An offering by lettering artist Harvey Hopkins Dunn for the 1930 classic, American Alphabets, provided the inspiration for this graceful, engaging typeface. Use it liberally to exude elegance, or to turn on the charm. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Lindisfarne Nova is an uncial-like design based on the script found in the Lindisfarne Gospels. Created by Harry Pears and Margaret Layson, it is available in two weights, regular and bold. Lindisfarne Nova is Harry’s first completed font. There are also two companion styles, Lindisfarne Nova Incised and Lindisfarne Runes.

A stylish cartoon sans reminiscent of lettering by Harvey Kurtzman on early issues of Mad, or other casual mid-century types. The three widths give full versatility for expressive, customised headlines and layouts, while the lighter weights can be used for text. Conveys an approachable, light touch with style and finesse.

Scorpio is a font based on lettering Michael Harvey drew for the card “The Sign of The Nudge” which was designed in collaboration with the concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay. The purpose of the card was to prompt those owing monies to IHF, into paying promptly. Michael also used it on some of the many book jackets he designed. As such, it is a condensed design necessary to enable a lot of text to be fitted with a restricted space. Scorpio has both style and verve. It was designed to attract the attention of potential purchasers browsing the shelfs in bookshops. In fulfilling this rôle, it succeeded admirably. In all these respects, it is unquestionably a unique Michael Harvey design. When Michael died in 2013, this font existed as a drawing of the basic upper and lower case letterforms plus numerals. Andy Benedek’s contribution to Scorpio was to digitise the existing letterforms and then create the remaining characters necessary for a modern font.

One of the type examples found within the pages of “Lettering” by Harry B. Wright (1950) is a bold hand lettered serif typeface with a unique twist – the slab serifs had rounded corners, looking very much like show card lettering of the early 1900s. This design is now available digitally as Maybrook JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Iowan Old Style was designed for Bitstream in 1990 by noted sign painter John Downer. Iowan Old Style is a hardy contemporary text design modeled after earlier revivals of Jenson and Griffo typefaces but with a larger x-height, tighter letterfit, and reproportioned capitals. Iowan Old Style Titling was designed by John Downer and added to the Iowan Old Style family in 2002. The cap-only character set includes several ornaments and fleurons, broadening the appeal and functionality of the typeface family. Iowan Old Style was originally designed for Bitstream in 1990 by Downer, a noted sign painter. Iowan Old Style is a hardy contemporary text design modeled after earlier revivals of Jenson and Griffo typefaces but with a larger x-height, tighter letterfit, and reproportioned capitals. Expert and old style figure font sets were added in 2000.

Balthasar is a very distinctive, stencil-type display font. Its letterforms originally appeared on a lettered book jacket by Michael Harvey. Its highly condensed letterforms being very economic in the use of space. The augmented, Balthasar Plus version has many alternative characters and ligatures, together with Opentype features for their automatic substitution where the application in which they are used permits.

Iowan Old Style was designed for Bitstream in 1990 by noted sign painter John Downer. Iowan Old Style is a hardy contemporary text design modeled after earlier revivals of Jenson and Griffo typefaces but with a larger x-height, tighter letterfit, and reproportioned capitals. Cyrillic letters were designed by Natalia Vasilyeva in 2016. Iowan Old Style Cyrillic was released by Paratype in 2017.

Becka Script was designed by David Harris in 1985 and is a wide running typeface with varying stroke contrasts. This font looks as though written with a broad tipped pen and its slight slant to the right makes clear its similarity to callipgraphy fonts. Becka Script is reminiscent of the 1950s and its strong strokes make it best for headlines or shorter texts.

From alphabets created for book illustrations in the 1970s to lettering created for a book jacket in the 1990s, the Mentor family of typefaces has developed along its own slow and circuitous path. Always present in its evolution, though, has been the influence of three 20th century design giants: Eric Gill, Reynolds Stone, and Hermann Zapf, as filtered through the meticulous sensibility of Michael Harvey.

Clarinetist Milton ?Mezz? Mezzrow (1899-1972) was a remarkable jazz musician, as becomes evident upon reading his autobiography Really the Blues. His sharp tone and serpentine lines inspired English lettering artist and jazz lover Michael Harvey to create a condensed, oblique display typeface with the look of a chiseled alphabet in the musician's honor. Vertical formats such as book jackets and posters will be invigorated by Mezz as the display face.

