inspired by and advertise lettering publishing from 1920's

1920s-era sheet music for "Tangos Pour Manon" from Brussels, Belgium had the title hand lettered in an unusual style. The alphabet was square, had serifs and the thick-and-thin stroke weights that were more popular in the upcoming Art Deco years of the 1930s and 1940s. This became the working model for Torrid Tango JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

At first glance, Transcendental JNL looks like a 1960s or 1970s-era "Hippie" type face, hence its "love generation" name. However, the actual inspiration comes from a piece of sheet music from the early 1900s with Art Nouveau influences. It is often proven that what goes around certainly does come around in art, fashion and lettering. Transcendental JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Originally presented as an alphabet suitable for movie title cards, this font is based on a 1920 work by showcard artist E. C. Matthews, and named after the eponymous 1940s radio show about a local saloon and its never-present owner. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Fette Deutsche Schrift also known as Koch-Fraktur or Kochschrift was created by Rudolf Koch for Klingspor foundry between 1908 and 1910. The basis of this font is a publication in the magazine “Das Plakat” of September 1921. The font contains swash capitals to use as dropcaps, contextual alternates, glyphs for line endings, ligatures, discretional ligatures for use in German, ornaments and other OpenType features. It supports all the European languages using Latin alphabets (including slashed S and slashed long s used in Latvian old orthography till 1930s).

German Designer Klaus Sutter digitized Bazar, a brush script typeface from the 1950s originally drawn by Imre Reiner (1900-1987) and published in 1956 by D. Stempel AG. Bazar is a calligraphic brush type free from accurate horizontal and vertical strokes and a contrast to the objective body type. It has a more static character and could be perfectly applied in headlines or as a figurative word mark. Like tradional chinese calligraphers, Imre Reiner was also a painter; this is reflected in the glyphs of Bazar.

Metropolica is a plakkat font, inspired in titglings from advertises from 1930's

A mid-1950s hand lettered ad for Stenso Lettering Guides provided the inspiration for Stencil Company JNL, now available in both regular and oblique versions. The Stenso Lettering Company of Baltimore, Maryland pioneered easy-to-use and inexpensive lettering devices with guide holes for accurate spacing. Originally designed by a school teacher (Ruth Libauer Hormats) around 1940, the company was family run until it was sold in 1962 to Ottenheimer Publishers. They in turn sold the line to the Dennison Manufacturing Company, and it was discontinued in the 1980s after Dennison merged with Avery.

Stars, faces, ornaments... a little of this-and-that comprises Dingdangits JNL, the companion dingbat font to Dingits JNL and Dangits JNL.

Boochie is a fun font, created as a homage to 1960's movie posters.

Rock-steady and friendly, yet animated and exciting, Adventuring evolved from the hand drawn, uppercase title lettering used for the 1950s and 1960s dust jackets of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series of books.

Stencil Work JNL was re-drawn from a vintage paper stencil with one inch high Roman letters and numbers, often found in stationery, drug and variety stores in the 1950s through the 1980s.

Display Inline JNL is a companion design to Jeff Levine's Signboard JNL font - both derived from die-cut display letters and numbers popular during the 1950s and 1960s for signs and show cards.

typeface based on old lettering by an 1930's advertise lettering in a Flight Magazine

School Desk JNL is a block-style sanserif based on die-cut cardboard letters used in classrooms during the 1940s and 1950s for making various projects and teaching children the basic shapes of letters.

A new font inspired by vintage hand-painted paper signs. The Doorbuster Collection is based on retro hand-painted paper signs primarily seen in grocery stores from the 1920s through the 1970s. We meticulously hand-drew each font, modeling the spacing and uneven baseline found in vintage sign painting. The purposely organic ascenders and descenders, along with a huge set of ligatures/contextual alternates to avoid the same letters repeating when paired, give it a real hand-lettered look. Doorbuster Plug is perfect for both vintage-inspired and contemporary marketing, branding, and packaging designs. It's a classic workhorse font from the 1950s thru 1970s. Check out a few of the samples included in the thumbnails to see what can be done with it.

Prankster JNL gets its inspiration from a casual typeface popularly used in print ads of the 1950s and 1960s. Its friendly, unstructured approach to titles made the style an all-purpose workhorse of the era.

Jeff Levine's collection of stencil fonts based on original source material has grown by one with the addition of Term Paper JNL, a bold sans serif based on a stencil lettering guide from the 1950's.

A classic, comic book sound effects font, inspired by 1970's horror books! Contains dozens of European characters!

Samuel Welo was a sign painter who had published in the 1920s and again in 1960 his “Studio Handbook – Letter and Design for Artists and Advertisers”, prolifically hand lettering all of the type style examples within the pages of the publication. In 1930 Welo also published “Lettering - Practical and Foreign”. From this book comes a thick-and-thin hand lettered Art Deco alphabet – now available digitally as Sightseeing Tour JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

The hand painted signage from a 1950s era photo of the Miami Diner Restaurant in Miami, Florida inspired the digital version of its 1940s-influenced lettering. Roadside Diner JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

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.

Latin music was all the rage in the United States from the 1930s through the 1950s and songs with a “South of the Border” or “Old Mexico” theme were plentiful. The 1940 sheet music for “Make Love with a Guitar” evoked the idea of serenading one’s lovely lady on horseback while strumming the guitar. ..at least if you went by the by the illustration under the song’s name. As the hand lettered title was rendered in an Art Deco design, it became the basis for Jazz Guitar JNL [which seemed a more befitting name], and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Mocombo JNL is a slightly modified version of one of the numerous alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times Magazine during the period of the 1930s through the 1950s. Tod Swormstedt of ST Media—who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio—supplied Jeff Levine a wealth of source material from which this font is derived. The angular style of this typeface was originally referred to as “German Poster Lettering” by Becker, but it can represent many styles from 1940s night clubs to African safaris and just about anything in-between.

Ebbets JNL is a variant of Jeff Levine's Base Runner JNL, with more of a 1930s-1940s feel.

Aldrans Medium is a homage to the poster style used in the 1920’s to promote skiing in Austria.

Sign Letterer JNL is the serif version of the Art Deco hand-lettering of Sign Painter JNL—and inspired by original pen lettering found on an old decal catalog sheet from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.

Greenwich is a modern-looking humanized sans-serif typeface with open aperture, inspired by the works of English typographers in 1910s–1920s. It comes in 9 weights accompanied with matching mixed-style italics. Containing over 950 glyphs, Greenwich offers extensive language support including Cyrillic, multiple OpenType features and numerous alternate glyphs to choose from. It works great in long paragraph texts, but is expressive enough to be used in headlines and branding applications as well.

Railroad Gothic Pro is a condensed, sans serif typeface, exclusively licensed from the Ludlow Collection. The original Railroad Gothic was produced by Ludlow in the early 1900’s, and Steve Jackaman (ITF) produced the digital version in 2017. The font provides support for Latin 1, Central, and Eastern European languages, and Cyrillic. Railroad Gothic Pro is reminiscent of typefaces used in 1900’s railyards, hence the name.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s a popular event was the sock hop - when kids would meet in the school gymnasium, kick off their shoes and dance to the popular records of the day. Sock Hop JNL recalls those simpler times.

Sheet music for the 1910 composition "Good-By Betty Brown" has its title hand lettered in a thick and thin, condensed sans serif design reminiscent of lettering found in later comic strips and books of the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles, Funny Papers JNL gets its name from the slang reference Americans of the early 20th Century gave the Sunday comics pages in their local newspapers, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.