"Hi there, thank you for passing by. Colllab Studio is here. We crafted best collection of typefaces in a variety of styles to keep you covered for any project that comes your way! So, you know the fonts that look like handwriting in the movies by Disney? Well, ours is like that! But it can also be used for other purposes, and it's fun to write with. Daddy The Comicaze is fun handwriting font, it was inspired by our love of cartoons and comic books, but as always, we wanted to add a little bit of humor to it. So we played around with the kerning and spacing until we came up with something that was both fun-looking and easy to read. What else is special about Daddy The Comicaze? Well, for one thing, it includes a lot of different characters! There are tons of punctuation marks and accented letters you won't find in normal fonts. And since it's based on our handwriting style, each character has its own unique personality. Basically, we've taken the best parts of our handwriting and turned them into a beautiful font. A Million Thanks Colllab Studio www.colllabstudio.com

Pétala Pro took its first steps almost ten years ago. Since then, the quest for perfection has forced several interruptions. It was necessary recalculate the route, tread other ways, discover new maps, and make easy curves. In the end, a new milestone on typeface design was reached. Pétala Pro combines readability with a gentle but strong personality. The smooth and balanced forms shares space with expressive ink traps. The 18 styles of the family – from Thin to Black – allow the flexibility needed to complex design briefs. When designing the different weights, rather than automated solutions, ​​subtle adjustments were made to value the optical qualities of each style. Such care makes all the difference under extreme conditions. The wide variety of alternates makes Pétala Pro even more versatile. All the styles come with a lot of advanced OpenType features such as stylistics sets, localized forms, contextual alternates, ligatures, small caps, numbers, fractions and more. Pétala Pro brings your message with efficiency and personality for a multi-language environment and in any medium or support, such as video, mobile and computers screens. Pétala Pro is the ideal choice for editorial, advertising, branding and corporate identity.

Gothic fraktur inspired design, I wanted to resemble old german calligraphy but making it very geometric, so I used an isometric reticle during sketching. This is a display font, created for BIG sizes, non textual. I recommend it for branding, poster, logos or titles. Its very experimental -- it exists within the limits of legible and illegible reading. I choose the name “Garbancera” because gothic calligraphy has issues that are linked with dark, gloomy, lugubrious things or fear feelings, culturally in Mexico. I related this with death and for mexicans, death is something we celebrate and give us joy and happiness, annoying, the most representative Mexican characters, one of those is “La Calavera Garbancera” or better known as “La Catrina”, a clothes skeleton with only a hat. It was drawn this way to make a critic to all Mexicans at that time, that were poor but they wanted to represent a high lifestyle, “those that where to the bones, but with a French hat with ostrich feathers”. La Catrina was created by José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican lithographer but also a newspaper illustrator. I think this is a beautiful font that can lead to great results, just use it wisely.

Type Tiles JNL is based on a ‘completed’ version of ‘Alpha-Blox’ by American Type Founders, circa 1944. The capitals, lower case and numerals shown in the sample sheet put out by ATF depicted type made with five-high blocks comprised of modular units spaced two points apart. These units could be combined in varying ways to create custom type of varying heights and widths and was available for purchase in both linear (multi-line) and reverse (white on black) formats. Using the 'reverse' model shown on the sample sheet, all of the characters were re-created digitally, and missing punctuation, foreign characters and other glyphs found in a basic computer font were drawn and added. The 'J' and 'T' in the type sample had truncations, so a more complete character was created for each of those letters. For those wanting an unbroken string of words or blank end caps, there is a double column space on the vertical bar key. A single column space is located on the broken bar key for shorter end caps. Type Tiles JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions

