Charlotte Weeks

How many times have you seen lettering on a book cover, poster, or card and wanted to make something similar? Decorata’s eight intertwining weights finally make that possible in an intelligent way. The first major collaboration of its kind, Decorata pairs the talents of supreme lettering artist Martina Flor and masterful type designer Neil Summerour. Lettering was traditionally understood as using words in an artistic way, while type design created written language for easy reading, the one overlapping the other in several ways. For this unique project, Martina created several versions of the alphabet and its decorative layers in her eye-catching style. Neil then took those designs and created an enormous eight-style font family that respects the designer’s need for control and capitalizes on the artist’s expressiveness.

Each style can work separately but, on top of the foundational styles, try placing the Lace, then Filigree in contrasting colors. Use any OpenType-capable program to turn headlines from blasé to wowza, make posters with some pow, and design your own cards with that just-right level of detail. Whatever idea you can imagine with the Decorata family, it promises to be a playful and precise wordsmith where the words themselves are the art.

Decorata’s glyphs are bifurcated, have medium contrast to showcase their intricate interactions, and include Shadow, Regular, Outline, Filigree, Lace, Fancy, Intricate, and Dingbat styles — eight in all. The Regular style sets the word or phrase to begin the design, Shadow ensures it lifts off the background, and Outline attempts to restrain its ornate flair. Think of those as the foundation and use the rest of the styles for flamboyance. The Intricate and Filigree styles vary only in the thickness of the glyphs, with Filigree being thinner. Lace removes the external curls around each letter but keeps the internal negative space from those decorative lines. The Fancy style is a solid lettershape that includes its attendant elements, and the Dingbats are exactly as expected: borders, manicules, patterns, frames, and many stylized items to bring designs to life.

Smoothread is a handwritten brush font, a contemporary approach to design, handmade natural look, suitable for use in title design such as clothing, invitations, book titles, stationery designs, quotes, branding, logos, greeting cards, T-shirts, packaging designs, posters, and more.

Smoothread has two weights: Smoothread Regular and Smoothread Slant. They are complete with uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as multi-language support, numbers, punctuation. Ligatures and extra swash characters are also provided.

The word ‘Prachar’ means publicity in Hindi. This informal-looking all-caps, slanted script face is exactly the kind of font you could use to create shop or grocery store signs that need to look hand-painted. Each letter in the font has visible stroke contrast and rough edges. Prachar was designed by Black Foundry in Paris/France, and includes a character set large enough to be able to set all European languages written with the Latin script. The typeface’s feeling is really quite dynamic; this is not due to its slant alone, but also to its letterforms’ underlying construction, which really looks like it could have come out of a sign painter’s brush. Although Prachar is an all-caps font, several of the ‘caps’ saved onto the font’s lowercase glyphs feature different forms of the letters than you’ll find on the uppercase keys. Not only do many of Prachar’s letters have rough edges, but they also look ‘roughed’ up. Especially in the ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘M’, and ‘Q’, part of the background will shine through the letterform (this is true both for print and in on-screen use). Prachar’s letters should be set as large as possible.

Cobbler is a friendly type family in six weights. With proportions of geometric type, Cobbler is a contemporary sans on the inside and an ultra soft display typeface on the outside. Not a single sharp corner and only a hand full of straights make Cobbler extra warm and huggable. In fact, the few straight horizontal lines give the typeface the stability of a workhorse while keeping the gooey playfulness that characterizes Cobbler so much. And to make all this even more fun, there is a pile OpenType features built in. For example loads of Discretionary Ligatures that make capital letters interlock left and right – just fun! Or automatic fractions, case sensitive punctuation and contextual alternates – for serious typesetting.

Cobbler works great for branding, packaging, editorial or any display application – and it comes with an expansive character set that covers Underware’s Latin Plus and with it over 200 languages. Furthermore Cobbler is manually kerned and auto-hinted for crisp display on screen also in small sizes.