Etelka was designed for purposes of corporate identities, branding, product package design and outside lettering. It works anywhere an extremely legible typeface is needed. Package and label design often requires a wide choice of weights and widths: light and narrowed fonts to fit huge amount of mandatory informations onto a small box, or to squeeze text lines around a bottle, fat and wide styles to emphasize information on a poster or vehicle. The regular styles will serve well for business card, small texts and for your website. Etelka’s design idea is wide, open rounded square. Some details are extremely minimized: lower-case “a, n” or “u” lack their typical spur. The typeface has a distinctive industrial expression with all diagonals slightly softened, and her overall strict mono-linear principle is exceptionally broken only for fine optical adjustments in joints. Cyrillic and Greek scripts are present for international business, as well as rich latin diacritics. Etelka is actually very well suited for all kinds of visual communication, especially orientation systems in modern architecture. The first drawing of the font, which was later named “Etelka”, was submitted in 2004 for the Czech Television identity competition and was rejected by the jury. We later concluded that the design was worth extending to the current superfamily of 42 fonts. It is a reliable typeface for corporate identities and websites.

The designer of ITC Medea , Silvio Napoleone said: “I've always had an interest in early letter shapes, particularly how they influenced modern typographic designs. While I was on vacation in Greece, I had a chance to see, first-hand, examples of early letterforms and typography. They really made an impression on me.” The idea of combining the ancient and the modern to create something new was the primary inspiration behind ITC Medea. ITC Medea is essentially a careful blending of the modern sans serif with the elegant forms of the uncial. At first glance, Medea appears to be constructed of geometric shapes. However, closer inspection reveals many calligraphic subtleties. Stroke terminals are flared slightly in characters like the 'e' and 'c.' The top curve of the 'd' is more pronounced than the bottom, and characters like the 'o' are elliptical rather than round. “I gravitated towards the simplicity and legibility of the uncial and half-uncial,” Napoleone recalls. “I thought it would make a great titling font, and I was surprised at how attractive ITC Medea looked in a body text.”

Mantika Book was originally conceived and drawn parallel to the first Agilita drawings. *[images: pencil drawings] It took several years before having a chance looking at these designs again. But then, my first impulse was to turn this alphabet into a new sanserif, which was to become Mantika Sans. This was the starting point to conceive a super family consisting of different design styles and corresponding weights. The initial drawings of Mantika Book were refined and an Italic was developed to go with it. The aim was to create a modern serif typeface which is reminiscent of humanistic Renaissance typefaces, yet without following a particular historic model. Its large x-height for one is far away from original Renaissance models. Mantika Book was designed as a companion serif typeface to Mantika Sans that can be set for lengthy texts as in books, hence its name. It shares the same x-height with Mantika Sans but has longer ascenders and descenders, making for better word shapes in long, continuous reading. The approach of an ›old-style‹ looking typeface with large minuscules makes Mantika Book also a choice for magazine text settings where one often needs smaller point sizes to fit in a multiple columns layout. The unique details of Mantika Book are the asymetric bracketed serifs in the upright font and its higher stroke contrast than usual in a Renaissance style. The stems are slightly curved inwards. Also, the Italics have a low degree of inclination, which makes longer passages of text set in Italic rather pleasing to read. Another feature Mantika Book shares with Mantika Sans is that all four weights take up the same line length. It covers all European languages plus Cyrillic and Greek, is equipped with lots of useful scientific symbols [double square brackets, angle brackets, empty set, arrows] and the regular weight has small caps. There is a kind of an old-style feeling to Mantika Book, yet these citations were turned into a contemporary serif typeface with a soft but sturdy character.

THE SPARK Uniform started as a spark of inspiration one day while I was shopping at the store. I was looking at some typography on a can of dog food and the idea popped into my head, “What if there was a geometric typeface with a circular O that when condensed, the O became straight sided, instead of becoming an oval?” I quickly sketched out the concept of Uniform and liked what I saw, the only problem was I was working full time as a graphic designer, and as a newly married husband, I didn’t have any time to make the extensive typeface. LETDOWN A year and a half later, shortly after the birth of my first child, my boss cut my hours in half. Although stressful, I saw this event as an opportunity to finally have time to complete the typeface I had in my head. I spent a couple months putting together a Kickstarter campaign, thinking it would be a smashing success, and I would be able to live off the donations long enough to complete the typeface. Wrong! The campaign was a flop and I was left discouraged and dejected, thinking that the great idea I had in my head would never become a reality... PERSEVERANCE At the end of the year, in December 2013, I decided to go for it and make this new type family no matter what it took. I began waking up a few hours before work each morning (getting only four hours of sleep each night) carefully crafting each individual glyph day by day. After nine months of hard work (and just about killing myself in the process!) in October 2014, I finally had a finished product ready to be released to the public! THE PINNACLE Fast forward a few years and now Uniform has reached it's pinnacle, Uniform Pro. Uniform Pro now offers extended language support including Cyrillic and Greek character sets, integrated italic styles, additional weights, and additional OpenType features.

