Originally designed in 1996, Mrs Eaves was Zuzana Licko’s first attempt at the design of a traditional typeface. It was styled after Baskerville, the famous transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England. Mrs Eaves was named after Baskerville’s live in housekeeper, Sarah Eaves, whom he later married. One of Baskerville’s intents was to develop typefaces that pushed the contrast between thick and thin strokes, partially to show off the new printing and paper making techniques of his time. As a result his types were often criticized for being too perfect, stark, and difficult to read. Licko noticed that subsequent interpretations and revivals of Baskerville had continued along the same path of perfection, using as a model the qualities of the lead type itself, not the printed specimens. Upon studying books printed by Baskerville at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, Licko decided to base her design on the printed samples which were heavier and had more character due to the imprint of lead type into paper and the resulting ink spread. She reduced the contrast while retaining the overall openness and lightness of Baskerville by giving the lower case characters a wider proportion. She then reduced the x-height relative to the cap height to avoid increasing the set width. There is something unique about Mrs Eaves and it’s difficult to define. Its individual characters are at times awkward looking—the W being narrow, the L uncommonly wide, the flare of the strokes leading into the serifs unusually pronounced. Taken individually, at first sight some of the characters don’t seem to fit together. The spacing is generally too loose for large bodies of text, it sort of rambles along. Yet when used in the right circumstance it imparts a very particular feel that sets it clearly apart from many likeminded types. It has an undefined quality that resonates with people. This paradox (imperfect yet pleasing) is perhaps best illustrated by design critic and historian Robin Kinross who has pointed out the limitation of the “loose” spacing that Licko employed, among other things, yet simultaneously designated the Mrs Eaves type specimen with an honorable mention in the 1999 American Center for Design competition. Proof, perhaps, that type is best judged in the context of its usage. Even with all its shortcomings, Mrs Eaves has outsold all Emigre fonts by twofold. On MyFonts, one of the largest on-line type sellers, Mrs Eaves has been among the 20 best selling types for years, listed among such classics as Helvetica, Univers, Bodoni and Franklin Gothic. Due to its commercial and popular success it has come to define the Emigre type foundry. While Licko initially set out to design a traditional text face, we never specified how Mrs Eaves could be best used. Typefaces will find their own way. But if there’s one particular common usage that stands out, it must be literary—Mrs Eaves loves to adorn book covers and relishes short blurbs on the flaps and backs of dust covers. Trips to bookstores are always a treat for us as we find our Mrs Eaves staring out at us from dozens of book covers in the most elegant compositions, each time surprising us with her many talents. And Mrs Eaves feels just as comfortable in a wide variety of other locales such as CD covers (Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief being our favorite), restaurant menus, logos, and poetry books, where it gives elegant presence to short texts. One area where Mrs Eaves seems less comfortable is in the setting of long texts, particularly in environments such as the interiors of books, magazines, and newspapers. It seems to handle long texts well only if there is ample space. A good example is the book /CD/DVD release The Band: A Musical History published by Capitol Records. Here, Mrs Eaves was given appropriate set width and generous line spacing. In such cases its wide proportions provide a luxurious feel which invites reading. Economy of space was not one of the goals behind the original Mrs Eaves design. With the introduction of Mrs Eaves XL, Licko addresses this issue. Since Mrs Eaves is one of our most popular typefaces, it’s not surprising that over the years we've received many suggestions for additions to the family. The predominant top three wishes are: greater space economy; the addition of a bold italic style; and the desire to pair it with a sans design. The XL series answers these requests with a comprehensive set of new fonts including a narrow, and a companion series of Mrs Eaves Sans styles to be released soon. The main distinguishing features of Mrs Eaves XL are its larger x-height with shorter ascenders and descenders and overall tighter spacing. These additional fonts expand the Mrs Eaves family for a larger variety of uses, specifically those requiring space economy. The larger x-height also allows a smaller point size to be used while maintaining readability. Mrs Eaves XL also has a narrow counterpart to the regular, with a set width of about 92 percent which fulfills even more compact uses. At first, this may not seem particularly narrow, but the goal was to provide an alternative to the regular that would work well as a compact text face while maintaining the full characteristics of the regular, rather than an extreme narrow which would be more suitable for headline use. Four years in the making, we're excited to finally let Mrs Eaves XL find its way into the world and see where and how it will pop up next.

