Today's digital font technology has allowed renowned font designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf to realize a dream he first had more than fifty years ago: to create a typeface that would come very close to the freedom and liveliness of beautiful handwriting. The basic Zapfino font family, released in 1998, consists of four alphabets with many additional stylistic alternates that can be freely mixed together to emulate the variations in handwritten text. In 2003, Zapf completed Zapfino Extra, a large expansion of the Zapfino family. Designed in collaboration with Akira Kobayashi, Zapfino Extra has a cornucopia of new characters. It includes exuberant hyper-flourishes, elegant small caps, dozens of ornaments, more alternates and ligatures, index characters, and a very useful "forte" (bold) version. Use Zapfino to produce unusual and graceful advertisements, packaging, and invitations. Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos, Best Fonts for Tattoos

Zapfino Arabic is designed by Nadine Chahine as the Arabic companion to Hermann Zapf’s iconic Zapfino typeface, with the approval of Prof. Zapf. The design is an evolution of Arabic calligraphic traditions that combines Naskh and Nastaaliq to form a backward slanted calligraphic style. The character proportions refer to Naskh traditions but the isolated and final forms bring with them an exaggerated swash-like movement that references the extravagant ascenders and descenders of Zapfino. The font contains a large number of contextual variants that work to create a smooth flow of pen movement, as well as 10 stylistic sets. The character set supports the Arabic language as well as basic Latin. Zapfino Arabic is meant to be used as a display typeface, for logos, greeting cards and short headlines. It could also work for short pieces of text, for poetry or chapter introductions, when used in a generous type size and with ample space around it. Its design is soft and elegant, and leaves a lot of room for typographic playfulness.

Zarlino is an original typeface in the Blackletter style. It does not solidly adhere to any of the historical Blackletter classifications, but draws from all of them, with some characters owing more to the Roman than the Fraktur. Zarlino Delux includes three complete sets of upper case, ranging from the simple to the embellished to the even more embellished, two complete sets of lower case, and two more sets of embellished alternates for selected lower case characters. These alternates are available through Stylisitic Sets in OpenType aware applications. For use in non-OpenType aware applications, Zarlino Delux comes with a set of separate, standard fonts, one for each style. These standard fonts are also available for individual purchase. Zarlino was named by my cousin, a musician. Gioseffo Zarlino was a sixteenth century composer and musical theorist. Among other things, he offered detailed advice on the setting of words to music. With its blends of the old and the new, the simple and the ornate, Zarlino is suitable for many uses, from the elegant to the aggressive.

Today's digital font technology allowed the world-renowned typeface designer/calligrapher Hermann Zapf to finally realize a vision he first had more than fifty years ago: creating a typeface that could capture the freedom and liveliness of beautiful handwriting. The basic Zapfino™ font family, released in 1998, consists of four alphabets with many additional stylistic alternates that can be freely mixed together to emulate the variations in handwritten text. In 2003, Herman Zapf completely reworked the Zapfino design, creating Zapfino™ Extra. This large expansion of the Zapfino family was designed in close collaboration with Akira Kobayashi. Zapfino™ Extra includes a cornucopia of new characters. It features exuberant hyper-flourishes, elegant small caps, dozens of ornaments, more alternates and ligatures, index characters, and a very useful bold version, named Zapfino™ Forte. A version of the 1998 Zapfino typeface ships as one of the pre-installed fonts included with Mac OSX. The Mac OSX version's letters are four times larger than the Linotype standard. In order to minimize compatibility problems for Macintosh users, Linotype has created OSX versions of its Zapfino Extra Pro typefaces, which have been enlarged to correlate visually with the Mac OS Zapfino system font. These special Linotype fonts can be distinguished by the letter X" in their name. Zapfino Extra is an OpenType format font, which is available in two versions. Which version you purchase should depend on which software applications you use the most and what features they support! The Contextual version of Zapfino Extra Pro contains a treasure-trove of extra contextual features. When created in 2004, this was the most advanced OpenType font released to date. By purchasing this version, users of OpenType-supporting applications, such as Adobe InDesign, may access all of the features available in the entire Zapfino family through just two fonts, Zapfino Extra LT Pro (Contextual) and Zapfino Forte LT Pro! Unfortunately, most non-Adobe applications currently do not support the contextual features made possible by recent OpenType developments. Users of Quark XPress and Microsoft Office should instead purchase all of the non-contextual fonts of Zapfino Extra Pro family, in order to access all of the Zapfino Extra family's 1676 glyphs. The Zapfino Extra family's character set supports 48 western and central European languages. Use Zapfino Extra to produce unusual and graceful advertisements, packaging, and invitations. Zapfino Extra is so joyously abundant that it's tempting to over-indulge, so be sure to check out the tips for working well with the possibilities."

