American Authors is a unique collection of signatures of 75 famous American authors, poets, writers, and novelists. A must-have for autograph collectors, desktop publishers, history buffs, fans, or anyone who has ever dreamed of sending a letter, card, or e-mail "signed" as if by one of these famous literary figures. This font includes signatures from the following literary figures: Joel Barlow, Charles Brockden Brown, J. Fenimore Cooper, Stephen Crane, Richard H. Dana Jr., Theodore Dreiser, W.C. Bryan, Timothy Dwight, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Eugene Field, Philip Freneau, Robert Frost, Hamlin Garland, Alexander Hamilton, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lafcadio Hearn, Ernest Hemingway, W.D. Howells, Henry James, John P. Kennedy, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, Francis Scott Key, Sidney Lanier, James Russell Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Cotton Mather, Herman Melville, George John Nathan, Henry W. Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allan Poe, J.K. Paulding, Sydney Porter (aka O. Henry), Carl Sandburg, Samuel Sewall, John Howard Payne, W.H. Prescott, W. Gilmore Simms, Captain John Smith, Gertrude Stein, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Trumbull, Daniel Webster, Noah Webster, Samuel L. Clemens (aka Mark Twain), John G. Whittier, Thomas Wolfe, Henry D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Jacqueline Susann, Louisa May Alcott, Wystan Hugh Auden, Pearl Buck, Edgar Rice Burroughs, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erle Stanley Gardner, Horace Greeley, Zane Grey, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Norman Mailer, Ogden Nash, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Leon Uris, Thornton Wilder. 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. Article abstract: American Authors is a unique collection of signatures of 75 famous American authors, poets, writers, and novelists in a high-quality font.

ATF Franklin Gothic® A new take on an old favorite Franklin Gothic has been the quintessential American sans for more than a century. Designed by Morris Fuller Benton and released in 1905 by American Type Founders, Franklin Gothic quickly stood out in the crowded field of sans-serif types, gaining an enduring popularity. Benton’s original design was a display face in a single weight. It had a bold, direct solidity, yet conveyed plenty of character. A modern typeface in the tradition of 19th-century grotesques, Franklin Gothic was drawn with a distinctive contrast in stroke weight, giving it a unique personality among the more mono-linear appearance of later geometric and neo-grotesque sans-serif types. Franklin Gothic has been interpreted into a series of weights before, most notably with ITC Franklin Gothic. But as the original type was just a bold display face (later accompanied by a few similarly bold widths and italics), how Benton’s design is expanded to multiple weights and styles as a digital type family can vary significantly. Benton designed several gothic faces that harmonize with one another, including Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, and Monotone Gothic, that can serve as models for new interpretations of his work. With ATF Franklin Gothic, Mark van Bronkhorst looked to Benton’s Monotone Gothic—originally a single typeface in a regular weight, and similar to Franklin Gothic in its forms—as the basis for lighter styles. ATF Franklin Gothic may appear familiar given its heritage, but is a new design offering a fresh take on Benton’s work. The text weights are wider and more open than some previous Franklin Gothic interpretations, and as a result are quite legible as text, at very small sizes, and on screen. ATF Franklin Gothic maintains the warmth and the spirit of a Benton classic while offering a suite of fonts tuned precisely for contemporary appeal and utility. The 18-font family offers nine weights with true italics, a Latin-extended character set, and a suite of OpenType features. Download the PDF specimen for ATF Franklin Gothic.

The alcoholic beverage Gin is drunk around the world, as far back as the 13th century. Originally distilled as a medicine, it draws its main flavour from juniper berries. Gin is colourless itself but – due to its smooth taste – a major ingredient in a long list of famous colourful cocktails. Gimlet, Singapore Sling, Negroni, Charlie Chaplin, French 75, Vesper, Tom Collins, White Lady, Aviation, Monkey Gland, Southside, Gin Gin Mule and New Orleans Fizz are but a few of them. That made us decide it simply cannot be missing from the Vette Letters font collection. Vette Letters designer Henning Brehm originally designed VLNL Gindicate for the 2015 action movie Hitman: Agent 47. It was specifically used for the logo and signage of the maverick ‘Syndicate International’ organisation in the film. It lay dormant in a folder for a while, when it was reworked into this flashy 5 weight family. VLNL Gindicate is a rounded modern sans serif family, suitable for a multitide of applications, corporate or otherwise. It has somewhat of a warm sci-fy feel, without being overtly techno-ish. In the family are 3 regular weights (Light - Regular - Bold), but also an Inline and Multiline weight for extra design possibilities. Company logos, brand identities, music flyers or posters, you name it. VLNL Gindicate will spice up any design. Bottom’s up!

