Roller Poster is named after Alfred Roller. In 1902, Roller created a poster to advertise the 16th exhibit of Austrian Artists and Sculptures Association, representing the Vienna Secession movement. The exhibit was to take place in Vienna during January & February 1903. The location is not mentioned because everyone in Vienna knew it would be held at the exhibit hall in the Secession Building at Friedrichstraþe 12, a few blocks south of the Opernring, near the Naschmarkt. Designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich in 1897, the buiilding has been restored and stands today as one finest of the many fine examples of Art Nouveau architecture in Vienna (see vienna_secession_bldg.jpg). Because of its dome, it is called “the golden cabbage.” The poster itself is unique. The word “secession” is in one type style and takes up two-thirds of the elongated poster. At the bottom of the poster are the details in a different lettering style. It is this second style at the bottom that is the basis for the font Roller Poster. In keeping with our regular naming conventions, we were going to call it Roller Gezeichnete (hand-drawn), but the wonderful play on both words and the shape of the three S’s in secession was too compelling. In November 1965 there was an exhibit of Jugendstil and Expressionist art at the University of California. Alfred Roller’s Secession Poster was part of that exhibit. Wes Wilson was designing promotional material at Contact Printing in San Francisco. Among their clients was a rock promoter named Bill Graham, staging dance-concerts at Fillmore Auditorium. Wilson saw the catalog from the UC exhibit and Roller’s lettering. Wilson adapted Roller’s letter forms to his own fluid style. The result was the poster for the August 12-13, 1966 Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead concert at Fillmore put on by Graham (BG23-1). Wilson continued to use Roller’s letter forms on most of the posters he did for Graham through May 1967, when he stopped working for Graham. The posters were extremely successful and the lettering style along with Roller’s letter forms were picked up by other artists, including Bonnie MacLean, Clifford Charles Seeley, James Gardner, and others. The Secession poster and the Fillmore posters have inspired a number of fonts in addition to ours. Among them are JONAH BLACK (& WHITE) by Rececca Alaccari, LOVE SOLID by Leslie Carbarga and MOJO by Jim Parkinson. Each is different and yet each clearly shows its bloodlines. Our font differs in two ways: 1) the general differences in the interpretation of the letter forms and 2) the modification of the basic letter form to incorporate the diacriticals within the implied frame of the letter, after the manner of the original design by Roller. We borrowed Carbarga’s solution to the slashed O and used it, in a modified form, for other characters as well to accomplish the same purpose. We recommend that you buy ours and at least one of the other three. According to Alaccari, a version called URBAN was released by Franklin Lettering in the 70’s (and is shown on page 51 of The Solotype Catalog). For comparison of our font to original design, see image files roller_poster_2s.jpg of original poster and roller_poster_2sx.jpg showing reconstruction using our font for the lower portion (recontructed area indicated by blue bar). Please note the consistency of character width. In the lower case, 23 of the basic 26 letters are 1/2 EM Square wide. The ‘i’ is an eighth narrower, while the ‘m’& ‘w’ are one quarter wider. All the Upper Case letters are 1/8 EM wider than the lower case. This is to make it easier to fill a geometrical shape like a rectangle, allowing you to capture a little of the flavor of Wes Wilson’s Fillmore West poster using only a word processor. We have also included a number of shapes for use as spacers and endcaps. If you have a drawing program that allows you to edit an ‘envelope’ around the letters to distort their shape, you can really get creative. I used Corel Draw for the gallary images, but there are other programs that can accomplish the same thing. The image file “roller_poster_keys.jpg” shows the complete character set with the keystrokes required for each character (see “HiH_Font_readme.txt” for instruction on inserting the non-keyboard characters). The file “roller_poster_widths.jpg” shows the exact width of each character in EM units (based on 1000 units per EM square). You will notice that the font is set wide for readability. However, most programs will allow you to tighten up on the character spacing after the manner of Roller & Wilson. In MS Word, for example, go to the FORMAT menu > FONT > CHARACTER SPACING. Go to the second Drop-Down Menu, labeled ‘Spacing’ and select "condensed' and then set the amount that you want to condense ‘by’ (key on the little arrows); two points (2.0) is a godd place to start. Let your motto be EXPLORE & EXPERIMENT. Art Nouveau has always been one of my favorite movements in art -- I grew up in a home with a couple of Mucha prints hanging on the living room wall. Perhaps because of that and because I lived through the sixties, I have enjoyed researching and designing this font more than any other I have worked on. Let’s face it (pardon the pun), Roller Poster is a FUN font. You owe it to yourself to have fun using it.

