Classic Grotesque by Rod McDonald: a traditional font with a modern face. The growing popularity of grotesque typefaces meant that many new sans serif analogues were published in the early 20th century. Setting machines were not compatible with each other but all foundries wanted to offer up-to-date fonts, and as a result numerous different typeface families appeared that seem almost identical at first glance and yet go their separate ways with regard to details. One of the first fonts created with automatic typesetting in mind was Monotype Grotesque®. Although this typeface that was designed and published by Frank Hinman Pierpont in 1926 has since been digitalised, it has never achieved the status of other grotesque fonts of this period. But Monotype Grotesque was always one of designer Rod McDonald’s favourites, and he was overjoyed when he finally got the go-ahead from Monotype in 2008 to update this “hidden treasure”. The design process lasted four years, with regular interruptions due to the need to complete projects for other clients. In retrospect, McDonald admits that he had no idea at the beginning of just how challenging and complex a task it would be to create Classic Grotesque™. It took him considerable time before he found the right approach. In his initial drafts, he tried to develop Monotype Grotesque only to find that the result was almost identical with Arial®, a typeface that is also derived in many respects from Monotype Grotesque. It was only when he went back a stage, and incorporated elements of Bauer Font’s Venus™ and Ideal Grotesk by the Julius Klinkhardt foundry into the design process, that he found the way forward. Both these typefaces had served as the original inspiration for Monotype Grotesque. The name says it all: Classic Grotesque has all the attributes of the early grotesque fonts of the 20th century: The slightly artificial nature gives the characters a formal appearance. There are very few and only minor variations in line width. The tittles of the ‘i’ and ‘j’, the umlaut diacritic and other diacritic marks are rectangular. Interestingly, it is among the uppercase letters that certain variations from the standard pattern can be found, and it is these that enliven the typeface. Hence the horizontal bars of the “E”, “F” and “L” have bevelled terminals. The chamfered terminal of the bow of the “J” has a particular flamboyance, while the slightly curved descender of the “Q” provides for additional dynamism. The character alternatives available through the OpenType option provide the designer with a wealth of opportunities. These include a closed “a”, a double-counter “g” and an “e” in which the transverse bar deviates slightly from the horizontal. The seven different weights also extend the scope of uses of Classic Grotesque. These range from the delicate Light to the super thick Extrabold. There are genuine italic versions of each weight; these are not only slightly narrower than their counterparts, but also have variant shapes. The “a” is closed, the “f” has a semi-descender while the “e” is rounded. Its neutral appearance and excellent features mean that Classic Grotesque is suitable for use in nearly all imaginable applications. Even during the design phase, McDonald used his new font to set books and in promotional projects. However, he would be pleased to learn of possible applications that he himself has not yet considered. Classic Grotesque, which has its own individual character despite its neutral and restrained appearance, is the ideal partner for your print and web project.

New Lincoln Gothic is an elegant sanserif, generous in width and x-height. There are twelve weights ranging from Hairline to UltraBold and an italic for each weight. At the stroke ends are gentle flares, and some of the round characters possess an interesting and distinctive asymmetry. The character set supports Central Europe, and there are three figure sets, extended fractions, superior and inferior numbers, and a few alternates, all accessible via OpenType features. Back in 1965, Thomas Lincoln had an idea for a new sanserif typeface, a homage of sorts, to ancient Roman artisans. The Trajan Column in Rome, erected in 113 AD, has an inscription that is considered to be the basis for western European lettering. Lincoln admired these beautiful letterforms and so, being inspired, he set out to design a new sanserif typeface based on the proportions and subtleties of the letters found in the Trajan Inscription. Lincoln accomplished what he set out to do by creating Lincoln Gothic. The typeface consisted only of capital letters. Lincoln intentionally omitted a lowercase to keep true his reference to the Trajan Inscription, which contains only magiscule specimens. The design won him the first Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) National Typeface Competition in 1965. The legendary Herb Lubalin even used it to design a promotional poster! All this was back in the day when typositor film strips and photo type were all the rage in setting headlines. Fast forward now to the next millennium. Thomas Lincoln has had a long, illustrious career as a graphic designer. Still, he has one project that feels incomplete; Lincoln Gothic does not have a lowercase. It is the need to finish the design that drives Lincoln to resurrect his prize winning design and create its digital incarnation. Thus, New Lincoln Gothic was born. Lacking the original drawings, Lincoln had to locate some old typositor strips in order to get started. He had them scanned and imported the data into Freehand where he refined the shapes and sketched out a lowercase. He then imported that data into Fontographer, where he worked the glyphs again and refined the spacing, and started generating additional weights and italics. His enthusiasm went unchecked and he created 14 weights! It was about that time that Lincoln contacted Bitstream about publishing the family. Lincoln worked with Bitstream to narrow down the family (only to twelve weights), interpolate the various weights using three masters, and extend the character set to support CE and some alternate figure sets. Bitstream handled the hinting and all production details and built the final CFF OpenType fonts using FontLab Studio 5.

