Jabana was designed by Nils Thomsen and published by TypeMates. Jabana contains 20 styles and family package options.
Inspired by having a ‘Schorle’ in Hamburg’s coffee bars, Jabana‘s smooth handwritten marker curves come in 20 styles across 5 widths: from the super-compressed to the extended.
A particularly wide range of OpenType features define Jabana. Each letter, numeral and punctuation mark has three alternates and after being randomly picked by the Contextual Alternates OpenType feature (or accessed via stylistic sets ss01, ss02) they ensure text set in Jabana has a lively, handwritten appearance.
But Jabana doesn’t stop there: it comes with the character set to deliver serious European typography. Alongside standard accented letters, fractions, mathematical glyphs, superiors and inferiors, you will find alternates, extra bullets, different arrows, negative figures and roman numerals. For decoration or distinction, there are extra bullets and numerator and denominator sets that include the full A-Z, their own punctuation and, for an additional decorative touch, can stand alone, atop a dot or a line.
If Jabana is a bit too crazy for your purposes, have a look at Jabana Alt. This alternative has some more standard forms, a larger x-height and shorter descenders. And, if you need some fancy designs try the nice Jabana Extras
The name Jabana comes from a container used to brew coffee in traditional Ethiopian, Eritrean and Eastern Sudanese coffee ceremonies. It is usually made of pottery, has a spherical base, a neck and pouring spout a handle where the neck connects to the base.