The characteristic ‘French face’ was originally made in 1899 under the supervision of Joseph Pinel. Thus, what was originally French 10 pt. Nº 2, got its present name. The Frenchman Joseph Pinel called himself a "typographical engineer", but was at the time employed as a type draughtsman at the Linotype Works in Altrincham. It appears that this and some other faces that he supervised, were, except for use on the Linotype, also meant for manufacturing matrices for the Dyotype. This composing machine was an invention of Pinel. The Dyotype was a rather complicated machine and consisted, like the Monotype, of two separate contraptions, a keyboard which produced a perforated paper ribbon and a casting machine which produced justified lines of movable type. Unlike the Monotype which has a square matrix carrier, the Dyotype had the matrices on a drum (in fact two drums, hence the name of the machine). A Pinel Diotype company was founded in Paris and a machine was built with the help of the printing press manufacturer Jules Derriey. As is often the case, a lack of sufficient capital prevented the commercializing of this ingenious composing machine. Coen Hofmann digitized the font from a batch of very incomplete, damaged and musty drawings, which he dug up in Altrincham. He redrew all characters, bringing up the hairstrokes somewhat in the process. The result is a roman and italic, while the roman font also includes Small Caps

Vaudeville JNL started out as the re-drawing of an angular Art Deco font hand-lettered on some old publications for sale online. After completing the basic alphabet, it was realized that it just didn't look good -- so a more traditional letter form was adapted to represent the style and times.

Hasan Aya is an Arabic display typeface. It is useful for titles and graphic projects The font is based on the simple lines of Kufi calligraphy. This font was created based on the Latin font "Bedrock" which was designed by Corel Corporation in 1992. It supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu.

ITC Ozwald was designed by David Farey and is a revival of a little-known typeface of American type designer Oswald Cooper called Cooper Fullface. The original was intended to be a modernized version of Bodoni and Farey captured all the charm, wit and creativity of the original in ITC Ozwald.

Welcome Home JNL gets its inspiration from metal letters and numbers affixed to homes, posts and mailboxes in the 1920s and 1930s. The block style of lettering that was silk screened onto enameled rectangles of steel was especially popular during that time period. This font has a limited character set.

The Ugaritic alphabet is a script with ancient letters that was used around 1400 BC. Ugarit is an Old Southwest Semitic language and was found in Ugarit, a place in Syria. It has 30 letters. Other languages ​​(especially Hurrian) are sometimes written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit

Dreamy JNL was modeled from the hand-lettered title on the sheet music cover for "If I'm Dreaming" and features an Art Deco type design with engraved lines in both regular and oblique versions. The Jerome Kern song was from the 1929 First National/Vitaphone picture "Sally" starring Marilyn Miller.

While viewing a video posted to YouTube of a 1952 drive through Los Angeles, a building was passed for King Bros. Productions, Inc. The lettering on the signage was designed in a stylized Art Deco sans serif, and thus inspired Production Company JNL – available in both regular and oblique versions.

Designed at Polygraphmash Type Design Bureau in 1988 by Svetlana Yermolaeva. Based on Kirillitsa (1982), inspired by typographic poluustav of the Printing Office of the Russian Empire Academy of Science (late 19th century). Shadow style was added by Alexander Tarbeev in 1994. Latin alphabet was added by Oleg Karpinsky in 2009.

Lonestar Western is a revival of the old classic slab serif font named Hellenic which was very popular in the middle to late 1800s. While watching an old western movie the opening credits caught my attention, it was the Hellenic font with spurs added which gave it a more western look.

Art Class JNL was re-created from the titling of a lettering booklet called "Drawlet Portfolio", published by the Esterbrook Pen Company in the 1930s. Drawlet pens were Esterbrook's answer to the popular Speedball lettering pens, and the booklet was an instructional manual on hand lettering with the pen nibs.

