Johann Neudörffer the Elder's 1538 writing manual fascinated the German designer Helmut Bomm for years. Together with Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Andreä, Neudörffer helped create Fraktur, perhaps the most Germanic of all the blackletter styles. As a tribute to this master, and bringing its letterforms to a 21st century public, Boom released the Neudoerffer Fraktur family through Linotype in 2009. Neudoerffer Fraktur's appearance is based very much in handwriting, and Bomm had already begun using letters from prototype versions of this typeface as early as the 1990s. For years, Neudoerffer Fraktur'sletters would appear secretly and seductively in design projects like historical sign restorations or heraldry pieces. The sources that Bomm used while drawing the typeface were images from Jan Tschichold's Treasures of Calligraphy" and Albert Kapr's "Schriftkunst." The Neudoerffer Fraktur family has four separate fonts. Any user of Adobe CS applications should consider licensing Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular (the font without any numeral suffixes). This font contains three different OpenType stylistic sets. Users can pick and choose which versions of the letters that they would like to set. Anyone using Quark XPress, Microsoft Word, or other applications without support for Stylistic Sets should license Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 1, Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 2, and Neudoeffer Fraktur Regular 3. Each of these three fonts has letters with slightly different style of flourish, and all three may be combined with each other. Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 1 is optimal for longer texts; Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 2 contains alternate letters, and well as more ornamented capitals; Neudoerffer Fraktur Regular 3's letters have a stronger calligraphic accent."

This all started with a love for Minister. This is a font designed by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt in 1929. In the specimen booklet there’s a scan from Linotype’s page many years ago. They no longer carry the font. I’ve gone quite a ways from the original. It was dark and a bit heavy. But I loved the look and the readability. This came to a head when I started my first book on all-digital printing written from 1994-1995, and published early in 1996. I needed fonts to show the typography I was talking about. At that point oldstyle figures, true small caps, and discretionary ligatures were rare. More than that text fonts for book design had lining OR oldstyle figures, lowercase OR small caps—never both. So, I designed the Diaconia family using the Greek word for minister. It was fairly rough. I knew very little. I later redesigned and updated Diaconia into Bergsland Pro—released in 2004. It was still rough (though I impressed myself). Now, with 4-font Biblia Serif family 13 years later, I’ve cleaned up, made the fonts more consistent internally, added more functional OpenType features, and brought the fonts into the 21st century. I used the 2017 set of features: small caps, small cap figures, oldstyle figures, fractions, lining figures, ligatures and discretionary ligatures. These are fonts designed for book production and work well for text or heads. Finally, in 2021, I went over the fonts entirely and remade them in Glyphs.

Mid Century Sans (MCS) is composed of high-geometric shapes. László Moholy-Nagy —professor in the Bauhaus— said “Typography is a tool of communication. It has to be communication in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity since this distinguishes the character of our own writing from that of ancient pictographic forms.” As same as you can see in modern typefaces in the early twentieth century, MCS has very efficient, clear and minima letterforms. There are not any decorative parts in the skeleton of letters. At the same time, Mid Century Sans has one more feature. In the middle of the twentieth century, one big movement which was called Mid-century modern had occurred. The Mid-century modern movement in the U.S. was an American reflection of the International and Bauhaus movements and it was slightly more organic in form and less formal than the International Bauhaus-style. In other words, it was friendly and stylish. We added Mid-century-spices to the Bauhaus-modernism. The basic letter form is geometric yet it has very friendly strokes and human touch. Mid Century Sans consists of 8 weights and their matching Italics for a wide range of usages. Farther, Mid Century Sans is supporting international Latin languages and basic Cyrillic languages including Basic Latin, Western Europe, Central and South-Eastern Europe. Also MCS covers Mac Roman, Windows1252, Adobe1 to 3. This wide range of international characters expands the capability of your works. Lowercase "a" has OpenType stylistic alternates for advanced typography.

