Vintage sheet music was initially a partial inspiration for what started out as a simple retro typeface, but the basic hand-lettered design from the Art Deco era lent itself to some further experimentation. Geometric shapes were added to the original monoline letters and numerals and the end result was a marvelous display face called Cafe Society JNL. During the 1930s, "Cafe Society" was popular slang for the financially privileged during the Great Depression who dined at fine cafes while others who were able to eat out did so at diners and cafeterias. Available along with Cafe Society JNL is the original version, Cafe Society Monoline JNL.

Fun Signs JNL comprises twenty-six humorous signs from a 1930s-era sales list of products manufactured by the Koehler Sign Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Koehler manufactured a large line of stock cardboard "Blue Signs" (presumably blue backgrounds with white lettering) and alongside the many standard phrases used by various businesses was a list of funny sayings. Such placards were bought by merchants to either evoke interest in their services (such as in a bar or restaurant, or jokingly comment on their business policies (as in credit billing). These novelty signs are a fun addition to a flier, ad, web page or announcement and will leave your readers smiling.

Havel is an updated interpretation of a Czech type design from the 1930s. It is powerful and very condensed. At a quick glance you might find kinship with other condensed typefaces of the same period, like Spire (Sol Hess, 1937), Onyx (Gerry Powell for ATF, 1937) or Quirinus Bold (Alessandro Butti, 1939). But Havel has its very own look, rooted in the rapidly disappearing "Eastern European Type", a typographical tradition where poster and packaging design were the highlights. Torbjörn Olsson has revived this classical Czech beauty, and the Open Type version, Havel Pro, can also be used for Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

Inspired by lettering styles of the 1930s, Seagrass BF is jazzy and jumping as a Lindy Hop. As such it captures I believe, something of the spirit of that age, yet somehow retains a fresh, contemporary feel. Headlines, logos, packaging, signage and branding are just a few of many usages. Seagrass BF contains Stylistic Alternates and Stylistic Sets for uppercase letters Y and Z, as well as ampersand (&). Other OpenType features include Standard Ligatures and Contextual Alternates. These features should at all times be employed to optimize the appeal of your word settings. So whenever your visual communication demands an energetic, vibrant voice please consider Seagrass BF.

My family and I recently bought a fixer-upper farm from the 1930 and I have been renovating and building for the last three+ months. I have a lot on my mind (as you can imagine), so I write little notes to keep track of what I need to do. Of course, since I’m often in the middle of something that needs to be done NOW, these notes are kind of messy. I just finished the bathroom and toilet upstairs, so I could actually finish a new font! Scribble Note is an ode to all those messy notes I wrote. Comes with a cool Doodle pack as well!

Bourget is a Display-Sans, which is inspired by the Art Déco Typo­graphy of the 1920´s, 1930´s years. It has a very characteristic and unique style by its thin line through every letter. The upright and italic versions have each 750+ Glyphs with Open Type Features, playful Ligatures and a lot of Alternates as Stylistic Sets. So there is a lot to discover and to play around with. Bourget is good to use for Branding, Signage, Packaging, Invitations, Advertising, Headlines, Displays, Magazines, Book titles or everything you want to use it for. Bourget has an extended character set to support 219 latin based languages in 212 countries and Pinyin.

Adams is a revival and major expansion of Dolf Overbeek's Studio typeface and Flambard, its bold counterpart, originally published by the Amsterdam Type Foundry in 1946 and 1954. This digital version adds small caps and a new light weight. Adams is a simple upright, flat brush script, with stroke angles carefully designed to give the same color in all sizes. It is reminiscent of the sign lettering commonly found in the 1930s and 1940s. The Adams fonts are available in all popular font formats, and the character sets cover a wide range of codepages, including Central and Eastern European languages, Esperanto, Turkish, Baltic, Celtic/Welsh.

My family and I recently moved to a ‘fixer upper’ farm from the 1930’s. It came with a slightly run down barn, 4000 square metres of land and a LOT of redcurrant bushes. I can’t really say that I am overly fond of them. I find them a bit too tart. As a kid, I used to smother them in sugar, but I can’t do that any longer, since I am a responsible dad… ;-) Redcurrant is a slightly wonky, slightly crazy handmade font. It can be used for book covers or post cards, but feel free to use it for whatever. Comes with cute little swashes as well.