A. R. Bosco made Romany for ATF in 1934, when there was much demand for script types in advertising and publishing. It was the high times of Speedball lettering, and a casual script in that fashion was naturally very welcome. It became an instant hit and was used widely for a good part of the 1930s and 1940s. Apricot is not only a revival of Bosco's work, but also a major expansion of it. It contains very effective solutions to the many problems presented by the original metal type, which had to always be tracked too wide because of the forms of some of its letters. Solving these problems was not an easy task. A comprehensive set of alternates was designed to give the user the ability to replace some forms in certain uses, and a large set of two-, three-, and even four-letter ligatures was added to solve the awkwardness of some of the more common letter pairings. The resulting work is quite delightful, especially for those who like to take advantage of OpenType technology. Apricot is the rarest kind of script in digital type these days, the kind that is upright, round, bold, feminine, and distinctly young in appearance. A birthday cake for a teenage girl can certainly benefit from these letters. So can greeting cards, family show posters, diary covers, party invitations, women's shirts, toy packaging, celebration literature, and almost anything that needs that special touch of shiny happy youth. Apricot is available in all common font formats. The Postscript and True Type versions come in 4 fonts, which include one for alternates and two for ligatures alongside the main font. The OpenType version is one font that contains more than 380 glyphs and all the necessary programming for the palettes of OpenType-supporting applications. If you liked Canada Type's hugely popular font Dominique, you will love Apricot.

A type designed in a grid, like on display panels Type is not only printed. There were always and still are a number of forms of type versions which function completely differently. Even very early in the history of script there were attempts to combine a few single elements into the diverse forms of individual characters and also efforts to construct the forms of letters within a geometric grid system. The “instructions” of Albrecht Dürer are probably most well-known. But although designers of past centuries assumed the ideal to basically be an artist’s handwritten script, the idea which developed in the course of mechanization was to “build” characters in a building block system only by stringing together one basic element — the so-called grid type was discovered, represented most commonly today by »pixel types.« But even before computers, there were display systems which presented types with the help of a mechanical grid display, like the display panels in public transportation (bus, train) or at airports and train stations. In a streetcar, I met up with a modern variation of this display which reveals the name of each tram stop as it is approached. This system was based on a customary coarse square grid, but the individual squares were also divided again diagonally in four triangles. In this way it is possible to display slants and to simulate round forms more accurately as with only squares. The displayed characters still aren’t comparable to a decent typeface — on the contrary, the lower case letters are surprisingly ugly — but they form a much more legible type than that of ordinary [quadrate] grid types. DeDisplay from ingoFonts is this kind of type, constructed from tiny triangles which are in turn grouped in small squares. The stem widths are formed by two squares; the height of upper case characters is 10, the x-height 7 squares. DeDisplay is available in three versions: DeDisplay 1 is the complex original with spaces between the triangles, DeDisplay 2 forgoes dividing the triangles and thus appears somewhat darker or “bold,” and DeDisplay 3 is to some extent the “black” and doesn’t even include spaces between the individual squares.

Taco is a new Mexican style font family based on our Tavern and Algerian Mesa type designs. When I finished the extra heavier weights for Tavern I decided to play around with a decorated version, the extra bold letters allowed for much more room to work with an inlay pattern. After experimenting with several designs I decided on a Mexican pattern because the original base font is very popular in Mexican restaurant logos and menus plus it's frequently used on Tequila bottle labels. I originally planned three weights for the Taco font family, however, after completing the bold weight I've decided to release it now so you may put it to use while the regular and extra bold are being produced, sorry I can't estimate a release date for the two other weights. To use the fill font layers you'll need an application that allows you to work in layers such as Adobe Creative Suite products. The Taco Fill Uno font may be used as a stand alone font, however, we recommend searching for our Tavern font family where you'll find three different bold weights of this same design. Opentype features aware applications are also needed for accessing the many alternate glyphs in Taco, all the alternates that you love in our Tavern fonts are also available in Taco. While the fill font layers are in registration with one another some applications may throw them out of alignment by changing the spacing. Custom inter letter spacing in Adobe Creative Suite may also throw the fill fonts out of alignment. We recommend doing your custom spacing first then duplicate the type layer and change to the next fill font and color. The inspiration for the Taco name of this font family was from a homemade Taco dinner I made for a guest at my house, after dinner I searched to see if there was a commercial font named Taco. There was no such font named Taco and the rest is history. The old Stephenson Blake Algerian font has come a long way since 1908, and we're not done with it yet. We hope you enjoy our Taco font family, we're looking forward to see it in use.

