Homelessfonts is an initiative by the Arrels foundation to support, raise awareness and bring some dignity to the life of homeless people in Barcelona Spain. Each of the fonts was carefully digitized from the handwriting of different homeless people who agreed to participate in this initiative. MyFonts is pleased to donate all revenue from the sales of Homelessfonts to the Arrels foundation in support of their mission to provide the homeless people in Barcelona with a path to independence with accommodations, food, social and health care. Loraine was born in London. She was an ordinary, hardworking family person, with nothing to worry about beyond paying the rent at the end of the month or keeping the fridge full. Until in 2009 she came to Barcelona on holiday. Soon after she arrived her passport was stolen from her and she had a series of problems with the British embassy. Somebody had made illegal use of her passport. So Loraine found herself in a strange place, unable to get home. She didn’t know anyone there and her circumstances meant she couldn’t ask for help from England, either. She had to sell all her possessions and, in time, learn to speak Spanish. “Living in the street is a wonderful adventure,” she says. In the street she discovered a new city, a new country and a new culture. “There are lots of people who prefer to sleep under the stars.” She also made lots of friends who helped her in a completely unfamiliar world.

Novarese font is the work of designer Aldo Novarese. He created 218 typeface cuts but as he was writing his book, Alfabeta, he decided to include only those he considered indispensable. He divided his fonts into 4 categories and in the designing of Novarese, took the best characteristics of each group and combined them into this font. In the style of Latin stone scripts of the second century BC. Novarese is a well-balanced and relatively wide text font with classic forms. ITC Novarese™ font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

This font began as an attempt of draw alternatives to the images of Microsoft’s Wingdings, but then grew beyond that. This new version from late 2010 has over 1400 characters, including almost all of the geometric shapes in unicode 2500 and 2B00 ranges, almost all of the arrows in the unicode 2100, 2700, 2900, and 2B00 ranges, almost all of the dingbats and symbols in the unicode 2600 and 2700 ranges, many of the pictures, symbols, and emoticons in the 1F300 to 1F600 ranges, and a few of the miscellaneous technical items in the 2300 range. There are also pictures on the standard open type letters, most of which can be accessed from the keyboard. However, most of the characters in this typeface have to be accessed using their unicode designation. In Windows this is done with the alt key and the unicode hex number. On the Macintosh the easiest way (and for the five digit unicode characters, perhaps the only way) is to use the “Special Characters” window under the Edit Menu in the Finder. A unicode index of the font is provided in a pdf file that was generated using FontLab. However, it only has four of the unicode digits for the five-digit elements. Almost all of the unicode numbers starting with F should have a 1 in front of the F.

Obcecada Sans & Serif are two geometric digital typefaces in regular and bold versions, very condensed and thin with a rounded finish on the horns and joints with a modern style. They include the Cyrillic and Greek alphabet. These fonts are the result of my obstinacy for very condensed fonts, in this case I have inclined to a very fine proportion with short ascending and descending that gives them elegance decó.

This font clearly illustrates Jan Tschichold’s dictum that the New Typography would employ “the simplest form” and “the minimum means.” Based on his typeface Transito, the letterforms are as fresh and vibrant today as they were when introduced in 1931. All versions of this font include the Unicode 1250 Central European character set in addition to the standard Unicode 1252 Latin set.

This set of typefaces was produced in conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum and the Josef Albers Foundation. Josef Albers was one of the most important artists and educators of the twentieth century. He was a member of the Bauhaus first as a student and then as a teacher from 1920 until its closing in 1933. He then moved to America, where he continued making art and teaching at numerous institutions until his death. Known principally as an abstract painter, he was also an accomplished designer, draftsman, typographer, and photographer. His works explore permutations of form, color, and perception using a restricted visual vocabulary. Created when he was at the Bauhaus, his Kombinationschrift alphabets exemplify the school's ethos. Using 10 basic shapes based on the circle and the rectangle, he created a system of lettering that was meant to be efficient, easy to learn, and inexpensive to produce. These 10 shapes in combination could form any letter or number. The letterforms of this computer version were taken directly from Albers' drawings and notes.

