The general idea: Can You imagine to yourself, what the hydroelectric power station is? The building of this electricity production foundry is half hidden under the water, but the visible above-water part astonishes your sense. It is a construction almost 1,5 km length dammed out the powerful river stream. Besides thousand of electricity conduction lines supports it bears also the highway and the railroad. From a faraway distance the train seems like a caterpillar that has climbed up the stout tree. There are also the navigable sluices, the flood channels and other erections. The idea of this typeface outlines arrived to the authors exactly on the viewing platform, under the impression of the waterfalls, which are escaping from the dam womb, falling from almost 50 meters altitude and becoming white-haired during this flight. Release: in the form of "gorod.Volgograd" font with the one style. We work with other styles now and sometime we will be very glad to introduce the Bold and Italic styles to You. We should explain the font name meaning. "Gorod" is "city of" in Russian and Volgograd is the old, big and famous Russian city. The Volga hydroelectric power station of a name of XXII congress of the CPSU caused the Volgograd sea formation. It expands of 14 km width and more than 600 km along the Volga river-bed. But HEPS isn't the sole Volgograd sight. There are many interesting places here. The most known tourist sight, the visit card of Volgograd is the Mamaev Hill. Being here You can see almost all 100 kilometers of city length. Due to its geographical position, Mamaev Hill has got a great importance during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). It became and still is the Main Height of Russia. Soviet people have built the huge stately memorial ensemble here. There are many other witnesses of the heroic past of Volgograd: the Alley of Heroes, the Perished Fighters Square, the Soldiers Field and others. The line of tank turrets is stretched out along all town not far from Volga bank. It marks the line, where fascist troops was stopped in 1943. It is very amazingly when You dive under the ground on a usual tram. Volgograders have built a few underground station for the high-speed tramway. The river tram need a quarter of an hour to get an island in the Volga. And You need the same time to walk across the river station. The Volga-Don navigable channel starts from Volgograd. There are planetarium, circus, some theatres, many museums in Volgograd. One of football matches of Euro-2004 qualifying round took a place in the "Rotor" stadium in Volgograd. Volgograd holds the longest - above 50 km - park in the world. Its avenues, squares, embankments are beautiful, Volgograd central districts are built in unique architecture style called the Stalin Empire. You can enjoy fountains, parks, attractions, water-pools and other Volgograd sights. If You visit Volgograd once You'll never forget it. You can read about the ancient history of Volgograd city on the Tsaritsyn font page. Also we plan to create the Stalingrad font and give You a short story about another period in Tsaritsyn-Stalingrad-Volgograd history.

INTRODUCTION When I started the first Selfie back in 2014 I was aware that I was designing something innovative at some point, because at that time there were not too many, (if any) fonts which rescued so many calligraphy features being at the same time a monolinear sans. I took inspiration from the galerías’ neon signs of my home city, Buenos Aires, and incorporated the logic and ductus of the spencerian style. The result was a very versatile font with many ligatures, swashes and a friendly look. But… I wasn’t cognizant of how successful the font would become! Selfie is maybe the font of my library that I see the most when I finally go out, (type-designers tend to be their entire lives glued to a screen), when I travel, and also the font that I mostly get emails about, asking for little tweaks, new capitals, new swashes. Selfie was used by several renowned clients, became part of many ‘top fonts of the year’ lists and was published in many magazines and books about type-design. These recognitions were, at the same time, cuddles for me and my Selfie and functioned as a driving force in 2020 to start this project which I called Selfie Neue. THE FONT "Selfie for everything" Selfie Neue, because it’s totally new: All its glyphs were re-drawn, all the proportions changed for better, and the old and somehow naive forms of the first Selfie were redesigned. Selfie Neue is now a family of many members (you can choose between a Rounded or a Sharp look), from Thin to Black, and from Short to Tall (because I noticed the feel of the font changed notoriously when altering its proportions). It also includes swashy Caps, which will serve as a perfect match for the lowercase and some incredibly cute icons/dingbats (designed by the talented Melissa Cronenbold, see also Selfie Neue Rounded for more!) which, as you see in the posters, make the font even more attractive and easy to use. You'll find tons of alternates per glyph. It's impossible to get tired with Selfie! Like it happened with the old Selfie, Selfie Neue Sharp was thought for a really wide range of uses. Magazines, Book-covers, digital media, restaurants, logos, clothing, etc. Hey! The font is also a VF (Variable Font)! So you can have fun with its two axes: x-height and weight, in applications that support them. Let me take a New Sharp Selfie! TECHNICAL If you plan to print Selfie Neue VF (Rounded or Sharp), please remember to convert it to outlines first. The majority of the posters above have the "contextual" alternates activated, and this makes the capitals a little smaller. I'd recommend deactivating it if you plan to use Selfie for just one word. Use the font always with the "fi" feature activated so everything ligatures properly. The slant of the font is 24,7 degrees, so if you plan to have its stems vertical, you may use Selfie with that rotation in mind. THANKS FOR READING

