Cities often have their own voice, a voice that can be read... in each location and each business, voice portraying a cultural fabric with an array of manifestations. Balneario Script is a small tribute to a coastal port and tourist city. Through the Sign Painters, in its golden age, a clear, friendly, practical, and functional way of making itself heard evolved. Far from wanting to be perfect, a typeface seeks to be close, warm, and casual. Inspired by the gestures of the brush, Balneario Script reverts to the use of “Casual Letters” so used by Sign Painters. In this adaptation, we sought to adjust its morphology to optimize its performance in small formats and extend the system to include lower case letters as part of the set. The set of fonts has two script weights in addition to an all caps version. The design emphasizes creating a harmonious morphological criterion. Friendly, rhythmic, and with a firm stroke Balneario Script is unique, ideal for headlines and short texts that need to be gestural but simple and highly functional. This typeface was designed to be used in promotional posters or for relaxed and fun Packagings. Balneario Script goes beyond constructive or functional aspects. It seeks to capture the smell of the sea, the warm summer breeze and the nostalgic feeling of a city that from its daily life, knew how to forge a unique personality. This atmosphere allows it to host millions of tourists year after year, and with them reinforce their spirit each summer.

Released on the occasion of the 2012 London Olympics, Olympukes 2012 was a new set of pictograms telling the ‘real’ story of the Olympics and extending the unofficial project that began in 2004. The occasion of the London games provided an opportunity to revisit the complex contradictions of the modern Olympics and to acknowledge the geopolitical shifts of the intervening eight years. The 2012 games arrived at a time of great economic and political uncertainty for the nation and Europe. Greece – the host of the 2004 games – was now located at Ground Zero of a disintegrating Eurozone and the United Kingdom was two years into a programme of austerity enacted by the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Given that the previous London Olympics had been held in 1948, in a climate of recovery and austerity after a devastating World War (1948’s Olympiad was dubbed the ‘Austerity Games’) there was a sick irony to the 2012 games' arrival. The suppression of human rights in order to deliver the perfect games for PRoC’s Beijing games shocked no-one and yet, in London, the security measures seemed grossly excessive. Then again, in a country with an estimated 1.8 million cctv cameras, perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised. Another aspect of the Olympics that returned for 2012 was the unfettered commercialism – if you think the Games are about pure sport, about noble human endeavour, think again. Please note that Barnbrook Fonts is in no way affiliated with, or has received any endorsement from, the International Olympic Committee, the organising committees of the Olympic Games, or any national Olympic committee.

Quinoa is display typeface by Catharsis Fonts that unites the seemingly opposed concepts of clean geometric architecture and organic humanist warmth. While it is designed for display and editorial purposes, its accessible forms make for comfortable reading even at small text sizes. Its exuberant adaptive "f", "j", "Q" and refreshing titling alternates bring display text to life. Quinoa covers multilingual Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Armenian. The Quinoa family spans four stylistic cuts (Quinoa, Quinoa Titling, Quinoa Round, and Quinoa Text) with matching hand-slanted obliques, each of which comes in nine weights. The Titling cut offers a number of alternate capital letter designs with lowercase-inspired forms for a refreshing unicase look, and the Round cut additionally removes the spurs from arched letters like n. The text cut introduces true diagonals and a two-storey "a" for a more sober, reading-friendly look. A host of other OpenType features including ligatures, contextual alternates, small caps, figure sets, and character variants are built into all cuts. Furthermore, the small caps of Quinoa, Quinoa Titling, and Quinoa Text are available as dedicated font files under the names "Quinoa SC", "Quinoa Unicase" and "Quinoa Text SC" for ease of use. Acknowledgements: I am thankful to the TypeDrawers and the Typografie.info communities for great feedback and support. In particular, Thorsten Daum has been tremendously helpful with suggestions and quality control. Thanks to Craig Eliason and Jan Willem Wennekes for their help with the Latin, Alexander L. Stetsiuk for Cyrillic, Ofir Shavit and Jonathan N. Washington for Hebrew, Khaled Hosny for Arabic, and Hrant H. Papazian for Armenian.