Jugendstil Initials were designed by Heinrich Vogeler around 1905, based on the German blackletter tradition. A similar set of initials by Vogeler, but based on roman letters was released by Rudhardsche Geisserei of Offenbach at about this time. I believe the originals were woodcuts. The backgrounds to the letterforms may be seen as examples of Heimatkunst, an art movement within Germany that drew deliberate inspiration from the rural countryside. Like the Arts and Crafts Movement in England a little earlier, Heimatkunst may be seen, in part, as a romantic rejection of urban industrialization, while at the same time representing a back-to-roots nationalism. Like any river, it was fed by many streams. Jugendstil Initials is an experiment with which I am most pleased. It is far and away the most complex font HiH has produced and I was uncertain whether or not it could be done successfully. To oversimplify, a font is produced by creating outlines of each character, using points along the outline to define the contour. A simple sans-serif letter A with crossbar can be created using as few as 10 points. We decided to make a comparison of the number of points we used to define the uppercase A in various fonts. Cori, Gaiety Girl and Page No 508 all use 12 points. Patent Reclame uses 39 and Publicity Headline uses 43. All the rest of the A’s, except the decorative initials, fall somewhere in between. The initial letters run from 48 points for Schnorr Initials to 255 for Morris Initials Two, with 150 being about average. Then there is a jump to 418 points for Morris Initials One and, finally, to 1626 points for Jugendstil Initials. And this was only after we selectively simplified the designs so our font creation software (Fontographer) could render them. The average was 1678, not including X and Y. There was no X and Y in the original design and we have provided simple stand-ins to fill out the alphabet, without trying to imitate the style of the orginal design. We did a lot of looking to find a compatible lower case. We decided that Morris Gothic from the same period was the best match in color, design and historical context. We felt so strongly about the choice that we decided to produce our Morris Gothic font for the purpose of providing a lower case for Jugendstil Initials. The long s, as well as the ligatures ch and ck are provided. at 181, 123 (leftbrace) and 125 (rightbrace) respectively. This font was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it. I hope you agree.

Neue Haas Unica by Toshi Omagari: The original purpose behind the creation of the typeface Haas Unica was to provide a sympathetic update of Helvetica. But now the font designer Toshi Omagari has decided to make this typeface his own and has thus significantly supplemented and extended it. In the late 1970s, at the same time at which hot metal typesetting was being replaced by phototypesetting, the Haas Type Foundry commissioned a group of specialists known as "Team '77" consists of Andre Gurtler, Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind to adapt Max Miedinger's font The characters of Haas Unica are somewhat narrower than those of Helvetica so that the larger bowls, such as those of the "b" and "d", appear more delicate and have a slightly more pleasing effect. In general, the spacing of Haas Unica was increased to provide for improved kerning and thus enhance the legibility of the typeface in smaller point sizes. Major changes were made to the lowercase "a", in that the curve of the upper bowl became rounder and its spur was eliminated. The form of the "k" was additionally modified to remove the offset leg so that both diagonals originate from the main stem. The outstroke of the uppercase "J" was also significantly curtailed. In addition to many minor alterations, such as to the length of the horizontal bars of the "E", "F" and "G" and to the angle of the tail of the "Q", the leg of the "R" was extended and made more diagonal. In the case of the numerals, the upper curve of the "2" was reduced and the lower loops of the "5" and "6" were correspondingly adapted. The sweep of the diagonal of the "7" was also reduced. Several decades later, Toshi Omagari returned to the original sketches with the objective of reinvigorating this almost totally forgotten typeface. First, however, he needed to revise the drafts prepared by Team '77 to adapt them for digital typesetting. So Omagari carefully adjusted the proportions of the glyphs, achieving a more uniform overall effect across all line weights and removed details that had become redundant for contemporary typefaces. It was also apparent from the old drafts that it had been the case that the original plan was to create more than the four weights that were published. Omagari has added five additional styles, giving his Neue Haas Unica? a total of nine weights, from Ultra Light to Extra Black. He has also greatly extended the range of glyphs. Providing as it does typographic support for Central and European languages, Greek and Cyrillic texts, Neue Haas Unica is now ready to be used for major international projects. In addition, it has been supplied with small caps and various sets of numerals. With its resolute clarity and excellent typographic support, Neue Haas Unica is suitable for use in a wide range of new contexts. The light and elegant characters can be employed in the large point sizes to create, for example, titling and logos while the very bold styles come into their own where the typography needs to be powerful and expressive. The medium weights can be used anywhere, for setting block text and headlines.

