The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵 ms3nd; modern Arabic: الْمُسْنَد musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the 9th century BCE. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, and Hasaitic, and the Ethiopic language Ge'ez in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the script date to the 9th century BCE in Yemen. There are no letters for vowels, which are marked by matres lectionis. Its mature form was reached around 800 BCE, and its use continued until the 6th century CE, including Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in variants of the alphabet, when it was displaced by the Arabic alphabet In Ethiopia and Eritrea, it evolved later into the Ge'ez script, which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages (including various Semitic, Cushitic, and Nilo-Saharan languages).

The Typeface «Mixcoatl» by Elia Salvisberg was developed as a part of a course at the Lucerne School of Design and Art in 2016. Based on the book «The Empire of the Inca», a display-font has been created, which is inspired by the graphic language of the South American Empire of the Incas. At the beginning, only capital letters were designed but there was the desire for a complete typeface – which is why the missing signs were added. The font is based on a grid, so the characters are constructed equivalently and a uniform geometric font arose. The name was adopted from the god of hunting who plays an important role in the mythology of the Aztecs and appears in various forms. The uppercase letters can also be represented and combined in two alternative character-sets, so there are a lot of opportunities to combine uppercase words in different forms.

The typography on a 1964 children’s activity book published by Whitman entitled “Build with Stencils” was in a bold, condensed design. The only problem was that the ‘rails’ [the parts that divide a letter into stencil pieces] were too narrow and would disappear at smaller point sizes. Widening the ‘rails’ just a bit greatly improved the appearance of the stencil characters. Play Day Stencil JNL is now available in both regular and oblique versions. In its day, the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin published dozens of activity books for children, including a number of them with stencils. The company was a division of Western Publishers from the early 1900s through the 1970s, but went through a number of sales and name changes. Currently [as Whitman once again] it is owned by Anderson Press, and is known for its line of coin folders and books on coin collecting.

URW Grotesk was designed exclusively for URW by Prof. Hermann Zapf in 1985. At the same time, Zapf designed URW Antiqua to go with URW Grotesk. At that time, we were working with a large German publishing house (Axel Springer) on type design solutions to replace certain of their newspaper fonts. Test pages of large German newspapers (e.g. Bildzeitung) were printed with URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua font families. For reasons not disclosed to us, the project was dropped and Springer never used URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua for that purpose. Anyway, Zapf finished his designs and URW produced both families. Zapf’s intention for the two typefaces was to design two highly legible, open and classical fonts that could be used for any kind of typography, especially books, newspapers, magazines, etc. However, we realized later on, that URW Grotesk is very well suited for multi media applications on screen.

URW Grotesk was designed exclusively for URW by Prof. Hermann Zapf in 1985. At the same time, Zapf designed URW Antiqua to go with URW Grotesk. At that time, we were working with a large German publishing house (Axel Springer) on type design solutions to replace certain of their newspaper fonts. Test pages of large German newspapers (e.g. Bildzeitung) were printed with URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua font families. For reasons not disclosed to us, the project was dropped and Springer never used URW Grotesk and URW Antiqua for that purpose. Anyway, Zapf finished his designs and URW produced both families. Zapf's intention for the two typefaces was to design two highly legible, open and classical fonts that could be used for any kind of typography, especially books, newspapers, magazines, etc. However, we realized later on, that URW Grotesk is very well suited for multi media applications on screen.

Soundboy is an ode to Elvis Presley and his music. The font was drawn by hand from a number of images from the Blue Hawaii film and finished to perfection. The digitization was done with great care and the font was also provided with a number of extras such as ligatures. Soundboy is a playful and translatable font that at first sight has already caught everyone with a spontaneous and broad smile. Logos, house styles, magazines, covers, vinyl records, book covers, t-shirts, house styles and all kinds of other graphic expressions will look a lot happier. This font is more than welcome in this sour society. The packaging makes the consumer buy and Soundboy certainly contributes to that. Don't wait for someone else to get it in your area, the best designs deserve the most beautiful fonts. Enjoy the "Soundboy font", it will never let you down.

Alta Mesa is a revival of an old type design from the 1800's that was sold by most of the type foundries in the US and Europe of that time period so it is difficult to know the foundry of origin. New with this version are the fill fonts and plain styles, the fill fonts may be used as stand alone fonts, however the letter spacing is much wider, the plain versions are recommended if you desire a solid black weight. The regular Fill font is in registration with the Regular and Open versions while the Fill L font is in registration with the L and Open L versions. This was a very charming font in its time which was heavily used on old billheads and letterheads. We're pleased to bring this type design, which hasn't been used for over 100 years, into the digital world today.

