At this time I found the Album of monograms – a guide for doing handicrafts in families and educational institutions. It was published in St. Petersburg in 18ХХ. Finally, I found an authentic English style monograms set. These monograms are characterized thin swirled lines and lush foliage patterns. I manually redesigned and vectorized two sets of alphabets (narrow and wide) and happy to introduce you Marriage Monograms font. You’ll get the set includes Wide and Narrow capitals, so you can make your own monogram, by combining letters you want. +SVG file as well. Please note, you should use graphic applications such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, but not Microsoft Word. All you need is place the Narrow one on top of the Wide one. Please feel free to request any help you need: kaer.pro@gmail.com All the best, Roman.

JMTF Robin is a new post-modernist typeface in the spirit of Art & Crafts, born as a concept of a reformulation of a Gothic traditional building structure. Interestingly medieval structural architectural rescue form is for creating a font of traits absolutely contemporary without losing its artisan flavor. JMTF Robin is then a modular typography with very specific characteristics that provides an innovative texts while an appearance of great personality. Early versions of Robin was winners in Letras Latinas 2006. JMTF Robin representing a before and after in terms of contemporary texts composition. JMTF Robin is a typeface family that is presented in a wide variety of forms, from JMTF Robin in condensed forms to other roman proportions like Robin9, ideal for text, also JMTF Robin comes in Shadow and Double Outline. I dedicate this letter to creative genius William Morris father of modernism.

Anabella is a typeface made for the Master’s Degree in Typography at the University of Buenos Aires. It is inspired by the posters of pizzerias located in Naples, Italy; in order to be used in the pizza franchise Giuseppe in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The font preserves and rescues gestural features of these posters, adding a vertical axis and high contrast, typical of the Italian types that arrived in the city product of the immigration. The stroke with brush provides a more organic quality to the sign and provides connotative features. The family has three variables for the different applications that may be required in a pizza place: Italic for bodies greater than 16 pt, Roman for short texts up to 14 pt, and Stencil for use in brands and titles. Anabella was selected to participate in the eighth typography biennial Tipos Latinos.

RARE BIRD SPECIMEN I From the the doyenne of modern calligraphy - Maybelle Imasa-Stukuls - we bring you Specimen I, a charming script lettered in Ms. Imasa-Stukuls' signature hand. OBSERVATIONS Specimen I stands on its own. Its subtle nuances make it stand out in a flock of fonts. It is easily recognizable, but it is never one to be too showy. Give it plenty of white space, so every quirk and curve can be noted. DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS Opentype programming, old style numerals, in and out-stroked letter forms at beginning and end of words, six alternate lowercase t cross-strokes, Roman numerals, seamlessly connecting script ligatures, alternate lowercase letters, realistic double-letter ligatures, basic Latin encoding. POTENTIAL SIGHTINGS Book covers, children's literature, broadcast titling, unique product designs, website titles, logo designs, restaurant menus, and gourmet food labels.

Ahmed is a modern Arabic headline face, first produced by Linotype-Hell Ltd. in the early 1980s. Originally developed as a simplified face, its design recalls the inscriptional and decorative tile work lettering of the medieval period. The strong treatment of the tails of certain characters departs from the more traditional style of tapering these finials, introducing a modern feel to the design. The contrasting proportions of the tall vertical strokes and the rather elongated counters lend a monumental look to Ahmed, allowing its effective use in titling. During the later 1980s Ahmed was developed into a traditional typeface, with the introduction of medial forms to improve character spacing and balance. Recently, Ahmed has been converted into the OpenType font format, ensuring its continued popularity as a heading face for newspaper typesetting. The Ahmed typeface contains two weights, Ahmed and Ahmed Outline. Both of the OpenType fonts include Latin glyphs from Clearface Gothic Roman inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. The two Ahmed fonts include the Basic Latin character set and the Arabic character set, which supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. They include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals, as well as a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.

