Once I had a young, very eager and interested designer in my employ. We got into talking about where our letterforms come from and the habits in perception we are used to. He did not quite believe me. So I said, let's try to design a typeface where everything is just the opposite of what we are used to. We really had a hard time, our habits crept up on us all the time. But after a couple of weeks we finally finished this typeface and wanted to call it crazytype, but my young apprentice ­ who did most of the manual labor ­ said Contype sounded crazier. So it became Contype and it's really crazy, with a small asian touch to it. Yours very crazy Gert Wiescher

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.

Before Bodoni, there was Didot. With the publication by Francois Ambroise Didot of Paris in 1784 of his prospectus for Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata, the rococo typographical style of Fournier de Jeune was replaced with a spartan, neo-classical style that John Baskerville pioneered. The typeface Didot used for this work was of Didot’s own creation and is considered by both G. Dowding and P. Meggs to be the first modern face. Three years later, Bodoni of Parma is using a very similar face. Just as Bodoni’s typeface evolved over time, so did that of the Didot family. The eldest son of Francois Ambroise Didot, Pierre, ran the printing office; and Firmin ran the typefoundry. Pierre used the flattened, wove paper, again pioneered by Baskerville, to permit a more accurate impression and allow the use of more delicate letterforms. Firmin took full advantage of the improved paper by further refining the typeface introduced by his father. The printing of Racine’s Oeuvres in 1801 (seen in our gallery image #2) shows the symbiotic results of their efforts, especially in the marked increase in the sharpness of the serifs when compared to their owns works of only six years earlier. It has been suggested that one reason Bodoni achieved greater popularity than Didot is the thinner hairlines of Didot were more fragile when cast in metal type and thus more expensive for printers to use than Bodoni. This ceased to be a problem with the advent of phototypesetting, opening the door for a renewed interest in the work of the Didot family and especially that of Firmin Didot. Although further refinements in the Didot typeface were to come (notably the lower case ‘g’ shown in 1819), we have chosen 1801 as the nominal basis for our presentation of HiH Firmin Didot. We like the thick-thin circumflex that replaced the evenly-stroked version of 1795, possible only with the flatter wove paper. We like the unusual coat-hanger cedilla. We like the organic, leaf-like tail of the ‘Q.’ We like the strange, little number ‘2’ and the wonderfully assertive ‘4.’ And we like the distinctive and delightful awkwardness of the double-v (w). Please note that we have provided alternative versions of the upper and lower case w that are slightly more conventional than the original designs. Personally, I find the moderns (often called Didones) hard on the eyes in extended blocks of text. That does not stop me from enjoying their cold, crisp clarity. They represent the Age of Reason and the power of man’s intellect, while reflecting also its limitations. In the title pages set by Bodoni, Bulmer and Didot, I see the spare beauty of a winter landscape. That appeals to a New Englander like myself. Another aspect that appeals to me is setting a page in HiH Firmin Didot and watching people try to figure out what typeface it is. It looks a lot like Bodoni, but it isn't!

ITC Cerigo is the result of a challenge which designer Jean-Renaud Cuaz set for himself: to create a typeface with the grace of Renaissance calligraphy but different from the numerous Chancery scripts. He calls Cerigo a 'vertical italic' and based it on 15th century calligraphic forms. The weights are carefully designed to complement each other and are made more flexible by a number of italic swash capitals. The flexible ITC Cerigo is suitable for both text and display.

Quanta was designed without reference to existing sansserif faces. As an original design, Quanta draws on principles of letterform developed during my studies of lettercarving (in Wales with Ieuan Rees) and Roman proportion. My intention was to produce a highly legible and adaptable sans-serif, initially intended to be a TrueType GX font, then as a Multiple Master font, later as a five weight range from extremely thin to extra black. A related uncial design will be released shortly.

