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You are probably familiar with Michael Doret’s work without even knowing it. If you have seen his logo for the New York Knicks, or one of his many covers for Time Magazine, then you are familiar with the power and dynamism he has brought to the art of hand-drawn letterforms. Doret’s font foundry Alphabet Soup shows that his background in lettering brings a unique perspective to type design. We’re proud to offer the collection at FontShop.
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Virtually years in the making, Metroscript is an outgrowth of a lettering style that Doret has used in his design work dozens of times, usually for connecting words such as “and the”, “from”, etc. This style has been described as a “baseball” or “sports” script — which is true — but its applicability is really much wider than that. Created in OpenType, Metroscript is chock full of features that will expand its usability, such as: 6 different tail styles with variable lengths; letters that “know” when they’re at the beginning or at the end of a word or following a certain other letter — and change accordingly; plus literally dozens of stylistic alternates, swashes, and ligatures, all fitting together in a way that makes each word seem as if it was lettered by hand. These extras are all built into the full-featured Metroscript OT font, and also as separate fonts for applications that are not OpenType-aware.
Download Metroscript PDF Manual
Download Metroscript Alts PDF Manual
A few years ago Doret needed to devise some letterforms for Hershey’s Chocolate. The design of PowerStation Block was the direct outgrowth of this project. When he initially decided to flesh out this “chocolate chunk” of a typeface into a family of usable fonts, he felt that the next in the family should be one in which the illuminated facets became more dominant — giving it a lighter feel — and so PowerStation Wedge was born. Doing a straight, solid version and then a thick, outlined version followed by wide versions of all of the above seemed only natural. But why stop there? Doret wanted to give this extremely graphic display font even more flexibility and usefulness by adding a two color capability. This was achieved by creating “layerable” versions of the four faceted designs — i.e. PowerStation Block Low, which is the base solid font, and PowerStation Block High, which contains the highlighted facets. By pasting the High over the Low and colorizing them differently, one can easily achieve virtually limitless color effects.
Although the initial idea for Deliscript Upright and Deliscript Slant was inpired by the neon sign in front of Canter’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles, the design soon took on a life of its own — and its own distinctive look. Unlike most “retro” fonts, Deliscript is not a retread of an older design that had been lost or forgotten, found, and then recreated. Like its sibling Metroscript, it is a completely new and unique design created from the ground up. It may have historical antecedents, but despite the “déjà vu” feeling it may provoke, it’s as new and fresh as anything else out there. Alternates, ligatures, and variable-length tails are all built into the full-featured Deliscript Regular and Italic OT fonts. Separate fonts are included for applications that are not OpenType-aware.
Download Deliscript PDF Manual
Download Deliscript Alts PDF Manual
Bank Gothic AS
Digital versions of Bank Gothic have never had a true set of lowercase characters — until now. Designing a set of lowercase characters also meant adjustments to the caps and small caps as well. This 21st century adaptation of a 20th century classic extends its usability and suitability for many more applications.
Inspired by an enameled sign from a Paris flea market, Orion can be defined as a geometric, connecting script that is at once contemporary, yet classic and timeless. Every word it sets could be a logo.
Tomás Broušil’s latest typefaces share the same elementary shapes, proportions, and weight variants. Kulturista is a distinctive monolinear slab with sturdy serifs, a display typeface well suited for use in magazines and newspapers. It can also work well in a corporate identity, on heavy machinery, or on the cover of a book.
Nudista is a geometric sans-serif based on the proportions of Purista, released by Suitcase in 2007. This time, the forms are not based strictly on a square shape, but rather on a pleasant round oval. The letter outlines are smooth, even technical, but the geometric precision is compensated in places where it would get in the way of legibility and compromise the desired visual impact. This naked typeface with no needless decorations will humbly serve where expressive type could be distracting.
Typonine Sans is what you’d expect from a quality humanist sans serif, but with Nikola Djurek’s signature style and an extensive character set supporting a broad range of OpenType features and all Latin based European languages. Five weights cover headline and text use. Surprisingly readable Condensed and Mono companions are available.
Cyrus Highsmith’s Zócalo was born from the dramatic redesign of El Universal, a leading Mexico City daily. Designed in three subfamilies for setting at specific sizes, the series was tuned for distinct character frequency and repetition when set in Spanish. Nicholas Kis’ oldstyle and Chauncey Griffith’s classic Ionic No. 5 inspired the sturdy Text while the energetic character of Mexico City influenced the Banner and Display.
Only Jonathan Barnbrook and Marcus McCallion could concoct such an original take on neon lettering and ’50s scripts. Marcus McCallion is now called Marcus Leis Allion
Angus R. Shamal took the Swiss neogrotesk tradition and diverted slightly to make his unusual but usable ARS Region. It’s now available in OpenType with small caps, oldstyle figures, and lining figures built in.