Introducing Rocketeers - Art Deco Type, created by ikiiko. Rocketeers is a condensed type with a simple Art Deco vibes. Inspired by the writing style of the 1930s era. A bold and sturdy aesthetic style characterizes this font. Some alternates styles can be adjust to explore different shapes. This typeface is perfect for an brand logo, vintage stuff, fashion stuff, clean design, magazine cover, invitation, poster & flyer, or simply as a stylish text overlay to any background image. What's included? Uppercase & Lowercase Number & Punctuation Alternates & Stylistic Multilingual Support Enjoy our font and if you have any questions, you can contact us by email : ikiikowrk@gmail.com

Superba Pro is a condensed Egyptian font family with short ascenders and descenders. The dots on the lowercase ‘i’ and the German umlaut-vowels are square. Haas Type Foundry created the original Superba in 1928-1930. Steve Jackaman (ITF) designed and produced a digital version of the bold weight in 1992. In 2017, Jackaman completely redrew the bold weight, added an accompanying wide weight, and expanded the glyph set to support Central and Eastern European languages. Like other slab serif faces, Superba excels at display sizes and is comfortable at subhead sizes. ­ It is robust, and has “superb” legibility, allowing it to dominate attention in any project it is utilized in.

Ahkio is a brushed disconnected script family of 5 fonts. Ahkio’s roots are in 1930s sign painting and showcard lettering but with a modern and individual twist. Main characteristics are soft, rounded forms and a bit curved stems. Ahkio is a friendly and gentle font that suits well in titles, packages, logos and for example posters. 5 weights makes Ahkio a versatile font that gives you a possibility to add contrast and interest to your typography. Ahkio includes black and white manicules. You can use them easily with OpenType options. Just choose Stylistic set 1 and make sure Standard ligatures are on. Then just type: >> for Blackmaniculeright >> for Whitemaniculeright

Alf Becker was a master sign painter and lettering stylist who created well over 100 alphabets for a monthly feature in the trade magazine "Sign of the Times" during the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST pubications for supplying the source material. One of these designs features a modernized version of Old English or "text" lettering making it more legible for sign and show card work. Doing away with extra curves and swashes, this type style is more calligraphic in nature than classic. Modern English JNL was modeled from Becker's original design, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Flamme was designed by Alan Meeks and appeared with ITC in 1993. It is a strong brush script with each stroke doubled and has a nostalgic, retro style. The 1930s and 40s saw an increase in the production of modern script typefaces in foundries all over the world. Expanding markets and their advertisements demanded more and more new typefaces, which then also appeared in newspapers and magazines. A distinguishing characteristic of these typefaces is their informal hastiness and calligraphic roots, a combination which was to embody progress and modernity. Flamme is best used for headlines and short texts in point sizes of 14 and larger.

Goudy Trajan Pro is based on the drawings by F.W. Goudy of his rendition of the capital letters inscribed on the Trajan column in Rome, rather than on his subsequent metal type, Trajan (Title), released in 1930. Goudy Trajan Pro includes almost 1500 glyphs in each of three weights, including: uppercase, alternates, swash caps, small caps, vertically centered small(er) caps, dozens of fleurons, and much more. Supports Latin, Cyrillic and modern Greek scripts. Many thanks to Krassen Krestev, Sergiy Tkachenko, and Adam Twardoch for their suggestions for improving the Cyrillic glyphs; and to Alex Sheldon for his suggestions for swash caps and improved OpenType features.

Scriptek was created by British designer David Quai in 1992, based on the constructivist forms which became popular after the First World War with the progressing industrialization in Moskow. Typefaces such as Scriptek were often used in the propaganda of totalitarian political systems and can still be seen on monuments like the central train station in Milan or political posters of the 1930s and 40s. The robust Scriptek has strong serifs in the upper left and lower right of characters and this, together with the diagonal strokes of many lower case letters, gives the font a dynamic feel. Scriptek is best used for headlines and display.

Straight Line is essentially an outline Modern, but drawn without any curves whatsoever. Thin horizontals and thick verticals provide the classic look of a Didone, updated and enhanced by clean, minimalist geometry. In addition to the Straight Line font itself, the package includes Straight Line Solid with matching spacing and kerning. The Solid font can be used solo, or layered with the outline font to provide a colour background. Straight Line is an excellent display face for contemporary, eye-catching headings and sub-headings, and the fonts contain a full complement of Latin Extended-A characters. The typeface was inspired by a 1930s experimental alphabet by the British artist, Percy J Smith.

The successful Gill Sans® was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill and issued by Monotype in 1928 to 1930. The roots of Gill Sans can be traced to the typeface that Gill's teacher, Edward Johnston, designed for the signage of the London Underground Railway in 1918. Gill´s alphabet is more classical in proportion and contains what have become known as his signature flared capital R and eyeglass lowercase g. Gill Sans is a humanist sans serif with some geometric touches in its structures. It also has a distinctly British feel. Legible and modern though sometimes cheerfully idiosyncratic, the lighter weights work for text, and the bolder weights make for compelling display typography.

