Alexandra Oldaker

I never needed to digitize this early design from 1988. I found it in a drawer underneath layers of dozens of other type designs. The drawings were made with ink on paper, about 15 cm high, meticulously executed and retouched separate glyphs for a primitive photo-lettering.

I used a photographic magnifier to set words and lines in my darkroom. In 2018 I decided to make a font out of it just for fun...

Waba Pronounced Vah-bah, is a font family that I designed. The name comes from a historical variation on the Estonian word vaba meaning free, or at liberty.

More Back in 2017 I visited the Estonian Print & Paper Museum in Tartu to see its great collection of type (well worth a visit!).

While I was there I saw some big woodcut blocks of Reklameschrift Herold - a super Art Nouveau/Jugendstil style display font.

The Print & Paper Museums collection covers both Latin and Cyrillic faces and as a foreigner in these parts I'm kind of fascinated by the exoticism of Cyrillic.

How it is different but the same to the Latin letters I take for granted (as a humble Englander no excuses).

Not to mention, Jugendstil with its imitation of natural form, reverse-weights and looping-delicious curves (like you've left the window open all summer and the garden plants are climbing in).

This mix of Jugendstil, Cyrillic letters and the beautiful historical border town of Tartu inspired me to start drawing Waba.

Trimming the serifs from Herold, simplifying those angles and expanding the category of weights, then taking look at the magical logic of Berthold Block and doing a few things that just seemed right at the time Waba is a bit of love letter to Estonia, the Baltics and the visual history of Eastern Europe.

Waba Monogram Waba also contains a monogram face, which allows you to create any monogramming latin and cyrillic.

Simply type out your 2-3-4 characters in Waba Monogram, making sure Contextual Alternates is turned on them voila! Monograms can be customised manually using the OpenType select-pop-up in Adobe.

Also included are a few Discretionary Ligatures for Mc, De, Von etc. Monograms work best when Contextual Alternates is turned on.

Wieynck Gotisch, a 1920s font family created by Heinrich Wieynck, was completely redrawn and redesigned for modern usage.

Use this remarkable and eye-catching fonts in an appropriate context. This font contains a bunch of useful ligatures, and by typing N, r and period plus activating the discretionary ligatures you get an oldstyle numbersign.

The round s lies on the #-key.

Suprema is 14 fonts modern sans serif family precisely designed for geometric perfection. It has 7 weights with matching true italics. When it comes to Opentype it has lots of features such as tabular lining, proportional oldstyle, tabular oldstyle, ligatures, superscript, subscript, fractions and language localisations for Polish, Dutch, Romanian, Moldovian and Catalan.

Suprema fits perfectly to any kind of modern graphic design project, it can be strikingly beautiful to look at as a logotype or pleasure to read in a long text.

It will definitely add a modern look and sense of professionalism to any piece of typography.

Folkwang is an unusual roman type with a lowercase that resembles an upright italic. Unusual top serifs are contrasted by almost no foot serifs. Originally released by the Klingspor foundry in 1955, this face originated from Hermann Schardt while he was the director of the Folkwang Werkkunstschule in Essen Germany circa 1949.

According to British book designer and printing historian John Dreyfus in the 1955 Penrose Annual: Folkwang is a lovingly made piece of work which could have easily have been little more than an act of awe-struck reverence for the calligraphic techniques rediscovered by Edward Johnston and spread abroad in Germany by Anna Simons.

Of special interest is the serif treatment of the lower-case letters: at the feet the terminals are mostly left bare, but the ascenders and the cross-strokes of the f and t are given elaborate curving serifs which in the mass create an effect unusual in a page of letters made as movable types, resembling rather more a piece of intaglio engraving.

The ligatures ch and ck are original and successful.

Koralle was an abundant family of grotesque font styles which had been released by Schelter & Giesecke in the first quarter of the previous century.

Out of this family four of the most impressive styles were revived, whereby I stuck as close to the original as possible.

All styles contain even the weird-looking capitalized German double-s of which I am a strong opponent.