I recently stumbled across this beautiful flickr set by F-letter and was struck by the perfect, simple harmony of his typography and imagery, a balance I continually strive for, but can never seem to achieve. Everything is just perfect in these images and they’ve raised an interesting side story into the script face that pairs so well with one of my favourite sans, Trade Gothic.

After a little research, it seems that the typeface carries several distinct monikers; Sport Script, Athletic Script, Spoleto and Aktuelle. However all of these have unclear origins, design and copyright information. This discussion on Typophile sheds some interesting light on the subject, though with no real conclusive results.

It seems that F-letter and us typophiles have stumbled upon a jewel in the rough world of pirated, retraced, shareware/freeware fonts (as opposed to typefaces…). With some further searching, I discovered a version of Aktuelle that seems to have been released by Brendel Informatik (now Quick Brown Fox) in 1994.

In a strange way, it saddens me to see such a beautiful and uniquely crafted font relegated to the dark of the interweb. Realising that I may be contributing to the problematic world of type piracy, I thought I would still post it here for the sake of posterity. If anyone (especially the real copyright holders! Perhaps this post will drag you out of the dark!) has any problems with this, please let me know and I’ll take the link down. But for now…

Download Aktuelle TTF

Thanks to F-letter and his work for bringing my attention to this little gem. Check out the rest of his beautiful set here.