Avesta ExtraBoldCondensed is designed by Naghi Naghashian. This Headline Font is developed on the basis of specific research and analysis on Arabic characters and definition of their structure. This innovation is a contribution to modernisation of Arabic typography, gives the font design of Arabic letters real typographic arrangement and provides more typographic flexibility. This step was necessary after more than two hundred years of relative stagnation in Arabic font design. Avesta supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. Avesta Font is available in ExtraBoldCondensed. This font is designed to be used as advertising and newspaper headlines. Avesta design fulfills the following needs: A Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. Avesta is not based on any pre-digital typefaces. It is not a revival. Rather, its forms were created with today’s technology in mind. B Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Avesta's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D An attractive typographic image. Avesta was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. E The highest degree of geometric clarity and the necessary amount of calligraphic references. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the contemporary sans serif aesthetic now common in Latin typography.

BiBi font family is designed by Naghi Naghashian. This font family is developed on the basis of specific research and analysis on Arabic characters and definition of their structure. This innovation is a contribution to modernisation of Arabic typography, gives the font design of Arabic letters real typographic arrangement and provides more typographic flexibility. This step was necessary after more than two hundred years of relative stagnation in Arabic font design. BiBi supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. BiBi Font family is available in five weights: Light, Regular, Demi, Bold and Heavy; each of them in two diferent styles including normal and extended. BiBi designs fulfill the following needs: A Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfils the demands of electronic communication. BiBi is not based on any pre-digital typefaces. It is not a revival. Rather, its forms were created with today’s technology in mind. B Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. BiBi's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D An attractive typographic image. BiBi was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. E The highest degree of geometric clarity and the necessary amount of calligraphic references. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the contemporary sans serif aesthetic now common in Latin typography.

Apadana is a new creation of Naghi Naghashian. Apadana design fulfills the following needs: A. Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. Apadana is not based on any pre-digital typefaces. It is not a revival. Rather, its forms were created with today's technology in mind. B. Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C. Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Apadana's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D. An attractive typographic image. Apadana was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. Apadana supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. E. The highest degree of geometric clarity and the necessary amount of calligraphic references. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the contemporary sans serif aesthetic now common in Latin typography.

Ekbatana is a new creation of Naghi Naghashian. Ekbatan design fulfills the following needs: A. Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. Ekbatana is not based on any pre-digital typefaces. It is not a revival. Rather, its forms were created with today's technology in mind. B. Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C. Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Ekbatana's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D. An attractive typographic image. Ekbatana was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. Ekbatana supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. E. The highest degree of geometric clarity and the necessary amount of calligraphic references. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the contemporary sans serif aesthetic now common in Latin typography.

Clean, crisp, rational, familiar, modern… serifed. Positype Scotch reaches back to history just enough to produce something warm and easy on the eyes. No corners were cut, no quick tricks… this type suite was drawn for specificity: Text, Display, and Deck… ALL in 3 widths that now include Condensed and Compressed. Each unique, each inter-connected, each part of the whole. Scotch Text is offered in 6 weights with matching true italics. Drawn for economy and an easy read, the family is a workhorse for long-passage text settings. 4 sets of numerals, well-proportioned small caps, and a plethora of extras round out each font. Scotch Display is not just a thinner version of Scotch Text wrapped in a higher contrast. Display sports shorter ascenders and descenders, a unique footprint, great contrast, and a more folded, calligraphic italics. Display subtly oozes sophistication and provides an attractive, exhuberant companion to Scotch Text. Scotch Deck rounds out the offering by choosing to be specific to its offering. Deck utlitizes traits and proportions shared between Text and Display, but alters its overall mass to balance out the needs for settings that require subheadlines, callouts and other similar uses. Essentially, something not so high-contrast and not so stress dense that works great for middle-sizes.

In the world of webfonts, Condensed proportions are key to maximizing your page's premium real estate while keeping your copy clean and catchy as you cut down to the essentials. Soon after the introduction of webfonts, I began to see Insigne's Le Havre used frequently for web headlines, not so much for its Art Deco look as for its more compact proportions. There seemed to be a need for a font that was designed to be used solely for the web's unique constraints. Enter Coegit Sans. Coegit is built specifically for web applications. Its highly Condensed forms range from thin--offering the greatest number of uses--to the attractive, accenting black. With three widths--Compressed, Compact, and the widest, Condensed --the family holds a total of sixteen fonts. The typefamily has also been hinted for excellent, onscreen display quality, even at small sizes. Overall, its lighter, humanist features provide the reader a more congenial welcome than its square, sans-serif counterparts can offer. Coegit is equipped for complex professional typography with stems, small caps and plenty of alts, including titling capitals. 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 family also includes glyphs to support a wide range of languages, including Central, Eastern and Western European languages. In all, Coegit supports over 40 languages that use the Latin script, making the new addition a great choice for multi-lingual publications and packaging. While the advanced OpenType features of webfonts are not currently supported in many browsers, the near future promises wide support. As acceptance of these features grow, Coegit Sans will prove to be a versatile element for your wide range of web projects.

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.

