The Penman fonts are partially based on the 19th century penmanship of one of the designer’s ancestors, and originally created for a personal mailing with an “old-times tradition” flavor. The fonts are lightly pair-kerned, in order to control punctuation and numeral spacing. Auto-kerning should be turned on, and tracking should be checked to make sure all characters join well.

Make your design as a time machine with "Mooners" typeface. Inspired by the decorative victorian advertising poster, Mooners came to make make your document, poster, logo, etc... perfectly have a vintage victorian vibes. It's a solid combination that can bring your design, logo, document, website, etc. back to 1800 decade. Multilingual fonts-family and playful one with 165 alternate characters.

Alan Meeks designed the Candice typeface in 1976. A groovy swirl of a font, Candice looks like an ice cream sundae topped with whipped cream. Candace is often seen on album covers, and has come to be associated with innumerable party hits from the 1970s. One thing is for sure: Candice is a child of it's times - flashy, lively, and fun!

This font is actually two different fonts. The uppercase mimics the typeface used once upon a time in Teletypes, and the lowercase is patterned after the face used during the first half of the twentieth century by Western Union for their telegrams. Both flavors of this font feature the 1252 Latin, 1250 Central European, 1254 Turkish and 1257 Baltic character sets.

Introducing Kangmas, a nostalgic retro serif font with regular and true italic style. This font has rounded serif inspired by all the retro aesthetics making a comeback and the awesome classic "Cooper Black" typeface, but includes more modern letter shapes in it. The combination make it has a nostalgic retro vibes and also gives modern looks at the same time.

Introducing Emirah is a cute handwritten font with a matching script and regular will be perfect for book, title branding, product packaging, invitation, quotes, t-shirt, label, poster, logo etc. Feature Uppercase & Lowercase Number & Symbol International Glyphs Multilingual support Ligature Feel free to drop us a message any time and follow my shop for upcoming updates Hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to the cosmic dance of typography with Groove Galaxy, a captivating and thrilling rounded vintage typeface that swirls you into a time warp of retro charm reminiscent of the beloved 1970s. Just like stars twinkling in the night sky, each letter of Groove Galaxy emanates a mesmerizing aura, pulling you into a captivating journey through the groovy days of the past.

Xtencil is a typeface inspired by the shapes of the drawing templates letters, based on the letter forms from my teacher Milton Glaser who at the same time was influenced by the modernism of Paul Renner. Xtencil is a round letter to create funny signs, ideal for posters and headlines. Xtencil not come as a drawing template, but as OpenType typography.

In the late 90’s, there were many German cars coming into Malmö (where I lived at the time). I was blown away by the font on the license plates. So strange, so strong, peculiar – but still macho. I built the uppercase from my own photos. After this I completed the font with my own lowercase, small caps and punctuation.

SUSHI is an unusual font family (2 styles), created by Bartosz Panek. The idea was created while working on the design of a certain logo. With time, a whole font was created from modular elements, which in its form brings associations with food, fish and sushi. The font contains uppercase characters, numerals and a large range of punctuation (over 220 glyphs).

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.

Save time and effort – choose your type wisely. Use Taurus and you’ll achieve impact without having to resort to cheap tricks. We have done the work for you: just type out words using Taurus and you’ll have a logo for a Wall Street law firm – or for that precious vintage Barolo.  
 Refinement. Sophistication. Seriousness. Sex appeal. Taurus has it all.

Nightspot JNL was modeled from one of many display alphabets created by the late sign painter and lettering expert Alf Becker. His work has graced the pages of Signs of the Times® magazine for decades. Special thanks to Tod Swormstedt of the American Sign Museum and ST Publications, Inc. in Cincinnati, Ohio for providing the source material for this typeface.

This rough-hewn offering is patterned after Antikva Margaret, designed by Zoltán Nagy for VGC in the mid-60s. Its energetic and, at times, eccentric letterforms make this face a perfect choice for headlines and subheads that will be noticed. Both versions include the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets, as well as localization for Moldovan and Romanian.

This font is based on a lot of the downtempo culture in Paris. Smoky bars, jazz clubs, that sort of thing. How a font can be influenced by intangibles is a question that I can't quite answer, but I can say that when I created it, it strongly reminded me of a couple of times spent in Paris back in the mid-90s.

Bodoni Classic Bold Ornate is another puzzlestone in my ever growing Bodoni Classic family. This time the letters are ornated within the limits of the letter, this keeps the classic form of the typeface intact and still gives it ample decoration. Please use this font only sparingly to decorate text or use it as initials only. Your Bodonimaniac, Gert Wiescher

Arcadian was first produced in wood type around 1870 by William H. Page & Company. It is a semi-ornamented face based on a French Clarendon, with dots added to the median and the tops and bottoms of the letters. It has a distinctly “Old West” feel, and was likely used to add a little pizzazz to advertising and broadsides of the time.