In Adrian Frutiger, the discipline of a mathematically exact mind is joined with an unmistakable artistic sense. His independent work possesses the controllable language of letterforms. Personal and intensive, this work is the manifestation of his expressive will. Frutiger's precise sense of outline reveals itself two- or three-dimensionally in wood, stone, or bronze, on printing plates and in the form of reliefs. However, even his independent work can be understood as objectivized signs; in their symbolism, they are embedded in the fundamental questions of human existance. They might have developed in the spirit of playfulness, but their nature is always conceptual, directed towards a complex, yet harmonic, whole. Following function, form also necessarily follows the content of the language. The entire spiritual world becomes readable through letters. Essentially, Adrian Frutiger attempts to fathom the basic, central truth which defines our lives: change, growth, division - beginning and end. In a virtual synthesis, he seems to close the circle in which the world reflects itself in symbolic forms. Frutiger Stones is for Adrian Frutiger the example of his formal artistic sensibility par excellence. Searching for the fundamental elements in nature, he has discovered the pebble, rounded and polished over innumerable years by gently flowing water. And out of this, he has created his complete system, a ruralistic typeface of letters and symbols. It depicts animals and plants, as well as astrological and mythical signs. Because of its unique aura, Frutiger Stones is particularly well-suited to different purposes - in headlines and prominent pictograms, as symbol faces, illustrations, and more. Frutiger Symbols is a symbol font of plants, animals and stars as well as religious and mythological symbols. Together with Frutiger Stones this typeface builds a complete design system, which offers endless possibilities. It can be used for illustrations or a symbol type with its distinctive pictograms. Frutiger Symbols is available in the weights regular, positive and negative.

Bang was designed by David Sagorski in 1993 as a playful font of spirals. It consists of two capital alphabets which can be combined like the usual capitals and small caps, although both have the same height. They differ from one another only in the decorative forms which adorn them and the highly decorated characters of one set are complemented by the slightly more reserved characters of the second. Serious this font is not, rather, with its circles and spirals, Bang is best in point sizes 12 and larger and is meant for short texts and headlines.

The inspiration for this exuberant exercise in penmanship was found in Frank H. Atkinson's A Show at Sho-Cards: Comprehensive, Complete, Concise, published in 1918, executed with the then-state-of-the-art Payzant Reservoir Pen. It retains its quaint charm, even after almost a century. Both versions of this font contain the complete Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Brushland was initially born as custom type project, where the goal was to achieve a natural feeling as if it was really written. The project raised some questions, how natural should be this script typeface? How to simulate this writing feeling? For this, four different glyphs were drawn for the same character. This “Feature” or “Behavior”, programmed in the font, combines the variants in the sequence of 1, 2, 3 & 4 and replaces the letters at the time the words are composed, in order to avoid the repetition of glyphs. Through the “Contextual Alternates” OT Feature, the user can decide if they appear or not.

Palestra - a modern sans serif font in four style : Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold italic. In this font, I can see many alternatives for the lowercase and most common ligatures that fit perfectly with this font style. This font can look more classic without serifs and more expressive with alternative substitutes, try to play with them and you will get the uniqueness in your project. All characters in this font are PUA-encoded.

The typeface Ruano was inspired from “Lettera cancelleresca formata” by the Vatican calligrapher Ferdinando Ruano, carved and cast in 1926 by Nebiolo of Turin on the advice of Raffaello Bertieri who designed the capital letters and numbers, missing in the original. The difficulty of the design of this chancery font lies in its original vertical layout, bending the calligraphic harmonies to the Gothic style, thus distinguishing it from contemporary cursive alphabets.

A 'quick' font, originally made for the 25th anniversary of SSP Printing Co. in Amsterdam. First used for an intro spread in Wired Magazine (#3.05, May 1995): "The problem with computers is that they don't have enough Africa in them. What's pissing me off is that they use so little of my body" (Brian Eno).