The impetus behind Felbridge was both ambitious and highly practical: to develop an ideal online" typeface for use in web pages and electronic media. Robin Nicholas, the family's designer, explains, "I wanted a straightforward sans serif with strong, clear letterforms which would not degrade when viewed in low resolution environments." Not surprisingly, the design also performs exceptionally well in traditional print applications. In 2001, to achieve his goal, Nicholas adjusted the interior strokes of complex characters like the M and W to prevent on-screen pixel build-up and improve legibility. Characters with round strokes were drawn with squared proportions to take full advantage of screen real estate. In addition, small serifs were added to characters like the I, j and l to improve both legibility and readability. "The result," according to Nicholas, "is a typeface with a slightly humanist feel, economical in use and outstanding legibility - even at relatively small point sizes. Most sans serif typefaces have italics based on the simple "sloped Roman" principle, but italic forms for Felbridge have been drawn in the tradition of being visually lighter than their related Roman fonts, providing a strong contrast when the italic is used for emphasis in Roman text. The italic letter shapes also have a slightly calligraphic flavor and distinctive "hooked" strokes that improve fluency. Felbridge is available in four weights of Roman - Light, Regular, Bold and Extra Bold - with complementary italics for the Regular and Bold designs. The result is a remarkably versatile typeface family, equally comfortable in magazine text copy or in display work for advertising and product branding. As a branding typeface, Felbridge works in all environments from traditional hardcopy materials to web design, and is even suitable for general office use. As part of a corporate identity, this no-nonsense typeface family will be a distinctive and effective communications tool." Felbridge™ font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

Jim Rimmer aptly described his Dokument family as a sans serif in the vein of News Gothic that takes nothing from News Gothic. Building on that internal analysis, Dokument Pro is the thoroughly reworked and expanded of the original main set released in 2005, with different widths still in the pipeline. This new version updates Jim’s work to six Pro weights and their italic counterparts, each of which takes advantage of OpenType stylistic sets to introduce different degrees of graduation from gothic to humanist. Dokument Pro is now a unique text sans family, with an adaptable personality suitable for the kind of edgy, uncompromising corporate and media typography that just tells it like it is, instead of having to resort to the common contemporary luring and baiting tactics. Dokument Pro’s range of weights, styles and features (over 775 glyphs per font, built-in small caps, alternates galore, and support for over 45 Latin languages) allows for multi-application versatility and clear, precise emotional delivery. This is the kind of straight-shooter sans that should be in every designer’s toolbelt. For more details on the fonts' features, text and display specimens and print tests, consult the Dokument Pro PDF availabe in the Gallery section of this page. 20% of Dokument Pro’s revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

Lythmore This font is called Lythmore and is inspired by Lithos. Lithos was originally designed for Adobe by Carol Twombly in 1990, based it on the lettering from ancient Greek inscriptions. The Capitals are similar in feel and design, but is totally original and built from scratch. It is designed to be similar intentionally, but it is not a clone or rip off. Lithos is an example of a simple blocky san serif font style, with subtly concave sides, angled ends, and off centred curves. Lythmore is also an example of that same style. But is also different in places where I felt it could be improved. And it has a complete lower case set, which Lithos doesn't. I built Lythmore with 8 different weights. Lythmore can be very effective when used in advertising and general display work, but it can also be used for much more. Although it was never designed to be body copy, when used as such, it is still perfectly readable and adds its own version of sans serif style and flavour. I have included two versions of the Lythmore family. Lythmore A and Lythmore B. In the Lythmore A family, the lighter 4 weights all vary in weight in both the horizontal and vertical axis. The heavier 4 weights all vary in the horizontal axis only. In the Lythmore B family, the transition is even in both directions across the entire family. The result of this difference is that the A and B versions difference is most noticeable between the Regular and Medium weights. While the extreme ends of each family version are virtually identical.

Iranica is a new creation of Naghi Naghashian. It is extremely legible even in very small size. "Iranica" is reminiscence to my birthplace and my cultural root. Iranica is a modern Sans Serif font family. This innovation is a contribution to modernisation of Arabic typography, gives the font design of Arabic letters real typographic arrangement und provides more typographic flexibility. Iranica supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu. The highest degree of calligraphic grace and the clarity of geometric typography. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the Roman aesthetic common in Latin typography. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. Iranica design fulfills the following needs: A. Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. B. Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C. Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Iranica's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D. An attractive typographic image. Iranica was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. Iranica supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. E. The highest degree of calligraphic grace and the clarity of geometric typography. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the Roman aesthetic common in Latin typography.

As comic book readers know all too well, team ups are every super hero’s bread and butter... when the brave and the bold are in a pickle, and super villains are running onion rings around them, here’s how they roll: They Meat! They Team-Up with your taste buds! They Fight Hunger! Yes, some hero combos may get along better than others, but they are always more powerful together. So take a footlong bite out of crime, and make the subways safe again with our mouthwatering HERO SANDWICH! Prepared with plastic gloves on by those awfully nice chaps at the Comicraft deli. Anyway you slice it, these five Ingredients can be layered to generate a Hero Sandwich with the carbs and protein you need to deliver a knuckle sandwich to the bulking agents of your deadliest foes! See these families related to Hero Sandwich Ingredients: Hero Sandwich Combos Hero Sandwich Pro

Eponymous is an Egyptian-style typeface with chunky, scalloped serifs. It is available in five weights in both roman and italic. I have always loved slab serif type and have created Eponymous to fulfil a yearning for a versatile, stylish and contemporary slab face. A key design characteristic is the implementation of scalloped serifs which, to me, imbues the typeface with a distinctive personality. Make use of the Open Type features that are part of Eponymous. For a start, you can implement some stylistic alternates, so, if the main characters don’t quite suit your concept, try activating Stylistic Set 1. There’s also a full set of small caps included. You can mix and match these characters with regular lowercase to create some interesting unicase typography. Of course, all characters have complementing diacritics, enabling multi-language support. Key features: Eponymous is is an Egyptian-style typeface with chunky, scalloped serifs 5 weights in roman and italic: Light | Regular | Medium | Bold | Black Full set of small caps with diacritics and figures 30+ alternate characters Full European character set 650+ glyphs per font Eponymous was redrawn and re-spaced to a higher standard in April 2021 (v2.0).

