Fisticuffs from Florida based artist/comedian Rev. Josh Wilhelm, formerly of Spork Thug Typography.. A nice olden west style cowboy woodtype looking rough and tumble style face. (note that it is all upper case with no numerals, etc).. Download the TTF.
Crimson Text, from Toronto-based designer Sebastian Koch who says “Crimson Text is a font family for book production in the tradition of beautiful oldstyle typefaces. There are a lot of great free fonts around, but one kind is missing: those Garamond-inspired types with all the little niceties like oldstyle figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters and the like. In fact, a lot of time is spend developing free knock-offs of ugly “standards” like Times and Helvetica. Crimson Text is inspired by the fantastic work of people like Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler. I hope that the free type community will one day be able to enjoy Crimson Text as a beautiful workhorse.” Definitely a nice face worth checking out, even though it is still in its early stages. Download the Crimson Text TTF.
Horst Roman Gothic from Cincinnati, Ohio based logo and type designer Christopher Horst “Horst is a world renowned logo designer, known best in the heavy metal community. He is most versed in, but by no means limited to metal, and he is eager to help you with all your text-based needs.” This one has a nice metal-edge with a gothic feel. Not a full upper lower case setup, but enough letters to set a headline or band name, etc. Check it out! Download Horst Roman Gothic TTF.
Antique typefaces can be fun, they are the origin of most of what we know today – the history of all our letterforms, but sometimes they are so hard to read and rough and dirty it makes you wonder how we got to where we are today. For a taste of some old time letter flavor, Powell Antique from prolific German shareware type designer Dieter Steffmann is a good one to choose. Download Powell Antique TTF.
Cardo from Fonts for Scholars in Rye, New York is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists. Since it may be used to prepare materials for publication, it also contains features that are required for high-quality typography, such as ligatures, text figures (also known as old style numerals), true small capitals and a variety of punctuation and space characters. It may also be used to document and discuss the features of Unicode that are applicable to the these disciplines, as we work to help colleagues understand the value (and limitations) of Unicode.
This font is my version of a typeface cut for the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius and first used to print Pietro Bembo’s book De Aetna. This font has been revived in modern times under several names (Bembo, Aetna, Aldine 401). I chose it mainly because it is a classic book face, suitable for scholarship, and also because it is easier to get various diacritics sized and positioned for legibility with this design than with some others. I added a set of Greek characters designed to harmonize well on the page with the Roman letters as well as many other characters useful to scholars. The Hebrew characters are designed to match those used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia as closely as possible and so have no claim to originality. Download Cardo 99 TTF.
OK, again I am hooked on these open source typefaces – they have been of great quality and consistency and of course, they are free to use, share, modfy, etc. Linux Libertine, from the .org of the same name is one such beautiful face – “Letters and fonts have two characteristics: On the one hand they are basic elements of communication and fundamental to our culture, on the other hand they are cultural goods and an artistic work. You are able to see just the first aspect, but when it comes to software you’ll see copyrights and patents even on the most elementary fonts. Therefore we want to give you a free alternative: This is why we founded the Libertine Open Fonts Project.” (also of note, Libertine is the face used on the Wikipedia logo). The package includes a very diverse 20 variants, including Regular, Italic, Bold Italic, Small Capitals, Biolinum (an organic sans-serif and could be also described as organogrotesque) and a few “keyboard” versions ideal for computer documentation. Download massive Linux Libertine package here.