Googie Architecture, also known as "Midcentury Coffee Shop Modern," was born in California during the Atomic Age. Martini at Joe's is based on lettering from several historic Googie sources - many of which no longer exist. The futuristic Martini at Joe's collection was named for Northern California's famous Italian-themed "Joe's" restaurants, some of which are still serving up large portions of charbroiled beef steak, canned buttered veggies and pretty decent martinis. Martini at Joe's contains many fabulous typographic extras – and is available in single font packages or as a 15 font interchangeable Megaset (with "italic-esque" obliques and "retro obliques"). Martini at Joe's is perfect for use as commercial signage, on the menu for your coffee shop, supper club, tiki bar, fish grotto, smorgy, space port or destination casino. It also holds its own in any vintage store, on greeting cards, t-shirts, hi-brow gallery announcements, product skins, your 'zine masthead, on the faceplate of your futuristic microwave oven, tv dinner packaging, at millionaire's conferences or even embellishing the fuselage of your latest jet airline venture. Martini at Joe's: there's no better way to say, "Hold the olive, I'm having a moment."

Oscar Niemeyer is one of the greatest architects of our time—his unique way of mixing straight lines and abstract curves gives rise to an unmistakable and characteristic style. This typeface is my own tribute to Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The design process started when my wife and I visited Brazil while she was running a series of workshops on calligraphy. In my spare time, I would walk through the streets of beautiful cities like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, enjoying the local architecture and urban life. I had also the opportunity to attend to some of the workshops during which I was able to observe the organic of calligraphy and people. Then, I started to draw some shapes that reflected everything about this beautiful place: Niemeyer’s architecture and work and, in his own words ‘the curves on the body of the beloved woman’. This versatile typeface comes in 8 weights with matching italics, alternative characters, oldstyle figures and much more! Niemeyer is well-suited for logotypes, advertising, publishing, branding and corporate use. Special thanks to everyone in the Latinotype Team (especially to César Araya) for their support, help with corrections and digital editing.

Pantographia Collection is a Intellecta digitization, in facsimile style, without artistical interpretation of any kind, of the work of Edmund Fry (monumental book), Pantographia , a work on languages containing over 200 alphabets. We just are collecting in digital way these alphabets. Each alphabet has a short pdf description (see in the gallery). For example, in the pdf brochure of the "Saracen One" font, according to Edmund Fry, "This characters, according to Theseus Ambrosius, was used by the Saracens at the time of their conquests. Claude Duret, p. 475." Ambrosius, Theseus: Introductio in Chaldaicam lingua, Syriaca, atque Armenicam, [et] dece*. - 1539. Theseus Ambrosius or AMBROGIO, was an Italian orientalist, which born in 1469, and died in 1539 - He wrote his Introduction to the Chaldean, Syrian, Armenian, and ten other tongues, with the alphabetical characters of about forty different languages, 4to." The Pantographia font have only the original characters showed in Fry's book. There are instructions in the PDF files to get them. These fonts have no philological (or linguistic) academic pretentions. They are digitized and faithful versions of the original, like first published at Fry's book.

With all ego aside, Romp was designed and influenced by my daughter, Angel. For some time now, she has wanted me to design a font based on her handwriting. But each time I sit down to do it, I run into more that she needs to do and redo. On a recent attempt, I ran into the same situation again. Instead of moving on to something else, I decided to whip out a sumi brush and start making letters...for me, type design is something a little ‘serious’ and never a time to just have fun. This typeface proved that notion wrong—it really was fun. As a result, each letter encouraged another and the design grew...and grew! The happy result spawned 3 separate sets of letters & numerals (small caps and some ligatures too!). Using the beauty of OpenType, these 3 sets have been fused into one, randomly generating font set. If you are using any type of OpenType enabled application, then the Romp Pro typeface is the way to go. They include everything found in the 3 separate variants for each style as well as entirely expanding offering of additional small cap and ligature sets.

