I’m a fan of the exljbris Font Foundry, partially because it provides all of its fonts for free*. The exljbris Font Foundry is the project of Jos Buivenga, who says he named the foundry after an ex libris (with his initials, jlb, replacing the lib in libris). To save you a trip to the dictionary: an ex libris is an inscription on a bookplate to show the name of the book’s owner. Jos Buivenga has won numerous awards for his fonts and was interviewed for the September edition MyFonts Creative Characters.
In this post, I will gather samples of exljbris fonts along with descriptions by Jos Buivenga of how these fonts might be used.
*Some exljbris fonts are available for free in just one or two weights.
Anivers
“The name Anivers derives from the word anniversary and was originally designed to celebrate the anniversary of Smashing Magazine. I wanted it to be a robust and rigid font, forgiving, flexible and elegant… and also suitable for a broad use: from a stationery to a poster headline. From an intro in a magazine to a base for a logo.” -JLB
Calluna
“Calluna started out as a little test I did to see if I could add serifs to Museo, to make a slab serif. Because of its pipe bend serifs I suddenly saw the connection between serif and stem, and some sort of direction. I thought that the direction idea might be a nice theme to shape Calluna as a text typeface with flow.” -JLB
Delicious
“Special attention was given to character spacing to obtain a homogenic appearance. With its relatively large x-height the Delicious can be used for text in smaller point sizes.” -JLB
Fertigo Pro Script
“In the process of making an italic for Fertigo Pro, I decided to make a connected script based on this.” -JLB
Fontin
“The Fontin is designed to be used at small sizes. The color is darkish, the spacing loose and the x-height tall. The numbers of the Fontin have a ‘hybrid’ design. They carry the characteristics of medieval numbers, but their size is larger than the x-height.” -JLB
Fontin Sans
“I’ve designed Fontin Sans to be a suitable sans companion of Fontin. With a nice classical appearance it will be a perfect match. Fontin will be rereleased in OpenType format (soon) as Fontin Semi (with a Bold Italic) to match new metrics an kerning. Be sure to check back once a while.” -JLB
Museo
“MUSEO … it all started with my love for U. One day this uppercase letter U just came to me as an image in a daydream. I saw the top of both stems bended into semi-slab serifs. From this principle I worked out the rest of the uppercase letters. My first intention was to make it an all-caps display font but after a few months I changed my mind. I wanted it to be a bit more versatile, so I decided to add lowercase and adjusted spacing and kerning to increase legibility.” -JLB
Museo Sans
“Museo Sans is based on the well-known Museo. It is a sturdy, low contrast, geometric, highly legible sans serif typeface very well suited for any display and text use. Two fonts are absolutely free!” -JLB
Museo Slab
“When Museo became a succes I researched some possibilities of other versions. So… I made Museo Sans and while doodling around and fiddling with slab serifs to make Museo Slab I discovered something nice I used to design Calluna first. Of course that escapade had a reason. I couldn’t find the right solutions to all Museo Slab’s design hurdles.
About one year later —after a radio interview with Aaron and Matt from RBtL —my interest in Museo Slab got fired up again. Don’t know why, but this time I got it all working.” -JLB
Tallys
“Tallys is a font that is one degree slanted and has large caps, a small x-height and long ascenders. It comes (see also Fontin) with hybrid numbers and a complete character set.” -JLB