The hand lettered screen credits for the 1940 film “The Proud Valley” feature a bold, hand lettered sans serif type design with strong Art Deco influences. This is now available as Paducah JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The 1920s Art Nouveau movement spawned a number of beautiful hand lettered pieces of sheet music from that era. Attractive and narrow, the characters found on the title page of one such piece of music was the inspiration for Easy Money JNL.

The free form hand lettering from the titles and credits of the 1964 French film comedy “Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez” [“The Policeman from Saint-Tropez”] was the basis for Off Duty JNL – which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Comic Opera JNL (and its oblique version) is a wide, bold sans serif type design with an Art Deco influence based on a 1930s namesake poster from the WPA (Works Progress Administration) advertising a performance put on by the Federal Music Project.

The name and design inspiration for Theater Bar JNL comes from an image of an old bar with an overhead neon sign in very stylized sans serif lettering (most likely from the 1940s) and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Designed at American Type Founders in 1930-33 by Morris F. Benton. An all-capital sans serif featuring squared-off letters with rounded corners. For use in advertising and display typography. Cyrillic version was created at ParaType by Tagir Safayev in 1997.

Federal Streamliner was inspired by lettering seen on the side of a 1950s/60s era train. It speaks of the designs of the 'streamline' era and is ideal for retro projects invoking the 30s, 50s or 60s needing a simple distinctive display face.

Brossard is a slab serif face redolent of French atmosphere and the design ethos of the 1920s. Use it for headines and posters that need that distinctive élan or where a Continental feel is called for. Regular and outline faces are offered.

Common Stencil JNL takes a vintage lettering stencil from the 1980s with imperfectly bent cutting dies [which unintentionally gave the characters a distressed or "grunge" look] and recreates it in a digital form. The design is available in both regular and oblique versions.

George Bruce's New York foundry had a remarkable number of decorative types, most of which were lost or destroyed when the firm was taken over by the American Type Founders Co. and closed down in 1906. Bruce catalogs are prized among collectors.

Named for a Manhattan neighborhood, Sutton Place JNL is based on a 1930s-era poster advertising training in the “Household Arts” that was produced by the Federal Art Project in Ohio; a segment of the larger Depression Era WPA (Works Progress Administration).

Stencil Press JNL was based on just a few existing sample punches from a 1920's stencil machine made by the Diagraph-Bradley company. Thanks to Neal Haynes at Diagraph for the samples and the ability to preserve this design in digital format.

Coen Hofmann revives an original design by Germany type foundry Schriftguss from 1940: His digital Admira is expanded with an extensive open type character set and even provides full Cyrillic. The face is set to best use at point sizes above 24.

Three of the four letters of the name “Jane” on the cover of a vintage piece of sheet music inspired So Nouveau JNL. The free-form swoops emulating the pen lettering of the early 1900s adds a nostalgic charm to this typeface.

A Liebestraum, in German is a "dream of love" or "love dream". Based on the ornate sheet music title from a 1920s edition of Franz Liszt's composition, Liebestraum JNL captures and preserves the unique look and feel of this pen-on-paper lettering.

Basic Stencil JNL was inspired by a lettering stencil sold by Dymo around 1968 that featured a sans serif design with rounded corners and an overall square look to the characters. This bold stencil design is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Designed in 2003 by Isay Slutsker and Irina Smirnova. Based on the calligraphic typeface of mid-1980 by Moscow type designer Isay Slutsker (1924-2002). There is a free variation of flat nib pen calligraphy. For use in advertising and display typography.

Helingston is a Fancy calligraphic font, Helingston is created with a copper plate stylus and features opentype with pua encode, Helingston is a Fancy Calligraphic including alternatives, style sets, ligatures, and swashes, Each glyph lowercase has a stylized style, Swiss is perfect for branding, invitations wedding and cards or quotes.