This is a modern font inspired in Avant Garde Gothic Latin font. There are 8 ligatures and You can type the Nekudot in them This font is for logos, covers and small texts This font has the modern Hebrew punctuation: Shevana, Kamatz Katan, Dagesh Hazak, and Cholam Chaser.

This revival of Harry is based on the original design by Marty Goldstein (and C.B. Smith). Goldstein, born in Chicago in 1939, was the co-founder of the groundbreaking Creative Black Book. He graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1960. Harry, first published by VGC in 1966, was named for his father. ITF has added four new weights to the original six.

Lualaba Snake is a bold display font, characterized by the snake-like decoration used in each letter. The design of the font was inspired by the legend of the Lualaba River in Central Africa. Snakes enjoy a special status in Africa, as they are reputed to be messengers of the ancestors, and are therefore good. Near the Lualaba river is a pool in which a big snake called Kabwe lives. Our ancestors are thought to communicate through this snake.

ITC Don't Panic's distressed shapes and craggy outlines evoke the feeling you get when you're just barely in control of a situation. This is type design on the edge. ITC Panic is further down the emotional track, when you've actually lost control and there is no hope in sight. Thompson says the inspiration for these faces arrived one day in the mail. I received an envelope that looked like it had a rough trip; the type that was stamped on it had a tired, ragged appearance. Ironically, the haggard envelope woke me up. I got excited and wanted to replicate the look as a font of type." Thompson designed ITC Don't Panic, then stood back and looked at it and decided it cried out for a more agitated companion. ITC Don't Panic gave birth to the positively psychotic offspring, ITC Panic. Both are all-cap designs with alternate characters in the unshift position. Creating an authentically disturbed appearance proved to be a challenge for Thompson. "I tried to design agitated characters, but they looked staged. So I tried multiple photocopies, but that didn't work. Eventually, I laser-printed the basic characters, wadded up the lasers, then flattened them out and stomped on them with heavy boots. The end result was scanned and used as the basis for the rest of the design." Thompson's work on web sites and multimedia has influenced his interest in type and typography that transcends the cool, unemotional nature of the computer."

ITC Don't Panic 's distressed shapes and craggy outlines evoke the feeling you get when you're just barely in control of a situation. This is type design on the edge. ITC Panic is further down the emotional track, when you've actually lost control and there is no hope in sight. Thompson says the inspiration for these faces arrived one day in the mail. I received an envelope that looked like it had a rough trip; the type that was stamped on it had a tired, ragged appearance. Ironically, the haggard envelope woke me up. I got excited and wanted to replicate the look as a font of type." Thompson designed ITC Don't Panic, then stood back and looked at it and decided it cried out for a more agitated companion. ITC Don't Panic gave birth to the positively psychotic offspring, ITC Panic. Both are all-cap designs with alternate characters in the unshift position. Creating an authentically disturbed appearance proved to be a challenge for Thompson. "I tried to design agitated characters, but they looked staged. So I tried multiple photocopies, but that didn't work. Eventually, I laser-printed the basic characters, wadded up the lasers, then flattened them out and stomped on them with heavy boots. The end result was scanned and used as the basis for the rest of the design." Thompson's work on web sites and multimedia has influenced his interest in type and typography that transcends the cool, unemotional nature of the computer."

In 1995, when indie rock hipness was just reaching its pique, Chank was really into Jawbox, a post-punk band from DC. It was their music he was listening to when he made this font for the Space Ghost web site. The band broke up in 1997, but the font named in their honor lives on. This font family includes Jawbox, Jawbox Chanky, and Jawbreaker.