Basic Commercial is a font based on historical designs from the hot metal typeface era. It first appeared around 1900, and was created by type designers whose names have not been recorded but whose skills cannot be overlooked. This typeface's design has been popular among groups and movements as diverse as the Bauhaus, Dadaism, and the masters of Swiss/International-Style typography. It influenced for a variety of later grotesque fonts, such as Helvetica and Univers. Basic Commercial was distributed for many years in the United States under the name Standard Series. The typeface worked its way into many aspects of daily life and culture; for instance, it became the face chosen for use in the New York City subway system's signage. The Basic Commercial's font family members have a clear and objective design. Their forms exhibit almost nothing unusual, but remain both lively and legible nonetheless. Perhaps for this reason, Basic Commercial's design has been popular with graphic designers for decades. To read more about the history of typefaces like Basic Commercial, visit our font feature, The Sans Serif Typefaces. In addition several weights of this typefamily are available as soft rounded versions."

For best results, use of OpenType features is strongly recommend. This font is inspired by Johannes Janssonius, well know as Jan Janszoon o Jan Janssonius (Arnhem, 1588 – Amsterdam, 1664), was a Dutch cartographer, publisher and engraver. Married to Hondius's daughter. He was the author of many masterpieces of cartography of the 1700s like Willem Blaeu and Hondius, famous maps with heavy use of decorations in the letterig to fill the spaces of oceans, seas, lakes and scrolls. Now you can easily recreate not just ancient maps without effort, but you can use this font creatively, to make unique, modern logos, product names, fresh packaging, hip fashion outfits, refined labels, signs, coordinated images ... Hundreds of alternatives to choose from and maybe to combine with other fonts in an original way. One extra font with 27 castles in Janszoon style are also usefull for map, of course, but also for many different creative artworks. Warning: Jannson Map having oversized swashes compared to the normal standards cannot be used with Windows Word because Word does not give the possibility to manage the line spacing professionally. Jannson Map works great with applications like Illustrator, In Design, quark Xpress, mac Text etc ...

Don't you HATE it when this happens? You're protesting the war in Iraq, and the other protesters keep pointing at you and giggling. You can't figure out what they could possibly be laughing at...You look up and then it hits you: you're holding a sign that looks like it was made by your 5-year old kid brother. It's sloppy, the words are crooked, hell, it's BARELY READABLE. How is anyone ever going to take you seriously with THAT SIGN???? There's only one solution...To further your cause, you need Burghal Design's Peace font. Peace contains upper and lower letters, numbers, punctuation, even foreign accented characters! Clean, concise, and oh, SO legible, you'll have no problem getting your message across with this typeface. Who knows, you might even make the evening news.

Excelsor Script is inspired by lithographically produced scripts. It is softer and simpler than, for example, engraved Splendid Script, because its designer used pens and lithographic needles. The graver for steel is held in a quite different way and this has an influence on the shape of the letter. Similar type faces were in use from Neo-Classicism until the beginning of Art Nouveau, when they were pushed aside by a completely different view of festive typography. It has, in contradistinction to other scripts, slightly narrowed letters, which signifies a distinctive elegance without wasting space on the line. For practical reasons it was not possible to encircle the bottle with too long a label. It is, therefore, a suitable type face for labels. Its two optical grades cover a wide range of sizes.

In 1978 I went to work at Mergenthaler as a letter drawer. Being an inquisitive sort I decided that I should take a stab at this type design 'stuff'. I drew 25 or 30 glyphs before the work found its way to a high shelf in a dark corner of my apartment. Just 23 years later I found the drawings on a different shelf, in a different home, in a different city and decided to finish what I had started. I'm still trying to deal with my predisposition toward procrastination but I've finished the font. The name of the font is the last name of somebody I played softball with before I moved to Beantown. Ronnie Geis was one of the courageous firefighters we lost on September 11th when the WTC collapsed.

