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An Ethiopic font archive: A1-Desta, A1-Kidan, A1-Qelem, A1-Tesfa, A2-Desta, A2-Kidan, A2-Qelem, A2-Tesfa, Addis-One, Addis-Two, AddisProOne, AddisProTwo, Ethiopia-Jiret-Set-I, Ethiopia-Jiret-Set-II, Ethiopia-Jiret, GF-Zemen-Primary, GF-Zemen-Secondary, GF-Zemen-Unicode, GF-Zemen2K-Ahadu, GF-Zemen2K-Kileitu, GF-Zemen2K-Selestu, GS-GeezMahtemUnicode, Ge'ez-1-Normal, Ge'ez-1-Numbers-Normal, Ge'ez-2-Normal, Ge'ez-3-Normal, Geez-Unicode, GeezA, GeezB, GeezDemo, GeezNet, GeezSindeA, GeezSindeB, GeezTypeNet, VG-Geez-Numbers, VG2-Agazian-Black, VG2-Main, VG2-Title, VG2000-Agazian-Black, VG2000-Main, Visual-Geez-Unicode-Agazian, Visual-Geez-Unicode, efonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

A12N

Mailing list for Africanization. Issues about African fonts are discussed here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

ABB

Designers of the Open Font Library Ethiopian font Macro Ge'ez (2007). [Google] [More]  ⦿

ACIS Consulting

Creators and vendors of an Ethiopic text family, HahuLite: "HahuLite is a program that runs on an IBM PC (or compatibles) that has Windows 95. This program enables you to write in Tigrigna and other languages that use the Geez alphabet, directly from your PC keyboard without any changes or additions to your existing Windows programs!" ACIS Consulting is based in Toronto. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Adinkra Symbols

Symbology from the Asante people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Waiting to be made into a font! Alternate URL. [Google] [More]  ⦿

African Drum Rhythms
[Lennart Hallström]

Free Djembe truetype font for Djembe drum music notation. By Lennart Hallström from Stockholm. [Google] [More]  ⦿

African Languages

A list of links for African languages south of the Sahara. [Google] [More]  ⦿

African theme fonts
[Manfred Klein]

African theme fonts include AfricEggs, Africaans, Africain, AfricanAngelsAndSpirits, AfricanArtifacts, AfricanQueens, AfriquArtes, AfroDesigns, Afrobats, ArteAfrique, BlackLiving, BlackSplinters, MotherAfrica, Africanissima (2005), AfricanissimaInvers (2005), AfroParts, AfricQuattro, AfriqueDrawings (2005), AfricanSymbols (2005), MotherAfricaArchetypo (2005), Artefacts Two (2006), AfricArtes (2006), BlacKLinoleum (2006), TribalDesigns (2006), Africaans (2006), African Ghosts (2006), Masks03 (2006), africaArt (2006), AfricanissimaOSix (2006). [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Afrikan Alphabets
[Saki Mafundikwa]

Saki Mafundikwa (Harare, Zimbabwe) gives a synposis of his book Afrikan Alphabets, the story of writing in Afrika (Mark Batty Publ., 2003). He covers all south of the Sahara, and divides things as follows:
A. Liberia and Sierra Leone:
a. The Vai syllabary---212 characters 1883
b. The Mende syllabary---195 characters 1921
c. The Loma syllabary---185 characters 1930
d. The Kpelle syllabary---88 characters 1930
e. The Bassa 'Vah' alphabet---30 characters, 5 diacritics 1920
f. The Gola alphabet---30 characters 1930

B. Guinea, Senegal and Mali,
a. The Mandingo alphabet---25 characters, 8 diacritics 1950
b. Bambara "Ma-sa-ba" script 1930
c. The Wolof alphabet---25 characters, 7 diacritics 1960
d. The Fula (Dita) alphabet---39 characters 1958
e. The Fula (Ba) alphabet
f. The Gerze script

C. Cote d'Ivoire
a. The Bete syllabary---401 characters 1956
b. The Guro script

D. Cameroon and Nigeria
a. The Bamum syllabary---80 characters 1895
b. The Bagam or Eghap syllabary---100 plus characters 1917
c. The Ibibio-Efik alphabet---34 characters 1930
d. The Yoruba holy alphabet
e. Nsibidi
f. A syllabary found among the Djuka of Suriname

[Google] [More]  ⦿

AfroBreak
[Afronsu Afronsu]

Crazy Sao Paulo-based Brazilian designer (b. 1986) of the grunge face Antropofagia (2010). Born in 1986. He also made Afronsu (2011) and Abstract Rua (2012). Aka afronsu Afronsu. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Afro-Roman

A roman font with diacritics for many African languages. As always, very expensive at Linguist's Software. [Google] [More]  ⦿

AKOFAType
[Kwesi A. Amuti]

Located in Powder Springs, GA, AKOFAType has published the following dingbats with symbology from Ghana: Adinkra Calabash, Adinkra FineFine, Adinkra WantaWanta (2007). The designer is Kwesi A. Amuti (b. East Lansing, MI, 1974). He is working on Steady Rockin (a display face) and Fat Head. Typedia link. Klingspor link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Alan Wood's Unicode Resources

Great Unicode jump page. Has a page showing all fonts that support the various Unicode ranges. Check, for example, his Shavian Unicode sub-page. Unicode font utilities. Some font downloads, including the Unicode font MPH Damase (2005, Mark Williamson). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Allen R. Walden

Type designer. Not to be confused with "Walden Font", a commercial foundry run by Oliver Weiss. Dafont link. Full list of his work: African (1993; see also here and here for this jungle font), Amelia, Asimov, Beveled, CalculatorItalic, Checkbook (MICR-like font), CrystalItalic, FinalFrontier, FinalFrontierOldStyle, FinalFrontierShipside, Goethe, Japan, Jurassic, Lansbury (1993), Neon Lights, NewYorker, OliviaBrush, StencilExport, Terminator (techno).

Lansbury is a free art nouveau face that mimics the font used in the TV series Murder She Wrote. The actual font used for the title of that series was URW's Art Gothic (specimen). Fletcher Gothic (1992, Casady&Greene) is another free version of it. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham (Multilingual Technical Officer, Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet, State Library of Victoria, Australia) is developing fonts for Dinka, a language of South Sudan. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Andrew Hart

Andrew Hart is a Corona-based American digital photographer (b. 1988), who runs a small free font archive. Another archive of his. Dafont link. Another URL. Yet another URL. And still another one. And another one. And one more. His later fonts refer to SickCapital.Com.

His own fonts include Dirt2 Copperbolt (2012, grungy copperplate), Truskey (2011, grunge), Sick Capital Kingston (2011), Full Moon On (2011),Grafitik Riot (2011, graffiti face), Electric Panda (2011), Last Draft (2011, grunge typewriter), CaliforniabyDirt2 (2010), JusticebyDirt2 (2010), SC Gum Kids (2010), SC Tinas Baby Shower (2010), Little Ryan (2010, handwriting), Sick Capital Vice (2010), Star Avenue (2009), Cute Tattoo (2009), DuerTWO (2009), Dirt2Stickler (2009), Ithornët (2009, grungy blackletter), NoXWay (2009, graffiti grunge), Skulls and Splatters (2009), Hacjiuza (2009, hand-drawn blackletter; +Dirty), Popstar Autograph (2009, comic book style script), The Quickest Shift (2009, curly script), DuerTwoo (2009, bloody horror font), Malgecito (2009, grunge), Ithornët (2009, grungy medieval pirate font), Little Bliss (2009), Loyal Fame (2009, curly script), Angelic War (2009, grunge), Soulstalker (2009, grungy blackletter), Kings of Pacifica (2009, ransom note font), GanixApec (2009), GoodPeace (2009), KatyBerry (2009), OffTheDrugs (2009), ThinFranq (2009), WILDAFRICA (2009, African-theme multiline face), St. Andrew (2009, a spray type font), Hawaii Lover (2009, grunge calligraphic script), Aristotle Punk (2009, grunge), Juicy Hunt (2009, grunge), Dead Hardy (2009, Victorian), Kate Perry (2009, fifties script), Kate Berry (2009, fifties script), Vloderstone (2009, hairline slab serif), Good Peace, Off The Drugs, Thin Franq (2009, hairline), Ganix Apec (2009, sans), Jailbox1 (2009, grunge), Blast Beat (2008), Ghosttown-BC (2008, Western style), Dead Secretary (2008, grunge), DIRT2-DEATH (2008, grunge), Robot Head (2008), Alpaca 54 (2007, grunge), Hawaii Killer (2007, Coca Cola grunge), Splinter2 (2007, grunge based on Franklin Gothic), Everyday Ghost (2007, grunge), Plague Death (2006, grunge), SEXtalk69 (2007), Screamz1 (2007). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Antonio J. Morata

Antonio J. Morata (Almeria, Spain) is a FontStructor (aka elmoyenique) who used FontStruct to make several modular faces starting in 2010. The typeface names start with z. We list them alphabetically:

• zadora-q-eYeFS (pixelized), zagreb-eYeFS, zahoree eYeFS (2012, dot matrix), Zakapunt eYeFS (2010), Zakyra eYe-FS (2010, a western font modeled after Kyra 1 my Michel Troy), zalamera eYeFS (2011), zalooneYeFS (Western face), zame-eYeFS, zanzibar-eYeFS, zancle-eYeFS, zancle-rev-eYeFS, zanity eYe FS (2012), zapristi-eYeFS (outlined and oblique), zarcs-eYeFS, zarina-eYeFS (2011, blackletter), zayre-eYeFS, zaza eYeFS (2011).
• zblackmagic-eYeFS (2011, Based on the Tomeri Nu-No font by Nuria González and Noël Nanton), zbrickfont eYeFS.
• zcell-eYeFS (2010, fat counterless, and outlined), zcloudy eYeFS (2012), zcout eYeFS (2010, a mini-stencilled art deco face), zcrackers eYe/FS (fa, counterless and starred).
• zdurer (blackletter).
• zeelandia-eYeFS (horizontally striped), zeenvoudige eYeFS (2011), zegovia eYeFS (2012), zelada eYeFS (2011), zelfvolution eYeFS (stencil), zenda-eYeFS, zenix-eYeFS (2011), zenoid eYe FS (2012), zenon eYeFS (2011, horizontal stripes), zenovia-eYeFS (2011), zeres eYeFS (2011), zerone eYeFS (2011, a modular piano key face), zetentas-eYeFS (disco light face; +Light), zeventy-eYeFS (2011), zextile-eYeFS.
• zfraktur eYe FS (2011, blackletter).
• zhadows eYe/FS (shadow face), zhalloween eYe/FS (pixel face), zhapp3y-eYeFS (alphading), zhappy eYeFS (2011, fat art deco), zharona-eYeFS (2010).
• ziabelle-eYeFS (shadow face), ziberia eYeFS (2011), zibernia blk eYe/FS (2011), zibernia blk x thal eYe/FS (2011), zilverstone eYeFS (2011, blackletter), zimbawee-eYeFS, zinergy-eYeFS (3d face), zinergy blk eYe/FS, zinfont eYeFS, zinnamon eYeFS (2011), zirconite eYeFS (2011, slab face), zircus eYeFS (2010), zirius eYeFS (2011).
• zkandia-eYeFS (stencil).
• zlabyrinths eYeFS (2011), zlash eYe FS (2011, a keyhole face), zloty eYeFS (2011, art deco face).
• zmorse xDad eYe FS (2011, a texture / African face based on morse code).
• znederland eYe FS (2012).
• zpanish caravan eYe/FS (2011, a bullet hole face), zpido eYeFS (2012), zpixel eYeFS (2011).
• zquadrata eYeFS (2010), zquared-eYeFS.
• zonora eYeFS (2011, a Far West face), zoolphabet eYeFS (2010, animal dingbats), zoutland eYeFS (2011, octagonal), zozial-eYeFS, zozial-sqrd-eYeFS.
• zround eYeFS (2010).
• ztarsky-eYeFS (+Round: art deco ultra black), ztay eYeFS (a condensed almost art nouveau face), ztedelijk-Crouwel eYe/FS (2011, based on Wim Crouwel's stedelijk Museum poster), zteefunny eYe FS (2011, ultra fat keyhole face; + zteefunny dm eYeFS), ztencils eYeFS (2011, army stencil face), ztires-eYeFS (2011, texture face), ztrands eYeFS (2011), ztrange eYeFS (2010), ztrange blk eYeFS (2011), ztream eYeFS (2011), zturdy-eYeFS (ultra-fat), ztylo eYeFS (2011, art deco).
• zunset eYeFS (2012).
• zweater eYeFS (2011, knitted look), zwimming eYeFS (2011), zwire blk eYeFS (an LED face), zwiss-eYeFS.
• zybona-eYeFS (athletic lettering), zydonia eYeFS (2012), zykedelia-eYeFS (2012), zylone-eYeFS (2011).

