Fang Roman

Beautifully crafted typography for all of your design needs, from your favorite type designers. Thousands of styles, hundreds of families.

Herzberg Design

Fang

Schmaltzy Thin

Schmaltzy

Thanatos Deck Thin

Thanatos Deck

Thanatos Display Thin

Thanatos Display

Thanatos Text Thin

Thanatos Text

Thanatos Variable Roman

Thanatos Variable

HDC TN FoundryPic

The Herzberg Design Co is a New Orleans based studio specializing in type design, brand identity, art direction, and everything related to letters. A one-man operation founded by Dutchman Matthijs Herzberg, it focuses on unconventional and exuberant work, but always with a sharp eye for detail, quality, and purpose (as such, combining the best of New Orleans with the best of The Netherlands).Letters are the building blocks of graphic design, and of human civilization in general. The Herzberg Design Co excels in the creation of letters that fit your specific requirements, so that the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole.

Fang is an honest attempt to make a Roman &amp; Italic display face as elegant as I am capable of. These letters flow like water, but stand like stone. This is accomplished by maintaining a brush-calligraphy inspired contrast structure, which retains relatively thicker thin strokes (for instance, the right arm on the “V” or the crossbar on the “A”), but becomes fantastically sharp and delicate where strokes end, like the serifs or the tail of the “e”.This three-way contrast structure of thick strokes, thinner strokes, and hairline stroke endings combines with letterforms taken from a variety of historical sources: two-millennia old Roman engravings, Renaissance printing, and the lettering work of Dutch-German artist Helmut Salden, all reconsidered anew to make a coherent gestalt.The deliberations of craftsmanship shine through in other ways. Fang contains very few straight lines. Stems are subtly concave, as are the feet of all serifs, lending a breath of humanity to forms that may otherwise feel rigid. While digital typography can easily be mathematically perfect, our eyes and souls are always more sated by the godly imperfection.Elegance also means restraint. Tempting, for instance, were cap-to-cap ligatures, which are quite trendy in editorial design. I had to face, however, that Fang simply looks best as is: letters unconnected, each standing strong on its own. Similarly, the allure of swashes was resisted—too much flamboyance would defeat the concept. Nonetheless, a few alternates did sneak their way into the stylistic sets, as well as some finely executed ligatures for the lower case (and maybe 1 or 2 for the uppercase—what freak could publish a Roman titling font without a T-T or O-O ligature?).While the uppercase between Roman and Italic is quite similar (as is tradition), there’s a large difference between the two lowercases. The Roman is exceptionally wide, with many letters being slightly wider than tall, with generous spacing. The italic, on the other hand, is heavily condensed and far tighter, so that clear contrast can be established between the two. Besides that, the italic letterforms are entirely different, being based on a quicker, cursive calligraphic hand than the Roman’s slow and deliberate strokes.Fang is equipped with a wide array of punctuation, math &amp; currency symbols, and Latin language support. It also comes with painstakingly drawn small capitals (boy, do I hate making those) and many OpenType features like ligatures, lining figures, fractions, and much more.<a href="https://www.herzbergdesign.com/blog/2022/8/9/on-fang">A blog post on the design process behind Fang</a>

Schmaltzy is about as relaxed as a blackletter can get. It contains not a single sharp edge, only smooth curves flowing gleefully into one another.This concept was once applied by Oswald Cooper to his Roman typeface, Cooper Oldstyle, the most famous weight of which saw popular success under the name “Cooper Black”.It could be said that Schmaltzy is to a blackletter what Cooper Oldstyle is to a Roman: Cooper Blackletter.But that’s a bit reductive. Schmaltzy is also a modernization of classical blackletter faces, legible to today’s reader and with far fewer connotations than other blackletters. If you’re looking for a fresh, friendly, and highly usable take on the genre, look no further.Ultimately based on calligraphic hands, Schmaltzy merges a weight and width-axis into one: a nib size axis. As the weight goes up, the typeface expands in width considerably too, which can help you fit your type more easily, as well as allow for dramatic contrasts.By default, Schmaltzy’s characteristics are more vanilla: the standard capitals are more akin to Roman forms, which makes them easily recognizable to today’s eyes, and appropriate for use in an all-caps setting. However, with a click of the button, they can be switched to beautiful, ornamental fraktur caps–great for a more historic or fantasy vibe.Similarly, Schmaltzy contains an abundance of alternates and opentype features that allow you to control the level of spice, and generally help you set some powerful, versatile type. It’s all about the details, and this beauty has lots of them!As always, Schmaltzy has lots of extended Latin alphabet support (Latin Plus, to be exact), supporting over 200 languages. Where unicode fails, built-in localized form features step in to assure optimal typography.

A typeface two years in the making; my most ambitious project to date. Eight weights, three optical sizes, in Roman and Italic. Chock-full of features and support for good typography—obviously.Thanatos has roots in calligraphy and wood carving (a skill I’ve tried to pick up but haven’t gotten very good at)—as evidenced by the ragged cuts on circular strokes, broken counterforms, and subtly concave stems.Originally conceived as a custom typeface for a short horror film, Thanatos has sharp features and knife-like serifs. However, this aesthetic doesn’t inherently say “Horror”—instead, it lends an air of craftsmanship and solidity. No coincidence, as a strong influence on Thanatos is Berthold Wolpe’s 1930’s Arts &amp; Crafts banger Albertus (used as a credit font throughout Jon Carpenter’s entire filmography).Albertus’ influence shows most clearly in Thanatos’ contrast structure: horizontal and vertical strokes are almost even in thickness (like a sans serif), while connections between strokes, like the shoulder onto the stem of “n”, are razor thin.These delicate features are awesome for display sizes, but become muddy when set smaller. Hence, Thanatos Text was developed, which features more robust stroke connections and serifs, as well as wider forms and more generous spacing. The Deck cut forms a welcome solution for the pesky in-between cases.The Italic uppercase uses the same forms as the Roman, but slanted (and optically adjusted to look nice). The lowercase, however, uses a different ductus (a fancy word for a calligraphic model), which emulates cursive writing motions, but still with the same parameters as the roman to help the two relate. In some letters, this is very noticeable. In others, it’s very very noticeable. All in all, Thanatos is the most versatile type family I’ve yet released, but does not sacrifice character one bit to do so. I hope that it can help you to focus your death drive on the things important in life.<a href="https://www.herzbergdesign.com/blog/2023/6/1/on-thanatos">Read more about the process behind Thanatos</a>