Aesop was developed from some book jacket lettering drawn by Michael Harvey for an edition of Aesop’s Fables by a master Japanese Artist. It is based upon a pen-drawn script, and is characterised by a lively sense of movement and grace. Aesop Plus, being an OpenType font, contains many alternative characters and additional ligatures which can be automatically substituted to enhance the liveliness of set text, where the application in which it is used, permits.

Ben Harris' illustrated cover for the sheet music of "I Found A Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)" from 1931's "Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt" lists the show's stars and other credits in a pen lettered monoline design with rounded terminals. This early Art Deco type style has now become the digital font Variety Store JNL (a reference to the Five and Ten Cent stores alluded to in the song title from the sheet music).

Calligrapher Margaret Layson works in partnership with Australian typographer Harry Pears, bringing designs such as the wonderful Lindisfarne Nova family to life. They both work on the digital incarnation in a true collaboration. Originally from the UK, Margaret began her professional career as a geophysicist. After arriving in Australia in 1968, she began to work as a freelance calligrapher. Over the years she has maintained an interest in the history of writing, particularly the scripts and decorations in manuscripts.

Secombe is a lively fun family of typefaces in the spirit of the turn of the last century. It's a boisterous fun design, named in honor of the late Harry Secombe (or if you prefer, Neddy Seagoon). Secome is a family of two 'small capitals' display faces, offered in a regular solid form and the 'Grande' form, engraved and shadowed. Ideal for posters, book covers and any other design work where a feel of the 1900s is needed.

Blackminster is a Gothic font, inspired by a handwritten set of letters (designed by Harry Lawrence Gage) I found in a 1916 book about lettering. I only had the ABC/abc to work with, so I designed the remaining glyphs myself. Use Blackminster for your Metal album covers, skateboards and downhill mountain bikes, or just anything that requires a bit of a Gothic look! Comes with a serious amount of diacritics and an alternate, swashy, g and y.

Dan Hardie, a Miami-based graphic artist and creative consultant at Mutiny, Inc. shared an image he’d spotted online of some interesting signage formerly on the front of the Miami Medical Building. Comprised of hand-cut metal characters (with a thoroughly avant-garde “Art Deco meets Modernist” approach), this instantly became a font design idea unusual and quirky enough to develop as a digital typeface. The end result is Office Visit JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Inspired by the elegant, rounded geometry of classic sans-serifs like Harry™ and Cirkulus™, Evcial was designed in 2000 to serve as the logo font for EVCco's website. The composition of each alpha-numeric glyph in Evcial is restricted solely to circular curves and lines of either 90 or 55 degrees, thus lending an air of chic consistency to this sophisticated typeface. Comes packaged in both TrueType and OpenType formats with standard complement of alpha-numeric glyphs, punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, and Western European diacritics.

Tisdall Script is based upon the brush-drawn script lettering of Hans Tisdall, who was the designer of many distinctive lettered book jackets for Jonathan Cape in the 1950s. Michael Harvey, also a designer of lettered book jackets, long admired Tisdall’s style and so, with the blessing of his widow, designed this typographic tribute. The augmented Tisdall Script Plus version, has many alternative characters and ligatures, together with Opentype features, to enable their automatic substitution where the application in which they are used permits.

In 1972, VGC released two typefaces by designer friends Dick Jensen and Harry Villhardt. Jensen’s was called Serpentine, and Villhardt’s was called Venture. Even though both faces had the same elements and a somewhat similar construct, one of them became very popular and chased the other away from the spotlight. Serpentine went on to become the James Bond font, the Pepsi and every other soda pop font, the everything font, all the way through the glories of digital lala-land where it was hacked, imitated and overused by hundreds of designers. But the only advantage it really had over Venture was being a 4-style family, including the bold italic that made it all the rage, as opposed to Venture’s lone upright style. One must wonder how differently things would have played if a Venture Italic was around back then. Chopper is Canada Type’s revival of Venture, that underdog of 1972. This time around it comes with a roman, an italic, and corresponding biform styles to make it a much more attractive and refreshing alternative to Serpentine. Chopper comes in all popular formats, boasts extended language support, and contains a ton of alternate characters sprinkled throughout the character map.

