake this font, smoothing out a few rough edges - so to speak - and adding value to the end result, with several different interesting tweaks and updates. Inspired in the Origami and Tangram tradition, the basic shape is an octagon. Geometrical and regular, resulting in a neat and captivating display font. Not particularly conceived to be used in common text, this stylized font will add value to any large scale image within the realm of logos & branding, outdoors, packaging, titles, magazines, posters, signs, shirts, scrap-booking... Your imagination is the limit. This display font comes now with Uppercases, updated Lowercases, Numbers, and a slew of new Diacritic Marks and Punctuation Marks. A large number of special characters was included in the package, enriching the font’s versatility and usability.

Roughmarker font consists of two handwritten scripts, a slant (regular) version and upright. This Script fonts are manually handwritten with quick and rough strokes. We write them on paper until we find a very proportioned form. Then we scanned and took the selected glyphs to be processed into a font. The biggest challenge in making textures fonts are the very many node points, many node points make the font processing performance a bit slow. At first we tried raising the node parameters to 2000-4000 points in one glyph. This is a big number, but if this number is lowered it will eliminate the impression of brush and natural look. We repeatedly look for gaps to minimize points so that the font capacity is not too large and comfortable when typed. This script font is equipped with ligature as well as several alternate according to handwriting habits, very effective in the sense of not too much but often used. This font is the great choice for contemporary brands, especially for businesses in fashion, urban style, websites, trends in architecture, cosmetics, and energetic lifestyle themes. An attractive typographic layout makes it also looks more premium in writing quotes.

Rotis is a comprehensive family group with Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Serif, and Semi Serif styles. The four families have similar weights, heights and proportions; though the Sans is primarily monotone, the Semi Sans has swelling strokes, the Semi Serif has just a few serifs, and the Serif has serifs and strokes with mostly vertical axes. Designed by Otl Aicher for Agfa in 1989, Rotis has become something of a European zeitgeist. This highly rationalized yet intriguing type is seen everywhere, from book text to billboards. The blending of sans with serif was almost revolutionary when Aicher first started working on the idea. Traditionalists felt that discarding serifs from some forms and giving unusual curves and edges to others might be something new, but not something better. But Rotis was based on those principles, and has proven itself not only highly legible, but also remarkably successful on a wide scale. Rotis is easily identifiable in all its styles by the cap C and lowercase c and e: note the hooked tops, serifless bottoms, and underslung body curves. Aicher was a long-time teacher of design with many years of practical experience as a graphic designer. He named Rotis after the small village in southern Germany where he lived. Rotis is suitable for just about any use: book text, documentation, business reports, business correspondence, magazines, newspapers, posters, advertisements, multimedia, and corporate design.

Grungy Old Typewriter is based on two typed letters, each on two pages and dated 1901. The results are eroded, rough, irregular and grungy. The final results are a vintage look. As a designer, I wanted as much flexibility as possible, so there are six versions that are designed to work together. Additionally, I decided to keep the grunge and irregularities within the shape and not include surrounding typewriter or paper marks. I leave it to the design to add those elements as desired. One note, the letter spacing is much tighter than an old typewriter. I felt that readability for modern readers suffered from the added space. Of course, you can get that same look by increasing the letter spacing in your favorite design program.

There is nothing dangerous about this font, but indeed something dashy! That may not make much sense, and that's the same with the font - unless you want to do something eye-catching and organic looking for kids! Dashy Danger is my laid back, kinda wild, legible but unpredictable kids font - with an organic twist!

The 1911 sheet music for “A Hot Time In Monkeytown" is an example of Art Nouveau hand lettering that could not be ignored as a typographic design source. The end result is Nouveau Moon JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

My son Konstantin wants to become a cook. So I thought it would be a nice idea if I designed a script for his fabulous future menus as a gift for him. I think he will become a great cook. The three Konstantin cuts can be mixed. The A cut has the most straightforward letterforms, the B cut has more swashes in the capitals and swinging descenders and last but not least, the C cut gives you some fancy lowercase letters. All three cuts have different numerals. If you mix the fonts be careful not to overdo things, mostly - even with scripts - less is more. Your family designer Gert

Vikings or Norses are Scandinavian pirate and merchant tribes. Actually, "Viking" or "Nors" is not a nation name; It is the name given to Dans, Norwegians, Swedes and other Scandinavians regardless of who they are. The Elder Futhark here is a runic script - a version of the Viking script. I will upload other versions over time. Write nice things with pleasure.

