Although the Estilo family has been around for almost five years, the new Estilo Pro is surprising and different in more ways than one. Dino dos Santos has dramatically updated and expanded his popular Deco-style typeface, producing what he calls ‘the ultimate Estilo’. Estilo Pro comes in five weights, from Hairline to Bold, each carrying a thousand glyphs. The glyph sets include alternate characters, initial and ending swashes, ligatures, ornaments, letter/ornament tiles, and drop caps. The result is huge — a fascinating toolkit for making decorative headlines, logos and more. Note: to access the non-standard characters, use the glyph panel and Stylistic Sets in your OpenType-enabled layout software.

In the course of just a few months, designer Laura Worthington has released an impressive array of new script typefaces, including the highly successful Recherché and Origins. Not only are her faces beautifully drawn and well produced, she has also proved able to master a broad range of script styles. Her latest offering, Sheila, is a case in point. It is decidedly different in atmosphere from its predecessors and strikes an interesting note half-way between formal and informal script styles. In Worthington’s words, Sheila “writes very deliberately, focusing on each letterform, trying to make her writing, and your designs, look as good as possible.” One of its secrets is its subtle thick-thin contrast, which makes it stand out without compromising legibility. Sheila features thirty-five alternate letters and thirty ligatures.

Last year, FaceType released Strangelove Text, a typeface of narrow capitals inspired by the title sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove. The new version, Strangelove Next, again pays tribute to Pablo Ferro’s original hand-drawn lettering for the movie, but takes the typeface several steps further. Besides the successful narrow version, the Strangelove Next family contains a new extended version as well as a mix of the first two to give your headlines a whimsical, unpredictable and jazzy look.

Purissima is Gert Wiescher’s exuberantly decorated reworking of his earlier Pura family of sans-serifs. So ebullient is the new family that its name (“very pure”) almost sounds ironic. Purissima is all about a delight in ornament and the fun of combining curls. Instead of stuffing all the typeface’s variations into one big OpenType font (which sometimes confuses less expert users) Wiescher produced five separate fonts which his foundry offers at a very affordable price. The Light cut has no embellishments. The A and B cuts are two fully embellished sets. The C and D cuts only have embellished initials, but those are driven to extremes. As the designer advises: “All five cuts can — and should — be mixed. But don’t overdo it!”