I found her in a German market while searching for the perfect parsnip. She was smoking catnip cigarettes and squeezing kumquats to test their ripeness. She had hair like a camel and index fingers like a Viking.

This revival of the Bruce Foundry’s No. 11 is typical of the nineteenth century types derived from the work of Didot and Bodoni; the face remains popular with lawyers and government printers. In fact, Theodore Low De Vinne opposed this kind of design as hard to print and read; he had Century designed to replace it.

Tombstones tumble as the night shift begins; as bloodsucking bats turn into pale predators and the undead reach through the dirt that covers their coffins to crush and destroy those who dare cross the cemetery path... Finally there emerges a cold cast of creepy characters, a macabre cadre of lurid letters we had to call… GRAVEYARD SMASH.

Endgame font was made using a very, VERY bad brush and Chinese ink. I had bought a bunch of brushes some time ago and I discovered that the hairs had been treated with some goo to keep them from sticking out. The goo didn’t really come off, so when I started to draw the glyphs for this font, the brush strokes were kind of wild. In the end, I really liked it (even though I will never again buy that particular brand of brushes). Endgame is a wild brush font. Comes with the works: diacritics, ligatures and alternates.

This digitally remastered high density lettering has been bitmapped out for you by Comicraft's Eric Eng Wong. Those of you harddriving through cyberspace on the information superhighway had better zap your prams and reboot your hard disk before you're dragged into your system folder while OVERBYTE makes a major withdrawal from your atm. Do not be fooled by the name, there's nothing goofy about this typeface.

"Grunge Typography? I invented it!" claims Chank Diesel. Badoni was created in 1993 for use in CAKE, a fanzine that reveled in grunge music. As creative director of CAKE, Chank wanted the magazine's design to reflect the music it glorified. Kurt Cobain was alive and miserable. Soundgarden had long hair. Seattle was everywhere. Chank's answer was Badoni, a gritty and distressed typeface that is a sign of the grunge glory years.

Early 1900s songwriters had a penchant for devising lengthy titles for their compositions. A perfect example from 1909, "It Is Hard to Kiss Your Sweetheart When the Last Kiss Means 'Good Bye'" is a whopping fourteen words long. The sheet music for this piece has a hand lettered, Art Nouveau sans serif design which became the working model for La Vie Nouveau JNL [which translates to "the new life"], and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Once I had a young, very eager and interested designer in my employ. We got into talking about where our letterforms come from and the habits in perception we are used to. He did not quite believe me. So I said, let's try to design a typeface where everything is just the opposite of what we are used to. We really had a hard time, our habits crept up on us all the time. But after a couple of weeks we finally finished this typeface and wanted to call it crazytype, but my young apprentice ­ who did most of the manual labor ­ said Contype sounded crazier. So it became Contype and it's really crazy, with a small asian touch to it. Yours very crazy Gert Wiescher

Bluenote is a font based on Franklin Gothic condensed. In the 60s and 70s the record label Blue Note published all those classic jazz records of my youth. Someone at their arts department cut letters to ribbons and designed wonderful record covers with those fragmented glyphs. I recently had a look at my music collection and rediscovered these letters. Being a hard-working type designer I couldn't resist the challenge, here is the result from your dilligent designer Gert Wiescher

Gutter Pigeon is not your every-day Ransom-kind-of-font! The prices of making it was really simple: I only used my phone and computer. I took pictures of letter from newspapers, magazines, bookcovers, candybars, movieposters, roadsigns, etc. In the beginning, It was easy to find new letters. But as I had the initial letters, it became quite a search for the missing letters. Not a hard job, you may think - but this font has 8 different versions of each letter! That's 26 lowercase glyphs and 26 uppercase glyphs...8 times! That's more than 400 glyphs! And on top of that comes numbers and punctuation! Go crazy with Gutter Pigeon! Actually, that is not very hard, because the font automatically cycles through the 8 different versions of each letter while you type! Upper- and lowercase in a wild mix!