The Geometry Pro family has been designed to be the final word in purely geometric fonts, and this rounded “Soft” sub-family is the ultimate web 2.0 style font collection. Even though it is strictly geometric (as drawn with a compass and a ruler fixed to 90 and 45 degree angles) it is not slavishly modular: letters have differing widths, and the sidebearings, spacing and kerning has been finely adjusted to create smooth text. The Soft family contains three weights each with 6 variants: A is the basic form and the starting point B has more dynamic and modern shapes C has open and swirly shapes X is the serious text version Y has a very horizontal look Z is a collection of all the remaining more funky shapes Mix and match to your heart’s desire! Please enjoy the free “Bold N” version - this “notched” variant lets you test out the quality of the outlines and the language support. ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual “western” glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

A common creation: (to pass from one hand to the other): For the first time, various hand-signs from diverse sources are unified into one single visual style. This compendium is the result of 15 years of incubation and 7 years of creation. In his travels throughout the world, graphic designer Jean-Benoit Levy, principal of the visual studio AND, has collected pictures of multiple hand signage. Uncertain what to do with those signs, he kept them year after year until the idea came to unify almost 200 handsigns into one single family. In accordance with this entire collection, the name of the typeface is a mix: "h-and-s". A global collection: (To put in good hands): We all have one thing in common: Hand-signs are an international language, they are meant to be understood by all of us. Each of us regularly comes in contact with modern hieroglyphs such as the hand-sign-codes that are so prevalent in our daily life. This way of communication belongs to no one in particular and to all of us in general. Even if the sense of certain signs varies from one culture to the other, there is a common hand-sign language. We are surrounded by this language of handsigns each time we step in a store, we eat, open a container of milk, we clean up, use package of wash-powder, by shaving, when we work, use tools, at home, by tearing the envelope of a condom, by traveling, etc. When we encounter these signs, we all understand them easily. A visual connection: (To go hand in hand): This typeface is a global visual statement. Collecting, ordering, redrawing, unifying. Reconstructed and assembled into one original alphabet, H-AND-S is a unique and complex signs program. Our choice is based on daily gestures and global hand-codes. Logically this typeface starts with the "American Sign Language" and expands on two type-variations, each on two levels of keyboard. The international team of H-AND-S would like to send his special thanks to all of the anonymous graphic designers throughout the world who designed different hand-signage and who influenced and inspired to create such a sign collection into one unified family. We, the global nomad team of AND, hope that you will enjoy our H-AND-S. Additional Credits Production: Studio AND. www.and.ch. Concept, Idea & Creative Direction: Jean-Benoît Lévy, Switzerland / USA. Research & Sketches: Eva Schubert, Germany. Illustration, Graphic Design & Visual Fusion: Diana Stoen, USA. Transfer, Adaptation & Refining: Moonkyung Choi, Korea. Finalization & Checking: Sylvestre Lucia, Switzerland. Coaching & Technical Advice: Mike Kohnke, USA. Creative Energy & Implementation: Joachim Müller-Lancé, Germany / USA.

The Garamond family tree has many branches. There are probably more different typefaces bearing the name Garamond than the name of any other type designer. Not only did the punchcutter Claude Garamond set a standard for elegance and excellence in type founding in 16th-century Paris, but a successor, Jean Jannon, some eighty years later, cut typefaces inspired by Garamond that later came to bear Garamond’s name. Revivals of both designs have been popular and various over the course of the last 100 years. When ATF Garamond was designed in 1917, it was one of the first revivals of a truly classic typeface. Based on Jannon’s types, which had been preserved in the French Imprimerie Nationale as the “caractères de l’Université,” ATF Garamond brought distinctive elegance and liveliness to text type for books and display type for advertising. It was both the inspiration and the model for many of the later “Garamond” revivals, notably Linotype’s very popular Garamond No. 3. ATF Garamond was released ca. 1918, first in Roman and Italic, drawn by Morris Fuller Benton, the head of the American Type Founders design department. In 1922, Thomas M. Cleland designed a set of swash italics and ornaments for the typeface. The Bold and Bold Italic were released in 1920 and 1923, respectively. The new digital ATF Garamond expands upon this legacy, while bringing back some of the robustness of metal type and letterpress printing that is sometimes lost in digital adaptations. The graceful, almost lacy form of some of the letters is complemented by a solid, sturdy outline that holds up in text even at small sizes. The 18 fonts comprise three optical sizes (Subhead, Text, Micro) and three weights, including a new Medium weight that did not exist in metal. ATF Garamond also includes unusual alternates and swash characters from the original metal typeface. The character of ATF Garamond is lively, reflecting the spirit of the French Renaissance as interpreted in the 1920s. Its Roman has more verve than later old-style faces like Caslon, and its Italic is outright sprightly, yet remarkably readable.

Morris Fuller Benton, the principal designer of the American Type Founders, designed Mariage in 1901. Mariage, which has been sold under a plethora of different names during the last century, is a blackletter typeface belonging to the Old English category. The term blackletter refers to typefaces that stem out of the historical printing traditions of northern Europe. These letters, called gebrochene Schriften, or "broken type" in German, are normally elaborately bent and distorted. Their forms often print large amounts of ink upon the page, creating text that leaves a heavy, black impression. The Old English style is a subset of blackletter type that dates back to 1498, when Wynken de Worde introduced textura style printing to England. Continental printers had been printing with textura style letters since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press fifty years earlier. Italian printers stopped using them around 1470. For northern Europeans, texturas remained the most popular form of typeface design until the invention of the fraktur style in Nuremberg. Mariage is heavily classicized sort of Old English type. During the Victorian era, designers admired the Middle Ages for its chivalric, community-based values and its pre-industrial lifestyle. Yet they also found the basic medieval textura letterform too difficult to read by present standards. They desired to modernize this old style. Today, this sort of update is often referred to not as "modernization" but as classicism. Benton's design for ATF builds upon earlier Victorian classicist interpretations of Old English/textura letters. For an example of what these Victorian designs looked like, check out the popular 1990 revival of the genre, Old English . Old English style types often appear drastically different from other blackletters. For contrast, compare Mariage to a classical German fraktur design, Fette Fraktur , a schwabacher style face, or the popular early 20th Century calligraphic gothic from Linotype, Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch . Especially in the United States, classicist Old English typefaces are thought to espouse tradition and journalistic integrity. These features, together with the inherent, complex beauty of Mariage's forms, make this typeface a perfect choice for certificates, awards, and newsletter mastheads.