Tavern is a super font family based on our Algerian Mesa design, with Tavern we've greatly expanded the usability by creating light and bold weights plus all new for 2020 with the introduction of extra bold and black weights Tavern is now a five weight family. The addition of the bold weight made it possible to go further with the design by adding open faced shadowed, outline and fill versions. Please note, the fill fonts are aligned to go with the open faced versions, they may work with the outline versions, however you will have to apply them one letter at a time. The Tavern Fill fonts may also be used a stand alone font, however, the spacing is much wider than the regular solid black weights of Tavern. In the old days of printing, fill fonts rarely lined up perfect with the open or outline font, this created a misprinted look that's much in style today. To create that misprinted look using two different colors, try layering the outline fonts offset over the top of the solid black versions. Next we come to the small caps and X versions, for a font that's mostly seen used in all caps we felt a small caps would come in handy. The X in Tavern X stands for higher X-height, we've taken our standard lowercase and raised it for greater visibility in small text and for signage where you want the look of a lowercase but it needs to be readable from the street. In August of 2016 I started the project of expanding this font into more weights after seeing the font in use where someone tried creating a bold version by adding a stroke fill around the letters. The result didn't look very good, the stroke fill also caused the shadow line to merge with the serifs on some letters. This lead me to experiment to see if a new bold weight was possible for this font and I'm pleased to say that it was. After the bold weight was finished I decided to type the regular and bold weights together in a first word thin second word bold combination, however the weight difference between the two wasn't enough contrast. This lead me to wonder if a lighter weight was possible for this font, as you can see yes it was, so now for the first time in the history of this old 1908 type design you can type a first word thin second word bold combination. So why the name change from Algerian to Tavern? Since the original font was designed in England by the Stephenson Blake type foundry I decided to give this font a name that reminded you of the country it came from, however, there were other more technical reasons. During the creation of the bold weight the engraved shadow line was sticking out too far horizontally on the bottom right of the serifs dramatically throwing the whole font off balance. The original font encountered this problem on the uppercase E, L and Z, their solution was a diagonal cut corner which was now needed across any glyph in the new bold weight with a serif on the bottom right side. In order to make the light and regular weights blend well with the bold weight diagonal cut offs were needed and added as well. This changed the look of the font from the original and why I decided to change the name, additional concerns were, if you're designing a period piece where the font needs to be authentic then this font would be too new. Regular vs. Alt version? The alternate version came about after seeing the regular version used as a logo and secondary text on a major product label. I felt that some of the features of the regular version didn't look good as smaller secondary text, this gave me the idea to create an alternate version that would work well for secondary text in an advertising layout. But don't stop there, the alternate version can be used as a logo too and feel free to exchange letters between both regular and alternate versions. Where are the original alternates from Algerian? Original alternates from Algerian are built into the regular versions of Tavern plus new alternates have been created. We're excited to introduce, for the first time, all new swash capitals for this classic font, you're going to love the way they look in your ad layout, sign or logo. The best way to access alternate letters in Tavern is with the glyph map in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign products, from Adobe Illustrator you can copy and paste into Photoshop as a smart object and take advantage of all the text layer style features Photoshop has to offer. There may be third party character maps available for accessing alternate glyphs but we can't advise you in that area. I know what you're thinking, will there be a Tavern Condensed? It takes a lot of hours to produce a large font family such as this, a future condensed version will depend on how popular this standard version is. If you love Tavern we're happy to introduce the first weathered edge version of this font called Bay Tavern available in February 2020.

You stand, poised at the brink. If you do not choose the right, the best typeface, this may be one of the greatest disasters in your history. The whole root and core and brain on which and around which your project is built seems about to perish into an ignominious end. But I do not for a moment fail to believe that Winsel shall prevail for you. This bold new face, founded from the tested mind of insigne design, will in the moment of need wield for you the full might of its ancestors. The entire strength of the British Empire’s vernacular poster lettering spanning the 1920’s to the 1950’s drives the very heart of every feature and weight this font has to offer. Winsel’s expanded design is sharp and angular, based on pointed brush strokes. Its thick, sturdy appearance will draw and direct your reader’s mind to the weight and importance of your messages and titling. Within the font’s full forces work a range of styles to achieve victory in the contest ahead: thick weights that are compact and muscular for carrying a heavier load and lighter, finer weights to lead you through your more sensitive operations. It stands equipped with OpenType features, ready to support most European Latin-based languages and providing features such as Small Caps and Titling Caps in all nine of its weights. Well-honed for the task ahead, Winsel has been crafted to ride out the storm of mediocrity and to outlive the merits of inconsequence, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. There has never been in all the world such an opportunity for you. With Winsel, you shall go on till the end. You shall write on the beaches. You shall write on the landing grounds. You shall write with growing confidence and growing strength in print or on the air. Every morn has brought forth a noble chance. Your chance this day is Winsel.

Axial Cut is a sans serif typeface (Latin Extended-A), a contemporary and rounded evolution of geometric fonts for screen, but this time the letters are built on an axial axis that results in trapezoidal counter-shapes, joints with reduced antlers and rounded corners that correct optical effects in small sizes to make the typography more legible, and at the same time, in large sizes it shows its original shapes. The Axial Cut typeface family is made up of four weights: Light, Regular, Medium and Bold, each with 785 characters. I have taken particular care with the metrics and dimensions of each letter or sign, with a very careful and precise kerning configuration to achieve the For maximum readability, these are fonts with slightly higher ascenders than capitals and short descenders to make it more compact. The editing possibilities and unique designs with these complex typefaces are very wide, the fonts have a complete set of uppercase letters and a lowercase set with alternative characters as well as lowercase letters and numbers in different positions (lowercase, denominators, numerals, and uppercase) that They also work as automatic fractions, they also incorporate small capital letters and three sets of alternative numbers (Normal, Old style numbers, Square numbers), etc. Discover other alternative signs, characters and Open Type functions in the PDF: Specimen & The Cheat Sheet.

