Piper Blackall

Grandis ("chainlink") was initially intended for a first person shooter’s UI, so this guided the design. The font had to be readable while maintaining sci-fi feel and also to not rely on kerning (most video games don’t support it). This meant a large x-height, steep diagonals and squared bowls to reduce the amount of white space between letters. Tabular numbers as default facilitate UI design where timers or tables are involved. What makes the font stand out from similar grotesks is the letters’ classical proportions with wide bowls and narrow rectangles. The result is a readable, versatile workhorse with an interesting dynamic rhythm and where extreme weights/widths can also be used for display purposes. Supports multilingual Latin and Cyrillic, including Bulgarian and Serbian alternates.

Analoga Sans was developed by Fernando Pérez while studying a Typographical Design masters at the Gestalt Studies Center in Mexico. Inspired by grotesque sans-serif shapes and the fluidity from humanist typefaces, this family seeks to reconcile both worlds in a proposal that is defined by typography blocks. This oscillates between rigid characters pertaining to a modernist inspiration, and others of generous and peaceful shapes that seek to help the text and the reader breathe. Italic and stylistic sets design is closely connected to calligraphy. In general, weight variables in this family are ideal for long text compositions, while its extremes, Thin and Extra Bold, play a great role for headlines and graphic compositions. The font has a 454-character set which includes alternative drawings and an extended set of ligatures that support over 200 Latin-based languages.

The typography on a 1964 children’s activity book published by Whitman entitled “Build with Stencils” was in a bold, condensed design. The only problem was that the ‘rails’ [the parts that divide a letter into stencil pieces] were too narrow and would disappear at smaller point sizes. Widening the ‘rails’ just a bit greatly improved the appearance of the stencil characters. Play Day Stencil JNL is now available in both regular and oblique versions. In its day, the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin published dozens of activity books for children, including a number of them with stencils. The company was a division of Western Publishers from the early 1900s through the 1970s, but went through a number of sales and name changes. Currently [as Whitman once again] it is owned by Anderson Press, and is known for its line of coin folders and books on coin collecting.

Ergonomique is a humanist sans serif typeface that has been designed to be efficient and comfortable to use across all applications. Ergonomique’s personality is defined by its spurless lowercase glyphs – the stems are truncated and blend into their adjoining arcs, as can be seen in the a/b/d/m/n/p/q/r/u characters. Ergonomique is ideal for branding and display purposes, but also performs well as body copy if you’re seeking a unique style for your text. With its nine weights and complementing italics, Ergonomique is highly versatile, especially when you consider that there are small caps and old style figures included, along with a Latin Extended character set. Key Features: • 18 font family – 9 weights in Roman and Italic • Small Caps, Ligatures, with Proportional, Old Style, and Small Cap figures, plus Fractions, Numerators, Denominators, Superiors, and Inferiors • Full European character set (Latin Extended) • 800+ glyphs per font.

Oversimplified JNL is based on some examples of lettering silk screened onto plastic pieces for use on an interchangeable sign board. These thin, monoline letters are modular in nature and have the look of a ‘constructed’ alphabet. Oversimplified JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.