A “point of view” is really just a shortcut phrase to say a designer has the ability to ingest all that is going on around him or her, including the work of fellow designers, and still create something that expresses the creator’s unique experiences, skills, or way of thinking. You will find echoes of Sutturah in other typefaces – the brushy exuberance of Bello, the incisions of Klimax or the ultra weight of Tomate. But when all is said and done, Sutturah can’t be confused with any of those faces.

Think of Sutturah as a collision of competing desires. On the one hand, it’s jovial, overstuffed, and good-natured. On the other, it’s got a taste for fast cars and loose women. Yeah, I said loose women (change it to men, if you like). There’s an undercurrent of speed, recklessness and mischief – carried out formally in part by Sutturah’s incisions – that transforms the typeface into something beyond the sum of its parts.

As of now, Sutturah is a single weight with glyphs supporting Latin-based languages. Its publishing foundry (Rosetta) focuses on multi-script fonts and, to that end, promises a Cyrillic is in the works. Adding the extra glyphs should be relatively easy for Octavio but after setting the bar this high, his next release might be another story.

Nicole Dotin is a typeface designer and partner at the Process Type Foundry. Her typeface Elena is on the Typographica 2011 list, too.

Although, of course, issued in OpenType format, Nouvelle Vague comes in just one weight with comparably few fancy features. Instead of including the countless ligatures or contextual alternates that fonts today use to emulate hand-lettering, for example MVB Sacre Bleu, Elena Albertoni focused on simple, impactful letters that look lively and natural even when OT features are switched off or can’t be applied (still the case in some applications and browsers, but also when you encounter a lazy user, like – believe it or not – me). Alternatives are provided for letters that frequently recur like ‘i’, ‘l’, ‘n’, ‘r’ but strangely not ‘a’ or ‘e’. Also, a small set of ligatures are included, mostly combinations with ‘f’ and ‘b’ although I don’t see the urgent need for those. The ‘AE’, ‘OE’, ‘&’, and ‘ß’ are particularly nice.

The uppercase characters have a different rhythm and are more expressive. Here, too, a few alternates are provided, e.g. smaller versions of vowels to accommodate accents. The caps in general are quite large. My guess is that they look best as initial letters of single words or in languages which don’t use uppercase letters as frequently as German. But the main field of application for Nouvelle Vague isn’t long continuous text anyway. I see it in all kinds of jobbing work, posters, headlines in print or on the web, packaging or display, and – like where it all started – as a piece of lettering for a French hotel.

Obsessed with topics such as the history of sans serifs and the classification of typefaces, Indra Kupferschmid is a German typographer, teacher, and traveling activist for the good cause of good type.

Siegel’s future has finally arrived and rising type designers have been doing fantastic things with OpenType’s huge playground. This year, Laura Worthington shines with Alana, a contemporary handwriting script that can play casual or formal, equally effortlessly. With hundreds of alternates and a few handy ligatures (Alana Pro also includes dozens of lovely ornaments), it’s a delight to keep trying different things with it. You can rein it in as you need to or let it flourish; it seems happy either way.

I chose Alana for the main identity of Rita Moreno’s autobiographical show at Berkeley Repertory Theatre this past fall. Though I didn’t take full advantage of the font’s features for the logo, its essential character came through, even with its default glyphs. Like Rita herself, Alana is just the right mix of playful and sophisticated, rough and polished. An instant classic.

Cheshire Isaacs, an art director and writer who also shoots photos and video, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughter.

Libertine is dagger-sharp and sexy. Don’t let the relatively short descenders or that charming ‘g’ fool you. There’s something devious in how quickly the letters shoot up and down. Like a paper cut, it sneaks up on you. This script has its curves but is far more interested in angles, leading to boxy apertures and a trenchant tone.

Now, Libertine still has a robust glyph palette that will surely help when repetitive characters hurt the typography. But, for the most part, the alternates serve as slight, deft touches, rather than overwrought flourishes that demand to be tried. There’s nothing worse in setting scripts than getting to the end of a treatment and finding you’ve unleashed every trick.

