Helvetica’s 50-year anniversary celebrations in 2007 were overwhelming and contagious. We saw the movie. Twice. We bought the shirts and the buttons. We dug out the homage books and re-read the hate articles. We mourned the fading non-color of an old black shirt proudly exclaiming that “HELVETICA IS NOT AN ADOBE FONT”. We took part in long conversations discussing the merits of the Swiss classic, that most sacred of typographic dreamboats, outlasting its builder and tenants to go on alone and saturate the world with the fundamental truth of its perfect logarithm. We swooned again over its subtleties (“Ah, that mermaid of an R!”). We rehashed decades-old debates about “Hakzidenz,” “improvement in mind” and “less is more.” We dutifully cursed every single one of Helvetica’s knockoffs. We breathed deeply and closed our eyes on perfect Shakti Gawain-style visualizations of David Carson hack'n'slashing Arial — using a Swiss Army knife, no less — with all the infernal post-brutality of his creative disturbance and disturbed creativity. We then sailed without hesitation into the absurdities of analyzing Helvetica’s role in globalization and upcoming world blandness (China beware! Helvetica will invade you as silently and transparently as a sheet of rice paper!). And at the end of a perfect celebratory day, we positively affirmed à la Shakti, and solemnly whispered the energy of our affirmation unto the universal mind: “We appreciate Helvetica for getting us this far. We are now ready for release and await the arrival of the next head snatcher.” The great hype of Swisspalooza '07 prompted a look at Max Miedinger, the designer of Neue Haas Grotesk (later renamed to Helvetica). Surprisingly, what little biographical information available about Miedinger indicates that he was a typography consultant and type sales rep for the Haas foundry until 1956, after which time he was a freelance graphic designer — rather than the full-time type designer most Helvetica enthusiasts presume him to have been. It was under that freelance capacity that he was commissioned to design the regular and bold weights of Neue Haas Grotesk typeface. His role in designing Helvetica was never really trumpeted until long after the typeface attained global popularity. And, again surprisingly, Miedinger designed two more typefaces that seem to have been lost to the dust of film type history. One is called Pro Arte (1954), a very condensed Playbill-like slab serif that is similar to many of its genre. The other, made in 1964, is much more interesting. Its original name was Horizontal. Here it is, lest it becomes a Haas-been, presented to you in digital form by Canada Type under the name of its original designer, Miedinger, the Helvetica King. The original film face was a simple set of bold, panoramically wide caps and figures that give off a first impression of being an ultra wide Gothic incarnation of Microgramma. Upon a second look, they are clearly more than that. This face is a quirky, very non-Akzidental take on the vernacular, mostly an exercise in geometric modularity, but also includes some unconventional solutions to typical problems (like thinning the midline strokes across the board to minimize clogging in three-storey forms). This digital version introduces four new weights, ranging from Thin to Medium, alongside the bold original. The Miedinger package comes in all popular font formats, and supports Western, Central and Eastern European languages, as well as Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish and Celtic/Welsh. A few counter-less alternates are included in the fonts.

☞ Bona Nova is a collective revival project of Bona typeface designed in 1971 by the author of polish banknotes Andrzej Heidrich. Besides giving the project a digital font form the aim was to expand the base character set: preparation of small caps, designing the alternative glyphs and multiple opentype features. Working together with the author we designed two new text versions: regular and bold – to give the family a form of a classic script triad. ☞ It is accompanied by three title versions and three contour styles under the name of Bona Sforza. All styles contains over 1200 glyphs. ☞ Bona Nova is an unprecedented typographic adventure for our team. We hope that our work will allow the cultural heritage of Bona and the work of Andrzeja Heidricha to gain new followers and fans. This project connected three generations of graphic designers who graduated the same school – the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. ☞ Bona Nova isn’t only a typeface. We have also prepared a book about the project (including an interview with Andrzej Heidrich, my text about the digitalisation and a font specimen). The Bona Nova release party was a big exhibition (over 1000 guests). I’ve invited 26 graphic designers to prepare their own initials of Bona Nova – they were presented as posters on exhibition too. LINKS Bona Nova WEB Bona Nova FP Bona-Nova-(FREE-FONT) Bona Nova Book BONA NOVA IN THE MEDIA Typeroom Typography Guru Slanted Designalley Stgu Typografie Info Wikipedia Bona Nova is a non-profit project, all founds that we raise we reinvest to develop the Bona Nova project (new styles, Cyrillic & Greek, extend character set).