Arial everywhere

Arial on a 100 billion bank note in Zimbabwe, 2008. [Google] [More]  ⦿

ASE

Outfit that created ESU, a font with Yoruba characters. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ato Yigezu Bisrat

Born and died in Addis Ababa, 1926-1979. Educator (at Addis Ababa University), author, and calligrapher, who was frequently called upon by Emperor Haile Selassie for calligraphy and lettering. His Gothic Goffer (blackletter-style) characters were extended into a font by Abbas Alamnehe (2006). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bambara

The Bambara "Ma-sa-ba" syllabary was devised by Woyo Couloubayi in the Kaarta region of Mali in 1930 and has a total of 123 characters. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bamum

From Cameroon: this script had originally 466 pictographic and ideographic symbols and was devised by sultan Ibrahim Njoya king of the Bamoun. These are interesting characters, and should be fun to design in a font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bassa font

Free font Bassa by the Bassa Vah Association, 1998, at Varnie Karmo's home page. Bassa is used in Liberia. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bassa (Kwa)

Bassa font which used to be at Dr. Berlin's archive. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Benjamin Yang

In 2009, Benjamin Yang (SIL) published Vai Slant Unicode, a Unicode extension of SIL's Vai font (for the language used in Liberia). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bisharat

African font links. Unicode tables for African fonts. Great jump page. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Brana

Free Ethiopic software that includes the Ethiopic fonts Brana I and Brana II. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bumbayo Font Fabrik
[Attila Zigó]

Hungarian foundry with commercial and free fonts, est. 2005 by Attila Zigó. On Deviantart, they claim to be from Rwanda. They specialize in grunge type--some of the fonts are quite gorgeous indeed. Has a fontmaking service. Dafont link. Yet another URL. Devian Tart link. Fontsy link.

• Free: Ed Gein Gwilty and Ed Gein Ynnocent (2008), Miguel Sangotisch (2010, blackletter), Kopanyica Strasse (2010, grunge), Third Man (2010, grunge), Pahuenga Cass (2010, grunge), McKoy (2010, grunge), Eordeoghlakat (2010, grunge mechanical face), Santa Gravita (2010, grunge), Fibyngerowa (2010, grunge), Pahuenga Cass (2009, grunge), Liszthius-Alkimista (2008, a lovely 3d-look grunge face), Rueckwarzsalto (2008, grunge), Szorakatenusz (2008), Grymmoire (2008, grungy blackletter), Hrawolam (2008, children's hand), Certto Headline (2008, 3d outline grunge), Kopanyica Strasse (2008), Pokoljaro (2008, medieval look, rough outlines), Fibyngerowa (2008, splatter grunge), Conrad Veidt (2007), Baron Kuffner (2007), Karloff (2007), Deutschische (2006, blackletter), Egyptientto2 (2005, slab serif), Bumbayo (2006), Gepetto (2005), Gipsiero (2006, grunge), Lugosi (2005), Matejino (2005), Matejo (2005), McKoy (2005), Tuce (2005), 3rd Man (2007, grunge), Kyselak (2007), Latabár (2007, grunge).
• Commercial: Der Erlkoenig (2007), Otranto (2007), Dajcsise (2005), Engelfeuer (2005), Gomulka (2005), Haniltom Gothic (2005), Perfuct (2005, a great irregular printed typeface), Osiris Records (2007, grunge), Thelema (2007, medieval hand).

Bureau Bunk
[Jan Bunk]

Dutch foundry located in Rotterdam. It is run, so MyFonts says, by Jan Bunk (b. 1968, Monrovia, Liberia) from Monrovia, Liberia. He made Foot Print (2011). [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Castle Type
[Jason Castle]

Designs by Jason Castle from San Rafael, CA, who graduated from Dominican University of California. He does custom font design and sells commercial faces through MyFonts and FontShop. Blog. These include:

• A: AfrikaBorders, Afrika Motifs, Agency Open (M. F. Benton, 1934, revival Jason Castle), Agency Gothic Inline, Ampersands, Azbuka (2005, a heavy slab serif).
• B: Brasileiro (2007, a new art deco face).
• Carisma (2007, a clean geometric sans), Carlos (art deco inspired by Elektra), Castle Fleurons, Chinoise (2008, based on hand lettering that is reminiscent of a style of ancient Chinese square-cut ideograms), Cloister Black, Copperplate Script.
• D: Deko Initials (1993, discontinued in 2007; based on NADA0 drawn in 1972 by Marcia Loeb), Dionisio (2008, didone).
• E: Eden (Bold, Light; originally designed by Robert H. Middleton in 1934).
• S: Sencia (2008, based on Spanish art deco stock certificate lettering from 1941).
• F: Fat Freddie, Futura CT and Futura CT Inline (2007, based on Futura ND, but discontinued after only a few weeks).
• G: Goudy Lombardy (Lombardic), GoudyStout, Goudy Text, Goudy Trajan (1994-2010, free; +alternates).
• H: Handsome (2002, nice finger dingbats, aka fists).
• J: Jensen Arabique (left field art deco, based on work of Gustav Jensen, 1933).
• K: Koloss (art deco).
• L: Latin CT (2008,, 6 styles), Latin Wide, Laureat, Lise Informal (2008, handprinted), Lombardy.
• M: Maximilian CS (Rudolf Koch, 1917), Metropolis Bold and Shaded (based on the 1932 Stempel cut as designed by W. Schwerdtner), Minotaur (2008, an original monoline design based on an Oscan votive inscription from the second century BC; looks like simulated Greek).
• N: Norberto (2009, an all-caps Bodoni).
• O: Ogun (2008, inspired by an Egyptian-style Russian block alphabet and useful for athletic lettering; formerly named Azbuka).
• P: Plantain (2002, a digital version of Plantin Adweight, a 1913 face by F. H. Pierpont), Plantain Stencil (2009), Progreso (2010, a condensed, unicase, serif gothic type design inspired by the hand-lettering on Russian posters from the 1920s).
• R: Radiant, Radiant Extra Condensed CT (both Radiants are revivals of Roger Middleton's face by that name, 1940), Ransahoff (2002, ultra condensed didone), Rudolf (1992).
• S: Samira (2008, art nouveau style), Shango (1993, based on Schneidler Initials by F.H.E. Schneidler (1936), and including a digital version of Schneidler Cyrillic (1992); extended in 2007 to Shango Gothic and in 2008 to a 3-d shadow version, Shango Chiseled, and in 2009 to Shango Sans), Sculptura (2005, an all caps face based on Diethelm's Sculptura from 1957), Sencia (2008, based on Spanish art deco stock certificate lettering from 1941), Sonrisa (2009, art deco family---Sonrisa Thin is free), Standard CT (a neo-grotesque family).
• Tambor (Light, Black, Inline, Adornado) (1992) (note: Jason claims that it was remotely based on Rudolf, which in turn was based on calligraphy of Rudolf Koch), Trio (an art deco sansserif), Trooper Roman (discontinued).
• V: Vincenzo (2008, a slabby didone), Warrior (2009, a 3d font based on Ogun).
• X: Xavier (art deco family based on Ashley Crawford by Ashley Havinden, 1930, revival by Jason Castle in 1992).
• Z: Zagora, Zamenhof (2011: an all caps poster face with constructivist ancestry, named after the inventor of Esperanto), Zuboni Stencil (2009, Latin and Cyrillic, constructivist).

Charles Allen

Type designer of the photolettering era (1960s) who created the chiseled 3d face Sculpture. Nick Curtis's Haut Relief (2007) is based on this typeface. The African-themed Djibouti of Nick Curtis (2007) is based on West's African Queen, also a 1960s font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

CheapProfonts
[Roger S. Nelsson]

Started in 2008, this web place by Norwegian entrepreneur Roger S. Nelsson (based in Honningsvåg, Norway) sells fonts by Ray Larabie, Brian Kent, Nick Curtis, Derek Vogelpohl and Kevin King that were originally freeware fonts. Nelsson reworked them (more glyphs, more multilingual) and asks about 10 dollars per font now. He says his fonts now cover these Latin languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Chamorro, Chichewa, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino (Tagalog), Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Greenlandic, Guarani, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Romanian, Saami (Inari), Saami (Lule), Saami (North), Saami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen, Ulithian, Walloon, Welsh, Yapese. Designer at FontStruct in 2008 of cowboy_hippie and Syndrome X (DNA-look face inspired by Syndrome BRK by Brian Kent). Nelsson's fonts are Classic Trash BRK Pro, Dynamic BRK Pro, Galapogos BRK Pro, Genotype BRK Pro, King Cool KC Pro (kid's hand; done with Kimberly Geswein), Lamebrain BRK Pro, Matrise Pro and Matrise Text Pro (dot matrix), Phorfeit BRK Pro, Syndrome BRK Pro, Technique BRK Pro, Vigilance BRK Pro, Grapple BRK Pro. The "BRK" refers to Brian Kent, the original free font designer. In 2009, he added a number of fonts that were done by Nick Curtis some years before that (hence the "NF"): Boogie Nights NF Pro (art deco face), Copasetic NF Pro, Coventry Garden NF Pro, Pro, Fontleroy NF Pro, Hamburger Heaven NF Pro, Monterey Popsicle NF Pro, and Wooden Nickel NF Pro. Trypewriter Pro (2009) is based on Kevin King's Trypewriter. Helldorado Pro (2009) is a Tuscan wood type style face based on a font by Levente Halmos.

Designer of Familiar Pro (2011, designed with the same metric as Helvetica but "better than Arial"), Bloco Pro (2010, fat counterless face), Trump Town Pro (2009, athletic lettering slab serif), Geometric Soft Pro (2009), Geometry Script Pro (2010, upright connected script), DIN Fun Pro (2011), Infantometric Pro (2012), Foobar Pro (2012) and Cheap Pro Fonts Serif (2009), freely available from Dafont.

Fontspace link. Fontsquirrel link.

Catalog of Nelsson's bestselling typefaces. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Chris MacGregor

Union Type Supply used to be run by Chris MacGregor in Houston, TX, who was (is?) a web communications specialist at Halliburton. He also used to run Penultimate Type in Seabrook, TX. He founded About with Don Synstelien.

His typefaces: Zehrgut (grunge face), Orti (by Jean-Jacques Tachdjian---a filled-in display face), Utile (high-contrast serif font designed by Matthew Chiavelli, Jeff Gillen, Chris MacGregor and Jean-Jacques Tachdjian), Afrobats, Bridgework, Citore, Emulate, Emulate Bold, Epaulet (1994), Tagged, Boxonoxo, Burner, Datapad, Empanel, Emulate, Esboki, Esdeki, Estuki, GleeClub, HiroItalic, HiroOutline, HiroSharp, Hiro, IttoBlock, IttoRound, JaySetch (named after Jay Setchell, who was Chris MacGregor's boss at Imagination Plus, The Woodlands, TX), LeslieSmith, Manitu, Metolurgy, MittenHollowHollow, MittenLeftLeft, MittenRightRight (1996), PepClub, Planet100, PlanetFiveHundred, PlanetSevenHundred, PlanetThreeHundred, ReverberateBold, Reverberate, Tagged, Tshtars, Unite, UtileCaustic. Some typefaces in this list were published by [T-26] (such as Epaulet, Emulate, Mitten, Tagged).

On-line gallery. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Christine Voigts

Namibian-German designer of Linotype Dropink (1999), an adorable font in which letters are written with a scratchy inky fountain pen. One of my favorites in its genre. Fontshop link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Cornell University Africana Library

African writing systems. Charts with hand-drawn glyphs. Covers Amharic (Ethiopia), Ethiopic writing system, Mende (Sierra Leone), Meroitic (hieroglyphic-style writing, Meroe people of Sudan), Egyptian writing system, Nsibidi (Ejagham people of Nigeria), Oromo, Vai (West Africa). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Custor Computing PLC

Creators of the Ethiopic fonts Visual Geez Unicode Agazian and Visual Geez Unicode. Downloadable here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Daisy Gandazha

Student at ZIVA, a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. In 2001, she designed an angry letter font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dale Halvorsen

Designer of Mugabe, "dingbats for an oppressive regime" (quotes by Sean O'Toole. This face was reviewed in the magazine National Typographika 2 (i-jusi magazine volume 17). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Daniel Kahn

Under the name NKO Computers, Daniel Kahn made Kankan (2009), which is based on Michael Everson's Conakry font. This is a font supporting the N'ko script of West Africa. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dave West

Type designer of the photolettering era (1960s) whose work is slowly but surely being digitally revived by Nick Curtis. FontShop link. His faces:

• The slightly psychedelic typeface West Banjo. Nick Curtis's Fiddle Sticks (2007) is based on this typeface.
• Elephant Gothic, a fat deco face. Remade by Nick Curtis as Elephunky NF (2011).
• Nick Curtis believes that Stymie Black Flair may also be due to him, and he based his Tutti Paffuti NF (2007) on the latter face.
• African Queen was revived by Curtis as Djibouti NF (2007), a minimalist tribal African alphabet.
• Nickelodeon. Revived by Curtis as Lily Hilo NF (2008).
• Barnum Block (Western face), done in 1960 at PhotoLettering Inc. This became Cg BarnumBlock at Compugraphics. The Compugraphics collection is now sold by Monotype. See also PL Barnum Block.
• Behemoth (1960, PhotoLettering): a slab serif. This too became a Compugraphics face, Cg Behemoth Semi Condensed. See also PL Behemoth Semi Condensed.
• Futura Casual inspired Nick Curtis to draw Occidental Tourist NF (2010).
• Walnetto Casual (Photolettering) is another psychedelic face. For a digitization, see Nick Curtis's Jackalope NF (2010). West Barnum Ultra, designed by Dave West and digitized by Ben Kiel&Adam Cruz at House Industries in 2011, was film no. 5494 in the original Photo-Lettering archive.