The Englishman William Caslon punchcut many roman, italic, and non-Latin typefaces from 1720 until his death in 1766. At that time most types were being imported to England from Dutch sources, so Caslon was influenced by the characteristics of Dutch types. He did, however, achieve a level of craft that enabled his recognition as the first great English punchcutter. Caslon's roman became so popular that it was known as the script of kings, although on the other side of the political spectrum (and the ocean), the Americans used it for their Declaration of Independence in 1776. The original Caslon specimen sheets and punches have long provided a fertile source for the range of types bearing his name. Identifying characteristics of most Caslons include a cap A with a scooped-out apex; a cap C with two full serifs; and in the italic, a swashed lowercase v and w. Caslon's types have achieved legendary status among printers and typographers, and are considered safe, solid, and dependable. A few of the many interpretations from the early twentieth century were true to the source, as well as strong enough to last into the digital era. These include two from the American Type Founders Company, Caslon 540 and the slightly heavier Caslon #3. Both fonts are relatively wide, and come complete with small caps, Old style Figures, and italics. Caslon Open Face first appeared in 1915 from the Barnhart Bros & Spindler Foundry, and is not anything like the true Caslon types despite the name. It is intended exclusively for titles, headlines and initials, and looks elegant whether used with the more authentic Caslon types or by itself.

Aila is a surprising slab serif built on the structure of a realistic Roman, but with unique organic features that make this typeface an exercise in tension between structure and rhythm. This expressive tension is displayed in heavier styles (Aila Bold and Aila Black), and is strongly evident in the italic forms. Aila's italics offer an interesting re-interpretation of the cursive ductus of classic italic forms, to offer rhythmic and swift variants, which are the ideal counterpoint to the regular set in body text. Each style of the Aila family offers an extended character set specially designed for editorial design projects.

Mezzotint CF is a daring and playful display typeface perfect for logotypes, posters, and editorial use. High-contrast strokes, flared serifs, aqueous connections, and inky terminals give Mezzotint CF its striking and rakish personality. Includes roman and italic sets across a single bold weight, with wide language support, optional ligatures, OpenType alternates, and more. Mezzotint CF pairs well with a contrasting, simple geometric sans-serif like Greycliff CF; for maximum effect, try a large difference in typeface size between the two. All typefaces from Connary Fagen include free updates, including new features, and free technical support.

Adrian Frutiger designed Egyptienne F for the Deberny & Peignot Foundry in 1956. This was the first of several Egyptians designed by Frutiger, see also Glypha and Serifa. “Egyptian” or “Egyptienne” is a typographic designation for roman typefaces with slab (or square or rectangular) shaped serifs; and those that have bracketing between main stroke and serifs (like this one) are known as “Clarendon-style Egyptians”. Egyptienne F has a medium x-height and excellent character spacing for setting text in small point sizes. Legible, flexible, and neutral in appearance, Egyptienne F is a good choice for books, magazines, and on-screen presentations.

The story begin from Condensed, Standard & Expanded style. Saint Regus built and designed with a super family typeface in mind. Its still growing and growing by uniquely bold charismatic persona. The family itself have total 8148 glyphs with a standard glyphs and multilingual context.The possibilities are have a huge prospect in various design project, digital and print. Saint Regus development tried to explore the impact by its proportional display form. The project started from a Standard weights (Roman) and then it become a big families with 21 styles that you can use for a large design assets in any kind of design works.

Cargan merges the strength of the slab serif with a gentle line flow. The result is a versatile typeface family with a distinct personality that performs superbly in headlines as well as subheads and shorter text applications. The Cargan family consists of 16 styles and is well suited for ambitious typography. It comes in OpenType format with extended language support. All weights contain ligatures, superior characters, proportional lining figures, tabular lining figures, proportional old style figures, lining old style figures, matching currency symbols, fraction- and scientific numerals and matching arrows. The roman styles offer alternative versions for the ”a” and ”g” characters.

Airy and delicate, Cerulya CF is a striking display typeface brimming with movement and grace. A unique semi-serif design with rounded teardrop terminals, Cerulya CF shines brightest at large sizes – perfect for logos, posters, headlines, and more. Includes five weights, roman and italic sets, and a selection of optional ligatures, swashes, and alternates. Cerulya CF pairs well with a contrasting, simple geometric sans-serif like Greycliff CF; for maximum effect, try a large difference in typeface size between the two. All typefaces from Connary Fagen include free updates, including new features, and free technical support.

Sole Serif is a newspaper face with features relating to book typography. Inspiration from Francesco Griffo’s romans was adapted to resist the rough usage typical of newspaper printing without any loss of quality. Sole Serif is available in an extensive range of cuts including extra bold and ultra thin. With its big x-height, short ascenders and a roundish and wide italic for text and titles, it has all the attributes of a newspaper face. Nonetheless, details like the inclined axis, calligraphic terminations, Renaissance proportions and a refined but slightly mannered design, all evoke the book rather than the daily paper.