Besley Clarendon ML is our version of the Clarendon registered by Robert Besley and the Fann Street Foundry in 1845. Besley Clarendon ML represents a significant change from the slab-serif Antiques & Egyptians that had become so popular in the prior three decades. Like Caslon’s Ionic of 1844, it brackets the serifs and strongly differentiates between the thick and thin strokes. Besley Clarendon is also what today is considered a condensed face, as a comparison to the various contemporary Clarendons will show. Robert Besley’s Clarendon was so popular that many foundries quickly copied it, a fact that caused him to complain vigorously. The reason it was so widely copied is simple ó it was extremely useful. It provided the attention-getting boldness to highlight a word or phrase, yet at the same time was compact and easier to read than the fat faces and antiques of the period. It wasn't until sixty years later that the concept of a typeface family of different weights was developed with DeVinne and Cheltenham. Until then, Clarendon served as everyone’s all-purpose bold face. It can be used for ads, flyers, headers or even short text. Don't leave home without it. Besley Clarendon ML includes the following features: 1. Glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 353 glyphs. 158 kerning pairs. 2. OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, salt, liga, dlig, hist and ornm. 3. Inclusion of tabular (std) and proportional (opt) numbers. 4. Kreska-accented letters.

This type of Richard Gans, has always seemed very striking, despite having the complexity of the sources extrusion, has its own personality, and readability unusual for this type of letters. Use it for composing posters, programs or logos was very common at the time. My father, Antonio Lage Parapar, typographer by profession, who composed the texts, which not only had it for profession, but he liked to do, always he spoke of sources and decorative elements of the type foundry Richard Gans, as well as other foundries, especially those that required the mender of them, exercised creator, many of these types they have already been recovered by professionals and companies with excellent results. I've been surrounded by these movable type, and the occasional catalog unfortunately lost. One of those guys that has always struck me visually speaking was the type IMAN Richard Gans, the typographer and more of German origin arrived in Spain, back in 1874, also a pioneer. This work to revive the type mentioned, as well as create non existing glyphs between documents and parts I've been finding, is and has been a personal pleasure all I want serve as a tribute to my father (of aopodo curiously "Richard"), the only sadness it has not been completed. Richard Gans, arrived in Spain in 1874 as a representative of several European factories. then liaised with journalistic and publishing companies, which led him knowledge required of the first sector art. In 1878 he created a center importer gadgets graphic arts and three years later he created his own type foundry. The first rotary newspaper ABC, very famous and the most advanced of the time, the brand manufactured Richard Gans.

Say hello to Retro Mango! The font that's as chunky as it is funky! Retro Mango is all about playful, bold vibes, with a dash of cuteness that's hard to resist, thanks to its soft corners. This font is like a friendly face you just want to hug, and it brings that fun-loving spirit to your designs :D Plus, you get three family styles to choose from: Regular, Bold, and Extra Bold to helps to create stunning logos, quotes, posts, blog posts, branding projects, magazine imagery, wedding invitations, and much more. What's Included? Retro Mango Main File Regular, Bold and Extra Bold version Instructions (Access special characters, even in Cricut Design) Unique Letterforms Works on PC & Mac Simple Installations Accessible in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word even Canva! PUA Encoded Characters. Fully accessible without additional design software. Language Support: Danish, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, German, Gusii, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Portuguese, Romansh, Rombo, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss-German, Uzbek (Latin) Thank you Dharmas Studio

Steel Grrrder is a robust, industrial-style stencil typeface family consisting of six weights, from light to black, with corresponding italics. Suitable for all kinds of display purposes including posters, film titles, book covers, magazines, advertising, logos, packaging, signage and games design, Steel Grrrder is especially useful where the message needs some serious geometric bite behind it. Steel Grrrder is best categorised as a constructivist sans family. The character shapes are sharp, angular and slightly condensed - it’s a rigid, no-frills, no-curves, mega-metallic design. Legible? Not really. Readable? I think not. In your faceable? Absolutely! This is a tough display typeface, designed to work in the most demanding typographic situations. It won’t buckle under pressure or wilt when the heat’s turned up. Forged from carbon steel and wrapped in a layer of Graphene, Steel Grrrder is unashamedly rugged, a rock-hard pound-for-pound boxer specialising in thumping knockouts. The Steel Grrrrder extended family also includes a six-weight joining script and two display fonts, Groove & Nutjob - all designed to work with each other.