Tony Wenman designed the display typeface Bottleneck in the early 1970s and its figures reflect the spirit of the times. Its distinguishing characteristic is the extreme heaviness of the serifs in the lower third of the characters, a trait which the viewer could associate with the plateau shoes of the 1970s. Bottleneck is a carefree, playful typeface which can be found even today on entertainment fliers and retro advertisements. When used sparingly in headlines and slogans, it is a real eye-catcher. Similar typefaces are Julia Script, by David Harris, and Candice, by Alan Meeks.

A casual semi-connected script, Eubie Script’s letterforms rise and drop to create surprising word shapes, helped by position-specific ligatures and contextual alternates. With tenacious rhythm and dynamic connections, Eubie Script gives power to your headings and overlays. To meet its design goals, Eubie Script draws from the many lettering styles of Harry Knorr, an artist at Globe Poster for over 50 years. The script’s contours are drawn (impossible to write with any tool) like the work of Knorr, who occasionally cut his captions directly into the printing linoleum backwards without preliminary sketching.

The history of Able’s connection with the Harry Potter phenomenon is really up in the air. It’s a catch-22 in this business - you either promote your own work and negotiate expensive exclusive licenses, or you work with a promoter and sell your designs to anyone and everyone. It could have been an in-house designer at Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, or a freelancer who proposed Able for the headings and such. The responsible party licensed it from T26, and JK Rowling’s storytelling made it a star. (I suppose it’s ironic that there’s a whole lot of unwritten history in the typography business.) Able’s rise to fame really is a classic love story between reading and type design. If the books weren’t so popular, Able might still be waiting for some Mexican fast food chain to pick it up for packaging design. The movie deal certainly made the font all the more recognizable, what with its merchandising campaign. Popularity can also cripple a great decorative face. It’s always being recognized as “The Harry Potter Font.” It might just have to wait a few decades for the Potter phenomenon to subside to be freed from the “Chamber of Pigeonholed Fonts.” In the meantime, I’m sure that a lot of fledgling graphic design apprentices are reading their new Potter books, being charmed by the idea of type design when they’re not turning the pages too fast to notice.

Future Bugler Upright is a non-slanted version of Future Bugler, a font based on the second logo created by Harry Warren in early 1975 for his sixth grade class newsletter, The Broadwater Bugler, at Broadwater Academy in Exmore, Virginia, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This font can convey several perspectives or moods. It can suggest a space-age vision of the future, or an art-deco perspective of the future as in the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It also communicates the idea of high performance, or extreme sports, without the grunge. Digitized by John Bomparte.

Conrad X. 'Cobb' Shinn (Sept. 4, 1887- Jan. 28, 1951) was a Fillmore, Indiana-born post card illustrator who sold a series of successful novelty postcard lines which included (among others) Charlie Chaplin, automobiles and the Dutch culture in the beginning years of the 20th Century. After serving in World War I, Shinn found the market for novelty postcards dwindling, and he also lent his artistic skills to cartoon features and illustrating many children's books [including his own, under the nickname 'Uncle Cobb'] which taught easy step-by-step drawing methods. Some time in the 1920s, he eventually migrated into the field of supplying electrotypes and stereotypes of 'stock cuts' of photos and line art to the printing trade. In the days of letterpress printing, this was the forerunner of paper clip art and its successor, electronic clip art. Purchasing many of his designs from 'journeyman' artists of the time, the diversity of Cobb Shinn's stock cuts library grew with the passing years, reflecting changing times, styles and topics. Some of the illustrators whose signed works were presented in Shinn's 'CUTalogs' [as he called his stock cuts catalogs] include Mary Clemmitt, Louis H. Hippe, E.C. Klinge, Nelson White, Harvey Fuller, Bess Livings, Lois Head, Harvey Peake and Van Tuyl. Upon his passing in 1951, it's not known how long the Indianapolis-based company existed before finally closing its doors. One of the more popular series of cartoons were the line illustrations of men and women affectionately called 'little big head guys' by many modern fans of these cuts because the heads of the characters were drawn somewhat larger than the rest of their bodies. Shinn Kickers JNL is a collection twenty-six of these illustrations, and just like a kick in the shin (as the pun in the name implies), these charming cartoons get your attention.

