Gobble gobble gobble! The Gobbler font was drawn with a leaky pen on a napkin at the Modern Cafe in Northeast Minneapolis while the designer, Mister Chank Diesel, was waiting for some pot roast. “Apple cobbler drippings on the napkin add more character to the strokes of each letter,” says Chank. This font was originally named Modern Napkin, a free font released in 1997. Chank completed the character set, fixed some curves, and cleaned up some of the apple cobbler to make a more elegant font in 1999. Gobbler works great for either text or display purposes.

An unsold 1973 TV pilot for the series “Catch 22” (based on Joseph Heller’s 1961 book and the subsequent 1970 movie) had its title hand lettered in an extra bold stencil type style. Heller coined the phrase as a satire on absurd military rules and bureaucracy. Although the show’s title provided only five characters to work with, there was enough inspiration there to create the military styled Enlisted Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. According to Wikipedia: “A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations.”

The type family in four basic styles was designed in ParaType (ParaGraph) in 1992 by Tagir Safayev. Based on Frutiger, of Mergenthaler Linotype, 1976 by Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger font was originally designed for use on signs at the new Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy. The straightforward sans serif shapes are suited well for both text and display setting. Six additional styles were added in 1998-2000. Multilingual versions of 6 styles (Light, Demi and Extrabold) include Armenian alphabet designed by Manvel Shmavonyan in 1997. Two condensed Cyrillic styles (Demi Condensed and Bold Condensed) designed by Manvel Shmavonyan in 2005.