If you've had too much coffee but not enough of Too Much Coffee Man you can now indulge in an excess of characters created by the hand of Too Much Coffee Man's creator, Mister Shannon Wheeler. Don't worry, in our efforts to ensure clean and confident lettering samples, we kept Shannon on decaf until he was done. Dip this font in your system folder and your hard drive will get a caffeine and sugar rush guaranteed to increase its memory partition and bring the images on your monitor into sharper focus.

Mayblossom was named after an old French fairytale (The Princess Mayblossom),which is quite similar to the tale of Sleeping Beauty. Mayblossom font is a fairytale font. It was made with a magic wand (with a Unicorn hair core) onto centuries old parchment. The font was then blessed by 12 lovely fairies. Of course, I had the evil thirteenth one kidnapped before she could cast her spell. In other words, if your work requires a certain lightness, a pinch of fairy dust and a sprinkling of magic, then Mayblossom is your best pick.

I'm always experimenting with new ideas for display fonts. I took the inside counter of a capital 'O', divided it into quarters, and applied an outline stroke to all the elements. By removing two quarters of the inside counter I had the beginnings for an interesting new design. Of course, the hard part was getting all the other letters in the alphabet to work well together using this approach. It's often a labor of love trying to shape an idea into a new typeface. I find the entire process stimulating and rewarding.

TT Tangerine made in 2017 has been a global hit. It's been used by the biggest performing artist in the world, luxury brands, designer packaging and more. Due to its popularity an italic style was added in Feb 2023. From the designer: I wanted to make a retro font with that 70's good vibes feel but i didn't want to just copy letters from that era. I decided to make new unique letters that had that groovy 70s feel. The bold curves pay homage to the big hair and bell-bottoms of the golden era.

Wardruna Arabic is a method of writing Arabic with a Runic-like alphabet devised by Devin Lester. He imagined that if some vikings had settled in the Middle East, they might have started speaking Arabic and writing it with a version of the Runic alphabet. This particular alphabet is based on Tolkien's Cirth Runes. A band of vikings went to Baghdad after raiding in Europe. The markets in Constantinople were closed as the Turks had just sacked the city. These men had heard of the great market in Baghdad and went there to sell their wares, seeing that this land was warm and fertile they decided to stay. They ended up settling the land and taking Arab wives and having children, because of thier Northern European accent their Arabic evolved into a part-Arabic dialect of Iraqi arabic. This is why today you see a few Arabs with green eyes and dark blonde or red hair. The Arabic alphabet was too fluid for them and vikings disdained the use of paper as a persons writings could be burned, so the evolved their runes to fit Arabic.

This font I had, had only to wake up, sit down and draw it.

Pill Gothic walks the tightrope between a heads down, hard working, utilitarian sans and something that stands out, saying, "Look at me!" Designers looking for a type that will work in blocks of text for callouts, captions and headlines will find that unique balance with Pill. Pill Gothic asks the question: what is the effect of a few truly unique characters on the meaning of a type? In particular, the 'a' and the 'g', while relating strongly to the forms of the other characters, stand out from the traditional milieu of sans serif types. The name Pill Gothic came from early studies of the condensed weight where the lower case characters had the shape of a pill capsule.

MacKeller, Smiths and Jordan had a font called Giraffe Wide which we liked, but like many Victorian display fonts it had no lowercase. We fixed that!

From the title screens and comic books of the Hair Bear Bunch comes the fun and funky Wonderbear typeface. All that 70’s flavor packed into a Caps/Alt Caps typestyle reminiscent of a lovable limited run cartoon show. The Hair Bears miss you as much as you miss them. Relive the laughter.

All Over Again is a messy, scratchy script that looks like someone wrote a lengthy letter, realized he had screwed up and had to start all over again.

The Kelson font family is a Armasen project completed for a graphic design agency in Brazil. The agency had a typeface, but the kerning, spacing, and related features were corrupted or otherwise not working very well. The Armasen team improved the qualities, refined the shapes, and enhanced the font features. Armasen is a group of hard-working, young Brazilian students and type designers focused on creating and developing professional quality typefaces with a distinctive and unique personality. The team is very pleased with the final result and is happy to share the efforts of their work as a FREE FONT for you to enjoy! [edited by John Alexander (jga30328 at gmail dot com) a very appreciative user and admirer of the Armasen team]

Display font for pixel lovers - mad for right angles and hard edges? Constructivists ate my bitmaps.

