The Waldorfschrift family was created in digital form in the years 1993-1994 by Joachim Frank, inspired by the naturally organic letters from the anthroposophical movement of the 20th century of Rudolf Steiner . In nature there are no right angles, straight lines or complete uniformity, but instead round corners, varying thicknesses and all kinds of variability. This is what the anthroposophical movement created in their buildings, their art, in their music – and also in their lettering. And this Font is like the plants in nature: it grows upwards, branches out, letters hugs to some letters, with others they keeps more distance, some letters proudly stretch their belly, others crouch in the corner - a completely natural font. Take a look at the brand of Weleda (the natural cosmetics company), Demeter (one of the biggest organic foods companies), Filderklinik (a great anthroposophical hospital in Germany) and you will see these great companies work with different but organic letter styles. More recently, Joachim revisited the Waldorf fonts with modern type design software and added extra characters such as the euro sign, and extra weights to make the fonts useable for a wide variety of design tasks. Dez 21: A big update: All fonts have been digitized again and given a complete character set, new kerning, minor bugs removed.

The font Speech Bubbles offers a convenient way to integrate text and image. While the font can be used to design comics, it also gives the typographer a tool to make text speak – to give words conversational dynamics and to emphasize visually the sound of the message. The font includes a total of seventy outlines and seventy bubble backgrounds selected from a survey of historic forms. What follows is a discussion of my process researching and developing the font, as well as a few user suggestions. My work on the Speech Bubbles font began with historic research. My first resource was a close friend who is a successful German comic artist. I had previously worked with him to transform his lettering art into an OpenType font. This allowed his publishing house to easily translate cartoons from German to other languages without the need to use another font, like Helvetica rounded. My friend showed me the most exciting, outstanding and graphically appealing speech bubbles from his library. I looked at early strips from Schulz (Peanuts), Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobes), Hergé (TinTin), Franquin, as well as Walt Disney. The most inspiring was the early Krazy Kat and Ignatz (around 1915) from George Herriman. I also studied 1980’s classics Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s Ronin and Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vandetta. Contemporary work was also a part of my research—like Liniers from Macanudo and work of Ralf König. With this overview in mind I began to work from scratch. I tried to distill the typical essence of each author’s or era’s speech bubbles style into my font. In the end I limited my work down to the seventy strongest images. An important aspect of the design process was examining each artist’s speech bubble outlines. In some cases they are carefully inked, as in most of the 80’s work. In others, such as with Herriman, they are fast drawn with a rough impetus. The form can be dynamic and round (Schultz) with a variable stroke width, or straight inked with no form contrast (Hergé). Since most outlines also carry the character of the tool that they are made with, I chose to separate the outline from the speech bubble fill-in or background. 
This technical decision offers interesting creative possibilities. For example, the font user can apply a slight offset from fill-in to outline, as it is typical to early comic strips, in which there are often print misalignments. Also, rather than work in the classic white background with black outline, one can work with colors. Many tonal outcomes are possible by contrasting the fill-in and outline color. The Speech Bubbles font offers a dynamic and quick way to flavor information while conveying a message. How is something said? Loudly? With a tint of shyness? Does a rather small message take up a lot of space? The font’s extensive survey of historic comic designs in an assembly that is useful for both pure comic purposes or more complex typographic projects. Use Speech Bubbles to give your message the right impact in your poster, ad or composition.

In 1978 I went to work at Mergenthaler as a letter drawer. Being an inquisitive sort I decided that I should take a stab at this type design 'stuff'. I drew 25 or 30 glyphs before the work found its way to a high shelf in a dark corner of my apartment. Just 23 years later I found the drawings on a different shelf, in a different home, in a different city and decided to finish what I had started. I'm still trying to deal with my predisposition toward procrastination but I've finished the font. The name of the font is the last name of somebody I played softball with before I moved to Beantown. Ronnie Geis was one of the courageous firefighters we lost on September 11th when the WTC collapsed.

This year we attended the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy. In our days off, we went to Piazza Maggiore to see what the city had to offer and luckily for us we saw an incredible store sign saying CAMPORA. We took some pictures of the typed font and later back in the studio we discovered that it was Dynamo. Immediately our minds were blown away by its beauty and thus we decided to design a new font inspired by its sharp and geometric design adding new weights and OpenType features. In the process we realized that both Dynamo and one of our favorite fonts Avant Garde, share a similar structure, so we made a type mashup between these beauties, including the sharpness of Dynamo and the revolutionary ligatures of Avant Garde.

A modern sans serif typeface inspired by the historic geometric’s of the 1920’s, specifically Futura. The design is not a simple pastiche of what went before this is much more than that. It is a close investigation to how Futura inspired other type designs like Avenir and helped push the boundary of what is a modern typeface of its generation. Overlaying perfect geometric shapes careful adjustment is made for each character and each corner to a point of balance between pure mathematics and optical correctness. The result is a distinctively modern geometric font family that is strikingly simple in design yet perfectly pleasing to the readers eye. Details include 550 characters with an alternative lowercase a, g and y, five variations of numerals, manually edited kerning and Opentype features.

During the Covid pandemic, I noticed that a lot of public figures (politicians, actors, influencers and even kings and princesses) had to apologise for not following the social distance rules, the lockdown rules or the 'stay at home' rules. They threw parties, went on holidays abroad and - in general - made a nuisance of themselves. When I finished this font, I decided to call it Public Figure! Public Figure is quite a neat, handmade font. It doesn't stick to the rules (but does like to keep up appearances), likes to party (but manages to stay safe) and brightens up your work (without being too gaudy). Public Figure comes with two alternate sets for the lower case glyphs (that cycle as you type) and a massive amount of diacritics, including Vietnamese.