Mister Earl, released by Bitstream in 1991, was designed by Jennifer Maestre. Inspiration came from a page in a ‘how-to’ book published in the 1930s. Later versions of Extra Light, Light and Bold were added by Jim Lyles, with the help of Wally Petty. Mister Earl is named in honor of Earl Biscoe, a Bitstream designer who retired in the mid-1980s because of illness. In the winter of 1994–1995, Richard Stetler accidentally left a copy of Mister Earl outside his Alaska home... In the spring, amazed to discover the unfortunate font was still just about alive, he decided to release the result to a wider public as Snow Cap.

There are thousands of pieces of vintage sheet music available for collectors and curiosity seekers. Prior to the 1930s, a large percentage of them had wonderfully hand-lettered titles on the covers, but gradually there was a shift by music publishers to utilizing metal type for the bulk of their output. Normally set in an all-caps format, certain type faces reappeared in growing frequency and familiarity. Composer JNL is one such example of a “workhorse” font, and has been re-drawn and reinterpreted by Jeff Levine Fonts in both regular and oblique versions. It is based on the design "Glamour", released by Lanston Monotype in 1948; which in turn was based on "Corvinus", designed by Imre Reiner.

Karmaline is a six-weight sans serif font family with a unique and expressive design. This font has some intriguing special features such as subtly tapered topheavy vertical strokes and selected wedge-shaped horizontal strokes. It is evocative of designs from Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands in the period spanning 1900 – 1930, but with thoroughly modern features like high legibility at small sizes, even inter-character weight and flow, and a high x-height. You'll find Karmaline's semi-condensed width to be useful for both strong headlines and for comfortable copyfitting in narrow column widths. This font also works very well when adding layered shadow and highlight effects, and is a great choice for logos.

Transat is a geometric sans serif typeface, with caps inspired by Art Deco signage — found inside the “Gare Maritime” (literally “sea station”) ocean liner terminals in both Le Havre and Cherbourg, France, in the early 1930s. The name “Transat” is the common shortening of “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique,” the company that operated majestic ocean liners like the SS Normandie out of Le Havre from 1862–1974. (Transat also has a more rational text-friendly companion font, " Transat Text ") Transat includes many OpenType features, such as ligatures (ff/ft/fft), small capitals, case sensitive forms, stylistic alternates, arbitrary fractions, and a full complement of proportional, tabular, and oldstyle figures. Transat is released in 5 weights plus including optically-corrected obliques.

P22 CoDependent is a revival of the Independant typeface from 1930 created by Dutch designer Johannes Nicolaas Coenraad Collette along with Jos Dufour from Belgium. Independant was released in metal by the Belgian division of the Amsterdam Type Foundry in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the independence of Belgium from the Netherlands. Despite the name, the two fonts contained in the set, Regular and Shadow, are not codependent upon each other. They can be used alone, but together they can create a dynamic two-color option. There have been other fonts inspired by and revived directly from Independant, but this version adheres the original design with the added consideration of how the shadow version will overlap.

Splendor was originally produced and released in 1930 by Schriftgu� AG, Dresden. The typeface was designed by Berlin designer Wilhelm Berg. Ralph M. Unger, who in the last few years has created a whole series of revivals and redesigns from the hot metal era, ?retrieved? this jewel of a typeface design, redesigning, complementing and digitally remastering it for profonts. Splendor is a broad nip, non-connecting handwriting script of timeless elegance, charm and beauty. It needs tight setting with plenty of space around it. The font contains a number of alternate characters: Two uppercase As, Ss (with descender); in addition, two uppercase Ms, Ns and Zs as well as two lowercase zs.

Josephine, named for Josephine Baker, the legendary dancer of the 1930s, is a twenty first century sans serif typeface that harks back to the earlier part of last century. Although very modern, it has been greatly influenced by the many art deco fonts produced during the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century.In it I have tried to capture the art deco spirit in a modern humanist font. Josephine is exceptionally readable and yet completely characteristic of the Art Deco period. It can be used for text passages as well as display in posters, advertising, labels and packaging. It is professionally finished and contains all upper and lower case characters as well as all special characters, punctuation and symbols.