URW Geometric® is a sans serif typeface inspired by the German geometric typefaces of the 1920s but designed for modern usability. The character shapes have optimized proportions and an improved balance, the x-height is increased, ascenders and descenders are decreased. Special glyphs, which are often designed afterwards for the original geometric typefaces from the 1920s, are perfectly integrated in the URW Geometric® . These design characteristics increase the usability and legibility tremendously. With its 10 weights ranging from Thin to Black, plus 10 additional oblique styles, it has a great versatility in mind. The extreme light styles shine bright in large sizes, the middle weights are perfect for body copy and the bolder variants for the use of emphasis information or bring a strong impact to headlines and information. The optically balanced styles are designed to work in perfect harmony together. URW Geometric® is functional, strong, simple and harmonized in form, and at a glance appears as a modern variant of its predecessors. Apart from the basic characters the design has an extra focus on the special glyphs. These are designed for todays needs. For example: the email glyph looks modern and unique, including a perfectly balanced spacing. The numero sign, in modern use called “hashtag”, is space saving and optically balanced for body text. Additionally, various extra and alternate glyphs are designed to provide a friendly usability. Including a wide Latin language support and character sets, URW Geometric® is perfectly designed for today’s requirements. Please have a look at the URW Geometric® Type Specimen (PDF) for further information.

Imagine America in the 1930s. A gangster flick with Al Capone, a crime novel featuring Philip Marlowe. Our hero in a fedora sits in a classy bar, orders a double bourbon, lights a cigar and eyes the evening paper. He turns the pages, reading about a bank heist over on Third Avenue, a scandal involving a baseball player, a small ad for a general practitioner and a large spread about a famous law firm. What do the bottle of booze and the majestic facade of the bank have in common? The elegant baseball uniform and trustworthy attorneys? - Copperplate Gothic - When Frederick William Goudy created his legendary typeface in 1901, it went on to literally become the symbol of early 20th century America. Tiny serifs, characteristically broad letterforms, and particularly bold titles decorated calling cards at 6-point size, enormous bronze-cast logos, newspaper headlines, restaurant menus and more. This was the golden age of Copperplate, lasting up until the arrival of die neue Typografie and monospaced grotesques in the 1960s. Then the typeface almost completely disappeared. It made a partial comeback with the advent of the personal computer; digitizations of varying quality appeared, and one version even became a standard font in Adobe programs. This may have played a role in Copperplate later being used in DIY projects and amateur designs, which harmed its reputation. Copperplate New has been created to revive the faded glory of the original design. Formally, the new typeface expands the existing weight and proportional extremes. The slight serifs are reduced even further, making the typeface sans-like at smaller point sizes and improving readability. In contrast, at large point sizes it retains all of its original character. Decorative inline & shadow styles have been added and both have been created in all five proportions, making it easy to adapt the typesetting to the format you need. Despite these changes and innovations, Copperplate New remains true to Goudy’s original design and represents a snazzy way to evoke a golden era in American culture. Specimen: http://carontwice.com/files/specimen_Copperplate_New.pdf

Go back to a time when the Mediterranean coastline was truly glamorous, when stylish women and men in wire-framed glasses listened to Domenico Modugno songs on the radio while sipping wine in sidewalk cafes. A relaxing summer’s day, a gentle sea breeze, taking the time to write a postcard to your loved ones in your best handwriting. The 1950’s may have come and gone, but the elegance and simplicity of that classic style has not, Mina keeps the feel of calligraphy, the long connections between letters is elastic, the clean, thin lines, it is a relaxed cursive ideal for logotypes, titles, and lettering. There are eleven Mina font styles and many loops to choose from to customize any letter. Bring the seaside glamour of a bygone era to your projects of today with Mina. Ranging from light to heavy, Mina Calligraphic, and Mina Shadow, this family of fonts work perfectly separately but you can also achieve beautiful results when combining them. Check out also Mina Chic We recommend to combine Mina with: PestoFresco Turquoise

This extensive 60-font type family was inspired by the best (and worst) of 1970s science fiction TV shows and movies. Verbatim aims to extract the essence of futuristic type from that era, add a dash of modern style and conjure a cinematic typeface for the 21st century. From the extremes of the thin condensed, all the way through to the black extended, Verbatim has the scope to add drama to your titles and headings, and finesse to your logo and branding projects. Distinguishing features include a large x-height and open counters that aid legibility. This typeface crosses a few boundaries of type specification in that it is both rounded and square, it is part geometric in construction with a touch of humanistic flair and stroke contrast – giving Verbatim a distinctive and confident air. Key features: • 6 weights in Roman and Oblique • 5 Styles – Condensed, Narrow, Regular, Wide, Extended • Small Caps and 7 Alternates • European Language Support (Latin) • 600 glyphs per font. See more detailed examples at the Verbatim microsite.

