Elfreth Elfreth Light 120 px Fonts ▼ Light Regular Bold Black Features ▼ Oldstyle #s Preservational Society Dungeons & Dragons? Elfreth Regular 120 px Fonts ▼ Light Regular Bold Black Features ▼ Oldstyle #s Frontier Pyschiatrist The Balrog of Melkor Elfreth Black 120 px Fonts ▼ Light Regular Bold Black Features ▼ Oldstyle #s Total Armageddon Holographic Lodge Elfreth Bold 60 px Fonts ▼ Light Regular Bold Black Features ▼ Oldstyle #s Cursiva refers to a very large variety of forms of blackletter; as with modern cursive writing, there is no real standard form. It developed in the 14th century as a simplified form of textualis. Elfreth Regular 60 px Fonts ▼ Light Regular Bold Black Features ▼ Oldstyle #s Fraktur is a form of blackletter that became the most common German blackletter typeface by the mid-16th century. Its use was so common that often any blackletter form is called Fraktur in Germany. Elfreth Light 60 px Fonts ▼ Light Regular Bold Black Features ▼ Oldstyle #s Hybrida is also called bastarda (especially in France), and as its name suggests, is a hybrid form of the script. It is a mixture of textualis and cursiva, developed in the early 15th century. About Elfreth What if blackletter was for more than graduations and gravestones? Perhaps more than any other style of type, blackletter tends to carry a lot of baggage. It would probably be safe to assume that pretty much everyone in the latin-type-using world has an association with it; some of these are good and some are not so good. Is there a way to make a blackletter typeface that pushes against these associations? Elfreth is an attempt to make a blackletter typeface that is less strict in its upbringing. Part of what makes blackletter so interesting (and challenging to read) is its repetition of form in its lower case. Most of us, when we think of repetition of form in letterforms, tend to think of the Modernists and their sans serif designs. Everyone from Herbert Bayer with his Universal Alphabet to Max Miedinger with Helvetica was working to make every letter look the same, something blackletter had already been doing for several hundred years. Part of our goal was to liven up this space—add a bit more character and a little less severity to the notoriously rigid blackletter we are so familiar with. While really interesting, this Didot Blackletter is so uniform in the lowercase it is almost unreadable. The starting point was with the contrast. Blackletter usually has a strong contrast between thicks and thins, Elfreth was a study in the effect of keeping things more mono-linear. This effect, we found, immediately made things a bit more casual (and gave us the cool bone-like strokes on the top of the ascenders). So we had something that was casual but it was still a bit sterile. It was then that we discovered the work of Max Körner. The cover of Max Körner’s lettering manual. Seeing that blackletter could be written with this kind of character was such a breath of fresh air (despite the lettering manual being around 90 years old). This work helped us solidify our direction. While we wouldn’t be copying anything in particular about his work (those crazy dieresis, for example), we couldn’t help but be inspired by the overall feel of it. With that work on our mind, we took our bone-y blackletter and started to humanize it. By playing with contrast and swapping some sharp angles with graceful curves, Elfreth took on a much more lively personality without looking like handwriting. Another area of contention was what to do about some of the uniquely blackletter designs of some characters. The lower-case x and k, in particular can be quite indecipherable to a lot of non-German readers. For Elfreth, a compromise was devised that blended the traditional German form with the more familiar non-German design. Elfreth compared to work by Rudolf Koch. The k and x in Koch’s design are harder for non-Germans to read. Elfreth ended up as blackletter that isn’t a pastiche or anachronistic. It is meant to be used in contemporary design. Due to the modulation of its unique strokes, the personality of the typeface changes as weight is built up, giving the black weight a different feel from the light, while still carrying the same relationships all the way through the extremes. OpenType Features Default Activated Oldstyle Numbers 012345012345 Contextual Alternates Tb Th ll rvTb Th ll rv Language Support Afrikaans Albanian Algonquin Asturian Basque Bavarian Bemba Bikol Bosnian Breton Catalan Cheyenne Cornish Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Faroese Fijian Finnish FrenchGalicianGerman Greenlandic HawaiianHungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Kurdish Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Madurese Malagasy Malay Maltese Mandinka Māori Norwegian Occitan Polish PortugueseQuechua RomanianRomansh Northern Sámi Lule SámiInari Saami Samoan Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Strine Swahili Swedish Tagalog Tswana Turkish Umbundu Vietnamese Walloon Welsh Wolof Xhosa Zulu Buy Elfreth ❶ License Type Standard Apps Trial All Standard Licenses Allow for Desktop & Web Use. •5 Computers •Unlimited Number of Websites •500,000 Unique Viewers Per Website Per Month *Larger quantities can be added in the cart 1 Year Personal use only ❷ Typefaces Elfreth Full Family Elfreth Full Family Web Elfreth Full Family App Elfreth Full Family Trial The entire collection of 4 fonts50% Savings over purchasing all 4 fonts individually The entire collection of 4 fonts The entire collection of 4 fonts $100 $ $900 $0 Elfreth Light Elfreth Light Web Elfreth Light App Elfreth Light Trial $50 $ $250 $0 Elfreth Regular Elfreth Regular Web Elfreth Regular App Elfreth Regular Trial $50 $ $250 $0 Elfreth Bold Elfreth Bold Web Elfreth Bold App Elfreth Bold Trial $50 $ $250 $0 Elfreth Black Elfreth Black Web Elfreth Black App Elfreth Black Trial $50 $ $250 $0