American Revolution is a unique collection of signatures of 84 key personalities from both sides of the American Revolutionary War, one of the supreme dramas in history. A must-have for autograph collectors, desktop publishers, history buffs, or anyone who has ever dreamed of sending a letter, card, or e-mail “signed” as if by one of these famous Revolionary War figures. This font includes signatures from the following American Revolutionary War personalities, from both sides: Ethan Allen, Charles T. Armand, John Armstrong, Benedict Arnold, Pudhomme de Borre, John Cadwalader, George Rogers Clark, George Clinton, James Clinton, Thomas Conway, William Davidson, Philippe du Coudray, The Chevalier Louis Lebegue dePresle Duportail, Chistopher Gadsden, Horatio Gates, Moses Hazen, John Glover, Mordecai Gist, Nathaniel Greene, William Heath, Edward Hand, John E. Howard, Robert Howe, Isaac Huger, William Irvine, Henry Knox, Baron Johann de Kalb, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Marquis de Lafayette, Charles Lee, Henry Lee, Andrew Lewis, William Maxwell, Benjamin Lincoln, Francis Marion, James Moore, Daniel Morgan, William Moultrie, Peter Muhlenberg, Alexander McDougall, Lewis Nicola, Lachlan McIntosh, John Nixon, Hugh Mercer, Samuel H. Parsons, Thomas Mifflin, John Paterson, Richard Montgomery, Andrew Pickens, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Enoch Poor, Count Casimir Pulaski, Israel Putnam, Joseph Reed, Elisha Sheldon, Arthur St. Clair, William Smallwood, Philip Schuyler, John Stark, Charles Scott, Adam Stephen, John Sullivan, Jethro Sumner, Thomas Sumter, James Varnum, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben, Lord Stirling, Artemas Ward, Joseph Warren, George Washington, Anthony Wayne, James Wilkinson, Otho H. Williams, John Paul Jones, William Woodford, David Wooster, John Burgoyne, Sir Guy Carleton, Charles Cornwallis, Sir Henry Clinton, Sir Thomas Gage, Richard, Earl Howe, Sir William Howe, Sir Banastre Tarleton. 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.

Look, folks! From what may just be the vernacular sign capital of the world, Chattanooga, Tennessee, it’s a brand new hyperfamily from insigne! Look includes three different related fonts, with three weights each. That’s over 70 fonts! Imagine: you turn onto a stretch of open country road. On the distressed, red background of an old barn wall, a large block of crisp white letters shout out: “See Rock City.” You soon realize this barn is not alone in competing for the passing eye. Far from it, ladies and gentlemen. This is just one of the many pieces of historic, hand-painted advertisements dotting the great Southern United States. Yes, these are the pieces of true Americana--the barns, the roadside signs, the machinery, the soda fountains, and more--that now inspire this splendid new set of three font families. This new, easily readable type from insigne digs deep to capture the very heart and passion of this splendid country’s lettering of the post-war era. Look’s compact frame quickly draws the audience to your headline, logo, subheading, or pull quote, working well in those compact spots of text without overpowering your content. You'll easily put the feeling of those days gone by into every piece with the natural beauty and simple usefulness of the Look hyperfamily. Each of the individual sub-families incorporates a variety of font weights with distressed attributes. Think Woodtype. Jeans. Antiques, folks. That deep, ingrained texture--that quality that will stand the test of time. And Look is flexible, too. Take, for example, Look Script. This powerhouse of a font offers thinner weights to give your work an easy-going, down-to-earth design. But bring in those heavier weights, and you'll have a muscular, assertive font that will go the whole nine rounds. Combine any of the Look families with Ornaments to really give your layouts a zing. Build an extraordinary design as well with Look’s swashes and alternates. To activate any of these alternates, just click on Swash, Stylistic or Titling Alternates in any OpenType-savvy application, or choose from the Glyph Palette. Explore hundreds of included extras to find that “cherry on top” for your one-of-a-kind project. There are over 70 fonts to choose from, including subfamily sans, serif, script and ornament fonts! You can't go wrong. To get the most bang for your buck, order the whole Look family now! Note on SHADOWS: Increase depth and make your designs pop! Add shadows to any of the Look fonts by duplicating the text content layer in place and switching it to its corresponding shadow. Color and offset to taste. Look shadows are offset automatically. In Illustrator, you may need to turn on Em Box Top for proper shadow alignment.