In 1903, faced with the welter of sanserif typefaces offered by ATF, Morris Fuller Benton designed News Gothic, which became a 20th-century standard. In 1995 Tobias Frere-Jones studied drawings in the Smithsonian and started a redesign. Cyrus Highsmith reviewed News Gothic, and with the Font Bureau studio expanded it into Benton Sans, a far-reaching new series, with matched weights and widths, offering performance well beyond the limits of the original; FB 1995-2012

Questal is an intriguing unicase serif. The face appears rather eccentric, yet it still retains a refined character. The typeface is wider than most, but not to the degree that Aviano is extended. The font includes some interesting OpenType alternate characters to extend the quirky quality of the letterforms even further. If unicase isn't your thing, the Questal family also includes a small caps variant for more traditional uses. Use Questal for eye-catching and distinctive logotypes or headlines.

Dalle was designed in 2012 by Stawix Ruecha, and has been continued to develop over the last two years in order to keep pace with the changing trends and to apply for different uses.  Dalle comes with a large font family and is ideally suited for body texts and also display. This typeface has OpenType features including multi-ligatures support and tabular figures. Add Dalle (Sans) in your font menu and spice up your layouts with this new flavour!

Ben is a simple sans serif font that we made for use on projects that require a touch of elegance. We believe simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication and give all the idea to Ben. This font is a mirror of our personality. Ben consist of 18 faces (9 weights with italics). All fonts include uppercase, lowercase, numeral, punctuation, and special characters. The weights will give you dynamic control to use Ben in any typography projects.

M Ellan HK is a soft yet robust typeface that strikes an appropriate balance between vertical and horizontal strokes (豎、橫). Finials of strokes are sharp but gentle, alluding to the appeal of calligraphy. It is elegant as well as contemporary. M Ellan Light features similar thickness in vertical and horizontal strokes (豎、橫) that together make it lucid and appealing, while thickness of strokes in M Ellan Bold are accordingly adjusted to maintain its friendly and graceful character.

This typeface was designed specifically for producing movie posters, as well as VHS and DVD packaging for them. The uppercase letters are ultracondensed, and the lowercase letters are small caps, approximately a third the size of the uppercase. Also included are various logos and symbols suitable for the intended use, including those for MPAA ratings, and various audio and video formats. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

Physe. Physe is a basic set of fonts, designed for scrapbooking and general use. It comes in a variety of versions, with a light version, expanding up to bold. Many hurdles were taken to finalize this version, both physical and electronic. Like all of us, as I grow older, my glaucoma keeps pace with my arthritis, while I look on in amusement, hedging my bets on which will be the one to finally complete my retirement.

Empire Display is a sans serif italic display face which references the styling of the 30s through to the 50s. It has a large x height and with its condensed proportions makes it ideal for headlines, posters or where large size settings are required. It has the unique feature of having the stems and cross bars slightly angled top and bottom. This also helps to create the art deco/modern feel that sets it apart from standard condensed typefaces.

Ladybird is an unabashedly playful face for joyful, summery, and youth-oriented settings. The fittingly named Ladybird sprouts gently arcing ascenders and cutely curved descenders from its cozy, compact letterforms. A sprinkling of ligatures and alternates give this font a sprightly variety. See what’s included! http://bit.ly/2bGRnnR This font has been specially coded for access of all the swashes, alternates and ornaments without the need for professional design software! Info and instructions here: http://lauraworthingtontype.com/faqs/

Amanllor is a thin lettered and graceful script font. Fall for its ravishing style and use it to create gorgeous wedding invitations, beautiful stationary art, eye-catching social media posts, and much more! Amanllor is PUA encoded which means you can access all glyphs and swashes with ease! FEATURES Alternate Characters Uppercase and Lowercase letters Numbering and Punctuations Multilingual Support Works on PC or Mac Simple Installation Support Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, also works on Microsoft Word

La Portenia pays homage to the spirit of early 20th-century show card writers and type designers. This face has two variations: La Portenia de Recoleta is slightly more formal and polite, while La Portenia de la Boca has longer, more extravagant flourishes and indulges in more interletter space. This showier variant is reminiscent of signs found in Buenos Aires. Both have been designed by Diego Giaccone and Angel Koziupa, and engineered and expanded by Alejandro Paul.