Out of a lifelong inner struggle, Philip Bouwsma unleashes a masterpiece that reconciles classic calligraphy with type in a way never before attempted. Maestro takes its cue from the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century. By this time type ruled the publishing world, but official court documents were still presented in calligraphy, in a new formal style of the high Renaissance that was integrated with Roman letters and matched the refined order of type. The copybooks of Arrighi and others, printed from engraved wood blocks, spread the Italian cancellaresca across Europe, but the medium was too clumsy and the size too small to show what was really happening in the stroke. Arrighi and others also made metal fonts that pushed type in the direction of calligraphy, but again the medium did not support the superb artistry of these masters or sustain the vitality in their work. As the elegant sensitive moving stroke of the broad pen was reduced to a static outline, the human quality, the variety and the excitement of a living act were lost. Because the high level of skill could not be reproduced, the broad pen was largely replaced by the pointed tool. The modern italic handwriting revival is based on a simplified model and does not approach the level of this formal calligraphy with its relationship to the Roman forms. Maestro is the font that Arrighi and his colleagues would have made if they had had digital technology. Like the calligraphic system of the papal chancery on which it is modelled, it was not drawn as a single finished alphabet, but evolved from a confluence of script and Roman; the script is formalized by the Roman to stand proudly in a world of type. Maestro came together on screen over the course of several years, through many versions ranging widely in style, formality, width, slant, weight and other parameters. On one end of the spectrum, looking back to tradition it embodies the formal harmony of the Roman capitals and the minuscule which became the lower case. On the other it is a flowing script letter drawing on the spirit of later pointed pen and engravers scripts. As its original designers intended, it works with simple Roman capitals and serifs or swash capitals and baroque flourishes. The broad pen supplies weight and substance to the stroke which carries energy through tension in balanced s-curves. Above all it is meant to convey the life and motion of formal calligraphy as a worthy counterbalance to the stolid gravity of metal type. The Maestro family consists of forty fonts distributed over two weights. The OpenType version compresses the family considerably down to two fonts, regular and bold, each containing the entire character set of twenty fonts, for a total of more than 3350 characters per font. These include a wide variety of stylistic alternates, ligatures, beginning and ending letters, flourishes, borders, rules, and other extras. The Pro version also includes extended linguistic support for Latin-based scripts (Western, Central and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Welsh/Celtic, Maltese) as well as Greek. For more thoughts on Maestro, its background and character sets, please read the PDF accompanying the family.

Nawin is an informal Arabic typeface inspired by handwriting. The idea behind this design is to create a type family attractive and ownable for children but at the same time a design that keeps excellent letter recognition for reading. Handwriting has been a great source of inspiration in this particular typeface. By emulating the movements of the pen, we have obtained letter shapes that express spontaneity. A bright group of letters create a lively and beautiful paragraph of text. To get closer to handwriting and the variety of letter shapes that we draw while writing, this typeface offers a large number of alternative characters, which differ slightly from the default ones. Because we have programed the «Contextual Alternate» feature in the fonts, these alternate characters appear automatically as you set a text on your computer. For instance, in the Arabic variability on vertical proportions between letters Alef and initial Lam, create movement in text and avoid the cold mechanical feel of repetition. In the case of the Latin a part from having an entire alternate basic alphabet, there are also different letterforms for characters with diacritics, this way variability becomes even greater. Nawin is quirky and elegant at the same time. Letter recognition is relevant when reading continuous text. For this reason, in the Arabic, we have added another contextual alternate feature with alternate characters that help to avoid confusion when letters with similar or the same shape repeat inside one word. This is the case of medial «beh and Yeh» repeated three times continuously in the same word. The alternate characters change in shape and length, facilitating distinction to the reader. Since this typeface is inspired by handwriting and the free movement of the hand while writing, we considered ligatures a good asset for this design. The Arabic has a wide range of ligatures that enhance movement and fluidity in text making look text alive, while the Latin achieves this same effect via contextual alternates.