Planeta Font, this font was created to look as close to a natural handwritten script as possible by including some alternates lowercase, ligature and underlines. Built in Opentype features, this script comes to life as if you were writing it yourself. Comes with regular and italic. Also support multilingual.Perfect for any awesome projects that need hand writing taste. It's highly recommended to use it in opentype capable software - there are plenty out there nowadays as technology catches up with design ... Other than Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, many standard simple programs now come with Opentype capabilities - even the most basic ones such as Apple's Text Edit, Pages, Keynote, iBooks Author, etc. Even Word has found ways to incorporate it. Thanks for checking out this font. I hope you enjoy it! AminMario

Tatline was intended to be a fun side project that developed into something cool and rather unprecedented. It's bold, it's chunky —and it just looks good whether it's a mock movie poster or a key element in a brand identity for a business. With serifs thicker than stems, it looks more down to earth, solid, reliable and firm. And yet there's an almost imperceptible playfulness in the way it looks and behaved on the screen and paper. Tatline would look great on posters and flyers. We've tried creating a coffee brand identity with it —and surprise, looks great again. Maybe it's magic, but we like to think it's just a result of tough work put into creation of Tatline. Try it yourself and let us know what you think!

This typeface family was inspired by a set of fonts, designed in the Garamond style, used for an edition of Remarques critiques sur les œuvres d’Horace by “D.A.E.P.”, published in Paris in 1689 by two different booksellers: Deny Thierry and Claude Barbin. We can see some differences in comparison with our “pure” Garamond (see our 1592 GLC Garamond), particularly in the lowercase of the Normal style and the uppercase of the Italic. Unfortunately, we know neither the name of the punchcutter, nor that of the printer. This complete font set contains small caps, fractions all the way up to 1999/1999, historical and standard ligatures, and all of the fleurons contained in the edition (Normal style only). The alphabet covers all Western, Eastern and Central European languages (including Celtic diacritics) and Turkish.

Yotta was created for situations where a thin sans with a little extra style is required in branding, advertising promotional projects — it is especially suited for the FASHION retail industry. The extended stroke feature (in u/c B,DP,R and l/c a,b,dg,h,m,npq,u,y) is discreetly applied so it does not dominate. I guess “quasi-serif” might be a way to describe Yotta. “Yotta Thin” and “Yotta Thin Italic” is a friendly Opentype and ready for you to unleash your creativity! btw. Yotta is big, very big: the name comes from YottaByte, as in Megabyte (one million bytes), Gigabyte (one billion (109)Terabyte (one million million (1012), Petabyte (a million gigabytes), Exabyte one quintillion (1018), Zettabyte one sextillion (1021), & Yottabyte (one septillion (1024)

In 2011, while tutoring an exercise on Slab Serifs, Josema discovered Robert Thorne’s work for Thorowgood. Specifically, he was fascinated by the extraordinary density of the 6-line Egyptian Pica from 1820-21. As a simple exercise, he wanted to test the limits of readability within the context of a contemporary alphabet. Rothwood Ultra is the result of this experiment. As a way of developing the series, he found it interesting to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and discover how to evolve the extra-black Ultra’s DNA into a super lightweight model. The Hairline and Thin styles are her slim sisters. The third challenge has been the creation of the text version. Light, Book, DemiBold and Bold, including italics and Small Caps close the Rothwood cycle for editorial use.

Jet is an assertive italic sans that anticipates the return of the simpler, optimistic times when progress was considered positive and forward seemed to be the only way to go. It may have felt right at home in the mid-1970s, the time of Sc-Fi, synthetics and disco, yet it unmistakably belongs to the present. Its dynamic sturdy forms and angular tapering of some horizontal forms convey movement and edgy impatience for change, with a few re-imagined details, like the reversed slant on top of the lowercase t and the atypical round counter of the lowercase a, showing a new hope for the bygone optimism. Available in five weights in Latin and Cyrillic, supporting many languages, with stylistic alternates and two sets of figures. Designed by Gayaneh Bagdasaryan and Vyacheslav Kirilenko, 2020

Millestone Font This font was created to look as close to a natural handwritten script as possible by including some alternates lowercase, ligature and underlines. Built in Opentype features, this script comes to life as if you were writing it yourself. Comes with regular and italic. Also support multilingual.Perfect for any awesome projects that need hand writing taste. It's highly recommended to use it in opentype capable software - there are plenty out there nowadays as technology catches up with design ... Other than Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, many standard simple programs now come with Opentype capabilities - even the most basic ones such as Apple's Text Edit, Pages, Keynote, iBooks Author, etc. Even Word has found ways to incorporate it. Thanks for checking out this font. I hope you enjoy it! AminMario