The Farela font is a serif ligature font that has an attractive elegant appearance. You can use this font in vintage, classic, and retro designs. This font gives a beautiful, classy and luxurious feel to your designs. This font is perfect for projects such as logos, branding, fashion, magazines, labels, posters, album covers and many more. This font features Open Type Format, Kerning, Ligature Style, Alternative Style, Numeral, Symbol and Multilingual Supports. Note: To use the alternate and ligature features, please look in the Glyph Panel / Character Map in your software to be able to access all the glyphs in this font. The ligature style in this font is simply "Standard Ligature", meaning it appears automatically. To set your desired letter binding, you can block letters or add them from the glyph panel. Thank you!

We’ve created Jinkay, a display typeface with a Japanese style that’s similar to original. Don’t be afraid to use this font in all of your special projects right now; imagine how beautiful and appealing your design will be; your project will instantly captivate all of your audience at first glance; they will easily remember the appearance of your project if you use this font, because it will be unique, different, and stand out from the crowd. Logotypes, food banners, branding, brochure, posters, movie titles, book titles, quotes, and more may all benefit from this font. Of course, using this font in your various design projects will make them excellent and outstanding; many viewers are drawn to the striking and unusual graphic display. Start utilizing this typeface in your projects to make them stand out.

Daiquiri is a revival of a handlettered font in two weights, from an ad for Puerto Rico Rum dating back to the forties or fifties. I found the ad on a French antique market on my last visit for Mardi Gras in Nice. The ad read "Breeze through the heat, be a Daiquiri fan". That's why they had this "fan" in the illustration! Did they want you to rotate like a fan when you had enough Daiquiris? Or did they just do it for that little "Jeu des mots"? Anyway I found the handlettering very pretty, so I took those few letters and made a whole font out of them. I think Daiquiri has that touch that brings those happy and uncomplicated times back when advertising was still fun. I started something like 20 years later in advertising and things had gotten more stringent. We already had to satisfy those marketing guys with their scholarly attitude. They have taken all the fun out of the job, for the creators as well as for the consumers. I would like to see more uncomplicated ads like this again, yours Gert Wiescher

The characteristic ‘French face’ was originally made in 1899 under the supervision of Joseph Pinel. Thus, what was originally French 10 pt. Nº 2, got its present name. The Frenchman Joseph Pinel called himself a "typographical engineer", but was at the time employed as a type draughtsman at the Linotype Works in Altrincham. It appears that this and some other faces that he supervised, were, except for use on the Linotype, also meant for manufacturing matrices for the Dyotype. This composing machine was an invention of Pinel. The Dyotype was a rather complicated machine and consisted, like the Monotype, of two separate contraptions, a keyboard which produced a perforated paper ribbon and a casting machine which produced justified lines of movable type. Unlike the Monotype which has a square matrix carrier, the Dyotype had the matrices on a drum (in fact two drums, hence the name of the machine). A Pinel Diotype company was founded in Paris and a machine was built with the help of the printing press manufacturer Jules Derriey. As is often the case, a lack of sufficient capital prevented the commercializing of this ingenious composing machine. Coen Hofmann digitized the font from a batch of very incomplete, damaged and musty drawings, which he dug up in Altrincham. He redrew all characters, bringing up the hairstrokes somewhat in the process. The result is a roman and italic, while the roman font also includes Small Caps

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.

This font family is inspired by printed work made by the Elzevir family back in the XVIIth century at Leiden (NL). They worked with material from several type designers, but further investigations sends us to the tracks of one in particular: Robert Granjon. Granjon italics were way ahead of his time, making some really beautiful signs like swashy ampersands and minuscule v letters. This font also contains old style figures in the same fashion as they were printed, like the flipped number 8 and open forms in 6 and 9. This is as much a revival as an original design, because of their weights bold and heavy (both with italics) that were inspired on some titles. In this font you can also find a lot of ligatures, small caps, diacritics and even a fleuron for each weight and variation. Leidener came up from two books: Constantini Imperiatoris (1611) and Exercitationum Mathematicarum (1657), printed by Louis and John Elzevir on their Leiden Workshop, back in the day.

