Hawkes is an extensive handmade typeface family that comes with a bundle of weights, widths and styles, all designed to work cohesively. Here is a breakdown of the Hawkes family. Hawkes Sans: The primary subfamily is a sans-serif typeface that includes nine fonts: three weights (light, medium and bold) and three widths (narrow, regular and wide). Within this set are an array of stylistic features; including small capitals, character style alternatives, discretionary ligatures and contextual alternatives. See details below for more information on OpenType Features. Hawkes Variable Width Sans: The secondary subfamily is the same base sans-serif fonts but combined in variating widths. Essentially, it takes all three widths of each weight and randomly mixes them together. This creates a funky and creative alternative to the more traditional sans-serif set. The variations are for the uppercase, lowercase, small capitals, ligatures and numbers. Hawkes Script: The last subfamily is the script typeface. It’s a quirky script with variations of its own, including ligatures, swashes and contextual alternatives (again, see below for further details.) The script font works great as a complimentary style to the sans-serif, or on it’s own. FEATURES Alright, let’s get into all the extra goodies this typeface has to offer. Small Capitals: Small caps are short capital letters designed to blend with lowercase text. These aren’t just capital letters just scaled down but designed to fit with the weight of both the lowercase and capitals. With Hawkes, small caps can either sit on the baseline (in line with the base of the capital and lowercase) or to be lifted to match the height of the capital letters by applying the discretionary ligature setting in the OpenType panel. These small capitals have a dot underlining them that sit along the baseline. The feature offers a unique display affect that is great for logos, titles and other headline needs. Discretionary Ligatures: A discretionary ligature is more decorative and unique combination than a standard ligature and can be applied at the users discretion (as the name indicates.) The specific styling for these ligatures varies for different fonts. With Hawkes, they are used as an all capital styling feature, or to lift the small capitals to align with the height of the capitals. In the former setting, both lowercase and uppercase letters are first changed to all capitals, then a specialized set of letter combinations are transitioned so small characters are positioned within a main capital letter. These combinations only happen with main characters that include an applicable stem, such as C F K L R T Y. Some of these combinations include two or three characters. When Small Caps is turned ‘on’, this feature will lift the small caps to the height of the capital letter. For more information, please check out the user guide! Stylistic Alternatives: Stylistic alternates are a secondary form of a character, often used to enhance the look or style of a font. For Hawkes, these alternatives provide a slightly more handmade feel. A - the capital and small capital A will lose its pointed apex and become rounded. Think of it more as an upside-down U than an up-side-down V ;-) Oo, G, Ss, Cc- these characters’ topmost terminal becomes a loop. The O is applied automatically, the G S and C need to be turn on individually. Titling Alternatives: This feature does sort of the opposite of what it intends. Instead of being used for titling purposes, this feature makes the text look better in paragraph text settings. Kk Rr h n m - curved terminals on the are straightened e - the counter stroke also gets straightened from a more looping motion y - the shape of y is changed from a rounded character to a sharper apex (think more like a ‘v’ than ‘u’) Contextual Alternatives: Contextual alternates are glyphs designed to work within context of other adjacent glyphs. With Hawkes Sans, there are three slightly different variations per character. The feature rotates the application of each variation. This helps with organic authenticity, so if you have two e’s next to each other, they won’t look identical (reflecting the natural variations in handwriting and lettering.) With Hawkes Variable width fonts, I have created a contextual pattern that randomizes the widths of each character. So, when the feature is turned ‘on’ in the OpenType panel, the widths would alternate in a pattern such as: Narrow, Wide, Regular, Narrow, Regular Wide, Narrow, etc. It happens automatically so the user doesn’t have to think or worry about getting a random seed. With Hawkes Script, contextual alternates allow strokes to connect properly from one character to the next while maintaining a believable, natural flow. Connecting strokes are present for two letters next to each other but are replaced by a shorter stroke when located at the end of a word or sentence. Some characters have in-strokes when located at the start of a word. When a character is preceded by a capital letter that doesn’t connect, it too needs an in-stroke or altered spacing. This feature is complicated and messy, but luckily