Florian is an elegant Roman Display typeface with three weights. It’s great for branding, packaging or as in headlines. Florian is a classic high contrast serif with contemporary features. Florian has a clear sense of fashion and style. Florian is equipped with 150 OpenType alternates including Swash, Stylistic and Titling Alternates. Florian also has interlocking ligatures set in Discretionary Ligatures. These ligatures contain pairs in Uppercase + Uppercase and Uppercase + Lowercase. All Alternates are PUA encoded and can also be accessed from Glyph Palette or Character Map. Try combining Discretionary Ligatures with other Alternates in Caps to create striking word forms.

John Baskerville spared no effort to create the ultimate typographic book. He prepared deep black inks and smoothed paper to show to full effect the letters that he had John Handy cut from his own brilliant designs, based on a lifetime of calligraphy and stonecutting. Punches and matrices survive at the Cambridge University Press. The present design is an accurate recutting, with particular attention to George W. Jones’ revision from the metal of Baskerville’s English (14pt) roman and italic in 1929 for Linotype & Machinery Ltd; Mergenthaler Linotype imported this design to the USA two years later.

Typography or Calligraphy. Unconnected or Connected. For us, at DSType Foundry, that was the main question. With Aparo, we tried to bring the best of the two worlds into a single, yet complex, typeface. Aparo appears to be a very simple bold italic roman typeface, but it has plenty of calligraphic flair, including swashes that make your words stand out, collision detectors so that you don't get weird combinations, alternate characters activated by default for improved calligraphic effect and a very extended character set in a total of 897 glyphs. Download our detailed type specimen for complete information on Aparo.

Bonning is a Roman face full of the spirit of the 1920s. It was inspired by a (real)estate agent's For Sale board seen in an old sepia photograph from that era and combines visual flair and period with good clear legibility. A range of Opentype features including alternate forms, old style numbers and fractions, as well as discretionary and standard ligatures are included. Three weights are offered, including a shadowed black form are offered, all in a choice of three widths. It's the ideal face for signage with a period feel, as well as posters, headings and feature paragraphs.

Mynaruse is an elegant and regal roman inscriptional titling family. It has sharp and elongated serifs that give the face extra punch. The face shines in settings that call for elegance and splendor. Mynaruse’s six weights range from a fine, delicate thin to a powerful and solid heavy weight. Mynaruse includes many useful OpenType features, including a set of swash alternates, alternate titling forms, ligatures and miscellaneous alternates. OpenType-capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages.

Lark is a modern calligraphic sans inspired by a rich history of broad-edge and translation contrast calligraphy. By combining its sharp geometry with flared curves, Lark exhibits a nice warmth as a display face. Lark was initially conceived as a final project as part of the Type@Cooper West Extended Program's post-graduate certificate program in typeface design, so its journey has benefitted from routine feedback from experienced typeface designers. Comes in Bold, Medium, Regular, and Light weights for both roman and italic, and supports multiple languages including Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and more.

Bucintoro is a modern version of the rotunda blackletter, the Gothic book hand of Italy and Spain in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. As the name implies, it's more "rotund" than the tall, angular Textur blackletter used in Germany that Gutenberg imitated. While the use of blackletter continued far into the 20th century in Germany and Scandinavia, the rotunda gave way to roman (and later also italic) letterforms in Italy, France, and Spain. It's less well known these days. Bucintoro has upper- and lowercase alphabets, numerals, punctuation, diacritics but lacks such modern characters as currency symbols. Has light, medium, and black weights.

Tradition meets tomorrow in Mexborough. Mexborough owes its origins to a challenge from a client of ours- they wanted a clear and easily readable typeface to use for signage in public spaces, but with enough flair and style to be suitable for use in heritage precincts. The result is a family of six Roman faces in a single weight, encompassing Regular, Text, Flamboyant, Small Capitals, Capitals and Title forms. These faces combine legibilty with traditional character, ideal for signage and poster work, where dignity and character are required. Mexborough's simple clean lines also lend themselves readily to web and online use.