DejaVu Fonts
[Stepan Roh]

The DejaVu fonts form an open source font family based on the Bitstream Vera Fonts. Free download. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters (see Current status page for more information) while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development. Included are DejaVuSans-Bold, DejaVuSans-BoldOblique, DejaVuSans-Oblique, DejaVuSans, DejaVuSansCondensed-Bold, DejaVuSansCondensed-BoldOblique, DejaVuSansCondensed-Oblique, DejaVuSansCondensed, DejaVuSansMono-Bold, DejaVuSansMono-BoldOb, DejaVuSansMono-Oblique, DejaVuSansMono-Roman, DejaVuSerif-Bold, DejaVuSerif-BoldOblique, DejaVuSerif-Oblique, DejaVuSerif-Roman, DejaVuSerifCondensed-Bold, DejaVuSerifCondensed-BoldOblique, DejaVuSerifCondensed-Oblique, DejaVuSerifCondensed.

Authors and contributors comprise Adrian Schroeter, Ben Laenen, Dafydd Harries, Danilo Segan (Cyrillic), David Jez, David Lawrence Ramsey, Denis Jacquerye, Dwayne Bailey, James Cloos, James Crippen, Keenan Pepper, Mashrab Kuvatov, Misu Moldovan (Romanian), Ognyan Kulev, Ondrej Koala Vacha, Peter Cernák, Sander Vesik, Stepán Roh (project manager; Polish), Tavmjong Bah, Valentin Stoykov, and Vasek Stodulka. The idea is to eventually cover most of unicode. Currently, this is covered: Latin (+supplement, extended A and part of extended B), IPA, Greek, Coptic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, N'ko, Tifinagh, Lao, Canadian aboriginal syllabics, Ogham, Arabic, math symbols, arrows, Braille, chess, and many dingbats.

Alternate download site. Wiki page with download information.

Fontspace link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye is the Belgian co-leader of the DejaVu font project (free fonts based on Bitstream Vera), the default GUI for fonts on several Linux OS distributions. He is working on extending various Open Source fonts to support African orthographies in Latin script. He is collaborating with a network of experts in African languages localization as part of the Pan Africa localization Network. Denis, with a Bs.C in Computer Science and a minor in Linguistics from McGill University, has experience in the Language Technology industry, Open Source software, Font Engineering and Unicode software support for African language. Speaker at ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg on African fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

DEPOTzNET

Organized font archive. Many subcategories including Party fonts, Holiday fonts, Balloons, Halloween, Christmas, screen fonts, phonetic fonts, African, Balinese, Bengali, Burmese, Cambodian, Croata-glagolitic, Cyrillic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Japanese, Javanese, Khmer, Lao, Malayan, Nepali, Nko, runes, Tamil, Vietnamese. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Deryk Hopley

Student at ZIVA, a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. In 2001, she designed an artsy initial caps font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Die Weberei
[Felix Holland]

Architect, web designer and hobby typographer Felix Holland runs Die Weberei in Kampala, Uganda. His first font is this sans (2006). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Diego Mier y Terán

Diego holds a Masters from the KABK in Den Haag, 2004. His thesis project was entitled Tuhun. A typographic exploration of the Mixtec language. He made the stencil face Nairobi Quality, the text face Tuhun (2006), the text face Viko (2004), and a font for the Mixtec language of Oaxaca, Mexico. Currently living in Mexico and working with his wife, Kythzia Barrera, in their studio called Frutas y Verduras. He teaches at the Universidad Iberoamericana, in Mexico City. Mainly interested in typography, graphic design and organic agriculture. Speaker at ATypI 2009 in Mexico City, where he explained the challenges posed by native languages in Mexico. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dixie's Delights
[Michelle Dixon]

This used to be a wonderful page, but Michelle Dixon seems to have retired from the font making business. There used to be five shareware dingbats fonts: African Ornaments One, Cave Painting Dingbats One, Mayan Dingbats, Pre-Columbian Ornaments One, and Printers' Ornaments One (Mac PS), plus about 45 other original fonts (not shareware). In her wonderful collection, the following of Michelle Dixon's creations stand out: Arrighi Copybook, ItalianMosaicOrnaments, Beautiful, LondonHouse, Love Letter Typewriter, Gaudy Medium, Rusty Nail-Medium (the last four are all old typewriter fonts), and the display fonts Isla Bella, La Negrita, Arty Nouveau, Victorian, Art Nouveau Fonts, Bad Dog-Black, Berlin, Caslon Frenzy, Dixon's Vixens Caps, AntiqueMonoTW, DangerousTypoWriter, Elegant Nouveau Initial Caps, Fruitbasket, Matador, Manhattan, Modern Scribe, Ovid, Spillage, Tacos, Tolstoy, Typewriter, Love Letter, Basketcase, ChiliPepperDingbats, Postage Stamps, Garish Monde, Taco Modern, and Beautiful Ink. All fonts are between 5 and 30 dollars a piece, but often there are four fonts per face. In August 98, the absolutely gorgeous calligraphic font Beautiful Ink became available as a 10USD shareware font in Windows TrueType. Check also here. Many designs by Blake Haber. Located in Santa Barbara, CA. Dafont link. Alternate URL. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Diyann Selman

Student at ZIVA, a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. In 2001, she designed a font in which the letters are inspired by African icons. [Google] [More]  ⦿

D-Net Communications (or: DNC)

Hommersaak, Norway-based foundry interested in African and technical typefaces. The fonts are sold through MyFonts. Their collection: Christmas (dings), Elektronika (dings), TechTools (dings), ABCKids, Gates (dings), Transistors (dings), Ariya (Yoruba based on Arial), Igba (Yoruba based on Times New Roman), Eagle (Nigerian), Eredo (Edo). [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

EthiO Systems

Commercial Ethiopic software and fonts: handwriting fonts such as WashRa (1995), Ethiopia (1996), Wookianos (1997), YebSe (2000). Plus a free Sabaean Script font. Based in Houston. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ethiolist

Vendors of AddisWord and AddisPro for Ethiopic. With this software comes the Ethiopic font AddisWord. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ethiopic Fonts

Fidel's site with links to Ethiopic fonts. Includes four BDF screen fonts for X11. Covers Amharic, Ge'ez, Tegrinya. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ethiopic Unicode Fonts

List of Ethiopic Unicode fonts, compiled by David McCreedy. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ethiopic.com
[Aberra Molla]

Free Ethiopic truetype font, Geezedit Amharic P by Aberra Molla. Also has many links related to Ethiopic typesetting. [Google] [More]  ⦿

EthioSoft

Ethiopic commercial software. Includes the EthioSoft font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

EthioSys

Ethiopian script typography. Fonts: WashRa, Ethiopia, Wookianos, WebSe. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ethiowalia.com

Free Ethiopic font AMH3. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Extended Ethiopian

Four free Ethiopian truetype fonts: EthiopicElementsNormal, EthiopicN1846Normal, EthiopicRareNormal, EthiopicVariantsNormal. Alternate site. [Google] [More]  ⦿

fc fonts for African languages
[Jörg Knappen]

Jörg Knappen's fc fonts for African languages. In metafont. The following languages are supported: Akan, Bamileke, Basa (Kru), Bemba, Ciokwe, Dinka, Dholuo (Luo), Efik, Ewe-Fon, Fulani (Fulful), G\~a, Gbaya, Hausa, Igbo, Kanuri, Kikuyu, Kikongo, Kpelle, Krio, Luba, Mandekan (Bambara), Mende, More, Ngala, Nyanja, Oromo, Rundi, Kinya Rwanda, Sango, Serer, Shona, Somali, Songhai, Sotho (two different writing systems), Suaheli, Tiv, Yao, Yoruba, Xhosa and Zulu. Plus Maltese and Sami. Jörg Knappen works at the University of Mainz in Germany. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Feedel web site: Ethiopian font

Fekade S. Mesfin's page on the shareware font "feedel" and other stuff about Ethiopian fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fidel (other site)

Fidel's Ethiopic fonts, in BDF and truetype formats. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fixedsys
[Darien Valentine]

Free truetype fonts: Tai Le Valentinum (for the Tai Le script used in China, Burma and Laos), Valentine Arabic, the faux pixel font Sounds of Apathy, and the unicode faux pixel font Fixedsys Excelsior 2.0 (2007). The latter covers Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Armenian, Tamil, Hylian, N'Ko, Ethiopic, blackletter, Dehong Dai, Pahawh Hmong, Thaan, Arabic, Thai, Ogham, runic, and IPA. All fonts made by Darien Valentine in 2004. See also here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts für Patristiker

List of links and free fonts collected by Martin Walraff (University of Bonn), for Greek, Coptic, Hebrew, Armenian, Ethiopian, Church Slavonic, Georgian and Syriac. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ge'ez -- Amharic

Ge'ez is the ancient language in which the scriptures of the Ethiopic Orthodox Church are written. Amharic is the majority language spoken in modern Ethiopia: it descended from Ge'ez, but is quite different. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ge'ez Free Zemen

The free GF Zemen truetype fonts (gfzemen1.ttf and gfzemen2.ttf) are encoded in the "Ethiopian ASCII" system developed by EthiO Systems. "gfzemenu.ttf" is a Unicode encoded font for Ethiopic. Yonas Fissehi told me that he created a BDF font for X-Windows that was the precursor to gfzemen. He believes that GFZemen's credit should go to Yitna Firdyiwek of "Goha Tibeb"---Biruk Asrat ported the files. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GeezEdit 1.1

According to some sources, Mike Murray is selling stolen goods, in this case GeezEdit 1.1 (20 USD). Here is the blurb: " This is a stolen product. Cnet should be ashamed for being used by such a stupid thief. Mike Murray is in possession of numerous illegal fonts reverse engeneered from a free GeezEdit Amharic P font. Very ugly characters have been concocted out of smaller pieces and thrown into three arbitrary and imaginary typefaces.". [Google] [More]  ⦿

GeezFont

Dead link. Before its death, it had commercial Ethiopic software, free trial download. Has some Ge'ez fonts: GeezBausi, GeezAddis, GeezBasic, GeezLong, GeezThin, GeezDirib. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GeezSoft

Free truetype font for Ethiopic: GeezTypeNet. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gikuyu

Gikuyu is a commercial font package prepared by Match Fonts with appropriate diacritics fir the Gikuyu language. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Glavy Fonts
[Jason Glavy]

Jason Glavy, who lives in Yokohama, runs Glavy Fonts. He has created some free fonts: JGLepcha (2001, a West-African language font), JG Chantabouli and JG Sasettha (cleaned up and extended unicode vesions of Sasettha and Chantabouli fonts created by John Durdin), JGAksaraBali, JGBasicLao, JGChamVer2, JGChamCambodia, JGChamVN, JGChantabouliLao, JGHurufJawaSanskrit, JGLaoOldArial, JGLaoOldface, JGLaoTimes, JGSoyombo (Tibetan), WL-LatinIPATimes. He used to have a bunch of Japanese fonts on his web site, including his Jindaimoji series. He also created three fonts for Makassarese/Buginese. At some point, he was associated with Saronix Japan. His Hmong page had JGCwjmemFinalVersion, JGCwjmemSecondVersion, JGCwjmemThirdVersion, JGNaadaasFinalVersion, JGNaadaasSecondVersion, JGNaadaasThirdVersion, JGPahawhFinalVersion, JGPahawhSecondVersion, JGPahawhSourceVersion, JGPahawhThirdVersion, JGPuajTxwm, all made in 2002: of these, the Pahawh series is original, while Cwjmem and Naadaas are improvements of other fonts. West African fonts designed by him: JGBassaVahHandwriting, JGBassaVahPrint, JGBete, JGKpelleA, JGKpelleB, JGNKo, JGVaiA, JGVaiB, JGVaiC. These fonts are well researched, and are based on drawings and findings by Dalby, Dr. Welmer, and Jensen. Some of Glavy's fonts for other languages: JGBasicLao, JGChamCambodia (1998), JGChamVN (1998), JGChantabouliLao, JGHurufJawaSanskrit (2001), JGLaoOldArial, JGLaoOldface, JGLaoTimes, JG Lepcha (2001), JGSoyomb (2001). [Google] [More]  ⦿

GNU Freefont (or: Free UCS Outline Fonts)
[Steve White]