ARS Twenty OT
Now in OpenType.
Nuri Pro
Now in OpenType.
ARS District OT
Now in OpenType.
ARS Maquette OT
Now in OpenType.
FontCase, our award-winning font management tool from Pieter Omvlee and Laurent Baumann, has a number of features that set it apart from other font managers. One such feature is the option for you Cocoa-savvy users to add your own features. FontCase offers customizability unlike any other available font manager: users can develop plugins to enhance the app and personalize their font management experience. Learn more about creating FontCase plugins.
We’ve also updated our FontCase page with some plugins that have already been created, which you can download and install for free. We’ll be updating the page with any new FontCase plugins created by the community, so we welcome you to submit and share your work!
Also check out our new Help section for FontCase. It will guide you through the best tips and practices for using FontCase, and explains the many features of the app, such as the handy Compare tool. Of course, if your question isn’t addressed in this Help section, let us know.
New End User Licence Agreement For FontFonts
The new FontFont EULA permits embedding in any non-editable document, application, and even device, as long as the font is embedded as a subset in a secure format.
Emigre Celebrates 25 Years In Graphic Design
Emigre and Gingko Press announce the publication of “Emigre No.70: The Look Back Issue – Celebrating 25 Years in Graphic Design”.
“Typography For Lawyers” Offers Basic Type Tips
You don’t have to be an attorney to benefit from the sound advice of Matthew Butterick. Anyone who uses type should read this site.
Our installation guides are the best in the business. Each slideshow gives clear step-by-step instructions for installing fonts on a Mac, Windows XP, or Windows Vista machine.
Already know what you’re doing? Keep this link handy for the next time Mom calls for help getting her fonts to work.
Our September Staff Picks are now up. This month’s selection features Proxima Nova, RePublic and more along with some excellent examples of the fonts in use.
Silas Dilworth’s Breuer Text is part geometric, part grotesque — a clean, contemporary sans with relaxed curves and slightly condensed proportions suitable for moderate lengths of body copy. The italics are optically adjusted obliques with a selection of augmented lowercase glyphs for a warmer read. The typeface offers the distinct aura of technical precision in a personable tone, ideal for instructional copy or safety warnings. Its basic structure and conservative letterforms maintain a level voice without turning robotic or sterile.
Pair with the two-font Breuer Headline family for a simple and complete editorial type system. The heavy, compact Headline face differs from the Text in the inside curvature of the lowercase arms and a simplified oblique as opposed to the Text Italics.
Every style of Breuer has small caps and figures for text, tables, and headlines. They also all include a set of figures at small caps height, a very useful feature that is all too uncommon.
What began as a typographic exercise to produce the TypeTrust logotype turned out to be the product of Neil Summerour’s obsession. Epic is the culmination of two years of work that has yielded a versatile and respectful contemporary garalde in the spirit of Garamond. With a full complement of six weights and italics, the family is a true workhorse. Numerous standard and discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates, and swashes expand its use as an effective headline face.
For Akagi, designer Neil Summerour sought to develop a sans that was a complete departure from his successful Aaux family. Whereas Aaux and its siblings are rather unforgiving and stark in their presentation, he wanted this new sans serif to “smile” at you from the page. To be truly satisfied with it personally, a great deal of time was spent to create forms that demonstrate crisp, clean legibility, yet maintain some personality.
Each member of the large 20-font family includes small caps, ligatures, alternate characters, Central European diacritics, and a complete set of figures.
Recovery and Black Monday
Recovery is a reinterpretation of Charles Coiner’s lettering for the National Recovery Administration of 1933 and Morris Fuller Benton’s Eagle Bold.
If Recovery represents hope, its cousin, Black Monday, goes down a darker road. The core of the Black Monday type family is a single OpenType font containing three full character sets of varying degrees of distressing treatment. Every glyph in each of the subsets is unique to provide an organically weathered look and feel. Individual fonts for each of the three distinct glyph sets are included for use in applications that do not yet support the Stylistic Sets OpenType feature. These styles are identified as Subset 1, Subset 2, and Subset 3, while the full version is simply “Black Monday Regular”.
This family joins the popular genre of extended grotesques but beats them all in versatility with its upper- and lowercase in three weights and italics. Alternate forms for ‘a’, ‘g’, ‘t’ make Reservation Wide even more flexible.
The hand-drawn curves and angled stroke endings temper the otherwise rigid proportions of the family. This painterly tendency becomes more apparent in the heavier weights keeping them from looking too imposing. The design first took shape as a custom font named Majestos for the cable channel The Food Network. It can be found in their growing online and printed presence in addition to their broadcast identity for which it was developed.
