Gérard Mariscalchi is a self-made designer. Born in Southern France of a Spanish mother and an Italian father, he has worked as a mechanic, salesman, pilot, college teacher – even a poet (with poetry being the worst-paying of these professions, he reports.) “Throughout all this, the backbone of my career has always been design,” Mariscalchi says. “I’ve been drawing since I was five, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-four that I learned that my hobby could also help me earn a living.” It was about this same time that Mariscalchi fell in love with type. He studied the designs of masters like Excoffon, Usherwood and Frutiger, as well as the work of calligraphers and type designers such as Plantin, Cochin and Dürer. With such an eclectic background, it’s no surprise that Mariscalchi’s typeface designs are inspired by many sources. Baylac and Evita reflect the style of the art nouveau and art deco periods, while Marnie was created as an homage to the great Lithuanian calligrapher Villu Toots. However, the touch of French elegance and distinction Mariscalchi brings to his work is all his own. Baylac Who says thirteen is an unlucky number? Three capitals and ten lowercase letters from a poster by L. Baylac, a relatively obscure Art Nouveau designer, served as the foundation for this typeface. The finished design has lush curves that give the face drama without diminishing its versatility. On the practical side, Baylac’s condensed proportions make it perfect for those situations where there’s a lot to say and not much room in which to say it Evita Mariscalchi based the design of Evita on hand lettering he found in a restaurant menu, and considers this typeface one of his most difficult design challenges. “The main problem was to render the big weight difference between the thin and the thick strokes without creating printing problems at small point sizes,” he says. Unlike most scripts, Evita is upright, with the design characteristics of a serif typeface. Mariscalchi named the face for a close friend. The end result is a charming design that is light, airy, and slightly sassy. Marnie Based on Art Nouveau calligraphic lettering, Marnie is elegant, inviting, and absolutely charming. Mariscalchi paid special attention to letter shapes and proportions to guarantee high levels of character legibility. He also kept weight transition in character strokes to modest levels, enabling the face to be used at relatively small sizes – an unusual asset for a formal script. Marnie’s capital letters are expansive designs with flowing swash strokes that wrap affectionately around adjoining lowercase letters. The design easily captures the spontaneous qualities of hand-rendered brush lettering.

This is the one and only Neil Bold, designed by Wayne Stettler in 1966 and originally published as a Typositor typeface. An award-winner and instant celebrity upon its release, Neil Bold became synonymous with magnified modernism for a whole generation. It was a jazz record packaging favorite, especially at Blue Note records, and made regular appearances on science fiction book covers during the last stretch of the genre's golden age. This digital version greatly expands on the film type one. New small caps and biform styles were added to the authentically revived main face (for a set of three fonts), and language support has been extended to include all Latin-based tongues. Neil Bold Pro, the OpenType version, comes in a single font that combines all three fonts into a single file, with programmed features for small caps, stylistic alternates (for biform shapes), a few extra alternates, class-based kerning, and additional language support for Cyrillic and Greek scripts.

Texicali is a multiple weight type design based on our FontMesa logo. The idea was simple: create a sans serif with a few slab serifs added resulting in a style that could feel at home just about anywhere. The regular/standard set works well for general use while the Alt set is perfect for when you want to add a little country charm. The Alt set has a few additional alternate letters built in which are easily accessed using Adobe Creative Suite products such as Illustrator and In Design. The X version, with its higher x-height lowercase, is ideal for signage where you want the look of a lowercase, however your sign still needs to be readable from the street. Larger x-heights also come in handy for web use helping to make the text more readable on smaller devices. The price of font styles are subject to change without notice.

Designed in 1950s Japan by Okanao & Kushiro, the perfect partnership until artistic temperaments drove them apart. The duo spent years crafting the font with the working title “Messenjā”, Okanao bringing technical expertise to craft letterforms, while Kushiro made it his life, obsessively working late into the night to check pages for errors. For him the project was never about making money, it was an artistic endeavor to reprint the great Western works of literature. When he found out Okanao had secretly sold the rights to the font for use as a logo for a major Japanese manufacturer, Kushiro burned all evidence of the designs in a fit of passionate fury. The two reportedly never spoke again. “Messenjā” was thought lost forever until a type specimen was discovered in a vintage typewriter box bought on eBay. Now redrawn and available as 57-nao, a faithful and beautifully crafted monospace characterized by what is considered Okanao’s defining moment, the angular loop on the lowercase ‘a’.