The 1930s era French textbook on lettering "100 Alphabets Publicitaires déssinés par M. Moullet" featured a hand lettered chamfered alphabet with slab serifs reminiscent of sports lettering. Although intended for advertising and signage inspiration, only a partial lower case was illustrated along with the capitals and no numbers or other characters existed. These had to be created from scratch. The finished result is not only a bit of classic lettering from the past, but the font also doubles as a typeface with a sports look and feel. A traditional (rather than stylized) M and N are located on the solid bar key and the broken bar key respectively. Old Sport JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Statistics Prove. Near and Far. That Folks Who Drive Like Crazy. Are! Burma-Shave. In the days before the Interstate Highway system, you were likely to encounter a series of signs like this, somewhere in the backwoods between the large and small towns connected by the U.S. Highway system. The fonts in this series are based on the typefaces used on U.S. Highway signs from the 1930s to the 1950s. Included in each font are a sign shield in the backslash position, and a Burma-Shave logo in the section mark position. The Truetype and Opentype versions contain the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

GP Metro® is a faithful version of the Dwiggins 1930 urban classic: Metrolight, Metromedium, and Metroblack. In 1929, English type designer, William Addison Dwiggins, (WAD) was commissioned by the Merganthaler Type Foundry to design a warmer, more humanistic, and less mechanical sans to effectively compete with Futura, a highly-popular geometric sans designed by Paul Renner in 1927 and first released by Meganthaler's arch-rival, the Bauer Type Foundry in Germany. FontHaus has licensed from GroupType updated files with additional styles including 2 rough versions and a soft together with the classic Regular styles and weights. These new styles will offer designers a wider range of options to design with these amazing classics.

Monolinear Vintage Elegance The Gimbel Script typeface was inspired by a monoline, semi-connected script from a 1930's holiday greeting card. From its ascenders and descenders that stretch high and low to its gentle curviness Gimbel Script exudes the elegance of a bygone era while standing on a thin line between formal and casual lettering styles. See the 5th graphic for a comprehensive character map preview. Gimbel Script Opentype features include: - Swash Alternates for an alternate M and N. - Stylistic Alternates & SS01-SS06 Stylesets for 151 varying forms. - 219 Ligatures for a smoother typesetting experience, along with 181 initial, middle and final forms. - Full set of Inferiors and Superiors for Limitless Fractions. - Proportional, Tabular and Oldstyle figure sets.

Aloe is a characterful and friendly display font family inspired by headlines from 1930’s newspapers and calligraphy. The family consists of 9 weights, ranging from Thin to Heavy, with matching ornament fonts. It features a variable font with weight axis. Each weight has over 900 glyphs including advanced typographic features, such as vast number of stylistic alternates, swashes, titling and terminal forms, case sensitive forms, ligatures, symbols, ornaments as well as lining and old style figures, fractions, subscripts and superscripts. This original mixture of display typeface with calligraphy gives a versatile family great for all sorts of uses - from advertising, packaging, branding, wedding invitations, menu cards and other editorial uses to screen and web projects.

Splendor was originally produced and released in 1930 by Schriftgu� AG, Dresden. The typeface was designed by Berlin designer Wilhelm Berg. Ralph M. Unger, who in the last few years has created a whole series of revivals and redesigns from the hot metal era, ?retrieved? this jewel of a typeface design, redesigning, complementing and digitally remastering it for profonts. Splendor is a broad nip, non-connecting handwriting script of timeless elegance, charm and beauty. It needs tight setting with plenty of space around it. The font contains a number of alternate characters: Two uppercase As, Ss (with descender); in addition, two uppercase Ms, Ns and Zs as well as two lowercase zs.

Cover art for the 1933 sheet music of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "Stormy Weather" (from the musical production "Cotton Club Parade") listed the cast of the show in a condensed hand lettered sans that typified the 1930s and the Art Deco era. This served as the inspiration for Uptown Review JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions. The Cotton Club was a whites-only night club which showcased black acts, and was originally located on 145th Street in Harlem from 1923 to 1935, then existed for a short time in the New York theater district from 1936 to 1940. After the Broadway incarnation of the club closed, its space was taken over by the Latin Quarter.

A 1930s WPA (Works Projects Administration) poster advertising a play entitled “Abraham Lincoln, The Great Commoner” had the play’s name done in a hand-lettered Art Deco sans. This is the basis for Art Project JNL. According to Wikipedia, “the Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. In a much smaller but more famous project, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.”

Cut as a private version for the Nonesuch Press in the early 1930s, Monotype Bulmer was first released for general use in 1939. Based on types, cut by William Martin circa 1790, used by the Printer, William Bulmer, in a number of prestigious works, including Boydell's Shakespeare. Martins types combined beauty with functionality. Narrower and with a taller appearance than Baskerville, it anticipated the modern face of Bodoni but retained vital qualities from the old face style. This new digital version of the Bulmer font family was drawn by Monotype following extensive research into the previous hot metal versions and a study of Bulmer's printed works. Additional weights have been designed together with a wide range of Expert and alternative characters.

