Palace Script is a formal English script from the 1920s. This typeface, inspired by centuries-old copperplate engravings, could add the perfect touch to any number of holiday cards. You could also make cute little names tags for all of your presents with Palace Script.

I was commissioned by Publish magazine to digitize Trio in 1990. Originally designed in a Light weight only, Trio is now available in Medium and Bold weights as well. Uppercase only, but each weight includes two alphabets, one more "deco," the other more "modern."

News Ticker JNL was inspired by some 1930s film footage of the famous electronic message sign that surrounded the New York Times building in Times Square. A blank panel is located on both the regular and broken vertical bars for use in spacing between words.

This is a modern-day interpretation of the 1930s font. With a wide range of alternates, you can create Art Deco and Bauhaus style typography in one piece. People who see it will be fascinated by the stylish and feminine look of the font.

A French lettering chapbook from the 1920s, entitled "Art du Tracé Rationnel de la Lettre," provided the inspiration for this decidedly Deco exercise in alternative letterforms. Both flavors of this font feature the 1252 Latin, 1250 Central European, 1254 Turkish and 1257 Baltic character sets.

This came from an early-1900s lettering book. Never was an actual font, but it has a quaint look that should be useful. We hate to see alphabets just fade away, which is why we make fonts like this. We added a few touches.

Sailor is the digital rendition of a film type that was popular in the early- to late-1970s. The type was called West Futura Casual at Photo-Lettering by David West. Some of the letter shapes of the original were replaced with more contemporary versions, but the originals remain accessible as alternates from different cells within the font, along with some other alternates and letter combinations. Just as the name implied, this sort of lettering is what happens when someone tries to apply Futura’s geometrical principles with a casual hand brush. This style has been popular for over three decades now, and is still going on strong. Posters with casual attempts at geometry are seen everywhere these days. Sailor’s brush style is now the standard visual expression of fun, cool, and happy atmosphere. It has the kind of versatility that can excite the eyes of children in cinemas, brand a product as happy and hip, turn a sign or banner into a cheerful invitation, or just make a poster or book cover that much more appealing to the eye.

Island Life is a font inspired by the loose, wavy style of the type associated with 1970s surf culture. Often found on lo-fi surf movie posters, t-shirts, and decals, it’s an aesthetic that promotes a laid-back, summer-loving style. With a zen “be like water” approach, this font has no straight edges. Behaving like letters inside a Lava Lamp, each individual character blends into a harmonious whole; perfect for groovy titles, logos and headers. The Island Life font features unique uppercase and lowercase characters, along with numerals, punctuation and language support, symbols and lots of custom ligatures for a truly hand-made look. All ligatures function automatically and can be turned on/off using the opentype features built into your software of choice. It’s the perfect font for the summer season and works great across posters, logos, t-shirts, menus and more. I recommend first laying out your text and then experimenting with warp, wave and bulge effects for some excellent results. Check out the visuals to see it in action. Enjoy!

The family contains two fonts - charged with OpenType features vintage soft serif and a sans serif with corresponding forms and softness. Serif: Grandma’s sweet and soft recipe with more than 1300 ingredients (lots of alternates, swashes, ligatures and design elements). This font takes it’s inspiration from Goudy, Windsor and Bookman typefaces. Watch the video showing the font stylistic alternates and swashes in action https://youtu.be/_MHNizwq1bM Sans serif: Soft and friendly, it is a simple 1970s inspired geometric grotesque to use as a support font with Praliné Serif or any other serif or script font of your choice. Both fonts fully unicode mapped so can be used in any application. Get your designs look 1970s!

Gerolinda has almost 1900 glyphs per weight; with its OpenType features it recreates the feeling of a mid-19th century Italian gentlewoman's handwriting. There are more than 1900 glyphs each weight with 250 variants covering all European accents and a broad choice of numbers: lined, tabular, ordinal, old style, etc. Also ligatures, discretional ligatures, contextual and stylistic alternates, smashes, contestual swashes, stylistic sets and ornaments. (la terminologia la do per buona!) This is a complete font for both editorial and graphic design. Gerolinda font is complemented by Gerolinda Design, dedicated exclusively to upper case letters: around 1,600 glyphs with all the accents. For best results, use of OpenType features is strongly recommend.