THE DANISH RUNES Prior to 500 AD the 24-rune Elder Futhark was used in Denmark. From 500 AD to 800 AD there were many transitional futharks, reflecting a change from the 24-rune Futhark to the 16-rune Futharks. By the end of this period, the 24-rune Futhark went completely out of use and the 16-rune Futharks had prevailed. From 900 AD some of the runes changed, visually and phonetically. This occurred again about 950 AD and 1100 AD due to language changes. Runes dated to 1300 AD show evidence of being influenced by the Latin alphabet. Runes found in Skåne, Halland and Blekinge in Sweden, and runes found in Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, is counted among Danish runes, because in the Runic period, this was Danish land.

Gia is 7 weights, true small caps and unicase options, designed after iconic letterforms of the 1960’s to 1980’s. In the early years of the American tech revolution, when Silicon Valley was more closely identified with Dallas, Texas, a curious type of letterform began to appear—strict in geometry, and curiously minimal in geometry and stroke, making it easier to be read by machine-readers, and people more used to reading machine-generated typography. Coders! As the years went on, this kind of sinewy, curved letterform began popping up in logotypes and music videos and upright video games: NASA, The Buggles, Atari, Pong, Sega, Namco, Stern, Devo, Apple. Gia pays homage to that letterform, and is named after Gia Carangi, the iconic face of early 1980’s pop fashion.

Electrostatic JNL was inspired by the 1930s lettering for radio station WMCA in New York City. It was found as part of an ad for the station in a 1932 radio broadcasting trade magazine. WMCA went on the air Feb. 6, 1925. According to Wikipedia, the "MCA" call letters stood for the Hotel McAlpin, where the station's original studio and transmitter were located. "W" is the call sign prefix for all broadcast stations East of the Mississippi River; with the exception of KDKA (Pittsburgh), which was the nation's first commercial radio station. This bold novelty typeface with lightning bolds intersecting the characters can be used to represent anything from electricity to stormy days; power generators to brute force and so forth. Electrostatic JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Cascadeur is a variable modular sans with 3 axes, a modernistic hommage to space-age typography. It was designed by Peter Bushuev and released in April of 2020. Cascadeur was born from a type design study and went a long way to its final form. The main feature is a structure of the font: it based on 4 lines grid, has very tight spacing to achieve maximum space coverage and set of inventive letterforms. It is also a variable font and has 3 axes: weight, slant, and roundness. Cascadeur has alternates for almost every letter (2-4) so you can find a rhythm and a unique pattern for your design piece. It is a perfect choice for posters, album covers, big headlines, oversize typography, identity and packaging, editorial design.

Claudium started as an attempt to create a sans serif version of Garamond. As time went on it gradually became a meditation on the nature of French typography from Garamond to Excoffon. It was especially influenced by Cassandre's type for the Orly airport which seems to epitomize certain aspects of the French character�at least in typography. Attempts to create an italic met with disaster. Gradually, after lots of Cotes du Rhone, a cursive, based on Garamond�s Greek forms, emerged. It came at a time when I was looking at lot at Victor Hammer�s uncial and Andromaque cursive. So Claudium Cursive was developed as a lower case only and mated to the Claudium Regular caps ala Griffo�s original italic type. In keeping with the cursive lowercase there are cursive oldstyle numbers.

Look, folks! From what may just be the vernacular sign capital of the world, Chattanooga, Tennessee, it’s a brand new hyperfamily from insigne! Look includes three different related fonts, with three weights each. That’s over 70 fonts! Imagine: you turn onto a stretch of open country road. On the distressed, red background of an old barn wall, a large block of crisp white letters shout out: “See Rock City.” You soon realize this barn is not alone in competing for the passing eye. Far from it, ladies and gentlemen. This is just one of the many pieces of historic, hand-painted advertisements dotting the great Southern United States. Yes, these are the pieces of true Americana--the barns, the roadside signs, the machinery, the soda fountains, and more--that now inspire this splendid new set of three font families. This new, easily readable type from insigne digs deep to capture the very heart and passion of this splendid country’s lettering of the post-war era. Look’s compact frame quickly draws the audience to your headline, logo, subheading, or pull quote, working well in those compact spots of text without overpowering your content. You'll easily put the feeling of those days gone by into every piece with the natural beauty and simple usefulness of the Look hyperfamily. Each of the individual sub-families incorporates a variety of font weights with distressed attributes. Think Woodtype. Jeans. Antiques, folks. That deep, ingrained texture--that quality that will stand the test of time. And Look is flexible, too. Take, for example, Look Script. This powerhouse of a font offers thinner weights to give your work an easy-going, down-to-earth design. But bring in those heavier weights, and you'll have a muscular, assertive font that will go the whole nine rounds. Combine any of the Look families with Ornaments to really give your layouts a zing. Build an extraordinary design as well with Look’s swashes and alternates. To activate any of these alternates, just click on Swash, Stylistic or Titling Alternates in any OpenType-savvy application, or choose from the Glyph Palette. Explore hundreds of included extras to find that “cherry on top” for your one-of-a-kind project. There are over 70 fonts to choose from, including subfamily sans, serif, script and ornament fonts! You can't go wrong. To get the most bang for your buck, order the whole Look family now! Note on SHADOWS: Increase depth and make your designs pop! Add shadows to any of the Look fonts by duplicating the text content layer in place and switching it to its corresponding shadow. Color and offset to taste. Look shadows are offset automatically. In Illustrator, you may need to turn on Em Box Top for proper shadow alignment.