Frogurt is a soft, plump, rounded slab serif font full of fun! Its fat curves make me think of frozen yogurt, and I've always preferred the shorthand "frogurt" to "fro-yo." I was inspired by a 30-year-old hand-carved wooden sign; when I went to try to find a font with a similar look, I couldn't really find anything soft and funky enough! It was a real Goldilocks situation: that one was too thin, that one's corners were too sharp, that one's baseline was too strict. So since I couldn't find something I liked, I made something I liked! I gave Frogurt big pillowy slab serifs, a slightly irregular baseline, and just enough tilt and variation to be fun while still keeping things really clean and readable. The outlines are cleaned up and sharp, so Frogurt will work well for both printing and cutting. Frogurt clocks in with just over 570 glyphs total, including all of the basics (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and a ton of punctuation), plus over 310 extended Latin characters for language support, and over 50 alternates and ligatures to add some variety and flair. Frogurt is PUA-encoded for easy access to all characters.

Hal Taylor's ITC Outpost was not the result of a detailed design brief, nor was there a methodical development of key concepts or characters. Outpost just seemed to emerge all at once during a brief sketching session," says Taylor. "I guess what I was thinking of was an antiquated Western perception of some sort of Middle Eastern hand lettering - a 'mysterious East' sort of thing." ITC Outpost's sense of the exotic has an almost Art Nouveau quality, with its sensuous curves and sweeping strokes. The open bowls and opposing weight bias in many of the characters add to the design's striking personality. A suite of alternate and swash letters enables the setting of distinctive display copy. ITC Outpost's family of roman, italic, and swash characters is compact but versatile. The caps have the grace and authority of a titling face. Add in the lowercase and swash letters and copy is transformed into something lighthearted and full of verve. ITC Outpost creates dramatic headlines and adds a flourish to invitations, menus, logos and packaging An accomplished designer, Taylor has spent most of his career in the lettering and typographic arts. He began as a photo-lettering typographer, setting headlines and creating custom lettering, and now works in the publishing industry. "

Syntax was designed by Swiss typographer Hans Eduard Meier, and issued in 1968 by the D. Stempel AG type foundry as their last hot metal type family. Meier used an unusual rationale in the design of this sans serif typeface; it has the shapes of humanist letters or oldstyle types (such as Sabon), but with a modified monoline treatment. The original drawings were done in 1954; first by writing the letters with a brush, then redrawing their essential linear forms, and finally adding balanced amounts of weight to the skeletons to produce optically monoline letterforms. Meier wanted to subtly express the rhythmical dynamism of written letters and at the same time produce a legible sans serif typeface. This theme was supported by using a very slight slope in the roman, tall ascenders, terminals at right angles to stroke direction, caps with classical proportions, and the humanist style a and g. The original foundry metal type was digitized in 1989 to make this family of four romans and one italic. Meier completely reworked Syntax in 2000, completing an expanded and improved font family that is available exclusively from Linotype GmbH as Linotype Syntax. In 2009 the typeface family was renamed into a more logical naming of "Syntax Next" to fit better in the Platinum Collection naming."

Bauhaus is a style of art that was born in Weimar Germany in the early part of the 20th century. The font that bears the bauhaus name was constructed in accordance with this style by making use of spheres and squares with little or no added flourishes. Since this typeface was already minimalistic in appearance, it was difficult to produce a similarly styled font. So I went back to bauhaus’ architectural roots for inspiration. The result contains a more detailed composition, but is still focused on the basic aesthetics that continue to make bauhaus a popular art form. Baudi has a glyph count of 388 and supports the following languages Afrikaans, Albanian, Asu, Basque, Bemba, Bena, Bosnian, Catalan, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, German, Gusii, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kabuverdianu, Kalaallisut, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Lower Sorbian, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Scottish Gaelic, Sena, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Turkmen, Upper Sorbian, Vunjo, Walser, Zulu

The font family Univers is one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century. The family has the advantage of having a variety of weights and styles, which, even when combined, give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. The clear, objective forms of Univers make this a legible font suitable for almost any typographic need. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry’s art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts — quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Peignot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype. The Deberny & Peignot type library was acquired in 1972 by Haas, and the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) was folded into the D. Stempel AG/Linotype collection in 1985/1989.

Philadelphian is a revival of a MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan font from 1867 by the same name. The regular version with shadow outline was the only style that was offered in 1867. We've taken the original design further by creating two additional weights of medium and bold plus plain black versions. The medium and bold weights are unique because only the horizontal strokes increase in thickness while the vertical strokes remain the same in each weight. Philadelphian Nite is the plain black version of this font family, Nite is the casual spelling of the word Night meaning dark or black. In the late 1800's Philadelphian was a very popular typeface which can be seen on many billheads and letterheads through the early 1900's. If you're looking for a western style font that doesn't look like any other then Philadelphian is the right choice. While the name doesn't remind you of the cowboy genre we've kept the original name for historical reasons because this font was so popular in its day. We plan on going forward with a weathered version of Philadelphian which will be released under a southwestern style name. With Philadelphian we've decided to set the complete family price to an amount that may be considered on sale all of the time.

