Who haven't heard the phrase that ‘any past time was better’?. Although I sometimes find this phrase a little too pessimistic (because I try to think that the best is yet to come), it may be true regarding my passion, typography. I'm too young (29) unfortunately, and this means I did not have the pleasure of being contemporary with maybe the man who has influenced my work the most (1). The man that showed that letters are more than just letters to be read. Herb Lubalin (1918-1981), also called sometimes as ‘the rule basher’ (2), smashed the taboos and sacred rules of type design and gave it personality. He rejected the functionalist philosophy of europeans in favor of an eclectic and exuberant style. To him, letters were not merely vessels of form, they were objects of meaning. (3). Nowadays, when looking at his portfolio, who dares to deny that the term ‘typography’ and ‘beauty’ may go hand-in-hand without any problem? Ed Benguiat, one of Herb’s partners, still likes making jokes with the phrase “screw legibility, type should be beautiful” and what I understand of this is not to forget the rules, but to know and break them carefully. In an era of pure eclecticism, we, the lovers of flourishes and swashes, can't do nothing but admire all the legacy that Lubalin, this wonderful type-guru, left. My font Lubaline read as “the line of Lubalin” is my humble tribute to him. Those who know his work, may see the influences easily like in his ‘Beards’ (1976) and ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965) posters; the art-deco forms in many of his amazing logos and practically in all his creations where letters seem to be alive just like you and me. I really hope that the future finds me still learning more and more about type-design and letterforms, and like him, always willing to make innovations in my field: Because letters are not just letters to be read. NOTES (1) These are some of my fonts in which some of Lubalin’s influences can be seen (in order of creation): Reina, Aire, Erotica, String, Beatle, Heroe, Selfie, Model, Seventies, and many others that are still in progress. (2) (3) Steven Heller. Herb Lubalin: Rule Basher. U&lc (1998) http://www.printmag.com/imprint/my-favorite-lubalin/

Designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli with Maria Chiara Fantini, Lovelace is Zetafonts homage to the tradition of nineteenth century “Old Style” typography - a revival of Renaissance hand-lettered shapes driven by the desire to create a less formal and more friendly alternative to Bodonian serifs. While taking inspiration from the letter shapes created by Pheimester or Alexander Kay - with their calligraphic curves and heavy angled serifs that influenced Benguiat and Goudy’s typefaces in the 70s - we also tried to add elegance and contrast by following another 19th century revival style: the Elzevir. This digital homage to victorian typography, aptly named after the algorist daughter of lord Byron, is developed in two optical sizes, both in a six weights range from extralight to extrabold. The text variant offers maximum readability thanks to the generous x-height and screen-friendly design, while the display variant excels in the sharp contrast and thin details needed for editorial and large-size titling use. The italics, strongly influenced by calligraphy, have been complemented with a display script family, including luscious swashes and connected lowercase letters, lovingly designed by Zetafont in-house calligrapher. All the thirty weights of Lovelace cover over 200 languages that use latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets, and include advanced Open Type features as Stylistic Alternates, Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Positional Numerals, Small Caps and Case Sensitive Forms.

Mollisa felt equally charming and graceful. Looks great on wedding invitations, thank you cards, quotes, greeting cards, logos, branding, business cards, and any other design that requires a handwritten touch. This font is PUA encoded which means you can access all glyphs and swashes with ease! To activate the Stylistic OpenType alternative, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7, Microsoft Word 2010 or later. and there is an additional way to swash, using the Character Map (Windows), Nexus Fonts (Windows), Font Book (Mac) or a software program like PopChar (for Windows and Mac). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzwjMkbB-wQ Thank you for your purchase!

The cover of the 1929 sheet music from the First National/Vitaphone picture “The Girl from Woolworth’s” had its title (“Someone”) hand lettered. This single word title was the model for Store Clerk JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions as well as solid and solid oblique versions (without an inline). A bold, casual sans serif with rounded ends and an inline, Store Clerk JNL is perfectly suited for projects where a strong, yet playful title is necessary to grab the reader’s attention. For those old enough to remember, Woolworth’s was a leading “Five and Dime” store chain, especially in the days when a nickel or a dime actually could purchase something.