Musical notes and letterforms, silences and white spaces, pentagrams and lines, music and writing have much in common and go beyond time, cultures, styles and locations. This new typeface emerges from the blend between the lyrics and the harmony, rhythm, femininity and luminosity of the traditional musical forms. It`s not about blues or rock, tango or salsa, instead it recovers the neoclassical characteristics of the current musical notation system and revitalize the essence of its signs. Taking care of both the function and the form, Elisetta has been specially designed for the writing of texts and musical sheets considering all its elements and communication needs. This source of inspiration also makes the font really good for extensive texts, since its design is based on situations that require high line performance, great readability and high aesthetic coherence. With 5 variables that vary in weight and style, the typography gathers asymmetry and organic nature in vertical structure, narrow horizontal proportions, high x height and extreme contrast between black and white. Elisetta Book has been created for the writing of clear texts and long lines composed in small sizes inside and outside the pentagram; Elisetta Italic intensifies the organic nature of the musical keys by offering softer signs, contextual alternates and initial caps; finally, Elisetta Display increase and emphasize the contrast between vertical stems and horizontal lines to highlight short texts and titles. For those who love music and for those who like romantic forms, this typography has a lot to offer: Elisetta is the best option to write light words with style, compose clear and rhythmic lines and read comfortable paragraphs with high performance. You can tell everybody this is your font, how wonderful life is while you're in the world! * This typeface was originally designed and supervised as «Elisa», the main project of the Master in Typography at University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Ambiguity is a type family with five distinct personalities or ‘states’, created as a tool for coaxing designers and brands out of their comfort zone. It embraces both tradition and radicality, as well as generosity and thrift, encouraging us to question our beliefs about the intersection of style and meaning. The family is designed by Charles Nix, who describes Ambiguity as “as much thought experiment as typeface.” Its five states—Tradition, Radical, Thrift, Generous and Normate—each express or subvert different aspects of typographic tradition. Tradition is conservative, relying on historical letter shapes. Radical rejects inherited ideas of proportion, making typically slender letterforms wide, and wide letterforms slender. “It’s contrarian,” says Nix. Thrift cherry picks the condensed shapes from Tradition and Radical, while Generous does the same for wide forms. Normate sits at the center, a synthetic blend of all of the others. “Tradition is very comforting,” says Nix. “It’s the mask of conservatism. It’s calming because it delivers the proportions we expect. With Thrift more fits into a smaller space, so it’s great where words want to get large, like gigantic headlines, or text needs to cram in, like small screen type. You get a sense of carefree and luxury from the Generous cut. One would expect the Radical to be used in a sort of Dadaist way, but in a classic context it provides an enjoyable jolt.” Ambiguity is a litmus test. Designers could spend hours trying on typefaces that offer just one of these voices. Ambiguity provides five different personalities—ideas—beliefs—each of which also work seamlessly together. “It’s a palettea, like idea cards,” he says. “It’s a way of making yourself see differently. My hope is that traditionalists will try on radical clothes and vice versa. It’s a way of exploring outside your comfort zone, breaking out of the doldrums, by stepping through a variety of voices.”

Nawin is an informal Arabic typeface inspired by handwriting. The idea behind this design is to create a type family attractive and ownable for children but at the same time a design that keeps excellent letter recognition for reading. Handwriting has been a great source of inspiration in this particular typeface. By emulating the movements of the pen, we have obtained letter shapes that express spontaneity. A bright group of letters create a lively and beautiful paragraph of text. To get closer to handwriting and the variety of letter shapes that we draw while writing, this typeface offers a large number of alternative characters, which differ slightly from the default ones. Because we have programed the «Contextual Alternate» feature in the fonts, these alternate characters appear automatically as you set a text on your computer. For instance, in the Arabic variability on vertical proportions between letters Alef and initial Lam, create movement in text and avoid the cold mechanical feel of repetition. In the case of the Latin a part from having an entire alternate basic alphabet, there are also different letterforms for characters with diacritics, this way variability becomes even greater. Nawin is quirky and elegant at the same time. Letter recognition is relevant when reading continuous text. For this reason, in the Arabic, we have added another contextual alternate feature with alternate characters that help to avoid confusion when letters with similar or the same shape repeat inside one word. This is the case of medial «beh and Yeh» repeated three times continuously in the same word. The alternate characters change in shape and length, facilitating distinction to the reader. Since this typeface is inspired by handwriting and the free movement of the hand while writing, we considered ligatures a good asset for this design. The Arabic has a wide range of ligatures that enhance movement and fluidity in text making look text alive, while the Latin achieves this same effect via contextual alternates.

Lettres d’amour! Flirting, fashionable, provocative, emotional, casual, moderate, extremely sensible & beautiful - Liza Pro covers it all. Liza Pro, Underware’s dear creation, is a live-script typeface. Thanks to its extremely intelligent OpenType architecture, she approaches human hand lettering as closely as technically possible. Liza Pro deeply analyzes the text. Out of a stock of 4000 hand crafted characters, Liza creates the most optimal combination. All of this works automatically. All you need to do is start typing your lettres d’amour, and Liza makes the text always look different. She gives your creative piece the impression par excellence. Erotique mais intelligent. She is as clever as we could imagine. She kept all folks at Underware busy for a couple of years. It all started one rainy night back in May 2004 but quickly changed into a fatal affair exceptionnelle. But now, 5 years later we are quite sure: this is something serious. Yes, we are talking about real love. L’amour pour la vie. Liza Pro has Underware’s world-dominating Latin Plus character set, supporting a total of 219 languages (Latin 1 + 2 and beyond). Liza Pro is a package of 4 fonts which work together. Liza Display Pro rocks the script lettering to the max. The build-in Out-of-ink feature, LetterSwapper and Protoshaper makes this font a realtime-digital-calligrapher. She’ll swash up your text drastically, giving long strokes, loops and swashes to letters if their context allows. Liza Text Pro has a more silent, moderate character - she’s well behaving sister of Liza Display Pro, designed to walk long pieces of text in a lively script style. Liza Caps Pro adds more possibilities and functionality to these two script fonts. It bridges the gap in case running script lettering doesn’t do the job, but it also works perfectly on its own. Every capital letter appears in various shapes to obtain the manual lettering feeling. Liza Ornaments Pro is for extra delicatesse et est plus charme. Four heart winning fonts, pour la langue l’amour!