Pilar and Ferran based Arlette on the fast stroke of one letter from a Roger Excoffon family, but along the way they abandoned that starting point in favour of experimentation. Many sans serifs are like a svelte black dress: functional, beautiful, and the unfussy outfit for a nice evening get together. The Arlette family isn’t like this. It’s a stunner — an incandescent reimagining of what defines a sans and how it can look. Arlette explores the boundaries of the sans serif landscape and returns with forms developed from gestural vigour. Thinking of it as “painterly” may at first seem to fit, but it underestimates Arlette’s ability to master an unseen world of countless emotions and physical applications: magazines, branding, editorial, teen and young adult works, book covers, and a host of products and packaging whose content will be amplified with Arlette’s voice. Not only does Arlette use its eight weights plus italics to speak in Latin-based scripts, it is also fluent in Thai and has six weights (hairline through bold) with which it meets that challenge, whether in text or display. Arlette Thai’s modern nature is seen in two features for the script. One is the decorative Thai characters that are based on original palm leaf manuscripts. Another is a version of the Latin numerals adapted to the height of the script due to their wide use in Thailand. Arlette Thai has been meticulously developed, including contextual kerning to avoid mark clashes. Arlette’s OpenType capabilities include mathematic and scientific figures, positional forms, pointers, arrows, and oldstyle, lining, and tabular lining numerals. In addition to all this, it’s packed with swashes and swash ligatures in both scripts for enthusiastic typesetting. Because it pushes experimentation without compromising readability, both Arlette Thai and Latin are surprisingly legible in small sizes and arrestingly beautiful when their details can be seen.

From fine print and red ink in corporate annual reports to huge three dimensional signage, Neutraface has become the definitive designers’ workhorse. Now this geometric juggernaut boasts even more font firepower with the addition of the Neutraface Slab family. Neutraface Slab features five display weights, four text weights with italics plus a unique stencil style that work together like a typographic symphony or can stand alone like accomplished soloists. Just like its sans-serif counterparts, Neutra Slab Text includes small caps, seven figure styles and a host of other sophisticated OpenType features that have been integrated in a single seamless package. The complementary display weights afford an uncompromising statement that can range from thin and delicate to bold and bombastic. FEATURES: MORE ALTS: Neutraface Slab comes with several alternate characters, accessed through either OpenType stylistic sets or through the Stylistic Alternates feature. TITLING ALTERNATES: The distinctive lower crossbars of the original Neutraface are included in Neutraface Slab as the Titling Alternates OpenType feature. TEXT FIGURES: All variations of Neutraface Slab Text feature seven figure styles. Included are text figures for use in running text, lining figures for use with uppercase forms and small caps figures. Each of these styles is supplemented with tabular figures for use in columnar settings. Plus, superscript and subscript figures are included for use in fractions, footnotes, etc. NEUTRAFACE SLAB CREDITS: Typeface Design: Christian Schwartz, Kai Bernau, Susana Carvalho Typeface Production: Ben Kiel, Hannes Famira Typeface Direction: Christian Schwartz, Andy Cruz, Ken Barber Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

From fine print and red ink in corporate annual reports to huge three dimensional signage, Neutraface has become the definitive designers’ workhorse. Now this geometric juggernaut boasts even more font firepower with the addition of the Neutraface Slab family. Neutraface Slab features five display weights, four text weights with italics plus a unique stencil style that work together like a typographic symphony or can stand alone like accomplished soloists. Just like its sans-serif counterparts, Neutra Slab Text includes small caps, seven figure styles and a host of other sophisticated OpenType features that have been integrated in a single seamless package. The complementary display weights afford an uncompromising statement that can range from thin and delicate to bold and bombastic. FEATURES: MORE ALTS: Neutraface Slab comes with several alternate characters, accessed through either OpenType stylistic sets or through the Stylistic Alternates feature. TITLING ALTERNATES: The distinctive lower crossbars of the original Neutraface are included in Neutraface Slab as the Titling Alternates OpenType feature. TEXT FIGURES: All variations of Neutraface Slab Text feature seven figure styles. Included are text figures for use in running text, lining figures for use with uppercase forms and small caps figures. Each of these styles is supplemented with tabular figures for use in columnar settings. Plus, superscript and subscript figures are included for use in fractions, footnotes, etc. NEUTRAFACE SLAB CREDITS: Typeface Design: Christian Schwartz, Kai Bernau, Susana Carvalho Typeface Production: Ben Kiel, Hannes Famira Typeface Direction: Christian Schwartz, Andy Cruz, Ken Barber Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