Duos Pro, a script for illusionists, comes in 10 styles. Whatever style you pick: apply this speedy monolinear handwriting font in large sizes, because it is made for catching the attention. Take Duos Sharp, which comes with speedy strokes and sharp endings in light, regular and black weights. Or pick Duos Round, and its 3 styles with a softer voice and round endings. Some people call those endings “funky ball noses“, an odd but appropriate description. Round styles look more like round tip speedball lettering, but contrary to most speedball letterings they're written with a very high speed. Especially Duos Round Black is more cuddlesome than its sharper counterpart. For an even more intuitive feel, we added two more sets: Duos Brush & Duos Paint. Duos Brush combines monoline strokes with brush beginnings and endings, for that graphical, freshly lettered touch. A closer look will reveal how its brushed tails vary all the time. Duos Paint is made up out of rough & artistic painted strokes, with all its accompanying shortcomings. In contradiction to the finesses of lighter weights, Duos Paint Black scores in being the most nonchalant and impressionistic. Poésie brutale! As well as having the option to choose between (or mix) these 10 styles, Duos Pro has additional hidden functionalities. For example, every style has many alternate lettershapes and ligatures, offering various different results and lengths to display every single word. Or manually add one of the swashes for more emphasis. A bonus font, Duos Tools, includes tool icons, strokes and banners. If that ain’t enough, throw in some polysemic letters for smart, ambiguous communication if you like. Want to become a signpainter? Then be a signpainter. Always wanted to be an artist? This is your chance! Duos Pro boosts your look. Make your visual vocabulary as grandiose, dramatic, sensitive or picturesque as you want. But whatever you do, don't hesitate to apply Duos Pro “short & big”!

The Neue Haas Unica™ family is an extended, reimagined version of the Haas Unica® design, a Helvetica® alternative that achieved near mythical status in the type community before it virtually disappeared. Originally released in 1980 by the Haas Type Foundry and designed by Team ’77 — André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt— for phototypesetting technology of the day, the design was never successfully updated for today’s digital environments – until now. Toshi Omagari of Monotype Studio has given this classic a fresh, digital facelift with more weights, more languages and more letters to meet today’s digital and print needs. Available in 18 styles, the Neue Haas Unica family is remarkably appropriate for a wide range of applications, possessing a delicate gradation of weights and clear character shapes. The family's lighter weights are perfect for headlines and other large settings, as well as small blocks of copy at typical text sizes. The regular, medium and bold weights know no boundaries and the heavy and black designs are ideal for when typography needs to be powerful and commanding. Like the Neue Helvetica and Univers Next typefaces, the Neue Haas Unica family can be used just about anywhere – or for any project. In addition to its 9 tailored weights and complementary italics, the Neue Haas Unica family also possesses additional characters for Eastern and Central European, Greek and Cyrillic language support, which did not exist in the original design. A cosmopolitan typeface for today's modern, discerning design needs, the Neue Haas Unica collection is a new classic in the making—one that every designer should surely have at their disposal.

Decora Arabic is a new creation of Naghi Naghashian. Decora Arabic's design fulfills the following needs: A. Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. A modern interpretation of Naskh which was invented as calligraphic style by Ebn Moghleh, a Persian savant in ninth century. This script is the most widely used and its popularity has increased through the centuries. Most recently, it has served as a basis for the typefaces that are in use today. B. Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C. Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Decora Arabic's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D. An attractive typographic image. Decora Arabic was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. Decora Arabic supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. E. The highest degree of calligraphic grace and the clarity of geometric typography. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the Roman aesthetic common in Latin typography.

Parvin is a new creation of Naghi Naghashian. Parvin design fulfills the following needs: A. Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. A modern interpretation of Naskh which was invented as calligraphic style by Ebn Moghleh, a Persian savant in ninth century. This script is the most widely used, and its popularity has increased through the centuries. Most recently, it has served as a basis for the typefaces that are in use today. B. Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C. Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Parvin's simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D. An attractive typographic image. Parvin was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. Parvin supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. E. The highest degree of calligraphic grace and the clarity of geometric typography. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the Roman aesthetic common in Latin typography.

By the 1990s, the availability of font creation software opened the door to an explosion of creativity, experimentation and exploration into the world of digital typography by amateur and professional alike. The undisputed king of the freeware fonts was Ray Larabie through his Larabie Fonts website. It seemed at the time that Ray’s output was endless, and he amassed dozens upon dozens of fonts that ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. In fact, Ray was the driving force of encouragement and a behind-the-scenes “mentor” who helped Jeff Levine Fonts get underway in January of 2006. As Larabie’s focus changed to higher-quality commercial type design with the launch of Typodermic, Inc., many of his “less than perfect” font experiments were withdrawn and shelved. Ray eventually turned those lost (and sometimes questionable) typefaces into a bundled zip archive released into the public domain through Creative Commons. One particular design “Boron” (circa 1996) featured computer-oriented lettering as if etched onto a circuit board. Running with this idea, and with Ray's approval, the electronic elements were stripped away, the characters cleaned up and modified, and the font reworked in Retro Checkbook JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

I just loved the design idea behind this font, but the original font had a lot of ugly artifacts - so I have completely redrawn ALL the letters, before expanding the character set. The lowercase has been redrawn with a higher x-height, making the font even more usable (with more "normal" word shapes). ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual "western" glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese.

The Siseriff family of types contains nine different styles, which were developed by the master Swedish typographer Bo Berndal in 2002. Siseriff is a contemporary slab serif face. Except for the Siseriff Black weight, all of the letters display a slightly condensed appearance that is coupled with a relatively uniform width throughout the alphabet. Siseriff's nine styles are distributed across five weights (Light, Regular, Semi Bold, Bold and Black). The Italic companions for these styles (Siseriff Black does not have an italic companion) are true italics. These redrawn italics add a higher degree of differentiation from the Roman weights than could be achieved with obliques alone. Many common Slab Serif families (e.g., Serifa) do not offer this degree of differentiation. This variety makes Siseriff the perfect choice for journalistic and editorial work, where a good hierarchy may be achieved solely by relying on the various weights available, and their italics. All nine styles of the Siseriff family are part of the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH."

