My brother is an architect, and I have always loved his lettering, you know, the style of writing that can be found on architectural drawings. There is a common thread to it, yet each architect or engineer brings their own personality to it. I have seen a similar style being used by some hand-letterers for invitations, place cards and signage. Inspired, I set out to create my own, and the result is my new typeface, Robard! I wanted something compact, somewhat modular, done quickly but with control, and sourced from hand-lettering. Starting out with a handful of pigment ink pens, I settled on a 0.1mm Copic Multi-Liner, and using a light table with a grid underneath the paper, I cranked out grouping after grouping, letter after letter, numbers, punctuation, accents, just trying to zero in on the feeling and the look I was after. There were some ideas that didn't work, like unicase (there would be no regular lowercase), or swash alternates. Ultimately, I ended up with a decent array of glyphs to choose from, and alternates like oldstyle numbers, and an alternate set of caps for the lowercase slots, and even alternative figures so doubles like 88 would be different. In the font, the OpenType ligature code automatically alternates the cap and lowercase (alternate cap) letters, and numbers as you type, lending Robard that hand-lettered look in a digital typeface that I was hoping for. There are also oldstyle figures, and unlimited fractions, ordinals, and a few alternate letters. I hope you like Robard!

Halloween lends itself to graphic images: witches, ghosts, bats, jack-o'lanterns and haunted houses. When we think of a haunted house, we generally think of a large, abandoned, derelict Victorian wood-frame house. The style is usually Second Empire or Queen Anne. There tends to be a lot of decoration. There is usually a porch or two with decorative spindle work. There is probably a tower, either square with a mansard roof such as one might see in Paris or round with a conical roof borrowed from a Loire Valley chateau. These houses were generally built in the United States between 1860 and 1900, products of the exuberance of a time before income tax. It took at least three servants to maintain such a house and was very expensive. Few can afford them today. That is why so many were converted to professional offices, multi-family dwellings or simply abandoned. HAUNTED HOUSE is our typographical contribution to Halloween. Based on our font PETRARKA ML, it features decorative capitol letters that utilize the silhouette of a Second Empire style house complete with a dead tree and a full moon. The font includes 8 ornaments suitable for flyers and party invitations. Revision 2.000 eliminates dual encoding, harmonizes metrics, adds new glyphs, and adds open type features. The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Bold, rounded and super cool. Those are the attributes of my latest font “Vinyle”, french for vinyl. In this epoque where all fields of Design are giving a lot of importance and attention to Typography and Lettering, I felt it was my duty to contribute with something that could really stand alone and ‘say something else’ that just words to be read. I've found that lately in the world, regarding a finished piece of design, the role of Typography (and of letters in general) went from being secondary, (like a minor player or a supporting actor) to the most important one. People are starting to understand the beauty of a well-done letter: they want their storefronts with unique scripts, they want to drink coffee surrounded by lettered blackboards, they want to buy books with astonishing covers with swashes ‘por doquier’. I'm more than happy to be alive in a present where even the most unimaginable friends of mine, (who couldn't spot differences between comic sans and helvetica before) are now conscious of the importance of a letter, or let’s say: Of the ‘voice’ of Typography. With Vinyle I tried to make a font with power. Following the nowadays trend of, let me say, “the vintage sans renaissance”. This time I put my brushes and nibs aside and experimented with something new. It wasn't easy, if you will pardon, for me to see swashes all over the place withouth the classic calligraphic ‘thick and thins’, but with after some weeks of work I started to love them. Like I already showed you in other creations (1) let me finish with the phrase: GEOMETRY IS SEXY! TIPS Vinyle has a lot of attitude, it shouts “here I am!” it really can ‘design an entire piece’ for you with just a word or two: It was designed with a 10 degree slant on purpose so the user may rotate it (like on the posters) that amount of degrees in order to see better results. Use Vinyle with the ‘fi’ standard ligatures activates for better kerning and ligatures! NOTES (1) See my font Selfie , the ‘little sister’ of Vinyle.