The term “Surf Bum” was a slang phrase used to casually describe anyone who spent as much of their time as possible at the beach catching waves in the 1960s. The Revell Company was a well-established maker of plastic model kits such as military airplanes, monsters from Universal horror films and other such items when it hooked up with custom car designer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth to develop a model kit line capitalizing on the surfing fad that was sweeping the West Coast at the time. A number of crazy-looking hot rods, dune buggies and what-have-you were turned out, and one such kit (“Surfite”, with Figure) featured a futuristic one-person dune buggy. It was on the box for the model that the words “with Figure” appear in a casual, brush design type face. Those few letters were the inspiration for creating a new retro type face entitled Surf Bum JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Have you ever used a handwritten font on your design project? Have you ever felt bored or dissatisfied with its glyphs style that looks stiff and doesn't flow even doesn't really characterize the peculiarities of a handwritten font? Or fonts that don't have alternative glyphs so they look monotonous in a word or even sentence. And in the end, it makes your projects so far from your expectations, even your clients. It's so frustrating, isn't it? Just wake up from your dissatisfaction and this is your time to make a good choice for your design project. So, we have a solution to fix it. We introduce 'Joyful Heart' just for you. This is a font that really characterizes from the handwritten style. This font is crafted carefully in every its single scratch, created to look as close to a natural handwritten font so that it can create the perfect combination on each glyph. Happy Creating www.azetypestudios.com

Lightbox 21 is a radical update of my previous version of a geometric sans serif. The design of the original Lightbox was fundamentally based on the idea of incorporating the proportions of the ‘Golden Ratio’ into each letterform; Lightbox 21 greatly improves on this concept by entirely abandoning it. The result is a much more readable, ‘natural’ typeface that retains elements of the original without being bound to it. Overall, Lightbox 21 has been designed to convey that classic feel of a geometric sans that makes the genre so tremendously enduring and versatile, as well as providing an effortless sense of class to whatever they are applied. Primarily intended for editorial work (i.e. short to medium length texts) or display settings, Lightbox 21 has a reasonably extensive character set, including support for Vietnamese, many currency symbols, arrows, and small caps. It also has OpenType support for nut fractions (via a stylistic set) and a barred alternate uppercase i and an alternate curled j.

Discover Daniella Megan, a captivating modern signature handwriting font that effortlessly combines elegance with a contemporary twist. This exquisite font is designed to bring a touch of sophistication and uniqueness to your creative projects. With its seamless integration of uppercase and lowercase letterforms, Daniella Megan offers versatility and creative possibilities for various design applications. Whether you're working on branding materials, logos, invitations, or any project that demands a modern and stylish look, Daniella Megan will make a lasting impression. Featuring an extensive range of numbers and punctuations, Daniella Megan ensures easy incorporation of numerical data into your designs without compromising on aesthetics. Additionally, its multilingual support enables effective communication across different languages and cultures, making it a versatile choice for global projects. Daniella Megan has equipped with PUA (Private Use Area) encoding, granting access to special characters, ligatures, and alternate letterforms. This empowers you to personalize and customize your typography, giving your designs a distinctive and handcrafted feel.

Redwater Banker is a Western slab-serif typeface. A historical frontier lettering, this font is rough and eroded, with a tough and confident attitude. Redwater Banker is a serif font with a strong cowboy personality, reminiscent of a bank or saloon in the Old West. Use the parenthesis characters ( ) [ ] { } to make patriotic symbols like eagles and crowns. Redwater Banker comes in three styles: The normal Regular, the slanted Italic, plus the bonus Corner font for a decorative edge. The font is built with advanced OpenType functionality and has a guaranteed top-notch quality, containing stylistic and contextual alternates, ligatures and more features; all to give you full control and customizability. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages, from North Europe to South Africa, from America to South-East Asia. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

Rozza is a single weight stencil cursive fat face font for extremal display use. Looking at this font the story of beauty and the beast comes to mind. That is how I would describe it. On the one hand prickly and dangerous, and on the other - pulsating beauty and passion. Try to combine Rozza together with Displace — great pair!