Cerulea is a unicase from the world of the sky. Drawing inspirations from Art Nouveau, Classical Roman, and Uncial styles, Cerulea's wide, spacious bowls, sharp points, and subtle wandering curves evoke airiness, flight, and fantasy. Seven weights, and true italics for each, range from zephyrous to thunderous. Vary the mood every time you choose between the serious capital form of a letter, the more fanciful lowercase form, or another variant in the stylistic sets. The more than 800 glyphs cover pan-European Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, fractions, circled numbers, planet and zodiac symbols, card suits, chess pieces, ornaments, and more.

British designer Jeremy Tankard began Blue Island in 1996 with the idea of creating a completely ligature-based roman typeface, an original but complex task that took years to realize. Individually, Blue Island's letters can appear a bit dismembered, but when set together, they are clearly transformed into words which fall in waves down the page. Successfully balancing readability with intriguing decorative forms, Blue Island is especially effective for titling. As for its romantic name, Blue Island is the title of a poem, also by Tankard, which evokes notions of freedom, escape, intrigue, and the undulating beauty of the sea.

As a late work the “Meier Kapitalis” forms an arch within the typographic creations of the Swiss type designer Hans Meier who died in 2014. The first sketches of this typeface can be found in the teaching manual “The Development of Script and Type” (German: “Die Schriftentwicklung”; French “Le développement des caractères”) which was published in 1994, however, under the title “Roman Lapidary, 1st Century”. The booklet was first published by the Syntax Press, Cham, Switzerland and contains an introduction by Max Caflisch in which he writes: „The present work, „The Development of Script and Type“ is a concise, authoritative textbook, concentrating on the essentials in a wide survey from ancient Greek inscriptions to the printer’s typefaces of the present day. His (Meier’s) 72 varieties of letterforms enable the student or general reader to understand the history of script and type, while more than 60 of his own calligraphic specimens provide excellent models for all who practice this art.“ Unfortunately, the “Meier Kapitalis” is one of the few typeface families in this publication which has been digitized. It was to be the last type project fully realized by Meier. In cooperation with Elsner+Flake, the typeface family was developed and expanded and now contains the four cuts: Roman, Medium, Demi Bold and Bold with either a complement of characters for 78 Latin-based languages (EL=EuropaPlus) or in West-Layout.

Another variation on the Renaissance-Baroque Roman face, it extends the selection of text type faces. In comparison with Jannon, the contrast within the letters has been enhanced. The dynamic elements of the Renaissance Roman face have been strengthened in a way which is illustrated best in the letters "a", "b" and "s". These letters contain, in condensed form, the principle of this type face - in round shapes the dark stroke invariably has a round finial at one end and a sharp one at the other. Another typical feature is the lower-case "g"; the upper part of this letter consists of two geometrically exact circles, the inner of which, a negative one, is immersed down on the right, upright to the direction of the lower loop and the upright knob. The vertical strokes slightly splay out upwards. Some details of the upper-case letters may seem to be too daring, but they are less apparent in the text sizes. It has to be admitted that typographers tend to draw letters in exaggerated sizes, as a result of which they stick to details. Serapion Italic are italics inspired partly by the Renaissance Cancelleresca. This is obvious from the drop-shaped finials of its lower-case descenders. The type face is suitable for illustrated books, art posters and short texts. It has a rather ugly name - after St. Serapion.

The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

AW Conqueror Sans was born out of this desire to fuse geometric and humanistic sans. It remains a typeface fundamentally influenced by both Bauhaus spirit — with its simplified geometric forms — and Jan Tschichold’s attempts to link this modular spirit to Eric Gill’s humanist sans serif. AW Conqueror Sans is a claimed French synthesis of Germanic Modernism and English classical tradition. Spheres of influence The core set of capitals are based on the proportions of the Roman capitals like Futura, Erbar, Nobel, Johnston, Gill Sans. During the 1930s, the Futura was a true success. Since then, Monotype offered a geometric version of the Gill Sans, and Linotype added Futura-like variants to WA Dwiggins’ Metro. AW Conqueror Sans is kind of a “fusion” of this approach. The lower case “b, d, p, q” are also directly influenced by Eric Gill’s, while the “y” is influenced by some of Jan Tschichold’s alphabets. In italics, drawn narrower, AW Conqueror Sans reinterprets Gill’s idea: a rigorous italic like a roman but which sometimes reveals some aspects of a Renaissance italic. AW Conqueror Sans and its extensions AW Conqueror Sans is the initial reference point for an extended family, including AW Conqueror Inline, Slab, Carved, Didot. The potential of these mixed families is powerful. Because AW Conqueror typefaces are based on an identical structure, and compatible proportions.