Preta, portuguese for a very pure kind of black, has its name very related to its concept: I wanted to make the fattest/darkest script ever. People who follow my work may notice its forms are very related to works of my past (1) but this time the challenge was to be very cautious with the white spaces between letters. Not only I followed some rules and ductus of the copperplate style of calligraphy but also I took a lot of inspiration in posters of the early Art Nouveau (specially in Alfred Roller of the Vienna Secession) where letters forms looked like black squares if not looked from a close distance. With Preta, I wanted to achieve that same idea of “darkness” and thanks to the always welcomed question -what if?- the font grew a lot. The result is a very fat font, that looks delicious. Due to possible customer needs, I designed Preta Small, so it can be used in smaller sizes. Preta Ao Sol (which literally means under the sun!) is a style with those lovely tiny details to give the sensation of bright. Preta Ao Sol Solo was made to be used as a layered font with Preta. Finally, Preta Capitals serves as a company for Preta. Hope you enjoy the font as much as I did when designing it: The fact that it’s full of alternates, swashes, ligatures and swirls makes it really pleasurable at the moment of using it. Give it a try and dance with Preta! TIPS For better results, use Preta with the ‘standard ligatures’ feature activated. NOTES (1) Beatle in 2014. Seventies in 2015.

Meet the successor of our bestselling design kit 'Chameleon': Perron. The concept of designing multiple contrasting designs under the same name was first introduced by Fontforecast in TyfoonSans and TyfoonScript. Two font families that were designed to complement each other. And that's exactly what this new release does. With the three designs in Perron, which means 'platform' in dutch, you will be able to take your design projects where ever you want them to go. This flexible kit consists of 7 fonts in three basic designs, and when combined Perron No1, No2 and No3 reïnforce each others charm. This offers great potential for creating lively layouts for many different projects, e.g. invites, menu's, magazines, brochures, packaging, greeting cards, T-shirts, etc. Perron No1 is a serif display font with large and small Caps. This font requires an Opentype savvy application to reach its full potential. Turn on contextual alternates and beginning and ending characters are replaced by their alternative versions, as you type. Stylistic sets and swashes offer even more variations. Perron No1 comes in two versions: No1 and No1 Shade. They can be used separate or layered for a colorful or shaded effect (if your application allows you to stack text frames). Perron No2 is a charming handwritten font, with slightly rough contours, that was added for an extra personal touch. It comes in regular and Italic. Perron No3 is a clean, tall and very skinny font family. It has large and small Caps and comes in three weights: Light, Regular and Bold. Because of its clean appearance No3 adds a modern touch to the design kit.

Novelty Script is a bold dynamic script, sharply delineated, yet fluid. Most of the lower case letters and many of the upper case letters have joins. The typeface was designed by Nicholas J. Werner and Gustave F. Schroeder and patented in March 1893. The original release was by the Central Type Foundry of St. Louis, Missouri. Although a part of ATF from 1892, the Central Type Foundry continued to operate under its own name until 1895. Novelty Script uses our new encoding, as noted in the All_customer_readme.txt. The Euro symbol has been moved to position 128 and the Zcaron/zcaron have been added at positions 142/158 respectively. Otherwise, Novelty Script has our usual idiosyncratic glyph selection, with the German ch/ck instead of braces, Western European accented letters, lower case “o” and “u” with Hungarian umlaut and our usual Hand-in-Hand symbol. But that is not all. With the takeover of the Central Type Foundry by ATF, a group of special characters appeared. All are included in this font, except the “&Co” and the "'s", for a total of nine in all. The “Ch” and “nd” ligatures are especially interesting because of the impact they have on the color and overall appearance of the page. Download the PDF Type Specimen for locations. This is a fun font to use. Its strength is print, where it gives a page a refreshing look. The joins sometimes have difficulty on the screen, in spite of extensive hinting. Playing around with small changes on the point size can pay dividends. Not for the faint-of-heart. Are you up to the challenge?