Tavern is a super font family based on our Algerian Mesa design, with Tavern we've greatly expanded the usability by creating light and bold weights plus all new for 2020 with the introduction of extra bold and black weights Tavern is now a five weight family. The addition of the bold weight made it possible to go further with the design by adding open faced shadowed, outline and fill versions. Please note, the fill fonts are aligned to go with the open faced versions, they may work with the outline versions, however you will have to apply them one letter at a time. The Tavern Fill fonts may also be used a stand alone font, however, the spacing is much wider than the regular solid black weights of Tavern. In the old days of printing, fill fonts rarely lined up perfect with the open or outline font, this created a misprinted look that's much in style today. To create that misprinted look using two different colors, try layering the outline fonts offset over the top of the solid black versions. Next we come to the small caps and X versions, for a font that's mostly seen used in all caps we felt a small caps would come in handy. The X in Tavern X stands for higher X-height, we've taken our standard lowercase and raised it for greater visibility in small text and for signage where you want the look of a lowercase but it needs to be readable from the street. In August of 2016 I started the project of expanding this font into more weights after seeing the font in use where someone tried creating a bold version by adding a stroke fill around the letters. The result didn't look very good, the stroke fill also caused the shadow line to merge with the serifs on some letters. This lead me to experiment to see if a new bold weight was possible for this font and I'm pleased to say that it was. After the bold weight was finished I decided to type the regular and bold weights together in a first word thin second word bold combination, however the weight difference between the two wasn't enough contrast. This lead me to wonder if a lighter weight was possible for this font, as you can see yes it was, so now for the first time in the history of this old 1908 type design you can type a first word thin second word bold combination. So why the name change from Algerian to Tavern? Since the original font was designed in England by the Stephenson Blake type foundry I decided to give this font a name that reminded you of the country it came from, however, there were other more technical reasons. During the creation of the bold weight the engraved shadow line was sticking out too far horizontally on the bottom right of the serifs dramatically throwing the whole font off balance. The original font encountered this problem on the uppercase E, L and Z, their solution was a diagonal cut corner which was now needed across any glyph in the new bold weight with a serif on the bottom right side. In order to make the light and regular weights blend well with the bold weight diagonal cut offs were needed and added as well. This changed the look of the font from the original and why I decided to change the name, additional concerns were, if you're designing a period piece where the font needs to be authentic then this font would be too new. Regular vs. Alt version? The alternate version came about after seeing the regular version used as a logo and secondary text on a major product label. I felt that some of the features of the regular version didn't look good as smaller secondary text, this gave me the idea to create an alternate version that would work well for secondary text in an advertising layout. But don't stop there, the alternate version can be used as a logo too and feel free to exchange letters between both regular and alternate versions. Where are the original alternates from Algerian? Original alternates from Algerian are built into the regular versions of Tavern plus new alternates have been created. We're excited to introduce, for the first time, all new swash capitals for this classic font, you're going to love the way they look in your ad layout, sign or logo. The best way to access alternate letters in Tavern is with the glyph map in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign products, from Adobe Illustrator you can copy and paste into Photoshop as a smart object and take advantage of all the text layer style features Photoshop has to offer. There may be third party character maps available for accessing alternate glyphs but we can't advise you in that area. I know what you're thinking, will there be a Tavern Condensed? It takes a lot of hours to produce a large font family such as this, a future condensed version will depend on how popular this standard version is. If you love Tavern we're happy to introduce the first weathered edge version of this font called Bay Tavern available in February 2020.

The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

Avenir Next Paneuropean 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 56-font collection offers condensed and semi 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. Complete your designs with these perfect pairings: Dante™, Joanna® Nova, Kairos™, Menhart™, Soho® and ITC New Veljovic®.