The name suggests it: the Chiq is based on a well-known system font from Apple's classic Mac OS operating system. By revamping and expanding good old “Chicago“, I want to make that 90s tech charm available for the future. The model consisted of just a single style and inspired me to create “Chiq Bold,” which later became the starting point for the entire font family. The shapes of the Chiq are constructed according to a very simple principle. The contrast of stems and hairlines becomes more pronounced towards the bolder cuts. A few basic shapes form the framework for all characters. The shapes are very regular and sometimes form somewhat unusual figures, which has a negative effect on readability and makes the font rather unsuitable for long passages of text, but results in a very even typeface. This is particularly true for the extra-wide “UltraExpanded,” which is so wide that you can no longer recognize word images but literally have to spell them out. In this way, words are turned into letter bands with a great decorative effect. With variants from “Light” to “Black”, from “Normal” to “Ultra Expanded” and the italics, Chiq reaches beyond its archetype. This opens up a wide range of uses. It is even clearer, even more sober, and to a certain extent speaks an even more modern formal language. Chiq is also a variable font!

Extraordinary impact and visual conspicuousness. Dr Slab is a super 3D serif family for posters, logos and all display. The basic idea is not a brand new. Stacking type system have been used since before wood type age. As you imagined, colored wood type(woodcut), many other engravings and contemporary printer machine print many colors separately with different printing plates for each colors. Dr Slab uses the same system for 3d effect. Please use Photoshop or Illustrator, or your favorite graphic design apps that can handle layers. Layers are the printing plates of wood type. You should be able to change text color for each layers. Dr Slab "Base" style is the core of this font family. You can add effects by using the other styles(Rim, Shadow, Ext). Instruction 1. Type your text as you like. 2. Set font-name "Dr Slab" and font-style "Base" 3. Set color for "Base". 4. Duplicate the layer which includes "Base" text. 5. Set font-style and color for new layers. 6. Stacked layers in different font-style and color make the text in 3D. For further detail, https://www.dropbox.com/s/9p9083zv2855bcq/DrSlab.pdf Dr Slab "Base" style can be used solely. Rounded slabs add soft, cute and casual impressions to your design. Spec: OpenType Format (.otf) with over 500 glyphs! Basic Latin ✓ Western Europe ✓ Central Europe ✓ South Eastern Europe ✓ Mac Roman ✓ Windows 1252 ✓ Adobe Latin 1 ✓ Adobe Latin 2 ✓ Adobe Latin 3 ✓ Almost all Latins are covered.

In Carpenteria each letter is hand-designed based on a geometrical old mechanical style. You can use it for posters or impact graphics.

Is it Halloween yet? Dead Inside Chilling Font is an adorable hand-made typeface with 13+1 chilling icons, for the upcoming Halloween.

JH Lea cursive is a school kids typeface; it is designed based on cursive handwriting , typical for children books, first hand calligraphy experience.

A page from an old manual for sign painters yielded the hand-lettered alphabet that served as a model for Claim Check JNL.

Social Gathering JNL is modeled from the Art Deco hand-lettered title of a vintage piece of sheet music entitled "Three of Us".

Washington Heights JNL is a sans serif type design based on a vintage hand-made directional sign for the New York subway system.

No Parking JNL was inspired by a hand-cut stencil of those words painted in an area of a department store's parking lot.

Maryhoid is a headline font with a retro vibe. Carefully hand made & designed by TOMO FONTS. It shapes very nice headlines! Enjoy! WWW.TOMOFONTS.COM

Inspired from blueprints of old Montreal buildings, this font is a hand lettered, all caps face with influences from the arts & crafts movement.

