RoyalBavarian was comissioned by King Ludwig the First of Bavaria about 1834. He was probably the greatest king Bavaria ever had, but he fell in disgrace for a short affair with the infamous Lola Montez and subsequently had to resign. He died in 1868, peaceful and happy in Nice on the French Riviera. I happened on an original etching of his type-guidelines for official writers of those days about 20 years ago. I always thought it was a very nice Fraktur (Blackletter), not a sturdy militaristic one as most of them are. Being me, I started with first tests immediately and then just forgot the font on my computer. When I was sorting out old stuff a couple of months ago I happened on the etchings once again and kept on working intermittently on the letters. The Plain cut is pretty much like the king wanted it. The Fancy cut is more to my liking and very decorative. Yours in a royal mood, Gert Wiescher.

I am (trying to) learn Danish using an app on my phone. The grammar and vocabulary are not that difficult, as the Danish language is very close to the Dutch language. The pronunciation, however, is quite tricky. Words look simple when written down, but when pronounced, they sound very different. Take ‘pige’ (‘girl’) - it reads ‘pee-guh’, right? Well, it is pronounced ‘pee-uh’. Or how about ‘brød’ (meaning bread)? If you keep in mind that the o-slash is pronounced as the ‘i’ in bird - almost like ‘uh’, it should be br-uh-d, right? Wrong again. It is pronounced br-uh-l. Aaargghh! I will succeed, hopefully! Utroligt is a Danish word meaning ‘incredible’. It is a nice, uncomplicated all caps font. I made it with a cheap rollerball pen and some nice French paper. Comes with double letter ligatures and all the diacritics you’d like - including the danish ones.

Nutcase is a perfect example of a font that principally designed itself. I created a hexagonal template (the most economical form in nature by the way) and took out the center to increase the decorative element. I played around with it, creating some pleasing characters at first but it soon became clear it would translate into a complete alphabet, so I set to work applying the idea to both upper and lower cases. It wasn't all straight forward though, avoiding awkward characters and retaining legibility took a little perseverance but it eventually paid off. I thought of this primarily as a decorative display face but having tested it out, found it reads surprisingly well as body copy too.

Founder is a neutral sans-serif font family consisting of 6 weight categories. The font was created for use on his own website, but eventually the account went on public sale. The original purpose of the font was not intended to be a multi-tool. However, now everything necessary has been added to it so that it can be safely used in projects. Founder supports more than 50 Latin-based languages, as well as Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Cyrillic. Gothic sans aesthetics give Founder a natural and relaxed feel that business fonts lack today. The font is perfect for cases when you need to dilute the silence of modern digital environment or just to complement the author's illustrations.

Rever is an experimental typeface by a young designer Sasha Smirnov. It clearly alludes to 19th century typefaces with reverse contrast, but still the character shapes are as simple and geometric as possible. Rever answers the question “What can a reverse-contrast typeface look like today?” Its set of styles is non-traditional: in addition to a regular one, there are also an oblique (slanted to the left, not to the right!) and a stencil styles. The typeface can work for typographic experiments of any kind -- web, print or motion design. The font was released by Paratype in 2019.