Tradewinds JNL is based on one of many innovative alphabets designed by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times magazine between the 1930s and 1950s. Thanks go to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media (who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio) for supplying the reference material used to make this font.

We have created this family inspired from the hand-drawn letters used from the late 1800s until beginning of 1900s for notices, advertising, posters and also early comic titles. It is a hand-made font, with little imperfections that give it its special poetic note. It can be used together with 1906 French News, 1906 Titrage and 1820 Modern.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Miller Music Corporation issued a number of its songs with a stock cover design for their “Miller Series of Piano Solos” but the song titles were hand lettered in an Art Deco dual line design. Recreated digitally as Music Lesson JNL, this type design is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Birch Beer JNL comes from lettering spotted on a European business sign found in some stock footage that was used for an old black and white film about World War II. The name is derived from a popular root beer-like soda sold by the Royal Castle Restaurants that were popular in Florida from the 1930s through the 1970s.

The Greek-influenced hand lettering on a 1930s WPA (Works Progress Administration) poster for the Federal Theater presentation of "Trojan Incident" inspired Euripedes JNL. The play was based on Homer and Euripedes, and was presented at the off-Broadway St. James Theatre (which opened in 1927 at 246 W. 44th Street on the site of the original Sardi's restaurant).

Vintage packaging for Frosty Stencil Flock contained the hand lettered term “spray flock” which served as the basis for Flocking Stencil JNL; available in both regular and oblique versions. Commonly referred to as “Spray Snow”, these kits of holiday stencils and spray cans were a popular item in the households of the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s.

At first glance, this unusual display face might appear to be a product of the 1960s, with its highly unconventional letterforms and its plastic, fantastic highlight treatment. However, this font is in fact inspired by a ca. 1930 poster for a Belgian beer of the same name. The uncredited Flemish designer was clearly a head of his time (ouch!).

A set of rubber stamp letters, figures and punctuation used for marking electrical or communications equipment [and made in Japan] is the basis for this serif typeface. Varying widths and some letters in more of a block style than rounded are typical of Japanese packaging text from the 1950s and 1960s. Available in regular and oblique styles.

Rundfunk is a condensed font which features an unusual lowercase with an extremely low x-height and high tail ascenders that align with the capitals. It is a reworking of the original designed by Adolf Behrmann for the Berthold type foundry in 1928. Rundfunk font is ideal for projecting the look and mood of the 1930s.

Night Life JNL follows the classic lettering forms of the Art Deco era of the 1930s and 1940s. On the upper case letters, the A,B,E,F,H,K,P and R have extended horizontals, while the lower case a,b,e,f,h,k,p and r have those extensions removed and are more traditional in design.

Printing Set JNL by Jeff Levine comes from a toy rubber stamp printing set imported from Japan in the 1950s and 1960s that's been revived, but is now imported from China. The font has a serif letter so typical of import toys of the day, but actually reads quite nicely in short headlines and specialty ad copy.

GRUND is a new fontographic adaption of a remarkable 1920s epigraphical find in the city of Leipsic. This old well-known European trade fair hotspot struggled with a severe shortage of exhibition space around 1920. The solution was to dig deeper into the matter – literally – and 1924 the world’s first underground trade fair exhibition hall was opened right under the city’s central market square. After several changes of use during the past decades the sophisticated Art Deco entrance structure (architect: Otto Droge) was re-opened in December 2013 as a gateway to a new subway rail track. – The original brass lettering of the UNTERGRUNDMESSHALLE MARKT has been retrieved – and served as the inspiration for this new and unique font. If you’d like to see more exceptional Art Deco type, have a look at my Arthur series. __________________________________________________________________________________________

A mixture of bold and fine line helps this distinctive design evoke the spirit of the 1930s Jazz Age. Due to the modular nature of this design there may be a slight lack of smoothness to the curves at very large point sizes (around 100 pt and above).