It all started with a simple idea back in 1998: do a digital version of a "lost" 70's typeface, and make up the missing letters that were not present in the only available example Jeff Levine had to work with. Jeff wasn't yet doing his own digital font creation, so he hooked up with Brad Nelson who owns a small foundry called Brain Eaters Fonts. Together, they collaborated on "Action Is"- a freeware font named after the source of the type example. This was a title page for a commemorative photo album of images from the 60's TV music show "Where the Action Is", formerly hosted by Jeff's employer at the time, singer-writer-producer Steve Alaimo. The free font took off like a rocket, being released just at the peak of the 60’s/70’s retro craze in the late 1990’s, and it was EVERYWHERE! It showed up on TV shows, packaging and web design -- and was even spotted on signage used on the side of a major amusement resort’s retro-themed hotel. From that point on, Jeff kept getting requests for a version with a lower case. Although they shared the copyright in the freeware version, Brad Nelson gave Jeff his blessing to re-work and take Action Is into the realm of commercial type. Newly improved and re-released as Groovy Happening JNL, it became one of Jeff's better selling type designs. A simplified, yet similar font was issued called Groovy Summer JNL. Now, after about a decade, Jeff had decided to clean up the 3-D (drop shadow) version that was originally freeware with many minute design flaws and re-release it commercially. Groovy 3D Caps JNL is an all-caps, limited character set font which ties in well with the previous releases, yet retains itís 1960s-1970s era charm. The font flag art is courtesy of Barbara D. Berney and is used by permission.

Cinema Macabre: Horror Fonts Torn from the Pages of Giallo A Hand-drawn Display Font for Creating the Most Diabolical Horror Titles This loose and inky brush font takes its inspiration from the classic Giallo film posters of the 1960s to 1980s - a cult cinematic subgenre beloved for its stylish visuals, haunting soundtracks and exploitation led marketing. It's a devilishly drawn design that aims to capture the feeling of vintage horror, preserving analogue details of old print while remaining versatile enough to work across a variety of digital designs. The Cinema Macabre font family boasts six fonts, each containing a unique set of uppercase and lowercase characters, as well as numerals, punctuation and language support. Add to this a host of custom ligatures, underlines and graphic elements and you have an essential toolbox for creating truly hand-made looking title designs. Cinema Macabre if a font that rewards experimentation by mixing all the various upper and lowercase alternatives, with interesting combinations waiting to be found and inspire terror across your own movie posters, book covers, albums and editorials. Few other fonts offer the versatility to create such diabolical designs! A Brief Introduction to Giallo: In popular cinema, Giallo is a genre of mystery fiction and thrillers often containing slasher, psychological horror, exploitation, supernatural and erotic elements. The term giallo (meaning yellow) derives from a series of pulp novels published by Mondadori from 1929 taking the name from its trademark yellow covers. The series consisted of Italian translations of mystery novels by well-known authors such as Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler. The popularity of these cheap paperbacks eventually established the word Giallo as a synonym in Italian for a mystery novel. The cinematic Giallo subgenre developed during the 1960-80s and are noted for their vivid cinematography, memorable soundtracks and inventive gore-filled scenarios. Key examples include Dario Argento's Suspiria, Tenebrae and Deep Red - stylish films that at once influenced the American slasher (see Black Christmas and Friday 13th) up to todays horror in Censor and Last Night In Soho.

The Joanna® Nova design, by Monotype Studio designer Ben Jones, is an extensive update to Eric Gill’s original Joanna typefaces and brings this much admired – but underused – slab serif typeface into the 21st century. Joanna Nova features 18 fonts – more than twice as many as the original Joanna – with a wide range of weights including thin and ultra black, which were not available in the original design. Every glyph has been redrawn using a variety of reference sources, including Gill’s original sketches and the copper patterns used in Joanna’s initial production. When Jones set out to design Joanna Nova, he saw that the ‘real Joanna’ was not immediately evident. “Some of Gill’s original drawings have a sloped ‘M’; there is also a ‘K’ and ‘R’ with a curled leg and a letter ‘d’ without the flat bottom,” he explained. “Is this Joanna? Or is it the version used to print Gill’s Essay on Typography? Or is it the digital version with which most people are surely more familiar than any other version? Ultimately, I think, none of these and all of these were ‘Joanna’ because, as with any typeface, it is more the idea or concept behind the typeface that makes it what it is. My approach was to create a version of Joanna that appears in your mind when you think of Joanna.” Jones noted that one of the most distinguishing aspects of Joanna is the italics; and that, for reasons unknown, many of the characters in the current versions are much more condensed than those in the hand-set fonts of metal type., The newer designs being almost unusable at small sizes. The italics in Joanna Nova have been reworked to be more legible and closer to their original widths. Joanna Nova expands the original Joanna in several ways that open up new typographic possibilities, These additions include several new weights, support for Greek and Cyrillic scripts, small caps for all scripts in both upright and italic styles, several numeral options and a host of context-sensitive ligatures. The Joanna Nova typeface family is part of the new Eric Gill Series, drawing on Monotype's heritage to remaster and expand and revitalize Eric Gill’s body of work, with more weights, more characters and more languages to meet a wide range of design requirements. The series also brings to life new elements inspired by some of Gill’s unreleased work, discovered in Monotype’s archive of original typeface drawings and materials of the last century.