Lush was a formal script until it had a few too many drinks and, as a result, loosened up a little bit. Harkening back to the handlettering of the 40s and 50s, Lush has evolved into a casual, but well-dressed script that maintains a rather aggressive rhythm. Transitions often whip back quickly, forcing the letters to reel from the movement and resolve efficiently. It is not as warm as some scripts, intentionally so, so as to distinguish it from its predecessors. Type and lettering fans will revel in the options afforded to each character—in some cases there are up to 15 different variations with multiple glyph recipes available to produce the most unique and fluid lettering combinations possible. An often overlooked segment of contemporary script fonts, the uppercase letters have at least 3 options to work with that mesh well with the 36 ornamental flourishes to add even further embellishment. In total, there are over 1,650 glyphs in the typeface that includes these OpenType options: Stylistic Alternates, Contextual Alternates, Swashes, Titling, Historical Forms, Initial Forms, Oldstyle Numerals and 3 additional Stylistic Sets. With this release, I have tried to provide as much flexibility and 'forgiveness' within the typeface so the lettering enthusiast can have fun and explore thousands of iterations… and it's pretty easy math to figure this out: with over 970 alternates and 270 ligatures, I intended this typeface to be one that keeps on giving. One important fact to note… this marks the first release of a smooth, non-brushed, non-textured script from me—but it won't be the last. That said, I will have to admit that the brush has influenced many of the characters and their construction. Enjoy :)

Passport48 exclusively in otf. opentype format, originally debuted in 1997 as Passport, close to the beginning of the indie typographer boom. Almost 25 years have passed since it was introduced at MyFonts as PS1 and later in 2003 in TT TrueType.** It was designed by Joseph Coniglio of Coniglio Type as a revival. Historically, Passport was digitized from a shiny black enamel 1948 Royal Silent Deluxe portable. Kept on the ship of merchant marine, Captain John O’Learn, it was a salty manual typewriter with no intrinsic value as a collectable, even though it is awash as a work horse and a fine communicator of it’s time.. **NOTE: Little Passport family leaves the nest: The old weight variations, styles and formats have been eliminated to allow the original face to be stand alone, on its own attributes. For those purchasing their first typewriter fonts and to our diehard collectors as well, Passport presents a friendly new port-of-entry. A simple set, that is freed of many of the normal distressed points and paths that had made most “typewriters” authentic looking, but difficult to print and manipulate in layouts back in the day. It’s smooth nature comes from its impressions struck directly onto a piece of carbon paper bypassing the silk ink ribbon and going directly from metal to carbon paper transferring to a piece paper with very little tooth. Examine the glyphs to be certain you have what you need from this minimalist set, Passport48 is intended for ease of use and affordability. This is a warm font in a cold cruel world and a real port in the storm! It is versatile in today’s layouts with 24 years of worldwide sales. …Please enjoy the fruits of its travels, hoping your destinations and explorations into graphic design and letter composition are happy ones. -Joe Coniglio, the Pacific Northwest (2021).

Homelessfonts is an initiative by the Arrels foundation to support, raise awareness and bring some dignity to the life of homeless people in Barcelona Spain. Each of the fonts was carefully digitized from the handwriting of different homeless people who agreed to participate in this initiative. A biography/story of each homeless person captures their story, to help raise awareness and bring some dignity to the life of homeless people. Monotype is pleased to donate all revenue from the sales of Homelessfonts to the Arrels foundation in support of their mission to provide the homeless people in Barcelona with a path to independence with accommodations, food, social and health care. Salvador was born in a small village in the province of Seville, Spain where he lived until 2002. During many years he worked in restaurants, construction, and in the fields, until he decided to go try his luck in Palma de Mallorca. There he worked in hotels and in construction, until the economic crisis erupted and he was left without work or benefits of any kind and he began to live in the street: “The street has few good things, but it teaches you to be more selfless, to share with others what you have, even if it isn’t much.” In 2006, a friend encouraged him to come along to Barcelona and bought his plane ticket. Once there, things did not go much better and he had to continue living in the street. A year ago he left behind that life and now he explains his experience in guided tours to school groups: “I like it because I see that many of them are interested and they ask questions. It is good that they learn.”