Quinoa is display typeface by Catharsis Fonts that unites the seemingly opposed concepts of clean geometric architecture and organic humanist warmth. While it is designed for display and editorial purposes, its accessible forms make for comfortable reading even at small text sizes. Its exuberant adaptive "f", "j", "Q" and refreshing titling alternates bring display text to life. Quinoa covers multilingual Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Armenian. The Quinoa family spans four stylistic cuts (Quinoa, Quinoa Titling, Quinoa Round, and Quinoa Text) with matching hand-slanted obliques, each of which comes in nine weights. The Titling cut offers a number of alternate capital letter designs with lowercase-inspired forms for a refreshing unicase look, and the Round cut additionally removes the spurs from arched letters like n. The text cut introduces true diagonals and a two-storey "a" for a more sober, reading-friendly look. A host of other OpenType features including ligatures, contextual alternates, small caps, figure sets, and character variants are built into all cuts. Furthermore, the small caps of Quinoa, Quinoa Titling, and Quinoa Text are available as dedicated font files under the names "Quinoa SC", "Quinoa Unicase" and "Quinoa Text SC" for ease of use. Acknowledgements: I am thankful to the TypeDrawers and the Typografie.info communities for great feedback and support. In particular, Thorsten Daum has been tremendously helpful with suggestions and quality control. Thanks to Craig Eliason and Jan Willem Wennekes for their help with the Latin, Alexander L. Stetsiuk for Cyrillic, Ofir Shavit and Jonathan N. Washington for Hebrew, Khaled Hosny for Arabic, and Hrant H. Papazian for Armenian.

Diotima Classic is a total upheaval for the 21st century of Gudrun Zapf von Hesse's mid-20th-century Diotima, one of the most beautiful types ever cast in metal. Its roots lay in a calligraphic sheet written by Gudrun Zapf von Hesse. The text was the Hyperion to Diotima" by Friedrich Hölderlin; Diotima is the name of a Greek priestess in Plato's dialogue about love. In the philosopher's imagination, she should appear slim and beautiful. In 1948, Gudrun Zapf von Hesse finished the typeface's Roman. The Diotima family was released as a metal typeface for hand setting by D. Stempel AG in 1951-53. This original Diotima is a festive design particularly suited to invitations, programs, and poems. The delicate Italic drew attention to text passages that should be emphasized. Linotype's previous digital Diotima only had one weight, which looked great in display sizes, but was too thin for text setting. Diotima Classic has four weights. The new Regular has more robust serifs and thicker hairlines, making it more appropriate for text sizes. The Diotima variation with finer serif remains under the name Light. Gudrun Zapf von Hesse also took the opportunity in 2008 to add an extremely heavy weight to the family. In comparison to the old Diotima, letterforms of the Diotima Classic are more harmonious and balanced. The rhythm of the Italic letters in Diotima Classic is more consistent. The lining figures of the Diotima Classic align with caps, and the letter spacing of the tabular lining figures in Diotima Classic is significantly better. The forms of the figures have been improved as well."

Based on my very first font creation, New Ayres keeps the same feel, but raised to high-quality level. Its long clean lines and soft curves merge old style and modern, giving a new meaning to timeless elegance. Perfect for titling; with at least five alternates per letter, the possibilities become endless. Choose the one better suited for your project and make your text stand out immediately! 703 glyphs take part in this font, including a large set of alternates, ligatures and swashes for you to choose from. With accents and special characters for languages, New Ayres supports 88 languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, German, Swiss German, Upper Sorbian, Asu, under Sorbian, Bemba, Bena, Norwegian Bokmal, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, chiga, cornic, Creole Cape Verdean, Creole Mauritian, Croatian, Danish, embu, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Esperanto, Estonian, Euskera, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Rialan, scottish Gaelic, Galician, Greenlander, gusii, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Icelandic, Italian, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kiroundi, kölsch, latvian, lithuanian, luo, luxembourgish, luyia, machame, makhuwa-meetto, makonde, malay, malagasy, maltese, manx, meru, Northern ndebele, nyankole, norwegian nynorsk, oromo, polish, portuguese, romeo, rombo, romanian, rwa, samburu, sango, sena, shena, shamble, Shona, rope, somali, swedish, swahili, taita, teso, Turkmen, vunjo, walser, zulu. This font is PUA encoded: this means each character has a unicode name, and you may access any of them through this codes. Open Type features on the open type file: easy access for alternates and ligatures! The download includes both .otf and .ttf files, so you may choose which one suits you better. With a strong personality, but yet adaptable into many styles, New Ayres is everything you are needing for your projects!!