Viking Initials are pure brute-force blackletter initials of the time just before the Nazis started to rule, somehow these initials are typical for that period. I made one alphabeth-set with rough edges on the uppercase keys and a second set with sharp edges on the lowercase keys. For you to choose. Your historical designer Gert Wiescher

Introducing Unique - Decorative Serif Font Unique is decorative, elegant font with tons of alternate glyphs, ligatures and multilingual support. It's a very versatile font that works great in large and small sizes. Unique is perfect for branding projects, home-ware designs, product packaging, magazine headers - or simply as a stylish text overlay to any background image. Uppercase, lowercase, numeral,punctuation & Symbol Alternate glyphs Ligatures Multilingual support How to access alternate glyphs? To access alternate glyphs in Adobe InDesign or Illustrator, choose Window Type & Tables Glyphs In Photoshop, choose Window Glyphs. In the panel that opens, click the Show menu and choose Alternates for Selection. Double-click an alternate's thumbnail to swap them out. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions! Mock ups and backgrounds used are not included. Thank you! Enjoy!

Hello Aluyeaholics! The Bulgaria Ligatura is a stunning display font that features beautifully crafted ligatures and alternates that provide a visually captivating effect, that will elevate your design to new heights. Coming with 200+ stunning and super easy to use alternates and ligatures with quick access. Super Easy to Use - Quick access combination like B.2 a.3 u.4 r.a c.m etc (more on images preview). To get results like the preview just type B.4u.4lga.ria.3 L.2iga.tu.4r.a

Futurum Parqez is the first collaborative font for Parquillian Design. The idea for this font first came to the creator, Jose V Lopez, almost 40 years ago. A couple years ago he shared his concepts and we were gradually able to collaborate on editing the designs and turn them into a working font. The philosophy behind the font is to use a standardized frame format and the fewest strokes possible, while maintaining legibility, to create an original minimalist and modern style.

SF Saggar is an Arabic typeface for Print and screen. Inspired by an alphabet written by the calligrapher and artist Mohamed Said Al-Saggar 40 years ago to simplify Arabic printing. Saggar is from Naskh style and contains 3 weights: Regular, bold and black. SF Saggar is a simple and little detailed font and its three weights are fully harmonized, one letter with one length on the line, and words with a uniform length on the line, gives a comfortable reading look.

Werdet Script is a calligraphic typeface, inspired by the samples of the calligraphy “Batarde” created the first half of the 19th century by the French calligrapher Père Werdet. It has expanded on the original samples, creating a complete typographic family with five weights. The typeface explores the power of Opentype to simulate a manual writing. Thanks to the "contextual alternates” function, ligatures, alternate figures, initials and final forms, are automatically configured to offer an aspect with human decisions to mechanically written texts.