Suggested by J.M.Bergling’s 1917 “New Romeo Initials, Last Midnight is a display face created in a distinctive pseudocalligraphic Belle Époque style that we’ve come to associate with beloved fairy tales. Rich in typographic goodies, with two additional stylistic sets and a host of standard ligatures, Last Midnight now even has a Roman small caps set in both smooth and rough varieties — great for all of your tale-telling, folkloric, swashbuckling, & spellcasting needs! Part of The Ampersand Forest's Sondheim Series.

Take a deep breath and tink in a deep and extrange galaxy where texts and signs are extrange for a first human look, with unrecognocible letters standing alone but readables all togheter... this font plays around this idea. Thin lines and simply curvatures define this rare group of characteres, ready to be used to challenge the capacity of adaptation and recognition of readable signs of the human brain. Are you ready to take the trip? Find it out!

XLeafMeAlone is a collection of leaf silhouettes from common Indiana trees based on actual leaves. Various leaves, selected for their good looks not their intelligence, were scanned and hand-traced. Some species, such as some oaks, are over-represented because they are more picturesque than others, such as apple or peach. LeafMeAlone was featured in the “Type Drawer” column of Personal Publishing (later renamed Business Publishing--I do not know if it still exists) in November of 1990.

Mangan is a new text face which combines classical rationality with contemporary design. Mangan appears dynamic, elegant, vivid and provides a high standard of functionality. The Mangan family comprises 14 styles and is well suited for ambitious typography. It comes in OpenType format with extended language support. All weights contain small caps, ordinals, ligatures, proportional lining figures, tabular lining figures, proportional old style figures, lining old style figures, matching currency symbols, fraction- and scientific numerals, and arrows.

Sixta, a new monoline face with a classical background, has comfortable proportions and a puissant appearance. Although it has plenty of movement and is eventful, its discreet stroke ductus makes it excellent both for text and display. Sixta comes in eight weights, in OpenType format and with extended language support for more than 40 languages. All weights contain proportional lining figures, tabular lining figures, proportional old style figures, lining old style figures, matching currency symbols, fraction- and scientific numerals.

Konrad Kachelhofen was a printer in the city of Leipzig beginning around 1483. He printed many works by contemporary authors and also many of the classics. He acquired an unusually large amount of typefaces for his shop, a place that included a wine bar and book store. This particular face is based on the Typ.8:170G GfT101 Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. He probably died in 1529 after passing his business on to his son-in-law Melchior Lotter.

Sultan Free, designed by Sultan Maktari in 2005, is a freestyle Ruqaa and a winner in Linotype’s first Arabic Typeface Design Competition. The design is open, calligraphic, and very dynamic. This makes it suitable for large display sizes, especially in the area of advertising, while still functioning well as a text face. The font includes a matching Latin design and support for Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages.

UUeirdie is weird. The Condensed-Light style was derived from the star-serifed font Asterx by replacing the star serifs with a rounded flare serif. Widening that style resulted in UUeirdie-Regular and the bold was then constructed to complement it. The warped version was a result of play with a font distortion program. Although the glyphs have sharp corners, they do not have straight lines. The UUeirdie faces are rough, irregular, and maybe a bit creepy.

Neonoir is an homage to neon lettering craftsmanship of the mid 20th century. The beautiful futuristic grace of wall-sized bent-glass hand-writing is distilled into a three-weight connected script that’s on the button for headlines, logo­type and branding designs. Its Slim and Bold weights are formal monoline scripts, while the medium weight mimics the rough edges of ink on paper. Neonoir is available as an Open Type font that features alternate endings and lots of ligatures.

Aesop was developed from some book jacket lettering drawn by Michael Harvey for an edition of Aesop’s Fables by a master Japanese Artist. It is based upon a pen-drawn script, and is characterised by a lively sense of movement and grace. Aesop Plus, being an OpenType font, contains many alternative characters and additional ligatures which can be automatically substituted to enhance the liveliness of set text, where the application in which it is used, permits.