"Hi there, thank you for passing by. Colllab Studio is here. We crafted best collection of typefaces in a variety of styles to keep you covered for any project that comes your way! CALLING ALL CREATIVE PEOPLE and any other creator who wants their work to stand out. Edcosmic is an urban glyphic font that pours unique character into your creation. The traditional way of having graffiti style is to draw every letter manually. For every styles that you want to create, you’ll have to draw each letter by hand. This will take you days and most likely months to finish your project. With technical development, it limits the use of graffiti style in real life because it is so time consuming. Edcosmic is a graffiti font with an elaborate character set that makes creating the new styles easier than ever before. You don’t have to draw every single letter by hand anymore. What took months can now be done within hours if not minutes! You are still limited by your own creativity instead of time consumption. Edcosmic is a font with a new graffiti character set that gives creative freedom to your world. The font has very detailed characters, this will make your design different from all the others. By having a special font you can create a new style and make the world your own! A Million Thanks www.colllabstudio.com

The slab serif Waterloo Bold was designed by Alan Meeks. He chose unique and individual forms to give this alphabet its unmistakable character. The cross strokes of the capitals are not in the optical center, the serifs have light furrows, and the figures have a slight slant tot he right, giving this font a dynamic, flowing look. Waterloo Bold is reminiscent of cigars, whiskey and the 1930s and should be used only in headlines in large point sizes.

Phiz is a diverse suite of 28 decorative fonts based on Figgins Sans Extra Bold. Classic (10 fonts), Rounded (7 fonts), Rough (4 fonts) and Particles (7 fonts). The Rough and Particles styles emerge as a unique niche—neither imitating distressed printing (e.g. the “rusty” look), nor casual, hand-drawn styles. These type designs are conceived and executed as complex algorithmically-generated graphic procedures, in which repetitive elements have been artfully applied to the Sans capitals, and manually nuanced. As such they also differ substantially from textured glyph shapes that have been cut out from larger pattern fields, for the constituent particles are disposed in relation to the specific shape of each character they define. The caps-with-small-caps format was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, titling display usage is predominantly capitals, and secondly, rather like optical scaling, having the same resolution of texture available in two different “sizes” (upper and lower case) should prove useful in the hierarchy of page layout—not primarily for setting upper and lower case text as caps-with-small-capitals, although this is of course an option. All figures and major symbols (punctuation and currency) are provided in both cap and small cap height.

"Culpa" is a children's themed handwritten font. This font looks cheerful and without being bound by standard rules, just like the nature of children who have not been constrained by standard rules. This font has almost the same lowercase and uppercase sizes, so it can be mixed up in words and sentences. "Culpa" is very suitable for use in designs with children's themes, such as posters, clothes printing, children's books, birthday greeting cards, etc.

I've been working on a usable sans serif for body copy since the mid-1990s (though I certainly did not know it at the time). This one works well. It started life back in the mists of time as a scan of an old German font by Carl Fahrenwaldt. It was developed fully as a synergized serif with strong traditional roots and released as Bergsland Pro. Now it finally makes it to where I was headed all along as a sans text font. This is a well modulated humanist, sans serif font family with many OpenType features and over 600 characters: Caps, lower case, small caps, ligatures, swashes, small cap figures, old style figures, numerators, denominators, accents characters, ordinal numbers, and so on. It is designed for text use in body copy. But it also works very well for elegantly stylized display.

Crowd Pleaser is a pleasant, handmade font. I hoped its lively looks, slightly crooked glyphs and overall happy appearance would appeal to many people - so I named it Crowd Pleaser. Well… not entirely true, as I have a list of font names and Crowd Pleaser was the next one up… ;-) I do hope, however, that you will like this font!

The Quickstep Bold, a 'quick' font, originally made for the 25th anniversary of SSP Printing Co. in Amsterdam. First used for an intro spread of a Brian Eno quote in Wired Magazine (#3.05, May 1995): "The problem with computers is that they don't have enough Africa in them. What's pissing me off is that they use so little of my body". For a less outspoken expression, the Quickstep Sans was developed later.