The GNU Freefont is continuously being updated to become a large useful Unicode monster. GNU FreeFont is a free family of scalable outline fonts, suitable for general use on computers and for desktop publishing. It is Unicode-encoded for compatability with all modern operating systems. There are serif, Sans and Mono subfamilies. Also called the "Free UCS Outline Fonts", this project is part of the larger Free Software Foundation. Scans: FreeMono, FreeMonoBold, FreeMonoBoldOblique, FreeMonoOblique, FreeSans, FreeSansBold, FreeSansBoldOblique, FreeSansOblique, FreeSerif, FreeSerifBold, FreeSerifBoldItalic, FreeSerifItalic. The original head honcho was Primoz Peterlin, the coordinator at the Institute of Biophysics of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2008, Steve White took over. Participants and credits, as of the end of 2010, with Unicode range responsibilities:

• URW++ Design&Development GmbH. URW++ donated a set of 35 core PostScript Type 1 fonts to the Ghostscript project.
  • Basic Latin (U+0041-U+007A)
  • Latin-1 Supplement (U+00C0-U+00FF)
  • Latin Extended-A (U+0100-U+017F)
  • Spacing Modifier Letters (U+02B0-U+02FF)
  • Mathematical Operators (U+2200-U+22FF)
  • Block Elements (U+2580-U+259F)
  • Dingbats (U+2700-U+27BF)
• Yannis Haralambous and John Plaice. Yannis Haralambous and John Plaice are the authors of Omega typesetting system, which is an extension of TeX. Its first release, aims primarily at improving TeX's multilingual abilities. In Omega all characters and pointers into data-structures are 16-bit wide, instead of 8-bit, thereby eliminating many of the trivial limitations of TeX. Omega also allows multiple input and output character sets, and uses programmable filters to translate from one encoding to another, to perform contextual analysis, etc. Internally, Omega uses the universal 16-bit Unicode standard character set, based on ISO-10646. These improvements not only make it a lot easier for TeX users to cope with multiple or complex languages, like Arabic, Indic, Khmer, Chinese, Japanese or Korean, in one document, but will also form the basis for future developments in other areas, such as native color support and hypertext features. ... Fonts for UT1 (omlgc family) and UT2 (omah family) are under development: these fonts are in PostScript format and visually close to Times and Helvetica font families.
  • Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F)
  • IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF)
  • Greek (U+0370-U+03FF)
  • Armenian (U+0530-U+058F)
  • Hebrew (U+0590-U+05FF)
  • Arabic (U+0600-U+06FF)
  • Currency Symbols (U+20A0-U+20CF)
  • Arabic Presentation Forms-A (U+FB50-U+FDFF)
  • Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70-U+FEFF)
• Yannis Haralambous and Wellcome Institute. In 1994, The Wellcome Library The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, England, commissioned Mr. Haralambous to produce a Sinhalese font for them. We have received 03/09 official notice from Robert Kiley, Head of e-Strategy for the Wellcome Library, that Yannis' font could be included in GNU FreeFont under its GNU license: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF).
• Young U. Ryu at the University of Texas at Dallas is the author of Txfonts, a set of mathematical symbols designed to accompany text typeset in Times or its variants. In the documentation, Young adresses the design of mathematical symbols: "The Adobe Times fonts are thicker than the CM fonts. Designing math fonts for Times based on the rule thickness of Times =,, +, /, <, etc. would result in too thick math symbols, in my opinion. In the TX fonts, these glyphs are thinner than those of original Times fonts. That is, the rule thickness of these glyphs is around 85% of that of the Times fonts, but still thicker than that of the CM fonts." Ranges: Arrows (U+2190-U+21FF), Mathematical Symbols (U+2200-U+22FF).
• Valek Filippov added Cyrillic glyphs and composite Latin Extended A to the whole set of the abovementioned URW set of 35 PostScript core fonts, Ranges: Latin Extended-A (U+0100-U+017F), Cyrillic (U+0400-U+04FF).
• Wadalab Kanji Comittee. Between April 1990 and March 1992, Wadalab Kanji Comittee put together a series of scalable font files with Japanese scripts, in four forms: Sai Micho, Chu Mincho, Cho Kaku and Saimaru. The font files were written in custom file format, while tools for conversion into Metafont and PostScript Type 1 were also supplied. The Wadalab Kanji Comittee has later been dismissed, and the resulting files can be now found on the FTP server of the Depertment of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo: Hiragana (U+3040-U+309F), Katakana (U+30A0-U+30FF). Note that some time around 2009, the hiragana and katakana ranges were deleted.
• Angelo Haritsis has compiled a set of Greek type 1 fonts. The glyphs from this source has been used to compose Greek glyphs in FreeSans and FreeMono. Greek (U+0370-U+03FF).
• Yannis Haralambous and Virach Sornlertlamvanich. In 1999, Yannis Haralambous and Virach Sornlertlamvanich made a set of glyphs covering the Thai national standard Nf3, in both upright and slanted shape. Range: Thai (U+0E00-U+0E7F).
• Shaheed Haque has developed a basic set of basic Bengali glyphs (without ligatures), using ISO10646 encoding. Range: Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF).
• Sam Stepanyan created a set of Armenian sans serif glyphs visually compatible with Helvetica or Arial. Range: Armenian (U+0530-U+058F).
• Mohamed Ishan has started a Thaana Unicode Project. Range: Thaana (U+0780-U+07BF).
• Sushant Kumar Dash has created a font in his mother tongue, Oriya: Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F). But Freefont has dropped Oriya because of the absence of font features neccessary for display of text in Oriya.
• Harsh Kumar has started BharatBhasha for these ranges:
  • Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
  • Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF)
  • Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F)
  • Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
• Prasad A. Chodavarapu created Tikkana, a Telugu font family: Telugu (U+0C00-U+0C7F). It was originally included in GNU Freefont, but supoort for Telugu was later dropped altogether from the GNU Freefont project.
• Frans Velthuis and Anshuman Pandey. In 1991, Frans Velthuis from the Groningen University, The Netherlands, released a Devanagari font as Metafont source, available under the terms of GNU GPL. Later, Anshuman Pandey from Washington University in Seattle, took over the maintenance of font. Fonts can be found on CTAN. This font was converted the font to Type 1 format using Peter Szabo's TeXtrace and removed some redundant control points with PfaEdit. Range: Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F).
• Hardip Singh Pannu. In 1991, Hardip Singh Pannu has created a free Gurmukhi TrueType font, available as regular, bold, oblique and bold oblique form. Range: Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F).
• Jeroen Hellingman (The Netherlands) created a set of Malayalam metafonts in 1994, and a set of Oriya metafonts in 1996. Malayalam fonts were created as uniform stroke only, while Oriya metafonts exist in both uniform and modulated stroke. From private communication: "It is my intention to release the fonts under GPL, but not all copies around have this notice on them." Metafonts can be found here and here. Ranges: Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F), Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F). Oriya was subsequently dropped from the Freefont project.
• Thomas Ridgeway, then at the Humanities And Arts Computing Center, Washington University, Seattle, USA, (now defunct), created a Tamil metafont in 1990. Anshuman Pandey from the same university took over the maintenance of font. Fonts can be found at CTAN and cover Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF).
• Berhanu Beyene, Prof. Dr. Manfred Kudlek, Olaf Kummer, and Jochen Metzinger from the Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science, University of Hamburg, prepared a set of Ethiopic metafonts. They also maintain the home page on the Ethiopic font project. Someone converted the fonts to Type 1 format using TeXtrace, and removed some redundant control points with PfaEdit. Range: Ethiopic (U+1200-U+137F).
• Maxim Iorsh. In 2002, Maxim Iorsh started the Culmus project, aiming at providing Hebrew-speaking Linux and Unix community with a basic collection of Hebrew fonts for X Windows. The fonts are visually compatible with URW++ Century Schoolbook L, URW++ Nimbus Sans L and URW++ Nimbus Mono L families, respectively. Range: Hebrew (U+0590-U+05FF).
• Vyacheslav Dikonov made a Braille unicode font that could be merged with the UCS fonts to fill the 2800-28FF range completely (uniform scaling is possible to adapt it to any cell size). He also contributed a free Syriac font, whose glyphs (about half of them) are borrowed from the free Carlo Ator font. Vyacheslav also filled in a few missing spots in the U+2000-U+27FF area, e.g., the box drawing section, sets of subscript and superscript digits and capital Roman numbers. Ranges: Syriac (U+0700-U+074A), Box Drawing (U+2500-U+257F), Braille (U+2800-U+28FF).
• Panayotis Katsaloulis helped fixing Greek accents in the Greek Extended area: (U+1F00-U+1FFF).
• M.S. Sridhar. M/S Cyberscape Multimedia Limited, Mumbai, developers of Akruti Software for Indian Languages (http://www.akruti.com/), have released a set of TTF fonts for nine Indian scripts (Devanagari, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, and Gurumukhi) under the GNU General Public License (GPL). You can download the fonts from the Free Software Foundation of India WWW site. Their original contributions to Freefont were
  • Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
  • Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF)
  • Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F)
  • Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
  • Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F)
  • Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF)
  • Telugu (U+0C00-U+0C7F)
  • Kannada (U+0C80-U+0CFF)
  • Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F)
  Oriya, Kannada and Telugu were dropped from the GNU Freefont project.
• DMS Electronics, The Sri Lanka Tipitaka Project, and Noah Levitt. Noah Levitt found out that the Sinhalese fonts available on the site metta.lk are released under GNU GPL. These glyphs were later replaced by those from the LKLUG font. Finally the range was completely replaced by glyphs from the sinh TeX font, with much help and advice from Harshula Jayasuriya. Range: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF).
• Daniel Shurovich Chirkov. Dan Chirkov updated the FreeSerif font with the missing Cyrillic glyphs needed for conformance to Unicode 3.2. The effort is part of the Slavjanskij package for Mac OS X. range: Cyrillic (U+0400-U+04FF).
• Abbas Izad. Responsible for Arabic (U+0600-U+06FF), Arabic Presentation Forms-A, (U+FB50-U+FDFF), Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70-U+FEFF).
• Denis Jacquerye added new glyphs and corrected existing ones in the Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F) and IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF) ranges.
• K.H. Hussain and R. Chitrajan. `Rachana' in Malayalam means `to write', `to create'. Rachana Akshara Vedi, a team of socially committed information technology professionals and philologists, has applied developments in computer technology and desktop publishing to resurrect the Malayalam language from the disorder, fragmentation and degeneration it had suffered since the attempt to adapt the Malayalam script for using with a regular mechanical typewriter, which took place in 1967-69. K.H. Hussein at the Kerala Forest Research Institute has released "Rachana Normal" fonts with approximately 900 glyphs required to typeset traditional Malayalam. R. Chitrajan apparently encoded the glyphs in the OpenType table. In 2008, the Malayalam ranges in FreeSerif were updated under the advise and supervision of Hiran Venugopalan of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, to reflect the revised edition Rachana_04. Range: Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F).
• Solaiman Karim filled in Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF). Solaiman Karim has developed several OpenType Bangla fonts and released them under GNU GPL.
• Sonali Sonania and Monika Shah covered Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F) and Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF). Glyphs were drawn by Cyberscape Multimedia Ltd., #101, Mahalakshmi Mansion 21st Main 22nd "A" Cross Banashankari 2nd stage Banglore 560070, India. Converted to OTF by IndicTrans Team, Powai, Mumbai, lead by Prof. Jitendra Shah. Maintained by Monika Shah and Sonali Sonania of janabhaaratii Team, C-DAC, Mumbai. This font is released under GPL by Dr. Alka Irani and Prof Jitendra Shah, janabhaaratii Team, C-DAC, Mumabi. janabhaaratii is localisation project at C-DAC Mumbai (formerly National Centre for Software Technology); funded by TDIL, Govt. of India.
• Pravin Satpute, Bageshri Salvi, Rahul Bhalerao and Sandeep Shedmake added these Indic language cranges:
  • Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
  • Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
  • Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F)
  • Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F)
  • Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF)
  In December 2005 the team at www.gnowledge.org released a set of two Unicode pan-Indic fonts: "Samyak" and "Samyak Sans". "Samyak" font belongs to serif style and is an original work of the team; "Samyak Sans" font belongs to sans serif style and is actually a compilation of already released Indic fonts (Gargi, Padma, Mukti, Utkal, Akruti and ThendralUni). Both fonts are based on Unicode standard. You can download the font files separately. Note that Oriya was dropped from the Freefont project.
• Kulbir Singh Thind added Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F). Dr. Kulbir Singh Thind designed a set of Gurmukhi Unicode fonts, AnmolUni and AnmolUni-Bold, which are available under the terms of GNU license from the Punjabu Computing Resource Center.
• Gia Shervashidze added Georgian (U+10A0-U+10FF). Starting in mid-1990s, Gia Shervashidze designed many Unicode-compliant Georgian fonts: Times New Roman Georgian, Arial Georgian, Courier New Georgian.
• Daniel Johnson. Created by hand a Cherokee range specially for FreeFont to be "in line with the classic Cherokee typefaces used in 19th century printing", but also to fit well with ranges previously in FreeFont. Then he made Unified Canadian Syllabics in Sans, and a Cherokee and Kayah Li in Mono! And never to be outdone by himself, then did UCAS Extended and Osmanya.... What next?
  • Armenian (serif) (U+0530-U+058F)
  • Cherokee (U+13A0-U+13FF)
  • Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (U+1400-U+167F)
  • UCAS Extended (U+18B0-U+18F5)
  • Kayah Li (U+A900-U+A92F)
  • Tifinagh (U+2D30-U+2D7F)
  • Vai (U+A500-U+A62B)
  • Latin Extended-D (Mayanist letters) (U+A720-U+A7FF)
  • Osmanya (U+10480-U+104a7)
• George Douros, the creator of several fonts focusing on ancient scripts and symbols. Many of the glyphs are created by making outlines from scanned images of ancient sources.
  • Aegean: Phoenecian (U+10900-U+1091F).
  • Analecta: Gothic (U+10330-U+1034F)
  • Musical: Byzantine (U+1D000-U+1D0FF)&Western (U+1D100-U+1D1DF)
  • Unicode: many miscellaneous symbols, miscellaneous technical, supplemental symbols, and mathematical alphanumeric symbols (U+1D400-U+1D7FF), Mah Jong (U+1F000-U+1F02B), and the outline of the domino (U+1F030-U+1F093).
• Steve White filled in a lot of missing characters, got some font features working, left fingerprints almost everywhere, and is responsible for these blocks: Glagolitic (U+2C00-U+2C5F), Coptic (U+2C80-U+2CFF).
• Pavel Skrylev is responsible for Cyrillic Extended-A (U+2DEO-U+2DFF) as well as many of the additions to Cyrillic Extended-B (U+A640-U+A65F).
• Mark Williamson made the MPH 2 Damase font, from which these ranges were taken:
  • Hanunóo (U+1720-U+173F)
  • Buginese (U+1A00-U+1A1F)
  • Tai Le (U+1950-U+197F)
  • Ugaritic (U+10380-U+1039F)
  • Old Persian (U+103A0-U+103DF)
• Primoz Peterlin filled in missing glyphs here and there (e.g., Latin Extended-B and IPA Extensions ranges in the FreeMono family), and created the following UCS blocks:
  • Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F)
  • IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF)
  • Arrows (U+2190-U+21FF)
  • Box Drawing (U+2500-U+257F)
  • Block Elements (U+2580-U+259F)
  • Geometrical Shapes (U+25A0-U+25FF)
• Jacob Poon submitted a very thorough survey of glyph problems and other suggestions.
• Alexey Kryukov made the TemporaLCGUni fonts, based on the URW++ fonts, from which at one point FreeSerif Cyrillic, and some of the Greek, was drawn. He also provided valuable direction about Cyrillic and Greek typesetting.
• The Sinhala font project has taken the glyphs from Yannis Haralambous' Sinhala font, to produce a Unicode TrueType font, LKLUG. These glyphs were for a while included in FreeFont: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF).