Introducing Junegull, the typeface that seamlessly blends retro-tech design with a contemporary twist. With its friendly all-caps rounded sans, Junegull is like a breath of fresh air—a perfect combination of technological prowess and gentle charm. But don’t let its cuddly appearance fool you; Junegull is like a murderous mechanical teddy bear, with a sharp edge that’s ready to take on any design challenge. For those who crave something wilder, Junegull Beach is the font for you. This wild sibling is perfect for those who want to take their designs to the next level. With Junegull Beach, every letter pair is carefully crafted to give you a more realistic, sandy feel. It’s like taking a walk on the beach, with every letter a grain of sand that transports you to a world of creativity. What sets Junegull Beach apart is its tailor-made pairs, giving you a font that’s uniquely yours. Whether you’re designing a logo, a website, or a poster, Junegull Beach will help you stand out from the crowd with its dynamic and playful style. So why settle for an ordinary font when you can have Junegull and Junegull Beach? With their retro-tech design and contemporary charm, these fonts are a must-have for any designer looking to create something truly extraordinary. Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

One menorah that I have long found particularly appealing was named The Tree of Life Menorah, a replica of which I gave as a gift one holiday to a kindly old couple who were neighbors and became friends. It had a simple, organic elegance that I see in the best of Art Nouveau sculpture. To me personally, Judeism is a celebration of life, like the triumph of the flower that blossoms in the crack of the city sidewalk. Just as Hanukkah celebrates the rededication of the temple and the miracle of the oil, it celebrates the victorious quest for freedom of the Hebrew people led by Judah Maccabee. Hanukkah represents determination and courage and faith — and it represents the presence of God in the lives of His people. It is interesting to note that the founding of the Albanian nation in the early twentieth century grew out of the resistance of the Albanian people to the imposition of Greek language and culture in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The typeface, HADASSAH, designed by Henri Friedlander (1904-1996), is my favorite Hebrew typeface. Thirty years in the crafting, I believe it is unsurpassed for its shear beauty, combining a subtle modulation of stroke with a simplicity and clarity of form. No doubt, that is why it has become so popular. For me, the Sîyn/Shîyn characters are especially satisfying. For a Hanukkah message in Hebrew, I would choose HADASSAH LIGHT for a headline and print it as large as I could. If, however, you are looking for a friendly, warm face for a seasonal message in a roman-letter based language, may I suggest BETHLEHEM EPHRATH. It will be as comfortable as a bulky, hand-knit sweater on a frosty afternoon and reflects the solid, encompassing, family orientation of this holiday. It was on the way to Ephrath that Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel gave birth to Benjamin and then died from her labor. It was to Ephrath that Naomi and Ruth returned and in Ephrath that we have the wonderful, heart-warming story of the marriage between Ruth and her Redeemer-Kinsman, Boaz. And it was to Ephrath that prophet, Samuel, went to find a new king and there in Ephrath that the prophet annointed a small shepherd boy named David. The Proverbs tell us to seek wisdom. Never underestimate the impact you have on others. Words of kindness can change people’s lives. The Talmud says that the highest form of wisdom is kindness. Be wise this holiday season. The font BETHLEHEM EPHRATH is based on the typeface Accent with the permission of URW++ of Hamburg, Germany. Like most display fonts, it is most effective at 18 points and larger. Like most script fonts, it is most effective when set with both upper and lower case. Although this font is readable in all caps (many scripts are not), that does not make it a good idea. Do so only with caution.

Fashion style meets typography in 9 styles The Ysans designed by Jean François Porchez is a sanserif influenced by Cassandre lettering pieces and the geometric sanserif style from the inter-war period. Since Chanel logo, the geometric sanserif style is the favorite typographic thing in fashion. Ysans asserts this reference. Not only Haute-Couture houses use these categories of typefaces for their visual identity, but fashion magazines usually strength their layout with these geometric sanserif when a Didot isn’t used. Details of Ysans drawings Nevertheless, Ysans takes its sources in certain details imagined by the graphic designer Adolphe Mouron Cassandre for the monogram then logotype Yves Saint Laurent (1961 …). One thing keeps coming in again and again in Cassandre’s post-war graphic work: the pointed finish and endings, the references to the Roman capitals engraved and unique features such as the open R or other details influenced by Antiqua and calligraphic forms or ductus (you should have in mind that an earlier typeface by Cassandre is the Peignot, a modern uncial based on researches of the palaeographer Jean Mallon.) Certain letters from the Ysans are directly an homage to the Yves Saint Laurent logo, the R, the narrow U, the apex of the N, and all the details of such pointed endings on the f and t lowercases. The Ysans, a typeface between diversity and synthesis There are several ways to approach the design of a new geometric sanserif. The first approach is to follow the Bauhaus philosophy by designing in the most rational way, typographic forms based on simple geometric elements: square, round, triangle. Another approach is to start a revival based on an historical geometric typeface and optimize the original ideas, in order to adapt certain details to the contemporary needs. For Ysans, the approach is somewhat different because this project started in 2011 at ZeCraft as a typeface designed specifically for Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, still in use by the brand under its original name Singulier. The Singulier-Ysans has been conceptualized by ZeCraft, both drawing its sources from Cassandre and various historical geometric typefaces. Some will spot specific traits as in Futura, others in Metro or Kabel. By closely observing the Ysans, the result can also recall the way Eric Gill draw the curves and endings of his typefaces, of which Jean François Porchez is a fervent admirer. In the end, Ysans is like fashion as envisioned by Yves Saint Laurent who constantly revealed multiple references in his new collections, without being recognisable any other than with his unique style. “Fashions pass, style is eternal. Fashion is futile, not style.” Cherry on the cake: Ysans Mondrian Ysans Mondrian, named in reference to the Mondrian dress created by Yves Saint Laurent, is the multi-layer version of the family. Ysans, fashion style meets typography Club des directeurs artistiques, 49e palmarès