The biggest surprise is in the numbers. Most notably, the ‘2’, ‘3’, and ‘5’ show off a sort of handmade feel. It’s this kind of crafty finish that keeps Libertine from aged classicism and allows it to work so well in a contemporary setting. It pairs easily with bold sans serifs.

Go ahead, slice pages in half with 500-point drop caps. Give your perfect little Swiss grid some much needed energy. Remind yourself that every stroke need not be “pretty”. At $50, Libertine will set you free.

André Mora is the Design Director of Seattle Met magazine. He likes it when fonts are printed on paper.

The three script fonts — Studio Lettering Swing, Slant and Sable — deliver just what one expects from a House Industries font family: high-quality, fresh, lively signwriter-style “hand lettering”. Yet unlike most “script fonts,” text set in the Studio Lettering faces looks anything but mechanical. Smart OpenType programming produces alternating letter shapes so that the result looks natural.

Owing some to House’s earlier successes, House Script and House Casual, the first member of the series, Sable, recreates the friendly “store signwriter” look — but takes it a few steps ahead. After an extensive study of handwriting differences between America and various European countries, Ken Barber created (in all three fonts of the series) letter and digit variants that follow different national preferences. In Sable, there is a “forward” and a “reverse” ‘r’, a ‘7’ with and without a horizontal stroke in the middle, or a ‘p’ with a swoosh or with a bowl. The variants have been linked to the OpenType language selection mechanism, so assigning a different language in InDesign automatically gives the text the appropriate local flavor. Bloody awesome! Also, the diacritics in all three fonts are really well done. I only wish Sable included the all-favorite “Sale! Yes! Free! Call!”
wordmarks, ideally with localized variants.

With more than 1,400 glyphs, Studio Lettering Swing has the most extensive character set in the suite. Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t. Rather than randomly switching alternate letterforms, Swing smoothly flows between slightly larger and smaller shapes, which produces a recurring rhythm. Signwriter-style, and a bit girly.

To me, the third member of the suite, Studio Lettering Slant, is probably the most impressive. The localized flavors in this bold, backslanted, somewhat serious script go as far as allowing the user to switch to a German-style flavor, in which some letterforms are derived from Sütterlin — a kind of a handwriting counterpart to Fraktur. But while Fraktur has very little practical application today, the German flavor of Slant feels very authentic, reminding me of handwritten signs that I still sometimes see in Berlin.

Overall, I’m impressed and amazed.

Based in Berlin, Adam Twardoch works as product and marketing manager at FontLab as well as multilingual typography and font technology consultant for MyFonts and other clients. He teaches at universities in the UK, USA, Germany, Poland, and Russia. In 2007, Adam edited the Polish edition of Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style”.

Paul has explained that he moved back in time, before Louis Madarasz, to conjure up the spirit and style of Platt Rogers Spencer. What more to say? The work of a man largely responsible for shaping American penmanship plus the genius of Ale Paul equals a stunning new script. I can’t wait to see what Ale has in store next.

Christian Palino is a salty Cape Codder and currently a design strategist at Adaptive Path. He’s appeared in and written for various design publications and has taught courses on subjects including typography and service design at IUAV University of Venice, Domus Academy, and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

This typeface is rich, voluptuous and mondo bodacious; but it’s also clever, educated and exceedingly gracious. At first you’re astounded by its unique combination of straights, cusps and spikes, where other charming fonts look decidedly pudgy in comparison. But then you note Pitu’s competence in OpenType, with standard & discretionary ligatures, swash capitals & finials, and multiple styles of numerals. After that you’re struck by its fluency in Latin encodings, extending far beyond Eastern Europe (its region of origin). For a moment, you start resenting that loyal, staid text face back home.

Most breathtaking in the bold weight, Pitu is no mere fling however: it exhibits an impressive and refreshing balance of fervent expression and graceful craft, a balance entirely absent in the gaggles of juvenile display fonts and the neutered humanist sans armies we’re surely tired of by now. This balance gives it staying power, even though its creator professes having “absolutely no clue what Pitu is useful for.”