Fontspace link. Download link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

GohaTibebZemen

A free Ethiopic font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Graphite Fonts

This site has a number of free truetype fonts, such as SILDoulos PigLatinDemo (2000, Summer Institute of Linguistics), NeoAssyrianRAI (2001, a Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform font by Karljuergen G. Feuerherm), DoulosSIL (2002, a big Unicode-compliant font), PadaukSuper (2003, Burmese font), Code2000 (2003, James Kass's huge unicode font; the version here is called Code2000 Tamil Graphite) Koli Nko Manden (1999, by the Fakoli Corporation for the West African language N'Ko). [Google] [More]  ⦿

HacenType
[Mohamed Hacen]

Run by Mohamed Hacen (b. 1978, Mauritania), a graphics and type specialist. Unless otherwise indicated, all fonts were made in 2006 by Mohamed Hacen. Free Latin fonts: HacenCAPSpice33, HacenCAPSpice65, HacenPixer (by Jen Aimon). Free Arabic fonts: HacenBeirutHeading, HacenBeirutLight, HacenBeirut, HacenCAPSpice33, HacenCAPSpice65, HacenCasablancaHeavy, HacenCasablancaLight, HacenCasablanca, HacenDalalSt, HacenDalalText, HacenDalal, HacenEgypt, HacenFreehand, HacenLebanon, HacenLinerPrint-outLight, HacenLinerPrint-out, HacenLinerScreenBd, HacenLinerScreen, HacenLinerXL, HacenLinerXXL, HacenNewspaper, HacenPixer, HacenPromoterLt, HacenPromoterMd, HacenPromoter, HacenSahafa, HacenSamraLt, HacenSamra, HacenTypographerBold, HacenTypographerBook, HacenTypographerHeavy, HacenTypographer. Hacen Tehran (2006) is here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Happyloverstown
[Jonathan Calugi]

Very talented Pistoia, Italy-based designer (b. 1982). Behance link. Dafont link. His typefaces:

• HAPPYLOVERSTOWN.EU-LoversSquare (2007; and Lover Square Stencil, 2009), a free art deco font.
• Ovatta (2009, fat and squarish).
• Umma Gomma (2007).
• Round and Round Love (2008). A rounded geometric ultra fat face.
• Disco Fat (2007), a rounded geometric ultra fat face.
• Supa Dupa Lovers (2008) showcases fantastic type examples.
• Right Way Yogurt and Cornflakes (2008) is a frilly didone face sent down from heaven.
• Somalove (2008) has African influences.
• Braggadocio Fat Love (2008) is a circle-themed stencil face.
• Pups In Town (2008) is a sans all-caps face.
• Noodle Park (2009). Free here, Noodle Park is a high-contrast art deco titling face.
• Badabum (2009) is just sheer pleasurable geometric experimentation.
• Hand Love (2009) is a fat counterless font.
• Love Sick (2009) is an anorexic hairtline sans.
• Loverstown meets Machas (2011) is a free poster font based on simple geometric shapes.
• Abake Workshop poster.

Hayley Rogers

Student at ZIVA, a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. In 2001, she designed an alphabet inspired by rock paintings, with letters in the forms of humans. Her alphabet is featured in "Language Culture Type" (John D. Berry ed., Graphis, 2002). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Holland Fonts
[Max Kisman]

Max Kisman (b. 1953, Doetinchem) is a Dutch freelance graphic designer who graduated in 1977 in graphic design, typography, illustration and animation at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In 1986, he co-founded TYP/Typografisch Papier, and taught graphic design and typography at various colleges in the Netherlands in the years following that. He is principal of MKDSGN, his studio in Mill Valley, California, and founded Holland Fonts, a foundry for his typeface designs in 2002. Max teaches graphic design, typography and typeface design in San Francisco. He currently lives in Mill Valley, CA.

His early typefaces: ExtendedMaxMixOne (1991), Rosetta, Jacque (1991, FontFont), Fudoni (1991), the experimental font Linear Konstruct (FUSE 2).

He wrote a coffeetable book on typography in the streets of Paris, but no book store in Paris seems to have it, and I have looked! He is editor of Tribe.

In 2002, he started Holland Fonts. His fonts there: Bebedot Blonde (2002), Bebedot Black, Bfrika (2002, an interesting African lettering font), Cattlebrand (2002), Chip 96 (2002), Chip 02 (2002), Circuit Closed (2002), Circuit Open, Interlace Single (2002), Interlace Double, Mundenge Rock (2002), Nevermind (2003, a cut-out style reminiscent of Saul Bass's movie titling types), Pacific Sans (2003), Pacific Serif (2003), Pacific Standard L, Pacific Standard B, Pacific Classic L (2002, artsy, stylish), Pacific Classic B, Quickstep Regular (2002, an angular font), Quickstep Bold, Quickstep Sans R, Quickstep Sans B, Submarine (2003, an octagonal font family), Traveller Regular (2002), Traveller Bold, Tribe Mono (2003, a tech font), Zwartvet (2002, a Van Doesburg/ De Stijl type font).

Four free ransom note fonts made in 2003: Dutch Doubles, Frisco Remix, We Love Your Font, MaxMix One. At Union Fonts, he (re-)published Bebedot, BFRIKA, Cattlebrand, Chip01, Chip02, Pacific, Quickstep, Submarine and Traveller in 2003, and Mata Hari (Indic simulation face in weights called Exotique, Hollandaise and Parisienne) and Xbats (2004, Christmas dingbats) in 2004.

Speaker at ATypI 2004 in Prague.

FontShop link. Klingspor link.

His bestselling fonts at MyFonts. Pic. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Isay Solomonovich Slutsker

Russian type designer (b. Orel, Russia, 1924, d. 2002). He lost both legs in World War II, but persevered and graduated in 1949 from the Moscow Printing Institute. He started working at the Type Design Department of VNIIPoligraphmash (National Printing Research Institute). From 1991 he worked for ParaType, Moscow. Isay Slutsker worked for major Soviet publishers, Khudozhestvennaya Literatura and Prosveshcheniye, designing and illustrating general fiction literature and textbooks. Slutsker designed many typefaces for a number of scripts and writing systems. Among his Cyrillic and Latin designs are Baltica (1951-2, a spin-off of Candida-Antiqua by Jakob Erbar; in co-operation with Vera Chiminova; Paratype did a revival in 1998); Bruskovaya Gazetnaya ('Slab-serif newstype', 1949; in co-operation with Alexandra Korobkova); Mysl (1986, a makeover of the typeface originally created by Vera Chiminova in 1966); PT Caslon (1962 and 1992, a version of the ATF Caslon; assisted by Tatiana Lyskova); ITC Franklin Gothic Cyrillic (1993; assisted by Tatiana Lyskova); PT BT Humanist 531 Cyrillic (1988, based on the Bitstream version of Syntax, by Hans Eduard Meier; assisted by Manvel Shmavonyan); PT BT Geometric Slabserif 712 (1999, based on the Bitstream version of Monotype Rockwell; assisted by Manvel Shmavonyan); MyslNarrowC (1992-1996, at Intermicro, together with Svetlana Ermolaeva and Emma Zfcharova). Slutsker's Greek typefaces are Obyknovennaya Novaya ('New Standard', 1950s); Rublenaya Slutskera ('Slutsker Sans'; 1960s); Chronos (1980s). Isay Slutsker created several typefaces for Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada. He designed two Amharic and one Hangul typeface, Inmin. Slutsker's Humanist 531 Cyrillic was among the winners of Kyrillitsa'99 and won an award at Bukvaraz 2001. Russian bio. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

James Albuquerque

Illustrator and web designer in Parede, Portugal, who made Afrika (2010)---the ornamental caps alphabet, not the continent. Behance link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Jayan Ratna

Graphic Designer from New Zealand, who was born in Nairobi, Kenya. He created the commercial face Techno Type (2010). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Jérémie Hornus

Frenchman Jérémie Hornus studied typography at the University of Reading, and graduated in 2006. He works now at Dalton Maag, where he designed Tornac, a connected script face. Creator of Kefa (2006), a Latin/Ethiopic family with slab serif origins and a futuristic twist. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Jeff Levine: Alf R. Becker fonts
[Jeff Levine]

Jeff Levine created a number of typefaces that were based on alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times Magazine during the period of the 1930s through the 1950s. These incude Hexide JNL (2011, a fat hexagonal design), Kanona JNL (2010), Karaoke JNL (2010), Mocombo JNL (2010, African look), Nightspot JNL (2011, an art deco headline face), Patriotica JNL (2011, a stars and stripes face), Police JNL (2010, caps only 3d shadow face after a design by Alf R. Becker), Roadblock JNL (2011), Tradewinds JNL (2010, African look). [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Jesse Andrew Tilley

Aussie designer (b. Melbourne) of the weird face Extreme Leet (2007). Why? He also made Scratchnessism (2007), Sound Board (2008), Lions Den and Starring (2008, kid's hands), Casual Script (2008, another child's handwriting font), and Guava Juice (2008). Alternate URL. In 2008, he went commercial and started selling his types at MyFonts. See also here. The faces there include the African theme/chiseled look font Rockband (2008), the 3d handprinted face Tusk (2008), the 3-d outline family Alabaster (2009), the fat counterless face Overdrive (2010), the pixel face Milko (2011), and the handprinted outline face Blubber (2008). Klingspor link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Jochen Schuss

German designer of the display faces Linotype Paint It and Paint It Black (2002, part of TakeType 4), ITC Vino Bianco (1998), ITC OutOfTheFridge (1996), ITC Whiskey (1999), ITC Kokoa (1996, inspired by lettering in Ghana), ITC Aspirin (2000), and the sans serif family Linotype Textra (2002, with Jörg Herz), ITC Schuss Hand, ITC Schuss Hand Bold. With Bob Alonso, he designed the brush face ITC Outback.

FontShop link. Klingspor link. Linotype link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Joi Joi

Joi Joi used iFontMaker to create Fontlajoy (2011), Font La Roy (2011), a leopard-skin handprinted face. Glorious (2011) is a flowery face. Other faces: Fantasy Font (2011), Fancy Free (2011), Pep Rally (2011).

