Several months ago, Dutch designer Jos Buivenga made a splash with Museo, a geometric semi-serif font family that was partially made available for free. The strategy worked — countless users also bought the fonts that were not gratis. Anivers is a follow-up to Museo in more ways than one. Again, some of the weights can be downloaded at no cost. And as the designer recently explained on the I Love Typography blog, its curves evolved directly out of Museo’s, although it took major tweaking and redrawing for one font to become the other. Buivenga calls Anivers “robust and rigid, forgiving, flexible and elegant.” A font with built-in contradictions, it is suitable for anything from calling cards to posters. We’d hesitate to recommend it for immersive text, though: it’s probably got too strong a character for that. No pun intended.

A perfectly connected script was once the holy grail of metal typesetting. Just try making a naturally flowing font with each letter on a rectangular chunk of lead! However, some metal typefaces came pretty close to the perfect illusion, and Jerry Mullen’s Repro (ATF, 1953) was one of them. Mullen Hand is a fresh digitization of Repro, taking full advantage of the possibilities of digital type design. Two- and three-letter ligatures take care of the r, s, x and z connections. These special ligatures are programmed so that they automatically activate in programs that support advanced typography.

Mullen Hand is casual yet elegant; its even strokes and confident connections make it a professional solution for a variety of applications, from posters and signs, to book and music covers and product packaging. The OpenType version of Mullen Hand combines the regular font as well as ligatures and alternates in one font, and includes programmed features for localization, alternation and intelligent substitution.

Insigne’s Aviano and Aviano Sans were last year’s “Top display couple.” After Aviano Slab, Aviano Serif is the latest addition to the family. It is an interesting step forward from the other serifed roman in the series, the original Aviano. Although the differences seem minimal at first sight, the new serifs are quite different: less intuitive, more regular, and more sturdy. Aviano Serif features the classically inspired construction and extended proportions of Aviano, but has more weights. It is also larger on the body — that is, it looks bigger at the same point size. Aviano Serif is a font for luxury mastheads, headlines and logotypes. Check out the eagle ornaments for unique custom designs.

A new script typeface from the Argentinean type tandem Angel Koziupa and Alejandro Paul is always something to look forward to. Koziupa is a lettering artist with forty years of experience in advertising and packaging design; Paul is a specialist of technically complex type design. As part of the Sudtipos collective, they combine their skills to create succulent script fonts like the recent Chocolate, and this beauty. Oxida has the unmistakable calligraphic pizzazz of all Sudtipos scripts, but this time the letters have a ragged, rusty edge — hence the name. You won’t notice it in small sizes, so it works best when used BIG, on posters, book covers and family size potato chip packaging. The script connects impeccably and there are plenty of alternates for the lowercase.