Agnes Fomina

Once, Blackletter was a calligraphy style. Full of ligatures, with letters bumping into each other to create an unapologetic picket-fence pattern. Some even claimed that the regularity improved legibility! But then Blackletter was cast into metal, and only a handful of established ligatures survived, while most interletter connections were disentangled. Everyone since followed suit, and hundreds of years later, digital Blackletter fonts were modelled mostly on the metal fonts that prevailed rather than the original handwriting. Up until now!

AJ Quadrata is an authentic revival of the textura quadrata hand, and its major inspiration is a 15th-century Latin manuscript of the Bible from Zwolle, the Netherlands. The typeface is delivered in two flavors.

The default cut is a modern take on textura quadrata that can be useful for today and tomorrow. The standard ligatures feature employs nearly all letters. The tittle of i retains its original, hasty squiggle form (except for the Turkish localization). Discretionary ligatures include medieval ligatures da, de, do, pa, pe, po (and their mixed-case counterparts!). Stylistic sets allow to use historic letter variants such as long s and rotunda r, closed-counter a, and alternate capitals.

AJ Quadrata Medieval is perfect for setting medieval Latin. Default forms of capital F, H and O are swapped with the alternates. The squiggles above i only appear for disamibiguation nearby m, n or u, as in original manuscripts. Discretionary ligatures and historic variants are promoted to the standard ligatures feature to make room in the discretionary ligatures feature for a variety of scribal abbreviations. Dedicated stylistic sets include medieval punctuation and justification alternates — glyphs with elongated terminals used for lengthening lines that end up too short.

The Rubrum styles can be layered and colored to create the illuminated effect on the capital letters.

Besides a faithful rendition of extended Latin including Vietnamese, numerous synthetic additions are included: polytonic Greek, Armenian, and Cyrillic (with Bulgarian and Serbian/Macedonian localizations).

Both flavors of the typeface can be considered a starting point that can be further customized using OpenType features, including Stylistic Sets (some features differ between AJ Quadrata and AJ Quadrata Medieval):

• ss01 Alt E
• ss02 Descending F / Roman F
• ss03 Uncial H / Roman H
• ss04 Angular O / Round O
• ss05 Contextual closed-counter a
• ss06 Diamond-dot i j / Always dotted i, j
• ss07 Contextual rotunda r / No r rotunda
• ss08 Contextual long s / No long s
• ss09 Dotless y
• ss10 Serbian Cyrillic
• ss11 Alt Cyrillic de
• ss12 Alt Cyrillic zhe
• ss13 Alt Cyrillic sha
• ss14-ss17 [reserved for future use]
• ss18 Scribal punctuation
• ss19 Alt linking hyphen
• ss20 Justification alternates

Morthern is inspired by the work of charming lettering artists with a combination of Old Style Display Bold. Each letter is modified so that the distance, width and weight can give the beauty of the alternates given. A passionate curve gives a touch of beauty to this font. With both weights you have two different shapes in terms of uppercase letters that aim to distinguish between title of the letter and the paragraph.

The source of inspiration for MFC Patisserie Monogram is a letter set from the book, "Letters and Lettering" by Paul Carlyle & Guy Oring, published in 1938. This elegant decorative style was shown as Capitals & Numerals only, but we've expanded it out to include Capitals, Smallcaps, Numerals, an Ampersand, and ornamental parenthesis, brackets, and braces.

MFC Patisserie Monogram can create one, two, or three letter monograms as well as basic headline and titling settings. It is a refined look that is as darling as it is delicate. The numeral set and bullet dividers allow for more detailed and personalized monograms. If you want an even more customized look, you can add any of a handful of brackets, braces, or parenthesis to surround your monograms in a complimenting style.