Inka is the name by which the closest-ones called my partner. Inka is also the name of a text typeface – in its form very friendly and welcoming. The same way as relationships develop through the life, text typefaces develop, too. I had started the work on this typeface about the same time as I met Inka, while reaching the final output has been a long and progressive process. Inka is a modern serif typeface with wide universality in functions (various editorial usages as books, magazines, annual reports…). The concept and the scope of the complete type family are based on the principle of optical sizes of the typeface designed for the particular use of the size of typesetting. Inka consists of several drawing variations for the typesetting of small sizes (Small), text typesetting (Text), larger typesetting sizes (Title), and headlines sizes (Display). Two constructive alternatives, differing in the height of the construction of the font signs, further extend the variability of the usage of the typeface. Inka A has classical proportions ideal for book typesetting. Inka B has lower ascenders and descenders, lower uppercase glyphs and numbers. Typeface with such construction allows us to use the typesetting efficiently while using tighter leading and still looking more contemporary. Each of the font set (Display, Title, Text, Small) consists of four weights (Regular, Medium, Bold, Black), each has wide character set and a lot of OpenType features. “Inka is dedicated to Inka.”

TT Tsars useful links: Specimen | Graphic presentation | Customization options The TT Tsars font family is a collection of serif display titling fonts that are stylized to resemble the fonts of the beginning, the middle and the end of the XVIII century. The project is based on title fonts, that is, the fonts that were used to design book title pages. The idea for the project TT Tsars was born after a small study of the historical development of the Cyrillic type and is also based on Abram Shchitsgal’s book "Russian Civil Type". At the very beginning of the project, we had developed a basic universal skeleton for the forms of all characters in all subfamilies of the family, and later on, we added styles, visual features, artifacts and other nuances typical of the given period onto the skeleton. Yes, from the historical accuracy point of view it might be that such an approach is not always justified, but we have achieved our goal and as a result, we have created perfectly combinable serifs that can be used to style an inscription for a certain time period. The TT Tsars font family consists of 20 fonts: 5 separate subfamilies, each of which consists of 4 fonts. Each font contains 580 glyphs, except for the TT Tsars E subfamily, in which each font consists of 464 characters. Instead of lowercase characters in the typeface, small capitals are used, which also suggests that the typeface is rather a display than text one. In TT Tsars you can find a large number of ligatures (for Latin and Cyrillic alphabets), arrows and many useful OpenType features, such as: frac, ordn, sinf, sups, numr, dnom, case, onum, tnum, pnum, lnum, salt (ss01), dlig. Time-related characteristics of the subfamilies are distributed as follows: • TT Tsars A—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars B—the beginning of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars C—the middle of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars D—the end of the 18th century (Latin and Cyrillic) • TT Tsars E—conditionally the beginning of the 18th century (only Latin) TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B families (both the beginning of the 18th century) have different starting points: for TT Tsars A it is Latin, for TT Tsars B it is Cyrillic. The development of the TT Tsars A family began in Latin, the font is based on the royal serif Romain du Roi. The Cyrillic alphabet is harmoniously matched to the Latin. The development of the TT Tsars B family began in Cyrillic, which is based on a Russian civil type. Characteristic elements are the curved one-sided serifs of triangular characters (A, X, Y), drops appear in the letter ?, the middle strokes ? and P are adjacent to the main stroke. Latin was drawn to pair with Cyrillic. It is still based on the royal serif, but somewhat changed: the letters B and P are closed and the upper bar of the letter A rose. This was done for the visual combination of Cyrillic and Latin and at the same time to make a distinction between TT Tsars A and TT Tsars B. TT Tsars C is now the middle of the 18th century. Cyrillic alphabet itself did not stand still and evolved, and by the middle of the 18th century, its forms have changed and become to look the way they are shown in this font family. Latin forms are following the Cyrillic. The figures are also slightly modified and adapted to the type design. In TT Tsars C, Cyrillic and Latin characters are created in parallel. A distinctive feature of the Cyrillic alphabet in TT Tsars C is the residual influence of the flat pen. This is noticeable in such signs as ?, ?, K. The shape of the letters ?, ?, ?, ? is very characteristic of the period. In the Latin alphabet, a characteristic leg appears at the letter R. For both languages, there is a typical C characterized by an upper serif and the appearance of large, even somewhat bolding serifs on horizontals (T, E, ?, L). TT Tsars D is already the end of the 18th century when with the development of printing, the forms of some Cyrillic characters had changed and turned into new skeletons of letters that we transposed into Latin. The figures were also stylized. In this font, both Cyrillic and Latin are stylistically executed with different serifs and are thus logically separated. The end of the century is characterized by the reduction of decorative elements. Straight, blueprint-like legs of the letters ?, R, K, ?. Serifs are very pronounced and triangular. E and ? are one-sided on the middle horizontal line. A very characteristic C with two serifs appears in the Latin alphabet. TT Tsars E is a steampunk fantasy typeface, its theme is a Latinized Russian ?ivil type (also referred to as Grazhdansky type which emerged after Peter the Great’s language reform), which includes only the Latin alphabet. There is no historical analog to this typeface, it is exclusively our reflections on the topic of what would have happened if the civil font had developed further and received a Latin counterpart. We imagined such a situation in which the civil type was exported to Europe and began to live its own life.