Satimah is a stunning Arabic style typeface that brings an elegant and professional look to any design. With its simple yet refined design, this font is perfect for a wide range of projects, from branding to editorial and beyond. The font also comes with stylistic set 1 and 2, as well as stylistic alternates for some characters, giving you even more creative options. Satimah is particularly well-suited for Islamic design and Islamic theme events, thanks to its beautiful calligraphic flourishes and timeless elegance. With both regular and italic versions, this font is versatile enough to be used in a wide range of design applications. And with multilingual support, you can be sure that your message will be communicated clearly and effectively no matter where your audience is located. Features : - Satimah Family Font - Stylistic Alternates - Stylistic Set - Multilingual, US Roman, Latin 1 Support --- This Font Support Language: Afrikaans, Albanian,Asu, Basque, Bemba, Bena, Breton, Catalan, Chiga, Cornish, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, German, Gusii, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Kinyarwanda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, ManxMorisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Portuguese, Quechua, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Scottish Gaelic, Sena, Shambala, Shona, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Uzbek (Latin), Volapük, Vunjo, Zulu, Hope you enjoy with our font! Attype Studio

Introducing "Kukulkan," a font designed by Raúl Plancarte, adorned with accolades, that unravels the structural possibilities nestled within the realms of ancient Roman letters and fantastical styles, infusing them with a contemporary essence. This typeface exudes a conspicuous plasticity and expressiveness, seamlessly harmonizing within its original intended context as a font for continuous text, bolstered by its robust and assured strokes. It stands as the triumphant culmination of a thorough exploration, meticulously considering legibility. Infused with nuanced elements that evoke a pre-Hispanic idealization of Mayan culture, this essence takes center stage in its darker iterations. However, it is adept at adapting to a myriad of ethnic and cultural nuances prevalent in our global village. Noteworthy is the fact that the "Kukulkan" font family is available as a variable font, offering a dynamic range of styles across its 18 fonts, endowing it with a lively, human, and refined demeanor. Additionally, it features a variant known as "Kukulkan Ornaments," a collection of 150 dingbats comprised of icons, symbols, and frames intricately inspired by the iconography of Mayan hieroglyphs. In its natural application, "Kukulkan" thrives in contexts of art, lifestyle, culture, seamlessly bridging tradition and avant-garde. This font excels in the realm of editorial design, evident in its adeptness at crafting robust headlines, and in select cases, it lends itself to creating striking brand identities.

Abril is an extension of the Abril typographic system that was engineered as a response to a very specific requirement from the editorial design community: a low contrast typeface for head- lines. Given its broad range of styles though, Abril deserves to be considered a separate font family on its own. Based on the original text styles of Abril, the letter shapes are sturdy, very legible, and deliver a newsy and trustworthy feel. The accented editorial style of the Scotch Roman finds continuity in this new type family, but some of the details have been ironed out for improved performance in headline, both in print and on screen. The family is conceived as four series of different widths, with four weights in each series plus matching italics, a total of 32 fonts. This wide range of styles allows for setting titles at almost any size. The wider series are aimed for smaller point sizes while the con- densed weights can deliver a striking and cohesive appearance as front cover headlines. Abril was designed as a versatile tool for those graphic and web designers looking for a workhorse with high impact. It is also an excellent companion for the rest of the Abril type family: Abril Titling and Abril Narrow.

JY Raj has had a lengthy gestation. The original one was a sans serif adaptation of a slab serif typeface design by Jure Stojan. Raj looked instantly better as a sans serif. After refining it further one lengthy night in 2001, he showed the drafts to Jack Yan, who completed the character sets and finished the kerning. A characterful sans serif, JY Raj pushes the boundaries of what is possible with various geometric shapes, combining legibility and tradition with sharp, unexpected angles. As with Stojan's earlier JY Koliba, it possesses a delightful balance, thanks to the designer's eye for detail and typographic harmony. The name has little to do with the Asian subcontinent: it translates to paradise in Stojan's mother tongue, Slovenian.

