Font Design Releases 2003

Frakto™ is a two-weight family of calligraphic Fraktur-style typefaces designed by Julius de Goede. One of the main categories of Blackletter typefaces, Fraktur was developed around 1517, and was used throughout Germany and Northern Europe well into the 20th century. With Frakto, Julius de Goede has re-applied the written element of the script back into the Fraktur style, rejuvenating and reinvigorating it for 21st century display use. Frakto is the perfect fit for certificates and newsletter headlines. We recommended using it in point sizes from 12-pt on up.

Making a Christmas card takes a lot of work! Finding the right typeface can be tough, too. Have you ever spent hours searching for the right one? Well, in 2003, instead of spending hours searching, German designer Guido Bittner made his own. Expectation™ was first used on the Christmas card for Bittner’s Wiesbaden design studio.This delicate series of letters maintains a handwritten feel, in part because it began as a digitalization of Bittner’s own handwriting. Expectation Swash includes additional swash letters, which can be paired with regular version of Expectation to create superior effects. Perhaps it is already time for you to begin working on next year’s holiday cards. Let these fonts be the starting port for your inspiration!

Pirouette™ is based on a logotype that Japanese designer Ryuichi Tateno created for a packaging design project in 1999 - a shampoo container, at that! Already Tateno’s original design experimented with overlapping swash italic letterforms. These experiments grew outside out their initial packaging project, taking on a life of their own. Eventually, they developed into the Pirouette typefaces, which were honored with a first place finish in the 2003 International Type Design Contest, sponsored by Linotype GmbH.
The Pirouette type family, which represents Tanteno’s first commercial font design, is greatly influenced by the calligraphic and typographic work of the master German designer, Prof. Hermann Zapf, especially his recent Zapfino collection.

Brazilian designer Eduardo Omine designed his Beret™ family of typefaces in an attempt to create a warm counterpart to the clean, minimalist sans serif of the 20th Century. The most individual characteristics of Beret are the terminals at the ends of its vertical strokes. They are slightly “bent”, simulating a subtle flare. Like many classic sans-serif typefaces (e.g., the original Syntax™ and Univers™), this family does not include true (calligraphic) italics. Instead, a masterful set of obliques has been created. As Stanley Morison articulated in the early 1920s and 30s, these slanted versions of the regular “roman” faces may even work better when one wishes to emphasize certain words or passages within a text.
The Beret family of typefaces is suitable for numerous applications, in both text and display sizes.

The Scriptuale™ family, which contains eight typefaces, is a contemporary upright calligraphic face. Designed by German designer Renate Weise, this family of typefaces speaks to the present, while at the same time reflecting on a lyrical past. The letterforms of the Scriptuale family are romanticized, they reference German calligraphic styles from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. For instance the design of Scriptuale‘s uppercase strays from the canon of classical proportion into romantic idealism. While the C and O are drawn according to the ancient quadratic proportions – almost twice as wide, optically, as the E or the L – the letter A is wider than would be expected, and the D narrower. These subtle differences introduce a different rhythm into text set in Scriptuale than Italic styles of calligraphy may offer.

The Bohemia™ type family was designed by Argentinean designer Eduardo Manso. Bohemia’s cunning and elegant essence shows off refined letters that evoke the Transitional style typefaces like Baskerville, though most Baskerville-like designs tend not to be as curvaceous as Manso’s! True to form, Bohemia shines in smaller text sizes, like 9 point and above, while still maintaining a unique character and spirit. Bohemia is a great alternative to better-known text faces.

Boogie™, designed by German graphic designer Ralf Weissmantel, is an ironic reference to pop art, and to disco lettering from the 1960s and 70s. Its round forms and outlines evoke the flashing, pulsating lights and music of that era. Shipping with five different, width-compatible fonts, the Boogie typeface has four different components: an outlined letterform is the base element, and forms the first font. Three additional fonts may be layered over top of this base, surrounding the first font with up to three bubble-outlines. In graphics applications like Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator, these elements can each be assigned different colors. There is also a fifth font, which contains the base outlined letterform pre-surrounded by three additional outlines of the same color.
Boogie works best in large headline, display and signage applications, where its forms can be clearly seen and enjoyed. When different colored layers are applied, text set in Boogie will gyrate and jive across the page!

