In 1805, December second, the Napoleonic French army won the famous battle of Austerlitz, against Autrichian and Russian armies. Napoleon was a great general, but his hand-writing was not legible at all, so he employed a few secretaries who wrote the official mail. This font was created, inspired from letters written by one of these professional secretaries and scribes in the months before the battle. We propose it as a typical example of the French Hand from this period. The font contains numerous ligatures and alternative characters so as to look as close as possible to real handwriting. The standard full set is complete with accented or specific characters for West (Including Celtic) and Central European, Baltic, Romanian, Hungarian and Turkish languages.

Newspeak is a display typeface based upon Soviet architectural forms from the Stalinist period (spanning the 1930s—'50s). Stalinist architecture is now considered unsightly and without aesthetic merit, yet it has a strange beauty, hinting at an unrealised utopia (while its function was to buttress a brutal dictatorship). Inspiration was also drawn from the Cyrillic alphabet which, to kids growing up in Western Europe in the '70s and '80s, was a cipher for an alternative way of living – Cyrillic letterforms represented the exotic, familiarity-twice-removed universe of Eastern Bloc states. When you visited a communist country you were confronted with unfamiliar typography that reinforced your sense of alienation and unease that there existed a real, if imperfect, working alternative to consumerism.

Nono is the nickname of my oldest son, Konstantin. His little brother could not really speak yet, but he was always looking for him and said something to the tune of, "wea is a nono". From that time on I call Konstantin Nono. I designed a handwritten script with his real name, that i named Konstantin. Now I made this slick version of that script – hence – Nono! I made three basic sets of characters plus a smallcaps version. To top things off, I designed a set of endletters that I throw in for free. Everything can be mixed! I sell single cuts but the best deal would be the entire packet, it goes for a very fair price. Your generous typedesigner, Gert Wiescher

Bodoni Classic Deco Two, like the original Bodoni Classic Deco, breaks all rules. Giambattista Bodoni himself would probably hate me for doing it; he was a real purist. The whole idea of the Bodoni typeface is no embellishments and here I go and decorate those nice clear letters. Shame on me! But I find this is a very nice and useful typeface for all kinds of cards and certificates. So I just did it for all of you out there that are not born purists, and want a little embellishment to their lives. And to make things worse, I added a small caps cut. I even decorated the numbers. This Bodoni is the condensed version!!! Enjoy! Yours, still breaking all the rules, Gert Wiescher

From the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, by way of Toronto, comes Martie's handwriting. Martie Byrd is a school teacher in Roanoke, Virginia, and a friend of Canada Type's Rebecca Alaccari. After years of admiring the cheer and clarity of Martie's handwriting, we asked her to write out full alphabets for some cool font treatment. The intent was to do three different versions of her writing in two different pens, then use the auto-magic of OpenType to determine letter sequences and rotate character sets on the fly when the fonts are in use. A successful endeavor it was. Take a look at the images in the MyFonts gallery to see the character rotation in action, along with a visual explanation of why Martie is not just another handwriting font. Unlike other available felt tip and ballpoint handwriting fonts, the regular and bold variations are style-based, not weight-based. They are the handwritten expressions of two different Sharpie pens: The fine point one (Martie Bold), and the ultrafine one (Martie Regular). The style-based variation considerably helps the realism needed in design pieces that take advantage of the contrast of two different handwriting fonts. Weight thickening in handwriting is an obvious mechanical effect that only happens with computers. Weight changing by replacing pens is what happens in the real world. Martie Pro and Martie Pro Bold each contain three different character sets in a single font. Language support includes Western, Central and Eastern European languages for all three sets. This translates into each Pro font containing over 750 characters. Add OpenType code and stir, and you have true handwriting fonts with versatility unavailable out there in anything else of the genre. A software program that supports OpenType features is needed to use the randomization coded in Martie Pro and Martie Pro Bold. Current versions of QuarkXpress and Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illlustrator, InDesign) do contain support for the randomization feature. But if you don't have one of these apps, you can still use the interchangeable Type 1 or True Type fonts and change the characters manually to achieve the appearance of true handwriting. The Martie fonts come in a variety of price packages, from the affordable single fonts to value-laden complete sets. All the proceeds from these fonts received by Canada Type will be donated 50/50 to two primary schools: One in Roanoke (where Martie teaches), and one in Toronto (where the 10-year old, real Canada Type boss goes). So next time a design project needs a handwriting font, do the write thing and use Martie to keep it real.

Patzcuaro is a summer resort by a lake of the same name. It is situated 370 km west of Ciudad de Mexico and a visitor from Europe, on seeing it, will be reminded of the Austrian Rust or the South Bohemian Trebon. The town's colonial architecture is protected as a historical monument, the reddish-brown tint of the footings of the buildings, their white facades and even the type of lettering with red initials is prescribed - and these regulations are also complied with as far as cars are concerned. This colour scheme is splendid in combination with the rich gamut of greys of the stone window jambs, vaults, lintels and pillars. Joking apart, even the local petrol station is 16th-century in appearance. Patzcuaro Regular is a cosy, welcoming type face which is good for use on labels.

