Looking back on my production to date, neither so little nor so large, it does not come as a surprise to find myself now introducing Lady René. A brief review of my career would read as follows: graphic designer graduated from Buenos Aires University, a 10-year professorship in Typography in the same institution, an illustrator in the making. For almost 15 years now my work has focused on the design of editorial pieces, predominantly books and CD sleeves. Typography proper has always been central to my research projects. All my obsessions eventually embodied as much the search for a perfect, spotless text as for a daring and provoking one. In my view, "how-to-say-something" ranks highest amongst a graphic designer’s responsibilities. It was in this vein that I called in the written word to illustrate, to draw, to narrate. Why not reverse the saying and proclaim that “a word is worth a thousand images”? If so, one single word could trigger endless meanings, associations, ideas, and memories in every reader’s mind. Language, we know, has a strong power and is a living expression of a culture. In my illustrations, letters and drawings reunite in one synergy said and unsaid, the finiteness of the message and the freedom of the free reading. And this is how and when, Lady René, my first born type font sees the light of day conceived out of a love of illustration and a reverence for the written word, recalling the whimsicality of the handmade drawing and reflecting its sensitive, warmth and spontaneity. Enabled by the characteristics of Open Type and the hard, outstanding work of designer Ale Paul, Lady René succeeds in composing texts in a simple, organic way by means of its contextual and stylistic alternates, swash characters, ligatures and connecting words. A bundle of decorative miscellanea completes the set of signs, enabling the user considerable freedom to create new typographic landscapes. Lady René is then prepared, very much like a character in a short story, to come to life in the reader’s mind. I expect you will enjoy her as much as I did creating her. Laura Varsky

OpenBookING is a gimmick or novelty font that has letters on pages of a book. It is caps only and monospaced. The letters on the upper-case keys are on the left-handed pages of an open book and the letters on the lower-case keys are the same letters but on the right-handed pages of an open book. One could alternate upper and lower case keys to get letters on complete books, but the Opentype feature of contextual alternatives (calt) does this automatically. Several previous typefaces from IngrimayneType used the calt feature to alternate shapes that fit together in an interlocking pattern, such as alternating concave and convex shapes. OpenBookING uses the calt feature in a different way, to alternate two halves of a symmetrical shape. To provide two copies of numbers and common symbols, some non-alphabetical characters are unavailable because their slots were taken by the second form of the number or common symbol. If stylistic set one (ss01) is turned on, spaces are replaced with empty pages. This may leave you with unwanted spaces at the end of lines, and to eliminate them, turn off the feature (or change the font) for these spaces. The empty pages can be used in a layer to add color to the text. There is also a second set of empty pages with a filled page that can also be used in layers. (See poster for examples.) These pages are on the (logicalnot multiply) and (register divide) characters for the first set and on the (ordmasculine ellipsis) and (macron trademark) keys for the second set. Finally, OpenBookING has a large set of accented characters if anyone should need them. The letters used on the books were derived from the font Myhota-Bold. For a related typeface of letters on book covers, see NewLibrary. OpenBookING has limited uses and is priced accordingly.

Named for a Manhattan neighborhood, Morningside Heights JNL is based on lettering found on a 1920s-era piece of sheet music. Part of the charm of hand lettering from the Art Nouveau era is found in the non-standard line thicknesses, experimental character shapes and varying character widths.

Here's a font that'll send shivers down your spine, stand your hair up on end and turn your skin into gooseflesh. Hand lettered by rotten old Richard Starkings after we locked him up in the attic one dark, stormy night, these stressed out characters are a real scream!