SGT PEPPERS LONELY HEARTS CLUB is a typeface inspired by the capital letters on the bass drum in the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album cover. The original lettering was hand painted by fairground artist Joe Ephgrave during March 1967 in an art deco style he called 'futuristic'. The font completes the uppercase, adds a lowercase, and includes a full complement of over 400 characters. SGT PEPPERS OUTLINE and SGT PEPPERS OUTLINE FILL are two fonts with matching spacing and kerning that can be overlapped for creating bicolor/multicolor effects and faux drums. The Outline and Outline Fill fonts do not contain lowercase characters, instead they comprise two weights of outline capitals as painted on the Sgt Pepper drum. The uppercase letters are in the wider style from around the outer edge of the drum, and the lowercase keys deliver the more condensed 'Lonely Hearts' inline style from the middle of the drum. The uppercase Y has been flipped to produce a more conventionally acceptable character with the thicker diagonal arm on the left. However, Joe Ephgrave's reverse Y (with inline) is included in the Outline fonts at the Section keystroke § (Alt-0167 on Windows). A simplified vector image (mono) of the bass drum without lettering is also included within the Outline fonts at the PlusMinus keystroke ± (Alt-0177 on Windows).

Palatino Sans was designed as part of a group of three font families: Palatino nova, Palatino Sans, and Palatino Sans Informal. Together these three families act as the fulfilment of Herman Zapf’s original Palatino idea. Palatino, which was born as a metal typeface in 1950, proved to be one of the 20th Century’s most popular designs. Not only is Palatino Sans a completely new typeface, it is also a completely new interpretation of the entire sans serif genre. Its letterforms are curved, rounded, and soft, not hard and industrial. The fonts in the Palatino Sans family include several OpenType features, such as an extended character set covering all Latin-based European languages, old style figures, small caps, fractions, ordinals, ligatures, alternates, and ornaments. Palatino Sans can be mixed well with Palatino and Palatino Sans Informal. Palatino® Sans font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives.

To Rafaella, a menina dos cachos. We, designers, have grown accustomed to seeing that lowercase letters—not only in calligraphy but also in typography (1)—may be very playful and decorative. Almost every part of them can become a potential swash, ligature or decorative accolade (2) if the designer has some expertise regarding this matter. However, since we are living in an era that elevates the status of handcrafts, lettering has gained a lot of ground in different kinds of mediums, and with it there’s a sort of overuse of capitals. This may be due to the reason that lettering pieces need a high impact to convey their messages and many times why big capitals are the only solution. With this in mind, I started Rafaella: A font consisting entirely of capitals which go from unadorned to very decorative. Rafaella has ductus and forms vaguely based on the 1970s Bookman-like styled fonts. The presence and behaviour of serifs and ball terminals in this style were the perfect excuse to make really attractive aternates which the user can choose from the glyphs panel. The result is a font full of life. Able to be both very playful and formal due to its roman style which can be combined with (and between) a wide range of other styles of expressive scripts or geometric fonts with nice results (3). Also try Rafaella Shade Solo combined with Rafaella or Rafaella Bold for a layer effect to emphasize any given word or phrase. NOTES (1) See my fonts Erotica from 2013 or Dream from 2014. (2) Accolades is a wonderful word that refers to the ornaments made around the words in the spencerian style of calligraphy (3) Combinations often seen in different pieces of lettering were usually a contrast of style is wanted.

A contemporary slab-serif which revisits aspects of Robert Besley’s all-time classic Clarendon, designed around 1842 for Thorowgood and Co. and named after the Clarendon Press in Oxford. The original design was subsequently extended by Sheffield foundry Stephenson Blake in the 1950s into a widely-used, robust workhorse family. Albiona uses the inwardly curved stroke terminals of the same foundry’s Grotesque series, while rationalising or removing entirely Clarendon’s ball serifs, flicked tails and other eccentricities to make it more functional in contemporary settings. The family consists of five weights plus italics and a stencil, and includes oldstyle and tabular numerals. Its clean readable style suits both text and headline setting.