Hear ye, hear ye! Adventurers of all realms, allow me to regale you with a tale of Mikadan, a font of great splendor and beauty. Behold, its letterforms are imbued with the grace and character of the medieval age, yet tempered with modern sensibilities. This typeface is a tribute to the great Verona of Stephenson Blake, a typeface of old that harks back to the days of yore, the age of kings and queens, and the rise of chivalry. Mikadan also draws inspiration from William Dana Orcutt’s Illumanistic, a font of great power and mystery from the turn of the century. Moreover, Mikadan possesses some of the accessible qualities of Morris Fuller Benton’s Motto, a font that has stood the test of time since 1915. Truly, Mikadan is a font that combines the best of old and new, of medieval fantasy and modern design. With its easy-to-read letterforms and medieval design, Mikadan is the ideal choice for all modern applications. Whether you’re designing a poster for a tournament, a sign for a market, or a banner for your guild, Mikadan will serve you well. And if your program supports OpenType alternates, you can access unique drop-down capital letters that will truly set your design apart. So come forth, brave adventurers! Embrace the medieval fantasy design of Mikadan and set forth on your journey to create designs that will endure through the ages. Most Latin-based European, and most Cyrillic-based writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dungan, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kalmyk, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kazakh, Khalkha, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Komi-Permyak, Kurdish, Kurdish (Latin), Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Rusyn, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tajik, Tatar, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec, Zulu and Zuni.

Friendly is an homage to Morris Fuller Benton's adorable Announcement typeface. It is not a strict interpretation, digital revival or reverent reproduction of the original letterforms… but I would be remiss and shady to not acknowledge the letterforms that inspired this typeface. If you are looking for a more accurate 'scanned revival' I would recommend searching "Announcement" on MyFonts. As stated earlier, it is an homage to the original letterforms of the typeface but takes a great bit of freedom tightening the construction up in order to loosen up the movement of the variant letterforms to allow a great deal of usable personality. I enjoy stating this dichotomy… "loosen up to tighten up the forms" and vice versa. It seems counterintuitive or silly but by allowing the letterforms to normalize, I felt more comfortable going back and adding rather indulgent personality. Infused with stylistic alternates, swashes, titling, many many contextual alternates, 9 stylistic sets and 2 stylistic sets with wordmarks, the typeface became far more 'friendly' for me… how could it not? With so many loops, swashes and typographic indulgences, it was bound to be fun. The more elaborate and 'overdone' Friendly got, the more I wanted to slant it. Here's where my thinking differs from MFB's original. I like slanted romans… especially ones with long ascenders, but I do not like much of a slant. It has to be the lettering person in me. It's hard for me to do a completely upright serif and not pair it with an angle, but I did not feel Announcement's 'Italic' offered much and the actual slant needed to be far less. If it's not an italic, I prefer the letters to slant with an angle equivalent to the thickness of the vertical stroke. The Slanted version of Friendly is set at 3.6 degrees, is quite subtle, and very fitting for me. You will find that most characters have a contextual, stylistic, swash and titling alternate assigned to them and some have an echoed alternate to the swash and titling options if the stylistic alt has been selected in tandem. Additionally, all of these are accessible in the glyph palette directly from the base glyph typed or through selecting options through the Stylistic Sets 1–9. Stylistic Sets 10 & 11 are a little different. They are actually configured as complex majuscule ligatures… a result of me getting carried away. Other features like a default old style numeral set and coordinating glyphs have been produced along with case support, ordinals, and more have been added to make it more relevant for contemporary use.

Some words from the designer, Frantisek Storm... Designed by Josef Tyfa in 1959, digitalized by F. Storm in 1996. This Roman and Italic are well-known perhaps to all Czech graphic artists and typographers ever since their release. Although this type face in some details is under the sway of the period of its rise, its importance is timeless, in contradistinction to other famous types dating from the turn of the sixties which were found, after some time, to be trite. The italics live their own life, only their upper-case letters have the same expression as the basic design. Thin and fragile, they work excellently, emphasizing certain parts in the text by their perfect contrast of expression. When seen from a distance they are a little bit darker than the Roman face. Tyfa Roman was released in 1960 by Grafotechna in Prague for hot setting. Later on, Berthold produced letter matrices - "rulers" for Staromat devices, used for manual photosetting of display alphabets. In the eighties it was available on dry transfers of Transotype and today it is offered also by ITC. The meticulously executed designs of the individual letters in the 288 point size are arranged into a set of signs on a cardboard of about B2 in size. The yellowed paper reveals retouches by white paint on the ink. Blue lines mark the baseline, the capital line, the ascender and descender lines and the central verticals of the letters. With regard to the format of the flat scanner, the designs had to be reduced, with the use of a camera, to the format A4, i.e. to the upper-case letter height of about 30 mm. These were then scanned in 600 dpi resolution and read as a bitmap template to the FontStudio programme. The newly created bold type faces derive from Tyfa's designs of the letters "a", "n", "p", the darkness of which was increased further, approximately by 3%, to enhance their emphasizing function. The text designs have hairstrokes thickened by one third; the contrast between thin and thick strokes has been modified, in order to improve legibility, in sizes under 12 points. We have used electronic interpolation to produce the semi-bold designs. Josef Tyfa himself recommends to choose a somewhat darker design than the basic one for printing of books.

