Font Garden specializes in handwriting fonts. Mostly low-contrast and informal scripts, whimsical and feminine faces like April, Jennifer and Typical are all excellent choices for a wide variety of advertising applications. Other more systematic approaches include Elias and various other scripts based, sometimes loosely, on architectural handwriting. Designer Ellinor Rapp tells us that beautiful handwriting “has always been an obsession,” so much that she needs to concentrate to see words and sentences over letters, something we can sympathize with; this certainly is an ailment that many typographers and type designers suffer from.

The Font Garden face Jasmine, an early experiment with manipulating the technology to more realistically mimic the informality of handwriting, includes two different lowercase variants. She strives for a truly hand-written look, and is beginning to experiment with Opentype’s contextual alternates, something we’ll be happy to see in her upcoming work. Ellinor has noticed an increase in the use of handwriting fonts and attributes much of the growth to the rise in popularity of digital scrapbooking, but notes that her work is equally at home in children’s books, greeting cards, embroidery applications and advertising. Her work is used on commercial packaging and greeting cards in Sweden and elsewhere, as well as on e-card sites like sentwithlove.com and imadeapostcard.com and by numerous commercial designers in the UK, Sweden, Germany and the United States. Ellinor would like “everyone to have at least 30 handwriting fonts to choose between,” MyFonts is certainly the place to find them, with over 950 fonts categorized as “handwritten.”

César Puertas is an independent graphic designer in Bogota and recently organized the 2006 Letras Latinas conference in his home country. His Urbana, an economical sans for headlines and other display use, is the first of what we hope are many of his faces to be seen here at MyFonts. Urbana’s mixture of modernism and organic hand-lettering saves space and, at the same time, catches a bit more attention than the average mechanical heading face.

Prokopios Tzoulis’ distorted space-age type is produced under the aegis of Tzoulis Graphic Design / TZ-Design, an Athens design firm working in both Greek and English. Tzoulis’ fonts – with complete Greek and Latin alphabets, and all in Opentype format – are distorted almost to the point of illegibility, but never further; he seems to take great care in playing with readers’ expectations of letterforms and carefully altering characters to evoke just as much of a mood as they communicate language.

Tzoulis has been drawing alphabets and developing fonts since a young age – long before his formal design education, which he finished in 2002. “I search for the evolution of form,” he writes, “trying to be perfectly unique and personally satisfied.” He designs more as personal expression than anything else, and is pleased that his work may find some commercial use.

AKOFAType is the type design wing of AKOFA Creative, a Marietta, Georgia-based design consultancy firm. Their first family sold through MyFonts is Adinkra, composed of three 66-character fonts – similar shapes, all inspired by African iconographic designs, in bold, fine and distressed styles. Finding an original source for the artwork was the most challenging aspect of the design process, writes Kwesi Amuti, principal of AKOFA Creative, who tells us that the original forms were influenced by textile designs – usually produced with relief printing techniques from calabash gourds or woodcuts – of the various ethnic groups of Ghana, and would be eminently useful for border and pattern making. The font is named after Nana Kofi Adinkra, a warrior king beheaded during the Ashanti-Jaman wars in what is now modern day Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana .

Sister-company to newspaper design firm A4, T4 is a Swedish type cooperative made up of graphic designers and typographers Martin Lexelius (nee Fredrikson), Ludvig Grandin, Bo Berndal, Torbjörn Olsson and Pelle Anderson. T4 draws from the rich and varied experience of its staff, and continues to produce a tremendously wide array of type – from the most conservative body types to graffiti-inspired display type – without ever getting “stuck in a rut.” T4’s most recent additions include the distinguished graffiti artist Lexelius’ Kantor, and Berndal’s Sergel and Garamont.

Kantor, an original design formed equally from graffiti and blackletter inspiration, has – like all of Martin’s work – a tremendous amount of humor and style. “I wanted to do a classic design,” writes Lexelius, “but not a Jenson, or a Garamond, or a Bodoni or a Fette … they already exist, so what’s the point?” After discarding a too-stiff earlier version called Baptisma, Martin redrew the entire character set by hand, with additional influences coming from 15th-century Venetian sources and more attention to consistency in contrast. The finished product has a sort of formal beauty, while keeping the humor that we see in his graffiti and graphic design work. Ligatures and alternates increase the liveliness and variety of the printed type.

Berndal has also been very busy, although Pelle Anderson points out that he always is – “Bo is very productive!” – recently finishing several new faces, two of which are new on MyFonts this month. TYMA Garamont comes in five styles – a regular, smallcap, italic, semibold and semibold italic – and is a sort of amalgam of the Berner-Egenolff sample from the 1560s and a great Granjon italic design from that same decade. The prefix “TYMA” is short of “AB Typmatriser,” a Swedish type foundry and equipment manufacturer established just after the second world war. Bo began working at TYMA in 1949 and stayed there until the company’s bankruptcy a few years later. He credits the typeface to librarian Sten Lindberg at the Royal Library of Stockholm (Kungliga Biblioteket), who procured copies of the original specimens, and Henry Alm, who started the family in 1948; Bo has finally finished the work they began a half-century ago in an eminently readable and usable OpenType edition.

Bo’s other new release is Sergel, a four-style incised display family. Named after the greatest Swedish sculptor and draughtsman of the 18th century, Tobias Sergel, the type has sculptural qualities, although luckily it does not reflect much of the life of its namesake (who spent much of his life “drinking, singing and whoring with Carl Michael Bellman, whose lyrics and songs are known by every Swede.”) Berndal credits the mix of Rococo and Empire styles in the letterforms to Bellman, who also mixed seemingly opposite styles to great effect in his own work. Bo writes that Sergel would be best used “on diplomas, gravestones or as signage type for Sergels Torg” (the city square in downtown Stockholm).

The endlessly productive and very talented Ray Larabie has a number of new Typodermic faces available and more to come in the next few weeks. Veriox, a condensed display sans that is both organic and mechanical at the same time, is an evolution of Ray’s earlier Milibus family – those same bent diagonals recur, although the letters are a bit more uniform and narrow. The “cut ends” technique used in Ray’s first font, Wyvern, recurs in Veriox Italic; the face works well as a friendlier, less-technical display alternate to DIN and similar faces.

Containment evolved from Tandelle Italic, which in turn came from an early version of Ray’s Doradani font – “one of those ‘News Gothic with contemporary open shapes’ of which you can probably find 100 examples of.” What he calls the “gravel effect” is the end-result of experiments with an automated system for filling up letterforms with various textures.

Augustine “is a Tuscan with no particular historical influence.” Ray writes that he designed the entire face upside-down “just to make it interesting,” and it certainly succeeds. While he concedes that there are some distressed Tuscans on the market, Ray suggests that the combination of a distressed, rubber-stamp or wood-cut styles make this an ideal face for music marketing, specifically for folk (or alt-country) posters.

Finally, Snowa is an original take on an old standby, the useful-at-least-part-of-the-year (unless you live really far up north) snowcap font. Where most snowcapped fonts are based on pre-existing hard-edged sans faces, Ray’s is an original design, using a hand-drawn sans, which lends it a soft and organic quality. “Obviously,” he writes, “it’s a Christmas font.”