Xavier Dupre’s Molto font family is a tonal master, creating tenderness in a slab serif and tempering toughness with flourishes. Slab serifs created their original niche by their ability to grab attention and overwhelm, which caused them to be seen as strong, dominant, and desired fonts, especially in advertising. Slab serifs are the result of placing defined edges on something meant to take up an inordinate amount of space, rather than meant to be graceful. Molto updates this concept to allow a greater, and gentler, range in the lighter weights. Molto’s nine weights are defined by their intended use. The two extreme weights (Hair and Fat) act as display partners for magazines, titles, and posters. The Hair weight is runway ready with its sturdy serifs, breathy internal space, and stable lettershapes that were designed both to perform and impress. Molto’s Fat weight packs maximum punch in a believable way. Its wide and deliberate curves contrast against thin connections and landing strip stems. Molto can be put to perfect use in a fashion magazine using swashy Hair headlines set against its darkest weight. Molto’s seven intermediate weights, with their classic and legible shapes, are meant for texts of all sizes. The notches on diagonals, distinct numerals, and acute terminals grant benefits from caption sizes up to headings. Molto’s refined light weights and punchy heavy weights set the stage for a swashy surprise — alternate capital letters act as refined garments laid atop its concrete skeleton. The Molto font family rejects saving space in favour of intensifying shapes, placing maximum weight on the edges for better legibility and impact. Latin-based digital and printed designs will benefit from Molto’s design voice and breadth. This means UI, video, and online text, and print materials like dictionaries, packaging, advertising, and branding can all put Molto’s robust forms to multipurpose use. Molto successfully creates balance in a slab serif design: an opinionated and striking type family, stalwart in captions and exuberant in display, thanks to swashes which add some originality to the slab category.

Bengala is a font based on Calligraphy & Geometry designed by Carlos Fabián Camargo. Its purpose is to be an innovative typographic system combining Script letters with geometric and hard Caps letters. The contradictory styles are ideal for designing covers, posters, branding and packaging. Its smooth calligraphic look meticulously incorporates characters to design logos and phrases that communicate dynamism and strategy. Bengala Script was inspired by Mistral by R. Excoffon. Bengala Script provides violent and unstable lines with generous spacing between the letters and tight horizontal proportions, producing showy upper and lower case italics inspired by French Gothic calligraphy late fifteenth century. For this reason, Bengala Script retains some uninterrupted calligraphic logic, up and down sometimes higher or shorter than the height of the lowercase, creating dynamism through a variable amount of contrast between thick and thin strokes. Bengala Dingbats has 62 drawings designed to accompany the designs. Script and Caps Bengala have different gender and the similar X height produces more visual appeal. This way Bengala Caps - inspired by the Porshe logo, due to its geometric uppercase Roman construction, extended horizontal proportions, light caliber, rounded strokes terminations and generous spacing between letters. Special thanks to John Moore and Manuel Corradine for their help with Open Type.

Originally released in 2008, Stern is the only typeface to be produced and marketed simultaneously in digital and metal. In the twenty-first century, no less. It is also the last typeface Jim Rimmer ever completed. The process he used for its design and manufacture is the stuff of legend, and can be seen in the Richard Kegler documentary, Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century. The design is a delicate upright italic named in memory of Chris Stern, the late artist and printer from Washington State. In 2013, Canada Type remastered and expanded the design's offerings to a glyphset of over 1200 characters, updated programming. Now Stern Pro includes the following features: - Small caps. - Caps-to-small-caps functionality, useful for setting mid-height caps alongside lowercase. - Tall caps. - Historical forms. - A wide variety of alternates for both uppercase and lowercase letters. - Plenty of ligatures. - Seven types of numerals, enclosers, cojoiners and currency symbols. - Automatic fractions. - A complete set of lowercase ordinals, from a to z. - Case-sensitive forms. - Language support for Greek and over 50 Latin languages. 20% of this font's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

In 2007 we shared our first pride together. More than 1 million people took the streets of Madrid for this huge celebration … seeing the diversity of people supporting love was incredibly touching. Gay Pride is a celebration of freedom, human rights and the right to love whoever we want. It’s a memorial for the battles, the lives lost and the pain suffered while fighting for a growing list of equal rights. But let’s not forget there are still places where LGTBQ community is repressed and persecuted. As Letter crafters we love seeing the signs people design for their different pride parades, and we wondered… Why don’t we create a collection of handcrafted lettering to share some love and to add a typographic realness to the party? Love Wins Font is a series of 60 phrases handwritten with expertise and love specially designed to celebrate diversity. The lettering was crafted with different calligraphic tools creating diverse aesthetics. You can use them to create your signs, t-shirts, stickers, poster, banners.. all you need is to spread love during your Pride Celebrations (or day-to-day life!).

Bonhomme Richard evokes the cursive penmanship of Chevalier John Paul Jones (1747–1792), celebrated Continental Navy commander during the American Revolution, in letters from the late 18th century. The font’s name comes from Jones’s famous frigate, lost during his victorious engagement with the British in the Battle of Flamborough Head in 1779. During this battle Jones is said to have exclaimed, when urged to surrender, “I have not yet begun to fight!” (In fact, his likely words were, “I may sink, but I’ll be damned if I strike!” – i.e., surrender.) A legible script, Bonhomme Richard has an elegance about it while also conjuring the colonial era of its source material. Use to simulate historical handwriting in film props, games, formal invitations, product labels, and the like.