ZapfinoExtra is an OpenType format typeface available in two versions. The Contextual version contains a treasure-trove of extra contextual features. When created in 2004, this was the most advanced OpenType font released to date. By purchasing the Contextual version, users of OpenType-supporting applications, such as Adobe InDesign, may access all of the features available in the entire Zapfino family through just two fonts, Zapfino Extra LT Pro (Contextual), and Zapfino Forte LT Pro! Unfortunately, most non-Adobe applications currently do not support the contextual features made possible by recent OpenType developments. Users of Quark XPress and Microsoft Office should instead purchase all of the non-contextual fonts of Zapfino Extra Pro family, in order to access all of the Zapfino family's 1676 glyphs. The Zapfino family's character set supports 48 western and central European languages. More Zapfino History: Today's digital font technology allowed the world-renowned typeface designer/calligrapher Hermann Zapf to finally realize a vision he first had more than fifty years ago: creating a typeface that could capture the freedom and liveliness of beautiful handwriting. The basic Zapfino™ font family, released in 1998, consists of four alphabets with many additional stylistic alternates that can be freely mixed together to emulate the variations in handwritten text. In 2003, Herman Zapf completely reworked the Zapfino design, creating Zapfino™ Extra. This large expansion of the Zapfino family was designed in close collaboration with Akira Kobayashi. Zapfino™ Extra includes a cornucopia of new characters. It features exuberant hyper-flourishes, elegant small caps, dozens of ornaments, more alternates and ligatures, index characters, and a very useful bold version-named Zapfino™ Forte. Use Zapfino to produce unusual and graceful advertisements, packaging, and invitations. Zapfino Extra is so joyously abundant that it's tempting to over-indulge, so be sure to check out the tips for working well with the possibilities!"

Gaius is a beautiful script face with a nice relationship between the broad-edged pen and the proportions of the letterforms. It is very flexible and gives a personal touch due to its various alternate fonts with swash beginners, ending and ligature letterforms. Like Zapfino from Hermann Zapf, Gaius offers a great variety and makes the text more personal and readable.

Matthew Carter designed the Shelley family 1972 for Mergenthaler Linotype to be used as a new script face for the photo typesetting machines. The basic idea was to create one script face that would offer dfferent elegant letterforms. Matthew designed Shelley in three different versions, Allegro which is in the style of Kuenstler Schreibschrift, Andante where the caps are less flowrish and wide and Volante where the letters have its most expressive and wide forms and the lowercase z in this font is in the french anglian double stacked form. All three versions can be easily mixed to give the text a more individual calligraphic look Besides Shelley Linotype Zapfino from Hermann Zapf shows similar basics, but in a totally different letterform. In Linotype Zapfino the individual lowercase letters from the four different versions have different letterforms which gives the text an even more individual touch.

Virtuosa Classicis the 21st century OpenType re-release of a classic Hermann Zapf design, his very first script typeface, Virtuosa. Based on the same sketches that would inspire Zapfino 50 years later, Hermann Zapf developed Virtuosa in 1948-49. It was originally released in metal in 1952. Virtuosa nova is an English copperplate script with character. The font includes two form variants for each capital letter, and there are a number of lowercase alternates and ligatures, too.

Whenever I see clippings on TV of demonstrations, protesting against this or that, with people holding up signs, I am surprised about the signs being professionally printed or plotted in Helvetica or Futura condensed. I've even seen signs in Zapfino! That doesn't really cut it, it doesn't look much like a real protest. So I decided to give the protesting world a real good font for the occasion. In German a Revolte is an uprising, I thought that was a good name for the font. Hasta la victoria siempre from your revolutionary type designer Gert Wiescher.

Despeinada, which means "uncombed" in Spanish, is a loose script, perfect for when you want to convey informality. It'll look good in a long text, or when a few rough and spontaneous word are needed... Being a packaging designer, my faces are mostly oriented toward that sector, although they won't look in any way out of place in the editorial world or in advertising, for example. This face was generated in the University of Barcelona Master of Typography, in 2010, where I dictated the “Practicum” It's a very versatile design that can be used in small sizes or enlarged as needed. It won't deceive you! I think that this particular face is halfway between Mistral and Zapfino: rough but clean at the same time. None of its glyphs follow any order, nor do their weights... In short, if you start writing with Despeinada you won't want to stop.

