Rather than confining itself to a single style, Ricardo combines the best of two worlds: the conceptual clarity of a geometric design with the legibility and warmth of a humanist design. Its open counters, crisp joints, and even texture allow for effective use in long-form text settings, while its simple geometric shapes combined with some unexpected details make it highly suitable for display settings such as branding and marketing. Ricardo contains seven carefully chosen weights, ranging from ExtraLight to ExtraBold. The Medium weight functions as a slightly darker alternative to the Regular. Ricardo’s 812 glyphs per style support over a hundred languages, and also include arrows and case-sensitive punctuation. The Ricardo family consists of three subfamilies: Ricardo, Ricardo ALT, and Ricardo ITA. Ricardo contains the most conventional forms, and is the most suitable option for long-form text. Ricardo ALT contains simplified shapes for the a, j, u, and t, which are also accessible through Stylistic Set 2 within Ricardo (in opentype-savvy applications). The cursive-like italics of Ricardo ITA provide a slightly more eccentric alternative to the standard italics. Furthermore, all styles contain stylistic alternates that swap the blunt apexes in A, M, N, V, W, v, w, y, and 1 for pointier ones. These are also accessible through Stylistic Set 1. Other opentype goodness includes: (discretionary) ligatures, smallcaps, case-sensitive forms, fractions, nine sets of numerals, and more. David Ricardo (1772-1823) is considered the first of the classical economists, and combined ground-breaking mathematical abstractions with an understandable down-to-earth way of explaining his ideas.

Following the success of the Ashemore family, it became clear that a rounded version of Ashemore would be a great addition to the product line that would allow designers even more design choices. Ashemore Softened’s rounder forms compliment the face well as the original font eschewed straight lines. The rounded terminators give the face a sense of friendliness that is unsurpassed. The distinct and flamboyant style of Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts style remain, but the blunted terminators give the face a more technological and contemporary look and feel. The Ashemore Softened family has a full range of six weights from thin to black and includes condensed and extended options for a total of 36 fonts. The typeface also includes some unique OpenType alternates that make the superfamily even more versatile. Ashemore Softened is equipped for complex professional typography, including alternates, small caps and many alternate characters. The face also has a number of numeral sets, including tabular figures, fractions, old-style, lining figures and superiors and inferiors. OpenType-capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe Suite can take full advantage of automatic ligatures and alternates. You can find these features demonstrated in the .pdf brochure. Ashemore Softened also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages, including Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Ashemore Softened supports over 40 languages that use the extended Latin script, making the new addition a great choice for multi-lingual publications and packaging. The original Ashemore was designed by Jeremy Dooley with production assistance from Lucas Azevedo and Marcelo Magalhaes. Kerning assistance from iKern.

Taca is a typeface built around a shape that Portuguese designer Rúben R Dias calls a “squircle” — neither square nor circle. We usually associate the rounded, convex box with the television screens of the 1960s and Aldo Novarese’s classic typeface, Eurostile. But whereas Eurostile is cold and machined, Taca is warm and rugged, as if it was molded from clay or carved from stone. Taca’s organic nature is also derived from another unique feature: rounded crotches at the right angles where perpendicular strokes meet. This subtle finish, along with blunt stroke endings, softens the otherwise rigid skeleton. With such a strong conceptual vision, Taca could be relegated to the bin of experimental designs, severely limited in their application. But that fate is usually born of a less experienced maker. As a teacher, designer, and letterpress printer, Dias is a type user, keenly aware of the functional requirements of good type. Taca is therefore not a slave to its concept, but a working font family, effective in various sizes and environments. Its lettershapes break away from the base shape whenever it makes sense for legibility, while still maintaining the flavor of the design as a whole. That said, a set of squircle-shaped alternates give the user the flexibility to get more stylized if the situation calls for it. Fitting to its functional aims, Taca has many of the features one expects of a proper text font: upper and lowercase figures, case-sensitive punctuation, and Extended Latin language support. The simplicity, openness, and squareness of Taca’s forms also make it an ideal design for the pixel grid of screen displays.

Hey there, font fanatics! Have you met Bonobo? This casual-style transitional serif typeface is the perfect addition to your font collection. With its robust uprights adorned with blunt serifs and curls, Bonobo exudes a friendly yet sophisticated vibe. But that’s not all—the italics are flared and laid back, adding a touch of playfulness to your designs. And the best part? Bonobo comes in a variety of weights to suit your every need—Regular, Semibold, Bold, and Italic. So whether you’re crafting a brochure, designing a logo, or just jazzing up your social media posts, Bonobo has got you covered. Why settle for boring fonts when you can add a little personality to your work with Bonobo? Try it out today and see the difference it makes! 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.

