In the 1990s I drew a text face for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was based on W. A. Dwiggins’ Electra and incorporated many features of the Linotype Legibility Series: More compact, with a taller lowercase X-height, etc. That type was called Electric and it was the Chronicle’s text face for nearly a decade, surviving several redesigns. From that, I made Azuza, a more detailed and sensitive style. Azuza was recognized in the TDC2 type competition in 2001. Then it went into hibernation as a Type 1 font family. Today it is back. Six fonts. Open Type.

Roberta goes back to the old poster fonts of the 1930s. It is an excellent alternative and combination to fonts like Arnold Böcklin or Hobo. Ralph M. Unger redrew and digitized this font in 2003. His work is based on artwork taken from old font catalogs.

Shockproof takes its inspiration from 1940s hand lettering. It's a display font that mixes elegance with a touch of informality. Great for use in identity, signage, posters, and anywhere that tall, cool typographic drink would be refreshing.

Gans Rasgos Escritura shapes (108 tails) was selected and freely interpreted from the vignettes catalog by Fundicion Gans published in 1920. You can combine these ornaments with your favorite fonts. We suggests the use of Pretoria Gross.

Carambola is a beautiful art deco typeface based on several posters from the 1920's. It is an elegant and stylish font with generous curves and sharp ends. Carambola is multilingual and comes in all caps only.

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!

Cinema Moderne is created to pay homage to he fabulous small town theaters from 1930's and 40's America. This unique font plays off of the Art Moderne and art deco style of the day. Art Moderne some times called Streamline Moderne design architecture emphasized curving forms, long horizontal lines, and sometimes nautical elements. Many of these masterpiece buildings have been lost forever. Some have managed to find new life with a new function. Cinema Moderne was created to preserve a small piece of that history forever. This font is to encourage the appreciation of the neighborhood theater culture as well as the grand style of the buildings. Comes in 9 different weights for one low price, or as individual fonts. Perfect for logo creation, or any art deco style project. Previous projects have included event flyers, Gatsby themed party invites and digital marketing content. Give your images a unique effect with this one of a kind font.

Syntax was developed by Hans Eduard Meier in 1968 and presented by the font foundry D. Stempel AG. Its figures are based on Old Face characters but have a distinctive, modern design. The inclination to the right lends the font a dynamic feel.

Compliment is a script design which is obviously based on H. Matheis' typeface designed for Ludwig & Mayer in 1965.Ralph M. Unger redrew and digitized this font in 2004. His work is based on artwork taken from old East German font catalogues.

Iris font was designed in the late 1930s for American Typefounders. It is an all capital sans serif typeface whose slender geometric letter forms suggest the Art Deco period without limiting its application potential. Iris font creates a look of refined elegance.

Eckhardt Speedletter JNL was named in honor of Al Eckhardt (1929-2005), a talented sign painter and good friend of font designer Jeff Levine. The font was inspired by hand lettering on a reproduction of a 1950s rock and roll show poster.

A heavy, cartoonish and fun font based on a hand lettered 1960s advertisement. The hand-lettered original gave me the idea to expand this into an OpenType font with multiple interlocking ligatures. There are over 260 alternate ligatures found the in the "Discretionary Ligatures" OpenType Feature, which will lend the font a hand drawn look. The ligature glyphs can also be accessed via the glyph palette. Great for any design that requires a fun and light-hearted mood. Contains language support for both Latin-based and most Eastern European languages.

Happy Trails is a font that is based on the lettering (all upper case) used on most Trailways buses from 1936 through the very early 1960s. It also has a newly created set of lower case letters which never existed before. The font was tweaked and digitized by Bob Alonso & John Bomparte. Happy Trails has not only the flavor of the early Trailways buses but also a folksy, Western feel to it, and it’s even a bit silly or goofy, a fun font that has a variety of uses.