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.

A creative context 2003. Fontsmith was sharing a small, cold, whitewashed studio space in Northburgh Street, Clerkenwell. But things were on the up following prestigious custom type commissions for The Post Office and E4. “Slab serifs were on the brink of another revival, we could feel it,” says Jason Smith. “All we wanted to do was have a play with these slabs, go as far as we could within what was acceptable and readable.” “It wasn’t initially clear what was happening,” recalls Phil Garnham. “We were becoming very influenced by our surroundings, outside the studio space. We absorbed the essence and the designer grime of where we were.” Process Jason began by drawing stems on-screen. “The key aspect of the font is the upward bend of the leading shoulder serif, the way it kind of ramps up and then plummets back down the stem. “The regular and light characters are quite narrow – great for text but the bold is quite wide and chunky – better for headlines. I think ‘y’ is quite different for a slab design. We call it the Fontsmith ‘y’.” Promotion Fontsmith were determined to get FS Clerkenwell noticed. To launch the font, Ian Whalley, a designer friend of Fontsmith, captured words heard on the streets of Clerkenwell, set them in the new font and crafted a small book of typographic conversations. It was a first for Fontsmith. “I think that’s part of why this font has been so successful,” says Phil. “It really does embody the spirit of the area, as a special place for design, arts and crafts. And designers love that.” Contemporary twist FS Clerkenwell, based on influences in and around this part of London with a rich tradition of printing and design, mixes tradition with creation. Old-fashioned values meet new-school trends. Its quirky, contemporary character lends an edge to headlines, logotypes and any large-size text.

Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed. Elegant but with that distance that well-defined forms seem to impose. Her voice, however, was sweeter, closer, and when she spoke her name, like a slow whisper, one felt like what she had come to say could be read in her image. Rufina's story can only be told through a detour because her origin does not coincide with her birth. Rufina was born on a Sunday afternoon while her father was drawing black letters on a white background, and her mother was trying to join those same letters to form words that could tell a story. But her origin goes much further back, and that is why she is pierced by a story that precedes her, even though it is not her own. Maybe her origin can be traced back to that autumn night in which that tall man with that distant demeanor ran into that woman with that sweet smile and elegant aspect. He looked at her in such a way that he was trapped by that gaze, even though they found no words to say to each other, and they stayed in silence. Somehow, some words leaked into that gaze because since that moment they were never apart again. Later, after they started talking, projects started coming up and then coexistence and arguments, routines and mismatches. But in that chaos of crossed words in their life together, something was stable through the silence of the gazes. In those gazes, the silent words sustained that indescribable love that they didn't even try to understand. And in one of those silences, Rufina appeared, when that man told that woman that he needed a text to try out his new font, and she saw him look at her with that same fascination of the first time, and she started to write something with those forms that he was giving her as a gift. Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed, wrote her mother when Rufina was born.

Auchentaller was inspired by a travel poster by Josef Maria Auchentaller in 1906. To our knowledge, it was never cast in type. Grado lies on the northern Adriatic, between Venice and Trieste. At one time the port for the important Roman town of Aquileia. With the decline of the Roman Empire, the upper Adriatic region came under the rule of the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines, the Lombards, the Franks, the Germans, the Venetians and finally, in 1796, the Austrian Hapsburgs. So it remained until the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1919, following World War I, when the seaport of Trieste was awarded to Italy. With Trieste came Montefalcone, Aquileia and Grado. The area was marked by years of political tension between Italy and Yugoslavia, exemplified by the d'Annunzio expedition to capture Fiume (Rijeka) in September, 1919. Some basic discussion of the period from 1919 to 1939 may be found in Seton-Watson’s Eastern Europe Between The Wars (Cambridge 1945) and Rothschild’s East Central Europe Between The Two World Wars (Seattle 1974). In 1965 I was traveling by train from Venice to Vienna. Crossing the Alps, the train stopped for customs inspection at the rural Italian-Austrian border, just above Slovenia. We were warned not to get off the train because there were still shooting skirmishes in the area. Through all this, Grado remained literally an island of tranquility, connected to the mainland by a only causeway and lines on a map. Auchentaller not only painted the beach scene at Grado, he moved there, living out the rest of his life in this comfortable little island town. His travel illustration contains the text from which the design of our font Auchentaller is drawn. The text translates: "Seaside resort : Grado / Austrian coastal land". Please see our gallery images to see a map locating Grado, as well as Auchentaller’s painting of the resort. Auchentaller is a monoline all-cap font, light and open in design , with a lot of typically art nouveau letter forms. Included in our font are a number of ligatures. As is frequently seen in designs by German speakers, the umlaut is embedded in the O & U below the tops of the letters. This approach led to two whimsies: a happy umlauted O and a sad umlauted U. This font has a clean, crisp look that is very appealing and very distinctive. Auchentaller ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Add glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 336 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, liga, salt & ornm. 3. Added 116 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Revised ‘J’. 6. Minor refinements to various glyph outlines. 7. Inclusion of both tabular & proportional numbers. 8. Inclusion of both standard acute and Polish kreska with choice of alternate accented glyphs for c,n,r,s & z. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