The idea behind designing ‘Matwin’ font was related to the youngest children of the designer namely the M-A fraternal twin. The name of the typeface (i.e., Matwin or M-A-Twin) was composed by merging three linguistic small syllables. The ‘-Twin’ syllable refers to the non-identical twin of the designer. The ‘M-’ and ‘A-’ syllables refer to the initial letters of the twin’s first names (i.e., Muhammad and Abdul-Wli) respectively. The typeface ‘Matwin’ has a personal trait which makes it as one of the most favorite fonts for the designer among his humble collection of fonts. Modestly, it is the designer’s handwriting and it has been designed to be added to the script font family known as brush un-joined. The brief process for having this typeface alive was done by firstly scanning the real script for each Latin letter, digit, symbol which were handwritten earlier by the designer himself. Then, the combination of these many scanned characters was manipulated using digital programs to produce at the end the complete typeface. The typeface has the essential glyphs comprising the character set required for most of the Latin, Western, and Eastern European languages including the Irish language. It combines +605 characters and this makes it as a pro font. It also entitles it to be applicable for usage in many languages of different communities and nations worldwide. ‘Matwin’ is dedicated for those who search for a genuine handwriting typeface with a natural touch and informal style to be added on their different published and produced products and services. It is more preferable when it is used in artistic, typographic, and other works using the lowercase letters or by mixing both upper- and lower-case letters. Moreover, the typeface is appropriate for any type of typographic and graphic designs in web, print, and other media such as boards and walls. It is also preferable to be used in the wide fields related to publications especially children-related ones, comics, printed or handwritten menus of cafeterias and restaurants at universities and public places, as well as other prints related to services and production industries. It also can create a very personal and friendly impact when used in headlines, books and novels’ covers, posters, titles, messages, envelopes addresses, grocery lists, postcards, ads, fliers, journals, paper arts, public notices, invitations, scrapbooks, notations, products’ surfaces for organic foods and juices, logos, medical packages related to children, Android applications, as well as products and corporates branding and the like. In a nutshell, ‘Matwin’ typeface fits without a glitch those (i.e., designers, typographers, publishers, artists, packagers, service providers, and so on) who have drastic and strong tendency towards imprinting their works with spontaneous and outlandish touches made by this typeface. Please, enjoy it extremely.

This is a cute story about a mother and her son. :) About a decade ago my own mother got very interested in my work. She used to say my letters had so many swirls and dazzling swashes, and suggested my job seemed to be very fun. She wondered if she could ever try to make her own alphabet... Well, she is a civil engineer and a maths teacher, and appeared to be a little tired of exact sciences... I remember answering this, while she was listening with her typical tender look: -"Mamá... While type-design may be a really enjoyable thing to do, it also involves having a great eye and knowledge about the history of letters: nice curves and shapes require a meticulous study and, like it happens in many fields, practice makes perfect"-. Well, she raised her eyebrows at me. -"and so what?"- She didn't have any experience neither in the field of art nor in the field of graphic design so, I told her that if she really wanted to get into this she should borrow some of my calligraphic books from my beloved shelves in my office. So... she did. Some weeks after that, she came to me with many sketches made with pencils and markers: some letters where very nice and unique while others naturally needed some work. I remember she added ball terminals to all of her letters (even if they didn't need them) because that was one of the rules she imposed. After some back and forth, we had the basis for what would be today, ten years later, the seed of this lovely font Girasol. Her proposal was nice, something I was not accustomed to do, that’s why many years later I decided to watch it with fresh new eyes and finished it. While she was in charge of making the lowercase letters, I helped with the uppercase and also added my hallmark in the alternates, already seen in others of my expressive fonts. The result is an upright decorative font that follows the behavior of the copperplate nib with a naive touch that makes it really cute and useful for a wide range of products. Many alternates per glyph make Girasol a very fun to use font which will delight you. Above posters are a proof of that! This font is a gift for my mother, Susana, who, in spite of her exacts academic background, taught me that beauty can also be found in the imperfect. 1 NOTES (1) In my fonts I'm always in seek of the perfect curve. When I designed Erotica and Dream Script, I read about Fibonacci’s spirals!

Hermit was born like a modern and personal reinterpretation of Gothic-style alphabets, where improvisation and personal taste have led the design towards a new aesthetic mix between gothic and modern typefaces, creating new glyphs with tweaked strokes to achieve a good level of legibility. Hermit is a modern gothic font designed for brave designers and for epic designs, available in three weights and variable fonts. It is good to use for Branding and Editorial projects with texts not too small, Advertising, Packaging, Labeling, and Book or Magazine titles.

The Stick Figure - Groovy Fun Font is a display typeface that embodies cuteness and uniqueness to the fullest. With its super thick and groovy letterforms featuring playful bubble-like endings, this font exudes a sense of fun and whimsy. It distinguishes itself further with a wide array of ligatures, adding extra character and distinction. Perfect for children's themes or any design that aims to convey joy and excitement, Stick Figure is a fantastic choice for logos, branding, headlines, titles, books, packaging, quotes, posters, children's toys, stickers, and more.