Nimous Daven is a distinct hand drawn font contains 50+ ligatures with two alternative. Nimous Daven is great for branding, posters, logos, invitation, writing and headings. Feature Uppercase & Lowercase Number & Symbol International Glyphs Multilingual support Alternative Ligature Thanks so much for checking out my shop and feel free to drop us a message any time and follow my shop for upcoming updates

Masserini is inspired by the 20's art deco era of colorful posters, fonts, and typography with a vintage flair. With its strong geometric shapes and letters, like a style of sans serif that was used in signs and posters during that time period. This collection consists of a variety of widths, weights, and variants to suit your creative needs.

The first plain weight of Cutoff was designed in 2005 to be used in Miele, an independent Italian free magazine. The need was for an elegant, unusual and legible semi-serif with contemporary flavour. I was fascinated by the deconstructivist work of Jeff Keedy (Hard Times Thick), Phil Baines (Can You, You Can) and Otl Aicher (Rotis), so my aim was to get the feeling of a cut transitional typeface; at the same time felt the exigence to work on the whole shape of the glyphs, in order to soften the “90s deconstructivist” effect and obtain a more balanced and readable design. In the last years I further worked on the typeface adding the other styles, extending the character set and refining the letterforms. Finally the precious collaboration with URW++ brought in 2010 to a complete OpenType Pro font family, with multilingual and advanced typographic features. Fulvio Bisca, July 2010

Inspired by the strange, blocky lettering on the sides of a set of a set of plastic kitchen containers in my childhood home, 8th Avenue is a sophisticated, somewhat syncopated font with a retro look and feel that at the same time brings a very modern attitude to your design. 8th Avenue works well as display font for packaging, headlines and logos. Those pastel turquoise plastic boxes from the early 1950s, with white screen printed letters reading FLOUR, SUGAR, COFFEE etc. on one side were a simple quiet presence in our home back then and for decades after. Seeing them, even that soft blue-green colour felt like home. SUGAR, the soul survivor of that set has become one of those mundane items of daily life that somehow become simple icons of another time, ripe with memories. Obviously I had to make a font. September 2014

Nature Boy was born in a fantasy world of old, where you can find magic, elegance, dreams and fun all together... just like nature in its purest form with its leafy curves and shapes that make it peacefully enjoyable. Soft and simple yet fairly ornamental, attributes that create an enchanting atmosphere but keep the texts legible at the same time when combined. Nature Boy can bring life and magic to every design, from editorial to posters, brands and packagings. Just picture this font on any product intended to move your soul and take you on a journey into a different and most beautiful place and time and let the adventure begin. This font family is made up of optically corrected regular, italic and bold types. All of them contain functional ligatures with alternative glyphs for texts and words to be dynamical and fluently graphed.

URW Grotesk was designed exclusively for URW by Prof. Hermann Zapf in 1985. At the same time, Zapf designed URW Antiqua to go with URW Grotesk. At that time, we were working with a large German publishing house (Axel Springer) on type design solutions to replace certain of their newspaper fonts. Test pages of large German newspapers (e.g. Bildzeitung) were printed with URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua font families. For reasons not disclosed to us, the project was dropped and Springer never used URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua for that purpose. Anyway, Zapf finished his designs and URW produced both families. Zapf’s intention for the two typefaces was to design two highly legible, open and classical fonts that could be used for any kind of typography, especially books, newspapers, magazines, etc. However, we realized later on, that URW Grotesk is very well suited for multi media applications on screen.

URW Grotesk was designed exclusively for URW by Prof. Hermann Zapf in 1985. At the same time, Zapf designed URW Antiqua to go with URW Grotesk. At that time, we were working with a large German publishing house (Axel Springer) on type design solutions to replace certain of their newspaper fonts. Test pages of large German newspapers (e.g. Bildzeitung) were printed with URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua font families. For reasons not disclosed to us, the project was dropped and Springer never used URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua for that purpose. Anyway, Zapf finished his designs and URW produced both families. Zapf's intention for the two typefaces was to design two highly legible, open and classical fonts that could be used for any kind of typography, especially books, newspapers, magazines, etc. However, we realized later on, that URW Grotesk is very well suited for multi media applications on screen.