HOKKIEN is an all caps sister to my other font Penang. It was inspired by some old pieces of Art Deco signage I had discovered in Penang Malaysia, The font is available in one weight for now. The font is loaded with plenty of foreign extras and currency symbols. I have also included an alternate cap S which works better visually in blocks of copy.

This font is influenced by Walbaum. However, I did not just trace the design, but sort of had the image in my head while I drew the letters. This font is balanced by not being entirely Walbaum, but still basically is. I've named it "NoraPen." Nora comes from the name of the main character in Ibsen's "A Doll's House," and Pen means a cage for livestock.

With all of the stencil fonts created by Jeff Levine from various vintage sources, you would think everything had already been covered. Not so. Along comes Amateur Stencil JNL. Modeled from a child's stencil set from the late 1950's or early 1960's, it vaguely resembles Futura, but its irregular widths and semi-stencil appearance sets it off greatly from that classic typeface.

A group of unique metal plates with stencil initials cut into them was spotted while browsing through online auctions for source material. What made these items even more interesting was how some of the stencil letters had been sectionally divided - not vertically or horizontally as in most stencils, but lines cut at angles. This is the basis for Steel Stencil JNL and Steel Stencil Oblique JNL.

Minou is a French cat’s name. There are more: you could name your cat Léo, Fripouille, Orion, Orphée or Tigrou, but I kind of like Minou. Minou font is a very cute, handmade affair, that started from some doodles I had drawn. Use it for children’s book covers, pyjama party posters, toy packaging and inspirational quotes. I am sure it’ll do the job purrfectly!

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.

Based on the lettering used on Alan Turing’s famous code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park, the “Bombe”, and the subsequent British answer to the German Enigma machine, the Typex. Research done at Bletchley Park on their restored and antique machines provided the inspiration. The unusual shapes for the capitals have all been retained - the square O, the monospaced characters and other eccentricities that make it unique. This reference material was then extended to the numerals (which did not exist in the original) and a full international character complement. The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. It was based on a device that had been designed in 1938 in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the "cryptologic bomb" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna). The Bombe was used to break the German Enigma code on a daily basis, and was a vital part of the Allied war effort. The British “Typex" (alternatively, Type X or TypeX) machines were an adaptation of the commercial German Enigma with a number of enhancements that greatly increased its security. It was used from 1937 until the mid-1950s, when other more modern military encryption systems came into use.

The Farfa fonts were designed for institutional use, commissioned by the City of Fara in Sabina, Italy. This project started from the study of the manuscripts found in the Abbey of Farfa, penned in a variant of the lower case of “Carolingian” typical style of that area. The Capital, ligatures and Small Caps, however, are based on the uncial writing that often appears in those codes and manuscripts. Farfa Abbey is a territorial abbey in northern Lazio, central Italy. It is one of the most famous abbeys of Europe. It belongs to the Benedictine Order and is located about 60 km from Rome, in the commune of Fara Sabina The origin of the Abbey is still unknown. Archaeological discoveries seem to prove that the first monastic establishment was built on the ruins of a pagan temple. The Vandals destroyed the first monastery in the fifth century. Only a few documents from the sixth-century prove the early presence of the monastic community. It had the heritage of Charlemagne (S VIII), the Lombard chiefs, and later the Carolingians, succeeded in withdrawing Farfa from obedience to the Bishops of Rieti, and in securing many immunities and privileges for the monastery. Farfa was at this period the most important monastery in Italy both from the point of view of worldly possession and ecclesiastical dignity.