Valenteena is in the spirit of the 19th century, but there are no other typefaces quite like it. It is geometric, using distorted hearts to form the letters. The lower-case letters are smaller versions of the upper-case letters. The overlay variant is derived by breaking ValentinaContour into its parts: the inner letter, the white inner border, and the black outer border. To use them one must have a program that allows layers of letters. Type in and format the inside variant to get the message you want. Also select the color you want this layer to have. Copy this layer twice, formatting one to the medium and and the other to outside. Color each of them in the colors you want and them combine the three layers, placing them so the letters exactly align. You will get letters with three colors.

Introducing the spookiest typeface on the block—Darkheart! With its condensed horror style, this font will send shivers down your spine. The interlocking letterforms are reminiscent of the monstrous creatures that roamed the silver screen in the 1960s. Darkheart’s eerie letters will give your message a mournful and terrifying voice, perfect for any horror-themed project. Use this font to create movie posters, book covers, or even Halloween party invitations. And, for your convenience, Darkheart is designed with ligatures that automatically create interlinked combinations. No need to fiddle around with separate letters, let the font work its magic and create the perfect spine-tingling message. Don’t miss out on this creepy typeface—get Darkheart today and let the monsters lurch to life! 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.

The Iberian scripts are the Paleohispanic scripts that were used to represent the extinct Iberian language. Most of them are typologically unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic.[1] The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 4th or possibly the 5th century BCE, and the latest from end of the 1st century BCE or possibly the beginning of the 1st century CE. The characters in this font do not contain all the characters of the Iberian script. If there are friends who need all the characters, contact me so that I can install the font on the system.

John Sigvard ‘Ole’ Olsen and Harold Ogden ‘Chic’ Johnson were musicians-turned-comedians who rose to fame in the zany 1938 Broadway musical review “Hellzapoppin'”. They reprised their roles in the 1941 film adaptation of the show, and the opening title card of the film has “Hellzapoppin'” hand lettered in a tall, condensed sans serif design with an inline. This is now available as Wild Comedy JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

The Schneidler Latein is a sharp and elegant Antiqua based on the ductus of the broad edged pen with a strong character. Running perfectly in paragraph text giving it something quite special and being effortlessly legible at the same time, Schneidler Latein works great in headings as well. Each glyph is a piece of art ready to be used in branding and blowup combining beauty and personality in a kick-ass blend. It is absolutely new to the digital world as it never has been digitized before. This new version digitized, further developed and extended by artist and graphic designer Lena Schmidt comes in nine styles from which there are four application-related ones like Subtext and Display and five weight-related ones like Bold and Heavy. Each style contains 948 glyphs, variations of numbers, three stylistic sets one preserving the historic forms of changed characters, small caps, open type features and superior and inferior characters. Designed by F. H. Ernst Schneidler the Schneidler Latein was released in 1916, the bold version in 1920 and the italics in 1921. Schneidler was born in 1882 in Berlin. He studied at the school for applied arts in Düsseldorf with professor F. H. Ehmcke and P. Behrens. He was as a painter, graphic designer and illustrator. In 1920 he was appointed as teacher in the school for applied arts Stuttgart. His students were Albert Kapr, Imre Reiner and Lilo Rasch-Naegele among others. Further well-known fonts from his hands are for example Legende, Amalthea, Schneidler Mediävel and Schneidler Antiqua. Lena Schmidt was born 1981 in Bremen. She is a german painter, graphic designer and illustrator mostly known for her huge wood carving paintings. From 2003 to 2011 she studied Fine Arts in Hamburg with professor Matt Mullican. From 2015 to 2019 she studied graphic design with a focus on type design at HAW Hamburg Department Design with professor Jovica Veljović. She lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.