Braga Huis typeface is a font family that is inspired by the famous street in Bandung that was made to embodies the atmosphere and the environment of Netherland-Indie city at its golden time, whereby all the elements were designed to give the impression of structural, artistic, and advance. Braga Huis typeface has a strong Art Deco character, where the impression is depicted from the strong lines, curvy passion so it is very appropriate to describing the future atmosphere from the perspective of the 19th century. Braga Huis typeface has 3 font styles consisting of uppercase, lowercase and various alternative options that can be customize to your taste, poster is one of the media form of presentation that we believe is very appropriate for this type of font. But whatever the medium is, honestly we say; using Braga Huis typeface will make your artwork will never be cracked by time.

Some time ago, I started to think about the idea of combining my passionate hobby cooking with my profession as a graphic designer. While browsing through cooking books, cooking magazines and graphic publications I noticed that there were no symbols and drawings easily recognizable for interested cooks (hobby or professional). So I decided to create symbols for all the classical cooking paraphernalia still found in grand mother’s kitchen cabinet. René Menue Symbol contains 99 kitchen symbols of classical design and quality. To complement the symbols typographically, there is René Menue, a fitting linear Sans Serif typeface with plenty of extra characters such as ligatures, figures etc. René Menue is a modern, slightly condensed and economic design with round shapes, very modern but classical at the same time. These features make it perfectly usable in many different publications, not necessarily restricted to cooking… A successful cooking and enjoy your meal!

Spiral Ornaments are of varying complexity with positive and negative variations. There are a total of 48 ornaments.

Xiphoid is the "unofficial" typeface of the Raelians. Download it now, or suffer the consequences on their return.

Developed over several years by the late Otl Aicher and first released in the late 1980s, the Rotis® typeface has become a timeless classic. ROTIS II SANS HISTORY Aicher was a renowned German designer and corporate image consultant. He created the four basic designs of Rotis – sans serif, semi sans, semi seif and serif – within an extended typeface family concept, wherein all designs share a common cap height, lowercase x-height, basic stem weight and general proportions. While each version is part of the large, integrated family, each was also designed to function on its own as a distinctive typestyle. The result is that all members of the Rotis family combine smoothly with each other. Aicher, however, did not design the Rotis family with the weights and proportions normal for more contemporary releases. Rotis Sans Serif, for example, was drawn with just six weights and only two italics. Starting in 2010, Robin Nicholas, senior designer for Monotype Imaging in the UK, and freelance designer Alice Savoie collaborated to bring Rotis Sans Serif up to current standards. The result is Rotis II Sans, a completely new addition to the Rotis family. “We devised our approach together,” recalls Savoie, “deciding which weights to start with, what kind of alterations to make to the original Rotis, etc. I went to work on the typefaces, regularly submitting proofs to Robin. We would then decide in tandem on the next steps to take.” Nicholas elaborates, “We revisited the range of weights and added matching italics so that the new additions to the family offer increased versatility. We optimized the outlines, corrected the weight of several letters and re-examined overall spacing and kerning. In addition to a new set of numerals, with a height similar to the capitals, we also drew case-sensitive punctuation.” ROTIS II SANS USAGE The new Rotis II Sans suite comprises 14 typefaces: seven weights, ranging from extra light to black, each with a companion italic. The designs are available as OpenType® Pro fonts, allowing for automatic insertion of ligatures and fractions. Pro fonts also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. Aicher’s original Rotis designs were widely used for branding and advertising. With the addition of Rotis II Sans, the family is again poised to become a powerful communicator.

Imagine you've decided to cut letters out of paper thereby creating a modern sans-serif for a broad application range. What result would you get? We already know the answer! Pines is a font family that we've carefully cut out of paper and then added lots of emotions and a few bright natural accidental details. Now you can create any text layouts and contemporary design with special warmth and friendliness that was inspired by paper. Pines font family is great for any ecological design theme. Use if for websites, hand-made items, and eco-friendly products packaging. Our font family is also great for ecological brand identity and navigation. We've named the font family Pines since it perfectly integrates into the natural environment and looks authentic and harmonious as if it came from the pine forest itself.

Abominio is a captivating display typeface featuring an innovative design of recurring chiseled forms. This font aims to capture the spirit of maximalism culture, offering a valuable asset for consumer-oriented designs, allowing them to stand out in a in a sea of competitors. With its bold and experimental appearance, Abominio remains true to the letters of the Latin alphabet. This unique characteristic is well-suited to capture and hold the attention of easily distracted viewers, extending their focus for a few more vital seconds. Designers now have the opportunity to explore their creativity, creating both refined and daring combinations for eye-catching headlines, titles, or graphic design projects that aim to convey strength and artistic innovation. Specifications: - Included: Abominio Regular, Abominio Oblique, Abominio Variable - Multi language support (Central, Eastern, Western European Languages) - OpenType Features Thanks for viewing, Unio.