Bauhaus Bugler’s design never appeared in Harry Warren’s 6th grade class newsletter The Broadwater Bugler but its design came about during that same period in 1975. Because of this, it has been officially designated an honorary Bugler font! Its theme of broad curves that leap over and under conjure visions of fashion and high-end department stores with their dress boxes and shopping bags, plus hair products, cosmetics, couture, and other stylish personal merchandise of the highest caliber. Bauhaus Bugler also has an art deco flavor, especially when all capitals are used. It comes with two alternate versions of the upper and lower Y to give users more freedom of choice. Put Bauhaus Bugler in your “haus” today! Be sure to check out Bauhaus Bugler Soft also! Digitized by John Bomparte.

Songlines is based upon a pen-drawn script drawn by Michael Harvey to illustrate a poem by Johannes Thurman. The expressive and rough-edged letterforms of Songlines do not have any lowercase characters. Instead, alternative uppercase characters occupy their positions. By using a mixture of upper-case and lowercase characters, text can be given a very lively and vigorous character. For example, the two versions of L are designed to overlap and interact whichever way round they are used. The augmented Songlines Plus version, has many alternative characters and ligatures added together with Opentype features to enable their automatic substitution where the application in which they are used permits.

Spencer is a calligraphic semi-serif type family that has been carefully designed to provide easily distinguishable letterforms that are practical in use, as well as aesthetically appealing. It's natural and organic forms comes from a deep consideration of the efficiency of the visible word and provides the typeface with a distinct and unique voice.

 Named after Herbert Spencer, an educator and researcher of legibility at the Royal College of Art in the sixties and seventies, and influenced by other early typographers and legibility researchers, such as Walter Tracy and John Harris. Spencer was designed as part of a legibility study by Sofie Beier and Kevin Larson.

Inversion is a display typeface that is based on a rare bit of lettering from a 1910 German lettering book. What was the inspiration for designing the font? I found the base lettering years ago in a specimen and scanned it. I've used it perennially for assorted metal bands' logos, and finally decided to digitize it. What are its main characteristics and features? It is a spidery bit of lettering that would work well in Harry Potter movies or on album covers. Usage recommendations: Display type for use in materials that are meant to have a hand-wrought look circa the turn of the century.

Future Bugler Soft is a soft version of Future Bugler, a font based on the second logo created by Harry Warren in early 1975 for his sixth grade class newsletter, The Broadwater Bugler, at Broadwater Academy in Exmore, Virginia, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. This font can convey several perspectives or moods. It can suggest a space-age vision of the future, or an art-deco perspective of the future as in the movie “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”. It also communicates the idea of high performance, or extreme sports, without the grunge. Also check out its siblings, the original Future Bugler, and Future Bugler Upright. Digitized by John Bomparte.

Cruller is a display typeface that is based on a rare bit of lettering from a 1910 German lettering book. What was the inspiration for designing the font? I found the base lettering years ago in a specimen and scanned it. I've used it perennially for assorted metal bands' logos, and finally decided to digitize it. What are its main characteristics and features? It is a spidery bit of lettering that would work well in Harry Potter movies or on album covers. Usage recommendations: Display type for use in materials that are meant to have a hand-wrought look circa the turn of the century.

Julia Script is a playful calligraphic font designed by David Harris in 1983. It takes the viewer back to the flower power of the 1970s. Generous capitals with cheerful, rounded stroke beginnings and endings contrast perfectly with the narrower, closer, but nevertheless vibrant lower case letters. Characteristic of this typeface and similar to Candice is the marked increase in stroke width in the lower third of the figures. This detail is reminiscent of the platform shoes typical of the 1970s. Julia Script suggests freedom and fun and can often be found on party fliers and retro advertisements. Used sparingly in headlines and slogans, Julia Script will be sure to attract attention.

Hollywood Revue JNL gets its design inspiration and name from a vintage movie poster for "The Hollywood Revue of 1929". The letter style shows early Art Deco influences, yet the hand lettering was done in the late 1920s toward the end of the Art Nouveau period. MGM produced this early "talkie" all-star musical with a cast that included Jack Benny, John Gilbert, Conrad Nagel, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Polly Moran and many others. This is the motion picture where Cliff ("Ukelele Ike") Edwards introduced "Singin' in the Rain" (composed by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown). Years later, Freed was a producer at MGM and gathered up many of the songs he and Brown wrote during the 1920s to form the musical core of the 1952 Gene Kelly-Debbie Reynolds-Donald O'Conner musical "Singin' in the Rain".