Max Joseph Gradl designed Art Nouveau jewelry in Germany. At least some of his designs were produced by Theodor Fahrner of Pforzheim, Germany -- one of the leading manufacturers of fine art jewelry on the Continent from 1855 to 1979. I don't know if he designed for Fahrner exclusively, but every example I found was produced by that firm. I assume it was also the same M.J, who edited a book, Authentic Art Nouveau Stained Glass which was reissued by Dover and is still available. For an artist as accomplished as Gradl was, he is very tough to research. There just does not seem to have been much written about him. The jeweler is visible in most of his typeface designs. They exhibit a sculptural quality as if they were modeled in clay (or gold) rather than drawn on paper. His monograms, especially, reflect that quality. Those shown in plates 112 through 116 in Petzendorfer actually appear to have been designed specifically for fabricating in the form of gold or silver pendents. Of the initial letters that came out of Germany during this period, these by Gradl seem unusually open and lyrical. They seem to be dancing on the page, rather than sitting. Please note that Gradl designed only the decorated initials. All other characters supplied were extrapolated by HiH, including the accented initials. Orn.1 (unicode E004) is based on a jeweled gold clasp designed by Gradl (please check out Gallery Image on Myfonts.com). Also included are an art nouveau girl’s face, a swan and the face from Munch’s “Scream”, from scans of old printer’s ornaments. Gradl Initialen M represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added 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 341 glyphs. Both upper & lower case provided with appropriate accents. 2. 558 Kerning Pairs. 3. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: salt, dlig, ornm and kern. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Refined various glyph outlines. 6. Alternative characters: 16 upper case letters (with gaps in surrounding decorations for accents above letter). 8. Four Ornaments: face1, face2, swan and orn1 (silhouette of Gradl clasp) The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Keep Calm is a family of fonts developed from the now famous World War 2 poster that was designed in 1939 but never issued, then rediscovered in 2000. As well as the original Keep Calm font, the medium weight of the poster, new weights are now available – Keep Calm Book (regular weight), Heavy and Light – and each weight comes with a complimentary italic. Version 2.0 (2017) is a comprehensive update which consists of numerous refinements and improvements across all weights. The family now contains a full complement of Latin Extended-A characters, Welsh diacritics and Irish dotted consonants. The four italics have been optically corrected with revised, ‘true italic’ forms of a and f. The crown motif from the top of the Keep Calm poster is located at the plus minus ± and section § keystrokes (Alt 0177 and Alt 0167 on Windows). The lowercase g follows the Gill/Johnston eyeglass model, but also included is an alternative, single-story g at the Alt G keystroke (Alt 0169 on a Windows keyboard), the normal location of the copyright symbol which has been relocated elsewhere in the fonts. An alternative lowercase t, without the curved wedge cutaway, is provided at the Alt T (dagger) keystroke (Alt 0134 on Windows). When I first saw the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, I wrongly assumed the letters to be Gill Sans. Recent research at the National Archive by Dr. Bex Lewis of Manchester Metropolitan University has revealed that the original poster was hand drawn by the illustrator and painter, Ernest Wallcousins. The Gill Sans influence is apparent, in the R particularly, the M’s perfectly pointed vertex is redolent of Johnston’s Underground, and the most anomalous character, the C, resembles the ‘basic lettering’ of engineers that provided the vernacular sources for the Gotham typeface. Developing the Keep Calm typeface has been an exercise in extrapolation; an intriguing challenge to build a whole, high quality font family based on the twelve available capitals of the Keep Calm poster, and on similar lettering from the other two posters in the original series. This has required the creation of new lowercase letters that are believably 1939; that maintain the influence of Gill and Johnston while also hinting at the functional imperative of a wartime drawing office. Wallcousins’s lettering balanced intuitive human qualities and the pure pleasure of drawing elegant contemporary characters, against an underlying geometry of ruled lines, perfect circles, 45° terminals, and a requirement for no-nonsense clarity.

This typeface is extrapolated from the ‘We the People’ calligraphy of the handwritten US Constitution Preamble which employed a style based on German Text and Square Text exemplars from George Bickham’s penmanship copy-books, the most celebrated being The Universal Penman published in 1743. The original Constitution document was transcribed onto parchment by Jacob Shallus, a Pennsylvania Assistant Clerk, over a weekend in 1787. Shallus’s biographer, Arthur Plotnik (The Man Behind the Quill, 1987), notes that he was paid $30, a modest monthly wage at the time. He also suggests that the calligraphic headings, ‘We the People’ and ‘Article’, may have been inserted by Shallus’s 14 year old trainee son, Francis, “The manner in which the ‘Article’ headings are squeezed into the space Shallus allowed for them suggests a second hand—and perhaps not a very experienced one.” The unconventional backslant of the headings would seem to support this contention, and at the end of the document there is perhaps a novice’s inconsistency in the structure of the letter n between that used for ‘done’ and those used for ‘In Witness’. However, one has to admire the elegant swagger of the wavy t, h and l which the K-Type font extends to the b, f and k. Also, the simpler, Schwabacher-style W, an enlarged version of the lowercase w, is a little less flamboyant than the capital W from the German and Square texts in Bickham’s manuals. For designers using OpenType-aware applications, the typeface includes some Alternates, including a Bickham-style W, the letters t, h and n with added flourishes, two simpler forms of the A, and a few roman numerals for numbering articles. Also some ornamental flourishes and a round middle dot/decimal point. Punctuation marks are drawn in square, calligraphic style, but an alternative round period/full stop, for use with currency and numerals, is available at the period centered position (though placed on the baseline), accessed by Shift Option 9 on a Mac, or Alt 0183 on Windows. The full phrase, ‘We the People’, has been placed at the trademark keystroke and can be accessed by Option 2 (or Shift Option 2) on a Mac, or Alt 0153 on Windows. For designers who find the backslant awkward or unpleasant, the licensed typeface also includes two additional fonts which have a vertical aspect that may be more conducive to graphic design layouts. ‘We The People Upright’ and ‘We The People Upright Bold’ both retain the distinctive style, and the heavier weight is only slightly emboldened, just enough to add some punch.