If you want to write something sincere and genuine but not too formal then this is the font for you. It is based on real handwriting, not some artificial calligraphy made to be either too haphazard or spiky or have loads of elegant flourishes but an ordinary person's writing, and designed to look as natural and as close to the original lettering as possible. Like any person's writing it is individual and distinctive, but so easy going on the eye those differences sit comfortably with you. It is friendly and open with easy to read glyphs both as lowercase and uppercase. The letters are relatively wide with clearly shaped distinct outlines. This font may be ideal for projects where you expect a wide readership with different reading abilities from young to old. When you are using this font a slightly bigger point size usually gives a better result so for a standard letter or similar you should size up to 15 points or more. Maree has been individually crafted to the smallest detail. To create a realistic handwriting font that looks relatively simple but works in a wide variety of languages requires a complexity and attention to detail most fonts will never require. This font in any ordinary business environment would never have been made, the effort required to make it too great, the length of time too long. There have been no shortcuts in this font, no automatic scanning or tracing, no automatic generation, no class kerning. Not only is each glyph individual but the width of letters, the height, the accents and the positions of the accents are all different. Even the line weight of the letters is designed to have natural variation but yet similar enough that the font appears as though it were written effortlessly in the same pen. And in order to keep the spacing consistent even though the letters have different widths, heights, lengths of descenders and so on, there are a vast number of kerning pairs, letter to letter, number to number, letter to number... All kerning has been individually assessed with an eye to proportionality taking in character shape, size and weight. For instance if you write a telephone number the numbers all sit close together but if you write a number before a letter such as in a UK post code or before a unit of measurement an extra little bit of space has been added which makes the number more distinct and therefore readable. That space is so natural to the eye that you don’t even know it is there. However even in the spacing allowance has been made for the fact it can’t be too perfect because when you write by hand the spacing is inconsistent. There have to be some letters which are too close or far apart otherwise the font would look artificial. For similar reasons if you are going to print out this font for a letter, etc, check the print version before you make any letter spacing changes because with the zoom functions in modern applications that uneven spacing and lettering can seem more pronounced than it actually is. When this font is printed out you will find it is surprisingly neat. This font is what it is, simple clear handwriting. You will not go wow. But if you want something unique and different and looks good on the page you won’t be disappointed. This font is not a work of art but it is a work of love. This font has a soul. How many fonts can you say that about?

Many typefaces are distinctive or attractive at the expense of legibility and versatility. Not so the Optima® family. Simultaneously standing out and fitting in, there are few projects or imaging environments outside of its range. Although Optima is almost always grouped with sans serif typefaces, it should be considered a serifless roman. True to its Roman heritage, Optima has wide, full-bodied characters – especially in the capitals. Only the E, F and L deviate with narrow forms. Consistent with other Zapf designs, the cap S in Optima appears slightly top-heavy with a slight tilt to the right. The M is splayed, and the N, like a serif design, has light vertical strokes. The lowercase a and g in Optima are high-legibility two-storied designs. Optima can be set within a wide choice of line spacing values – from very tight to very open. In fact, there are few limits to the amount of white space that can be added between lines of text. Optima also benefits from a wide range of letter spacing capability. It can be set quite tight, or even slightly open – especially the capitals. If there are any guidelines, Optima should be set more open than tight. It’s not that readability is affected that much when Optima is set on the snug side; it’s just that the unhurried elegance and light gray typographic color created by the face are disrupted when letters are set too tight. Optima is also about as gregarious as a typeface can be. It mixes well with virtually any serif design and a surprisingly large number of sans serif faces. The Optima family is available in six weights, from roman to extra black, each with an italic counterpart. In addition, the family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts, providing for the automatic insertion of small caps, ligatures and alternate characters, in addition to offering an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. When you’re ready to find its perfect pairing, browse these fantastic matches: Monotype Century Old Style™, Dante®, Frutiger® Serif, Joanna® Nova, Malabar™, and Soho®.