Creations from 2012: Headline3, Headline2, Fontisize. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Joiaco

Knysna, South-Africa based designer. He created several commercial typefaces: Qik Edges (2011, dingbats and borders), Cut&Torn (2011, papercut face), Qrypton (2011, sci-fi), Qumbazonki (2011, African look face), Qwagga (2011, another African face), Qixbox (2011, handprinted 3d face), Qongasushi (2011, poster face). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Kanjamadi

Free Nko fonts here. Downloads not functional. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Karen Leisegang

Designer (aka Karz) of the handwriting fonts Karz 001 (2009, made with Scanahand), Chloe (2010) and Holmes 001 (2005). Karen (b. 1982) lives in Ramsgate, South Africa. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Kigali Designs
[Diane Collier]

From the blurb at TypeCon 2009: Diane Collier has over 20 years experience in type design and development specializing in complex scripts, with technical expertise in font hinting and OpenType development. Collier started her professional career in 1988 as a type designer for Compugraphic Corp. in Massachusetts, where she worked with many of today's top designers and developers. Collier started Kigali Designs in 1998 and has established a reputation in the industry for providing high quality work, while developing long term relationships with companies like Microsoft, Ascender, Monotype Imaging and others. She has written several font development specifications and created training videos for Microsoft. In addition, Collier provides training in many of the industry's type development tools for companies and individuals. When not on the computer, Collier teaches pottery and drawing at a local art school. She made a font by Arthur Baker into an 8-set family in 1994, called Kigali, an African-look family in memory of the victims of the 1994 Ruanda genocide. Kigali Designs will also do custom font work from their office in Massachusetts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Kokekoko

Creator of the African-style handprinted Kokekoko (2009). Dafont link. Kokekoko (Puño) is an illustrator based in Paris. [Google] [More]  ⦿

LaTeX Navigator
[Denis Roegel]

General links on typography and fonts, compiled by Denis Roegel (with earlier contributions by Karl Tombre who is no longer involved). Very, very useful. This page contains, among other things:

• METAFONT for Beginners (Geoffrey Tobin)
• The METAFONT book (TeX source) (Donald E. Knuth)
• How to Create Your Own Symbols in METAFONT and for use in LaTeX Documents (Richard Lin)
• Milieu -- METAFONT and Linux: A Personal Computing Milieu (Thomas Dunbar)
• Simple drawings with METAFONT (Zdenek Wagner)
• Some METAFONT Techniques (article from TUGboat, 10 pages) (Yannis Haralambous)
• List of all available Metafont fonts
• Liam Quin's Metafont Guide (last version)
• MetaFog: Converting METAFONT Shapes to Contours (Richard J. Kinch)
• METAFONT source
• Design of a new font family (slides) (Gerd Neugebauer) (1996)
• PERL Module for reading .tfm files (Jan Pazdziora) (1997)
• fig2mf (UNIX manual) (Anthony Starks)
• bm2font (Friedhelm Sowa)
• Essay on math symbols by Paul Taylor
• drgen genealogical symbol font by Denis Roegel, 1996
• Chess fonts
• The Marvosym Font Package (Martin Vogels)
• Eurosymbol, another font for the euro symbol
• Lots of stuff on virtual fonts
• P. Damian Cugley's Malvern (Greek) font
• Yannis Haralambous's Omega project
• DC and EC fonts by Joerg Knappen
• Technical notes on Postscript fonts, and Postscript fonts in TEX
• Computer Modern type 1 fonts
• Articles on computer typography by Sebastian Rahtz, Aarno Hohti&Okko Kanerva, Richard J. Kinch, Basil K. Malyshev, Hirotsugu Kakugawa, Karl Berry, Victor Eijkhout, Vincent Zoonekynd, Tom Scavo, David Wright, Erik-Jan Vens, and Nelson H. F. Beebe.
• Articles on mathematical symbol fonts
• Links to essential pages for Cyrillic, Japanese, Berber, Khmer, Chinese, Korean, Greek, Indic, Syriac, Hebrew, Hieroglyphic, Tibetan, Mongolian, African fc

Learn Yoruba

The YorubaOK font (1998) by James Kass. [Google] [More]  ⦿

LiveGe'ez

Daniel Yacob's fantastic page with a near-complete listing of all available Ethiopic fonts, and with explanations about Ethiopic in HTML pages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Lorna A. Priest

Manager of the Abyssinica font project at SIL. Under an Open Font License, Abyssinica SIL (2006) is for Ethiopic script (for the languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Mandinka.org

Gambian site run by Jouni Jaakkola out of Banjul. It has three free truetype fonts for writing Mandinka, all made by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1994: GamBiaSILSophiaLBold, GamBiaSILSophiaL, GamBiaSILSophiaLItalic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Manfred Klein's Fonteria
[Manfred Klein]

Frankfurt-based designer (b. 1932) whose creative output is so large that he deserves a separate web page. His URL at Moorstation from 2000-2007. New page on him by Florian Rochler. Font squirrel link. Dafont link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Martin Mirucah

Kenyan student of Saki Mafundikwa at ZIVA in Harare, who designed the primitive lettering font Mistari. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Mende

The Mende script from Sierra Leone was devised around 1920 by Kisimi Kamala and is purely phonetic and has 195 characters. The Mende people belong to the Mande group of languages which includes Bambara. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Mina Arko

Slovenian designer (Ljubljana, b. 1983) of the futuristic monoline sans family Nouvelle during the design workshop TipoBrda in 2008. It was perfected and started selling at MyFonts in 2011. In 2009, she created Afrikana, an alphabet with a decidely African theme.

During TipoBrda 2010 in Ljubljana, she created the didone numbering face Kampula.

MyFonts page. MyFonts foundry page. Klingspor link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Monotype

Ethiopic fonts by Monotype: Monotype Ge'ez, Monotype Ge'ez Book. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Monotype

Monotype sells fonts for the following languages: Amharic, Aksara Kaganga, Arabic, Armenian, Balinese, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Coptic, Devanagari (Hindi/Marathi/Nepali), Farsi, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gujerathi, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Hebrew, Japanese, Javanese, Jawi, Kannada, Korean, Laotian, Lontarak, Malayalam, Old Bulgarian, Oriya, Pushto, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Surat Pustaha, Syriac, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Urdu, Vietnamese. [Google] [More]  ⦿

MyFonts: African album

An album on African-themed typefaces at MyFonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Namib Rubber Stamps

Namibian handwriting font service, based in Windhoek. It has a small archive of fonts. One free font: Address Symbols. [Google] [More]  ⦿

N'Ko

N'ko (or Nko) is a West-African alphabet created in 1949 by Souleyman Kante. Its alphabet and rules are shown on this page. It is mainly used by speakers of Malinke, Bambara, Dioula and their dialects, especially in Guinea, Mali and Ivory Coast. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Nko contacts

Main jump site for the West African language Nko. It has Nko fonts for download by these groups:

• Fakoli.net: Koli Nko Manden.
• Kanjamadi (run by N'karamo Baba Mohamed Diané): Mamudu Bamba, A-Manding-BATEkA-GUINE-ms, Karifala-Berete, Mading, Solomana-Kante, MandenUnicode.
• Jason Glavy : JG Nko.

Nsibidi

From Nigeria and Cameroon: this script was invented by the Ejagham people of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon. The ideographs represent life among the Ejagham. Today, nsibidi is still widely used by Cuban blacks and called anaforuana and used by such secret societies as the Abakua. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Okeowo Adeniyi

Nigerian designer of 3d (2011). [Google] [More]  ⦿

OmniTech

Outfit that is supposed to sell some Ethiopic fonts but I can't find them. Based in Addis Ababa. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Pascoal Mbundi

A student of Saki Mafundikwa at ZIVA in Harare, who designed the beautiful human form alphading font Kukumbila Kunyata. Alternate URL. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Patrick Andries

Quebec-based computer scientist who has been involved in the multilingual and Unicode world. He was one of the authors of a proposal adding Tifinagh to Unicode. He is currently working with people in France and Niger on the development of OpenType fonts to support Tuareg. He is also involved in other African scripts such as Moroccan and Sahelian Arabic and a recent script from the Congo (Mandombe). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Paul Ndunguru

Student at ZIVA, a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. In 2001, he designed the experimental alphabet Amandungu. [Google] [More]  ⦿

PenUltimate Type Foundry
[Chris MacGregor]

Foundry in League City, TX, started in 1993 by its head designer, Chris MacGregor. Fonts available through [T-26], Prototype and Image Club. About 40 dollars per face. Interesting display faces include Citore, Zehrgut, LeslieSmith and Manitu. Also check the dingbats Afrobats and Nerybats. It is unclear if Chris designed all of these fonts. I wish they would indicate who made what. Anyway, the list of typefaces: Afrobats, Nerybats, Tagged, Citore, Emulate, Emulate Bold, Bridgework, Epaulet, Utile Inky, Utile Inky Italic, Utile, Utile Italic, Utile Coastic Italic, Utile Caustic, Leslie Smith, Zehrgut, Neohead, Itto Round, Empanel, Empanel Bold, Arrgoculture, Itto Block, Linkletter, Fleming Tall, Fleming Short, Delfinola, Attune, Fleming multiple master, Manitu, Monte Family, Pep Club, Stans. Here he says in 2009: I have over forty commercial typefaces available for sale through various type re-sellers around the world and my average yearly income off the typefaces is $115, even though I regularly see my typefaces in use on the web, on TV in print and in video games. I used to think that one day I'd have a nice supplemental income from my typefaces but the reality of the situation is that people like you don't value the effort that goes into making a typeface. I haven't designed a new typeface in eight years now and I have no desire to do so. Why should I when you're going to be a big bitching twat you greedy self-centered tantrum throwing teenager? Fuck the foundries? You and others who haven't paid for the typefaces you use have been fucking the foundries for years. Fuck the foundries? Fuck you. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Pipian

Designer of Nekogo Hand (2005), which looks either like an artificial language or an African tribal script. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Plagiarists of Ethiopic

Very interesting reading: Aberra Molla of Ethiopian Computers&Software graphically proves plagiarism cases against Ato Yitna Firdyiwek (Modified ModEth to GohaTibeb), and fights the style of Ethiopic practiced by Daniel Yacob, who is also known as Mr. Daniel Mulholland, Ato Fekade Mesfin - Feedel Software, Los Angeles, California, Ato Abass Alamnehe, and Ato Daniel Admasse. He states that the font AmharQ listed at LiveGeez is an illegal (renamed) copy of his GeèzEdit Amharic P font (they took that font and changed the name to AmharQ and passed it on to Dr. Berlin). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Power Ge'ez

Creators in 1998 of the Ethiopic fonts Ge'ez-1-Normal, Ge'ez-1-Numbers-Normal, Ge'ez-2-Normal, Ge'ez-3-Normal. Downloadable here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Quartet Systems
[Eric Wannin]

Eric Wannin's French commercial foundry with PC and Mac fonts for all European languages, most Indic languages, Cyrillic, Vietnamese, Amharic, Inuit, Slavonic, Greek, Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Cri. Hieroglyphic fonts too. Free font family: EuroQuartet. These fonts have one glyph only, the Euro symbol. It has some bar code fonts too.

Multilingual fonts. They cover Braille, East European languages, Turkish, Baltic, Cyrillic, Icelandic and Greek. According to the Google] [More]  ⦿

Retype
[Chris Houston]

Chris Houston (Retype) is the creator of Proletarian (1997, at Chank), Red Shirt (1997, futuristic) and MDMAbeta (1997). Old URL in South Africa. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ryan Rodrigues

Student at ZIVA, a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. In 2001, he designed a font in which letters are inspired by birds. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Sabaean

Sabaean Script font (free by EthioSys): Ethiopian script, PS and TTF. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Sarah Schumacher

American graduate from the type design program at the University of Reading in 2010. She created the typefaces Rhodora and Eskesta for her graduation project: Rhodora and Eskesta were designed together as a harmonious family. Rhodora was inspired by the work of Joseph Blumenthal in the 1930s and the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Rhodora). Eskesta, named after a traditional shoulder dance, follows Rhodora's lead, with a slender calligraphic style from 17th-century Ethiopia. Rhodora and Eskesta are serious and sober, but sympathetic. Created for magazines and newspapers, with support for Amharic and European languages, Rhodora and Eskesta speak clearly in print. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Senamirmir

A free Unicode Ethiopic font called Jiret. More Ethiopic fonts, all by EthiO Systems Company (1994-1995). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Senamirmir Projects
[Abbas Alamnehe]

Thirteen free Unicode 3.0-compliant Ethiopian fonts by Abbas Alamnehe: EthiopiaJiret, EthiopiaJiretSlant, EthiopicFantuwua, EthiopicHiwua, EthiopicTint, EthiopicWashRaBold, EthiopicWashRaBoldSlant, EthiopicWashRaSemiBold, EthiopicWashRaSemiBoldSlant, EthiopicWookianos, EthiopicYebse, EthiopicYigezuBisratGoffer, Sabaean. There are subpages on Ethiopian typographic history.