Montage was designed by Alan Dempsey. Like the name suggests, the design was inspired by the arrangement of elements such as torn paper, cut-outs, scratch board and stencilled letters. Montage is a creative, eye-catching alphabet of casually drawn letterforms set on a background of daub-like brush strokes.

Eckhardt Fancy JNL was named in honor of Al Eckhardt (1929-2005), a talented sign painter and good friend of font designer Jeff Levine. The design was inspired by a vintage alphabet found within a collection of decorative display alphabets from the type collection of the late Dan X. Solo.

The idea of the font Black Sirkka was, to develop a modern interpretation out of the general blackletter typefaces. Black Sirkka is a bastard with the typical characteristics of the blackletters, mixed up with modern, simple shapes from grotesk typefaces. The whole typeface was built up in a modular construction system.

Charles Beeler Jr. designed this in 1895 for Mackellar, Smiths and Jordan, which was part of the American Type Founders combine. The font had a short life because five years later ATF began an "off with the old, on with the new" program, and this font was an early victim.

British Stencil JNL was sketched from images of a vintage stencil set made by Reese and Sons of England that was being sold on ebay. In truth, this is a semi-stencil, as some of the characters are solid; lacking the breaks in the letter shapes so typical of stencil alphabets.

Originally, this 1870s wood type font was called Armenian. We came across a showing of alphabet at the South Street Seaport in New York, bought it and immediately drew the additional characters needed to make the font. We used it for some circus program work that was part of our livelihood.

ITC Veljovic Script was designed by Jovica Veljovic and displays an obvious calligraphic heritage. The designer was strongly influenced by German designer Hermann Zapf and Israeli designer Henri Friedlander. ITC Veljovic Script exhibits a crisp precision, as if the letters were cut in stone rather than drawn with pen and ink.

The WebType family was designed to be used on screen with web design applications.

This handwritten font was designed with Ashley Sanderson at Flying High In First Grade.

Inspired by old French poster art. This typeface was cut from an old rubylith.

Futuretro is a font that transfers you to a bygone age that never was.

Lawyerbait was designed to be a clean, light and easy to read display face.

This font was drawn with a round marker and is very bubbly and girly.

April font was initially designed with a different style compared to other Arabic typefaces

Telegrafo was developed from a couple of words on a 1920s telegram from Argentina.

Broxa was designed with a flat brush and inspired by Roman Sans Serif Alphabet

Ungap Blocks This font was designed by blocks, square glyphs, by Pedro Teixeira Foundry

This font was written with a calligraphic pen, loosely based on old-school calligraphy.

This font was designed to resemble the Indo-Aryan scripts of the Indian subcontinent.

This font was inspired by lettering found on old tradecards from the 19th century.

The design of Montada was inspired by the manual printing of mixed wood types.

Victoriana arose from an inquiry from the Victorian Society for a Victorian font for their journal. As it turned out, no commission resulted, but interest in such a font was aroused in Andy Benedek. Basing the design on some woodblock letterforms, outlines of a basic set of characters were drawn. These, however, were modified to the extent that the final font bore little resemblance to the woodblock letterforms. As erstwhile cyclists, the font was named after the British and champion world track cyclist, Victoria Pendleton who was greatly admired.

“One Hundred Alphabets for the Show Card Writer” was published in 1919 to afford sign artists the ability to create signs and show cards in then-contemporary lettering styles. One such alphabet was big, bold and representative of the Art Nouveau stylings popular in the early part of the 20th Century. Most likely it was applied to store sales and public events that were casual and informal, for its letter forms are free of any constraints. This design is now available as Fun Time Nouveau JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Palaima is a geometric display font, its name means word-image and is inspired by our aboriginal pictographs, Palaima was created to compose texts informal, where each character is an entertainment, featuring several variations of this font letters to make more enjoyable composition. Palaima has a set of characters that include swash, stylistic alternates, ligatures, fractions and twenty funny icons. Palaima was selected in the third Biennial of Latin American Typography "Tipos Latinos" also was honored by the Ruben Fontana's JournalTipográfica of Argentina "Best Latin American Typographic Creativity".