Chatter Pro is a handwritten unconnected script face in four styles: Light, Regular, Semibold and Bold with Small-Caps. Chatter Pro is a Pro-version of my previous font 'Chatter'. A free style specifically designed for Packaging but still works well for Greeting cards, Magazines, Posters and Advertising Ads. Invoking the OpenType CONTEXTUAL ALTERNATIVE variant. A space after any lower-case glyph will produce the word terminal. (Opentype variants may only be accessible via Opentype-Aware applications.)

Tazugane Gothic is a Japanese typeface family developed by the Monotype Studio. The project began as a companion Japanese typeface for the famous Neue Frutiger. The goal for Tazugane Gothic was a humanist sans serif face with a clear and legible forms, and nearly unlimited applicability in a broad range of uses, from signage and publishing to advertising and websites. The Tazugane Gothic font family is extremely versatile with ten different weights from Ultra Light to Extra Black.

At first glance, Else may seem to be similar to many of the Century typefaces, with its prominent figures and sturdy alphabet. But when Robert Norton, of Norton Photosetting Ltd., designed Else in 1982, he added a bit of flair to that basic model. Note the bowl of the g, the splayed legs of the M, the sharply curved G and J, as well as the leading strokes of v and w and both of the graceful ampersands.

We call this font Fancy Pants and if you give it a glance, it WILL just dance, dance, dance! In tall high heels and pretty toes, this slick chick font is ready to pose for invitations, party plans or high society soirées and forays into the boom boom rooms and pubs and clubs where fancy meets schmancy, and your pants will make YOU get up and dance and your face want to grin. It's all win-win!

ATF Agency Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1932 as a lone titling typeface. In 1990, David Berlow saw potential in the squared forms of the narrow, monotone capitals. He designed a lowercase and added a bold to produce Font Bureau Agency, an immediately popular hit. Sensing its potential to be than just a useful condensed face, Font Bureau developed Agency into a major series offering five weights in five widths; FB 1990-95

Chift is a quite narrow serif font for both body text and headlines in periodicals, where economy of space is needed. The type family consists of ten faces: five styles of low contrast for body text sizes and five styles of high contrast, including Hairline and Black, for display purposes. One of the main features of the typeface is its professionally-designed Cyrillic, which won one of the special prizes at Modern Cyrillic 2009 competition in Text category.

Patterned after cheap neon signage, this face has class, all of it low. Uppercase only, the lowercase positions are filled with an assortment of cheesy neon graphics, intended to be used at twice the point size of the caps. Named after a 70s TV show about a hotel with a defective neon sign. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

This growing family of friendly faces is based on the typeface Bravour, designed in 1913 by Martin Jacoby-Boy for the D. Stempel AG foundry in Frankfurt am Main. The wide stance and very large x-height shared by the family members makes them warm and inviting, and equally suitable for use in headlines or text blocks. All versions of this font include the Unicode 1250 Central European character set in addition to the standard Unicode 1252 Latin set.

Vintage Wedding is a collection of 432 icons, divided into 4 categories. These symbols were selected and created in order to bring to mind the past times, yet at the same time, to retain the modern design. You can find here such rare and beautiful objects as phonograph or cult eyeglasses. The font includes many diverse elements, which will help you create compositions out of flowers, to choose commemorative vases, and even to dress the bride and groom!

The object of Grover was to join two distinctive typeface designs: the basic European gothic of the late nineteenth century and the ‘rounded’ style found in 1960s America. The result is a clear, friendly face with subtle yet unforgettable features. Named after Grover Washington, Jr., the jazz saxophone player, Grover is geometrically constructed and yet very human in appearance. Sans and slab serif variations, true italic weights, as well as small caps afford Grover versatility and unique display characteristics.

✔ Sejam means a thin binyeo, a Korean traditional ornamental hairpin ✔ Features remarkably slender horizontal stroke and graceful, decorative serif ✔ Its concise and neat shape follows modern aesthetics while the high contrast and traditional symmetry give a refined impression. ✔ Suitable for various uses including luxury brands, posters, packaging ✔ Supports a variety of OpenType Features such as Ligature, Localized forms ✔ Provides 3000+ glyphs of more than 60 Latin-based languages, including Korean