Joachim Müller-Lancé's Uppercut is a rather sporting fellow, originally developed for the Krav Maga training center of San Francisco (Krav Maga is a simple and efficient self-defense system that has become equally popular in Hollywood and with law enforcement). Joachim has spent several years training, hitting things and people whenever he needs a break from kerning. Uppercut can be seen on the school's t-shirts and other articles. Despite bearing the same moniker as an upwards punch to the chin, the name actually fell together quite naturally as Uppercut is an all uppercase typeface, and the word "cut" is also historically used to describe a type style in hot metal type. For this slanted look, "Angle" felt just right (with thanks to Mia McHatton). The design idea sprang from pencil sketches for the center's new identity. Uppercut's shapes are not calligraphic or handwritten, more like lettering seen in comics or sports logos. Its brush movements are imaginary, not too literally brushy. During development, details were simplified and reduced until a bit of a cut-paper feel emerged, but more fluid like writing. The shapes are economical and efficient; simplicity makes the font versatile, holding up in small as well as big sizes. Uppercut is decidedly analog, muscular but not bulky, with the fluid but determined movements of a boxer or martial artist - not theatrical but powerful, fast, confident and dynamic. Well... it has punch. In the proportions, there is emphasis on a strong upper edge "keeping its guard up", while several stems protrude downward, giving the impression of leaping or being "light on the feet". Use Uppercut to pick up the pace, add snap, verve and drive - on movie posters for action and adventure, to advertise your dojo, rumble or prizefight, racing team or tuning shop, or invite friends to your barbecue with old time rock'n'roll and homemade hot pepper sauce.

Welcome to the nostalgic world of typography! Bleqcki is a retro serif display font that brings the strength and beauty of a classic look to your projects. If you are looking for the perfect solution to bring a classic and vintage look to various visual branding design projects, then Bleqcki is an unmatched choice. What makes Bleqcki so interesting? This font not only brings a strong classic feel but also comes with several features that allow you to express your creativity. With families that include regular, shadow, outline, and slant, as well as alternate ligatures and characters. You have various options to create a look that suits your brand identity. We understand that branding and design projects can be very diverse and reach different audiences worldwide. That's why Bleqcki supports multiple languages, allowing you to communicate with your audience without restrictions. So, make each branding project an enchanting trip back in time. Get Bleqcki now and enjoy the nostalgic feel it brings to your projects.

Platoon was designed as a much needed alternative to other stencil fonts that don't provide enough weights. Comes in four weights, regular, medium, bold and black, which gives it enough flexibility to make it the stencil of choice for posters, titling, book covers, and military-related designs.

Sporting pot-hook serifs and a tiny aperture, the Scotch Modern was an evolution of the Didone and Scotch Roman classifications, becoming the default type genre of the 19th century. Recontextualizing the 10-point type of a scientific report published in 1873, Nick Shinn has produced sleekly refined, micro-detailed vector drawings by eye, without the assistance of scans, of this magnificent classic. A beautiful genre of type, so popular in books, magazines and advertisements during the Victorian era and much of the 20th century, the Scotch Modern was derided by advocates of both the Arts & Crafts movement and 20th century modernists, and was never been properly adapted to hot metal, phototype, or digital media -- until now. Now the full range of typographic expression is possible in this style. The OpenType fonts support Western and CE encodings, Cyrillic (with Bulgarian alternates) and Polytonic Greek. There are many special features, including small caps, unicase, italic swash capitals, ten sets of figures per font, and both slashed and nut (vertical) fractions. Together with Figgins Sans, comprises The ModernSuite of matched fonts.

Maraka is a handwritten font family, drawn with a paint marker on rough paper, then scanned and turned into vector format. Maraka has a lot of alternative letters and is available in three versions: “Regular”, characterized by an unique look obtained by drawing the letters on a rough sheet, "Solid" and "Serif". Maraka is ideal for large headers, straplines and typographic compositions, but it still gives a great dynamic effect when writing wordy paragraphs.

We cannot imagine anyone not liking beer. Especially on a warm summer night there is simply little that can top an ice cold brewski. And with the current wave of home-brewed ales and lagers, Vette Letters decided to not stay behind and brew its own brand. Just so we can design our own beer bottle label using our own font. VLNL Thueringer comes from the drawing board of Jacques Le Bailly (a.k.a. Baron von Fonthausen), the German-French specialist in the fields of both beer and type design. One day Jacques got inspired by Albrecht Dürers 15th century Fraktur (blackletter) alphabet, and decided to design a contemporary rounded version of it. Although the historic context is clearly visible, Thueringer definitely stands its own ground. It's a modern techno-style blackletter with a (beer)truckload of interesting design details. Thueringer contains a number of ligatures and an alternate set of numbers. Apart from the regular uses like logos, posters, flyers and headlines we definitely would like to see our Thueringer used on beer bottle labels and crates, but also cafés and hipster bars would do well with this modern-day blackletter. Hell, even wine or liquor labels, football team jerseys, Oktoberfest flyers, it's just too much to mention. As long as it is accompanied by a cold beer.