Brda™ originally designed by the Polish designer Franciszek Otto for the Powiat weekly newspaper. Powiat needed a new, dynamically drawn sans serif for its headlines, and Otto’s Brda fit the bill. Combining traditional Grotesk letterforms with witty subtleties, like the notched-joint seen in the capital G, Brda displays a novel design that works best when set large. The typeface is named after the Brda river, which runs through Bydgoszcz, Poland, the city where Powiat is published. The Brda family includes three weights, each with a companion italic: Regular, Bold, and Extra Bold.

German designer Hans-Jürgen Ellenberger originally developed the concept behind Elementis™ in 1975. Wanting to create an alternative typewriter script that was more round and natural, Elementis’ design was born. True to its typewriter roots, Linotype’s Elementis exhibits more character than one expects from that genre. The letters display a delightfully quirky nature, which is sure to lighten up any document. Elementis may be used in a number of point sizes: although the letters function best in large display settings, short passages of text in sizes of 12 point or less may also be created.

Hildegard™, a sans serif text face of designer Jan Sonntag, works well in both larger and smaller point sizes. On close inspection, one will discover a world of subtle angle variation within the letters’ structure that is loosely inspired the stroke movements one uses in calligraphy. These built-up strokes create visible ink traps at many joints, which in smaller sizes play a functional as well as an aesthetic role.

The Samba™ family was inspired by the lettering art of J. Carlos, a Brazilian illustrator during the early 20th century. Turned into a workable series of fonts by the contemporary Brazilian designers Tony and Caio de Marco, Samba is especially recommended for use in logos, flyers, posters, and tattoos! This family of types offers the user a chance to mix three different styles of lettering into one coherent design, which can be very useful in solving certain design problems. While the regular Samba face is made up of mono-line letters, the style of Samba bold offers much more of a thick to thin contrast. The Samba Expert set displays lavish swash endings, which were inspired by Brazilian metal work.

Latvian designer and educator Gustav Grinbergs created Stencil Moonlight™ as an attempt to slightly lighten up the stencil type scene. Intended as a lively, semi-formal face, its shapes are smooth and compact. It leaves a very heavy feeling on the page, as its letters display a very fat bold design. Stencil Moonlight is available is two separate font styles, Regular and Small Caps. When used together, the Stencil Moonlight family can create the perfect combination for your next display need.
Stencil Moonlight works best in larger sizes, where it is clear that its forms stem from an experiment with stencil design. Grinbergs recommends the face for application in package design, advertising, poster design, and perhaps even for the subtitling of foreign films!

Marathon™ was originally designed by Rudolf Koch in 1931 for Schriftgiesserei Klingspor. It is a roman with short ascenders and descenders. The serifs are small, but longer at the ends of the arms of E, F and L, M is rather splayed and is without top serifs, like M in other typefeaces designed by Rudolf Koch. The lowercase g has no link and an open tail, again like the g in other Koch types. U has the lower-case design. In the W the middle strokes cross, the lower case w has no middle serif. The figures are short-ranging.
Ute Harder from the Fachhochschule Hamburg had redesigned Marathon with the help and supervision of Professor Jovica Veljovic. She has added a book weight to offer more flexibility with this beautiful typeface.

Montix™ is a narrow, constructed type family, developed by the German designer Diana Fischer. With five weights (light, light italic, regular, regular italic, and bold), Montix is a particularly effective small family, especially when used for headline or display purposes. Montix’s letterforms have relatively long ascenders and descenders, which compared with its horizontally compact body gives it its unique style. Words or lines of text set in Montix would look best when some amount of white space is left around them. Because of this, the faces are well suited for logos and corporate identity uses (corporations that are forward thinking and “with it,” of course).