Some fonts avoid parties, and some fonts just get drunk at them. Pitu adores parties, but never gets lost in them; and some typographers will doubtless get lost in the party that is Pitu.

Hrant Papazian’s perspective on written communication was formed at the crossroads of three competing visual cultures. A multimedia designer by trade, his true love remains the black-and-white, but colorful world of non-Latin typeface design, with commissions from Agfa, Unitype, IKEA, the Narod Cultural Institute, Disney, UCLA, the Israel Postal Authority, Liverpool University and TeX Users Group.

It’s a sort of calligraphic typeface that is not directly influenced by writing. The calligraphy is found in a collection of playful details incorporated into a real true typeface. Like Madisonian by Thierry Puyfoulhoux, Zanzibar is an italic that is very structured without losing the charm of a good italic. It’s a controlled italic. The black and white rhythm of the “repetitive” counters, good proportions, and good spacing, makes a professional face.

Jean François Porchez created the typefaces for Le Monde and the Paris métro, and more recently for the Baltimore Sun, Beyoncé Knowles, Costa Crocieres, and Louis Vuitton. He offers his retail typefaces at typofonderie.com. Porchez is Honorary President of the ATypI and was ATypI President from 2004–2007. He was awarded the Prix Charles Peignot in 1998.

OpenType has finally brought us the technology to create and use fonts which successfully emulate the improvised, context-driven characteristics of handwriting. It has also brought us an alarming new wave of pseudo-calligraphic kitsch. Typefaces come with hundreds of fancy ligatures, elaborate swashes and unnecessary flourishes, force-feeding us the kind of mindless “elegance” that some hoped Modernism had gotten rid of once and for all.

Some designers, such as Berlin-based Elena Albertoni, have realized that the wonders of OpenType aren’t only there to make type perform affected tricks or go orna-mental, but can also be a tool to simulate normality. Elena, a computer programmer’s daughter, combines a strong sensibility to the aesthetics of the handmade with a nerdy determination to make fonts behave more intelligently. Two of her script fonts were introduced to the general audience last year: Dolce and Dyna. Both were begun while studying and working in Paris, and further developed in Berlin, where she has worked at Lucas de Groot’s FontFabrik.

The two fonts are closely related. Dolce, an earlier version of which won an award in the 2005 TDC competition, is the most regular and well-behaved of the two. One of its features is a piece of OpenType wizardry that replaces uppercase with small caps when you’re trying to set a word in all-caps: the capitals were designed to be used as initials only. It’s a nice illustration of how a quality-obsessed type designer is now able to actually manipulate (or “help”) typographically naive users through technology.

My personal favorite is the more whimsical Dyna. It dances above and below the baseline, varying the angles of its strokes in a convincingly spontaneous rhythm. It also suggests alternate characters and specially made glyph combinations on-the-fly. When typing a word like “trapping” in InDesign, for instance, the font will make five glyph substitutions to select the best version of each letter in the given context. It is by no means the first time this is done, but in Dyna’s case, the result is so modest and self-evident that it seems to deny the sophisticated technology that’s going on in the back office. A fine piece of work — and very usable.

Jan Middendorp is a Dutch type writer and page maker working in Berlin. He wrote the acclaimed Dutch type and co-edited “Made with FontFont”. He is a contributor to Eye and was one of the 10 curators of Area2 (Phaidon). He works as consultant and editor for companies such as Linotype and MyFonts and is a book designer for Lannoo and Lannoo Campus publishers in Belgium.

Dozens of swash characters, ligatures (some specifically created for beginnings- or ends-of-lines) and ornaments reinforce its handmade — but much more than “handwritten” — quality. Subtle curves, sharp contrast and fanciful curlicues give it an outgoing personality which rivals some of the best formal scripts of recent years, and make this an immensely useful script, even while its (formalized) graffiti-esque roots make it apropos for less serious work.

Joshua Lurie-Terrell is the founder of Typographica and has since moved on to successful blogging ventures like Hewn & Hammered and Urban Cartography. His days are spent as graphic designer for the California State Senate.