We all love a good burger here at Vette Letters. We also love to prepare them ourselves. Grilling the patties, cutting the tomatoes and cucumber, nothing beats a home made hamburger. And the best and tastiest way to grill a burger is on a wood charcoal grill. So all in all we can safely say that burgers and wood are a pretty darn good combination. This made Donald Roos decide to design VLNL Woodburger, obviously based on 19th century American wood type alphabets. Donald decided to add cyrillic characters, as he strongly believed that Russians would be equally partial to home made burgers. VLNL Woodburger is not really polished font, it will give any design a rough sturdy edge.

Varietta is the result of my fascination with photographing the type designs of some marquees in Spanish markets. In them you can see many letter designs with reversed contrast and in different widths, probably based on the possibilities of photocomposition. At the same time I was working on the expansion of the Hastile typeface designed by Alessandro Butti for the Nebiolo foundry in Italy in the late 1930s, of which I had not seen any digitization. As I am not a fan of perfect revivals, I thought it could be interesting to connect Spain and Italy in a single typeface. The first step was to expand Butti's design to 27 styles, ranging from thin condensed to black expanded. To look for the Spanish connection and its characteristic inverse contrast I took advantage of the current technology that allows variable typefaces with many axes. From this, three scenarios of horizontal contrast were incorporated (top, bottom and mixed) which allows infinite possibilities of use. The final result is a collection of 108 static typefaces or a single variable file.

Eurostile® is one of the most important designs from the Italian font designer Aldo Novarese. It was originally produced in 1962 by the Nebiolo foundry as a more complete version of the earlier Microgramma, a caps-only font designed by Novarese and A. Butti. Eurostile reflects the flavor and spirit of the 1950s and 1960s. It has big, squarish shapes with rounded corners that look like television sets from that era. Eurostile has sustained the ability to give text a dynamic, technological aura. It works well for headlines and small bodies of text. The Eurostile font family has 11 weights, from roman to bold and condensed to extended. In 2009 Linotype released a revised version in the Platinum Collection under the name , with three weights in all three different styles. And additionaly there are now new weights for the Eurostile family as , and ."

The famous Italian type designer and Nebiolo director Alessandro Butti designed Rondine in 1948. Not so surprisingly - given its beauty - it quickly became quite a commonly copied metal type. But for some reason Rondine was spared during the massive “phototyping” that happened with the introduction of film type. Perhaps this is why no digital version of it ever existed until now. Bella Donna is an upright round script that can be used both formally and informally, in almost any design where an elegant script completes the equation. The almost dramatic grandeur of the majuscules is very nicely complemented by pouty low-x-height minuscules that sprout graceful and very visible ascender and descender loops. Titles, sentences and paragraphs set in Bella Donna are meant to delightfully tease the reader and make hearts skip a beat. Bella Donna can deliver a subtle promise of joyful playfulness, inviting elegance, memorable romance, sensuality, or sincere understanding. Bella Donna was redrawn and digitized from original specimen by Rebecca Alaccari, who also extended the character set with plenty of alternates and some add-on swashes built within the font.

History is always in sight; it is constantly being reconsidered and reformulated in the context of now. We see approaches to art, fashion, textiles, homewares, furnishings … not to mention music, graphics and everything else that culturally enriches our daily lives, revisited and made anew for today.    Address Sans indulges in the spirit and aesthetics of mid-century Modern – Italian industrial design, sleek coffee makers, stylish cars, seductive jazz pressed on vinyl – with a charm and charisma that defies time. It evokes history but is decisively created for today.    Its design, in reality, is rooted in the condensed structure and block modulation of early 1950s German lettering intended for use in street signage, but when we started to work on the various weights and widths, the result was a set of fonts in a style similar to the typographic work developed by Butti and Novarese in the 60s. The multitude of potential applications for Address Sans then became clear.    In a range of 3 widths and 8 weights each, Address Sans includes little verses, true italics, small caps and numerous alternative signs for a total of 48 fonts. The result is a functional typeface that is effortlessly seductive, with geometric features and design details that ooze cool, and take it away from mere reinterpretation towards typographic forms that adapt perfectly for contemporary use.

Simplo: the ‘Italian Futura’. Simplo is a geometric sans serif typeface, built in sixteen styles. It is a tribute to the 1930s typeface Semplicità, designed by Nebiolo’s Alessandro Butti. Although many details of Simplo differ from Semplicità, it preserves the spirit of the original. Simplo is ideal for use in display sizes. It is also quite legible in text, and is well suited for graphic design and corporate identity design. Simplo has sixteen styles, extensive language support, eight different kinds of figures, sophisticated OpenType features — so it’s ready for advanced typographic projects. The most notable characteristics of this typeface are the ‘t’ and the ‘f’. The ‘t’ is the culmination of simplicity: a vertical line with just a simple right-side crossbar. The ‘f’ also has just a right-side crossbar, and is really tall: it reaches both the highest and lowest vertical position of the typeface. The top of the distinctive ‘s’, is much narrower than its bottom. The ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘g’, ‘p’, ‘q’, and ‘u’ are spurless, and show a family resemblance with Hans Reichel’s 1990s typeface Dax. However, these letters are rounder and more geometric than Dax’s counterparts, because of Dax’s higher x-height and narrower design. In Paul Shaw’s Imprint article about typefaces that have been overlooked and/or underappreciated, “Overlooked Typefaces”, he concluded his discussion of Semplicità as follows: “These idiosyncrasies suggest that Semplicità might find a warm reception today, given the current love affair with Gotham, Neutraface and Proxima—and the resurgence of ITC Avant-Garde Gothic.” Free demo font available. For more information about Simplo, download the PDF Specimen Manual.