BILLIARD was born from the numerous sketches André Toet did for the design of a series of postage stamps in 2011. It’s a capital monospaced and ‘fun’ alphabet, based on the classic billiard play with two white and one red ball. Actually snooker and pool were derived from this rather old sport! In Europe it used to be a sport played by elderly people, practiced in traditional bars, including the smell of beer and the at that time prevalent smell of cigarettes and cigars. These days billiard, snooker and pool are quite popular once again with young people. Hopefully our new font will get the same attention the ‘old sport’ deserves and who knows it might even be used in a sportive way. Concept/Art Direction/Design: André Toet © 2017

Abigale was built with OpenType features and includes beginning and ending swashes, heart / love swashes, numbers, punctuation, alternates, ligatures and it also supports other languages :) Say hello to Abigale - A font that you were meant to find, and is now destined to be with you :) Abigale is a lovingly handwritten script , with an air of grace and flamboyancy. Abigale is special in that one word can be written in a many different ways - thanks to the large selection of extra letters that it has built in. To access all the extra characters , Opentype capable software is recommended - most apps support Opentype features now days. The alternates are accessible by turning on 'Stylistic Alternates' and 'Ligatures' buttons on in Photoshop's Character panel, or via any software with a glyphs panel, e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop CC, Inkscape.

Lunatica Display is a single weight, all capitals, slanted typeface ideal for titles and headlines due to its strong presence. It is constructed in a very modular fashion, stepping away from some typographic conventions, while keeping the form of its characters familiar and easily recognisable. This typeface is heavily inspired on the aesthetics of the space related sci-fi movie genre, specifically on the movie Moon (2009), directed by Duncan Jones and starring Sam Rockwell, from where it also picks up the inspiration for the name “Lunatica”. It was first designed as a branding exercise, thought to be the official typeface of Lunar Industries Ltd. — the company through wich the movie exists and unfolds. You can use Lunatica Display in more conventional contexts like branding but also in more experimental and futuristic-looking ways.

BC Away is a display typeface. It has emerged from the idea of drawing letterforms with a single-line path. Thanks to this idea, the characters are designed out of standard and conventional forms. Character designs are a combination of sharp corners and smooth curves, at the same time keeping readability. Some parts have been left blank in accordance with the letter forms. The name 'Away' represents these blanks. Also, the word 'a way' refers to the design of letterforms using a single-way.

The hand lettered title on the cover for the (ca. 1917) sheet music for “After the War is Over” provided the design inspiration for National Nouveau JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. A precursor to the Art Deco movement which would arrive within the next decade, this bold thick-and-thin design embraces the elements of both Art Nouveau and Art Deco in one type design and gets its name from the patriotic spirit of America during “The Great War”.

Linotype Monticello was designed by C.H. Griffith in 1946. Its design is based on James Ronaldsons Roman No.1 and Oxford Typefaces from American Type Founders and was revised by Matthew Carter while he was working at Linotype between 1965 -1981.

Flox display typeface was designed in 2000 by Vladimir Pavlikov. Cyrillic was developed in 2005. The project was aimed to create a decorative vivid alphabet of geometric shapes. For use in advertising and display typography. Licensed by ParaType in 2005.

The FaRer family was originally made in 1997. The OpenType revision, with extended Latin characters, was made in 2009.

Bauhaus Geometric, economical, functional... The good, wholesome, modernist values that once fired up the tutors and students of the Bauhaus became the inspiration for FS Dillon after an exploration of the work of the pre-war art and design powerhouse in the Fontsmith studio. The font combines simplicity and directness with a characteristic Fontsmith warmth. Letterforms are compact, with a generous x-height, and built for maximum clarity and impact. The Bauhaus sought beauty through function. FS Dillon achieves it. Made for TV The weights of fonts for TV sometimes have to be adjusted so as not to “blow” on-screen. FS Dillon was originally drawn for the on-screen presentation branding of Film Four, whose primary colour was red. Black type on a red background looks heavier than white, so Dillon needed two weights that would allow white and black type to be used together, looking balanced and equal. Type design is an organic process. Years after developing FS Dillon, we revisited it, redrawing elements and adding italics to maintain consistency. Olympic You don’t get a much higher confirmation of the functional fitness of a typeface than to have it selected to guide visitors around an Olympic complex. FS Dillon was selected as the font for signage at some of the key venues at the London 2012 Olympic Park, helping to get spectators, athletes and officials from all over the world to their seats and starting blocks on time.