Perfora is the typographic antidote to our relentlessly anxious and uncertain times. On one hand, Perfora is heavy, monospaced and brick-like. It feels secure, permanent, reliable. On the other, Perfora is extra variable—stretching taller or growing wider as needed—so all your words can fit perfectly together. And this seeming contradiction is the sweet spot we’ve all been missing: sturdy but not rigid. Named for its punch-hole shaped counters and eyes, Perfora is a flexible powerhouse that’s easy to use, stack, and click into any shape. Use it to assemble everything from dynamic logos to posters and festival lineups, from seamlessly responsive titles to instantly recognizable product lines. Perfora features two uppercase styles—rounded and angular—punctuation, numbers, latin diacritics, and stylistic alternates for a subset of characters. It also includes 19 ornamental glyphs to compose with flair and add some rhythm to your copy. It’s available (and recommended) as a variable type (.ttf) for designers using compatible platforms. It’s also available in opentype format (.otf) as a set of 25 static fonts, spanning 5 widths and 5 heights. Perfora was created by In-House International, designed by Alexander Wright and developed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida.

New for 2020 Bodoni Ornamental now has two italics to choose from, one basic italic and a second which is more of a true italic with a few uppercase letters that have been stylized. Only one italic can be style linked to the regular upright version so in the second italic we've added Avanti to the name which means forward in Italian. When purchasing the regular upright and Avanti italic together they will install as two separate families. Bodoni Ornamental is a revival of a very old typeface based on the Poster Bodoni letter shape. Giambattista Bodoni passed away in 1813, this decorative version was created in the 1820’s or 1830’s which was the time period when many of these ultra bold decorated type faces began to appear, the original artist is currently unknown. The original version of this ornate classic was only available as a set of uppercase letters, today over one hundred eighty years later this font is now complete with a new lowercase, numbers and accented characters for Eastern, Central and Western European countries. Due to the ornate detail in Bodoni Ornamental when printing itís recommended to use a laser printer 600dpi or greater, a 1200dpi printer will give you the best results rendering the most detail at the smallest possible point size for this font. Small home user Ink Jet printers are not recommended for Bodoni Ornamental unless you set the font to a very large point size. With Ink Jet printers much of the detail in the letters will bleed together as the ink hits the page, commercial Ink Jet printers such as GiclÈe printers may give good results. When using Bodoni Ornamental for digital images including web site graphics it may help to add a one pixel stroke fill around the letters setting color to white or grey, this may help the web site images display better on some computer's. You will need a photo editing application such as Adobe Photoshop to create your image adding the stroke fill and save as a jpg , png or gif file. I hope you enjoy this old font as much as I did making it. Note: When previewing the Bodoni Ornamental font in the Windows font preview you may notice some letters appearing lighter and some darker, this is a problem with the preview window and some ornate fonts, Bodoni Ornamental will print normal and not with mixed light and dark letters.

Rinzler AOE is a revival of a LetterGraphics film type called Caren. A modular, mechanical, sans-serif stencil all rolled up into one retro typeface. It's not an all-purpose typeface, it's not an everyday typeface, but it is a cool typeface for the right design projects. Rinzler AOE carries itself with a bold weighted style, and stencil cutouts that don't follow standard stencil formatting. It might be considered more of a techno stencil (if there is such a thing). It reminded me in a vague way of TRON, hence the main poster graphic styling, although it looks NOTHING like the Tron titling typeface. Nevertheless, it's a fun typeface that needed to be preserved and used again. WHAT'S INCLUDED: Extensive language support. Rinzler has accented and special characters that support the following languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan Cornish, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Indonesian, Italian, Kurdish, Leonese, Luxenbourgish, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Occitan, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Walloon, & Welsh. One of my guilty pleasures is in taking the time to recreate historical typefaces as digital fonts, but a lot of incredible historical typestyles created as wood or metal or film type usually have bare bones character sets and have been lost or only exist as limited specimen proofs in old books. These typefaces may have more niché uses than modern typefaces, but I believe it is important nonetheless to preserve these typefaces for future generations. These typefaces, if nothing else, can often inspire new creations.

Night Train is a new font built from the ground up; while Night Train may resemble an old classic wood type there are a few lines that make this font a little more modern setting it apart from other wood type revivals. If you're a railroad enthusiast you're sure to enjoy the steam locomotive graphic located on the less than and greater than keys on all versions of this font, due to the fine detail of this train illustration the best printing results will be at 600dpi or higher on a laser printer. An alternate K and R are within the Night Train fonts, for Win Type1 these alternates are on the left and right bracket keys, for Truetype and OpenType you may access the alternates by using the Character Map in Windows or Adobe Illustrator, for OpenType you may also find them on the stylistic alternates page of the glyph map in Illustrator. There's something new with Night Train that the sign making people will love, for the first time FontMesa is pleased to offer a block shadowed version in four directions. One fill font is all that is needed for all four open faced fonts, you'll need an application that works in layers in order to use the fill font with the open faced fonts, simply place the fill font in its own layer then move it behind one of the open faced fonts of Night Train. The Night Train name has been on my list to use as a font name for a few years, a friend from years ago used to sail his boat in the Mackinac race from Chicago to Mackinac Island, the name of that boat was the Night Train. Watching the 2010 Olympic four man U.S. bobsled team win gold with their sled also called Night Train has inspired me to complete this font.