Gerhard is an early 1900’s Victorian style typeface that has been carefully refined for today. It was inspired from delicately hand painted lettering on a century-old vintage piano. This typeface has an bold and elegant natural aesthetic that can work for eye-catching headlines yet work gracefully enough for wedding invitations. Small caps have been designed for sub headings and allow a visual difference. Put it to use on your next branding, signage or publication project. A number of glyphs and diacritics included make this typeface usable for a wide number of languages. Alternate letters and forms have been included to create some versatility with your design.

The inspiration source for Verre Monogram is an unusual hand-drawn letterset from a vintage embroidery publication which comes off more as a Drop Cap or Initial lettering style than monogram. Although its original intention is uncertain, it has many possibilities. This monogram design from the early 1900’s has been updated from a Capitals only to a Caps/Smallcaps set with decorative linking ornamentation. The unique stained glass look of the letterforms allows for a lot of play with manual coloring, and the newly created linking ornaments offer interesting bracelet monogram design options. Download and view the MFC Verre Monogram Guidebook if you would like to learn a little more.

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.

An ad for the annual Variety Club Convention appeared in the March 18, 1940 issue of "The Film Daily. The main headline was hand lettered in a classic Art Deco "solid" style of sans serif - ultra bold and with no counters - but had one additional feature: 'engraved' lines to the left of each character. This has now been expanded into the digital typeface Trade Convention JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. Variety Clubs (now know as Variety - The Children's Charity) was founded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928 by entertainers specifically to aid children. Their history can be found at https://variety.org/who-we-are/history

Inspired by 1920's Art Deco, Artisual Deco is a 2020's celebration dedicated to the hundred-year-old history of geometric design. This retro typeface will be the perfect fit for your logo designs or graphic project. Drawn, created and published in 2021, the typeface has vintage letterforms with a classy personality. Artisual Deco contains ten high-quality styles: Thin, Light, Regular, Bold and Black with each weight provided as Upright and Italic. It has extensive lingual support, covering all Latin-based languages, from North Europa to South Africa, from America to South-East Asia. It contains all characters and symbols you'll ever need, including all punctuation and numbers.

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.

Plenty of swashes, ligatures, beginning and ending shapes, Wishes is a wit option for invitations, cards, stationery, fashion and apparel, among a wide range of uses. The curves of the cursive style are neither too solemn or pompous, its grace and playfulness are more 1950s than 1750s. This family offers the designer an additional decorative toolkit full of frames, ribbons, hearts, flowers and ornaments, plus a collection of caps and small caps. Wishes Script Pro includes the complete set of Script characters plus Ornaments and Caps. The family offers optically optimized Display and Text styles for each of the weights: Light, Regular and Bold. Use professional software that widely support Open Type features. Otherwise, you may not have access to some glyphs. For further information about features and alternates, see the User Guide Use Wishes to express your greetings!

P22 Nudgewink is a funky font family with humorous retro 1960s attitude and crazy bouncy baseline now in four weights (That is one louder!) Each character in the Pro fonts has four different variations accessible with any OpenType friendly application. The "P22 Randomizer" feature makes sure that variations of each letter keep the look of hand lettering with slight variations of up to four versions of the same letter appearing automatically. Along with stylistic alternates, Pro versions include automatic fractions, ligatures, superiors, inferiors, ordinals and a whole bunch of groovy graphic dingbats. With all these options at your disposal, dynamic handcrafted effects can be achieved with just a little bit of goofing around. So check it out, load it up and turn it on!

This is Canada Type's second Helmut Matheis revival. Rhino is what Matheis did under the name Mobil for the Ludwig & Mayer foundry in 1960. It's an informal text face with some attractive irregularities relating to the traits of handwriting. The influence of the human hand can be clearly seen in letters like the A, J, Q, R, T and pretty much all of the lowercase. Though obviously inspired by and tooled after the human touch, Rhino's functionality extends to even a page or two of text setting. Aside from its functionality, Rhino gives short paragraphs what the classic immersive-reading fonts are not built for: immediate friendliness and natural humility. A few alternates and ligatures are included within the font.

