A friend once jokingly told me that what I really do is mine extinct arts for parts to use in modern things, like going to the scrapyard to pick up bumpers, quarter-panels and dashboards off of Datsuns and Ponies to build a shiny new Ferrari. I still kind of grin at that, but I certainly do spend a lot of time looking at old things and imagining ways they would work today. This shiny new Ferrari here is called Bibliophile, and it contains scrap heap parts from various pages by Louis Prang, the Prussian-American printer and publisher who inspired my Prangs fonts. This is my second engagement with the late 19th century man, and it’s quite a bit more intricate than just an italic Didone with a connected lowercase. Bibliophile marries Round Hand calligraphy with Italian capitals, two styles not often relayed in the same alphabet, but work together beautifully when combined well. When you combine them well with a few long-practised tricks of the trade, then mix in a few trusted features from my previous work over the years, you get my usual crazy exuberance, like 17 different shapes for the d, 21 different forms for the y, endings, beginnings, swashes, ornaments, and so on. It’s no secret that I can get carried away when I’m so consumed by an idea. — Bibliophile comes in 2 weights, each of them with over 900 glyphs covering all the latin languages. Bibliophile also comes with a bold weight, something I’m always reluctant to do with something as adventurous and complex as the structure of this historical mashup. But I couldn’t chase away the idea of increasing the contrast while maintaining the hairlines in a lowercase this narrow. Part of it was the curiosity about the outcome, and part was the sheer challenge of it. I think it turned out OK. Words set in either weight will show delicateness and elegance, and the more time you spend inside the font and micro-manage the setting, the more ways you will find to magnify either. Bibliophile can be as muted or luxurious as you want it to be. This is the kind of alphabet that fits well in fashion marketing and high-end packaging, from the very subdued to the super-exquisite. Enjoy the gleaming new vehicle made with freshly polished old parts.

Surpassing traditional Antiqua, our new collaborative font family Audela emerges after overcoming time, national borders, language differences, cultural gaps, and professional challenges. Starting off as an exercise project of our very first intern Léa Bruneau in 2018, Audela slowly shaped into a full-fledged elegant serif typeface of 14 styles under the watchful eye of Plamen Motev, Fontfabric’s Type Director. Three years later, Audela is internally regarded as a breaker of limits earning its name from the French “au-delà,” meaning “beyond.” This new rising star features sharp serifs, flowing letterforms, advanced OpenType features, Extended Latin and Cyrillic support, to name a few.

My eldest son Sam always wanted to visit Japan and he has been saving up for a ticket for years now. We should have traveled there this year, but due to the pandemic, that was impossible. We’re now trying to go next year. Sam and I did make some kind of itinerary and I told him how we were going to get around, as I have been to Japan many times. I told him about the Shinkansen trains, the cute Tram in Nagasaki and the immense subway system in Tokyo. One of the lines in Tokyo is the so-called Yamanote Circle Line, which I have used on numerous occasions. A new font name was born and it stuck to this particular font! Subway Circle is a 100% handmade font. It is rounded, slightly slanted and comes with a sunny disposition. I am sure that, when you use it, you will find your 生きがい… ;-)

Gandur is a display textura in three weights, split into two families: Alte — the German word for old — and New . Gandur was inspired by other geometric texturas, specially Max Bittrof’s Element (1933). The design began by adhering to a strict hexagonal grid, but during its development, slowly moved from a purely geometric to a more pen-based design (this is especially true in the heaviest weights). The differences between Alte and New are essentially morphological, with reflections in the character set and OpenType features. Gandur New has a more humanistic, contemporary structure and is more ‘romanized’ then Alte. Gandur New also features small capitals. Gandur Alte, on the other hand, remains truer to historical forms, most notably: S s X x Z z. Gandur Alte also features the long-s, which can be accessed via a Stylistic Set or the glyph palette. (As is historically accurate, a short-s will be used at the end of words automatically when the historical Stylistic Set has been activated).