Loosely based on an early 20th century type from the Brussels foundry of Van Loey-Nouri. Many European foundries had fonts of this general design. Schelter & Gieseke of Germany had several.

Kolker is a brushy script style based on the use of a camel hair brush. It's easy on the eye!

A font I made in celebration of hard working, dedicated women who sacrifice to help others all over the world.

What does a 1932 movie about a love affair between a circus' trapeze artist and a sideshow "little person" have to do with the 1960s counter-culture? They both share some commonalities. The title card for Tod Browning's "Freaks" inspired the lettering design for Hippie Freak JNL. It's in a retro style that was embraced by the youth movement that had its epicenter in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Circus performers with birth defect abnormalities were displayed in what was referred to as "freak shows"; while young men with long hair and beards who sought peace, love and an end to the war in Vietnam were commonly referred to as "hippie freaks". As the saying goes "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

Merchantry is a hard-working display font inspired by vintage signage you might find in local supermarkets of days gone by.

This Contemporary style reflects a modern hand-lettered feel. Modeled from a camel hair brush, it is a very legible flowing script.

This font was adapted from an old lettering book, circa 1900. The book got away from us many years ago, but we had made stats of all the potentially useful fonts. Original had no lowercase or numerals, so we designed them.

HardTimes has been hard work, designing a handmade typeface must always have the right balance between rough and smooth, specially with this Times-like face. It has the big European glyph-set, so that it can be used all over the continent I come from. I gave this font extensive kerning. Times are too hard for boring typefaces, so try this one for a change. -Your hardworking type designer, Gert Wiescher

I just love biscotti; they’re one of my favourite cookies! I thought they were all rock hard and half-moon shaped, but I found out that there’s a ‘soft’ variety as well, mainly aimed at young children who may have trouble munching on the hard cookies. Soft Biscotti is a handmade, all caps font. It comes with extensive language support and a set of alternates for the lower case letters.

Valimo RMX is a destroyed hard-to-read typeface. It's suitable for creating text "textures" where you don't necessarily need any actual content.

This font was made while listening to The Cure, and taking a trip down memory lane. However, the particular song I had in mind naming the font after, was already taken. But perhaps you can figure out which song I had in mind?

FourJuly contains three patriotic fonts that might be fun to use in July. They are also very hard to read, but perhaps not as hard as the somewhat similar letters in the fonts of FlagDay. FourJuly A has square, blocky letters with star interiors. FourJuly G and FourJuly H add diagonal stripes. FourJuly G and FourJuly H can be layered on top of FourJuly A to create bicolored letters. See the example here.

Strong, hard lines inspired the name of this font, based on the "nuclear standard" set by the U.S. and the Soviets during the cold war.

Confident, endearing and youthful, Judlebug is brimming with personality that’s hard to deny. Now available in 3 weights, Judlebug is ready to light things up!

Like many cities in the Midlands and North of England, Stoke-on-Trent has a rich history linked to making and industry. In Stoke’s case it was pottery. In the early 1900s bottle kilns could be seen covering the landscape of the six towns making up Stoke-on-Trent with hundreds of factories producing some of the best ceramics in the world. But by the 1990s most of these had gone. Torn down for development of housing or just left to rot. During the next few decades Stoke continued to change. The industry was in a decline and Stoke itself was seen as another poor midlands city with a dwindling industry. Then in 2008, Spode, one of the largest and most famousceramics factories in Stoke entered into administration. Pens cast aside, drawings left half finished, designs left in the turned-off kilns; Spode factory was abandoned. This was a real shock and the way everything was getting thrown into skips to be put on the tip was heartbreaking. Thankfully people salvaged some of the technical drawings, sketch design, old sample pieces and ceramics that people hard worked so hard on. Potbank has been in development over a number of years taking inspiration from the heritage and designs from the ceramics industry. It has a mixed Clarendon and Antiqua style structure with its main purpose to be used as a printed type.