Siren Script from Canada Type is this month’s most popular script font, having lived almost permanently in the top 3 of our Hot New Fonts list. This ravishing unconnected script by by Rebecca Alaccari and Patrick Griffin takes its cue from BB&S’s Stationers Semiscript, produced as a metal font in 1863, and its countless imitations. It also taps into a variety of uncredited film faces from the 1960s. Its mixing of flourished majuscules with more subdued minuscules results in an attractive balance between the formal and the informal — the message is gracefully yet clearly delivered. With four full fonts of different variants, and a fifth that contains alternates, ending letters and some ligatures, the variety is almost endless. Siren Script Pro combines all five fonts into a single one of over 880 glyphs, which includes programming for push-button stylistic alternates and various glyph palette conveniences.

Launched in the early days of January, HVD Bumper is likely to remain one of the year’s heaviest cases – and we mean that literally. Despite its overweight proportions, the font climbed effortlessly to the highest regions of our best-selling new fonts list. Hannes von Döhren’s Bumper is the perfect ultra-bold sans for headlines that want to be LOUD without committing crimes against good taste. A short text set large in Bumper — because of its tiny counters, it won’t work at small sizes — will shout out its message and still fit in with its context. There are three degrees of Bumper: from the broad-shouldered Regular via the narrower Condensed to the artfully squeezed Compressed. For a more anarchic result, try mixing the three widths in one word or line. The effect is one of tension and unrest, but when carefully done, it looks great.

TipografiaRamis published two typefaces on the same day in December, and both became hits. They are both geometric in construction, but otherwise they couldn’t be more different. While Croog is a monolinear face with short rounded serifs, Compass TRF proudly displays its strong vertical stress and has thin, straight lines for serifs. Designed in the vein of the early 1800s “modern face” or Didone types, Compass strikes a balance between the rational and the ornate. It comes in various degrees of flamboyance. While the Regular weight is a rather straightforward roman with some curly elements, the Alternate is an eclectic collection of unusual letterforms. Flourish gets totally decorative in the uppercase, with simple small caps in the lowercase positions.

Tour de Force is a microfoundry from Serbia that joined MyFonts early last year. With Oblik, designer Slobodan Jelesijevic has now scored his first real hit. Oblik is a cool, clean sans-serif, more radical than the foundry’s earlier, smooth-looking Belco family. Oblik’s simplified letterforms exude a space-age atmosphere — the kind of optimistic futurism that may also seem subtly retro. It comes in four weights, of which the middle ones — Regular and Bold — will work smoothly in longer, medium sized texts as well. A jazzy face with a strong personality, Oblik is a good choice for flyers, magazines, posters and packaging. Don’t forget to check out Oblik’s sturdy-looking sibling, the rounded slab serif Oblik Serif.