Volta is a robust typeface from the 1950s. A revisit to styles that were en vogue at the turn of the century, Bauer type foundry designers Walter Baum and Konrad Bauer designed this type family in1955. The form of Volta's letters are similar to those in New Transitional Serif typefaces, like Cheltenham and Century. Developed after the Didone (i.e., Bodoni) style types, New Transitional Serifs speak more to the zeitgeist of the late 19th Cntury, and were typographic adaptations to it's newer technologies. Already in the period of mass production, typographers and printers at the dawn of the 20th Century had to cope with larger print runs on cheaper materials. The robust letterforms of New Transitional Serifs were designed to compensate for this, but they were also ingenious little inventions in their own right. Form the beginning, the new, peculiar forms of New Transitional Serif letters were adopted for use by advertisers. Their robustness also allowed them to be used in virtually all sizes. Volta was designed especially with advertising display usage in mind. The x-height of Volta's letters is higher than average for serif faces. It is recommended that Volta be used exclusively for shorter tracks of text, above 12 point. Headlines look dashing set in Volta. Four different font styles are available for the Volta typeface: Regular, Medium, Medium Italic, and Bold."

Ultra legible forceful sanserif in 32 fonts Parisine was born as official parisian métro signage typeface. This family of typefaces has become over years one of the symbols of Paris the Johnston for the London Underground or the Helvetica for the New York Subway. The Parisine was created to accompany travelers in their daily use: ultra-readable, friendly, human while the context is a priori hostile. Meanwhile, Parisine is now a workhorse and economical sanserif font family, highly legible, who can be considered as a more human alternative to the industrial-mechanical Din typeface family. More human, but not fancy: No strange “swashy” f, or cursive v, w etc. on the italics, to keep certain expected regularity, important for information design, signages, and any subjects where legibility, sobriety came first. Born as signage typeface family, the various widths and weights permit a wider range of applications. In editorial projects, the Compress version will enhances your headlines, banners, allowing ultra large settings on pages. The Narrow version will be useful as direct compagnon mixed to standard width version when the space is limited. The various Parisine typeface subfamilies Parisine is organised in various widths and subsets, from the original family Parisine, Parisine Gris featuring lighter versions of the usual weights and italics, Parisine Clair featuring extra light styles, to Parisine Sombre with his darker and extremly black weights as we can seen in Frutiger Black or Antique Olive Nord. Many years of adjustments were necessary to refine this complex family. Initially, Parisine was designed by Jean François Porchez in 1996 for Ratp to solely fulfil the unique needs of signage legibility. Parisine remain the official corporate typeface of the public transport in Paris, the worldwide capital for tourism, and now integral part of the French touch. Directly related, Parisine Office was initially created for Ratp’s internal and external communication, Parisine Office is available at Typofonderie too. Not connected with Ratp and public transports, Parisine Plus was created as an informal version of Parisine. Parisine: Introducing narrow and compressed families About Parisine Parisine helps Parisians catch the right bus Observateur du design star of 2007

NOMAD —Regular is a stand alone font. Nomad -Regular is a clean, interesting revival font. It is a Display font. Nomad, now exclusively in OpenType .oft by Joseph V Coniglio of Coniglio Type. It is a narrow boldfaced font. Its analog source was comprised of an extremely limited die cut, truly generic, craft, peel-and-stick vinyl set of capital letters of ascenders and numbers. It was purchased at a five & dime stores, hardware department from the 1970's. My father owned an original set of characters: Nomad-Regular is nicely expanded to meet the needs of OpenType. The original adhesive labels adhered to the bows of that small boats so fisherman wouldn't get turned away at the Canadian border for not having their vessels tagged and listed with the appropriate license name and numbers, recorded by customs. It was a required serialization of letters and numbers marked on the side of their vessels. On the other hand, most beer and whisky drinking fishers, card players and bait casters would rather not deal with it, but the boat could not cross over the border without them. (Once part of Market LTD from the 1990's, a collection of limited faces, mostly alpha-numeric and some just plain numeric, used primarily in retail and display situations and titling.) Designer: Joseph V Coniglio Author: Coniglio Type

Isabelle is the closest thing to a metal type revival Jim Rimmer ever did. The original metal face was designed and cut in late 1930s Germany, but its propspects were cut short by the arrival of the war. This was one of Jim's favourite faces, most likely because of the refined art deco elements that reminded him of his youthful enthusiasm about everything press-related, and the face's intricately thought balance between calligraphy and typography. Not to mention one of the most beautiful italics ever made. Jim's early 2000s digitization included mathematical corrections to the original metal cut, as well as some functional improvements for digital use. In 2013, during the remastering of the entire Rimmer collection, Isabelle underwent a considerable rethinking/expansion and was rechristened Isabelle Pro. The new revisions include small caps, ligatures, seven types of figures, automatic fractions, extended Latin language support, stylistic alternates that include lowercase serif angle options in the roman and looped ascenders/descenders in the italic, and plenty of extra OpenType features like caps-to-small-caps substitution, case-sensitive positioning, ordinals, and extended class-based kerning. Now each of the Isabelle Pro fonts includes over 680 glyphs. 20% of this font's revenues will be donated to the Canada Type Scholarship Fund, supporting higher typography education in Canada.

Derived from a photograph Rian Hughes took in Hong Kong, the Roadkill family of typefaces is a literal interpretation of rough and worn road lettering. The original provided almost all of the key character shapes, with the others being designed to keep the unique hand painted feel intact. Most of the letters have alternate versions provided. This font works equally well at wider letterspacing settings. Roadkill Alternates provides curved versions of the 2 and the S, a G with higher crossbar, and less worn versions of several other characters. The heavy version packs even more gritty wallop in a non-condensed and blacker weight. Roadkill Heavy packs even more gritty wallop in a non-condensed and blacker weight. Use in conjuction with the original Roadkill and Roadkill Alternates. A set of arrows and other road symbols again taken directly from tarmac to Mac, thus preserving the worn and eroded appearance of the original characters is also part of the Roadkill family.

