Here is a nice sign-painterly display font inspired by the 1920s.

Arbor Brush is a fresh and lively brush script from the FontHaus design studio. The design is organic, strong, painterly, and anything but tentative. Great for advertising, menus, signage, or display.

Turman Grotesk is inspired by the hand-drawn painterly letterforms poster artist Adam Turman uses in his poster designs. Each character uppercase and lowercase has contextual alternates that can be used to give your type a more natural, handmade feel.

Canvas was inspired by the textural qualities of painting and drawing letters on, of course, rough canvas. Canvas will give your artwork a rough, painterly feel, yet Canvas is readable and clear. Canvas will add a bit of the texture of fabric to all of your paper arts.

Storyboard is expressive, rough, partly connected and full of painterly, brushed energy like the sketches of a storyboard. It's bold and kind of edgy, but can be friendly too. There are tons of ligatures you can turn on or off depending on the look you're after. So what's your story?

Reservation Wide is intended for headlines with its relatively snug letterspacing and extended forms. Its simplicity will accommodate smaller sizes and lower resolution displays. OpenType Stylistic Alternates for characters 'a', 'g' and 't' lend an even simpler finish. The hand-drawn curves and angled stroke endings temper the otherwise rigid proportions of the family. This painterly tendency becomes more apparent in the heavier weights keeping them from looking too imposing. The design first took shape as a custom font named Majestos for the cable channel The Food Network . It can be found in their growing online and printed presence in addition to their broadcast identity for which it was developed.

By day, Ken Gitschier is one of Monotype Imaging's in-house type designers, busy creating fonts for on-screen typography - a demanding undertaking that requires meticulously editing fonts on a pixel-by-pixel basis. His tools are Fontographer software, a Wacom digital tablet, a high-resolution monitor and a keen understanding of typographic forms. But by night, Gitschier uses the same tools to indulge his passion for experimental typeface designs. GitchHand is one of Gitschier's nocturnal projects. The design has an almost painterly quality. Depth, texture and even a sense of color are found in the lettershapes. Edgy, iconoclastic, and not for the typographically faint of heart, GitchHand makes a strong visual statement.

Sunshine is the unlikely alphabet collision of Gobbler and Liquorstore. Chank's napkin scrawl smashed into the letters commonly found on signage at the neighborhood liquor store. Gobbler's blotchy textures fragmented Liquorstore's uniform stroke. It began as a hideous lumpy thing with random vector points everywhere. Chank came to the rescue with his Alphabetician's first aid kit. He smoothed the blunt corners with a few hammer blows. He wrapped the font in extra strokes, in a sans serif Roman style, to increase its contrast. His industrial influence helped stabilize Gobbler's gloppy qualities and his grunge aesthetic softened Liquor store's checkerboard rigidity. The end result is a font with a solid structure and a painterly wiggle that creates a dirty display or a slightly clumsy text face. Because of its many detailed strokes, it tends to look a little better in print than on the web. All organic. Earthy.

A font from the tube: an individual handwriting with a slightly wet character. In this case, the “pen” was a tube of black paint. It’s easy to see that you can’t really write “beautifully” with it. Nevertheless, the “Tube Script” is a beautiful, personal handwriting whose clumsy origins are not at all obvious in small font sizes. But if it’s big enough, then all the peculiarities of the paint container misused as a writing implement become apparent. Sometimes the line is very thin and delicate, sometimes it’s just a thick blob meant to represent a letter, depending on how hard the tube was squeezed. A few spills are inevitable. These coincidences of painterly writing are what make this font so appealing. This creates organic forms, random effects, breaks, streaks, where the writer normally determines the form. As such, this font is a great match for anything organic, picturesque, handmade, personal, or even random, unpredictable, or just plain natural. Hundreds of ligatures make the letters appear in a different form each time depending on it’s combination. And more than a hundred alternate characters can be selected using the corresponding OpenType features, thus enabling even more variety in the typeface. This creates the typically restless, extremely varied impression of a really individual script – almost as if it were really handwritten.

A playful caricature of a midcentury grotesque, Guzzo is a fresh addition to the Monotype Library. Somewhat eccentric and full of surprises, its unmistakable quirk can be found on closer inspection, stemming from details proudly borrowed from brush lettering and calligraphy. The wide range of weights and style can take you through any design space, from the condensed weights squeezing in larger headlines or dense blocks of text with the condensed range, to experimenting with small point sizes, labels or packaging with the extended cut. However, Guzzo’s real charm is probably best expressed through its wonderfully playful shapes, its unusual 'laid-back italics' feature cursive forms and a backslant. The different stylistic sets allow you to decide what you make of Guzzo, with several sets of alternate glyphs steering it in any direction you want. Guzzo is a happy-go-lucky character, and has a warm, humble and painterly quality that - at a glance - may be unrecognizable as a typeface. It can almost pass for hand-lettering. Guzzo pairs exceptionally well with scripts and slab typefaces, and feels most at home in situ with toys, packaging, menus, broadcasting, cartoons and merchandising! Guzzo encourages you to turn up the silliness and is for designers who want to emulate hand-painted and casual motifs. Taking its name from American artist Jeremy Pinc, aka the painter Guzzo Pinc, the typeface channels the quirky, funny and poignant qualities of his paintings - with wacky characters, loosely painted geometric forms and bright colors. For this mid century, authentic, nostalgic typeface - the story is really what you make of it.

Pilar and Ferran based Arlette on the fast stroke of one letter from a Roger Excoffon family, but along the way they abandoned that starting point in favour of experimentation. Many sans serifs are like a svelte black dress: functional, beautiful, and the unfussy outfit for a nice evening get together. The Arlette family isn’t like this. It’s a stunner — an incandescent reimagining of what defines a sans and how it can look. Arlette explores the boundaries of the sans serif landscape and returns with forms developed from gestural vigour. Thinking of it as “painterly” may at first seem to fit, but it underestimates Arlette’s ability to master an unseen world of countless emotions and physical applications: magazines, branding, editorial, teen and young adult works, book covers, and a host of products and packaging whose content will be amplified with Arlette’s voice. Not only does Arlette use its eight weights plus italics to speak in Latin-based scripts, it is also fluent in Thai and has six weights (hairline through bold) with which it meets that challenge, whether in text or display. Arlette Thai’s modern nature is seen in two features for the script. One is the decorative Thai characters that are based on original palm leaf manuscripts. Another is a version of the Latin numerals adapted to the height of the script due to their wide use in Thailand. Arlette Thai has been meticulously developed, including contextual kerning to avoid mark clashes. Arlette’s OpenType capabilities include mathematic and scientific figures, positional forms, pointers, arrows, and oldstyle, lining, and tabular lining numerals. In addition to all this, it’s packed with swashes and swash ligatures in both scripts for enthusiastic typesetting. Because it pushes experimentation without compromising readability, both Arlette Thai and Latin are surprisingly legible in small sizes and arrestingly beautiful when their details can be seen.