A friend of mine says that sports are the ultimate popular drug. One of his favorite things to say is, “The sun’s always shining on a game somewhere.” It’s hard to argue with that. But that perspective is now the privilege of a society where technology is so high and mighty that it all but shapes such perspectives. These days I can, if I so choose, subscribe to nothing but sports on over a hundred TV channels and a thousand browser bookmarks. But it wasn't always like that. When I was growing up, long before the super-commercialization of the sport, I and other kids spent more than every spare minute of our time memorizing the names and positions of players, collecting team shirts and paraphernalia, making up game scenarios, and just being our generation’s entirely devoted fans. Argentina is one of the nations most obsessed with sports, especially "fútbol" (or soccer to North Americans). The running American joke was that we're all born with a football. When the national team is playing a game, stores actually close their doors, and Buenos Aires looks like a ghost town. Even on the local level, River Plate, my favorite team where I grew up, didn't normally have to worry about empty seats in its home stadium, even though attendance is charged at a high premium. There are things our senses absorb when we are children, yet we don't notice them until much later on in life. A sport’s collage of aesthetics is one of those things. When I was a kid I loved the teams and players that I loved, but I never really stopped to think what solidified them in my memory and made them instantly recognizable to me. Now, thirty-some years later, and after having had the fortune to experience many cultures other than my own, I can safely deduce that a sport’s aesthetic depends on the local or national culture as much as it depends on the sport itself. And the way all that gets molded in a single team’s identity becomes so intricate it is difficult to see where each part comes from to shape the whole. Although “futbol” is still in my blood as an Argentinean, I'm old enough to afford a little cynicism about how extremely corporate most popular sports are. Of course, nothing can now take away the joy I got from football in my childhood and early teens. But over the past few years I've been trying to perceive the sport itself in a global context, even alongside other popular sports in different areas of the world. Being a type designer, I naturally focus in my comparisons on the alphabets used in designing different sports experiences. And from that I've come to a few conclusions about my own taste in sports aesthetic, some of which surprised me. I think I like the baseball and basketball aesthetic better than football, hockey, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket, rugby, and other sports. This of course is a biased opinion. I'm a lettering guy, and hand lettering is seen much more in baseball and basketball. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Even though all sports can be reduced to a bare-bones series of purposes and goals to reach, the rules and arrangements of baseball and basketball, in spite of their obvious tempo differences, are more suited for overall artistic motion than other sports. So when an application of swashed handlettering is used as part of a team’s identity in baseball or basketball, it becomes a natural fit. The swashes can almost be visual representation of a basketball curving in the air on its way to the hoop, or a baseball on its way out of the park. This expression is invariably backed by and connected to bold, sleak lettering, representing the driving force and precision (arms, bat) behind the artistic motion. It’s a simple and natural connective analysis to a designer, but the normal naked eye still marvels inexplicably at the beauty of such logos and wordmarks. That analytical simplicity was the divining rod behind Fan Script. My own ambitious brief was to build a readable yet very artistic sports script that can be a perfect fit for baseball or basketball identities, but which can also be implemented for other sports. The result turned out to be quite beautiful to my eyes, and I hope you find it satisfactory in your own work. Sports scripts like this one are rooted in showcard lettering models from the late 19th and early 20th century, like Detroit’s lettering teacher C. Strong’s — the same models that continue to influence book designers and sign painters for more than a century now. So as you can see, American turn-of-the-century calligraphy and its long-term influences still remain a subject of fascination to me. This fascination has been the engine of most of my work, and it shows clearly in Fan Script. Fan Script is a lively heavy brush face suitable for sports identities. It includes a variety of swashes of different shapes, both connective and non-connective, and contains a whole range of letter alternates. Users of this font will find a lot of casual freedom in playing with different combinations - a freedom backed by a solid technological undercurrent, where OpenType features provide immediate and logical solutions to problems common to this kind of script. One final thing bears mentioning: After the font design and production were completed, it was surprisingly delightful for me to notice, in the testing stage, that my background as a packaging designer seems to have left a mark on the way the font works overall. The modern improvements I applied to the letter forms have managed to induce a somewhat retro packaging appearance to the totality of the typeface. So I expect Fan Script will be just as useful in packaging as it would be in sports identity, logotype and merchandizing. Ale Paul