Maclean's is a weekly Canadian newsmagazine with a broad editorial mission. A typical issue covers everything from violence on the other side of the globe to the largest pumpkin grown in a local county. In 2001, Maclean's invited Rod McDonald to become part of the design team to renovate" the 96-year-old publication. The magazine wanted to offer its readers a typographic voice that was professional, clean, and easy to read. Above all, the typeface had to be able to speak about the hundreds of unrelated subjects addressed in each issue while remaining believable and uncontrived. A tall order, perhaps? Now add in that this would be the first text typeface ever commissioned by a Canadian magazine. McDonald, who some have called Canada's unofficial "typographer laureate," took on the challenge. McDonald used two historic models as the basis for Laurentian's design: the work of French type designer Claude Garamond, and that of the English printer and type founder, William Caslon. From Garamond Laurentian acquired its humanist axis, crisp serifs and terminals that mimic pen strokes. Caslon's letters are less humanistic, with a more marked contrast in stroke weight and serifs that appear constructed rather than drawn. These traits also made their mark on Laurentian. Using these two designs as a foundation, McDonald drew Laurentian with the narrow text columns and small type sizes of magazine composition in mind. He gave his letters strong vertical strokes and sturdy serifs, a robust x-height and a slightly compressed character width A tall order, per McDonald's genius is evident in the face's legibility, quiet liveliness and in the openness of the letters. The result is a typeface that not only met Maclean's demanding design brief, but also provides exceptional service in a wide variety of other applications. Laurentian is available in three weights of Regular, Semi Bold and Bold, with complementary italics for the Regular and Semi Bold, and a suite of titling caps."

Minuet, an informal script with crossover deco elements giving it an unmistakable 1940s flavor, is a revival and expansion of the Rondo family, the last typeface drawn by Stefan Schlesinger before his death. This family was initially supposed to be a typeface based on the strong, flowing script Schlesinger liked to use in the ads he designed, particularly the ones he did for Van Houten’s cocoa products. But for technical reasons the Lettergieterij Amsterdam mandated the face to be made from unattached letters, rather than the original connected script. Schlesinger and Dooijes finished the lowercase and the first drawings of the uppercase just before Schlesinger was sent to a prison camp in 1942. Dooijes completed the design on his own, and drew the bold according to Schlesigner’s instructions. The typeface family was finished in February of 1944, and Schlesinger was killed in October of that same year. Though he did see and approve the final proofs, he never actually saw his letters in use. It took almost four more years for the Lettergieterij Amsterdam to produce the fonts. The typeface was officially announced in November of 1948, and immediately became a bestseller. By 1966, according to a memo from the foundry, the typeface had become “almost too popular”. This digital version of Schlesigner’s and Dooijes’s work greatly expands on the metal fonts. Both weights include a complete set of lowercase alternates — based on Schlesinger’s own drawings, as well as alternative variations for some of the capitals, a few ligatures, and extended language support covering Western, Eastern and Central European languages, plus Baltic, Celtic/Welsh, Esperanto, Maltese and Turkish. Minuet is available in all popular formats. The OpenType version, Minuet Pro, takes advantage of internal font programming to combine the main and alternate fonts into a single file per weight, making all alternates and ligatures automatically available at the push of a button in OpenType supporting programs.