Introducing Quasix—the typeface that defies logic! With its compact industrial headline design, this font is the perfect choice for anyone looking to add an edge to their design work. But beware, its quirky design might have you scratching your head at first. Just like the inside of a machine, Quasix is full of moving parts, each with its own unique purpose—but don’t worry, you don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate its beauty. This typeface is perfect for those who want to convey the concept of engineering devices without using typical techno typefaces or cliche physical symbols like gears and bolts. Quasix will elevate your design to the next level, and its versatility makes it suitable for a range of themes, from retro to modern and even futuristic. Don’t be afraid to get creative with Quasix—this typeface was made to be bold and unconventional. Let it take center stage and watch as it transforms your design into something truly unique. Quasix defies convention and breaks the mold, making it the perfect choice for those who aren’t afraid to think outside the box. Try it out and see for yourself! Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Welcome to Wubble Labs—where we don’t just think outside the box, we dissolve it! Our team of mad scientists has been busy experimenting with the latest in colloidal glopulation technology, and we’re thrilled to present our latest creation: Wubble, the blobbiest, squishiest, most liquid font you’ve ever seen! We know what you’re thinking, “liquid font? What the heck does that even mean?” Well, let us tell you, Wubble is more than just a font—it’s a living, breathing, dripping typographical workfish. Each letter is like a tiny blob of ooze, flowing and shifting in a mesmerizing dance of liquidy goodness. But don’t let Wubble’s gooey exterior fool you—this font is the product of years of careful research and development. Our team of scientists have spent countless hours studying the precise characteristics of colloidal glopulation, perfecting every last detail to bring you the finest liquid font ever produced. So if you’re ready to take your design game to the next level, come on down to Wubble Labs and see what all the fuss is about. We promise, once you go Wubble, you’ll never go back! Most Latin-based European writing systems are supported, including the following languages. Afaan Oromo, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Aymara, Bashkir (Latin), Basque, Belarusian (Latin), Bemba, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Cape Verdean, Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chavacano, Chichewa, Crimean Tatar (Latin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dholuo, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz (Latin), Galician, Ganda, Genoese, German, Greenlandic, Guadeloupean Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Hiligaynon, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Kaqchikel, Karakalpak (Latin), Kashubian, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish (Latin), Latvian, Lithuanian, Lombard, Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, Maasai, Makhuwa, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Ndebele, Neapolitan, Norwegian, Novial, Occitan, Ossetian (Latin), Papiamento, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rarotongan, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Sango, Saramaccan, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Latin), Shona, Sicilian, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tetum, Tongan, Tshiluba, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen (Latin), Tuvaluan, Uzbek (Latin), Venetian, Vepsian, Võro, Walloon, Waray-Waray, Wayuu, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yapese, Zapotec Zulu and Zuni.

Type designer Xavier Dupré’s Garalda is a charming 21st century family that renews a legacy of finesse. As paragraphs on a page, Garalda’s overall impression is of a workaday personality, committed to the main purpose of the job: easy long-form reading. But setting it in display sizes proves something different: This reinvented Garamond is anything but basic. The Garalda story begins with the serendipitous finding of a book typeset in a rare Garalde, called Tory-Garamond, with which Dupré was not immediately familiar. This Garamond was used in bibliophile books in the decades surrounding 1920, but after that it became déclassé for an unknown reason. Dupré found the italic styles especially charming and discovered the family was probably the mythical Ollière Garamond cut from 1914. He obtained low resolution scans of the typeface and used them, rather than high resolution scans, as the basis for his new type family. This allowed Dupré the mental freedom to experiment and remix as he saw fit, culminating in a contemporary family with heritage. As seen in the simplistic rectangular serifs, Garalda is a humanist slab serif, but with a mix of angles and curves to give the classic shapes a fresh, unorthodox feeling. While almost invisible in paragraph text, these produce a graphic effect in display work. The set of ligatures in the roman and italics lend themselves to unique display use, such as creating lovely logotypes. In the italics, some swashes inspired by different historic Garamonds are included, sometimes breaking their curves to be more captivating. Just look at how the italic ‘*-s’ ligatures create ‘s’ with a cursive formation rather than merely a flowing slant. And how the roman ‘g’ link swings as wide as a trainer’s whip. These are all balanced by squared serifs in the roman to keep an overall mechanised regularity. The Garalda family comes in eight styles, includes some of the original arrows and ornaments, and speaks multiple languages for all typesetting needs, from pamphlets to fine book printing. The complete Garalda family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed. Elegant but with that distance that well-defined forms seem to impose. Her voice, however, was sweeter, closer, and when she spoke her name, like a slow whisper, one felt like what she had come to say could be read in her image. Rufina’s story can only be told through a detour because her origin does not coincide with her birth. Rufina was born on a Sunday afternoon while her father was drawing black letters on a white background, and her mother was trying to join those same letters to form words that could tell a story. But her origin goes much further back, and that is why she is pierced by a story that precedes her, even though it is not her own. Maybe her origin can be traced back to that autumn night in which that tall man with that distant demeanor ran into that woman with that sweet smile and elegant aspect. He looked at her in such a way that he was trapped by that gaze, even though they found no words to say to each other, and they stayed in silence. Somehow, some words leaked into that gaze because since that moment they were never apart again. Later, after they started talking, projects started coming up and then coexistence and arguments, routines and mismatches. But in that chaos of crossed words in their life together, something was stable through the silence of the gazes. In those gazes, the silent words sustained that indescribable love that they didn’t even try to understand. And in one of those silences, Rufina appeared, when that man told that woman that he needed a text to try out his new font, and she saw him look at her with that same fascination of the first time, and she started to write something with those forms that he was giving her as a gift. Rufina was as tall and thin as a reed, wrote her mother when Rufina was born. Photo (Fragilité): Karin Topolanski / Post: Raw (www.raw.com.uy) - María Pérez Gutiérrez