Our Maiden Orange Pro is a light and festive slab serif font inspired by custom hand lettered 1950's advertisements. Clean and legible, while also being offbeat and friendly, this font lends itself to a wide variety of uses. The SmallCaps and extensive figure sets offer a slightly more serious tone as well as a wider range of design use. Opentype features include: - SmallCaps. - Full set of Inferiors and Superiors for limitless fractions. - Tabular, Proportional, and Oldstyle figure sets (along with SmallCaps versions of the figures). - Stylistic Alternates for Caps to SmallCaps conversion.

Emporia JNL is a wonderfully decorative and vintage wood type named for a city in Kansas, and modeled from just a dozen images of individual type blocks spotted for auction online. The release of this typeface is also a milestone for Jeff Levine Fonts. The foundry started in January, 2006 with only ten releases, and has now grown to be an impressive library of unique lettering designs from the past. The collection also contains numerous original and novelty creations. Emporia JNL is proudly released as the 500th font design to join this extensive library.

My 9-year old son Sam asks a lot (a LOT!) of questions. Like: ‘what killed the dinosaurs?’ (probably an asteroid), ‘what is the distance to Pluto’ (about 7.5 billion km), ‘how big is space’ (93 billion lightyears - give or take). I am pretty sure he asked me about gravity as well. Gravitational Pull is a messy pencil script font. It comes with a whole bunch of double-letter ligatures and some really wonky glyphs. And no, in its virtual form, this font is not subject to the Earth’s gravitational pull.

Elida JNL was modeled from an image of some wood type for sale online. Although the type design most likely has its roots in the classic Bodoni, there were a few characters in the original wood type that had a bit of a square or block shape to them. Those characters were modified in order to keep with the overall roundness of the other characters. The name Elida JNL comes from a small town in New Mexico. Available in six styles: Regular, Oblique, Extra Condensed, Extra Condensed Oblique, Ultra Condensed and Mega Condensed.

Heavy Rain is a decorative roman typeface. Drawn and created by Mans Greback during 2020 and 2021, this medieval serif font has a distinct classic style and a historical character. It gives antiquity to any graphic project, and with its ornamental capitals it accentuates your message. In addition to the decorated uppercase, it is provided in a regular, simplified text style. Heavy Rain is built with guaranteed top-notch quality. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

Complement your collection of animal-shaped fonts with an illustration series that brings the different moods and moments of wildlife right to your desktop. Formed by shadows of animals in a variety of real life poses, it's perfect for design situations that require animals with a non whimsical look and a more correct morphology. 87 silhouettes and 9 pairs of tracks that range from the enigmatic energy of dodgy rats and rabbits, to the mysterious serenity of amphibians and much more. A simple and useful picture of nature.

A typeface that celebrates marching to the beat of your own drum. Snare is a jazzy little display type that presents like a stencil but behaves in its own way.Featuring angled section breaks and variable heights, Snare keeps each character’s footprint steady as as its heights change, revealing unique crossbars, periscoping capitals and deep-sinking descenders. Because each character follows its own rules, the more each word grows, the more it shows the beautiful rhythm of variety. Or stretch individual characters to shape the contours of your words. Beyond just being playful, fun to dress in colors, and delightfully useful for tight spaces,Snare’s lanky verticals and nervous energy reflect the time it was created. In this second pandemic spring, Snare brings up the drumroll-expectant heartbeat of our uncertainty, and the wish that when we can all meet again, our newfound weirdnesses will find a home in the world. The Snare font family includes one uppercase alphabet with two lowercase variants and comes in ten standard weights-which-are-just-really-heights (.otf) and as a variable type(.ttf) for designers using compatible platforms. Snare was designed by Alexander Wright and In-House International and developed byRodrigo Fuenzalida at FragType. In-House International’s foundry was launched in the summer of 2020 to offer bold, experimental, display typefaces that tell a story. Our previous releases have been featured on Design Milk, DesignBoom, Slanted and all sorts of exciting places.

