Dutch designer Jos Buivenga decided to take a risk when submitting his first type family to MyFonts: he wanted three out of the five weights to be offered free of charge. His daring strategy paid off; many users noticed the spirited Museo and liked it so much they bought the other weights as well, pushing the new face straight to number one on our Starlets list. Museo is a lucid semi-serif family with simple, open forms and highly original details. It makes for striking headlines, but is also very readable in medium-sized texts. Museo supports a wide range of languages and comes with several extra ligatures and alternates.

Lettering artist Charles Borges de Oliveira has published a handful of beautifully drawn brush script fonts in the best American signpainting tradition. Check out his energetic Sarah Script or the cheeky Bounce Script. Louisiana is different. Based on the lovely handwriting of Melanie Snedeker, it is less fancy, but just as confident. It’s informal and natural, while having just the right kind of regularity to make for comfortable reading. It’s one of those legible handwriting fonts that come in handy for many design jobs ... but also for writing a letter or invitation that looks personal without being sloppy.

Rouge is what you might call a “novelty typeface”: witty and surprising, an alphabet that defies categorization. You can imagine members of a future tribe scribbling it on a stone wall in some apocalyptic science fiction movie. Rouge’s forms are eclectic and paradoxical: they are geometric while having a hand-made feel; several lowercase letters have uppercase shapes; some characters are strangely symmetric and simplified. If you allow us a little speculative theorization: Rouge is the alphabet remade as a set of pseudo-ritual symbols — just like the children’s myths based on an old View-Master reel in the third Mad Max film. But if you prefer to think it’s just a nice wacky font that is fun to play with — that’s fine with us.

Veronika Burian and José Scaglione met while completing their MAs in Type Design at the University of Reading, UK. They struck up a lasting working relationship, founding Type-Together, based in José’s native city of Rosario. The foundry’s output so far, with great text faces like Ronnia and Karmina, has been very promising. Bree is their most original font family to date. Based on Type-Together’s attractive logo, it combines an upright structure with italic-style shapes — witness the one-storey ‘a’, cursive ‘e’, and fluid ‘g’, ‘y’ and ‘z’. Alternate versions of these letters are available when a more classical look is desired. Technically, Bree is highly professional: it is impeccably drawn and comes as an OpenType family with four sets of numerals, ligatures, alternate characters, fractions, scientific superior/inferior figures and language support for over 40 languages.