The success of Foco has prompted us to add a suite of Italic font styles. Naturally, the design follows the features of the upright companion but the Italics are designs in their own right. We carefully chose and tested the correct angle and width proportions. This, combined with the traditional cursive shapes of a number of characters, creates a softer texture than the upright, ideal for subtle emphasis, be that in body copy or display.

Foco Italic is available in OpenType format for both Windows and Mac OS X. Licences are available now to buy online. Registered users of Foco have the opportunity to purchase the Italics at a 20% discount from our standard pricing until 28 February 2009. If you would like to discuss licensing options for Foco, or any other Dalton Maag Exclusive fonts, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Toyota is a well-known and respected manufacturer in the highly competitive motor industry, and takes pride in producing superior quality products in an efficient and disciplined manner.

London-based design agency, Greenspace, was commissioned to develop and strengthen emotional affinity for the Toyota brand by developing a new Visual Identity system. An integral part of the new identity was the development of a bespoke and meaningful font family to be used in Toyota’s communications.

The brief for the font design was to visually reflect the key qualities of the Toyota brand, creating a contemporary, innovative and quality visual language. An especially important consideration was that the font had connotations of Toyota’s Japanese heritage and philosophy. Dalton Maag worked with Greenspace to submit several design concepts, of which three were chosen and then developed further to be tested in market research. The successful design was refined and expanded to a font family consisting of two display fonts, and four styles for body copy. The fonts support character sets for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic to enable Toyota to communicate its brand in a wide range of markets.

The new visual identity system and typeface were initiated by Toyota Motor Europe and has already been successfully be rolled out across forty European countries. This heralds a new era for Toyota as the brand grows to embrace design sophistication and emotional affinity that is married with their values and heritage.

For the launch of Jianchi, Dalton Maag was approached by Fitch Singapore with the commission to design a display font that is inspired by the look and feel of Chinese calligraphy. Working in close cooperation with the design team at Fitch we developed an all-caps character set that includes alternative designs for each letter. The alternatives allow the brand design team to enhance the brand expression and give variation to the designs. As Jianchi is sold internationally, Dalton Maag supplied the font with its own standard character set supporting over 100 languages.

Often it is the font that is thought to be at fault if the behaviour is somewhat unexpected. This is what happened to us when one of our clients alerted us that the letter combination 'Ge' was kerning quite badly in one of our custom fonts – in fact the letters were overlapping. Interestingly, this behaviour was only appearing in Microsoft Word; graphics applications did not display this problem.

We conducted a number of tests, including double checking the font, and eventually found the problem to be a previously unidentified bug in Microsoft Word which appears when the font also contains kern values for the Greek character set. In our case the Greek letter combination 'Epsilon gamma' was kerned and this kern value was being erroneously transferred to 'Ge' by Word. There are a number of other letter combinations in the Greek that affect unkerned Latin pairs.

The obvious workaround of not using kerning in Word was unacceptable when high quality design was needed, so we did some tests and discovered that we could mask Word's erroneous behaviour by adding our own dummy kerning value of -1, a value imperceptibly small in normal use, to the pairs which were being wrongly kerned. We have reported this bug to Microsoft.