The name of this font brings back memories of an old fried chicken restaurant in Willow Springs Illinois circa 1960’s and 1970’s, my family would all get in the car and take a long drive down to an old country road Illionis Rt 171 through a forest preserve where we’d come upon the old Willowbrook motel with a bar and restaurant next door. The restaurant was called Kegal’s, when you entered the building you had to walk through the smoky bar first to get to the restaurant, I can still see the hard wood floors with all the finish worn off from decades of foot traffic. Up until the mid 1960’s Kegal’s used to raise their own chickens behind the restaurant, back then fried chicken in the Midwest was either coated in flour or bread crumbs, Kegal’s was covered in a beautiful layer of golden bread crumbs. Before your meal arrived they’d bring a basket of dinner rolls along with crackers, bread sticks and country butter, on the side they’d serve coleslaw with a vinegar sauce, which is very common in the Midwest, the first time you try it your face puckers up like you just sucked on a lemon but you get used it over time. After waiting for what seemed like forever to a child the waitress comes out of the kitchen with a huge tray of that golden deliciousness and your mouth begins to water, in her other hand was another tray filled to overflowing with crinkle cut french fries all made by hand, I’d eat a hole handful of those french fries first then take a bite of that tender juicy farm raised chicken. Today a fine Italian restaurant occupies the old Kegal’s building and the motel is long gone, only my fond memories remain. Fast forward to 2020 and FontMesa has just made some Fried Chicken as an eight weight type font family with alternates. With the Fried Chicken slab serif font family we’ve broken some rules by removing a few of the slabs on certain letters for a unique homemade look. Fried Chicken is perfect for your next product label, t-shirt design, logo, headline or cookbook cover. Treat yourself to some good ol’ Fried Chicken today.

Hand Drawn is a faithful adaptation of the original typeface of hte Letraset range by Michael Gills. A set of numerals was added to complete the font. Hand Drawn has all the charisma of the 1950s brush style and should be set closely for the best impact.

Many years ago, we bought a bunch of proofs that had apparently come from the defunct Van Loey-Nouri foundry in Belgium. Cognac was an incomplete alphabet among them, which we completed. Just a guess, but 1910 seems like a probable date for this art nouveau design.

English designer Richard Bradley created the Calligraphic Ornaments symbol font for ITC in the 1990s. Drawn in a lively traditional style similar to fine calligraphy, this font's characters set the perfect holiday spirit with little teddy bears, a Santa Claus, ringing bells, holly leaves, and other charms.

Letter Gothic font was designed by Roger Roberson for IBM sometime between 1956 and 1962. Inspired by Optima, the typeface originally had flared stems. A monospaced sans serif font designed for use on an IBM Selectric typewriter, Letter Gothic font is a good choice for tabular material.

Toronto Gothic was developed from a headline in a 1920s issue of the Toronto Star. In a previous life, it was probably Condensed Titling Gothic #11, but in this form its rounded corners and irregular lines are meant to make it look worn from years of use.

Sign Artist JNL is a casual typeface, emulating the hand-lettered look of show card and sign lettering. Created by Jeff Levine from lettering seen on some 1940's packaging, the slightly irregular letter stroke widths and shapes more closely resemble printing made with brush or ink.

Sweet Titling No. 22 is part of the Sweet Collection of engraved lettering styles from the 20th Century, published by MVB Fonts. This obscure, art deco design would have been used for engraved letterhead, business cards, etc., and likely first appeared in the 1920s or ’30s.

Hauslan is a simple, minimal and geometric type family inspired by the rationality presented by Bauhaus in 1920 which affected many areas such as architecture and graphic design. Following the concept of basic geometric shapes, Hauslan focuses on readability and versatility, either for small texts or headlines.

Athan is an uppercase geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Dani Montesinos in 2009. Inspired by one piece of lettering from the 1970s, Athan offers something a little different in terms of typography. With strong geometric forms, and highly distinctive characters, it's sure to catch your eye.

Pigalle Swing is a very elegant script from the 1950s which I found some time ago in a similar but not so elegant version on Place Pigalle in Paris. I designed lots of alternate capitals and lowercase letters to make the font more usable and interesting. Enjoy!