The techno sound of the 1990s, a personal computer, font creation software, and some inspiration all came together to inspire the F2F (Face2Face) font series. Alessio Leonardi and his friends had the demand to create new unusual typefaces, which would be used in the leading German techno magazine of the day, Frontpage. Even typeset as small as 6-points, in nearly undecipherable layouts, it was a pleasure for the kids to read and try to decrypt the messages. F2F Mekkaso Tomanik is a font whose letters have had diamond holes punched into them. In fact, so many holes have been punched into the letters that one could ask whether this font is more letterforms, or more holes!

Cowling Sans AOE is a charming Art Deco architectural style typeface. It is the cleaned-up, refined revival and elaboration of a lettering design from “Lettering for Commercial Purposes” by Wm. Hugh Gordon published in 1918. What began as a basic character set of Capitals, lowercase, and two styles of ampersand has been expanded to a full character set including unlimited fractionals, superiors & inferiors, ordinals, tabular, proportional, and oldstyle figures, and an expanded language glyph set, all with a smallcaps and Caps to Smallcap set to match. This lettering style exudes the charm of its era with every word set in it by way of the small details that set it apart from other sans typestyles.

Graúna is Typeóca’s first ‘serious typeface’. The idea was to produce a revival of Block Heavy, removing the ‘rough’ texture from its outline. Though other revivals existed, most of them approached the Block family as a whole, leaving aside the idiosyncrasies that make the Heavy weight so unique. In the early stages of its development, however, we realized that a lot of its quirkiness is only possible precisely because of the ‘rough’ texture we were trying to remove. That way, we started going further and further away from the original model, and thinking about the typeface in its own terms, resulting in an impactful yet friendly sans serif, ideal for logos and short titles.

Journal Hand was inspired by a 45-year-old travel diary I bought at an estate sale. The carefully constructed all-uppercase letters indicated that this traveler cared about style and legibility. Each picture, postcard and brochure that was glued into the diary had a neatly written caption and I admired the care this day tripper took to record his European trek. While the pages are now yellowed and falling apart, the handwriting is still legible and stylish. Because his handwriting totally suits today's uses, I re-created it in modern journalistic style that looks like it was written with a technical pen. Use this typeface when you need a neatly handwritten style. Uppercase only!

“I originally drew the primary characters with a felt tip marker, scanned them and then proceeded to noodle on the computer,” says George Ryan of his new typeface, Koorkin. “Over the years, I’ve designed many original typefaces, but Koorkin has become one of my favorites. I’ve worked on hundreds of highly structured text faces. For the most part, the roots of all of them can be found in the handwritten letterforms we learn as children. I enjoy going back to these shapes whenever the opportunity presents itself. ”The happy result of Ryan‘s felt tip marker sketches and his love of simple letterforms is a new family of upright and italic scripts in medium and bold weights.

Avantgarde fonts Batory and Batoswash are monoline sansserifs designed by Bo Berndal. The futuristic Batory (think Bladerunner and Total Recall) and the spicier relative Batoswash come in three versions: Narrow, Middle and Wide. The font family is available in Truetype and Postscript for Mac and PC. Bo Berndal, born 1924, has been designing typefaces over 56 years, for Monotype, Linotype and other foundries. "Batory is a monoline reaction to my many calligraphic fonts", says Bo Berndal. "That is also the reason I did several widths instead of weights. Batory has short stems and high x-height. Batoswash is a Batory gone wild!" The successful Batory has already been used for logotypes, vignettes in magazines and as headline type.

Florabella is a new handmade script font with an irregular baseline. Rough edges create a trendy look and harmony. Florabella looks lovely on wedding invitations, thank you cards, quotes, greeting cards, logos, business cards and more. It is perfect to accompany ink or watercolour. Features 290+ glyphs and 110 alternate characters - including initial and terminal letters, alternates, ligatures and multiple language support. To enable the OpenType Stylistic alternates, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7, Microsoft Word 2010 or later versions. There are additional ways to access alternates/swashes, using Character Map (Windows), Nexus Font (Windows) or a software program such as PopChar (for Windows and Mac).

