Ciseaux was inspired and is dedicated to the art of paper cutting. Early paper cutting artists were often royalty, but it soon became a folk art practiced by commoners whose cutouts decorated their homes. By the seventeenth century it had spread throughout the world. The Japanese called it Mon-kiri, the German's Scherenschnitte and Turkey even boasted a guild devoted to the art form. In Poland the designs were traditionally symmetrical and often used layers of colors to form pictorial collages. When Russian invaders confiscated scissors, villagers were found to cut their intricate designs with sheep shears! The art form later developed into cutting out elaborate designs of nature scenes and people, celebrating special occasions and even decorating legal documents. Ciseaux letterforms mimic paper cutting art in its shapes with a rather loose and almost joyous rhythm. The overall effect is somewhat earthy and natural yet it has an element of sophistication that cannot be ignored. Just like paper cutting, Ciseaux can be used for special occasions like invitations, brochures, identities, restaurant menus, and if you dare, some awesome looking paper graffiti. Available in TT, PS and Opentype for Mac and Windows.

Ciseaux Matisse was inspired by the exhibition Drawing With Scissors, which I visited at the Kunsthalle Schirn in my hometown of Frankfurt am Main in 2003 and the book Jazz published in 1947 by Henri Matisse. Admittedly, before that time I wasn’t a fan of Matisse’s work, neither his late nor the early work. That definitely changed after the exhibition. While his motifs have been overused on postcards and mouspads, in front of the originals you forget those tiny pictures. Some of the works were massive—larger than 24ft. By cutting directly into the color Matisse created shapes with strong dynamics. Years later, in 2007, I used that inspiration to cut an exclusive font for a newspaper that I designed at that time (see Gallery Pictures). Later I developed that font into the four styles featured here. The cut-out style is a paper cutout; boxed is the paper background. Both linear and boxed linear have no curved outlines, so they are more aggressive. As drawing with scissors implies, all characters are cut by hand. With only uppercase letters, this font is designed for editorial use: headlines, slogans in ads, or musical usage in posters and flyers that need the little touch of the jazz scissors. In special cases the lowercase letters contain alternate shapes to the uppercase forms.

The Fontazia Chateaux series features a unique assortment of characters inspired by some of the great castles and chateaus of Europe and beyond. These simple yet elegant symbols are delivered to you in both silhouette and outline format. For more in the Chateaux series, see also Fontazia Chateaux Deux.

A simple stylistic device gives this clean, bold sans serif face a slightly spooky feeling. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

for all your royal invitations: The Fontazia Chateaux series features a unique assortment of characters inspired by some of the great castles and chateaus of Europe and beyond. These simple yet elegant symbols are delivered to you in both silhouette and outline format. For more in the Chateaux series, see also Fontazia Chateaux.

An image of a vintage metal stencil for the French wine region Côteaux du Tricastin [now Grignan-Les Adhemar] served as the inspiration for Wine Vat Stencil JNL. This condensed sans serif design is available in both regular and oblique versions.

On the one hand Chateau is almost palatial but at the same time it has a quite earthy personality as represented by the stenciled strokes. However, this stencil effect serves to refine the strokes by creating the illusion of a completed thin stroke. Chateau is more of a hybrid roundhand script with its contrasting ornate capitals. Originally a fortified residence in France was called a Chateau. Today there are many estates with true Chateaux on them in Bordeaux, but it is customary for any wine-producing estate, no matter how humble, to prefix its name with "Chateau". This is true whether the building itself is a magnificent palace or a shack. The distinctive chateau architecture was in inspiration for the name of this script. Chateau is ideal for packaging design, invitations, announcements, headlines, brochures, menus, weddings, scrapbooking, etc. Chateau is available in Opentype, Postscript and Truetype for Macs and PCs.