The award-winning Hipster Script by Alejandro Paul is based on a style of hand lettering that was created for advertising in the 1940s and 1950s yet stills looks fresh today. While the lettershapes have their roots in copperplate script styles, it’s the tool that made the difference. Painting the letters on board or paper with a round brush, the artist created thinner and thicker strokes by exerting less or more pressure, varied letterforms according to context, interrupted the connected flow by lifting the brush. A faithful digitization must emulate all these aspects of brush lettering, and Hipster Script does it very well. Have a close look at the various letter combinations in the sample above, such as the recurring “-er”, or letter pairs such as “ee” and “ll”. These variations are selected automatically for specific combinations using OpenType’s Contextual Alternates function. The result is a convincing imitation of hand-painted letters. Use with OpenType-enabled layout software!

Today’s cutting-edge graphic design seems to have a predilection for display fonts that are somehow self-referential — in other words, typefaces that in their shapes and structure say something about the history and mannerisms of type design itself. Diamonds from HVD Fonts responds to this trend in a smart and witty way. Designer Hannes von Döhren created a family in five weight plus italics that shows influences from Art Deco and Modernism; its letterforms are geometric and somewhat experimental, yet readable and clear. The Italics are in fact slanted romans, lending themselves very well to setting lines at an angle — as show in HVD’s posters. Each font includes alternate letters, fractions and scientific superior/inferior figures and arrows; check out the Ornaments font, an ideal toolkit for making banners and labels.

Skinny, narrow typefaces with a hand-made feel have been everywhere in the past couple of years, but some have more character than others. Ride My Bike is particularly lively. Playful and irregular, it is a typeface with a sassy, streetwise attitude and a mischievous smile. It is the first alphabetic font family by Chilean illustrator-bookbinder Guisela Mendoza who previously contributed several charming picture fonts to the Latinotype collection. Ride My Bike’s Pro version has initial caps, terminals, alternates and dingbats — more than 600 glyphs per font — but for those who don’t need all that, there’s the cheaper Essential version, with no OpenType features. Have fun!

Diamonds galore in this newsletter: Kohinoor Latin was named after one of the most famous precious stones in history, a diamond that probably originated from Andhra Pradesh in India. The typeface comes from India as well — MyFonts is proud to welcome the Indian Type Foundry, an independent foundry established by Satya Rajpurohit and Peter Bilak. India uses about a dozen different writing systems, and the Indian Type Foundry is the first independent company to offer original fonts for all of them; Kohinoor Latin shows that Rajpurohit also is a confident and talented designer of Latin fonts. With its subtly humanistic approach, Kohinoor Latin is a fine sans-serif suitable for both body and display text in five weights with italics.