Fonts2U link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Seonil Yun

Seonil Yun designed Zaghawa Beria (2007, SIL), a free font for Central african writingi, in cooperation with SIL International and the Mission Protestante Franco-Suisse au Tchad. It is built around a sampling of the markings on livestock (especially camels) within the Zaghawa Beria language region of western Sudan and eastern Chad. It is an idea that has its origins in the work of a Sudanese schoolteacher, who developed the first version of this over 25 years ago. The script has since been better adapted to the Zaghawa Beria language by Siddik Adam Issa, and he has found a great enthusiasm by the people for what he has put together. Seonil obtained a Masters degree in type design at KABK in Den Haag in 2008. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Shannah Adams

Student at ZIVA, a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. In 2001, she designed a font with letters made up of lizards. [Google] [More]  ⦿

SIL Cameroon

Free fonts for Cameroonian languages by SIL: CamCamSILDoulosL, CamCamSILDoulosLBold, CamCamSILDoulosLItalic, Cam2Cam2SILManuscriptL, Cam2Cam2SILManuscriptLBold, CamCamSILSophiaL, CamCamSILSophiaLBold, CamCamSILSophiaLItalic, SassoonSansSILCAM. See also here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

SIL International (or: Summer Institute of Linguistics)

Located in Dallas, TX, est. 1934. Founded over 70 years ago, SIL International is a faith-based organization that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world's lesser-known languages. SIL's staff shares a Christian commitment to service, academic excellence, and professional engagement through literacy, linguistics, translation, and other academic disciplines. SIL makes its services available to all without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race, or ethnic background. Fonts in Cyberspace is an archive of many multilingual fonts. SIL Fonts, free to all, and professionally put together include the following:

• Charis SIL Font: A serif, proportionally-spaced font optimized for readability in long printed documents
• Doulos SIL Font: A Unicode font with a comprehensive set of characters needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system (including IPA), whether for phonetic or orthographic needs.
• Gentium: Supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.
• Lateef: An extended Arabic script font for OpenType and AAT systems. See also here.
• Nastaliq Navees: Font package for Nastaliq style of calligraphy
• Scheherazade: An extended Arabic script font for OpenType and AAT systems
• SIL Apparatus Fonts: Symbols used for Biblical text apparatus
• SIL Dai Banna Fonts: Xishuangbanna Dai (New Tai Lue) fonts for Windows and Macintosh
• SIL Encore Fonts: Library of phonetic characters and linguistic symbols. This package includes SIL Doulos (similar to Times), SIL Sophia (similar to Univers), SIL Manuscript (monospace, like Prestige), and SIL Charis (enlarged x-height). Included is Sophia Nubian (2008), which is based on an old Nubian text.
• SIL Encore IPA Fonts: Phonetic fonts
• SIL Font Cache Extender: This Macintosh extension increases the MacOS font cache size. It is useful when working with large fonts, such as SIL Greek, SIL Hebrew, or any GX font.
• SIL Greek Font System (Galatia): Greek font package for Windows and Macintosh. See also here.
• SIL Greek Unicode Font (Galatia SIL): Greek Unicode OpenType fonts
• SIL Hebrew Font System (Ezra): Hebrew font package for Windows and Macintosh
• SIL Hebrew Unicode Font (Ezra SIL): Hebrew Unicode OpenType fonts for Windows
• SIL Tai Dam Fonts: Tai Dam fonts for Windows and Macintosh
• Tai Heritage Pro (2009), designed to reflect the traditional hand-written style of the Tai Viet script.
• SIL Unicode IPA Font beta: Released as Doulos SIL with a more extensive character inventory.
• SIL Vai Fonts: The SIL Vai Fonts are regular and bold versions of the African Vai script used in Liberia
. In 2009, Benjamin Yang (SIL) published the free Vai Slant Unicode.
• SIL Xishuang Banna Fonts: Xishuangbanna Dai (New Tai Lue) fonts for Windows and Macintosh
• SIL Yi Font: Unicode-based Yi font for Windows
• Unicode BMP Fallback SIL font (2008). Intended for debugging, this font contains a glyph for every character in the Basic Multilingual plane (including Private Use Area) of Unicode 5.1, each glyph consisting of a box enclosing the four hex digits identifying the Unicode scalar value.

Fontspace link. Dafont link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Simeon out West Foundry
[Brett T. Johnson]

Brett T. Johnson's outfit in Englewood, CO, sells fonts based on ideas from Byzantine, Ge'ez and old slavonic scripts, to name a few. Brett Johnson was born in Loveland, CO, in 1972. The creations: Simeon's Handwritten Blackletter (2008), Pseudo-Hellenic (2008, a Greek and Latin didone pair), Tiblisi (2008, a Georgian simulation face), Pentopolis (2008, based on an ancient Coptic script), Svati Sava (2008, a Serb-look font), Muscovite Manuscript (2005), Pravoslavnie (2005), Alexandria (2005), Alaskaya (2006), Svati Nikolai (2005), Thebes (2005), Suzdal (2005), Kniga Molitva (2005), Vladimir (2005), Scetis (2005), Adis Ababa (2008). Colonial Press (+Italic) (2008) is based on work by William Caslon I (1692-1766). Klingspor link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Somali

East Afrikan script developed by Isman Yusuf son of the Somali Sultan Yusuf Ali around 1930. Today the script has been replaced by Arabic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Sophia Oduol

Lesotho-based typographer. At Typography Day 2012 she speaks on Innovative applications of Typography - Ancient African Typographic Symbols in Contemporary Publication Design. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Spark-Ceresa

Type designer who created Mecanorma Zambesi, an ornate African-looking biline face. To be bought from URW. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Studio for Transcultural Design-Creative Solutions

Foundry in Vienna that makes gorgeous commercial fonts for African languages. These pictograms are so nice that I will list each of them. The complete font set retails for about 1000 USD.

• Akelouke1: cave writing from the Sahara, 5000BC.
• Bete: symbols from Cote d'Ivoire, 1956.
• Mezzouliet: cave writing from the Sahara, 5000BC.
• Indalag: cave writing from the Sahara, 5000BC.
• Adinkra: modern symbols from Ghana.
• Meroitic: Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• Celto-Iberic: Spanish and North-African runes.
• Canary: runes from the Canary Islands.
• Bamum: pictograms from Liberia, 1890 and 1894.
• Loma: Liberian script, 1930.
• Vai: Liberian script, 1894. The Vai script was devised by Momulu Duwalu Bukele in about 1833 (Near Cape Mount, Liberia).
• Nsibidi: a complex Nigerian system of pictograms and ideograms, known as Nsibidi (or Nsiberi) has been used traditionally in the cross river area of Nigeria, especially among the Ekoi, Igbo and Ibibio.
• Nubian: Ethiopian script.
• Amharic: Another Ethiopian script.
• Ibo Geneva Style: Geneva with proper diacritics for Ibo.
• Nigerian Times.
• Pan African Arial Style.
• Orisha Arial Style.
• Djuka: A pictogram language from Suriname, 1910.
• Voodoo (Veve): A particularly elegant set of pictograms found in Haiti.
• Abakuá: Pictograms from Cuba, 1980.
• Cabbal: Pictograms from Tobago, 1990.

SUBFLUX experiment
[Mickey Rossi]

Mickey Rossi graduated in 1986 from the Philadelphia College of the Arts. He then worked in Maryland and Virginia, such as at AOL in Dulles, VA, and is a creative director in Atlanta, GA since2004.

He offers these free typefaces under the Subflux label: Alpha Male Modern (1997), AthleticSupporter, BallparkWeiner (connected fifties script), BarBenderBold, BobbiTheHippie, BongoFraktur (in Koch's Neuland style), CargoCrate (stencil), CollegeBoy (athletic lettering), FlandersRideItalic, FlandersRide, Fleetwilly, FlyTrapExtended, Hair Brush, HighlightsCondensed, Helga Broad, Hilda Broad, JimThorpeHigh (octagonal / mechanical), LevelFourteenDruid (medieval), LifestyleCondensed (avant garde), NotANumber, On That Shark (angular), RetroSuperSkinny (Peignotian), SatansMinions, Scrawlly, Scritchy Eye, Zerengetti (African look), ZiggyStandard. Rossi calls himself also "Loveless".

Dafont link. Klingspor link. Abstract Fonts link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

SymbolMinded
[Marie Flaherty]

SymbolMinded is Marie Flaherty's foundry in Scituate, MA. Her first typeface is Adinkra Symbols (2012). which is a set of 100 symbols from Ghana named after King Adinkra. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

TeX and Africa

Article by Jörg Knappen (Universität Mainz) on fonts for African languages, published in Cahiers GUTenberg, 1991. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Thaddeus Typographic Center
[Thaddeus Ted Szumilas]

Thaddeus "Ted" Szumilas was born in Poland in 1951. In 1966 he emigrated to the United States where he attended Haaren H.S. and Parsons School of Design, majoring in Graphic Design. Practical experiences at Lubalin, Smith&Carnase Design Studio and with John Pistilli at Sudler&Hennessey ad agency prepared him for the real world of typographic design. He did book jackets, packaging, corporate identity, entertainment and TV. Here is one of his early typefaces. Thaddeus has been teaching the curriculum of basic and advanced typography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, from 1998-2008. Designer of the medieval script family Ovidius Script (2001, FontHaus; in Light, Demi and Bold weights; also known as TS Ovidius), Sans Original, On The Line (2008, great calligraphic grunge), Singles Bar (2008, display sans), Wind Factor (more calligraphic grunge), Agitas Gallery (2008, blackletter), Big New Sign (2008), Breslau City (2008), Daily Fix (2008), Deltona (2008), Nigerian King (2008, avant garde face), Stigmal (2008, African theme), Amerigraf (2009), Election (2009, medieval with a rough outline), Gillateg (2009, grungy outline), Wackoface (grungy like Treefrog), Taliography (2009, another script with a rough outline). URW++ link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

The Ethiopian News Headline Tools

Ethiopian truetype and BDF fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

The Ethiopic Unicode Resource Page

Everything about Unicode-compliant fonts for Ethiopic scripts. The fonts listed and recommended are:

• Code 2000: http://home.att.net/~jameskass/CODE2000.ZIP
• Ethiopia Jiret: http://www.senamirmir.com/download/jiret.zip
• GF Zemen: ftp://ftp.ethiopic.org/pub/fonts/TrueType/gfzemenu.ttf
• Titus Cyberbit: http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/unicode/tituut.asp
• Visual Ge'ez: http://www.custorc.com/downloads/VGNSetup.EXE

Tiro TypeWorks
[John Hudson]

John Hudson and Wm. Ross Mills, the co-founders of Tiro Typeworks, design wonderful top-of-the-line fonts in Vancouver. From the TIRO web page: "TIRO TYPEWORKS is an independent digital type foundry developing&marketing high quality typeface families for PC and Mac platforms. Our commitment is to continuing the independent tradition of typography, as it has existed for more than five hundred years, free from the influence of fashion and novelty." Agfa write-up. Tiro is increasingly involved in font technologies, and are avid advertisers for OpenType and work often with Microsoft and Linotype on projects. Interview in 2008 byy Hiba Studio. Tiro's typefaces:

• Academia (1997, by Mills).
• The titling and display face Aeneas based on classical Roman capitals. This incomplete typeface was created by John Hudson based on glyphs drawn by an Austrian designer.
• 1530 Garamond (one of the most beautiful and faithful revivals of Claude's creations), by Mills.
• Manticore (John Hudson's own absolutely magnificent brainchild).
• Plantagenet (by Mills).
• Sylfaen was designed for Microsoft in 1998 by John Hudson and Wm. Ross Mills of Tiro Typeworks, and Geraldine Wade of Monotype Typography. Sylfaen is a Welsh word meaning "foundation"; an apt name since the font stemmed from research into the typographic requirements of many different scripts and languages. Sylfaen supports the WGL4.0 character set, for Pan-European language coverage. In addition to Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letterforms, the font contains the characters necessary for support of the Armenian and Georgian languages. [Download site, see also here].
• Hudson also does corporate identity work, such as HeidelbergGothicOsF (done for Heidelberger based on NewsGothic). Other clients included Microsoft, IBM and Apple.
• In 2001, Mills developed Pigiarniq (Download site), a multiscript face for native American languages. This project was commissioned by the government of Nunavut, a new Canadian territory. Note: please visit the page on James Evans' type cutting methods: it was this missionary who developed the Cree writing system which was later adapted for use with Inuktitut.
• Winner with Mamoun Sakkal and Paul Nelson at the TDC2 2003 competition for Arabictype.
• In 2003, he is publishing unicode-compliant fonts called SBL Greek, SBL Hebrew and SBL Latin, at the Society for Biblical Literature.
• In 2004, winner of an award at TDC2 2004 with Nyala, an Ethiopic text face, which has a nice Latin component as well.
• Hudson and Mills have, to date, designed and built fonts for the Arabic, Cherokee, Cyrillic, Ethiopic, Greek, Hebrew, Inuktitut (Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics), extended Latin, and Ogham scripts. These include, for example, Adobe Hebrew (2000-2008).
• Constantia (2004, a beautiful OpenType family made for Microsoft's ClearType project).
• Helvetica Linotype (2004), for which he received a TypeArt '05 award for the Cyrillic component.
• Vodafone Hindi (2007, with Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross) won an award at TDC2 2008.
• Gabriola (2008) is a script font by Hudson done for Microsoft---it is included in some Windows packages---see, e.g., here. It has many swashes and special ligatures, but its not connected.

