Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.

Albertina was a typeface ahead of its time. It was in the early 1960s when designer Chris Brand, an accomplished calligrapher, aspired to draw a typeface based on the principles of calligraphy. Unfortunately, typesetting machines of that era put many restrictions on designers. Characters had to be drawn within a very coarse grid, which also defined their spacing. Technological limitations meant that italic designs often had to share the same character widths as the romans. Designers were forced to draw italic faces much wider and with more open spacing than what would be typical in calligraphic lettering or hand-set type. Not surprisingly, production of the first Albertina fonts went very slowly. Brand would submit his character drawings, and the Monotype Drawing Office would modify them to be compatible with the company's typesetting equipment. The new drawings would then be sent back to Brand for approval or rework. Most were reworked. The process took so long, in fact, that by the time the face was completed it was once again out of phase with the times: instead of being released as metal type for the Monotype composing machines it had been tailored for, Albertina debuted as phototype fonts for the Monophoto typesetter. The design's first use was for a catalog of the work of Stanley Morison, exhibited at the Albertina Library in Brussels in 1966. Sales of the design were not remarkable. With the advent of digital type technology, Albertina's story took a far happier turn. Frank E. Blokland, of the Dutch Type Library, used Brand's original, uncompromised drawings as the foundation of a digital revival. The Monophoto version had taken a considerable battering from the limitations of Monotype's unit system," recalls Blokland, "but there was no need for me to incorporate these restrictions in the digital version." With the full backing of Monotype and original designer Brand looking over Blokland's shoulder, a new design for Albertina emerged, displaying all the grace and verve of Brand's original drawings. The basic family drawn by Brand also grew into three weights, each with an italic complement and a suite of small caps and old style figures."