CA Normal is a typeface aiming for beauty without ostensible effects, merely relying on clarity and well balanced proportions. True beauty is not to be found in perfect geometry, so slight irregularities and inconsequences are spread throughout the typographic image. That’s perfection through imperfection. CA Normal merges influences from European grotesques and American gothics, breeding an experimental mongrel. The underlying concept stays in the background, giving the design a great self-evidence. Although it is doubtful if there can be such thing as neutrality, CA Normal comes pretty close to what people mean when speaking of a neutral font. Nevertheless it’s not faceless, anonymous or confound able. It’s just that the charm comes from subtle details rather than obvious design features. As good text typefaces must not be too smooth nor too agitated, CA Normal is smuggling little uneven details into the typographic image, that keep the readers eye awake. The well crafted oblique follows the grotesque tradition which knows no individually drawn italics. A rather unexpected addition is the reverse oblique, a style mainly used for maps. Under the classic surface lies a modern well equipped font, featuring small caps, a Central European character set and numerals in all kinds of flavors. Numerous ligatures round up the overall impression. By default CA Normal will set numbers as proportional lining figures. But if you prefer oldstyle figures, or tabular figures, just use the OpenType functions of your layout program. These allow access to the small caps as well, which feature a complete central European character set, brackets, punctuation and lining figures in small caps height.

From the beginning “Esmeralda” was born with a strong influence of the classical “capitalis monumentalis”, carved in stone. In the same way, the origin of this majuscule writing emerged from the brush, from a way of writing made merely by hand. For this reason, these two universes were intended to lie beneath the shape of each letter, redefining them. And this combination of styles should also be reflected in a lower case set that also allows to open up the spectrum of usage possibilities. Foundational calligraphy represented a solid base for the development of lower case glyphs, ensuring proper interaction with the upper case letters. “Esmeralda” features a great number of ligatures that mix classic structures with a more contemporary impression. With more than eleven hundred glyphs, it provides a multiplicity of uses across a wide combinatory of ligatures, alternative signs, initial caps, miscellaneous and connectors; each one of them accessible through Open Type. “Esmeralda” is perfect to speak with a classical yet fresh, modern – and a little bit bold – tone of voice. Designed by Guille Vizzari, together with the tough and remarkable work of Ale Paul, in use “Esmeralda” stands out in a subtle and unexpected way that’s almost unnoticeable. Its delicate yet solid curves, serifs and endings give each composition a fine, elegant and exquisite feeling, along with a firm and sturdy look. “Esmeralda” was initially born as a typographic project developed by Guillermo Vizzari – tutored by Ale Paul and Ana Sanfelippo – under completion of the Specialization in Typography Design at University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the years 2011 and 2012.

In 1939 the Stephenson Blake Company bought a very popular script called Undine Ronde and began marketing under the name Amanda Ronde. Although Undine/Amanda was quite popular and can be seen in many advertisements from the 1930s and 1940s, there seems to be no surviving record stating the original foundry or designer. We thought that six and half decades of dust layers over the once-popular typeface were enough, so here and now you have its complete and expanded digital incarnation, Adore. It is quite easy to see why this typeface was popular. A round script with graceful meaty curves is rarely found and can be used in plenty of applications. Wedding paraphernalia, chapter titles, posters, poetry, book covers, religious literature... you name it, Adore can fit it. Aside from its totality being unmatched by currently available designs, Adore also possesses some of the most unique and imaginative letter shapes. The narrow loops on the B, P and R, the minuscule-like Z, the looped b and d, the descending h... all these shapes contribute to a breathtaking and adorable calligraphic work unlike any other. The original design came in a basic alphabet, but we have updated it for current digital technologies, and expanded it to include plenty of alternates and ligatures, as well as some ornaments. The Postscript Type 1 and True Type versions come in two fonts, the second containing the alternates and extras, while the Open Type version is a single font containing all the alternates and extras in conveniently programmed features, easily accessible at the push of a button in OpenType-supporting software. We also encourage you to take a look at Typodermic's Mecheria font, which is further experimentation with the same letter forms, resulting in a quirky, friendly, curly, angular gothic-like creature.