Seven superb scripts, to be freely mixed with one another. Alone, each of them flows nicely, but combined they reach ultimate vitality and grace. The Pleiades are one of the most beautiful constellations in the sky, and in Greek mythology they were seven divine sisters. Luxurious freedom of choice and excellent readability make Pleiad the perfect face for a variety of projects, from stylish invitations to magazine ads, from poetry books to restaurant logos. Sometimes calm, sometimes flittering – but always fair and graceful – this sublime calligraphic type family will hold an everlasting fascination.

A playful handwriting of a child Twelve-year old Tobias Düsel designed the characters of this font in 2002 during his family’s furlough in the USA. He drew the alphabet freehand in pencil on a piece of stationery, and clearly had examples of the well-known college and military fonts in mind. The characters in their basic form are geometrically thought out, as well as the construction of the shadows. But remarkably, while drawing, Tobias Düsel did not reach for the obvious aid of a ruler. In fact, the strokes of the letters are not linear, rather are recognizably well-balanced with declining and increasing straights as can be seen in polished classical fonts. Originally this font consists only of upper case letters — all other characters (punctuation marks, figures and similar) have been modified from the components of the capital letters. Complementary to the original Outline-Shadow-Version TobyFont Empty, the variations TobyFont Inside and TobyFont Full are also available. ”Empty“ is, so to speak, the frame of the typeface as “Inside” is the filling, and “Full” is the sum of both. All three versions have the exact same body size so that they can be placed over one another congruently. In this way the effect of a font in two or three colors can be attained. TobyFont is excellently suitable for designing “picturesque” or “hand-carved” contents; large weights are especially charming and striking.

Years ago, by happenstance, designers Nancy Mazzei and Brian Kelly found an old decrepit typewriter in an abandoned lot with tall grass in Brooklyn. They kept it around their apartment for two years. Then one day they decided that it was time to move and they planned to throw the old typewriter away. But it was so beautiful they wanted to keep at least a part of it. So they decided on keeping the keys. They kept the keys in a brown bag until one fine day the keys were introduced to a camera. It was a match made in heaven that resulted in some beautiful quirky images of typewriter keys. These images were the inspiration for Backspacer. They were scanned, traced and turned into a working typeface by Zuzana Licko.

Scorpio is a font based on lettering Michael Harvey drew for the card “The Sign of The Nudge” which was designed in collaboration with the concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay. The purpose of the card was to prompt those owing monies to IHF, into paying promptly. Michael also used it on some of the many book jackets he designed. As such, it is a condensed design necessary to enable a lot of text to be fitted with a restricted space. Scorpio has both style and verve. It was designed to attract the attention of potential purchasers browsing the shelfs in bookshops. In fulfilling this rôle, it succeeded admirably. In all these respects, it is unquestionably a unique Michael Harvey design. When Michael died in 2013, this font existed as a drawing of the basic upper and lower case letterforms plus numerals. Andy Benedek’s contribution to Scorpio was to digitise the existing letterforms and then create the remaining characters necessary for a modern font.

This monospaced version of Galix was commissioned in 2037 by the space exploration company Earth2, as part of a major overhaul of their branding, which had used, since 2021, a generic sans serif (much like every other company). Many specialists in both design and space exploration suggested that this very rebrand started a chain of events that concluded with the invention of time travel in 2041. Contrary to the perceived notion put forward in popular Science Fiction, time travel is only (as of now) possible in the digital realm. It was considered fitting that included among the first files sent back in time should be the Galix Mono typeface, which was remade in OTF format to ensure that it would work with the technology available in 2019. Earth2, for all their insight, did not foresee that the release of the typeface in September of 2019, would lessen the impact of their rebrand. What kind idiots would rebrand a forward looking company with a font that was, by then, almost 18 years old? The subsequent lacklustre response to the redesign didn’t inspire the tidal wave of R&D funding Earth2 had anticipated, and the company went into administration in the summer of 2039, having never invented the time travel which made the release of Galix Mono in 2019 possible. Experts believe that the files sent back in time, although their very sending made it impossible for them to be sent, remained as “time relics” of the future that might have been.

