Feel Script is based on lettering that calligrapher and logo designer Rand Holub created for Intertype for his face Monterey. Fortunately, I didn’t have the technological limitations today that Intertype had back then. Holub’s lettering is presented in its entirety within Feel Script. Some letterforms were redrawn from vintage American magazine ads (some by Holub himself), along with many new alternates, ligatures, ending forms, and strangely beautiful character combinations. The experience I’ve accumulated from my previous calligraphy typefaces (Ministry Script, Affair, Buffet Script, Burgues Script, et al.) made it easier for me to apply Holub’s lettering in a new context using OpenType technology. The usual extended treatment was given to Feel Script, all the way into the implementation of three-letter ligatures and the dreamiest swashes I could imagine. I changed some of the connections between the lowercase letters in order to fit Holub’s calligraphy as opposed to the limited Intertype metal attempt. I hope you like Feel Script. I also hope what I contributed to this particular Holub design is somewhat of a happy ending to a calligraphy story that crosses many technologies. From the pen to computer Bézier. My part of this story stops here ... and yours begins. Feel Script has more than 1200 glyphs including: stylistic alternates, contextual alternates, titling alternates, swashes, and ligatures. Check out the PDF!

The talented Ronna Penner has created many beautiful script fonts, and Black Jack’s quality was very good so only a few spacing issues had to be addressed. I've added some kerning pairs, and then added all the glyphs needed for the CheapProFonts language coverage. This font was an absolute joy to rework, and with its extended character set I hope it now finds many more users! ALL fonts from CheapProFonts have very extensive language support: They contain some unusual diacritic letters (some of which are contained in the Latin Extended-B Unicode block) supporting: Cornish, Filipino (Tagalog), Guarani, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Romanian, Ulithian and Welsh. They also contain all glyphs in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block (which among others cover the Central European and Baltic areas) supporting: Afrikaans, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Polish, Saami (Inari), Saami (North), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Turkish and Turkmen. And they of course contain all the usual “western” glyphs supporting: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Chamorro, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Sami (Lule), Sami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Walloon and Yapese. There is no yen currency symbol is this font.

Like many cities in the Midlands and North of England, Stoke-on-Trent has a rich history linked to making and industry. In Stoke’s case it was pottery. In the early 1900s bottle kilns could be seen covering the landscape of the six towns making up Stoke-on-Trent with hundreds of factories producing some of the best ceramics in the world. But by the 1990s most of these had gone. Torn down for development of housing or just left to rot. During the next few decades Stoke continued to change. The industry was in a decline and Stoke itself was seen as another poor midlands city with a dwindling industry. Then in 2008, Spode, one of the largest and most famousceramics factories in Stoke entered into administration. Pens cast aside, drawings left half finished, designs left in the turned-off kilns; Spode factory was abandoned. This was a real shock and the way everything was getting thrown into skips to be put on the tip was heartbreaking. Thankfully people salvaged some of the technical drawings, sketch design, old sample pieces and ceramics that people hard worked so hard on. Potbank has been in development over a number of years taking inspiration from the heritage and designs from the ceramics industry. It has a mixed Clarendon and Antiqua style structure with its main purpose to be used as a printed type.

Volta is a robust typeface from the 1950s. A revisit to styles that were en vogue at the turn of the century, Bauer type foundry designers Walter Baum and Konrad Bauer designed this type family in1955. The form of Volta's letters are similar to those in New Transitional Serif typefaces, like Cheltenham and Century. Developed after the Didone (i.e., Bodoni) style types, New Transitional Serifs speak more to the zeitgeist of the late 19th Cntury, and were typographic adaptations to it's newer technologies. Already in the period of mass production, typographers and printers at the dawn of the 20th Century had to cope with larger print runs on cheaper materials. The robust letterforms of New Transitional Serifs were designed to compensate for this, but they were also ingenious little inventions in their own right. Form the beginning, the new, peculiar forms of New Transitional Serif letters were adopted for use by advertisers. Their robustness also allowed them to be used in virtually all sizes. Volta was designed especially with advertising display usage in mind. The x-height of Volta's letters is higher than average for serif faces. It is recommended that Volta be used exclusively for shorter tracks of text, above 12 point. Headlines look dashing set in Volta. Four different font styles are available for the Volta typeface: Regular, Medium, Medium Italic, and Bold."

Based on the lettering used on Alan Turing’s famous code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park, the “Bombe”, and the subsequent British answer to the German Enigma machine, the Typex. Research done at Bletchley Park on their restored and antique machines provided the inspiration. The unusual shapes for the capitals have all been retained - the square O, the monospaced characters and other eccentricities that make it unique. This reference material was then extended to the numerals (which did not exist in the original) and a full international character complement. The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. It was based on a device that had been designed in 1938 in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the "cryptologic bomb" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna). The Bombe was used to break the German Enigma code on a daily basis, and was a vital part of the Allied war effort. The British “Typex" (alternatively, Type X or TypeX) machines were an adaptation of the commercial German Enigma with a number of enhancements that greatly increased its security. It was used from 1937 until the mid-1950s, when other more modern military encryption systems came into use.

The Farfa fonts were designed for institutional use, commissioned by the City of Fara in Sabina, Italy. This project started from the study of the manuscripts found in the Abbey of Farfa, penned in a variant of the lower case of “Carolingian” typical style of that area. The Capital, ligatures and Small Caps, however, are based on the uncial writing that often appears in those codes and manuscripts. Farfa Abbey is a territorial abbey in northern Lazio, central Italy. It is one of the most famous abbeys of Europe. It belongs to the Benedictine Order and is located about 60 km from Rome, in the commune of Fara Sabina The origin of the Abbey is still unknown. Archaeological discoveries seem to prove that the first monastic establishment was built on the ruins of a pagan temple. The Vandals destroyed the first monastery in the fifth century. Only a few documents from the sixth-century prove the early presence of the monastic community. It had the heritage of Charlemagne (S VIII), the Lombard chiefs, and later the Carolingians, succeeded in withdrawing Farfa from obedience to the Bishops of Rieti, and in securing many immunities and privileges for the monastery. Farfa was at this period the most important monastery in Italy both from the point of view of worldly possession and ecclesiastical dignity.

The German designer Emil Rudolf Weiss originally created Weiss Rundgotisch for the Bauer typefoundry in 1937. In their catalog for the typeface, Bauer began with this quote from Leonhard Wagner: The round gothic (rundgotisch) script is the most beautiful kind of script; she is called the mother and the queen of all the rest." While designing Weiss Rundgotisch, Weiss was inspired by Renaissance types cut by the Augsberg printer Erhard Ratdolt. Ratdolt had spent some time in Venice, which is most likely where he became familiar with round gothic letters. This sort of letterform was never as popular in Germany as Fraktur or Gotisch may have been, but round gothic types were used there for centuries to represent arts and craft feelings, as well as old-fashioned handwork. For a blackletter typeface, Weiss Rundgotisch is very similar to normal serif and sans serif designs, especially its uppercase letters, which seem to have some uncial influence in them as well. Therefore, Weiss Rundgotisch is more legible for contemporary readers, making this an excellent choice for anyone looking to set text, logos, or headlines with in blackletter. Weiss Rundgotisch was apparently quite a difficult typeface to design, even for a master designer like Weiss. He began work on the face in 1915; Weiss Rundgotisch's development took over 20 years to complete."