Linotype Projekt was created by German type designer Andreas Koch with both a well-defined inspiration and goal. It occurred to me that typefaces like Helvetica and Univers seemed to have a higher quality in hot-metal composition as with modern digital typesetting. They are stronger and livelier. This is in part due to the printing process, which presses the characters onto paper, and in part to the forms of the letters, which differ from the PostScript version of the same typeface. An important aspect of printing is the slight increase in character width resulting from the pressure which also serves as an optical correction to the forms. (True exact squares appear slightly barrel-formed to the eye.) I wanted to revive this peculiarity, not because of a nostalgic feeling, rather just because it is more attractive." The result is Linotype Projekt, a text font which is harmonious, clear and extremely legible. Koch lives in Bielefeld, Germany, and is a freelance book and type designer."

ATF Franklin Gothic® A new take on an old favorite Franklin Gothic has been the quintessential American sans for more than a century. Designed by Morris Fuller Benton and released in 1905 by American Type Founders, Franklin Gothic quickly stood out in the crowded field of sans-serif types, gaining an enduring popularity. Benton’s original design was a display face in a single weight. It had a bold, direct solidity, yet conveyed plenty of character. A modern typeface in the tradition of 19th-century grotesques, Franklin Gothic was drawn with a distinctive contrast in stroke weight, giving it a unique personality among the more mono-linear appearance of later geometric and neo-grotesque sans-serif types. Franklin Gothic has been interpreted into a series of weights before, most notably with ITC Franklin Gothic. But as the original type was just a bold display face (later accompanied by a few similarly bold widths and italics), how Benton’s design is expanded to multiple weights and styles as a digital type family can vary significantly. Benton designed several gothic faces that harmonize with one another, including Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, and Monotone Gothic, that can serve as models for new interpretations of his work. With ATF Franklin Gothic, Mark van Bronkhorst looked to Benton’s Monotone Gothic—originally a single typeface in a regular weight, and similar to Franklin Gothic in its forms—as the basis for lighter styles. ATF Franklin Gothic may appear familiar given its heritage, but is a new design offering a fresh take on Benton’s work. The text weights are wider and more open than some previous Franklin Gothic interpretations, and as a result are quite legible as text, at very small sizes, and on screen. ATF Franklin Gothic maintains the warmth and the spirit of a Benton classic while offering a suite of fonts tuned precisely for contemporary appeal and utility. The 18-font family offers nine weights with true italics, a Latin-extended character set, and a suite of OpenType features. Download the PDF specimen for ATF Franklin Gothic.

The Ahoura font family, designed by Naghi Naghashian, was developed considering specific research and analysis on Arabic characters and definition of their structure. The Ahoura innovation is a contribution to modernisation of Arabic typography; gives the Arabic font letters real typographic arrangement and provides for more typographic flexibility. This step was necessary after more than two hundred years of relative stagnation in Arabic font design. Ahoura supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. The Ahoura Font family is available in three weights; Light, Regular and Bold. Each has two different styles-- normal and italic. Ahoura is the first real italic Arabic typeface known until now and its intuitive design arrangement fulfils the following needs: - It is precisely crafted for use in electronic media and it fulfils the demands of electronic communication. Ahoura is not based on any pre-digital typefaces and it is not a revival. Rather, its forms were created with today’s ever-changing technology in mind. - Ahoura is suitable for multiple applications, and gives the widest potential for acceptability. - It is extremely legible not only in its small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Ahoura's simplified forms may be artificially obliqued with In Design or Illustrator, without any degradation of its quality for the effected text. - Ahoura is an eye-catching and classy typographic image that developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. - Ahoura uses the very highest degree of geometric clarity along with the necessary amount of calligraphic references. The Ahoura typeface is of a high vibration that is finely balance between calligraphic tradition and the contemporary sans serif aesthetic commonly seen in Latin typography.

A sign of something better When designer Stuart de Rozario surveyed the fonts used in signage on London’s public transport systems, he reached a dead end. They seemed staid, sterile, lacking in personality, and ill-suited to use by modern brands. He was pointed in another direction entirely. ‘The driving force behind my thoughts was to design something more current and fresh without compromising legibility and clarity. A font with both personality and function, that’s versatile and large and small sizes, and effortless to read, but which also says something new.’ Speed reading Late for a meeting and can’t find your way? Trying to catch a flight? Lost in a hospital? Reading signs is a different business to reading a book or a newspaper. Text on signs needs to be deciphered quickly and effortlessly. So the legibility criteria for signage letterforms are different to those for normal reading, too. Throughout FS Millbank’s uppercase and lowercase alphabets, characters have been given features for extra definition, including: wide ink traps on the A, K, M, V, W, X and Y; a serifed i, accentuated spurs on the a, d, l u; and different x-height shapes on the b, g, p and q. Distinctive forms and generous, open internal shapes all help the quick reading of sign text, and wide, open terminals and counters allow similar letter shapes to be distinguished easily when viewed at different angles. Running down a corridor, maybe... Positive/negative Standard type tends to glow on the kind of dark backgrounds often used for signage, and look heavier than its true weight. To correct the imbalance caused by this optical trick, special weights of the typeface have to be drawn for these ‘negative’, light-on-dark applications. These are lighter than their comparable positive weights to overcome the ‘glow’ effect. After extensive tests of the negative weights, at all sizes, we achieved the right optical balance. Glowing, glowing, gone. Icons This wouldn’t be a signage typeface without its own set of icons, or symbols, to help people find what they’re looking for. So, to sit alongside the positive and negative fonts, we’ve created a comprehensive set of 172 icons, covering a wide range of applications from transport and user interface to information and directional. Designed within the typeface capital height, they sit on the baseline and are spaced centrally.