A no-nonsense block serif display typeface with hard geometry and minimal negative space, Facebuster is ideal for making a strong yet playful statement. It comes equipped with OpenType Small Caps.
Anuthin Wongsunkakon has always been fascinated in OCR (machine-readable) typefaces and their distinctive texture when set as text. Do Gothic is his latest OCR-inspired face, but moves furthest from its roots, performing as a modern, usable sans serif.
There are no straight lines in Everafter. The vectors were all drawn and tweaked by hand (and mouse) for a softened, wobbly appearance. The result is a naive serif type that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The large x-height and occasional brushy flair read like an illustrated children’s fairytale compendium — rich in verbal tradition and playfully illuminated.
OpenType features include Old Style Figures, Fractions, Ornaments and Contextual Alternates.
A delightfully fresh take on the extra black type trend, Cooter Deuce feels hand made, drawn by sharpie pen or cut from paper. It consists of two feature-rich fonts: Cooter Deuce Regular and Cooter Deuce Plugged. Taking advantage of the OpenType format, Cooter Deuce was fleshed out with a bevy of alternate glyphs, dingbats, and nifty decorative ligatures.
Every couple of weeks the FontShop staff meets to learn a little something from each department. Here’s a bit from my presentation on how we go about making type samples. I thought I’d share it with you, the blog readers, so you can get a peek behind the process of creating all these images.
The typeface is Miller by Matthew Carter. Miller is Carter’s take on “Scotch Roman” faces. Scotch Roman faces were widely used in American design in the early 1900s. As such the theme of the sample is 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, which chronologically, if not geographically matches the time period. Some key characteristics featured are true fractions, and italic small caps. Personal favorites are the italic ligs, and ampersand. However, in creation of this sample I accidentally used fake small caps, oops, don’t do that.
There are a couple (more) inexcusable typographic errors in the sample, if you spot them, please leave a comment.
— Chris Hamamoto, FontShop.com
Blender from Gestalten
Nik Thoenen’s tribute to Wim Crouwel is based on the Dutch design legend’s rational approach, built on a grid system, yet with an emotional, human element. When Thoenen first designed Blender, he was heavily influenced by an alphabet that Crouwel called “the thinking man’s Courier”. The intention was then to create a typeface that was less conspicuous, featuring a curved outline in place of Crowel’s sharp, rigid shapes.
Since its original release, Blender has expanded from 254 to 468 glyphs per font. The Pro version includes support for all Eastern European languages from Czech to Turkish, plus Cyrillic characters.
Download Blender Specimen (232KB PDF)
Novel from Büro Dunst
Christoph Dunst designed Novel for use in editorial and literary design — which shouldn’t be too surprising given its name. Yet he also wanted it to work for corporate typography, where he felt most typefaces are a bit harsh and stiff. He set out to create a design with a calligraphic appearance but still conventional enough for use in serious applications, with italics that are very readable, due in part to their upright stance. The effort earned him a Certificate of Excellence from the Type Director᾿s Club in 2009.
The Novel family consists of 6 weights and 6 styles, each with generous character sets, small caps for both roman and italics, a complete range of figures, OpenType-enhanced ligatures and features, and support for most Latin-based languages.
T-Star from Gestalten
T-Star is the fruit of designer Michael Mischler’s many labors. Originally designed and used as the text font for the popular book Los Logos, Mischler spent several years tweaking T-Star Mono Round (a face of soft-ended glyphs, all with same width). The result was T-Star, a nine-weight proportional sans serif face with a clinical look. Built using a rational — rather than chirographic — concept, T-Star has much in common with the cold, technical typefaces in the DIN genre. But its narrow fit and unusual details put it in a class by itself.
Download T-Star Specimen (712KB PDF)
Starling from the Font Bureau
The story, as told by the Font Bureau, goes like this: “In 1904 William Starling Burgess, Boston racing sailor, designed his second typeface. Six years later, now the Wright Brothers’ partner, Starling quit type, returning the drawings to Monotype. Frank Pierpont collected the nameless roman for British Monotype, passing it to Stanley Morison in 1932 for The London Times. Typography historian Mike Parker found the original superior and prepared this Starling series for Font Bureau, who found it to be ‘the right stuff’.”
We agree. This extensive family of five weights (from Book to Ultra), with small caps and a much more palatable italic, makes it difficult to justify using common Times or Times New Roman again.
Download Starling Specimen (84KB PDF)
 Founded by Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody in 1989, FontShop is the original independent retailer of digital type. We offer more than 100,000 fonts from dozens of expert-selected foundries, including our house brand: FontFont.
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