Dutch Designer Jos Buivenga has been a busy man lately. While his text type family Calluna made its steady climb to the top of our Hot New Fonts list (where it sits comfortably as we are writing this) he was already plotting the release of yet another fine font, Fertigo Script Pro.

Calluna, like the popular Anivers, was initially a by-product of the design process leading up to Buivenga’s Museo typeface. While “fiddling around” with different serif shapes, the designer wrote, “…something nice happened: slab-serifs with a direction!” Instead of using the resulting asymmetrical serifs for a new Museo version, Buivenga incorporated the concept in a completely new typeface. Calluna is the designer’s first serifed text family — a robust, clean and contemporary face with interesting details and a forward flow. Thanks to its clarity, it makes for comfortable reading even at extremely small point sizes; its striking details ensure that it can also be used as a display font with personality.

There has been an avalanche of sans-serifs lately — from clean and square to rounded, soft and human. Is there still any room for new and different flavors in the genre? If you’re a typographer who likes the typeface to strike exactly the right note for the job at hand, you’ll probably think there always is. And for the discerning designer, Alright Sans (not a bad name for an Okay typeface) does have something to offer that other grotesques don’t. It is lucid and modest without being bland or stiff. It is also open and relatively wide, resulting in a kind of roundabout economy: instead of using a narrow face at a large size, you can save space with Alright Sans by choosing a smaller size without compromising legibility. Alright comes with a robust set of typographic features, such as small caps (in both the roman and italic), eight sets of figures, case-sensitive punctuation, arbitrary fractions, and more.

Ivory was inspired by a typeface used in an 1882 compendium about pomology (the study and cultivation of apples and similar fruits). Ornament and typographic fancy abound in 19th-century book design, and this work was no exception. In FaceType’s digital version, the apples were artfully split from the pears, that is: separate fonts were created for the letters and the ornamentation. By layering a text set in “NoSwashes” over the same text set in “Swashes”, nice two-color headlines can be created. For those who simply want to set one-color titles using ornamented characters as initials, there’s Ivory Headline, a font that has the swashed capitals in the uppercase section, and the straight ones in the lowercase section. A warning: the spacing of Ivory NoSwashes leaves room for the swashes and would look irregular without them; so if you want to use Ivory’s fine classic capitals with no ornaments, grab the Headline version. Any questions?

Carrosserie (French for “car body”) was based on the kind of straightforward capitals you may find in hand-rendered signs or book covers from the 1930s. It’s an all-caps sans-serif, strictly meant for display use, but it has some interesting alternate lettershapes that you can play around with, such as an ‘A’ with rounded top or an ‘M’ with diverging legs. There are some great alternate ampersands for creating company logos. Designer Fabian Widmer has radically updated this vintage alphabet to the internet age by adding a set of www domain symbols — check the PDF in the gallery for details.