A few emails sent to Canada Type have asked for more “bad scripts”. A few others asked for "more Mascara-like treatments". And some asked for more fonts of “distressed elegance”. Whatever you like to call this style of doubled-script font, sightings of designs using it have become common within the last few years. Such fonts have become the standard in expressing elegant confusion, old chaos in modern settings, recycled histories, and rebellious ideas. This style is quite often seen on chic clothing, music packaging, some sports paraphernalia, surfer and skateboarder gear, even book covers. That said, the Heathen font was made to include an advantageous feature that other distressed scripts do not normally have: More intertwined over-swashing in the majuscules. This over-swashing is quite useful in settings where the stroke and fill colors differ, or complement each other. It is also quite the point of emphasis where the idea is to show elegance gone ancient, old thoughts in a modern wrapper, rust never sleeping, or the very basic limits of the world’s nature. The original Heathen was made by redrawing Phil Martin’s Polonaise majuscules and superposing them over the majuscules of Scroll, another Canada Type font. The lowercase is a superposition of Scroll’s lowercase atop a pre-release version of Sterling Script, yet another Canada Type font. Heathen Two was made in a similar way, by combining two pre-release Canada Type scripts.

When Patricia Lillie was growing up, she thought the coolest thing in the world would be finding her own name listed in a library catalog. The fantasy came true in 1986 when her first children's book was published. Five more followed. The thrill of seeing her work on library shelves hasn't abated, but today, Lillie is just as likely to see one of her typefaces on the cover of a book. She has created several display faces and image fonts. My first typeface designs were based on lettering I'd done while working for a library, doing graphics work for the children's section," she explains. "I currently do a lot of web design, but type is my favorite thing." The Tickles (ITC Tickle and ITC Tickle Too) are Lillie's first ITC typeface releases. "I was playing around with a Sharpie marker one day and liked the way the letters looked," she recalls. "I started redoing the letters from scratch in Fontographer to see what developed, and liked those letters too." ITC Tickle is a bi-form font (with both cap and lowercase letters of the same size) that clearly breaks a typographic rule or two. ITC Tickle Too has the same basic lettershapes, but they've grown clusters of stipples that give a three-dimensional quality to the design. The result is a friendly, offbeat display family that's guaranteed to add a giggle to your work."

The original Frutiger typeface was designed in the early 1970s by Adrian Frutiger and his studio for the way finding system of the Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Soon after the airport was opened, a huge demand for the typeface arose from companies wanting to employ it in other signage systems, as well as in printed matter. The Frutiger typeface came out as part of the Linotype library in 1977. Epitomizing functionality and clarity both in signage and as a bread-and-butter typeface in print, Frutiger became a modern classic. Neue Frutiger® is the 2009 version of the Frutiger typeface family. It was revised and improved by Akira Kobayashi in close collaboration with Adrian Frutiger. While Frutiger Next, the 1999 revision, introduced a new concept (including a larger x-height, a more pronounced ascender height, narrower letter-spacing and, most notably, an italic with calligraphic traits), Neue Frutiger returns to the original 1977 design. The result is a well-balanced range of 10 finely-graded weights. Despite the various changes, the ‘New Frutiger’ still fits perfectly with Frutiger and serves to harmoniously enhance the styles already in existence. Neue Frutiger Variable are font files which are featuring two axis and have a preset instance from UltraLight to ExtraBlack and Condensed to Extended. Featured in: Best Fonts for Resumes, Best Fonts for Websites, Best Fonts for PowerPoints, Best Fonts for Tattoos

SF Groove Machine Pro, a typeface that's just as groovy as Johnny Bravo himself! This font family is so happening in a far-out way. Well, at least we think so.