Vienna designer Viktor Solt has a love affair with handwriting. “Usually” he says “when I start with a specific calligraphic style I take some historic specimens and try to integrate their main features into my own handwriting.” Although there are hints of various 18th-century calligraphic styles in Ballerino it was not based on any historical model. The swash ascenders and descenders on the lowercase are all slightly different; this and the rough texture of the edges gives Ballerino a distinctly hand-written feel. The swash caps are meant to be used only in conjunction with the lowercase not to be combined with each other.

Yummo is a geometric and somewhat condensed sans serif type family that can be used in a wide range of applications. The minimal glyphs that have been shaped superbly will give modern and contemporary impressions. At the same time, the rounded shape makes your typography softer and cuter. Yummo is not only a ‘geometric rounded font’ but also conveys humanness and loveliness as though the forms were handwritten. To accommodate a wide range of usage, This family consists of 5 weights and includes diacritics for most European languages in each weight.

The Nov. 26, 1921 issue of “The Moving Picture World” carried an ad for the dramatic film “For Your Daughter’s Sake” (originally tilted “The Common Sin” and produced in 1920). Hand lettered in an Art Nouveau sans serif style, the ad copy inspired Movie Drama JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Introducing the latest styles Brittensy script is a modern calligraphy design, including Regular. This font is enough with a sweep. Can be used for various purposes. such as logos, product packaging, wedding invitations, brand imagery, titles, signs, labels, signatures, book covers, posters, quotes, and more.

COMBA is a quirky all caps display font that is perfect for display type and contemporary branding. It has just enough eye-catching letters to pull the reader in and make them smile. COMBA also comes with 5 logo templates and a color palette.

Fruitygreen is Indonesian designer Andi AW. Masry's second typeface following Coomeec™. Idiosyncratic but appealing forms are the signature feature of Fruitygreen™ and provide this new typeface with its truly distinctive character that you can utilize for your projects - and not just in headlines. The unique forms of fruits are not only individually fascinating, but are just as captivating when they are brought together, for example as decoration on a dining table. For Masry, these can be compared with an alphabet whose letters spell out in combination different words and with this as his inspiration, he based his designs for Fruitygreen on the versatile forms of fruits. However, it was not the whole fruits as such but rather small sections of their curves and ends that he decided to use. It is not only because of the characteristic line terminals that the rounded characters of Fruitygreen seem at first glance reminiscent of a brush-written calligraphic typeface; these are traces of the creation process, in which Masry used a digital brush. At the same time, Fruitygreen is by no means simply a brush font. Its dynamic characters reference biological forms and there is definitely something amoeba-like about them, particularly in the bolder variants, and they exude the same serenity and harmony that is inherent to organic structures. The many unconventionally shaped characters also provide for optical contrast. There is, for example, the very scaled down g", the open "q" and the lowercase "r", which has the form of the capital letter. Other letters, such as the sinuous "k" and the rounded uppercase "F" impart an exotic touch to Fruitygreen. Similarly remarkable is the "@", that has only a semi-circle. Available to the designer are other characters that can be used to accentuate a design, such as swash capitals and numerous ligatures. And, last but not least, there are also various numeral sets with oldstyle and lining figures for setting proportional text and table columns together with a selection of symbols, such as arrows and, appropriately, fruits. "

ITC Hornpype is the work of California freelance designer Mott Jordan, a cheerful display face inspired in part by the cartoons of the 1920s and 30s. According to Jordan, the typeface's name and three-dimensional quality can be traced to an early cartoon in which a cat blows on a horn with such force that the instrument bulges out. For the three-dimensional look, Jordan added highlights to the thicker strokes to create letters that look as though they were, in his words, squeezed from a toothpaste tube". Jordan suggests his eye-catching font for shorter words in larger point sizes. ITC Hornpype is a lively font perfect for anything needing a "fun, goofy" look."

Occasionally a type design is started - then set aside for whatever reason - before eventually being completed. More often than not, the original source material is forgotten, so proper attribution cannot be made. Such is the case for a hand lettered Art Nouveau alphabet likely found within the pages of an early Speedball lettering book from around the 1920s. This playful and casual design is now digitally reproduced as Nouveau Signage JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.