The ITC Nova Lineta™ design is the first commercial typeface from Slobodan Jelesijevic. As with many typeface designs, it began as simple sketches. “I was working on a packaging design project,” recalls Jelesijevic, “and wanted an informal, slightly cursive design for the type. I could not find anything that matched my need, so I began sketching.” The preliminary design had an elegant yet fresh quality that, once developed, turned out to be perfect for Jelesijevic’s project. After its first use, however, Nova Lineta lay dormant for over a year. Other projects came and went, and new typeface ideas filled Jelesijevic’s notebook. Although Nova Lineta continued to tickle the creative crevices of his mind, no more work was done on the face. Then, in a period between projects, Jelesijevic began to polish the design – and, in the process, created extended and condensed versions to complement the normally-proportioned original. Born in Gornji Milanovac, Serbia in 1951, Jelesijevic graduated with a degree in graphic communication and lettering from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. These days, Jelesijevic is sought out not only as a typeface designer, but also as a graphic designer and illustrator. When not working on design projects, he teaches graphic communication at the Faculty of Art in Niš, Serbia. Although it is a casual and inviting design, Nova Lineta has been carefully constructed and refined. As a result, it performs exceptionally well within a wide range of sizes and in a wealth of applications. An ample x-height, open counters and distinctive character shapes also ensure a high level of legibility. And, although at first glance Nova Lineta may appear to be a sans serif design, subtle serifs make their presence known at large sizes. Nova Lineta emanates warmth when used for extensive text, and it has a fresh quality at display sizes. The small family’s range of proportions also provides added flexibility. The result is a friendly yet powerful communication tool in a remarkably modestly-sized package.

Type designers have been integrating the design of sans serifs with serifed forms since the 1920s. Early examples are Edward Johnston's design for the London Underground, and Eric Gill's Gill Sans. These were followed by Jan van Krimpen's Romulus Sans, Frederic Goudy's ITC Goudy Sans, Hermann Zapf's Optima, Hans Meier's Syntax and Adrian Frutiger's Frutiger. Now, ITC Stone Humanist joins this tradition. It is a careful blend of traditional sans serif shapes and classical serifed letterforms. ITC Stone Humanist grew out an experiment with the medium weight of ITC Stone Sans, a design that already showed a relationship to these sans serif-serif hybrids. ITC Stone Sans has proportions based on those of ITC Stone Serif, and its thick-and-thin stroke contrast suggests the bloodline of humanistic sans serif typefaces. But other aspects of ITC Stone Sans are more closely aligned to the gothics and grotesques, a tradition that accounts for the largest portion of sans serif designs. Enter ITC Stone Humanist. During his experiments with the earlier design, Sumner Stone recalls, I was actually quite surprised at how seemingly subtle changes transformed the face," moving the design firmly into the humanist tradition. "The form of the 'g,' 'l,' 'M,' 'W,' and more subtly the 'a' and 'e' are part of the restructuring of the family," he explains. The top endings of vertical lower case strokes have been cropped on an angle, as have the ascender and descender stroke endings. ITC Stone Humanist is a full-fledged member of the ITC Stone family. It has been produced with the same complement of weights, and the x-heights, proportions, and underlying character shapes are completely compatible with the three original designs. The original ITC Stone Sans is a popular typeface, in part because of its notable versatility. ITC Stone Humanist shares this virtue, and can be used successfully at very small sizes, in long passages of text copy, and even as billboard-sized display type."

Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed. Elegant but with that distance that well-defined forms seem to impose. Her voice, however, was sweeter, closer, and when she spoke her name, like a slow whisper, one felt like what she had come to say could be read in her image. Rufina's story can only be told through a detour because her origin does not coincide with her birth. Rufina was born on a Sunday afternoon while her father was drawing black letters on a white background, and her mother was trying to join those same letters to form words that could tell a story. But her origin goes much further back, and that is why she is pierced by a story that precedes her, even though it is not her own. Maybe her origin can be traced back to that autumn night in which that tall man with that distant demeanor ran into that woman with that sweet smile and elegant aspect. He looked at her in such a way that he was trapped by that gaze, even though they found no words to say to each other, and they stayed in silence. Somehow, some words leaked into that gaze because since that moment they were never apart again. Later, after they started talking, projects started coming up and then coexistence and arguments, routines and mismatches. But in that chaos of crossed words in their life together, something was stable through the silence of the gazes. In those gazes, the silent words sustained that indescribable love that they didn't even try to understand. And in one of those silences, Rufina appeared, when that man told that woman that he needed a text to try out his new font, and she saw him look at her with that same fascination of the first time, and she started to write something with those forms that he was giving her as a gift. Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed, wrote her mother when Rufina was born.