The Eskapade font family is the result of Alisa Nowak’s research into Roman and German blackletter forms, mainly Fraktur letters. The idea was to adapt these broken forms into a contemporary family instead of creating a faithful revival of a historical typeface. On one hand, the ten normal Eskapade styles are conceived for continuous text in books and magazines with good legibility in smaller sizes. On the other hand, the six angled Eskapade Fraktur styles capture the reader’s attention in headlines with its mixture of round and straight forms as seen in ‘e’, ‘g’, and ‘o’. Eskapade works exceptionally well for branding, logotypes, and visual identities, for editorials like magazines, fanzines, or posters, and for packaging. Eskapade roman adopts a humanist structure, but is more condensed than other oldstyle serifs. The reason behind this stems from the goal of closely resembling the Fraktur style to create harmony in mixed text settings. Legibility is enhanced by its low contrast between thick and thin strokes and its tall x-height. Eskapade offers an airy and light typographic colour with its smooth design. Eskapade italic is based on the Cancellaresca script and shows some particularities in its condensed and round forms. This structure also provided the base for Eskapade Fraktur italic. Eskapade Fraktur is more contrasted and slightly bolder than the usual darkness of a regular weight. The innovative Eskapade Fraktur italic, equally based on the Cancellaresca script previously mentioned, is secondarily influenced by the Sütterlin forms — an unique script practiced in Germany in the vanishingly short period between 1915 and 1941. The new ornaments are also hybrid Sütterlin forms to fit with the smooth roman styles. Although there are many Fraktur-style typefaces available today, they usually lack italics, and their italics are usually slanted uprights rather than proper italics. This motivated extensive experimentation with the italic Fraktur shapes and resulted in Eskapade Fraktur’s unusual and interesting solutions. In addition to standard capitals, it offers a second set of more decorative capitals with double-stroke lines to intensify creative application and encourage experimental use. The Thin and Black Fraktur styles are meant for display sizes (headlines, posters, branding, and signage). A typeface with this much tension needs to keep a good harmony between strokes and counters, so Eskapade Black has amplified inktraps and a more dynamic structure seen in the contrast between straight and round forms. These qualities make the family bolder and more enticing, especially with the included uppercase alternates. The Fraktur’s black weights are strident, refusing to let the white of the paper win the tug-of-war. It also won’t give away its secrets: Is it modern or historic, edgy or amicable, beguiling ornamentation or brutish presentation? That all depends on how the radically expanded Eskapade family is used, but its 16 fonts certainly aren’t tame.

Artist and calligrapher Daniel Reeve, well known for the lettering and maps in The Lord of the Rings films, is creating hand-crafted fonts of some of his writing styles - Kereru is the inaugural release, allowing users to emulate some of his much-admired calligraphy. Nominally a half-uncial style, clever arrangements of the stylistic sets allow Kereru to be set as full uncial or standard roman, as well as offering numerous alternates, ligatures, swashes and flourishes, ornaments, unlimited fractions, scientific inferiors and numeric superscript, all accessible via OpenType features. Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are included, in addition to the letters required for all the languages of Western, Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic. Kereru is very legible and easy on the eye, without sacrificing calligraphic flair. A pdf description of the Stylistic Sets and their usage is included with the font package, which comprises regular, bold and italic variations. Kereru Italic supercedes and improves upon its previous incarnation, Shire Regular. The name Kereru comes from New Zealand's Maori language - it is our native wood pigeon, a bird of generous and rounded form, like the font itself.

A few years ago I've discovered the work of one of the most prolific typeface designers of the Bruce type Foundry in NYC during late nineteenth century. Browsing Julius Herriet's work I found a very unique kind of ligatures in his patented "Old Style Ornamented" type design. Some letters were designed with a little top tail that allowed them to connect to each other. After that, I found that he also designed a single italic weight of the same font 7 years later. Since the beginning of the Opentype days I’ve been deeply obsessed with exploring different ways to build ligatures, so that lead me up to this point where I felt the need to create “Plethora”, this new font inspired by Herriet’s work. Extrapolating weights, adding variable technology and playing with additional interconnected letters and alternates. Definitely, Plethora means a large or excessive amount of something, and this font tries to bring back this abundance of details two centuries later. Available in 9 weights, from roman to italic, and also as variable format, “Plethora” supports plenty of latin languages and is a perfect choice for today’s design tides.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.