Introducing Moxie Twist, a captivating revival typeface that pays homage to the timeless elegance of 1930's design. Inspired by the iconic typography of the era, this font seamlessly blends nostalgia with a modern twist. With its unique flair and charming details, Moxie Twist breathes new life into vintage aesthetics, infusing your designs with a touch of sophistication and character. Whether you're working on branding materials, editorial layouts, or poster designs, this font will transport your audience to a bygone era while maintaining a fresh and contemporary feel. Rediscover the spirit of the past with Moxie Twist and let it lend an air of classic elegance to your next project, adding a touch of timeless allure that is sure to captivate.

Pacific Script is a font inspired by an alphabet created by Howard Trafton in the 1930s. However, I felt it needed some changes to bring it to the cutting edge of 21st century font design. Though designed as a display font, it works very successfully in longer passages of text, however, it should not be used in font sizes less than about 15 point. Small x height in contrast to extravagant caps gives the font a very dramatic feel. Though it has cursive qualities, the characters in this font do not connect, making it slightly more legible and less like handwriting. The inclusion of 26 alternate upper case characters give the user the freedom to create a hand crafted design. Language support includes all European character sets.

In 1932, Xanti Schawinsky (1904?1979) designed an alphabet that combines two styles: a neo-classic stroke contrast paired with characteristics of stencil lettering. This mix is a child of its time and seems to reflect the Swiss and Italian biography of Schawinski. Luca Pellegrini took on the modern look and re-drew the letterforms, interrupted by subtle spaces where thick and thin strokes meet. Although Schawinsky had already designed a complete alphabet and figures in the early 1930s, Pellegrini took the character set to another level, adding currency signs, mathematical symbols and all kinds of punctuation ? anything needed to set more than just headlines. Xants is a blend of Swiss elegance and exclusiveness with Italian charm and imperfection, a combination that never gets old.

Taking its cue from the lettering of 1930s Dutch commercial artist Martin Meijer, Libertine is a script where expert calligraphy and total wrist control are on display. With strokes stopping and starting at very steep angles and extreme contrasts, every character is a high riff jolting from within a stunning epic that brands the message home. This is the rebel yell, the adrenaline of scripts. Libertine comes in three interchangeable fonts, each of which containing extended language support. The complete set comes with a fourth font that includes tons of alternates and ligatures and, more importantly, Libertine Pro, the 1160+ character behemoth that combines all four fonts for advanced typography environments, where automatic ligatures, stylistic alternates, and position-sensitive forms are seamlessly put to good use.

Trebuchet™ Family, designed by Vincent Connare in 1996, is a humanist sans serif designed for easy screen readability. Trebuchet Family takes its inspiration from the sans serifs of the 1930s which had large x heights and round features intended to promote readability on signs. The typeface name is credited to a puzzle heard at Microsoft, where the question was asked, 'could you build a Trebuchet (a form of medieval catapult) to launch a person from the main campus to the consumer campus, and how™' The Trebuchet fonts are intended to be the vehicle that fires your messages across the Internet. 'Launch your message with a Trebuchet page'. Character Set: Latin-1, WGL Pan-European (Eastern Europe, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish).

Frederic Goudy drew Truesdell in 1930 and first used it for an article in a quarterly journal for book collectors. Since it was a small family and not promoted, Goudy received few orders for fonts. The original drawings and matrices for the face were lost in the fire that destroyed Goudy's studio in 1939.The only known examples of Truesdell fonts reside in the extensive collection of typographic material at the Rochester Institute of Technology School of Printing. It was proofs from these fonts that served as the basis for Monotype's digital revival of the family. Monotype Truesdell was released in March of 1994, just slightly over fifty-five years after fire destroyed Goudy's original work. Truesdell font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

ITC Luna is the work of Japanese designer Akira Kobayashi. He turned to the designs of the 1930s for his inspiration for both ITC Luna and ITC Silvermoon. Luna is designed to fill the gap between a pure Art Deco display face and an ordinary text face," says Kobayashi. "It has an Art Deco style but is still fairly easy to read. It can be used in short passages of text. As for individual characters, I especially liked the distinctive O, shaded only on one side. Lowercase a and g are also unusual, but they are somehow legible enough in text matter." And for a finishing touch on his Luna, Kobayashi added the charming moon face as an extra character.