Simultaneously futuristic and retro, Retron is perfectly named. Retron is a partially connected script - or is it a connected sans? Either way, it's a strange, unique combination that works surprisingly well.

We usually describe Mayayo as no good for condolence letters, nor for carving inscriptions, etc. Indeed, as we have seen, the designers who choose Mayayo used it in funny different ways.

Introducing Astheresia, a modern ligature serif font with elegant style. It's an easy way & perfect choice to make your design projects; logo, branding, invitation, social media ads & website have classy looks.

TAN KULTURE is a bold display type. Simple in a good way and efficient with tight kernings making it a nice choice if you want a retro look in your design.

A creative context 2003. Fontsmith was sharing a small, cold, whitewashed studio space in Northburgh Street, Clerkenwell. But things were on the up following prestigious custom type commissions for The Post Office and E4. “Slab serifs were on the brink of another revival, we could feel it,” says Jason Smith. “All we wanted to do was have a play with these slabs, go as far as we could within what was acceptable and readable.” “It wasn’t initially clear what was happening,” recalls Phil Garnham. “We were becoming very influenced by our surroundings, outside the studio space. We absorbed the essence and the designer grime of where we were.” Process Jason began by drawing stems on-screen. “The key aspect of the font is the upward bend of the leading shoulder serif, the way it kind of ramps up and then plummets back down the stem. “The regular and light characters are quite narrow – great for text but the bold is quite wide and chunky – better for headlines. I think ‘y’ is quite different for a slab design. We call it the Fontsmith ‘y’.” Promotion Fontsmith were determined to get FS Clerkenwell noticed. To launch the font, Ian Whalley, a designer friend of Fontsmith, captured words heard on the streets of Clerkenwell, set them in the new font and crafted a small book of typographic conversations. It was a first for Fontsmith. “I think that’s part of why this font has been so successful,” says Phil. “It really does embody the spirit of the area, as a special place for design, arts and crafts. And designers love that.” Contemporary twist FS Clerkenwell, based on influences in and around this part of London with a rich tradition of printing and design, mixes tradition with creation. Old-fashioned values meet new-school trends. Its quirky, contemporary character lends an edge to headlines, logotypes and any large-size text.

Buffet Script is based on fantastic calligraphy by Alf Becker, arguably the greatest American sign lettering artist of all time. The Alf Becker series of nameless alphabets published by Sign of the Times magazine in 1941 has attracted letter digitizers for a few years now, so it’s really a wonder that a few of those alphabets are still in the non-digital realm. It is understandable, though, that the basis for Buffet Script was not digitally attempted until now. The page presenting this alphabet shows a jungle of letters running into each others and swashes intertwining. The massive amount of work involved in digitizing such lettering, where scanning is nowhere near being an option, is quite obvious at a mere glance. If anyone was going to commit this particular alphabet to a digital form, it would have to be redrawn stroke by stroke and curve by curve on the computer. And don't we love a challenge! But seriously, the challenge was not the main attraction. In a way, the Becker approach to lettering is so far from digital that the imagination is almost forced to work out possibilities and letter combinations to solve problems presented by the scant showings in that magazine. After a few imaginative visualizations, the digital potential becomes clear in the mind, and the eye and hand follow. The result with Whomp (another Alf Becker-inspired work) was an enormous font with a lot of alternates and ligatures. With Buffet Script the imaginative process was no different, but the result particularly shines here, because this is some of the most fascinating flowing calligraphy ever seen. Calligraphy is where the accountability of all the little extra touches, such as alternates and swashes and ligatures, is raised to a higher level than in most other type categories. Buffet Script’s OpenType programming contains discretionary ligatures, stylistic and contextual alternates, interacting with each other to allow the composition of just the right word or sentence. This font is best used where lush elegance is one of the design’s requirements.