you don’t really have to think about it! I’ve done all the coding so all you have to do is turn ‘on’ the feature in the OpenType panel and you are off to the races! I’m just letting you know what’s happening behind the scenes. Swashes: These are just for Hawkes Script and provide tail swashes to the start and ends of letters. There are three different options. You can pick the basic option by turning ‘on’ the swash feature in the OpenType panel, or you can pick using the Glyph panel. Stylistic Sets: This feature work in new versions of Illustrator CC and InDesign CC. You can pick specific styling sets instead of turning on an entire feature. For example, let’s say you want to have a loopy S, but not a loopy C or O, you can just turn on the S in the Style Set. It also helps create the little drop box that pops up when you hover over a character, showing you the alternates associated with that character. This makes it easy to pick and choose specific styles you want in a word or headline. ---------- And there it is folks! That’s all the basic info on Hawkes, I know it’s been a lot and I appreciate you hanging on. If you are like me and need more of a visual reference to accessing all these goodies, I’ve made a user guide to help navigate Hawkes and everything it has to offer. Altogether this extensive family boasts 14 total fonts in a wide array of styles, weights and widths, making it a great addition to any handmade type collection. Enjoy!

It took me a long time, but I think I now understand why people of my generation and older feel the need to frame current events in an historical context or precedents, while most of the young couldn't care less about what happened ten years ago, let alone centuries back. After living for a few decades, you get to a point when time seems to be moving quite fast, and it’s humbling to see that your entire existence so far can be summed up in a paragraph or two which may or may not be useful to whoever ends up reading the stuff anyhow. I suppose one way to cope with the serenity of aging is trying to convince yourself that your life and work are really an extension of millenia of a species striving to accept, adapt to, and improve the human condition through advancing the many facets of civilization -- basically making things more understandable and comfortable for ourselves and each other while we go about doing whatever it is we are trying to do. And when you do finally convince yourself of that, history becomes a source of much solace and even a little premonition, so you end up spending more time there. Going far back into the history of what I do, one can easily see that for the most part it was ruled by the quill. Western civilization’s writing was done with quill pens for more than thirteen centuries and with newer instruments for about two. By the mid-18th century, the height of the quill experience, various calligraphy techniques could be discerned and writing styles were arranged in distinct categories. There are many old books that showcase the history of it all. I recommend looking at some whenever the urge comes calling and you have to get away from backlit worlds. Multiple sources usually help me get a better perspective on the range of a specific script genre, so many books served as reference to this quill font of mine. Late 17th century French and Spanish professional calligraphy guides were great aides in understanding the ornamental scope of what the scribes were doing back then. The French books, with their showings of the Ronde, Bâtarde and Coulée alphabets, were the ones I referenced the most. So I decided to name the font Auberge, a French word for hotel or inn, because I really felt like a guest in different French locales (and times) when I going through all that stuff. Because it is multi-sourced, Auberge does not strictly fit in a distinct quill pen category. Instead, it shows strong hints of both Bâtarde and Coulée alphabets. And like most of my fonts, it is an exercise in going overboard with alternates, swashes, and ornamental devices. Having worked with it for a while, I find it most suitable for display calligraphic setting in general, but it works especially well for things like wine labels and event invitations. It also shines in the original quill pen application purpose, which of course was stationery. Also, as it just occurred to me, if you find yourself in a situation where you have to describe your entire life in 50 words or less, you may as well make it look good and swashy, so Auberge would probably be a good fit there as well. This is one quill script that no large bird had to die for. A few technical notes The Auberge Script Pro version includes 1800 glyphs, everything is included there. Also latin language support. We recommend you to use the latest design application to have full access to alternates, swashes, small caps, ornaments, etc. The images from the gallery uses this version. For better results use the fonts with “liga” feature on. Awards During 2014 the early develop of Auberge Script was chosen to be part of Tipos Latinos, the most important type exhibition in South America.