Soho is the latest addition to the growing range of typefaces from Sebastian Lester. This grand opus of a project resulted in a typeface that comprises nine weights and five widths of precision engineered OpenType. 40 fonts, 32,668 characters and 24 OpenType features. Hot on the heels of the popular Neo Sans and Neo Tech range, and his first typeface release Scene, Soho represents three years of work by Lester. As a type designer I'm preoccupied with finding ways in which I can address modern problems like good legibility in modern media, and create fonts that work precisely and efficiently in the most technically demanding of corporate and publishing environments." Slab serif typefaces are enjoying something of a renaissance, offering versatility whether for corporate identity, product branding, text or display use. With 40 weights to choose from Soho gives designers endless possibilities from the ultra chic lines conveyed by the lighter weights to the rock solid statement made by the heavier weights. Soho is cross-platform compatible. The Pro version provides extended language support for Central European languages. Used in conjunction with software applications that support OpenType many useful features like "stylistic sets" can be leveraged -- in which a wide variety of alternative characters can be introduced at the click of a mouse button giving one font several "tones of voice" from conservative to cutting edge. The wide range of glyphs includes ligatures and small caps."

A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, suitable for display, or text, closely related to Latin.

A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, suitable for display, or text, closely related to Latin.

This kooky font has thick bold style letter. They are slightly toggled to give it a fun look. You will enjoy this one.

Shirah 25 started as a freehand study, while experimenting with ink and new nibs. Later on, when David decided to have a digital version, he drew it merely with the tablet, trying to keep the spirit of the ink and the nib. Shirah 25 is an OpenType/TTF Unicode font.

Here’s a simple, classic hand-lettered gem, based on an old photoface named Adonis. Suitable for headline or text use, it’s a refreshing and lively alternate to Comic Sans. All versions of this font include the Unicode 1250 Central European character set in addition to the standard Unicode 1252 Latin set.

Introducing Shutter is a handwritten brush that is written casually and quickly. Letters are made with brushes on Procreate. Then crafted carefully drawn into vector format. That is why Shutter has charming, authentic and relaxed characteristic more natural look to your text with a more natural look to your text.

Barbara Script is an OpenType font released by BluHead Studio. Based on the handwriting of a friend, Barbara Script is a connecting typeface that uses the OpenType ligature and contextual swash features to substitute 59 ligatures and 93 alternates to automatically recreate the look and feel of natural variations in handwriting!

When you think of marmalade or jam (that’s Marmellata in Italian), images of a happy breakfast table are conjured up into the mind, with of course the unforgettable emotive response accompanied. These emotions are exactly what our Marmellata fonts can conjure up for your designs as well (we agree, nothing can beat marmalade on a hot toast)! Our Jar 1 is ideal for all designs where you need to send across a feeling of care, childhood, comfort, motherhood or friendship...amongst all those ideas you will get on your own! With that classic breakfast table feel, you are sure to connect on a very comforting level with all those who view your designs using these fonts. May we suggest, these fonts go very well with unusually dull colours, and can add a spark of life to the most mundane of words! Try getting a taste of our Jar 2 if you want even more of the classic taste (sorry, touch!).

Vito is a strong and elegant sans serif family in 60 styles. A wide range of weights and widths offering tremendous typographic flexibility. Perfect to mix in magazines or packaging, corporate designs or movie titles. Masculine and sporty for adrenaline junkies, reliable and elegant for serious typographers, but with a touch of bling for high snobiety. Vito was selected as one of Typographica’s favorite typefaces of 2015. The Vito Family sets its goal to stay very functional but with a strong and unique look. Neutrality is good, but sometimes you need a bit more edge. The extreme weights and widths work great in title sizes, while the normal weights make longer texts deliciously readable. The classic and elegant outlook in all sizes make the family suitable for everything high quality. While the family looks great on the outside, it is even greater on the inside. Loads of OpenType-Features, a big amount of language support, and the flexibility of alternative letters, make working with Vito easy and exciting. And the big range of widths invite you to mix all together, and find new ways to express your designs. We would love to see, what you come up with!

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