Many typefaces are distinctive or attractive at the expense of legibility and versatility. Not so the Optima® family. Simultaneously standing out and fitting in, there are few projects or imaging environments outside of its range. Although Optima is almost always grouped with sans serif typefaces, it should be considered a serifless roman. True to its Roman heritage, Optima has wide, full-bodied characters – especially in the capitals. Only the E, F and L deviate with narrow forms. Consistent with other Zapf designs, the cap S in Optima appears slightly top-heavy with a slight tilt to the right. The M is splayed, and the N, like a serif design, has light vertical strokes. The lowercase a and g in Optima are high-legibility two-storied designs. Optima can be set within a wide choice of line spacing values – from very tight to very open. In fact, there are few limits to the amount of white space that can be added between lines of text. Optima also benefits from a wide range of letter spacing capability. It can be set quite tight, or even slightly open – especially the capitals. If there are any guidelines, Optima should be set more open than tight. It’s not that readability is affected that much when Optima is set on the snug side; it’s just that the unhurried elegance and light gray typographic color created by the face are disrupted when letters are set too tight. Optima is also about as gregarious as a typeface can be. It mixes well with virtually any serif design and a surprisingly large number of sans serif faces. The Optima family is available in six weights, from roman to extra black, each with an italic counterpart. In addition, the family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts, providing for the automatic insertion of small caps, ligatures and alternate characters, in addition to offering an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages. When you’re ready to find its perfect pairing, browse these fantastic matches: Monotype Century Old Style™, Dante®, Frutiger® Serif, Joanna® Nova, Malabar™ and Soho®.

The concept of the Baroque Roman type face is something which is remote from us. Ungrateful theorists gave Baroque type faces the ill-sounding attribute "Transitional", as if the Baroque Roman type face wilfully diverted from the tradition and at the same time did not manage to mature. This "transition" was originally meant as an intermediate stage between the Aldine/Garamond Roman face of the Renaissance, and its modern counterpart, as represented by Bodoni or Didot. Otherwise there was also a "transition" from a slanted axis of the shadow to a perpendicular one. What a petty detail led to the pejorative designation of Baroque type faces! If a bookseller were to tell his customers that they are about to choose a book which is set in some sort of transitional type face, he would probably go bust. After all, a reader, for his money, would not put up with some typographical experimentation. He wants to read a book without losing his eyesight while doing so. Nevertheless, it was Baroque typography which gave the world the most legible type faces. In those days the craft of punch-cutting was gradually separating itself from that of book-printing, but also from publishing and bookselling. Previously all these activities could be performed by a single person. The punch-cutter, who at that time was already fully occupied with the production of letters, achieved better results than he would have achieved if his creative talents were to be diffused in a printing office or a bookseller's shop. Thus it was possible that for example the printer John Baskerville did not cut a single letter in his entire lifetime, for he used the services of the accomplished punch-cutter John Handy. It became the custom that one type founder supplied type to multiple printing offices, so that the same type faces appeared in various parts of the world. The type face was losing its national character. In the Renaissance period it is still quite easy to distinguish for example a French Roman type face from a Venetian one; in the Baroque period this could be achieved only with great difficulties. Imagination and variety of shapes, which so far have been reserved only to the fine arts, now come into play. Thanks to technological progress, book printers are now able to reproduce hairstrokes and imitate calligraphic type faces. Scripts and elaborate ornaments are no longer the privilege of copper-engravers. Also the appearance of the basic, body design is slowly undergoing a change. The Renaissance canonical stiffness is now replaced with colour and contrast. The page of the book is suddenly darker, its lay-out more varied and its lines more compact. For Baroque type designers made a simple, yet ingenious discovery - they enlarged the x-height and reduced the ascenders to the cap-height. The type face thus became seemingly larger, and hence more legible, but at the same time more economical in composition; the type area was increasing to the detriment of the margins. Paper was expensive, and the aim of all the publishers was, therefore, to sell as many ideas in as small a book block as possible. A narrowed, bold majuscule, designed for use on the title page, appeared for the first time in the Late Baroque period. Also the title page was laid out with the highest possible economy. It comprised as a rule the brief contents of the book and the address of the bookseller, i.e. roughly that which is now placed on the flaps and in the imprint lines. Bold upper-case letters in the first line dramatically give way to the more subtle italics, the third line is highlighted with vermilion; a few words set in lower-case letters are scattered in-between, and then vermilion appears again. Somewhere in the middle there is an ornament, a monogram or an engraving as a kind of climax of the drama, while at the foot of the title-page all this din is quietened by a line with the name of the printer and the year expressed in Roman numerals, set in 8-point body size. Every Baroque title-page could well pass muster as a striking poster. The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Among these manuals the one published by Fournier stands out - also as regards the selection of the texts for the specimen type matter. It reveals the scope of knowledge and education of the master typographers of that period. The same Fournier established a system of typographical measurement which, revised by Didot, is still used today. Baskerville introduced the smoothing of paper by a hot steel roller, in order that he could print astonishingly sharp letters, etc. ... In other words - Baroque typography deserves anything else but the attribute "transitional". In the first half of the 18th century, besides persons whose names are prominent and well-known up to the present, as was Caslon, there were many type founders who did not manage to publish their manuals or forgot to become famous in some other way. They often imitated the type faces of their more experienced contemporaries, but many of them arrived at a quite strange, even weird originality, which ran completely outside the mainstream of typographical art. The prints from which we have drawn inspiration for these six digital designs come from Paris, Vienna and Prague, from the period around 1750. The transcription of letters in their intact form is our firm principle. Does it mean, therefore, that the task of the digital restorer is to copy meticulously the outline of the letter with all inadequacies of the particular imprint? No. The type face should not to evoke the rustic atmosphere of letterpress after printing, but to analyze the appearance of the punches before they are imprinted. It is also necessary to take account of the size of the type face and to avoid excessive enlargement or reduction. Let us keep in mind that every size requires its own design. The longer we work on the computer where a change in size is child's play, the more we are convinced that the appearance of a letter is tied to its proportions, and therefore, to a fixed size. We are also aware of the fact that the computer is a straightjacket of the type face and that the dictate of mathematical vectors effectively kills any hint of naturalness. That is why we strive to preserve in these six alphabets the numerous anomalies to which later no type designer ever returned due to their obvious eccentricity. Please accept this PostScript study as an attempt (possibly futile, possibly inspirational) to brush up the warm magic of Baroque prints. Hopefully it will give pleasure in today's modern type designer's nihilism.

