Georgia Carne

How many times have you seen lettering on a book cover, poster, or card and wanted to make something similar? Decorata’s eight intertwining weights finally make that possible in an intelligent way. The first major collaboration of its kind, Decorata pairs the talents of supreme lettering artist Martina Flor and masterful type designer Neil Summerour. Lettering was traditionally understood as using words in an artistic way, while type design created written language for easy reading, the one overlapping the other in several ways. For this unique project, Martina created several versions of the alphabet and its decorative layers in her eye-catching style. Neil then took those designs and created an enormous eight-style font family that respects the designer’s need for control and capitalizes on the artist’s expressiveness.

Each style can work separately but, on top of the foundational styles, try placing the Lace, then Filigree in contrasting colors. Use any OpenType-capable program to turn headlines from blasé to wowza, make posters with some pow, and design your own cards with that just-right level of detail. Whatever idea you can imagine with the Decorata family, it promises to be a playful and precise wordsmith where the words themselves are the art.

Decorata’s glyphs are bifurcated, have medium contrast to showcase their intricate interactions, and include Shadow, Regular, Outline, Filigree, Lace, Fancy, Intricate, and Dingbat styles — eight in all. The Regular style sets the word or phrase to begin the design, Shadow ensures it lifts off the background, and Outline attempts to restrain its ornate flair. Think of those as the foundation and use the rest of the styles for flamboyance. The Intricate and Filigree styles vary only in the thickness of the glyphs, with Filigree being thinner. Lace removes the external curls around each letter but keeps the internal negative space from those decorative lines. The Fancy style is a solid lettershape that includes its attendant elements, and the Dingbats are exactly as expected: borders, manicules, patterns, frames, and many stylized items to bring designs to life.

Extenda is a variable width sans serif type family designed by Francesco Canovaro with Andrea Tartarelli and Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini.It been created to provide designers with a powerful but flexible tool to create strong headlines, logos, and display text with tight spacing and maximum space coverage. Rather than providing a family of weights, it gives you a fine-grained range of widths to choose from, allowing maximum control in display editorial uses, and proportional size variation in logo design, keeping consistent appearance and readability.

From the vertical, ultra-condensed and thin Pica, Nano and Micro weights to the wide and ultra-bold Peta, Exa and Yotta weights, all Extenda fonts include an extended character set covering Latin languages as well as ones using Cyrillic and Greek for a coverage of 200+ languages. Full Open Type features are included, from small caps to stylistic alternates, positional number forms and discretionary & standard ligatures.

The 11-weights family is complemented by the Extendable special weight, that uses Open Type scripts to create a dynamically scaling typeface where each letter becomes automatically tighter or wider than the previous one.

The addition of a monospaced version returns the Ballinger family to (some of) its roots: a 70s-era typewriter face called Candia, which Josef Müller-Brockmann designed for Olivetti. Ballinger Mono is designed on the same principles as its sister face: plain, sturdy forms with large counters, open apertures, deep junctures, and a generous x-height. It matches Ballinger’s eight weights, which makes it unusually versatile for a fixed-width face, and has been carefully rebalanced for ease of reading, like the classic jobbing sanses that inspired it. Oldstyle, inferior, and superior figures are available, as well as old-fashioned nut fractions.

Kometa Sans is a contemporary grotesk with a certain personality. She has a steady geometric skeleton, but its appearance is rather humanistic. The precise details of the artwork, the carefully drawn true italics, the six types of numerals, the variety of alternates, the broad range of open-type features and the extensive glyph set can meet most of the contemporary typographer’s demands for a neutral, but not boring type family for both long text and display use. Among the distinctive qualities of Kometa are also the forms of ligatures (both default and discretionary). They follow the natural constructive transitions between oval parts and stems, which is an advantage to mark, at least for designers who respect the beauty of clean forms.

Note the specially designed Kometa Unicase sub-family, substantially enough to exist as a separate typeface. Its elegant and expressive letterforms are boosting further the power to create outstanding design work. Kometa Unicase has original and playful, yet reasonable approach to letterforms variety.

Kometa has a very broad usability range – from logotypes and poster designs to corporate identities and complex editorial projects. The contemporary Cyrillics of Kometa allows easily completion of graphically consistent multilingual corporate and artistic design projects.

Designed by Kiril Zlatkov and Vassil Kateliev.

Introducing Lansdowne, vintage all-caps typeface. Perfect blend between clean and vintage themed typework, inspired by the old advertisement letters. Lansdowne’s 470+ glyphs give you strong, sharp, yet clean feels without sacrificing its vintage/classic touch. Mouse-crafted with passion to quench your drought of versatile classic typeface.

