Current Fonts in Focus

Amanda™ is a family of two typefaces from Tom Rickner. He developed the typeface while and his wife were expecting their first child, although they eventually gave their baby a different name. Amanda is loosely calligraphic and full of vigor, contrast and angularity. Its texture just hints at some of the typefaces in the Lydian family which served as inspiration.

According to designer David Farey, “Cachet™ is a monospaced, monostroke typeface – that isn’t.“ Why the sleight of hand? Typefaces that are limited to a single character and stroke width suffer in terms of legibility. Farey’s goal in drawing Cachet was to create a typeface that gives the illusion of monospacing, while delivering a subliminal dose of reader-friendliness.
At first glance, Cachet appears to be constructed of straight and nearly-straight strokes. A closer look, however, reveals several subtleties. Curved strokes have an almost calligraphic spontaneity. Places where character strokes meet are tapered slightly, while stroke ends have been flared. These quiet deviations from geometric uniformity give the design a human, organic, and decidedly non-digital look. An added benefit is that the subtle design modulation benefits readability.
Farey’s subtle design modulation results in a legible and highly usable new typeface.

Aldo Novarese designed the Fluidum typeface in 1951. As its name implies, the design is very fluid. This high contrast script face curls and twists across the line. It is sort of a cross between Giambattista Bodoni’s cursive letters, and Aldo Novarese’s later, heavier designs, like Microgramma™ , Eurostile™, and Sprint™. Fludium should be set in very large point sizes. It is perfect for invitations, greeting cards, and fine logos.

Mundo Sans™, from Carl Crossgrove, is becoming quite a popular design. Mundo Sans is a humanist sans serif, but it brings its own personality into this successful genre. In addition to the fine typefaces that have preceded it, Crossgrove gives credit to hand-lettered signage as a strong influence on the heavy weights in the Mundo Sans family.
Throughout his work on the project, Crossgrove aimed to create a humanistic typeface with subtle pen ductus, a wide range of weights and a fluid, unobtrusive italic. He kept the design clean and distinctive enough for display use while still being sufficiently understated and proportioned for text composition. With seven weights and a complementary suite of cursive italics, there is little outside the range of the Mundo Sans family. Weights range from the delicate and understated Extra Light through the forthright Medium to the lively and robust Ultra. Mundo Italics are true cursive designs with fluid strokes and obvious calligraphic overtones. The flick of the down-stroke in the “a,” the descending stroke of the “f” and graceful curve of the baseline of the “z” add grace to the design and distinguish it from more traditional sloped-roman italics. Crossgrove says that Mundo Sans isn’t meant to be revolutionary, yet it has a quiet distinction that separates it from other types. Without shouting “new and different,” Mundo Sans just works.

Aldo Novarese, the famous Italian type designer (ITC Novarese™, Eurostile®, and many others), designed Nadianne™. The elegant, readable Agfa Nadianne looks as good on an invitation as it does on a business letter.

The branding agency’s client wanted an “ultra modern” typeface that was “futuristic without being gimmicky or ephemeral,” according to the design brief. Designer Sebastian Lester took on this intriguing custom font assignment, but soon, a bureaucratic decision cancelled the project.
“I was left with a sketchbook full of ideas and thought it would be a shame not to see what came of them,” says Lester. He decided to finish the design on his own.
Lester’s research confirmed that the principal ingredient of an “ultra modern” typeface was simplicity of character structure: a carefully drawn, monoline form, open letter shapes and smooth, strong curves. To conceive a typeface that crossed the line from modern to futuristic, Lester decided to amplify these qualities.
About a year after Lester’s initial conceptual work, two highly functional and versatile typefaces emerged. These are Neo® Sans and Neo Tech , designs Lester describes as “legible without being neutral, nuanced without being fussy, and expressive without being distracting.“
Both the Neo Sans and the more-minimalist Neo Tech families are available in six weights, ranging from Light to Ultra. Each has a companion italic, and Neo Tech offers a suite of alternate characters.
While engineered to look modern as tomorrow, Neo Sans and Neo Tech display the functional and aesthetic excellence that earns them a place in the list of classic designs from the Monotype typeface library.

Monotype Script is a French-style script typeface dating back to the 1930s. Why makes it French? Well, a number of the forms found in its design are common in traditional French lettering and sign painting, e.g., the uppercase a that take the form of an enlarged lowercase a. The characters in Monotype Script connect with each other, and have a high degree of stroke contrast, just like you would expect from this sort of brush lettering inspired font.

Soho® is one of the latest addition to the growing range of typefaces from Sebastian Lester. This grand opus of a project resulted in a typeface that comprises nine weights and five widths of precision engineered OpenType. 40 fonts, 32,668 characters and 24 OpenType features.
Hot on the heels of the popular Neo Sans and Neo Tech range, and his first typeface release Scene®, Soho represents three years of work by Lester. “As a type designer I’m preoccupied with finding ways in which I can address modern problems like good legibility in modern media, and create fonts that work precisely and efficiently in the most technically demanding of corporate and publishing environments.”
Slab serif typefaces are enjoying something of a renaissance, offering versatility whether for corporate identity, product branding, text or display use. With 40 weights to choose from Soho gives designers endless possibilities from the ultra chic lines conveyed by the lighter weights to the rock solid statement made by the heavier weights.
Soho is cross-platform compatible. The Pro version provides extended language support for Central European languages. Used in conjunction with software applications that support OpenType many useful features like “stylistic sets” can be leveraged – in which a wide variety of alternative characters can be introduced at the click of a mouse button giving one font several “tones of voice” from conservative to cutting edge. The wide range of glyphs includes ligatures and small caps.

Storm Sans™ is a Scandinavian-style sans serif typeface family. Designed by Nina Lee Storm, Storm Sans bears some similarity to her later, more sophisticated typeface Noa™. Storm Sans looks and feels like its native Denmark, with characteristically Danish forms in certain letters. The typefaces include oldstyle figures as its default figure style.

Stuyvesant™ is a decorative script face from the 50’s. Based on engraved lettering, its forms have very low x-heights and capital letters that are much larger than the ascenders. This typeface is the perfect choice for formal applications, like the design of a holiday card, invitation, or certificate.

Zemestro™ is a straightforward design that is meant to be read. According to its designer, Dave Farey, “There’s nothing calligraphic about it, and there are no defining or identifiable single characters – it’s just clean and simply constructed.”
Farey’s goal was to create a more legible and friendlier typeface than those limited to single character and stroke widths. The face finds its foundation in two earlier designs from Farey: Cachet™, a soft-terminal sans he drew in 1999, and a partial alphabet he created for the New Scientist, a British scientific journal. Cachet appears to be monospaced and constructed with geometrically precise character strokes, but it isn’t. The characters drawn for New Scientific are more condensed and structured than Cachet. Their offspring Zemestro takes on the proportions of the New Scientific letters and builds them into a full typeface family. Round characters have squared shoulders, helping to create visually consistent letter spacing and even typographic color. Terminals are now square and clipped at right angles to the stroke.
The Zemestro family is available in four weights, with complementary italics for the two lightest weights. Text copy in the Book weight is inviting and easy on the eyes, while the Regular is more imposing and authoritative. The Medium and Bold weights are excellent for providing emphasis in text copy and are also strong communicators at display sizes.
The name Zemestro? “I’m always fascinated by typeface names,” says Farey. “Most of mine are inspired by movies or books.” It was while reading a book on the Russian revolution that Farey learned zemestro was the word for a village council or group of elders, “before Comrade Lenin dissolved them all,” he explains. “So this is the first Zemestro since 1917. I thought it was worth reviving.”