Now even more design possibilities with the popular DIN Next. With its technical and neutral character, DIN Next has earned a permanent place in contemporary typography. Now, DIN Next Slab expands the font family further, offering new design potential. Now comes the next step, DIN Next Slab, also produced under the direction of Akira Kobayashi. On a team with Sandra Winter and Tom Grace, Kobayashi is creating the new font variant based on the optimized shapes of DIN Next. The expansion will make the popular font all the more flexible and versatile. Apart from that, the geometric slab serifs underline the technical and formal nature of the font and emphasize a central design element of DIN Next. However, the team did have some challenges to overcome. While it is relatively easy to imagine DIN Next Light with slab serifs, the amount of available space quickly disappears when it comes to the Black styles. Winter explains that many tests and trials were necessary to find a compromise between space, letters and the serif shapes. Experiments with modified contrast in the weight or only one-sided serifs were quickly abandoned. The central, technical and powerful character of the font changed too much. Nevertheless, it was necessary to simplify slightly the shape of some letters, such as the ‘k’ or ‘x’, for example. These changes, first developed in the Black styles, were applied to all weights in order to lend the font a consistent appearance. Like DIN Next, DIN Next Slab also has seven weights, which cover the range from Ultralight to Black, each with matching italic. There are various character sets in all of the styles and the four middle weights have small capitals available. DIN Next Slab harmonizes perfectly with the styles of DIN Next: the basic letterforms and weights are identical. Both versions of the font can work together perfectly, not just in headlines and body text, but also within a text; they complement each other very well as design variations. With the new DIN Next Slab, Monotype expands the DIN Next super family consistently. With DIN Next Slab, you can underscore the technical and formal nature of the understated font not only in headlines, but in texts, as well. In this way, you have new and diverse potential for application, thanks to the way the different styles of DIN Next combine perfectly.

The Mashq script is the oldest documented Arabic Jazm calligraphy style. It was invented by the early Muslims in the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina, exclusively for writing the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. The Mashq style employed complex ligature and multi-level baseline rules, and therefore it went through a continuous simplification process. Around the time period Mashq was developed, the early Arab Muslims experimented with another short-lived Mashq-like style with heavily slanted vertical stems, which closely resembled the common Ḥijazi style. This style is commonly referred to as the Ma’il (slanted) style. Eventually, the early complex Mashq style was replaced as the main Islamic Arabic script, by a more simplified Mashq-derived calligraphy style that was developed in the city of Kufa, modern day Iraq, which was commonly referred to as Kufi. The Kufic style became the official Arabic script style for centuries before it was replaced by the more developed Naskh, the modern Arabic script style used today. The Mashq font family by Arabetics includes three styles of Mashq. The first is Mashq regular, which closely follows the script style of Musḥaf ‘Uthman (currently displayed in the Topkapi Museum in Turkey) with only the initial and final Haa’ baselines shifting. The second is Mashq Maail, which emphasizes the features of the Ma’il style shared with Mashq. The third is Mashq Kufi, which closely follows the script style in an adequate sample from the Quran manuscripts of the Bergstraesser Archive. All three fonts include two styles, with and without Tashkeel (dots). The Mashq and Mashq Kufi fonts include two more styles, with and without Harakat (soft vowels), and Hamza. Only three soft vowels are implemented along with their Tanween (double) forms. The Sukoon vowel is the default shape before inserting a soft vowel. Hamza was treated as a vowel in the Mashq and early Kufi manuscripts. Kashida is a zero width character. In the Mashq fonts, inserting one Kashida before the final ‘Ayn glyph group will trigger alternative shapes. In the Mashq Kufi fonts, inserting one Kashida (or two) before the final Yaa’, ‘Ayn, and Ḥaa’ glyph groups will trigger alternative shapes. The Mashq font family by Arabetics was designed to be as compatible as possible with the Arabic keyboard and Unicode alphabet used in computers today. Calligraphic variations were implemented only when they marked significant and permanent script features.

Ablati is the commercial release of the font designed during the production of our new font design book, “Practical Font Design”. It is a new serif font in my continuing objective of designing book fonts that I can really use. In many ways, Ablati is a very different direction for me. Designed to produce gaphics to use in the font design book, I was forced to really reconsider many of my working methods to make them work for outside readership. Like all designers, my internal design processes can get really sloppy. The book helped me clean up my act. Taking my inspiration from one of my favorite fonts of all time {though I've never really been able to use it much}, Romic, by Colin at Letraset, I decided to design a unilateral serif font. In most ways, this is a normal serif for me in that it has caps, lowercase, small caps with the appropriate figures for each case. This font has all the OpenType features in the new set developed for the book. There are several ligatures for your fun and enjoyment: bb gg ff fi fl ffi ffl ffy fj ft tt ty Wh Th and more. Several alternative forms, a dozen ornaments, and more. Like all of my fonts, there are: caps, lowercase, small caps, proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, & small cap figures, plus numerators, denominators, superiors, inferiors, and a complete set of ordinals 1st through infinity. Enjoy! The Oldstyle and Small Cap fonts are an attempt to have most of the OpenType characters available to people still using Type 1 and TrueType fonts.