Tom Barden

Tom Barden created the geometric but also playful typeface Evolution (2009). He also made Africa Type (2010) and the octagonal athletic lettering face There It Is (2009). Visually Interesting (2009) is a type experiment. Unity (2011) is a heavy octagonal poster face. He is also working on Airport Icons (2011). He is based in London and is a graphic designer and photographer. Home page. [Google] [More]  ⦿

TransRoman

Commercial Mac and PC fonts from Linguist's Software. These are useful for most European languages, as well as for these African languages: Acholi, Afrikaans, Anyi, Ashanti, Bantu (Zulu, Xosa), Bobangi, Buluba-Lulua, Chikaranga, Fulani-Adamawa, Ga, Kanuri, Kongo, Lu-Ganda, Masai, Mashona (Chiswina), Mole, Namaquah-Hottentot, Nyika, Shuna, Swahili, Tebele, Temne, Umbundu, Wolof, Yao, Yoruba, and Zulu-Kafir. And also for these native American languages: Caddoan, Chippewa (Ojibway and Otchipwe), Choctaw, Cree, Dakota (Sioux), Eskimo, Hupa, Iroquoian, Kalispel, Kwakiutl, Maidu, Muskokee (Creek), Navaho, Osage, Tsimshian, Zuñi. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Twi

Twi is an African language spoken in the southern two-thirds of Ghana. It is written by a common script developed by the Bureau of Ghana Languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Typesetting African Languages

Wonderful essay, TeX-oriented, by Conrad Taylor on the typography of African languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Unicode Afrique

Unicode issues for African languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Unicode Ge'ez

Help page for Eritrean computer users. Has the font GFZemenUnicode (1997, based on the GohaTibeb HP LasterJet fonts, converted and adapted by Biruk Asrat), a Unicode-compliant font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

University of Hamburg

Berhanu Beyene, Prof. Dr. Manfred Kudlek, Olaf Kummer, and Jochen Metzinger from the Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science, University of Hamburg, prepared a set of Ethiopic metafonts. See also here. The fonts are released under GNU GPL. They participate as the Ethiopic experts in the Free Software Foundation project. [Google] [More]  ⦿

VADA Software Talen I-L

Free fonts for Ibo, Inuit, Japanese, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Kanuri, Khmer, Kikongo, Kikuyu, Kinya Rwardan, Hangul, Kpelle, Krio, Kru, Laotian, Latvian, Luba, Luo, Maltese, Oriya, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Pali, Punjabi, Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, African languages such as Mandinka, Mende, More, Ngala. Plus Navajo, Oromo, Ogham, Phoenician. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Vai

The Vai syllabary (Liberia) was devised by Momolu Duwalu Bukele in 1830 near Cape Mount in Liberia. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Valereyes

FontStructor who made the African-themed face Changos4 (2010). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Victor Kudakwashe Bagu

Designer of the free constructivist Cyrillic simulation grunge font VKB KonQa (2006), about which he writes that My typeface was influenced by Communism, Land Politiks, War and Grunge in Afrika. Victor Bagu (b. 1982) lives in Harare, Zimbabwe. Alternate URL. He operates under the label Victorius Graphics. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Victorius Graphics
[Victor Kudakwashe Bagu]

Harare, Zimbabwe-based designer (b. 1982) of KonQa (2006), a grunge Cyrillic simulation face. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Volcano Type (MAGMA)
[Lars Harmsen]

Magma Brand Design in Karlsruhe, Germany evolved in 2004 into Volcano Type. Magma is headed by Lars Harmsen (b. Hannover, 1964) and Ulrich Weiss. Lars Harmsen spent the first four years of his life in Chicago. He then moved to Geneva with his parents for eight years, and then moved to Karlsruhe. He completed his schooling at the French section at the European School. He first studied history and Germanics in Freiburg before beginning to study design at Basel, Boston, Saarbrücken and Pforzheim. He got his degree in graphic design, and in 1996 he founded MAGMA [Büro für Gestaltung] together with Ulrich Weiß. He is the co-founder of STARSHOT GmbH, a design company for sports products, now based in Munich. MAGMA created Type Foundry Volcano-Type.de and the internet forum Slanted.de. In the meantime, Slanted.de has become the most active German typography forum. Volcano Type offers commercial and some free typefaces: DigiBo (Boris Kahl), Objects (free ransom face by the house), MonoPoint and DoublePoint (monospace dot matrix families by the house), Amiga Normal and Rounded (pixel faces by Boris Kahl), Screeny, Pixel and C64 Style (pixel faces by Boris Kahl), Fette Pixel (pixel face by Florian Gärtner), Teckbo (digital face by Boris Kahl, who writes: Retro-Avant-Garde for Club-Flyer-Honks and Plastic-Pussy-Chicks), Psycho (grunge by Boris Kahl), Wald Ast (tree branch look by Sandra Augstein), Wald Blatt (tree leaf look by Tanja Rastätter), Rollerblind (a pair of dot matrix faces by Boris Kahl), Chaucer (uncial by Boris Kahl), Glossy (dot matrix face by Sandra Hofacker), Brüll (a funny frog dingbat face by Andre Rösler), Pax (a free peace symbol face by Heidrun Weißschädel and Alexander Kassel), Mud (free face by Boris Kahl). And these display faces by Florian Gärtner: Republic, Tacora. And finally the Fone 1 through 3 grunge faces by Florian Gärtner. The typefaces of Lars Harmsen (or codesigned by him) at Volcano:

• African look faces: Masai
• Athletic lettering: Sports (grungy, with Kahl), Sports Skinny.
• Blackletter: Fraktape Duct, Fraktape Sticky, Fraktendon (=Fraktur+Clarendon, codesigned with Kahl), Trigot (2010, modular, semi-blackletter), Black Sirkka, Frakturbo, SAR-Lupe
• Diabolo
• Dingbats: Genocide (free). Mr. J. Smith Eye, Mr. J. Smith Head, Mr. J. Smith Mouth, Mr. J. Smith Nose, and Mr. J. Smith Wanted are experimental dingbat faces by Nikolaii Renger, based on an idea of Lars Harmsen, and digitized by Ulrich Weiss and Boris Kahl. These won an award at the 2005 FUSE competition.
• Experimental: Sewed (2009, stitched letters), Cross Fourty, Cross Sixty, Cross Ten, Cross Thirty, Cross Twenty, Cross Ultra
• Grunge: Basalt, Magneta, Punta Negra, Mrs. Tape Tape
• Hand-drawn: B-Scratch (2009, Harmsen and Egger's take on sketched letters), Amebo, Diabolo, Keycaps, Kulli (curly), Oboni, Wawe, Tape One Bold, Tapemate Outline, Tapemate Regular, Tape One Bold
• LED style: Digibeck, Strichcode (a family codesigned with Kahl).
• Kitchen tile faces: Bus, Bus PI, both done with Boris Kahl.
• Oriental simulation: Japanese
• Patriot family, done with Boris Kahl: Saddam, Commander Robot, Fidel, Slobbodan, Osama, George.
• Ransom note face: Kriminal
• Sans families: Copy (2009).

W. Negga

Located in Croydon, UK. Designers of these Ethiopic fonts in 2002: A1-Desta, A1-Kidan, A1-Qelem, A1-Tesfa, A2-Desta, A2-Kidan, A2-Qelem, A2-Tesfa. Downloadable here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Wazéma system

A free Amharic (Ethiopian) writing system for Windows that includes six free Amharic fonts by Welé Negga: A1Desta, A1Tesfa, A2Desta, A2Tesfa, A4Desta, A5Desta. All in truetype. [Google] [More]  ⦿

William Caslon III

British typefounder in London, 1754-1833. Son of William Caslon II, grandson of William Caslon I. He co-owned the Chiswell Street family firm from the death of his father in 1778 until 1792, when he sold his share in the foundry to his mother and his sister-in-law, the widow of his brother Henry. In the same year he purchased the Salisbury Square foundry of Joseph Jackson (apprentice to his grandfather and rival to his father), who had recently died, and called the foundry Caslon&Son. In 1807, this business was passed on to his son William Caslon IV who in turn sold up in 1819 to Blake, Garnett&Co. (later Stephenson Blake). Author of A specimen of printing types (1785, Galabin and Baker, London) and A specimen of cast ornaments (1795, C. Whittingham, London).

Images from A specimen of printing types (1785): a crown, Double Pica Greek, English Arabic, English Italic, Five Line Pica Ships, Long Primer Roman No 1, Pica Black No. 2, Pica Coptic, Pica Ethiopic, Two Line Double Pica, Two Line Great Primer, Two Line Long Primer. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Wilton Foundry
[Robbie de Villiers]

The Wilton Foundry in Wilton, CT, est. by Robbie de Villiers in 2003, published Marcus (2012, a roman type family in the Trajan style), Typetonic (2011, techno), Skript (2011, a stencilish script), Vallassina (2011, like a child's hand), Bellezza (2010), Pagina (2010, humanist sans), Rijk (2010, calligraphic), Saycheez (2009), Chamber (2009, serif face), Ciseaux (2009), Terzo (2009, calligraphic), Werk (2009, 12-style sans family), Velouté (2008, script), Diario (2009, blackboard script), Carnegie Classic (2009, calligraphic), Ziro (2008, almost a comic book font), Suzie Q (2007, handprinted), Brasserie (2007, connected script), Chateau (2007, calligraphic script), Pointe (2007, a blackboard script), Atto Sans (2007), Santa Cruz (2007, a serifed headline face), Marzipan (2007, a whimsical script), Spark (2007), Fete (2006, formal script), Flax (2006), Cyan (2006, a compact serif face reminiscent of Trajan), Ceres (2009, related to Cyan), Cyan Sans (2006), Petronella (2006, medieval script), Pezzo (2006, calligraphic script), Canette (2006, calligraphic script), Vecta Serif (2005), Vecta (2005, sans family; also published in 2006 as Vecta DT (DTP Types)), Cinnamon (2005, children's handwriting), Cilantro (2005, fun handwriting, and its niece Hanna (2008)), Misspink (2005, stone-age simplicity), Brown Fox (2005, script), Celsius (2005, felt tip face), Plumage (2007, formal high contrast calligraphy), Plato (2005, faded roman caps), Diplomat (2006, calligraphic), Duet (2004, calligraphic; also published in 2006 as Duet DT (DTP Types)), Spark (2005), Anno Rex (2005), Hampton, SCelsius, Gluestick, Duet Bold (2005, calligraphic), Duet-Flourishes (2004), Duet2Deux, Duet-Regular (2005), Nobodi Bodoni (2005), About Face (2004, script), Benjamin (2003, a geometric sans), Paella (2005), Boondoggle (2005, curly face), Monotonose (2004), Password (2004), LoosieGoosie (2004), Pippin (2005, transitional serif), Carnegie (2004, calligraphic), LatextBold (2003), ModusBoldItalic (2003), Nantucket (2004), Nicolas (2005), Oslo (2005, a legible sans family), Sepia (faded look), Belair.

Chatype is a geometric slab serif typeface family designed in 2012 for the city of Chattanooga, TN, by Robbie de Villiers and Jeremy Dooley.

View Robbie de Villiers' typefaces. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

XenoType Technologies

Commercial outfit with language kits (including fonts) for these languages: Burmese, Cherokee, Inuktitut, Kannada, Lepcha, Limbu, Lontara, Malayalam, Sinhala, Telugu, Tibetan, Bassa, Cambodian, Ethiopic, Laotian, Saurashtra, Sylheti, Tai Le, Tamil, Assyrian (Syriac), Burmese, Georgian, Khmer. [Google] [More]  ⦿

xorg

Free font depository with many BDF bitmap files. In addition, Adobe's Utopia, Bitstream's Charter, the Lucida fonts, and IBM Courier. Also, GohaTibebZemen (for Ethiopic) and several Syriac fonts from the Syriac Computing Institute. Japanese mirror. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Yoruba Fonts

Shareware Yoruba language fonts developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Yoruba program by Antonia Schleicher. Truetype for Mac and PC. 20USD for the full font, free for lower case letts only. [Google] [More]  ⦿

ZIVA

The Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts is a typography and graphic design school in Harare, Zimbabwe, led by Saki Mafundikwa. Alternate URL. Creative Pro page. [Google] [More]  ⦿