Milton Glaser on designing Babyfat: “This is the first alphabet I ever designed. For some inexplicable reason I called it Babyfat. Because I’m not a type designer, most of my alphabets are actually novelties or graphic ideas expressed typographically. Here the idea was to take a gothic letter and view it simultaneously from two sides. It started out as a rather esoteric letterform; it ended up being used in supermarkets for ‘Sale’ signs.” This forced perspective 3-D font has appeared on many LP covers and posters from the mid 1960s onward. This revival includes the original lowercase for the first time in digital form. Besides the three original styles (Outline, Shaded, and Black) made for photo typesetting, the new P22 Glaser Babyfat introduces six additional variations to allow the user to easily colorize the type as Glaser envisioned. The Keyline, Fill, Glyph, Left, Right, and Down font styles give the user nearly infinite options to create dynamic chromatic effects. P22 Glaser Babyfat was based on original drawings and phototype proofs from the Milton Glaser Studios archives. Typographic punctuation and sorts were imagined by James Grieshaber to work with Glaser’s design, as well as diacritics to accommodate most European languages. Over the years there have been many typefaces that borrowed heavily from the Glaser designs, but these are the only official fonts approved by Milton Glaser Studio and the Estate of Milton Glaser.

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 debut from the most anticipated vintage digital typefoundry by Gilang Purnama and Ilham Herry, who stucked their mind, body and soul back into the first era of 18th century. They build this intense visual-time machine that no one capable before. Started by the visual branding of the Ephemera Fonts, they bring every letters of it to the another level of journey. They called it Ephemera Sickles. Ephemera Sickles is a ornamented letterhead style typeface-inspired by the era of victorian (1800-1900) and this style was commonly used by engrossers at the turn of the century to embellish official documents, such as diplomas and other certificates. Carefully crafted for every single letters with the soul of Sickels Lettering, Spencerian, and some research from the Penmanship Journal book. The style is named after Charles Sickels, who headed the art department of Electro-Light Engraving Co. in New York City during the early 20th century. There’s no doubt that such a very strong presence typeface like Ephemera Sickles will bring a powerful identity to your visual project. Will be a perfect joint for a logo, visual branding, poster, beer label, packaging, classic bar decor, vintage hotel, et cetera.

Among the countless typefaces available today, the Modern Face style is relatively underrepresented. During the 19th century and then later with the competition from the mechanized hot metal types and film setting, a number of attractive headline types appeared in this style. For text, however, the available types were limited to those based on tried and true classics like Walbaum, Didot and Bodoni, which were created between 1780 and 1830, as well as a few variations from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The demand for new Modern text types remained nonexistant until the 1960s. Such was the situation when the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) commissioned me to come up with a concept and sketches of a new hot metal type. I was able to convince the director of the foundry that there was a niche to be filled with contemporary Modern typography. Another reason for the production of a new type was of a technical nature: the introduction of a new setting technique should not be limited to existing typefaces, but instead should lead to innovative text types suited to the demands of the new applications. André Gürtler, Basilia's designer: I began to work on the concept and initial designs of the new text type in 1968. I wanted to give the type a classical look, expressed above all in the strong stroke contrast between the robust verticals and fine horizontal strokes and serifs. This is one of the main characteristics of Modern typography.""This new typeface, Basilia, is distinguished by its soft, open appearance as well as a number of details which together mark a departure from historical models. For example, it has nothing of Bodoni's round letters and their angular, narrow spacing, and displays instead round forms with a much softer stroke in the curves. It was very important to me to avoid the Modern characteristic of stiff, vertical, grid-like strokes and to create instead a lighter, more transparent type. I retained the Modern style by using straight horizontal serifs at right angles to the strokes to still give the type its sense of rigidity." Three sketches for Basilia (normal, italic, and bold) were finished in 1973. Only the 9-point size was produced at first. In the following years, basic weights were made and adapted to filmsetting."

Lugano has it’s inspiration in 1920s advertising material and is ideal for lively banner lettering, posters and cover design. Four typefaces are offered - Lugano comes in regular, alternate, striped and alternate striped forms. Try it out and inject a little fun into your work today!