Here are some of the current Hackberry font packages for sale on this site. My focus for my font designs has always been functionality, usability, and readability. My most recent efforts have been directed toward developing book design font groups to help you design books of grace and elegance which are exceptionally easy and comfortable to read.

The problem is that most excellent text fonts for body copy have fairly small x-heights and there are not many sans serifs with x-heights that small. As a result, good book design font groups are rare. You can put together some fairly decent modern versions with large x-heights—but they’re frustrating also because they are obviously not designed as a package.

Hackberry font packages available on this site

Most font designs simply ignore the issues of book design. We need companion font families with the same vertical metrics to enable smoothly flowing run-in heads, the strong emphasis tools like switching from serif to sans within a body copy paragraph—or run-in topics in lists, for example.

So far, I have developed three of these book design groups.

The Contenu/Buddy Book Design Group

This gives you an “old-fashioned” group of modern fonts for use with books which need a traditional look with a new twist. The first Hackberry font packages used Contenu and Buddy.  Contenu began as an oldstyle font which I’d been working on for years. I built it into a  family with many up-to-date OpenType twists. Buddy started as a loose sans I really love named Aerle. I tidied the family up quite a bit to make it more palatable for the general public. But it still has that twinge of breaking loose—a little bit. Contenu and Buddy share the same vertical metrics and work very well together. It was my go-to set of fonts I used for my house fonts for half a decade [which is really a long time for me]. Seventeen fonts for $29.99, including the licensing for ebook use and the desktop license.

Buy the Contenu/Buddy production group This link includes licensing for print and ePUBs. Email me for a written copy, if needed.

The Librum Book Design Group

After using Contenu/Buddy for a long time, I began to see some limitations for the general market. I needed a new set of house fonts to use with my clients—recognizing that my personal taste in fonts is not mainstream [as lamentable as that may be 😉 ]. So, I set about trying to make a more normal book design group. (Yea, I know. That’s a real stretch for me.) The result was Librum, with a much larger x-height. Librum Sans was much tamer than Buddy, but a radical complement to Librum. I later added a slab serif, Bookish. Plus, I made an ASCII version, Librum E, for use in ePUBs. On sale, for a while: $99.99, including the licensing for ebook use and the desktop license. But that’s for twenty fonts, and six different families.

Buy the Librum Book Design Group This link includes licensing for print and ePUBs. Email me for a written copy, if needed.

The Biblia Serif, Draetha, Araldo Book Production Group—plus, Biblia

It’s an update to my all-time best selling fonts: Brinar. This elegant, flare serif, humanist sans badly needed an update. It was Bergsland Pro without the serifs and very popular. Biblia is that update. It was on the same vertical metrics as my original serif family: Bergsland Pro from Diaconia, as Biblia Serif. Plus this group includes, Draetha,  and the looser, more free headline font family: Araldo. So this is eighteen fonts for $69.99, plus it includes the desktop license plus the licensing for ePUBs.

Buy this larger font group This link includes licensing for print and ePUBs. Email me for a written copy, if needed.

The specimen books of the book design font groups

The materials in the specimen books are all copyrighted. But you can freely distribute them without changes.

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