Jetlab is a typographic time machine that drops you squarely into the techno-futuristic optimism of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s! While certain weights may conjure familiar space race-era logos from the sci-fi movies, board games, sports teams, new wave bands and sneaker brands of the late 20th century, the complete 45-weight Jetlab font family is loaded with modern features to power your retro-futuristic designs with near-infinite versatility. Features: 45 weights provide widths from squeezed to stretched and weights from light to heavy, plus reverse-stress (that's thick horizontal strokes with thin verticals) high, medium and low crossbar options upper and lowercase letters provide two distinct styles a four-axis variable font provides precise control of width, vertical & horizontal weight, and crossbar height 500 glyphs support 223 languages, including Western & Central Europe and Vietnamese

Dnipro is a version of experience generalization of Ukrainian decorative font creation. The generalization development was initited by Georgy Narbut and Mark Kirnarsky in the 1920s and continued in 1970-80s. Latin letters of the font have half-uncial forms, which makes it appropriate for the printing of the relevant content. Besides its decorative properties the font is easy to read and quite suitable for short texts. It is well suited for folk tales, Ukrainian and Slavic in general as well as Western European.

The inspiration for SJURecord was calligraphic lettering used for the title of a student newspaper, St. John’s Record, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The three upper-case and nine lower-case letters were considerably different from any calligraphic lettering I had developed, so I thought creating a complete typeface around these twelve letters would be an interesting challenge. The SJCRecord family has four members: regular, oblique, shadowed, and oblique shadowed. There are alternate letters for A, J, L, S, V, W, and X.

FA Berlewi is inspired by stencil lettering of a vanguard creator, Henryk Berlewi, who was a precursor of contemporary typography, a painter and a creator of the mechano-facture (Mechano-Faktura) theory. In 1924 he designed a poster for his mechano-facture one-man show in Warsaw Austro-Daimler car salon. An attention-grabbing composition with stencil lettering was doubtless a real innovation and according to Berlewi - the first typographic poster to be made in Poland.

Unzial typefaces consist of letter forms of the Capitalis Monumentalis and the majescule cursive. The origins of Unizial faces date back to the 5th century. The Neue Hammer Unziale was developed from the Hammer typeface, which was designed by Victor Hammer in 1921, cut by A. Schuricht and appeared with the font foundry Klingspor in 1923. In 1953, American Unizial was expanded to include some new figures, also designed by Hammer, and was rereleased by Klingspor with the name Neue Hammer Unziale. The forms are based on old scripts in books of antiquity and the early Middle Ages and the font is a new variation of a classic. Neue Hammer Unziale has been a favorite for certificates and diplomas and is recommended for headlines and shorter texts in a point size of 12 or larger.

Frans Masereel wrote or should I rather say cut some "novels in pictures" around 1927. They are written in powerful black and white woodcuts and were apparently printed from the original cuttings, at least that what it looks like. On the cover he cut the titles in rough wooden letters. Those letters inspired me to produce Woody. Maybe some day I will add a second weight, wich will be an extended cut. But for the time being this is enough woodwork. Your woodcutter Gert Wiescher

Picture if you will, a balmy autumn evening in Manhattan during the 1930s and a well-dressed couple out on the town. They hail one of the hansom cabs located near Central Park and climb in for an old-fashioned romantic ride around the green. Such are the type of images the stylized Art Deco hand-lettering comprising Horse Drawn Carriage JNL evokes. The inspiration for this font was the title card for a 1935 Bette Davis feature entitled "The Girl from 10th Avenue".

Picture frame and border font.

Used Cars JNL is based on one of the many unique alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times magazine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Special thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media (who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio) for providing the reference material for this design

PM Showman is based on vintage hand-painted sign writing from the 1900s through the 1960s. Seen on everything from office signs to posters, it was a staple of business communication and entertainment advertising in the early 20th century. We meticulously hand-drew each font, modeling the spacing and quirkiness of the original letterforms to give PM Showman an authentic hand-painted look.