Dream Within a Dream was the title of exhibition of Czech art inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe curated by Otto M Urban and Veronika Hulíková. Three dozens of artists exhibited their works in the Czech National Gallery in 2020. The cataloguje was printed with the use of the present typeface. Artists took significant interest in Poe's literary oeuvre only after the writer's untimely death. This was mainly thanks to the poet Charles Baudelaire who translated Poe's works to French. As early as in the second half of the 19th century, prominent artists such as Edouard Manet, Odilon Redon, James Ensor and Gustave Doré created remarkable artworks inspired by Poe. Although the first Czech translations of Poe's woks date to the 1850s, artworks inspired by them only appeared several decades later, at the turn on the 20th century. Poe's poems and short stories inspired František Kupka and soon after him, Josef Váchal, Jan Konůpek and František Kobliha. Alfred Kubin, a German artist born in Bohemia, made illustrations for the German translation of Poe's collected stories. Later on, Alén Diviš and František Tichý created further Poe-inspired artworks. Poe was a source of inspiration for Jan Švankmajer and more recently, František Štorm and Jaroslav Róna.

Ladoga — one of the most beautiful Russian designs from the soviet period. The type family was developed in Polygraphmash in 1968 by Anatoly Shchukin on the base of his own lettering for book covers and titles. It was one of the first attempts in Cyrillic typography to create text face in a style of renaissance antiqua. Stylization to broad pen calligraphy resembles early forms of Latin types that were based on handwritten humanistic minuscule. Unique in its character set digital version of Ladoga was designed by Viktor Kharik on the base of artworks of Shchukin for ParaType. The family consists of roman and italic styles in text and display versions. Character set includes characters of original shapes as well as more modern alternatives. Besides there are a set of additional characters, old style figures and small caps. The fonts cover all modern languages based on Latin and Cyrillic scripts, Greek alphabet (including polytonic extension), Hebrew and historical Cyrillic letters. Ladoga is gorgeous in display sizes and pretty readable in texts. It’s well suitable for fiction literature, historical books, art criticism, religious and philologist works. It will be extreme helpful for multilingual issues and for inclusions into body text historical passages in original orthography. The family was released in 2010.

VetteLetters is proud to bring you the TpKurier-family. It is cooked up by our German chef Martin Lorenz currently living in lovely Barcelona! Chef Lorenz about the TpKurier recipe: “TpKurier is the second redesign we did of Courier. The first redesign in 2000, although based on a five-unit grid, was drawn completely by hand. Six years later we designed another grid version of Courier, and the TpKurier family was born. This version is completely constructed up till its last detail. We didn't want to correct ‘mistakes’ deriving from the use of the grid, but instead make them visible (see “S”). TpKurier is based on a very simple grid, composed a proportion of four units high by two units wide. A series of other links between them make it possible to form a font from this grid. We felt it was important to consistently work within these limitations so that any unexpected asperities would help provide the font with its character. Even though it is a rough constructed typeface it was important to us to design real italic lower case letters and not just a sloped roman (see “a”, “g” or “s”). The first family published contained a serif and sans-serif version of the TpKurier, with italic and bold.”

John Seddon (1644-1700), was a famous english writing master, the leading calligrapher of his time, and master of Sir John Johnson’s Free Writing School in Priest’s Court, Foster Lane. His portrait was drawn by William Faithorne and was engraved by John Sturt as the frontispiece for his copy-books, such as ‘The Ingenious youth’s companion’ of c.1690 and 'The pen-man’s paradise' of c.1695. These were engraved after his work by others. Your extra-rare book - "The Pen-mans Paradise Both pleasent & Profitable OR Examples of all ye usuall hands of this Kingdome. Adorn'd with variety of ffigures an Flourishes done by Command of hand. Each ffigure being one continued & entire Track of the pen most where of may be struck as well Reverse (or to answer bothwayes) as Forward", London (1965). - YES (that is the title of the book) was the starting point to these new extra accurated works of Iza W, a series of revivals of the penmanship Seddon’s artworks, animal and human kingdon inspired penmanship forms in the Bestiario font. On the other hand, his highly ornamented animal kingdon inspired capitals and alphabets in the Seddon Penmans Paradise Capitals typeface. The “SeddonsFleurons” completes the collection. Fantastic choice to elaborated barocque/renaissance inspired and historical accurated layouts.