The ITC Franklin™ typeface design marks the next phase in the evolution of one of the most important American gothic typefaces. Morris Fuller Benton drew the original design in 1902 for American Type Founders (ATF); it was the first significant modernization of a nineteenth-century grotesque. Named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, the design not only became a best seller, it also served as a model for several other sans serif typefaces that followed it. Originally issued in just one weight, the ATF Franklin Gothic family was expanded over several years to include an italic, a condensed, a condensed shaded, an extra condensed and, finally, a wide. No light or intermediate weights were ever created for the metal type family. In 1980, under license from American Type Founders, ITC commissioned Victor Caruso to create four new weights in roman and italic - book, medium, demi and heavy - while preserving the characteristics of the original ATF design. This series was followed in 1991 by a suite of twelve condensed and compressed designs drawn by David Berlow. ITC Franklin Gothic was originally released as two designs: one for display type and one for text. However, in early digital interpretations, a combined text and display solution meant the same fonts were used to set type in any size, from tiny six-point text to billboard-size letters. The problem was that the typeface design was almost always compromised and this hampered its performance at any size. David Berlow, president of Font Bureau, approached ITC with a proposal to solve this problem that would be mutually beneficial. Font Bureau would rework the ITC Franklin Gothic family, enlarge and separate it into distinct text and display designs, then offer it as part of its library as well. ITC saw the obvious value in the collaboration, and work began in early 2004. The project was supposed to end with the release of new text and display designs the following year. But, like so many design projects, the ITC Franklin venture became more extensive, more complicated and more time consuming than originally intended. The 22-font ITC Franklin Gothic family has now grown to 48 designs and is called simply ITC Franklin. The new designs range from the very willowy Thin to the robust Ultra -- with Light, Medium, Bold and Black weights in between. Each weight is also available in Narrow, Condensed and Compressed variants, and each design has a complementary Italic. In addition to a suite of new biform characters (lowercase characters drawn with the height and weight of capitals), the new ITC Franklin Pro fonts also offer an extended character set that supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages. ITC Franklin Text is currently under development.

The Tecn@ Dark&Light Triangle Background Nomenclature Font family is differentiated by the direction of the triangle tip in the 4 cardinal points. The family were designed to head, enumerate, indicate or highlight writings or design plans, for this reason, the characters are available only in capital letters and some signs or symbols that can serve such purposes. A triangle or empty character is included so that the user can use it overlaying any character of his choice or to be used alone. What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Why do we use it? It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like). Where does it come from? Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32. The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham. Where can I get some? There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.

For much of the world, the last half of December encompasses the beginning of winter and the a season of gift-giving, marked by Hanukkah and Christmas. It is generally accepted that the tradition of giving of gifts at this time was begun by The Three Wisemen. As described in The Gospel According to Matthew, the wisemen, led by a star from a distant land to the east, found the baby Jesus. First, they worshipped him and then, "they presented him with gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh." (Matthew 2:11). Thus began the tradition of celebrating the birth of Christ with the giving of gifts. There is a parallel tradition in the Jewish faith of the giving of gelt or gold at Hanakkuh to help support poor students, in keeping with the rich history of scholarship that is fundamental to the rabbinic system. Inevitably, in our secular culture, there has been a blending and a secularization of these traditions. The reasons have gotton lost in the “gimme.” What is often overlooked is what Paul realized when he told Timothy, “Neglect not the gift that is in thee.” The most importent gift is the gift inside of us, the gift of sacrificial love for others. When we let that gift be diminished in our minds amid the clutter of modern day material seeking, we can recall the prophesy of Micah over 2800 years ago, But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel: whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting." (Micah 5:2 KJV) Never underestimate the impact you have on others. Words of kindness can change people’s lives. The Talmud says that the highest form of wisdom is kindness. Be wise this holiday season. The font BETHLEHEM STAR was originally designed for the church to which I belong, The Star Bethlehem Church of Ansonia, Connecticut, USA and is based on the typeface Accent with the permission of URW++ of Hamburg, Germany. You might choose BETHLEHEM STAR for your personal greetings as well as for flyers and programs at your church this holiday season. Like most display fonts, it is most effective at 18 points and larger. Like most script fonts, it is most effective when set with both upper and lower case. All caps with this font is like eating two pieces of pecan pie — too much of a good thing.

