Claudia Toosey

Grava is Neil Summerour’s injection of warmth within the geometric sans font category. Historically, geometric sans families have been based on primal shapes — triangle, circle, square — and the more closely they held to those rigid rules, the more internal inconsistencies they showed. Angles won’t match up correctly, letters will lean, overshoots complicate clean typesetting, and idealized circles become grotesque and unwieldy in some weights. Because of issues like these, geometric sans fonts have a reputation of being cold, austere, even a bit “off”. Grava was made to hold a T-square and triangle in one hand while giving a welcoming handshake with the other.

The Grava font family comes in two styles (a normal and a Display), each with 20 weights (Thin to Ultra) and paired with italics. Its design allowed the three scripts of Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek to emerge seamlessly, ensuring Grava will find its home in multilingual publications. Even better, each character in the three scripts is spaced with every other character for a beautifully matched fit, and it’s a buy-one-get-all-three deal since they are all packaged together. The normal style’s large x-height won’t let you down in paragraphs, headings, and any call-out text. And have you seen the angles on those numerals? Pairing Grava’s numerals on a jersey is sure to catch some eyes, just sayin'.

Grava Display is purposefully quirky and sharp, and made for poster sizes, book and album covers, and those websites with a well-defined character — somewhere between playfully self-aware and overtly vintage. Flat edges are abandoned to make way for sharp points and conspicuousness, for geometrical attitude and respectful expressiveness. Corporate reports use Grava Display to take on a professional and current look. The optional ligatures (N–T, L–L, G–A, C–O, almost anywhere an ‘A’ is placed, and more) in both the normal and Display styles invoke a midcentury modernist and high art feel. Now that introductions are done, you can let go of Grava’s hand and put it to work for you.

strokeWeight is inspired by the aesthetics of computer vector graphics. strokeWeight is the name of a processing programming function to set the thickness of a stroke. The single bezier curve that describes a stem as a centerline with a particular stem thickness represents the basic idea of this typeface. The unconventional corners and stem endings derive from the concept.

If you buy the complete strokeWeight family you will get a strokeWeight variable font file for free!

Hela is a high contrast rounded font with interpolation twist. I have a personal saying that fits this font: So long you drive around nice lettering, until you digitize it. Hela comes from lettering of an old Czech textile company called Helana, which does not exist anymore, but the signage is still on the building. The weird thing on this font is that it does not add weight on every stem from Light to Black as usual, but rather adds more and more black stems to the light skeleton.

Another nice thing about this font is that it does not include unnecessary glyphs. So there are just 10 figures - you don't have to think which one is the correct figure kind for you. There is just one kind. No alternates, no italics, no opentype features - even no lowercase. Well, who would use it anyway, it is a display font!

Try it yourself with Basic character set for free.

Mezalia Sans is a logical continuation of the Mezalia family. Its shapes are based on medieval calligraphic style: the Bastarda. This time the evolution is taken a step further, as these classic shapes are merged with the straightforwardness of a modern sans-serif. This results in an original, strong yet very much usable typeface, that can hold its own in a wide range of applications.

Mezalia Sans has two distinct styles: straight and cursive (true italic if you will, although the word is not really correct here), which come in ten weights, from thin to black. This wide range ensures that whether you are looking for delicate or bold strokes (or a combination of both) you will be satisfied. Every style also contains a set of small caps (with matching punctuation). Old-style, proportional and tabular numerals are included too, along with ligatures, symbols and language support in Adobe Latin 3 range.

Coltan Gea is a Slab Serif typographic family with 6 Weights plus the italic versions all include small capital letters and cryptocurrency symbols.
It is a geometric, minimalist typeface, with neo-grotesque modulations and slightly rounded corners. The typeface has alternative letters and numbers, small caps and advanced OpenType functions. The proportions, metrics and kerning I have configured meticulously for a perfect reading in any size.

These Typoart fonts were redesigned and revived for modern use. The italic style got an entire set of swash caps, and both styles contain superior and inferior numerals as well as the historical long s.

Six Hands is a set of handwritten fonts based on various writing tools, such as pencil, felt-tip pen, ball-point pen, and brush. The character set of each of these fonts supports the Cyrillic alphabet, as well as the extended Latin script for all European languages. Most of the styles also contain additional alternatives that have the capability of automatically interchanging in the setting, which significantly variegates and humanizes the text. Six Hands is quite a rare combination of diverse display fonts that work well together. It is made for talented designers who can use it creatively in packaging, advertising, displays, posters, menus, invitations and so on. The design of Six Hands was a result of collaboration between Alexandra Korolkova, Alexander Lubovenko and all those who assist them in this work. This set of fonts was released by Paratype in 2018.