Originally commissioned by magazine publisher IPC, Rogue has proved to be one of the most popular Device releases. Now extended and updated as Rogue Nova, it sports additional weights, East European language support and reengineered spacing and kerning. It is now a versatile 30-font family, with five weights and three widths, all with italics. Powerful and authoritative, sharp-edged and contemporary.

Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.

“More is better” may have been the motto of Richard Austin of Austin and Son’s Imperial Letter-Foundry on Worship Street at Finsbury Square in London when he designed and cut his Antique typeface. The year it was created is uncertain, but it is known to have appeared in a specimen book produced in 1827. At first glance, the upper case letters of Austin Antique look very much like Figgins Antique. But, upon examination, one will note that the Austin face is much darker. In general, the letters designed and cut by Richard Austin have fatter strokes, larger serifs and smaller counters -- more metal and less daylight. The premise was that the darker the letter, the more attention an ad using the typeface would receive. In old pictures of London and Paris one may see walls crowded with posters and “bills” -- competing for the attention of the passerby. Morris and Updike aside, the early nineteenth century marked the beginning of a commercial as well as industrial revolution. Patterns of commerce were changing. With new methods of marketing came the need for new typefaces to support the new methods. Foundries found the display types were very profitable and competed most energetically and creatively for the trade. There was a lot of trial-and-error. Some ideas faded away. Others, like the Antiques or Egyptians, were refined and developed. From them came the Clarendons that were to prove both popular and long lasting -- because they worked. Their job was to sell goods, not please the aesthetic sensibilities of the critics. They did their job well. Austin Antique has a full Western European character set, plus the following ligatures: ct, st, fi, fl, ff, ffi and ffl. Tabular numbers. Surprisingly readable.

The Verdana typeface family was designed specifically to address the challenges of on-screen display. Verdana was originally designed by world-renowned type designer Matthew Carter, and tuned for screen display by the leading TrueType hinting expert, Tom Rickner. The Verdana fonts are unique examples of type designed specifically for the computer screen.The Verdana family received a major update in 2011 as a collaboration between The Font Bureau, Monotype Imaging and Matthew Carter. The original Verdana family included only four fonts: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. The new and expanded Verdana Pro family contains 20 fonts in total. The Verdana Pro and Verdana Pro Condensed families each contain 10 fonts: Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold and Black (each with matching italic styles).Verdana exhibits characteristics derived from the pixel rather than the pen, the brush or the chisel. The balance between straight, curve and diagonal were meticulously tuned to ensure that the pixel patterns at small sizes are pleasing, clear and legible. Commonly confused characters, such as the lowercase i j l, the uppercase I J L and the number 1, have been carefully drawn for maximum individuality - an important characteristic of fonts designed for on-screen use. Another reason for the legibility of the Verdana fonts on the screen is their generous width and spacing.Designed by David Berlow and David Johnathan Ross of the Font Bureau, with typographic consultation by Matthew Carter, the new Verdana Pro includes a variety of advanced typographic features including true small capitals, ligatures, fractions, old style figures, lining tabular figures and lining proportional figures. An OpenType-savvy application is required to access these typographic features. The expanded weights and completely new condensed range of fonts provide designers with an expanded palette of typographic options for use in print and on-screen, in both small text sizes and headlines.

Aramus is a new serif font in my continuing objective of designing book fonts that I can really use. In many ways, Aramus is a very different direction for me. It comes from a scan of an old display face that has been radically modified to a much smaller x-height than I have been using lately, plus taller ascenders. Many of the characters needed a lot of correction to bring them into my taste. In general, I have decided that many of my fonts create a type color that is too dense. Aramus is an attempt to get away from that look. Although Amitale has been a very successful book family and excellent to work with, I find I still need something more open with a lighter color. Aramus is the first look at the new direction. The original hand-cut serifs vary a lot, different for almost every character. This gives a little looseness and helps the lightness I am looking for. It will be interesting to see where this all goes. This is a normal serif for me in that it has caps, lowercase, small caps with the appropriate figures for each case. This font has all the OpenType features in the set for 2009. I didn't bother with the CE accents (though I can add them upon request. They will be in the final new book family). There are several ligatures for your fun and enjoyment: bb gg ff fi fl ffi ffl ffy fj ft tt ty Wh Th and more. Like all of my fonts, there are: caps, lowercase, small caps, proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, & small cap figures, plus numerators, denominators, superiors, inferiors, and a complete set of ordinals 1st through infinity. Enjoy!

Arc Neuvo has a retro, art deco feel and provides a few quirky glyphs to add to the fun.

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. <