Digitized handwriting fonts are a perfect way to give documents the “very special touch”. Invitations look simply better when handwritten than when printed in bland Arial or Times New Roman. Short handwritten notes look authentic and appealing. There are numerous occasions where handwritten text makes a better impression. Hilly Handwriting Pro is a beautiful typeface that mimics true handwriting closely. Use Hilly Handwriting Pro to create stunningly beautiful designs easily. This typeface comes with many pre-made ligatures and alternative characters for sophisticated typography – all easily accessible as OpenType features. A “random” feature even allows for automated random switching between variations of the same character, resulting in type that looks authentically handwritten.

Ellida is a very elaborate and elegant script in the tradition of the 18th-century English calligrapher George Bickham and the 19th-century American calligrapher Platt Rogers Spencer. I really enjoyed designing this script and maybe one day I will add starting and ending letters. Doing this script was extremely time- and brain-consuming, it is a huge challenge to make calligraphic letters work on computers so that they join perfectly. That's also the reason that this has become my most expensive font so far, but I think the price is fair for the incredible amount of work I put into the script. I really need a break from scripts now! Yours very exhausted Gert Wiescher.

Introducing Borensa. our brand new serif exploration with reversed contrast and unique shapes. Inspired by the historical books and vintage signage. Borensa is classically elegant to be applied to formal designs and can be used for the headline and long text. This font also has some alternates characters to give you some options in making the design. You can use Borensa for editorial, label, invitation, newspaper, books, poster, flyer, signboard, logo, branding, merchandise, apparel, and many more! We recommend you to use a program that has OpenType support such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, CorelDraw, etc. Featured : Uppercase Lowercase Numbers & symbols Accented characters Stylistic alternates Ligatures. Thank you for your support and have a nice day!

With the original Ranelte, Insigne Design pays tribute to the strong, simple forms of the long-lasting DIN series. Now, Ranelte Deco, a new variant on the classic-inspired font, makes a more specific statement with some unique styles that are clearly contemporary. It’s the type of face that you’ll find adds great value to your high-tech and bleeding edge design uses. Ranelte Deco is designed for title use and posters. Since it’s an experimental display font, there are no OpenType features, but the typeface fully covers Latin-based languages. Remember, even a timeless classic can be reshaped to something beautiful. See how the new style of Ranelte Deco can make your next masterpiece.

Balega is stencil-like display font, created by German designer Jürgen Weltin in 2002. Balega's letters are very bold, and have a slight italic slant. While some of the uppercase forms appear somewhat sharp, the lowercase is definitively round and friendly. Text set in Balega has a very forward moving motion, as the slant makes all of the letters seem to be lunging toward the right. This gives the typeface a very dynamic feel. Because the counterforms in and between the letters are very narrow, we recommend using Balega in posters and other larger displays, where its design may be truly appreciated. Balega is part of the Take Type 5 collection, from Linotype GmbH."

Minnesota Plaid is the baddest plaid ever! It may not be the choice pattern for golfers' slacks or bagpipers' kilts, but it has a City-like flavor with its own twist, a stylish ruggedness & toughness that could even be described as a sort of formal graffiti, thanks to the art deco swash of many of its strokes. It’s the kind of look that would be perfectly at home with hip hop or rap music, football and other sports, cars and trucks, power tools, and other manly, masculine usages. Of course, women are just as capable of having the aforementioned interests, too. Minnesota Plaid is the kind of font that can get stuck on you! Digitized by John Bomparte.

When was the last time you listened to elevator music and found yourself humming along? And perhaps the tune you were listening to, got stuck in your ears for the rest of the day...the rest of the week? That's often what happens with elevator music: maybe you don't notice it - but it is there, and it could most likely be one of your all time favourites! :) My Elevator Music font does somewhat the same: it's nice and pretty harmless - but it works, perhaps even without you noticing! :) I've added 4 slightly different versions of each lowercase letter - and that goes for both Regular and Scratch versions. And they both have multilingual support, because elevator music is universal!