Dassitzt™, designed by Jörg Herz, is a family of two typefaces, Dassitzt LT Typos and Dassitzt LT Pictos. Dassitzt LT Typos is a heavy industrial-grunge display face, with dark, even letters that appear cut out of black paper or iron. Dassitzt LT Pictos is a whimsical collection of pictograms. The figures in this font are black silhouettes that show a minimum amount of detail, but a maximum amount of expression.

Arcana™ Manuscript is a calligraphic exploration of the Victorian gothic aesthetic that created literary classics such as Frankenstein and Dracula. Designer Gabriel Martínez Meave first wrote with a fountain pen, then digitized the results to create this unique typeface. “Arcana” takes its name from the ultimate secrets that lie behind astrology, alchemy, and magic. In gothic novels, such secrets were written in forbidden books, hidden in the dark and grotesque sanctums of magicians or mad scientists (possibly the ancestors of today’s computer scientists and type designers).

The Bix Bats™ symbol family was developed by Argentinean designer Victor Garcia to complement his display text font Bix Plain. Bix Bats contains four different symbol fonts. Most of the characters in these fonts have their lower halves reversed out. Typing a line of text in these symbol fonts, or mixing these symbol fonts with Bix Plain, will create a very interesting text effect: the bottom half of your lines of text will be reversed out, on top of a colored bar.
Bix Bats Arrows contains numerous possible arrow combinations, from archery references to the American recycling symbol. Bix Bats Funny includes all of the symbols needed for a party, from beer steins to bunny rabbits! Bix Bats Shiny has enough starbursts to light up a night sky, and in Bix Bats Wired you will find all of the technological accessories needed to be in the now. All four fonts are included in the Take Type 5 collection.

Moscow-based designer Julia Borisovna Balasheva created her Lubok™ face as a pictogram-based font. The term lubok refers to a popular style of Russian folk art printing, which dates back to the 18th Century. In Lubok, Bakasheva has digitised several whimsical characters and animals, which were common in these prints. She suggests that you use Lubok’s symbols to illustrate fairy tales; we suggest that you use Lubok to decorate everything: from your next office party invitation to comic books of your own design!

German designer Roberto Mannella first sketched out the idea for Bobotta™ Icons during a vacation in 1999. Recently, he fleshed these sketches out into a full-fledged symbol font, which was awarded with an Honorable Mention in the 2003 International Type Design Contest, sponsored by Linotype GmbH. Bobotta Icons presents a lively, spontaneous style of drawing, guaranteed to bring a new voice to your funkiest typographic work. The characters contained in this font are a wide array of comic symbols, word shapes, and fantastical creatures. This font contains both symbols that resemble happy crocodiles, and symbols that resemble a neon sign flashing the word “ove”.

Create your own world with the Picture Yourself™ collection! Picture Yourself is a graphic image collection, which functions a font family instead of hundreds of EPS files. The family is made up of 24 different symbol typefaces. Picture Yourself was designed by the collaborative effort of Karin and Peter Huschka, both living in Germany.
The symbol library found in Picture Yourself offers an astounding array of high-contrast, simple forms, which may be used happily either separately or together in your layouts. Just as the fonts themselves stem from two designers working in collaboration, the imagery of the collection itself stems from two different influences.
In comparison with other large pictographic type collections, all of the characters in Picture Yourself fonts share the same horizon. The glyphs themselves are also drawn so that many of them can be combined with one another, creating tall or wide decorative compositions. Additionally, the proportions of the forms of the pictographs are aligned with various industry standards, in order to harmonize workflow. Picture Yourself Portraits (3:4), Landscapes (6:4), Cinema (9:4), and Panorama (12:4) each adhere to one of several photo or video formats. The Picture Yourself family of fonts can best be used with graphics applications like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, where different characters may be assigned to different layers, each with their own color.