First presented by the Bauer Type Foundry in 1928, Futura is commonly considered the major typeface development to come out of the Constructivist orientation of the Bauhaus.movement in Germany. Paul Renner (type designer, painter, author and teacher) sketched the original drawings and based them loosely on the simple forms of circle, triangle and square. The design office at Bauer assisted him in turning these geometric forms into a sturdy, functioning type family, and over time, Renner made changes to make the Futura fonts even more legible. Its long ascenders and descenders benefit from generous line spacing. The range of weights and styles make it a versatile family. Futura is timelessly modern; in 1928 it was striking, tasteful, radical - and today it continues to be a popular typographic choice to express strength, elegance, and conceptual clarity. The PL Futura Maxi font family was created by Victor Caruso in 1960 to add more display weights to Paul Renner's 1927 Futura family. Typefaces in the same style like Futura are: Avenir, Metromedium, Neuzeit Grotesk,

With over a year of design and development, Victorian Supremacy is ready to help you and your clients make a statement by adding elegance and unique flair to your next design project. Victorian Supremacy inspired by letterheads from the late 1800's and early 1900's. Set includes four major styles and layered version (gradient, outline & extrude). Victorian Supremacy offers an expansive set of options, making it the perfect choice for books, magazines, packaging, branding and signage. From period style and Victorian to modern and elegant, Victorian Supremacy is strong and stately, yet elegant and decorous.

From scrapbooking to intensive graphic design applications, Craft Roman is a wonderful choice for charming and lighthearted communications. Craft Roman is based on Speedball and signpainter books from the 1920s and 30s, and reminiscient of the style of some of the lettering accompanying Mary Engelbreit artwork. Craft Roman is perfect for capturing the feel of vintage posters and retro stylings dating back to simpler times or handworked arts & crafts projects- even elementary school and childhood art. Extended character sets and intensive kerning provide foreign language support for many regions, plus bonus glyphs for quick stylistic flair.

ITC True Grit is the work of American designer Michael Stacey, a bold distinctive typeface. An enthusiastic collector of vintage graphic design, Stacey says that he is especially intrigued by lettering styles from the days when most display typography was done by hand. The style for ITC True Grit was taken from the 1930s and updated for digital imagine. Stacey say his goal was to retain the casual feel of handlettering yet impart the crisp finish of current precision typography." ITC True Grit is a hybrid design, a cross between German Blackletter and brush script with a hint of Jugendstil thrown in."

A rounded version of Albiona, a contemporary slab-serif which revisits aspects of Robert Besley’s classic Clarendon. Originally named after the Clarendon Press in Oxford, the type family was subsequently extended by Stephenson Blake in the 1950s. Albiona adds the inwardly-curved stroke terminals of the same foundry’s Grotesque series, and includes italics and old-style and tabular numerals. The original Clarendon’s ball serifs and calligraphic eccentricities have been rationalised for functional contemporary uses. The family consists of five weights plus italics and a stencil, and its clean readable style is perfect for both extended text as well as headline setting.

Stan Davis drew this face for VGC in 1967, following the structure of the MICR figures to suggest a ‘computerized’ effect.

PyeMan is a rounded block typeface influenced by home computer games from the 1980s. Examples include Asteroids, Defender and Pac-Man.

A bold sans serif typeface influenced by Ed Benguiat 's work for the 1968 movie poster for Planet of the Apes .

C-V dashes are transcribed from 72-pt ornaments designed by Enric Crous-Vidal and issued by Typefoundry Amsterdam c. 1950.

Playful JNL takes its name from the obviously playful lettering found on the title of a piece of 1940s sheet music.

Stan Davis drew this face for VGC in 1967, following the structure of the MICR figures to suggest a ‘computerized’ effect.

Easy Living JNL is a bold Art Deco type face modeled from the name of a 1930s magazine entitled "Country Living".

The geometry of Paul Renner’s sans letterforms was tempered by optical correction to follow earlier typeface proportions, with capitals close to old-style forms, yet still retaining the spirit of the New Typography. His early experimental characters were included as alternatives in the sans which was to become the Futura released by Bauer in 1927–30. Unusually, old style figures also appeared in his early versions but they too were soon discarded. Foundry Architype Renner as a new four weight family has been developed from the original Renner Regular and Bold, created by The Foundry for the first Architype Collections in the early 1990s. This new family features the old style figures and the experimental elements.

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.