Kamui is a font designed by Carlos Fabian Camargo G. and used to write headlines. Its strategy makes it ideal for covers and advertisements with Japanese-style manga comics requiring latin style. Precisely its purpose was inspired by typographical classics such as Mistral by R. Excoffon and Zapfino by H. Zapf that then were diluted by separate strokes as blackletter calligraphy. However, high doses of miscegenation and lettering untimely torn between 50% esthetic and 50% legibility. That way his radical expression is highly profitable for composing and designing words and phrases with Eastern look. And more importantly, the writing seems drawn quickly with thin-tipped brush staining over a rough surface, from that process comes the idea of corroded outlines and changes in contrast. In conclusion, some diagonal strokes, horizontal, curved and vertical stand or hide from their simulation of scarcity or abundance of ink clots. That way each stroke seems inconsistent, footprint of the 423 brush drawing glyphs in Regular Kamuy. In that sense, the OpenType features included are: Standard Ligatures, Contextual Alternates, discretionary ligatures, swash, stylistic alternates, alternatives for titles, ordinals, fractions. And to end the Variable “Kamuy Dingbats” has is 52 fictitious drawings and zamurais.

Silken is a stylish and contemporary handwriting font that combines the elegance of fonts such as Zapfino with the immediacy of handwriting fonts such as Affable. There are many handwriting fonts out there, but many of them border on being grungy and irregular. This font combines beauty with individuality and spontaneity. Silken comes in a number of styles, the primary style of which is Silken Scarf. This style has a strength and sophistication that is particularly appropriate for headlines and short passages of text (such as invitations, certificates, greeting cards etc.) Silken Thread is a variant of the font family that is even more delicate and polished than Silken Scarf. The third style, Silken Book, with a greater x-height and less dramatic capitals, is more readable and less extreme than the other two styles. It should be used for longer passages or where readability is of primary importance. Suggestions for use: - wedding stationery - greeting cards - valentines day mediaa - beauty product media - lingerie tags - women's magazine pages - classical music media - award certificates The font is fully professional: carefully letterspaced and kerned. It contains over 235 characters - (upper and lower case characters, punctuation, numerals, symbols and accented characters are present). It includes all the accented characters used in the major European languages.

Pirouette is based on a logo that Japanese designer Ryuichi Tateno created for a packaging design project in 1999 (a shampoo container!). Tateno's logo experimented with complex, overlapped swash letterforms. He continued to develop these outside of the initial packaging project, until they took on a life of their own. Eventually, Tateno designed a full typeface out of the logo, Pirouette, which was the first place display face in Linotype's 2003 International Type Design Contest. The Pirouette typeface contains six different fonts. The basic font is Pirouette Regular. This is an engraver's italic lowercase paired with elaborate swash capitals. The swash capitals have two visual elements in their forms: thick strokes and thin strokes. Pirouette Text includes the same lowercase as Pirouette Regular, but the uppercase letters are much shorter and simpler. This "text" font can be used to set longer amounts of copy. Pirouette Alternate contains different lowercase glyphs and additional ligatures, which can be used as substitutes for the lowercase forms in the Pirouette Regular and Pirouette Text fonts. Pirouette Ornaments contains swashes and other knick-knacks that can either be added onto the end of a letter, or used as separate decorative elements or swooshes (accolades) on a page. Pirouette Separate 1 and Pirouette Separate 2 are two fonts that can be layered over top of one another in software applications that support layering (e.g., most Adobe and Macromedia applications, as well as QuarkXPress). Pirouette Separate 1 contains the thick stroke elements from Pirouette Regular's uppercase letters, as well as the same lowercase glyphs that can be found in Pirouette Regular and Pirouette Text. Pirouette Separate 2 contains only the thin stroke elements from Pirouette Regular's uppercase letters. By layering Pirouette Separate 1 and Pirouette Separate 2 over one another, you can give the uppercase letter's thick and thin stroke elements different colors and create unique, more calligraphic designs. The Pirouette family, Tanteno's first commercial typeface, was greatly influenced by the calligraphic and typographic work of the master German designer, Prof. Hermann Zapf, especially his Zapfino typeface.