Charlemagne, one of the great rulers of the Middle Ages, was instrumental in the reestablishment of formal education in the West. This font was inspired by the notion that he felt the need to protect his communications from people with the ability to read; a rare skill then. Did he really command such a script to exist? He did instigate the development Carolingian minuscule script. Here are two different systems that are both attributed to him. Does it provide any real security? No, but it is fun to think about how such a system might have been used.

This square serif typeface is a real workhorse. It is a modern tool for text design: extremely legible and well shaped. Bandera has six weights with original italics. It catches attention in headlines of posters and magazines or makes reading comfortable in plain texts. Bandera shares main proportions with sans serif Osnova Pro typefamily so ideally can pair it. It has Bandera Text and Bandera Display sister families as well. Please check also Pro version for pan-european support (full Latin-Greek-Cyrillic). Bandera is Spanish for ‘flag’. And Bandera is a symbol of Ukrainian fighting for freedom for many years.

Take The Money is a wonky all caps font, made with a Sharpie pen. The name was inspired by something I read in the newspaper: apparently a Danish artist received €72.000 from a museum to create two works of art. The works of art should depict the average income of someone from Austria and someone from Denmark - in real money. The museum then loaned him the €72.000 and told him he'd receive €3.300 for his work. The artist decided that €3.300 would merely cover the costs, so he delivered two empty canvases and called the work: Take The Money And Run.

LTC Athena brings a somewhat “lost” hot-metal typeface back from obscurity into digital Opentype format. In fall 2012, printing historian Rich Hopkins contacted P22 type foundry regarding some inked type drawings he had just uncovered from his acquisition of the Baltimore-based “Baltotype” company some 20 years ago. It is a rare face whose original matrices were destroyed and thought fully lost. The drawings included a full upper and lower case set, numerals, basic punctuation, and alternate forms of some letters. The design is a narrow deco-flavored design from the 1950s with a curious avoidance of straight lines in the stems and main strokes. The face has been expanded to over 340 characters by Miranda Roth and includes ligatures as well as a full Pan-European character set. It is released through the Lanston division of P22 in consideration of its earlier incarnation as a metal typeface.

WildThing is just that, a script that has a real wild character.

Classica Pro by Bernd Möllenstädt A real alternative for letterpress printing A masterpiece It was only after many years, shortly before the end of his life, Bernd Möllenstädt brought out these early drafts of his Classica Light and Light Italic from his drawer, and asked me to produce for him on the computer a Bold and Bold Italic, from which we later wanted to interpolate further cuts like Regular and so on. The boldening of letters with an oblique axis and with hairlines which should not grow to the same extent as the general line widths, is hard to cope with perfectly, even for the smartest computer program, and even more so, when it concerns an as complicated set of data as those conceived by Bernd. The automatically generated result could therefore only be a first step that had to be improved manually later. This was about the stage that we had reached when Bernd died in March 2013, leaving me behind with comprehensive corrections on proofs of this automatically generated Bold. Although I was aware that it would mean a lot of work to complete the project, I did not want to leave it unfinished and decided to finalize and publish the Classica, also in Bernd‘s honor. In the course of the two years that I worked on this font family it somewhat naturally became also my own. New details were added and some of the existing changed. A book typeface requires the supreme and forgives rarely, it represents a true masterpiece. My intention and my ambition were to create a real alternative for letterpress printing, with a font family that contains all the typographic options for an excellent typesetting, and is better readable and has a better appearance than other existing typefaces. Whether this was achieved, the reader may decide. Volker Schnebel, Hamburg, december 2014

Cuantica font family has been designed for Graviton Font Foundry by Pablo Balcells in 2012. It is display typeface with a geometric look. Cuantica consists of 4 styles.

A French form of Fat Face, derived from the British; matrices survive at Berthold in Berlin.