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

A tessellation is a shape that can be used to completely fill the plane—simple examples are isosceles triangles, squares, and hexagons. Tessellation patterns are eye-catching and visually appealing, which is the reason that they have long been popular in a variety of decorative situations. These Tessie fonts have two family members, a solid style that must have different colors when used and an outline style. They can be used separately or they can be used in layers with the outline style on top of the solid style. For rows to align properly, leading must be the same as point size. To see how patterns can be constructed, see the “Samples” file here. Shapes that tessellate and also resemble real-world objects are often called Escher-like tessellations. TessieMoreStuff contains mostly Escher-like tessellations with no clear organizing principle. Most or all of these shapes were discovered/created by the font designer during the past twenty years in the process of designing maze books, colorings books, and a book about tessellations. (Earlier tessellation fonts from IngrimayneType, the TessieDingies fonts, lack a black or filled version so cannot do colored patterns. The addition of a solid style that must be colored makes these new fonts a bit more difficult to use but offers far greater possibilities in getting visually interesting results.)

Inspired by the Indonesian island’s laid back feel and easy going culture, Bali Script is a tribute to the hand-lettered signage on beach bars, surf shacks and cafes. The swell of the stroke endings and the bolder-than-your-average gooey look convey a cool, contemporary take on baseball scripts. Overlay Bali Script Highlight for a cartoonish, glossy finish. Perfect for logos. This font is jam-packed with OpenType features that make smooth flowing text a doddle. Contextual alternates and ligatures are best left on by default. The alternates especially work a subtle magic that helps letters connect with an even rhythm, and automatically substitutes letters with the best fit alternatives based on their context, such as at the end of words, or adjacent to certain other letters. There are four stylistic sets (or all grouped together in the stylistic alternates feature for those without easy access to them) which do the following: SS01 - changes the r to a script form SS02 - makes certain caps more ‘scripty’ SS03 - capital I (and accented versions of it) get serifs SS04 - underline function. typing two or more underscores extends on underline beneath the previous word. Also included for your pleasure - oldstyle figures, automatic fractions, superior and inferior numbers, ordinals, some discretionary ligatures, swash alternates and extended language support.

A few bold caps drawn by Albert Du Bois for the 1906 Henderson Sign Painter book started me in the direction of looking at how sign painters approached slabs after the industrial revolution. The usual happened from there. My exercise in the early lettering roots of what eventually became the definition of geometric typography ended up having a life of its own. The majuscules led to minuscules, one idiosyncratic bold weight led to six more, and uprights led to italics. What was kind-of-interesting in the early twentieth century persuaded me to make it interesting enough a century later. This of course meant alternates, swashes, the standard baggage that keeps calling my name. Henderson Slab is a family of seven weights plus italics, all full of open features and extended Latin language support. Part of this family’s appeal is its coverage of nearly the entire of the slab serif through the last 100 years — the basis is the manual, humanist origins, the swashed forms come right out of the phototypesetting era, and the alternates and mostly modern constructs of contemporary ideas. The result is a set with the ability to function in modern spaces, from corporate to editorial, in text or display, while both winking and nodding at the roots of what is now considered a geometric endeavor. (Basic version do not include alternates, swashes, etc).

The hand-drawn script Costa Blanca Cyrillic was handwritten with a thin cola pen and will look great on branding design, posters, apparel, logotype, website header, fashion design, wedding card design, and more. Hand-drawn script font Costa Blanca contains a full set of uppercase letters and 2 full sets of lowercase letters and 36 ligatures - which can be used to create a handwritten calligraphy look. Use alternate lowercase and double-letter ligatures to create a perfect hand-painted look in your creations. The Cyrillic part of the font contains the uppercase letters and lowercase letters and 17 ligatures, giving a realistic hand-lettered style. Additional symbols font Costa Blanca symbols contain illustrations and elements and can help to make your design more original. It is a font with over 60 unique, hand-drawn illustrations and elements. A different symbol is assigned to every uppercase and lowercase standard character plus numbers 0-9 so you do not need graphics software just simply type the letter you need. Multilingual Support for 33 languages: Latin glyphs for Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh, Zulu. Works perfectly on the Canva platform. For Cricut & Silhouette recommended. And Cyrillic glyphs support for Russian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and Kazakh languages.

Casino Hand is a handwriting font that comes with some exciting new OpenType features*. The font comes with an alternate glyph for every uppercase letter, lowercase letter, numbers and some punctuation. These alternates are extremely easy to use with OpenType doing all of the hard work for you! Plus, you get the cross platform compatibility that OpenType provides. When the Contextual Ligatures feature of Casino Hand is utilized in your graphics application, the font substitutes a duplicate letter with the alternate glyph for that letter. This automatically makes the font look less like a font and more like real handwriting! Casino Hand also allows you to switch to use the alternate glyphs as the default by using the Stylistic Alternates feature. You can even use the two OpenType features together! This means that you can have duplicate glyph substitution with either the standard letters, or the alternates. You can also use the Glyph window in the Adobe CS applications to selectively choose characters. You can simply go into the glyph window and replace a letter that you don't like with its alternate. With Casino Hand, you essentially get two fonts in one, and a handwriting font that is much easier to use than previous designs. * Contextual Ligatures and Stylistic Alternates require Adobe CS applications. Many more software applications will be supporting these features soon!

While sketching for a music project logo, Donald DBXL Beekman looked at several wood type alphabets as a starting poing. One of these was No.120, patented in 1880 by William Hamilton Page. With its distinct diagonally cut serifs and round shapes cut off at top and bottom, it bore just the right feel for the project. DBXL digitized the alphabet, adding all characters needed for a full set. During this process all shapes were widened, tweaked and streamlined to enhance consistency and rhythm along the whole font. VLNL Bonen is an all-caps display font with a very specific western cowboy or circus look. For instance burger or barbecue grill restaurants would do well with this one. We can easily see it shine on a festival flyer or poster as well, and not just country & western festivals. VLNL Bonen is suitable for any ‘big’ use that needs to stand out of the crowd. Bonen is the Dutch word for beans, a world wide source of nutrition and proteins it comes in a multitude of shapes, colours and sizes. Beans are also the most eaten foods in a cowboy’s diet along the trail. Available in abundance and easily preserved and transported, many recipes on the cattle drives in the American Wild West used beans. Think of chili, mashed beans with biscuits and bean soups. “Keep them doggies movin’, cowboy!”