When we interviewed Erica Jung and Ricardo Marcin of PintassilgoPrints a few months ago, they made it clear that nonchalant lettershapes and sloppy fonts are not the same thing. There may be deliberate “mistakes” in the way their letters are drawn — but on a technical level, the fonts must work impeccably. Monstro is a case in point. Its letters look rough and quickly sketched, yet the font family was produced to be a reliable typographic tool. An all-caps font, Monstro comes with different lettershapes in the upper- and lowercase slots, allowing you to avoid having the exact same lettershape twice in letter pairs such as ‘LL’ or ‘MM’, even when working with normal office software. If your program does support OpenType features, Contextual Alternates can take care of that automatically, and the Stylistic Alternates feature will add in even more variations. Monstro comes in two versions, Sketchy and Solid — layer them for a two-tone effect, as in the word AHOY above. There is a matching picture font with a bunch of irresistible monsters and other graphic elements.

While many fonts from Bangkok-based foundry Cadson Demak are cool, clean corporate-looking sans-serifs, designer Ekaluck Peanpanawate likes exploring slightly more exotic areas. His squarish Clarendon-like Kondolar was a big success a year ago, and now Kurry is among the best selling fonts of the moment. Kurry’s basic structure is simple — a sans-serif drawn on a narrow rectangular skeleton rounded at the top and the bottom — but it’s the somewhat quirky details that make it stand out. Many of the terminals end in a softened point, as do some strokes where curves join straight stems. Most letters have a swashed alternate version, and special English-language keywords such as WITH, OF and BY (the latter two in upper- and lowercase) add to the font family’s versatility. There’s also a wealth of ligatures and various numeral styles. Use for packaging, brochures, identity and poster projects.

Based in Belgrade, Serbia, the father-and-son team of Zoran and Nikola Kostić has published a string of interesting, well-made typefaces during their first year on MyFonts. The recent Kostic Serif is their most successful typeface to date. Conceived in the classicist, transitional style of Baskerville or Miller, it was begun by Zoran Kostić around 2002, then abandoned, and redesigned eight years later by Nikola. With tall, clean characters and a large glyph set to support all European languages — Greek and Cyrillic included — Kostic Serif is a good choice for setting body text and excellent for international publications. With multiple figure sets and 31 ligatures, the family is a versatile and superbly legible face for large and small texts.

Acto is a type family designed as the sans serif counterpart of DS Type’s previous release Acta, a high-quality news face. Both families were designed in 2010 for the redesign of the Chilean daily La Tercera. Yet the sans-serif has a somewhat different family structure from the serif text family, Acta. With Hairline, Thin and Ultra Black weights, Acto is ready to lend power and subtlety to the most attention-grabbing of headlines. In order to form horizontally even text lines, Acto’s uppercase has the same height as the ascenders. Designer Dino dos Santos therefore drew a curved lower-case ‘l’ in order to avoid confusion between ‘l’ and ‘I’. In the same spirit he removed the spurs on ‘b’, ‘g’ and ‘q’, resulting in a warmer typeface than his more technical Prelo. The process resulted in a powerful sans family in eleven weights with matching italics for editorial and corporate design.