Clearface Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Typefounders. The design was released between 1907 and 1910 for text and display use. Since then, many variations have been released. An interesting typeface, Clearface Gothic is useful in advertising for display and small quantities of text.

The inspiration for Fence Post JNL comes out of an early 1900s manual for sign writing. A number of changes were made to make the design more aesthetically pleasing, but it retains its novelty effect of evoking the look of wooden fence posts or Western-themed typography.

Inspired by Barcelona’s Diagonal street, Antoni Morillas designed Diagonal ND in 1970. A sans that alternates straight and inclined lines, with a strong rhythm and its own personality. Its range of possible usages are very varied: signage, headlines, packaging, etc. Diagonal is a Trademark of BauerTypes SL

Konscript is a distressed typewriter face developed from analog samples from papers Mary Browers typed in the 1950s for her high school coursework. The model and age of the typewriter are not known. Additional characters were developed based on the analog samples to complete the character set.

A handsome font, perhaps a little classical. Regularly-connected script, so it’s legible but also memorable font. Holiday Type Project offers retro hand drawing scripts. Inspired by retro script on shopfront lettering, wall paint advertisements in Italy around 1950s. Check out the script fonts from Holiday Type!

Just two capital letters from a sign inspired Box Lunch JNL from Jeff Levine. The restaurant - an early 1950s favorite in Miami Beach, Florida specialized in fried chicken meals and other delights of the day - long before the big corporate chains took over the local landscape.

On page 45 of Samuel Welo’s 1930 instructional book “Lettering Practical and Foreign” is a multi-line alphabet of Art Deco elegance that perfectly captures the spirit of the Streamline era. The digital version is available as Showcard Multiline JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

A set of cling vinyl letters and numbers for titling home movies or slides is the basis for Home Movies JNL. The set was made by the Clingtite Letters Company of Chicago and retailed for $2.95. It was advertised in many photographic publications of the 1950s.

A set of water-applied decals manufactured in 1962 by the American Decalcomania Company for Goodyear serves as the basis for Margate JNL. This block-style letter (with a hint of the Art Deco era) is bold, uniform in weight and commands attention in any titling application.

Letter Gothic font was designed by Roger Roberson for IBM sometime between 1956 and 1962. Inspired by Optima, the typeface originally had flared stems. A monospaced sans serif font designed for use on an IBM Selectric typewriter, Letter Gothic font is a good choice for tabular material.

This roly-poly romp through the alphabet is based on Jürgen Riebling's irrepressible Mr. Big from the 1970s. Big, bold, bubbly and a little brash, it's a natural choice for happy headlines. Both versions contain the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets.

AZ Union font was inspired from an old vintage tin from the early 1900's This font utilizes an "old look" to the line work which is designed to have a "worn feel" to it. Ideal for use as headline or sub-head text in you design.

AZ Tiki font was inspired from Polynesian pop art Ephemera of the 1950's. This font utilizes an "old look" to the line work which is designed to have a "worn feel" to it. Ideal for use as headline or sub-head text in you design.

Springfield is a narrow, western-style display face from Bob McGrath. The design recalls wood types that were popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but which also found resonance during the 1970s. Use Springfield to liven up otherwise dull headline and logo projects.

If you like thematic fonts, this is for you. It appeared in an old lettering book (from the 1930s, if memory serves) and later came out as a film font for photolettering machines. We cleaned it up and drew the missing characters, and here it is. Enjoy.

Crude Stencil JNL is a rough auto-tracing of a vintage lettering stencil from the 1980s, with additional characters added in post-production. At small type sizes, the lettering takes on a "grunge" effect, but larger scale text will reveal more of a jagged "cut paper" look.

Trailerpark numbers 0-9 were rather old fashioned 1950's cut aluminum numbers, you've seen digitized nowhere else but here! Part of Market LTD, a collection of limited faces, mostly alpha-numeric and some just plain numeric, used primarily in retail and display situations and titling.

La Carte Pen is a paper textured version of the popular La Carte font. Inspired by a series of handwritten menus produced in 1980, La Carte is a stylish but easy-to-read script that sets as well in body copy as it does in headlines.