Ready for the designs of today, the Sancoale superfamily takes a softer turn with a rounded slab serif. Crafted from Sancoale’s simple geometry, new softened slab serifs provide a lively typeface that conveniently enhances its cousins: Sancoale Softened--a sans with blunted terminals; Sancoale Slab; and, certainly, the first Sancoale. The weights of each and every member are balanced diligently to be compatible with one another. When used alongside one another, the combination makes for robust and tight design. With weights starting with the slender thin ranging to the juicy black, Slab Soft opens the doorway to the vary of uses. Its design is legible and neutral enough for bodies of copy--both in print and on your website. The web font also stands out perfectly as a headline or a display face. Slab Soft carefully places a foot ahead, and doesn't overpower like many slabs. This font’s the choice to seize the day and get the job done. All insigne™ fonts are absolutely loaded with OpenType options. Sancoale Slab is geared up for pro typography, together with alternates with stems, compact caps and lots of alts, together with “normalized” capitals and lowercase letters. The font features many numeral sets, with fractions, old-style and lining figures with superiors and inferiors. OpenType-capable programs like Quark or the Adobe suite allow you to quickly change ligatures and alternates. You can see these options shown in the .pdf brochure. Bundled are compact caps, fractions, old-style and lining quantities, scientific superior/inferior figures, entire ordinal and inferior alphabet. The Sancoale superfamily also features the glyphs to aid a variety of languages, together with Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Sancoale Slab supports around forty languages that utilize the Latin script, earning Sancoale the pick for for multi-lingual publications and packaging.

The contemporary feel of the Sancoale superfamily takes a bolder turn with this futuristic slab. Built from Sancoale's successfully simple geometry, Slab's serif elements and tall x-height give the face an energetic, yet clean figure that easily complements its cousins: Sancoale Softened--a sans with blunted terminals; Sancoale Narrow; and, of course, the original Sancoale itself. The weights of each member have been balanced carefully to ensure compatibility with the others, and when used together, the combination creates a powerful design that is easy to identify. With weights ranging from the classier Thin to the authoritative Black, Slab opens the door to a range of applications. Used in different text sizes, its tech image is legible and neutral enough for longer bodies of copy--both in print and on the web. Have a more prominent need? The web font also stands out well in a headline or even as a display face. Slabís great personality puts a strong foot forward without giving its reader a kick in the teeth. Whatever the task, this font's one to capture the Zeitgeist into your work. All Insigne fonts are fully loaded with OpenType features. Sancoale Slab is also equipped for complex professional typography, including alternates with stems, small caps and plenty of alts, including "normalized" capitals and lowercase letters. The face includes a number of numeral sets, including fractions, old-style and lining figures with superiors and inferiors. OpenType-capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. You can find these features demonstrated in the .pdf brochure. Included are small caps, fractions, old-style and lining numbers, scientific superior/inferior figures, complete ordinal and inferior alphabet, and a set of symbols and arrows. The Sancoale family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages, including Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Sancoale Slab supports over 40 languages that use the extended Latin script, making the new addition a great choice for multi-lingual publications and packaging.

Whether you call them slab serif, square serif, or Egyptian, you know them when you see them – sturdy, nearly monoweight designs with blunt, straight-edged serifs and a no-nonsense attitude. The Rockwell® Nova family is a fine example of this appealing and eminently usable type style. This is a design that is both robust and adaptable. Marked by the flat top-serifs on the cap A, unusual Q tail and high-legibility two-storied lowercase a, Rockwell has a bit of handmade charm that distinguishes it from the cool, more modern interpretations of the slab serif style. The family is excellent for branding, headlines and other display uses. The simple shapes and hearty serifs also make it a good choice for short blocks of textual content in both print and on-screen environments. The light and bold weights are perfect for setting blocks of text copy, while the extra bold and condensed designs bring authority to display copy. Throw in a little color, and you amp up Rockwell’s messaging power. The regular and italic designs perform handsomely, in the most modest of screen resolutions. With four weights of normal proportions, each with a complementary italic, and three condensed designs, two with italics, the family is a commanding and versatile graphic communicator. Rockwell’s large x-height, simple character shapes and open counters, make for an exceptionally legible design. It should not, however, be set so tight that its serifs touch, as this will erode legibility and impair readability. A benefit to Rockwell’s slab serifs, however, is that the design combines beautifully with both sans serif typefaces and a variety of serif designs. Rockwell OpenType® Pro fonts have an extended character set supporting Greek, Cyrillic, most Central European and many Eastern European languages, in addition to providing for the automatic insertion of ligatures and fractions. Looking for its perfect pairing? Look no further than ITC Berkeley Old Style, Between™, ITC Franklin Gothic®, Harmonia Sans™, Metro® Nova or Frutiger® Serif.