The Scriptorium got its start in the early days of personal computers with a few font designs for the Commodore 64, and the very first font which we did back then in the early 1980s was a gothic calligraphy font. That style of fonts - the medieval, gothic and black letter genre - has always been the backbone of our collection, but with recent releases we've stayed away from them to introduce a bit more variety. Well, with our new Zauberer font the antique, medieval and gothic look is back with a vengeance. Zauberer isn't a true medieval calligraphy style. It's based on early printed type from Germany which combines calligraphic elements with decorative embellishments from the woodcut printing era. The result is decorative and antique looking and rather appealing. The name comes from the German word for a magician or illusionist.

The Metro Office family is designed after the model of the original sans serif family – Metro No.1 – produced by W.A. Dwiggins and Mergenthaler Linotype’s design studio during the late 1920s and 1930s. A distinctly new interpretation of the sans serif idea, Metro was a thoroughly “American” sans serif when it was released. However, over the ensuing decades, it became a favorite the world over. Moreover, it is one of the first “humanist” sans serif typefaces designed. While redesigning Metro in 2006, Linotype’s Type Director Akira Kobayashi drew from his own knowledge of humanistic letterforms. The result is a redefined Metro; a typeface that is finally ready for heavy text setting. The original Linotype Metro No.1 never had italic variants. Kobayashi has created oblique variants, extending its use in document setting. A double-storey a and g, as well as a wider w were features of Dwiggins’ original Metro design that were filtered out by Mergenthaler Linotype in the 1930s. Kobayashi remedied this historical slight, retooling Dwiggins’ original forms and optimizing their legibility. Kobayashi has additionally retooled some of Metro’s more troublesome letters, which has black elements that became too dense. By opening up the troublesome joins (like that on the Q), Kobayashi has given his new Metro a more even color in text, improving its legibility while retaining its original spirit.

The original Ronsard Crystal began its life as a single-weight VGC photo display font in the 1950s. We liked it so much, that we decided to design four traditional weights to go with the original inline version.

Based upon Riedingerschrift, cut by Franz Riedinger for Benj. Krebs Succ. in Frankfurt am Main in 1906, here come Ridinger Std and its extended version, Ridinger Pro. An elegant cursive font which also includes various adorning swash strokes.

Based upon Riedingerschrift, cut by Franz Riedinger for Benj. Krebs Succ. in Frankfurt am Main in 1906, here come Ridinger Std and its extended version, Ridinger Pro. An elegant cursive font which also includes various adorning swash strokes.

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.

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!

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.

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".

Permanent Park - 1990s Graffiti Inspired Marker Pen Font A hand-drawn marker pen font inspired by graffiti tags and 1990s Hip Hop. Permanent Park is a marker pen font with a graffiti tag aesthetic inspired by the golden-age of Hip Hop and 1990s TV shows. It’s 100% hand-drawn and comes packed with alternative characters for creating truly natural looking type treatments. No repeated oo’s, ee’s and ll’s that are a dead give-away of lazy lettering! Permanent Park is a highly customisable all-caps design featuring a complete set of uppercase and lowercase characters, along with numerals, punctuation and language support. It also features a complete set of alternatives with additional lowercase characters (for mixing things up even more), and a selection of underlines and symbols for an illustrative flourish. It’s a uniquely fun, urban looking font, typical of 90s music videos and TV shows, and equally suited to sports, travel and food themes. Check out my visuals for ideas on how you might use it on posters, movie titles, product packaging, broadcast and advertising.

The Vondelpark is the famous Amsterdam city park, 47 hectares stretching out from Leidseplein to the Amstelveenseweg. It was founded in 1864 when a group of well-to-do Amsterdam citizens got together and bought land at the (then) edge of the city centre in order to create a park ‘for riding and strolling’. Designed by architect J.D. Zocher, it opened officially in 1865. The park received its name two years later when a statue of Dutch writer Joost van den Vondel was placed in the park. In the 1960s and 1970s the Vondelpark became a symbol and epicenter of the hippie flower power era. The park was declared a state monument in 1996. Donald DBXL was intrigued by the handmade iron nameplate lettering on the park’s entrance gates, and decided to design VLNL Vondelpark in its glory. The somewhat clumsy iron letters were not revived as is but optimized to turn it into a useful typeface. The all-caps serif with a deliberate constructed feel, contains a Positional Open Type feature that places half circles on the vertical stems, at the beginning and end of a word, to enliven the rhythm.