Family additions

 For the past two and a half years I have posted about new font families that I have developed but almost nothing about the many additions to existing families. This post provides a quick update about those additions.

In 2022 I greatly expanded the Youbee family by adding condensed and semi-condensed widths. The red letters in the picture below show original styles and the black letters are the new styles.

In 2022 I also added styles to many other text font families, including three to BetterTypeRight, two to Xabced, four to JasperSqueeze, four to EuroikaKamp, two to BetterEuroika, four to BetterIngriana, and five to KampIngriana. When these families were created twenty or thirty years ago, a family with four styles was considered a complete family. This is no longer the case.

I added oblique styles to fonts and families including Renslaer, Auldroon, RoundUp, TRGrunge, Swanville, VunderScript, and InsideLetters. Obliques are easy to add and may increase the usefulness of the families. I added outline and oblique styles to SJURecord, AbagailJackson, and Talloween.

I added 12 styles to the NewNerdish family. Included were a new semibold weight with oblique and ten new condensed styles.

Other families getting new styles were IngrianaCasual with six new styles, Dschoyphul with two, and CemeteryWalk with six. IanSego had a new style added and then later two obliques.

A final family with new styles is Grandecort with six. The yellow styles are new and the red styles are old.

 Grandecort may be the last family I upgrade for a while because I have had a great deal of difficulty making edits with the Monotype's Foundry Platform. I find that even small edits run the risk of causing big problems often unrelated to the item I am trying to fix. If Monotype ever gets its Foundry Platform fixed, I may see what else I can improve. 

SanSeraph

     SanSeraph is a simple, clean, sans-serif font family that is highly legible and useful for both text and some display purposes. It is not meant to stand out but to blend in and let the reader focus on the meaning of the text rather than the look of the text. The family has 32 styles composed of three widths, two with five weights and the third with six, and each of these 16 has an italics style.

As the name suggests, SanSeraph is sans serif. 

SanSeraph is available from myfonts.

Revecon

Revecon is a new sans-serif typeface family from Ingrimayne Type now available on myfonts.com. It is a bit unusual because it has reverse contrast (sometimes called inverse contrast), that is, the letters are thick where normally they are thin and vice versa. Serif fonts with reverse contrast were popular in the 19th century for advertising and display purposes. As a result these fonts have an old-fashioned or wild-west look. San-serif fonts with reverse contrast have an uncommon look that is quirky and modernistic. Revecon is legible but seems inappropriate for lengthy text. It can be useful for display purposes such as advertising and similar uses where one wants something simple but a bit unusual and odd.

The Revecon family has three weights with nine styles. Included are three backslanted styles, adding a bit more quirkiness to an already strange family.

Decorate The Tree

It struck me in early December 2023 that my typeface Vinetters, which puts letters on alternating leaves, could be reworked to make a font of Christmas lights with alternating letters. I initially thought the name Christmas Lights would be appropriate but found that name was taken by a typeface that seemed to have little to do with either Christmas or lights. The name DecorateTheTree both captures a Christmas theme and is weird enough so others have not used it for a typeface.

DecorateTheTree is a festive novelty font family that is useful to display a holiday message not just in words but in the lettering itself. The family has two styles, a regular style with clear bulbs and the bold style with filled bulbs. They are designed to be used in layers. Further, the fonts use the OpenType feature contextual alternatives to alternate two sets of letters, one set with bulbs standing up and the other set with the bulbs hanging down. The end result gives the impression of a string of Christmas lights. (The characters on the bulbs are derived from the font SansduskiMono.)

DecorateTheTree is available from myfonts and fontspring.

DecoSpring: a font with flowers

DecoSpring is a decorative art-deco family that was inspired by one word in an advertisement in a 1978 edition of my local newspaper. I could not find a typeface that matched it so decided to create one, which became DecoSpring-Regular. It is caps only, with an alternative set of capitals on the lower-case keys. Characters with very thick stems invite interior decoration and I opted for floral decorations. DecoSpring-Flowers can be used alone or it can be layered on top of the regular style to create colored flowers as shown below. Changing the width of the bolder stem resulted in two more style, the light and thing styles. Another set of four styles, the Simple set, was formed by eliminating the split in the stems by merging the two parts. All the DecoSpring faces are display faces to be used in small doses, and especially the bolder ones, at large point sizes,

Seven of the eight styles are illustrated above. DecoSpring can be purchased from myfonts and fontspring.

Vasetters, another alternating-letter typeface family

Vasetters is a novelty font in which the letters are cut from the shape of a tessellating vase. To get the tessellating effect, the two sets of letters (and numbers and some symbols) must alternate, and this is done automatically in applications that support the OpenType feature of Contextual Alternatives (calt). Vasetters is monospaced and comes in two weights. The regular weight is tightly spaced, which should not be a problem at large point sizes. At small point sizes adjacent letters can be colored differently or the character spacing can be increased. The lighter weight can be used alone or layered above the regular weight to create the effect of hollow lettering. Vasetters is fun, bizarre, weird, and obviously a decorative display font.

Vasetters is available from myfonts and fontspring.

RensGazet

RensGazet is a decorative blackletter typeface with elaborate upper-case letters and condensed lower-case characters. It was inspired by the masthead of a short-lived weekly newspaper, The Rensselaer Gazette, which was published from 1857 until 1860. I could not find any existing digitized fonts that replicated this old typeface, so I decided to create an interpretation of it. I had samples of few letters in large point sizes and a number of others at a small point size, though these were blurry and not sharply defined. As a result, this typeface is undoubtedly considerably different from the original. Also, my spacing is much tighter than that in the source samples.

RensGazet is available from myfonts.com and fontspring.