Retro Signs JNL collects nearly 50 designs modeled from old water transfer sign decals once manufactured by the Duro Decal Company of Chicago, Illinois and adds in a generous amount of additional phrases newly-drawn in the same hand lettered style. These vintage sign panels are perfect for creating nostalgic signage to fit projects centered around the 1950s and early 1960s.

The chamfered block style of lettering has been a workhorse for years. From the early signage of the 1800s to military markings to the techno fonts of the 1980s and beyond, its clean and simple look gets the message across easily and boldly. Industrialist JNL and its oblique partner were modeled from the title on a piece of sheet music from the 1940s.

Bill Rigney, an old job printer in my home town, established his shop in 1896, closed it in 1900 to take a steady job, stored the equipment in a large shed, and reopened for business upon his retirement in 1950. What a find! A bonanza of old type! We became good friends and upon his death I bought the type. Bless you Bill.

Display Board JNL is based on Futura Display, which was designed in 1932 by Paul Renner as an extension of his original (1927) Futura family of typefaces. According to Wikipedia, the font was developed as a typeface by the Bauer Type Foundry, in competition with Ludwig & Mayer's seminal Erbar typeface of 1926 Display Board JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

One in the series of fonts celebrating the Halcyon Days of Handlettering. Magic Lantern is a caps and small caps font based on an untitled design by Samuel Welo, whose Studio Handbook for Artists and Advertisers appeared in six editions between 1927 and 1960. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Stradivarius, sometimes known as Symphonie was designed by Hungarian born Imre Reiner (1900-1987). Reiner was not only a type designer, he was a fine artist. He enjoyed sculpture, painting, graphic and industrial design. In 1921, F. H. Ernst Schneidler, (Schneidler Initials) introduced Reiner to type design. Stradivarius was designed and first released by the Bauer Type Foundry in 1938.

Hand lettering on the packaging for an Arrow "Commander" Staple Remover seen in an online auction is the inspiration for the unusual and angular typeface comprising Staple Remover JNL. The Art Deco era of the 1930s and 1940s offers many wonderful examples of stylized and experimental lettering, and this, by far is one of the more eclectic styles of the time.

This bouncy little number is based on handlettering often found on greeting cards in the 1950s and 1960s, and often the work of Alan Denney. Wild and wacky (and maybe a little bit tacky), this monocase font is a sure attention-getter. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

This exuberant face was suggested by a piece of French sheet music from the 1930s for the song Sur un Air de Shimmy, The name comes from an Australian song from the 1950s about a noncompliant boomerang. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

The unusually-shaped hand lettering of Penny Wise JNL was modeled from the cover of the 1936 sheet music for "You Dropped Me Like a Red Hot Penny", and is available in both regular and oblique versions. Although it was drawn during the Art Deco period, this type of lettering design style was revived during the Hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

At the apex of the 1960s-70s Hippie movement, San Franscisco's Haight-Ashbury district was the epicenter of the Love Generation, and the Fillmore (East and West) were the city's musical venues. Inspired by a 1970 concert poster, the Art Nouveau influence was strongly felt in the hand lettering from that poster, which is the basis for Flower Children JNL.

Grafiker means 'Graphic Designer' in German. This fat, colored, uneven font with a 1001 uses was loosely based on the work of designers Oskar Kokoschka (1886 - 1980) and Jean Carlu (1900 - 1997). The glyphs were hand-drawn with a 0.5 roller ball and colored in with Chinese ink, using a stiff brush. The result is a lively, rather unusual font.

Alexandrya is a subtly modulated block serif font family with a humanist sensibility and all of my personal style for font design. A distant ancestor of the basic letterforms is Minister (a German font of the 1920s) through my first font in the mid-1990s, Diaconia. There are many OpenType features with over 600 characters: Caps, lower case, small caps, ligatures, discretionary ligatures, swashes, small cap figures, old style figures, numerators, denominators, accent characters (including CE), ordinal numbers (1st-infinity: lining and oldstyle), and so on. It is designed for text use in body copy.