Zebramatic - A Lettering Safari Zebramatic is a font for editorial design use, to create headlines and titles in eye-catching stripes. Constructed to offer flexible and a variety of graphical possibilities, Zebramatic type is easy to use. The font is offered in three styles: POW, SLAM and WHAM. These styles work both as ready-made fonts and as patterns to create unique, individualized type. The font design’s full potential is unleashed by layering glyphs from two or all three styles in different colors or shades. Working with the different styles I was reminded of the late Jackson Pollock poured paintings—in particular the documentation of his painting process by Hanz Namuth and Paul Falkernburg in the film Jackson Pollock 51. In Pollock’s pictures the complex allure arises from how he layered the poured and dripped paint onto the canvas. Similar joyful experience and exciting results emerge by layering the different styles of Zebramatic type. Texture In the heart of the Design is Zebramatics unique texture. It is based on an analog distorted stripe pattern. The distortion is applied to a grade that makes the pattern complex but still consistent and legible. You can view some of the initial stripe patterns in the background of examples in the Gallery. Zebramatic POW, SLAM and WHAM each offer a distinct pallet of stripes—a unique zebra hide. POW and WHAM use different distortions of the same line width. SLAM is cut from a wider pattern with thicker stripes. The letter cut and kerning is consistent throughout styles. Design Concept Attention-grabbing textured or weathered fonts are ideal for headlines, ads, magazines and posters. In these situations rugged individuality, letter flow, and outline features are magnified and exposed. Textured fonts also immediately raise the design questions of how to create alignment across a word and deal with repeated letters. Zebramatic was conceived as an especially flexible font, one that could be used conveniently in a single style or by superimposing, interchanging and layering styles to create a unique type. The different styles are completely interchangeable (identical metrics and kerning). This architecture gives the typographer the freedom to decide which form or forms fit best to the specific project. Alignment and repetition were special concerns in the design process. The striped patterns in Zebramatic are carefully conceived to align horizontally but not to match. Matching patterns would create strong letter-pairs that would “stick out” of the word. For example, take the problematic word “stuff”. If Zebramatic aligned alphabetically, the texture of S T and U would align perfectly. The repeated F is also a problem. Imagine a headline that says »LOOK HERE«. If the letters OO and EE have copied »unique« glyphs - the headline suggests mass production, perhaps even that the designer does not care. Some OpenType features can work automatically around such disenchanting situations by accessing different glyphs from the extended glyph-table. However these automations are also repeated; the generated solutions become patterns themselves. Flip and stack To master the situation described above, Zebramatic offers a different programmatic practice. To eliminate alphabetic alignment, the letters in Zebramatic are developed individually. To avoid repetition, the designer can flip between the three styles (POW, SLAM, WHAM) providing three choices per glyph. Stacking layers in different sequences provides theoretical 27 (3*3*3) unique letterforms. A last variable to play with is color (i.e. red, blue, black). Images illustrating the layering potential of Zebramatic are provided in the Gallery. The design is robust and convenient. The font is easily operated through the main font panel (vs. the hidden sub-sub-menu for OpenType related features). The process of accessing different glyphs is also applicable in programs that do not support OpenType extensively (i.e. Word or older Versions of Illustrator). International Specs Zebramatic is ready for your international typographic safari. The font contains an international character set and additional symbols – useful in editorial and graphic design. The font comes in OpenType PostScript flavored and TrueType Format.