The Quickstep Bold, a 'quick' font, originally made for the 25th anniversary of SSP Printing Co. in Amsterdam. First used for an intro spread of a Brian Eno quote in Wired Magazine (#3.05, May 1995): "The problem with computers is that they don't have enough Africa in them. What's pissing me off is that they use so little of my body". For a less outspoken expression, the Quickstep Sans was developed later.

From tablet to table – from freehand to font – Average Handwriting was designed originally in freehand on paper then onto a tablet with the help of an appropriate app to give it a ‘wet brush’ feel – this was transferred to paper then tweaked PS and only then imported into a font design programme – this is how we work to keep the original flourishes and a freehand feel to the font. Thus, a well-ordered handwriting with both elements of freehand and precision. It looks especially good in lower-case text situations, delivering an original look - there again you may be looking for a new display font for some large graphic projects such as posters, Average Handwriting also works well in these situations, again, delivering an original look.

Art into type In 2008, Fontsmith were approached by their friend, Jon Scott, to investigate whether a typeface could assume the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon’s not-for-profit charity, Measure, was organising an event for the artist, Conrad Shawcross, whose giant mechanical installation, entitled Chord, was going on public display in the long-disused Kingsway tram tunnel in Holborn. Chord explores the way we perceive time, as either a line or a cycle. Two enormous machines with dozens of rotating arms and moving in opposite directions, weave rope with almost infinite slowness. An unusual brief Phil Garnham visited Conrad in his Hackney studio to get a feel for his work and ideas. “Conrad is a very clever and philosophical guy. He struggled to see how typeface design had any relevance to him and his art. This was going to be a challenge.” The artist presented the type designer with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and mathematical workings. “This was, in essence, my brief.” Phil developed three concepts, the simplest of which ticked all the boxes. “The idea of the strokes in the letterforms appearing and ending at peaks or points of origin fitted perfectly with Conrad’s idea of time occurring and ending at two ends of the sculpture.” Two versions Phil planned modules for two versions of the typeface: one with five lines in the letterforms and one with seven. He then drew the modules on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is FS Conrad. “This is not a simple headline typeface,” says Phil. “It’s not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, and it’s informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as piece of functioning, harmonious type.”

Rabenau (formerly Lucinde), the distinctly warm and legible type family For 30 years the graphic designer Axel Bertram worked at creating his typefaces: He developed complete new alphabets for magazines and typewriters as well as for the constant demand for typefaces for use by commercial artists. He has developed wall charts the size of advertising posters as teaching aids for training commercial and graphic artists to write in a clean, classic cursive script. In the eighties he used the American Chyron computer to design a screen font for television. In the mid-nineties he discovered for himself the fabulous possibilities offered by the Fontographer font software program and explored them playfully. From the results of these experiments, Axel Bertram selected a design for further development. From 2003 onwards the calligrapher and type designer Andreas Frohloff collaborated with him on the further development and production of the 16 fonts of the Rabenau™ typeface family.The Rabenau font was inspired by many factors: From the fonts used as book covers to typewriter fonts and even printed material from England dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century (e.g. those used by the skilled printer William Bulmer), Rabenau's relatively high contrast is offset by some organic tapers, subtley rounded bracketed serifs, and a fairly generous x-height. This makes for a typeface that looks especially good in print. Its broad repertoire of weights and styles - Condensed, Poster, and Shadow - give it added versatility, and make it ideal for setting both display and text in the same typeface. Throughout the heavier weights, the contrast is maintained. The Poster Italic sparkles, and will make a fine display type for dynamic headlines, or logotypes. This family of sixteen fonts works beautifully together. All Rabenau font styles have a large set of ligatures and thus cover typical letter combinations in many European languages. Besides the standard ligatures for ff, fi and fl, letter connections are also available for tt, th and fj or ffi, ffl and ffk. The range is completed with lovely arched transitions for the characters st, ck or ct. The latter gives the font that certain something, both in continuous text and above all in headlines.