Here I am, once again digging up 60-year sign lettering and trying to reconcile it with the typography of my own time. The truth is I've had this particular Alf Becker alphabet in my sights for a few years now. But in the typical way chaos shuffles the days, Buffet Script and Whomp won the battle for my attentions way back when, then Storefront beat the odds by a nose a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, revisiting Alf Becker’s work is always a breath of fresh air for me, not to mention the ego boost I get from confirming that I can still hack my way through the challenges, which is something I think people ask themselves about more often as they get older. You can never tell what may influence your work, or in this case remind you to dig it out of dust drawers and finally mould it into one of your own experiences. On my recent visits to the States and Canada, I noticed that quite a few high-end steak houses try their best to recreate an urban American 1930s atmosphere. This is quite evident in their menus, wall art, lighting, music, and so on. The ambience says your money is well spent here, because your food was originally choice-cut by a butcher who wears a suit, cooked by a chef who may be your neighbour 20 minutes from downtown, and delivered by a waitress who can do the Charleston when the lights dim and who just wouldn't mind laughing with you over drinks at the bar later. So Steak is just that, a face for menus and wall art in those places that see themselves in the kind of jazzy, noirish world where one-liners rule and exclamation points are part of a foreign language. As is usual with my lettering-inspired faces, there is very little left of the original Alf Becker alphabet. Of course, the challenges present in bringing typographic functionality to what is essentially pure hand lettering gives the spirit of the original art a hell of a rollercoaster ride. But I think that spirit survived the adventure, and may in fact be even somewhat magnified here. This font is over 850 glyphs. It’s loaded with ligatures, swashes, ending forms, alternates, ascender and descender variations, and extended Latin language support. Steak comes in 3 versions. According to your taste you can choose Barbecue, Braised or Smoked. It’s up to you!

Garish was inspired by how trees curl and twist their roots into the ground. At how they stretch up desperate to scratch up into heaven.

Tailor was a study of slab serif style with round and comfortable feel. I wanted to merge round shapes with exaggerated ink traps for legibility.

A light roundhand with mildly clubbed terminals on the capitals. It was expertly transferred from an engravers’ pattern plate to the Fotosetter Intertype about 1955.

Fashyon was created as an experiment blending script and calligraphic elements, and with a perfect balance between characters, looks dynamic yet with a classical look.

How To Consume Oxygen was created with the plan of emulating words written on a fluted-steel 'warehouse'-type door in advanced state of rusting.

American Brewery was inspired by lettering found on vintage beer label. Clean and rough version are available, “rough” version comes with a vintage letterpress feel.

Digitally engineered by Steve Jackaman. Based on the original Willard T. Sniffin design of 1933 for ATF, this informal brush script was known as Keynote.

This font was made in collaboration with Nikki at Melonheadz Illustrating. The quirky look and feel of the lettering is perfect for illustrations for children.

What was the inspiration for designing the font? Spanish script from 16th Century. What are its main characteristics and features? Handwriting. Usage recommendations: Literature books.

Edwardian font was designed by Colin Brignall, a free-flowing roman face with hints of the early Edwardian period. Edwardian exudes warmth, individuality and charm.

Cartoonist JNL was modeled from a casual brush lettering style found in a catalog of lettering templates sold by the Wright-Regan Instrument Company (Wrico).

The word "Signs" hand-lettered on the cover of a 1930s instructional book on sign and poster lettering was the basis for Poster Inline JNL.

The typeface was designed at ParaType (ParaGraph) in 1990 by Alexander Tarbeev based on Pragmatica typeface, 1989 by Vladimir Yefimov. A monospaced condensed sans serif.

Justine, while a playful, swirly, girly font is a complete font with the full character set. It was inspired by the handwriting of Justine Childs.

The hand punched lettering of an antique French shipping stencil was the inspiration for French Shipping Stencil JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions.

PT Adventure™ was designed by Natalia Vasilyeva and licensed by ParaType in 2001. An original calligraphic script. For use in advertising and display typography.

This font was designed as an experiment in simplfying the Blackletter. We never showed it in the Solotype catalog, so it didn't get much use.

Ornamental font, based on samples of Alphonse Mucha, who was an Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist. In this collection assembled typical wavy shape secession.

JasperSqueeze was an attempt to do a decent text face. Blending it with XAabced resulted in JabcedHy, which seems to be superior to both parents.

Edwardian font was designed by Colin Brignall, a free-flowing roman face with hints of the early Edwardian period. Edwardian exudes warmth, individuality and charm.

This font was made to be clean and legible. It's versatile nature makes it perfect for note taking, posters, or even for long form copy.

Andale Mono was designed by Steve Matteson. It is a highly legible monospaced font designed with the needs of terminal emulation and software development environments.

Presenting a vintage typeface named "Fisherman's Knot". Its style was inspired by boating knots and old graphics heritage. Thank you and have a great day!

Adroit was designed by Phil Martin in 1981. Adroit’s letters have a strong contrast between thick and thin strokes and a distinct diagonal stress.

Shopping Spree JNL was inspired by the hand lettering on the title card for the 1938 film "Fast Company" starring Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice.