Inspired by a biography of Coco Chanel and trying to capture the quintessential mood of classical fashion elegance, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini designed Coco Gothic looking for the effect that the first geometric sans typefaces (like Futura, Kabel or the italian eponyms like Semplicità) had when printed on paper. The crisp modernist shapes acquired in printing charme and warmth through a slight rounding of the corners that is translated digitally in the design of Coco Gothic. This signature touch is enhanced by the inclusion of light humanist touches to the proportions of the letters, resulting in the unique mix that makes Coco Gothic one of our best sellers, with a look that is both contemporary and vintage. After six years from the original project (that has spawned in the meanwhile successful families like Cocogoose and Coco Sharp), we went back to the design to completely redraw and expand the original family, creating with a Pro version that has better on-screen readability, a wider weight range, variable type versions and more language coverage (with Coco Gothic Arabic adding a new script to the latin, greek and Cyrillic of the original). Coco Gothic Pro comes in three subfamilies, each with seven weights with matching italics and featuring an extended character set with open type support for small caps, ligatures, alternates, European languages, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. The original, body-text optimised Coco Gothic and Coco Gothic Alternate subfamilies have been kept for compatibility with the previous version, while a new Coco Gothic Display subfamily has been developed with a complete redesign aimed at display usage, featuring tighter spacing and optimised letterforms. A distinguishing feature of Coco Gothic Pro is the inclusion of ten alternate historical sets that allow you to use the typeface as a true “typographic time machine”, selecting period letterforms that range from art deco and nouveau, to modernism and to eighties’ minimalism. Equipped with such an array of historical variants, Coco Gothic Pro becomes an encyclopedia of styles from the last century, ready to transform itself and adapt to the mood of your text.

A ‘Brochette’ in French is a skewer. I used to be a tour guide and some years ago, I guided a couple of tours in Mali. Every night at dinner we had the choice of a ‘Brochette de Capitaine’ (grilled Nile perch on a skewer) or a ‘Brochette de Bœuf’ (grilled beef on a skewer). Of course, every night the Brochette came with French fries and ‘petits pois’ (peas). It was really nice, but after 4 months of eating Brochettes, I longed for something different! Brochette is a very nice rounded font. It comes with curls, swirls and swashes.

Vowels produce 'end-characters'. These are used whenever a string of symbols start or end. Consonants make 'middle-characters'. Numerals are zero-width characters. these can be used whenever you feel like it, they will float above and below the string of symbols. Puncuation adds extra spice. Hold down 'shift' and you get the individual symbols mirrored. (very useful with the vowels.) Check my website for a more graphic representation and play, for gods sake, play!

The Bauer Typefoundry first released the Beton family of types in 1936. Created by the German type designer Heinrich Jost, the present digital version of the Beton family consists of six slab serif typefaces. First developed during the early 1800s, by the 1930s slab serif faces had become one of many stock styles of type developed by foundries all over the world. Because of their distance from pen-drawn forms and their industrial appearance, they were seen as “modern” typefaces. (Their serifs kept them from being too modern.) The first slab serif typefaces were outgrowths of didone style text faces (e.g., Walbaum). As newspapers and advertising grew in importance in the western world (especially in “Wild West” America), type founders and printers began to create bigger, bolder typefaces, which would set large headlines apart from text, and each other. Through display tactics, businesses and industry could begin to visually differentiate their products from one another. This craze eventually led to the development of monster sized wood type, among other things. By the 20th Century, the typographic establishment had begun to tame, categorize, and codify 19th Century type styles. It was in the wake of this environment that Jost developed Beton. The Beton family is a type “family” in a pre-1950s sense of the word. Although six styles of type are available, only four of them fit in logical progression with each other (Beton Light, Beton Demi Bold, Beton Bold, and Beton Extra Bold). The other two members of the family, Beton Bold Condensed and Beton Bold Compressed, are more like distant cousins. They function better as single headlines to text set in Beton Light or Beton Demi Bold, of as companions to totally separate typefaces.