— Type for you.

New from ReType, Medusa is Ramiro Espinoza’s homage to one of the most renowned masters of Spanish calligraphy, Ramón Stirling, who was active in Barcelona during the 19th century. Not much is known about his life, and there is even some doubt as to his real name, but his Bellezas de la Caligrafía(Beauties of Calligraphy) is one of the most exquisite English roundhand manuals ever produced.
The starting-off point in the creation of the typeface was an analysis of the historical models of formal English handwriting and the ways in which those styles had been adapted to the typographic technologies of different eras.

Nowadays, the OpenType format affords the possibility of solving this problem. Instructions can be programmed into a font to automatically select the appropriate alternate glyphs as the user types. Despite the existence of this option, no one has yet published a copperplate typeface that is a faithful reflection of historical writing models, connecting “b”, “o”, “v” and “w” in the correct manner. Extra effort is required to program and design the many alternate character sequences necessary, and this has not been implemented by type foundries accustomed, as also are type users, to the familiar faux convention.
At ReType we decided to move in the opposite direction. We didn’t force the shape of hard-to-format letters into the service of technology, but rather resolved to press technology into the service of respecting the original graceful quality of those letters.
Medusa is much more than a mere digital transfer of Ramón Stirling’s model. Several of the original letters, such as “f”, “s” and “z,” whose appearance was somewhat weaker, have been replaced by designs based on Espinoza’s own accomplished pointed nib calligraphy.

In addition, numerous elements lacking in Stirling’s book have been added. The fantastically ornate capitals were redrawn in order to strike a greater balance and enhance the consistency of the set of letters as a whole. Several swashes and ligatures were also created from scratch, but with an unwavering respect for the formal rules of pointed pen calligraphy to ensure that theirductus was correct. Perhaps the most unusual feature of Medusa is its small caps, which have been carefully designed to produce an all-cap setting that is stylistically harmonious with the classic copperplate script, something which has up to now been missing from this genre of typeface.
Finally, we are offering a separate set of modular swashes that enable complex decorative headings and cartouches.
We are pleased to say that Medusa is a complete script system the unique features of which will lend elegance and sophistication to a wide variety of design projects.

I think it´s great! I already loved the Neutraface, and I guess House Industries made a very nice job with this new “raising the bar” design.

Neutraface No. 2 is a completely reconceptualized, redrawn and re-engineered version of our venerable best-selling Neutraface collection. The new collection complements the original Neutraface by satisfying a broader range of typographic needs with stylistic nuances that express ideas clearly and accurately. Neutraface No. 2 also includes an inline version of the titling weight for eye-catching yet classic and timeless headlines.

Typotheque launched a new product: Fedra Arabic.

It takes into consideration the contemporary uses of Arabic type and offers a pragmatic solution for multilingual typesetting. The simplified forms of Arabic are stripped of all decoration while keeping the intrinsic structure of the Arabic writing system.

The typeface is available either as a separate Arabic font, or as part of the large Multiscript font package, which includes support for extended Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic, with advanced typographic features.

The characteristics that were carried over to the design of the Arabic version are mainly the proportions of the Latin: the baseline, ascender and descender, which were kept identical. On the other hand, two middle heights were defined, which are different than the x-height of the Latin font. Rather than directly bringing shapes from Latin, it was mainly the character of the curves that has been adopted for the Arabic counterpart. In Fedra, the curves start fairly fl at and begin to turn relatively late, which creates a particular tension of shapes. The contrast between the thick and thin is maintained. This has allowed for keeping the same color in both the Latin and the Arabic text. Of course many things are not possible to translate from Latin to Arabic directly, so oneto be very sensitive not to impose the Latin structure on Arabic. The Arabic version uses the proportions and formal attributes of Fedra, but not its individual shapes. Because of the Semitic roots, the angle of the contrast is inverted, and what was the thickest horizontal in Latin, becomes the thickest vertical in Arabic. The same is true of the thinnest strokes, it is again rotated 90 degrees.

Fedra Arabic was designed so it can be combined with either Fedra Serif or Sans, by carefully matching the typographic ‘colour’ of the typeface.