ITC Christoph's Quill is just about everything you could want in a typeface: it's distinctive, beautiful, and exceptionally versatile. According to designer Russell Bean, ITC Christoph's Quill is the culmination of experimentation with a graphics tablet that spanned several years. Then one day, as if by magic, it all just fell into place. The design seemed to flow from my pen." Bean was born in Australia and, except for a brief stint with a photo-lettering firm in Southern California, has spent most of his career working down under. "I can recall a deep fascination for the written word," he says. "Even before learning to spell, read or write, I think I recognized that this was a means of visual communication." Bean's first job was in a small ad agency as a trainee in the production department, where he learned art techniques and how to handle print, as well as "the value of visual impressions," he says. His career path meandered from one design job to another, but always in the general direction of fonts and typefaces. Today, his workload consists of logo design commissions, font editing, typography and print production consultation to a select group of loyal clients - still leaving time, notes Bean, "to pursue my type design ambitions." ITC Christoph's Quill began life as a simple, visually striking font of caps, lowercase, punctuation and numerals. To this Bean added a bold weight, for when a little more strength is desirable. Next came a flock of alternate characters. Finally, Bean drew a set of decorative caps, a suite of logos, and a sprinkling of beginning and ending swashes. The net result is a type family that can add a signature flourish to a vast range of projects: from invitations and menus to logos, signage, packaging and more."

Conrad X. 'Cobb' Shinn (Sept. 4, 1887- Jan. 28, 1951) was a Fillmore, Indiana-born post card illustrator who sold a series of successful novelty postcard lines which included (among others) Charlie Chaplin, automobiles and the Dutch culture in the beginning years of the 20th Century. After serving in World War I, Shinn found the market for novelty postcards dwindling, and he also lent his artistic skills to cartoon features and illustrating many children's books [including his own, under the nickname 'Uncle Cobb'] which taught easy step-by-step drawing methods. Some time in the 1920s, he eventually migrated into the field of supplying electrotypes and stereotypes of 'stock cuts' of photos and line art to the printing trade. In the days of letterpress printing, this was the forerunner of paper clip art and its successor, electronic clip art. Purchasing many of his designs from 'journeyman' artists of the time, the diversity of Cobb Shinn's stock cuts library grew with the passing years, reflecting changing times, styles and topics. Some of the illustrators whose signed works were presented in Shinn's 'CUTalogs' [as he called his stock cuts catalogs] include Mary Clemmitt, Louis H. Hippe, E.C. Klinge, Nelson White, Harvey Fuller, Bess Livings, Lois Head, Harvey Peake and Van Tuyl. Upon his passing in 1951, it's not known how long the Indianapolis-based company existed before finally closing its doors. One of the more popular series of cartoons were the line illustrations of men and women affectionately called 'little big head guys' by many modern fans of these cuts because the heads of the characters were drawn somewhat larger than the rest of their bodies. Shinn Kickers JNL is a collection twenty-six of these illustrations, and just like a kick in the shin (as the pun in the name implies), these charming cartoons get your attention.

Get in touch with Tipogra Fio and get inspired by Guaruja Neue specimens. Guaruja Neue is a neo-grotesque typeface with additional industrial traits to it, such as open corners in diagonal glyphs and short curves. The semi-cursive italics shapes, more than an orthographic matter, give sea waves for the headlines and copies that Guaruja Neue will compose, since it is named after a city on the coast of São Paulo, Brazil. Stylistic alternates, ligatures, ordinals, arrows and emojis give extra personality for texts that cross millennial and modernist concepts, going from a comprehensive Latin script, including Vietnamese support, until a basic Cyrillic set. Brazilian music tells the graphic story of Guaruja Neue specimens, songs that speak about beaches and the city of Guarujá, as well as the inspiration of 50’s and 60’s modernist design and the music movement of Bossa Nova. This family is also an evolution of Guaruja Grotesk (2021), a typeface with four fonts —Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic— developed as part of a design school project, that now in Neue gains professionalism, refinement and knowledge. Guaruja Grotesk took 18 months to make, and Neue took additional 12 months of redrawing and rethinking, as design as processes. Part of the project got feedback from the typeface designer Ulrike Raush, under the Alphabettes mentorship program. Overview and features: 8 weights and 8 italics; 2 free fonts: Guaruja Neue Regular and Guaruja Neue Italic; Extended Latin and basic Cyrillic; 800+ glyphs; Numbers: proportional, tabular, superscripts, subscripts, denominators, numerators and fractions; Greek for math; Case-Sensitive forms; Arrows; Standard and discretionary ligatures; SS01: one story a and SS02: two story g; Emojis and SS03: negative alternate emojis; Ligatures for English ordinals;