Nazanin, originally named Haghighi, is a modern Arabic text face first produced by Linotype in 1978. Its popular design was converted into OpenType format in 2005, taking full advantage of digital technology to allow accurate positioning of diacriticals and kerning refinements. The counters and inter-character proportions of Nazanin are characteristic of Persian display lettering and typography. This is particularly true of Nazanin bold, which gives a strong image when used for display purposes. Nazanin possesses fuller, deeper characters than is normally exhibited in Arabic typography: its angled counters contributing to fluid, well-balanced, yet vibrant, letterforms. Originally designed for Farsi typesetting, Nazanin has now become popular for Arabic typesetting as well. Nazanin is available in two OpenType weights: Nazanin Light and Nazanin Bold. Both of the fonts include Latin glyphs (from Palatino Roman and Palatino Bold, respectively) inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. Nazanin incorporate the Basic Latin character set and the Arabic character set, which supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. They include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals, as well as a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.

Type designer Xavier Dupré’s Garalda is a charming 21st century family that renews a legacy of finesse. As paragraphs on a page, Garalda’s overall impression is of a workaday personality, committed to the main purpose of the job: easy long-form reading. But setting it in display sizes proves something different: This reinvented Garamond is anything but basic. The Garalda story begins with the serendipitous finding of a book typeset in a rare Garalde, called Tory-Garamond, with which Dupré was not immediately familiar. This Garamond was used in bibliophile books in the decades surrounding 1920, but after that it became déclassé for an unknown reason. Dupré found the italic styles especially charming and discovered the family was probably the mythical Ollière Garamond cut from 1914. He obtained low resolution scans of the typeface and used them, rather than high resolution scans, as the basis for his new type family. This allowed Dupré the mental freedom to experiment and remix as he saw fit, culminating in a contemporary family with heritage. As seen in the simplistic rectangular serifs, Garalda is a humanist slab serif, but with a mix of angles and curves to give the classic shapes a fresh, unorthodox feeling. While almost invisible in paragraph text, these produce a graphic effect in display work. The set of ligatures in the roman and italics lend themselves to unique display use, such as creating lovely logotypes. In the italics, some swashes inspired by different historic Garamonds are included, sometimes breaking their curves to be more captivating. Just look at how the italic ‘*-s’ ligatures create ‘s’ with a cursive formation rather than merely a flowing slant. And how the roman ‘g’ link swings as wide as a trainer’s whip. These are all balanced by squared serifs in the roman to keep an overall mechanised regularity. The Garalda family comes in eight styles, includes some of the original arrows and ornaments, and speaks multiple languages for all typesetting needs, from pamphlets to fine book printing. The complete Garalda family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Zarlino is an original typeface in the Blackletter style. It does not solidly adhere to any of the historical Blackletter classifications, but draws from all of them, with some characters owing more to the Roman than the Fraktur. Zarlino Delux includes three complete sets of upper case, ranging from the simple to the embellished to the even more embellished, two complete sets of lower case, and two more sets of embellished alternates for selected lower case characters. These alternates are available through Stylisitic Sets in OpenType aware applications. For use in non-OpenType aware applications, Zarlino Delux comes with a set of separate, standard fonts, one for each style. These standard fonts are also available for individual purchase. Zarlino was named by my cousin, a musician. Gioseffo Zarlino was a sixteenth century composer and musical theorist. Among other things, he offered detailed advice on the setting of words to music. With its blends of the old and the new, the simple and the ornate, Zarlino is suitable for many uses, from the elegant to the aggressive.

Plantin is a Renaissance Roman as seen through a late–industrial-revolution paradigm. Its forms aim to celebrate fine sixteenth century book typography with the requirements of mechanized typesetting and mass production in mind. How did this anomalous design come about? In 1912 Frank Hinman Pierpont of English Monotype visited the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, returning home with “knowledge, hundreds of photographs, and a stack of antique typeset specimens including a few examples of Robert Granjon’s.” Together with Fritz Stelzer of the Monotype Drawing Office, Pierpont took one of these overinked proofs taken from worn type to use as the basis of a new text face for machine composition. Body text set in Plantin produces a dark, rich texture that’s suited to editorial and book work, though it also performs its tasks on screen with ease. Its historical roots lend the message it sets a sense of gravity and authenticity. The family covers four text weights complete with italics, with four condensed headline styles and a caps-only titling cut. Plantin font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.