Cute FS Kitty is the type equivalent of Bagpuss: plump, cute, cuddly and not fond of exercise. So don’t go giving it a run-out on body copy; FS Kitty is an all-caps font made for showing off in posters and headlines, and on products, point-of sale and especially sweets. Blubber Kitty had been quietly curled up in Phil Garnham’s sketchbook for a year before he brought it out to be brushed up. “It was in the mix as a basic form when I started thinking about FS Lola. It was a twisted, bubbly beauty – quite squishable and huggable. The working file was called Blubber. “At that time it was a basic construction of strokes. I created the ‘A’ first, purely as a shape to play with, not as type. I flipped it for ‘V’, and copied that for a ‘W’. I flipped the ‘W’ for an ‘M’... I thought, ‘This looks a bit wacky, but I like it,’ and just carried on. The most tricky characters were the ‘B’ ‘P’ and ‘R’. I must have drawn about 20 kinds of B for this, just to get it to fit.” Variety “When the regular weight of Kitty had been designed,” says Jason Smith, “it just felt like a natural progression to go on and explore how far we could go with it: Light, Solid, Headline, Shadow.” Phil Garnham thinks there’s still more to come. “There are some really individual characters in this font that I think have yet to be exploited: the Greek Omega symbol, the strange face in the ampersand. Like Bagpuss, Kitty has kept a low profile so far. “We know people are using Kitty. In fact, it was the first of any of our fonts that we sold on the day it was released. But I still haven’t seen it out there in the wild. It’s going to be a exciting moment.”

Cute FS Kitty is the type equivalent of Bagpuss: plump, cute, cuddly and not fond of exercise. So don’t go giving it a run-out on body copy; FS Kitty is an all-caps font made for showing off in posters and headlines, and on products, point-of sale and especially sweets. Blubber Kitty had been quietly curled up in Phil Garnham’s sketchbook for a year before he brought it out to be brushed up. “It was in the mix as a basic form when I started thinking about FS Lola. It was a twisted, bubbly beauty – quite squishable and huggable. The working file was called Blubber. “At that time it was a basic construction of strokes. I created the ‘A’ first, purely as a shape to play with, not as type. I flipped it for ‘V’, and copied that for a ‘W’. I flipped the ‘W’ for an ‘M’... I thought, ‘This looks a bit wacky, but I like it,’ and just carried on. The most tricky characters were the ‘B’ ‘P’ and ‘R’. I must have drawn about 20 kinds of B for this, just to get it to fit.” Variety “When the regular weight of Kitty had been designed,” says Jason Smith, “it just felt like a natural progression to go on and explore how far we could go with it: Light, Solid, Headline, Shadow.” Phil Garnham thinks there’s still more to come. “There are some really individual characters in this font that I think have yet to be exploited: the Greek Omega symbol, the strange face in the ampersand. Like Bagpuss, Kitty has kept a low profile so far. “We know people are using Kitty. In fact, it was the first of any of our fonts that we sold on the day it was released. But I still haven’t seen it out there in the wild. It’s going to be a exciting moment.”

Thalweg serif typeface is a project focused on the digitalization and development of the Thalweg font. The font was originally designed in 1993 by the Bulgarian artist Ivan Kyosev. In 2018 Ani Dimitrova began the revival of the Thalweg font and converted the drawings into a digital form. The existing set of characters required some necessary expansions such as the development of capital letters, alternative symbols and many other functions. Furthermore, some additional weights were developed which aimed to make the font more complete. Thalweg was completed in 2020 with 16 weights ranging from Thin to Black with extra drawn italics and small caps versions, each style containing more than 1100 glyphs. The font comes with an extended coverage of the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek Scripts. All of the weights are specifically equipped for complex, professional typography with Open Type Features. These features include: Small Caps, Ligatures, Discretionary Ligatures, Superscript, Subscript, Tabular Figures, Old-Style Figures, Circled Figures, Arrows, Matching currency symbols and fraction. The Thalweg serif typeface is a perfect choice for body text, branding design, web design, editorial design and more. Ivan Kyosev (1933-1994) was one of Bulgaria’s most famous artists whose work influenced several generations of bulgarian designers. He was born on February 5, 1933, in the city of Burgas. In 1957 he graduated in illustration at the National Academy of Art in Sofia led by Prof. Iliya Beshkov. Mr. Kyosev was a member in the management of the “Graphics and Illustration” section in the Union of Bulgarian Artists, member of the UBA board, artist in the publishing houses “September” and “World”. Together with Boris Angelushev, he worked on the layout design of the “Literary Front” newspaper. Furthermore, in 1963 - 1964 he was the main artist in the publishing house “Prosveta”. Ivan Kyosev excelled in the field of illustration, book design and library layouts in various genres (classics, children's literature, poetry, journalism, memoirs, etc.). He is also the author of many fonts.