Based on the Hiragino Sans (Kaku Gothic) design, this is the first Chinese-language font from a Japanese font manufacturer to be certified compliant with China’s GB 18030-2000 standard. Unique features are a contemporary typeface design that sets it apart from existing Chinese typefaces and a dedication to high quality down to the slightest detail. Multi-language composition using both Japanese and Chinese Hiragino fonts offer a sense of unity With demand growing rapidly in China, Hiragino Sans Simplified Chinese is the optimal font for uses in those fields that need both readability and contemporary vibe such as product packaging, catalogues, books, magazines, websites, and sign and displays.

Config Rounded is a condensed geometric sans serif with rounded corners. A sibling to Config, this typeface was influenced by geometric sans serifs with circular forms on the tops and bottoms of characters, but the proportions have been condensed by incorporating straight sides for a design that is sturdy and space-saving. It’s efficient yet friendly. Use Config Rounded for a subtle softness that still looks modern and strong. Or use Config for a sharper appearance.

The neutral design of this typeface with subtle details makes it functional for type setting in small and large sizes. With 10 weights (plus italics), there are multiple options to fit the need—black and thin for extreme uses and intermediates for more common needs. It’s clean nature allows it to be readable at small sizes, but the touch of character—as seen in the notched joints (like the n and u), rounded details (like the l and t), and horizontal/vertical terminals (like the a and e)—make it interesting at large, display sizes.

Config Rounded includes lots of OpenType features, as well as symbols to enhance your typography:

• Multiple stylistic alternates (8 stylistic sets)
• Standard and discretionary ligatures
• Case-sensitive punctuation for All Caps
• Tabular figures
• Fractions, numerators, denominators
• Superscript, subscript
• Slashed zero
• Arrows, circled numbers, geometric shapes

With over 600 glyphs, this font has extensive Latin language support (100+ Latin languages) for Western, Central, and South Eastern European.

Faktum is an exploration into the geometric sans genre, inspired by Mid-century modern architecture and interior design. Especially the combination of clear lines, organic curves and geometric shapes, highly popular among designers and architects of the second third of the 20th century, gave the impetus for a design with clear modernist roots and a strong contemporary finish.

The family comes in 8 weights plus matching italics, featuring a wide range of alternate characters and opentype features like discretionary ligatures, case sensitive shapes, different number sets and many more. Due to its clean lines and slightly organic structure, Faktum functions great in many sizes and surroundings, working either as a restrained supporting font in long paragraphs, or as a main actor in powerful headlines.

Elicit Script is a hybrid script family, that can be as casual or formal as the occasion demands. Created by Laura Worthington and Jim Wasco, the design is based on pointed pen Spencerian Script handwriting. “It’s like one of those German italics from the early 20th century, that have beautiful shapes that hold their own,” says Wasco.

Elicit Script spans five weights, from Extra Light to Bold, and three styles – Formal, Normal and Casual. This makes it an incredibly versatile script design, easily paired with other typefaces and able to be dressed up or down, depending on what it’s used for. The monoline Casual style offers a more relaxed tone of voice, while Formal sits at the more decorative end of the spectrum. Designers can keep things straightforward, tidy and practical with the typeface’s simple caps, or add in swash caps if they need more exuberance and expression. Generous spacing means Elicit Script works well at smaller sizes as well.

Designed by Alberto Romanos, Bw Seido Round is a semi condensed font family with rounded corners striking a gentle balance between minimal strict geometry and typographic refinement, conveying a subtle industrial yet friendly feel. It consist of 12 styles (6 uprights + 6 matching obliques) supporting all European Latin languages.

The design of Bw Seido Round started heavily Influenced by the systematic principles behind the original German DIN 1451, with its clean, minimal shapes and rigid geometric feel: Both the lowercase and the uppercase have their own horizontal waistline running through all the characters of the font, reinforcing the engineered feel and focusing the rhythm on its vertical pace.

Beyond the very obvious rounded corners and terminals, which are instantly softening the feel and positioning this font on the friendly side, Bw Seido Round presents a series of subtle typographic adjustments elevating the design while staying invisible: The monoline look is achieved seamlessly thanks to the subtle modulation and the corrections at the joins; the tall x-height married with the open counters and the unambiguous shapes make it a very legible font,... All these ingredients play a balancing game with the crude geometry by adding the right doses of warmth into the industrial feel.

The resulting combination is a very functional font family suited for carrying the weight of a contemporary brand’s visual identity. Its tabular figures feature includes currency symbols and punctuation, making it a great candidate for information design and annual reports. Bw Seido Round is equally comfortable in print as it is in digital environments, thanks to the additional symbols and arrows included matching each weight. Other OpenType features included on the Bw Seido Round font family are stylistic alternates, slashed zero, fractions, case sensitive and localized forms.

Vektra takes advantage of the high-resolution afforded by the Glyphs font design program. Stripes of different density overlap to create a cross-hatched tonal effect. Best used at larger sizes and in shorter settings where the details can be seen.