New for 2020 Bodoni Ornamental now has two italics to choose from, one basic italic and a second which is more of a true italic with a few uppercase letters that have been stylized. Only one italic can be style linked to the regular upright version so in the second italic we've added Avanti to the name which means forward in Italian. When purchasing the regular upright and Avanti italic together they will install as two separate families. Bodoni Ornamental is a revival of a very old typeface based on the Poster Bodoni letter shape. Giambattista Bodoni passed away in 1813, this decorative version was created in the 1820’s or 1830’s which was the time period when many of these ultra bold decorated type faces began to appear, the original artist is currently unknown. The original version of this ornate classic was only available as a set of uppercase letters, today over one hundred eighty years later this font is now complete with a new lowercase, numbers and accented characters for Eastern, Central and Western European countries. Due to the ornate detail in Bodoni Ornamental when printing itís recommended to use a laser printer 600dpi or greater, a 1200dpi printer will give you the best results rendering the most detail at the smallest possible point size for this font. Small home user Ink Jet printers are not recommended for Bodoni Ornamental unless you set the font to a very large point size. With Ink Jet printers much of the detail in the letters will bleed together as the ink hits the page, commercial Ink Jet printers such as GiclÈe printers may give good results. When using Bodoni Ornamental for digital images including web site graphics it may help to add a one pixel stroke fill around the letters setting color to white or grey, this may help the web site images display better on some computer's. You will need a photo editing application such as Adobe Photoshop to create your image adding the stroke fill and save as a jpg , png or gif file. I hope you enjoy this old font as much as I did making it. Note: When previewing the Bodoni Ornamental font in the Windows font preview you may notice some letters appearing lighter and some darker, this is a problem with the preview window and some ornate fonts, Bodoni Ornamental will print normal and not with mixed light and dark letters.

Averta Standard is the basic version of Averta. Bringing together features from early European grotesques and American gothics, Kostas Bartokas’ (Greek: ‘αβέρτα’ – to act or speak openly, bluntly or without moderation, without hiding) Averta is a geometric sans serif family with a simple, yet appealing, personality. The purely geometric rounds, open apertures, and its low contrast strokes manage to express an unmoderated, straightforward tone resulting in a modernist, neutral and friendly typeface. Averta Standard is intended for use in a variety of media. The central styles (Light through Bold) are drawn to perform at text sizes, while the extremes are spaced tighter to form more coherent headlines. The dynamism of the true italics adds a complementary touch to the whole family and provides extra versatility, making Averta Standard an excellent tool for a range of uses, from signage to branding and editorial design. Averta Standard comes with alternate glyphs, case sensitive forms and contextual alternates, in eight weights with matching italics and supports over two hundred languages with an extended Latin, Cyrillic (Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian/Macedonian alternates), Greek and Vietnamese character set. It ships in three different packages offering different script coverage according to your needs: Averta Standard PE (Pan-European: Latin, Cyrillic, Greek), Averta Standard CY (Latin and Cyrillic), and Averta Standard (Latin and Greek). Averta's Cyrillic have received the 3rd Prize in the 2017 Granshan Awards in the Cyrillic Category.

ITC Johnston is the result of the combined talents of Dave Farey and Richard Dawson, based on the work of Edward Johnston. In developing ITC Johnston, says London type designer Dave Farey, he did “lots of research on not only the face but the man.” Edward Johnston was something of an eccentric, “famous for sitting in a deck chair and carrying toast in his pockets.” (The deck chair was his preferred furniture in his own living room; the toast was so that he’d always have sustenance near at hand.) Johnston was also almost single-handedly responsible, early in this century, for the revival in Britain of the Renaissance calligraphic tradition of the chancery italic. His book Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering (with its peculiar extraneous comma in the title) is a classic on its subject, and his influence on his contemporaries was tremendous. He is perhaps best remembered, however, for the alphabet that he designed in 1916 for the London Underground Railway (now London Transport), which was based on his original “block letter” model. Johnston’s letters were constructed very carefully, based on his study of historical writing techniques at the British Museum. His capital letters took their form from the best classical Roman inscriptions. “He had serious rules for his sans serif style,” says Farey, “particularly the height-to-weight ratio of 1:7 for the construction of line weight, and therefore horizontals and verticals were to be the same thickness. Johnston’s O’s and C’s and G’s and even his S’s were constructions of perfect circles. This was a bit of a problem as far as text sizes were concerned, or in reality sizes smaller than half an inch. It also precluded any other weight but medium ‘ any weight lighter or heavier than his 1:7 relationship.” Johnston was famously slow at any project he undertook, says Farey. “He did eventually, under protest, create a bolder weight, in capitals only ‘ which took twenty years to complete.” Farey and his colleague Richard Dawson have based ITC Johnston on Edward Johnston’s original block letters, expanding them into a three-weight type family. Johnston himself never called his Underground lettering a typeface, according to Farey. It was an alphabet meant for signage and other display purposes, designed to be legible at a glance rather than readable in passages of text. Farey and Dawson’s adaptation retains the sparkling starkness of Johnston’s letters while combining comfortably into text. Johnston’s block letter bears an obvious resemblance to Gill Sans, the highly successful type family developed by Monotype in the 1920s. The young Eric Gill had studied under Johnston at the London College of Printing, worked on the Underground project with him, and followed many of the same principles in developing his own sans serif typeface. The Johnston letters gave a characteristic look to London’s transport system after the First World War, but it was Gill Sans that became the emblematic letter form of British graphic design for decades. (Johnston’s sans serif continued in use in the Underground until the early ‘80s, when a revised and modernized version, with a tighter fit and a larger x-height, was designed by the London design firm Banks and Miles.) Farey and Dawson, working from their studio in London’s Clerkenwell, wanted to create a type family that was neither a museum piece nor a bastardization, and that would “provide an alternative of the same school” to the omnipresent Gill Sans. “These alphabets,” says Farey, referring to the Johnston letters, “have never been developed as contemporary styles.” He and Dawson not only devised three weights of ITC Johnston but gave it a full set of small capitals in each weight ‘ something that neither the original Johnston face nor the Gill faces have ‘ as well as old-style figures and several alternate characters.