Compendium is a sequel to my Burgues font from 2007. Actually it is more like a prequel to Burgues. Before Louis Madarasz awed the American Southeast with his disciplined corners and wild hairlines, Platt Rogers Spencer, up in Ohio, had laid down a style all his own, a style that would eventually become the groundwork for the veering calligraphic method that was later defined and developed by Madarasz. After I wrote the above paragraph, I was so surprised by it, particularly by the first two sentences, that I stopped and had to think about it for a week. Why a sequel/prequel? Am I subconsciously joining the ranks of typeface-as-brand designers? Are the tools I build finally taking control of me? Am I having to resort to “milking it” now? Not exactly. Even though the current trend of extending older popular typefaces can play tricks with a type designer’s mind, and maybe even send him into strange directions of planning, my purpose is not the extension of something popular. My purpose is presenting a more comprehensive picture as I keep coming to terms with my obsession with 19th century American penmanship. Those who already know my work probably have an idea about how obsessive I can be about presenting a complete and detailed image of the past through today’s eyes. So it is not hard to understand my need to expand on the Burgues concept in order to reach a fuller picture of how American calligraphy evolved in the 19th century. Burgues was really all about Madarasz, so much so that it bypasses the genius of those who came before him. Compendium seeks to put Madarasz’s work in a better chronological perspective, to show the rounds that led to the sharps, so to speak. And it is nearly criminal to ignore Spencer’s work, simply because it had a much wider influence on the scope of calligraphy in general. While Madarasz’s work managed to survive only through a handful of his students, Spencer’s work was disseminated throughout America by his children after he died in 1867. The Spencer sons were taught by their father and were great calligraphers themselves. They would pass the elegant Spencerian method on to thousands of American penmen and sign painters. Though Compendium has a naturally more normalized, Spencerian flow, its elegance, expressiveness, movement and precision are no less adventurous than Burgues. Nearing 700 glyphs, its character set contains plenty of variation in each letter, and many ornaments for letter beginnings, endings, and some that can even serve to envelope entire words with swashy calligraphic wonder. Those who love to explore typefaces in detail will be rewarded, thanks to OpenType. I am so in love with the technology now that it’s becoming harder for me to let go of a typeface and call it finished. You probably have noticed by now that my fascination with old calligraphy has not excluded my being influenced by modern design trends. This booklet is an example of this fusion of influences. I am living 150 years after the Spencers, so different contextualization and usage perspectives are inevitable. Here the photography of Gonzalo Aguilar join the digital branchings of Compendium to form visuals that dance and wave like the arms of humanity have been doing since time eternal. I hope you like Compendium and find it useful. I'm all Spencered out for now, but at one point, for history’s sake, I will make this a trilogy. When the hairline-and-swash bug visits me again, you will be the first to know. The PDF specimen was designed with the wonderful photography of Gonzalo Aguilar from Mexico. Please download it here http://new.myfonts.com/artwork?id=47049&subdir=original

With its extended complement, this comprehensive redesign of Bank Gothic by Elsner+Flake offers a wide spectrum for usage. After 80 years, the typeface Bank Gothic, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1930, is still as desirable for all areas of graphic design as it has ever been. Its usage spans the design of headlines to exterior design. Game manufacturers adopt this spry typeface, so reminiscent of the Bauhaus and its geometric forms, as often as do architects and web designers. The creative path of the Bank Gothic from hot metal type via phototypesetting to digital variations created by desktop designers has by now taken on great breadth. The number of cuts has increased. The original Roman weight has been augmented by Oblique and Italic variants. The original versions came with just a complement of Small Caps. Now, they are, however, enlarged by often quite individualized lower case letters. In order to do justice to the form changes and in order to differentiate between the various versions, the Bank Gothic, since 2007 a US trademark of the Grosse Pointe Group (Trademark FontHaus, USA), is nowadays available under a variety of different names. Some of these variations remain close to the original concept, others strive for greater individualism in their designs. The typeface family which was cut by the American typefoundry ATF (American Type Founders) in the early 1930’s consisted of a normal and a narrow type family, each one in the weights Light, Medium and Bold. In addition to its basic ornamental structure which has its origin in square or rectangular geometric forms, there is another unique feature of the Bank Gothic: the normally round upper case letters such as B, C, G, O, P, Q, R and U are also rectangular. The one exception is the upper case letter D, which remains round, most likely for legibility reasons (there is the danger of mistaking it for the letter O.) Because of the huge success of this type design, which follows the design principles of the more square and the more contemporary adaption of the already existing Copperplate, it was soon adopted by all of the major type and typesetting manufacturers. Thus, the Bank Gothic appeared at Linotype; as Commerce Gothic it was brought out by Ludlow; and as Deluxe Gothic on Intertype typesetters. Among others, it was also available from Monotype and sold under the name Stationer’s Gothic. In 1936, Linotype introduced 6pt and 12pt weights of the condensed version as Card Gothic. Lateron, Linotype came out with Bank Gothic Medium Condensed in larger sizes and a more narrow set width and named it Poster Gothic. With the advent of photoypesetters and CRT technologies, the Bank Gothic experienced an even wider acceptance. The first digital versions, designed according to present computing technologies, was created by Bitstream whose PostScript fonts in Regular and Medium weights have been available through FontShop since 1991. These were followed by digital redesigns by FontHaus, USA, and, in 1996, by Elsner+Flake who were also the first company to add cursive cuts. In 2009, they extended the family to 16 weights in both Roman and Oblique designs. In addition, they created the long-awaited Cyrillic complement. In 2010, Elsner+Flake completed the set with lowercase letters and small caps. Since its redesign the type family has been available from Elsner+Flake under the name Bank Sans®. The character set of the Bank Sans® Caps and the Bank Sans® covers almost all latin-based languages (Europe Plus) as well as the Cyrillic character set MAC OS Cyrillic and MS Windows 1251. Both families are available in Normal, Condensed and Compressed weights in 4 stroke widths each (Light, Regular, Medium and Bold). The basic stroke widths of the different weights have been kept even which allows the mixing of, for instance, normal upper case letters and the more narrow small caps. This gives the family an even wider and more interactive range of use. There are, furthermore, extensive sets of numerals which can be accessed via OpenType-Features. The Bank Sans® type family, as opposed to the Bank Sans® Caps family, contains, instead of the optically reduced upper case letters, newly designed lower case letters and the matching small caps. Bank Sans® fonts are available in the formats OpenType and TrueType.