Waba Pronounced ‘Vah-bah’, is a font family that I designed. The name comes from a historical variation on the Estonian word ‘vaba’ – meaning ‘free’, or 'at liberty'. Back in 2017 I visited the Estonian Print & Paper Museum in Tartu to see its great collection of type (well worth a visit!). While I was there I saw some big woodcut blocks of Reklameschrift Herold - a super Art Nouveau/Jugendstil style display font. The Print & Paper Museum's collection covers both Latin and Cyrillic faces and as a foreigner in these parts I'm kind of fascinated by the exoticism of Cyrillic. How it is different but the same to the Latin letters I take for granted (as a humble Englander – no excuses). Not to mention, Jugendstil with its imitation of natural form, reverse-weights and looping-delicious curves (like you've left the window open all summer and the garden plants are climbing in). This mix of Jugendstil, Cyrillic letters and the beautiful historical border town of Tartu inspired me to start drawing Waba. Trimming the serifs from Herold, simplifying those angles and expanding the category of weights, then taking look at the magical logic of Berthold Block and doing a few things that just seemed right at the time – Waba is a bit of love letter to Estonia, the Baltics and the visual history of Eastern Europe. Waba Monogram Waba also contains a monogram face, which allows you to create any monogramming latin and cyrillic. Simply type out your 2-3-4 characters in Waba Monogram, making sure Contextual Alternates is turned on them voila! Monograms can be customised manually using the OpenType select-pop-up in Adobe. Also included are a few Discretionary Ligatures for Mc, De, Von etc. Monograms work best when Contextual Alternates is turned on.

Gaslon is a slight reinterpretation and major expansion of a 1973 film type called Corvina Black, originally designed for VGC by A. Bihari. While the original typeface was popular in its own right, there were some things in it that were too quirky to work in the display applications it was intended for. Some of the letter combinations just didn't work to their visual optimum. For example the a and o were too similar, ditto the C and G, the E, F and J were too overwhelming to be set properly within certain display uses. Gaslon eliminates these problems by the inclusion of plenty of alternates for the vast majority of the original letters. In fact, the original a is itself now an alternate to a gorgeous new one. The Gaslon Alt font includes tremendous possibilities for both unicase use, and proper use in conjunction with the main font. This is our true homage to a typeface that had great potential more than three decades ago, but was overlooked by digitizers because of a few quirks it had in film type contexts. Full of curves and invitation, Gaslon ranks very high among the friendliest poster faces ever made. It is ideal for friendly store signs, children book covers, and plenty of other applications. In fact, if you're planning on contributing to a few protests around your neighborhood or city, you would probably be better off using Gaslon to help your sign/placard carry words and slogans that are big but friendly. Nothing beats "DOWN WITH GAS PRICES" set in a nice imaginative mix of the many Gaslon letters. The OpenType version of Gaslon is a single font that contains all the alternates and niceties programmed within features accessible by OT-friendly programs.

Mutable is as flamboyant and changeable as its name suggests. These characterful fonts were designed specifically for display purposes. It’s an exuberant type family that’s jam-packed with alternates and bestowed with a loud personality. This typeface is defined by its barbed serifs and elegantly curved terminals, or “foxtails” as they are sometimes known. An extremely large x-height amplifies the friendliness and buoyancy of the lowercase glyphs. These qualities give Mutable a unique aesthetic that will undoubtedly give your logotypes, headlines, and titles a distinctive appeal. Mutable has a strong Art Nouveau influence and was mainly inspired by Ed Benguiat’s Tiffany and the mysterious Pretorian typeface accredited to P.M. Shanks and Sons of London. Special OpenType features include 523 alternates that will make each word resonate beautifully when used in titling and branding situations. With so many alternates available, you may find it difficult to stop playing and settle on a selection... but that’s a good thing, right? Small Caps are also included (along with their matching diacritics and alternates) – these are designed to harmonise with regular lowercase forms making unicase-style typography a cinch. Mutable has a total glyph count of over 2,400 characters. There are 9 weights across 2 widths, ranging from a delicate and wispy Narrow Thin to a chunky and imposing Ultra. And... it’s variable! This allows you to select any width or weight in between, making Mutable even more... erm... mutable! This type family has an extensive character set that covers all Latin European languages. Finally, you can test drive Mutable immediately as the Regular weight is offered as a free download. Key features: 9 Weights 2 Widths Variable Small Caps 500+ Alternates Old Style Figures European Language Support (Latin) 2400+ Glyphs per font