Sancoale Softened is the new rounded companion to Sancoale. While the original Sancoale is crisp and defined, its delicate forms also lend themselves well to a lighter, more rounded version. The stems of Sancoale Softened are blunted, and its corners have been carefully rounded, avoiding the “sausage” look seen with some rounded fonts. This blend of definition and delicacy makes the Sancoale Superfamily versatile and appropriate for a variety of applications. The design minimizes the characters to their essence, leaving a default set of simple characters without notches or spurs. However, the typeface family’s slightly technological feel still appears friendly and approachable to the reader. It’s slightly condensed proportions and tall x-height also make the design readable at a wide range of sizes, which works especially well for web pages. These softer letterforms give Softened its unique, futuristic look--great for distinguishing your text or display. There are six weights with true italics. All insigne fonts are fully loaded with OpenType features. Sancoale Softened is also equipped for complex professional typography, including alternates with stems, small caps and plenty of alts, including “normalized” capitals and lowercase letters. The face includes a number of numeral sets, including fractions, old-style and lining figures with superiors and inferiors. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. You can find these features demonstrated in the .pdf brochure. The Sancoale family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages, including Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Sancoale Softened supports over 40 languages that use the extended Latin script, making the new addition a great choice for multi-lingual publications and packaging. Sancoale Softened continues with Sancoale’s successfully simple, geometric and legible structure. With its suitability for a wide range of uses, the Sancoale superfamily is a very economical and versatile addition to any designer’s font collection.

Milan-based Leftloft studio has produced a third leg to its hit Etica font family: LFT Etica Mono. Meant to be a coder’s go-to font for everyday use as much as a designer’s way to invoke a certain genre, it is part of a broader and more versatile family that already contains almost 80 sans and serif fonts. LFT Etica Mono’s ten weights carry the same modern, recognisable DNA of the Etica family while hewing to the defined requirements of a coding typeface: space, density, distinct forms, and clarity. It uses the same instroke on the ‘c’ and open form of the ‘a’ for which the Etica family is famous, but adds something new in the form of an additional italic style. Monospaced fonts usually incorporate slanted letters as italics, as does LFT Etica Mono, but its default italics have warmer, cursive shapes while the alternate italics are simply slanted. The default ‘a’ is a simplified bowl and stem instead of a two storey shape; the ‘d, f, i, l, t, y’ and others gain an outstroke tail; the ‘e’ is one smooth stroke; and the default ‘k’ is looped. These characters have basic, slanted alternates if the cursive look isn’t desired, and includes a set of arrows and geometric shapes. The monospaced design, by nature, makes the typeface useful in coding and in low readability situations. And how does LFT Etica Mono work from the designer’s perspective? The starting point was the need for a monospaced Etica companion intended for technical applications: captions in graphic layouts, small text, confined or predefined space, and overall tone. Flat terminals and counters maintain the colour and versatility of the original typeface, but choosing between the organic cursive or blunt slanted alphabet will give every layout its own character. Of particular aesthetic interest may be the & and % symbols. Designed to be applied to the common visual environment, the new LFT Etica Mono font family completes a more complex system. One benefit is to give an expressive tone — less serious and more friendly — to something inherently technical, to bytes and bots, to encode the beautiful life.

First, the important information…Nori is a hand-lettered typeface that contains over 1100 glyphs, 250 ligatures, 487 alternate characters, 125+ swash and titling alternates, lining and old style numerals. To make sure it is perfectly clear—Nori is the result of brush and ink on paper. The textures produced in each glyph are real and the imperfections are intentional and add to the sincerity of the letters. I say this to be as blunt as possible in order to avoid confusion and to frame what this typeface represents—calligraphic, handwritten letters captured digitally for their warmth and poetic variation for print and screen. Like my handwritten, calligraphic or brush-driven faces before it (the Baka series and the TDC2 2010 winning typeface, Fugu), Nori is a product of my analog and digital hand. To view the words and sentences formed by this typeface is to look at how my hands, yes hands, make letters. The fluidity, as well as the irregularity, is human, honest and intentional—to do so lets the brush I am holding breathe life into each letter. Once digital, any number of points and repetitive processes can’t mask its influences—and I like that. The brush, a simple instrument, my tool, my friend designed to emulate traditional Japanese sumi-e brushes... the Pilot Japan Kanji Fude brush pen. Each letter, each variation was written over and over again until I found the right combination. From there, each was scanned, digitized and optimized. Points were removed in order to ‘clean’ the glyphs up some but I did not want to compromise the integrity of the actual brush stroke. Once this base set of characters (about 350) were completed, the thoughtful manipulation of the glyphs, their gestures and forms were further expanded to solidify the embellishments used within the ligatures, alternates, swashes and additional features. This process was admittedly self-indulgent to an extent. I wanted the words created with this typeface to have the flexibility of variation and cohesiveness of movement that someone fluidly producing these letters by hand might have.  I hope you enjoy this typeface as much as I did during the six months working on it. A specimen and style guide is included with the purchased of Nori.

The famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.