A typeface with lightly-worn futurism, Sagittarius is equally at home among the beauty and wellness aisles, or the coils of the warp core. The Sagittarius typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2021. A decorative adaptation of Hoefler’s Peristyle typeface (2017), Sagittarius’s rounded corners and streamlined shapes recall the digital aesthetic of the first alphabets designed for machine reading, a style that survives as a cheeky Space Age invocation of futurism. Sagittarius was created for The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, where it first appeared in 2021. From the desk of the designer: Typeface designers spend a lot of time chasing down strange valences. We try to figure out what’s producing that whiff of Art Deco, or that vaguely militaristic air, or what’s making a once solemn typeface suddenly feel tongue-in-cheek. If we can identify the source of these qualities, we can cultivate them, and change the direction of the design; more often, we just extinguish them without mercy. Sometimes, we get the chance to follow a third path, which is how we arrived at Sagittarius. During the development of Peristyle, our family of compact, high-contrast sans serifs, I often found myself unwittingly humming space-age pop songs. Nothing about Peristyle’s chic and elegant letterforms suggested the deadpan romp of “The Planet Plan” by United Future Organization, let alone “Music To Watch Space Girls By” from the ill-advised (but delicious) Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, but there they were. Something in the fonts was provoking an afterimage of the otherworldly, as if the typeface was sliding in and out of a parallel universe of high-tech spycraft and low-tech brawls with rubber-masked aliens. It might have had something to do with a new eyeglass prescription. But I liked the effect, and started thinking about creating an alternate, space-age version of the typeface, one with a little more funk, and a lot more fun. I wondered if softer edges, a measured dose of seventies retrofuturism, and some proper draftsmanship might produce a typeface not only suitable for sci-fi potboilers, but for more serious projects, too: why not a line of skin care products, a fitness system, a high-end digital camera, or a music festival? I put a pin in the idea, wondering if there’d ever be a project that called for equal parts sobriety and fantasy. And almost immediately, exactly such a project appeared. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Jesse Sheidlower is a lexicographer, a former Editor at Large for the Oxford English Dictionary, and a longtime friend. He’s someone who takes equal pleasure in the words ‘usufructuary’ and ‘megaboss,’ and therefore a welcome collaborator for the typeface designer whose love of the Flemish baroque is matched by a fondness for alphabets made of logs. Jesse was preparing to launch The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a comprehensive online resource dedicated to the terminology of the genre, whose combination of scholarship and joy was a perfect fit for the typeface I imagined. For linguists, there’d be well-researched citations to explain how the hitherto uninvented ‘force field’ and ‘warp speed’ came to enter the lexicon. For science fiction fans, there’d be definitive (and sometimes surprising) histories of the argot of Stars both Trek and Wars. And for everyone, there’d be the pleasure of discovering science fiction’s less enduring contributions, from ‘saucerman’ to ‘braintape,’ each ripe for a comeback. A moderated, crowdsourced project, the dictionary is now online and growing every day. You’ll find it dressed in three font families from H&Co: Whitney ScreenSmart for its text, Decimal for its navigational icons, and Sagittarius for its headlines — with some of the font’s more fantastical alternate characters turned on. The New Typeface Sagittarius is a typeface whose rounded corners and streamlined forms give it a romantically scientific voice. In the interest of versatility, its letterforms make only oblique references to specific technologies, helping the typeface remain open to interpretation. But for projects that need the full-throated voice of science fiction, a few sets of digital accessories are included, which designers can introduce at their own discretion. There are alternate letters with futuristic pedigrees, from the barless A popularized by Danne & Blackburn’s 1975 ‘worm’ logo for NASA, to a disconnected K recalling the 1968 RCA logo by Lippincott & Margulies. A collection of digitally-inspired symbols are included for decorative use, from the evocative MICR symbols of electronic banking, to the obligatory barcodes that forever haunt human–machine interactions. More widely applicable are the font’s arrows and manicules, and the automatic substitutions that resolve thirty-four awkward combinations of letters with streamlined ligatures. About the Name Sagittarius is one of thirteen constellations of the zodiac, and home to some of astronomy’s most inspiring discoveries. In 1977, a powerful radio signal originating in the Sagittarius constellation was considered by many to be the most compelling recorded evidence of extraterrestrial life. Thanks to an astronomer’s enthusiastically penned comment, the 72-second transmission became known as the Wow! signal, and it galvanized support for one of science’s most affecting projects, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). More recently, Sagittarius has been identified as the location of a staggering celestial discovery: a supermassive black hole, some 44 million kilometers in diameter, in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. <

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

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.