Inspired by the graphic spirit of old packaging and store signs of Portugal, this font seeks to transmit the warm and sunny sound of Portuguese language in a visual way. Portuguesa has 3 partners, designed to work nicely together and to complement one with each other. Portuguesa Script, with friendly and rhythmic personality, great for titles and short text, Portuguesa Caps, with small caps and ligatures that perfectly match (and contrast) with the script version. And Portuguesa Icons, that recalls the legendary blue tiles. This last version was specially designed to mix signs up with delightful combinations for creating patterns, borders, stationary, tableware and all kind of commercial products and projects that needs a memorable strike. The possibilities are numberless. As a mantra, Portuguesa is always in a positive mood, spreading the “Portuguese art of welcoming people”. Seja Bem-Vindo!

Anadolu was inspired by the distinct style of sign lettering in rural Turkey, and refined based on sign lettering in Hungary. Shown here are samples in Turkish and Hungarian, as well as Finnish and Estonian, two other languages in the Finno-Ugric language group with Hungarian. The slight curve at the tops of ascenders and bottoms of descenders is inspired by the linguistic process of "vowel harmony" in Turkish and Hungarian. Anadolu is the Turkish name for Anatolia, the peninsula where Turkey lies. The name recalls another sans-serif typeface named for its country of origin. The tittle on the i is reimagined as a diacritic, and the dotless ı is reimagined as the basic, prototypical i. Too many typefaces treat diacritics as afterthoughts. Since diacritics are integral to the languages that inspired Anadolu, they were designed as core components of the typeface.

The font is based on an alphabet from a mid1920s art deco book. The original seemed to have tapering strokes but it was too small to be sure; I made all strokes parallel & orthogonal and slightly modified the original in a number of other ways to bring it into the 21st Century. The designers of the original were Paul Carlyle and Guy Oring. Nocturne has all the elegance of the Deco fonts of the 1930s. It recalls the romantic, sophisticated Zeitgeist of the early 20th century, that nostalgic time "between the wars". Nocturne comes in two styles: Nocturne Regular, which uses the Art Deco convention of small x height, and long ascenders. This style is perfect for headers, posters, labels etc. Nocturne Book, which, with its higher x height and slightly wider characters, is extremely legible and suitable for small size text.

A few emails sent to Canada Type have asked for more “bad scripts”. A few others asked for "more Mascara-like treatments". And some asked for more fonts of “distressed elegance”. Whatever you like to call this style of doubled-script font, sightings of designs using it have become common within the last few years. Such fonts have become the standard in expressing elegant confusion, old chaos in modern settings, recycled histories, and rebellious ideas. This style is quite often seen on chic clothing, music packaging, some sports paraphernalia, surfer and skateboarder gear, even book covers. That said, the Heathen font was made to include an advantageous feature that other distressed scripts do not normally have: More intertwined over-swashing in the majuscules. This over-swashing is quite useful in settings where the stroke and fill colors differ, or complement each other. It is also quite the point of emphasis where the idea is to show elegance gone ancient, old thoughts in a modern wrapper, rust never sleeping, or the very basic limits of the world’s nature. The original Heathen was made by redrawing Phil Martin’s Polonaise majuscules and superposing them over the majuscules of Scroll, another Canada Type font. The lowercase is a superposition of Scroll’s lowercase atop a pre-release version of Sterling Script, yet another Canada Type font. Heathen Two was made in a similar way, by combining two pre-release Canada Type scripts.

Some 40 km north of Helsinki, surrounded by meadows and a serene Finnish lake, lies Ainola, the former home and now museum of composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). I know the place quite well, since it is only a stone’s throw away from the art school where I began my graphic design studies. We sometimes went there after classes—a beautiful walk, especially in spring, when the days were getting longer, the snow melting in the sun and the ice cracking on the lake. The composer often professed his love for this landscape and found constant inspiration in its moods, sounds and scents during different seasons. For many people, Sibelius and his music, most notably his famous symphonic poem Finlandia, are a symbol of Finland. I decided to name the typeface family I’m presenting here FinlandiaScript, because it owes its influence to both Sibelius’ manuscripts and the Finnish landscape around Ainola. The shape of letters, their poise and the rhythm they create resemble Sibelius’ handwriting without copying it. The letters form gently flowing lines of text which is legible without giving up individuality. The font family comes in three styles: FinlandiaScript, FinlandiaScript Bold and FinlandiaScript Frost. Together they are perfect for magazines, websites and brands aiming to create a personal and sincere image. While the fine details of FinlandiaScript Frost are best suitable for display sizes, FinlandiaScript and FinlandiaScript Bold work well in both headlines and texts of smaller sizes. Hundreds of ligatures give them an especially flexible appearance. The FinlandiaScript family contains Western, Central European and Extended Cyrillic character sets and supports almost 100 languages. It is best suited for Opentype savvy programs with the “standard ligatures” and “contextual alternates” features turned on.

Decima Mono – condensed geometric monospaced Sans Serif typeface, released back in 2009 and quite successful ever since (MyFonts Rising Star, February 2009). This new edition is an upgraded version of Decima Mono and Decima Mono X, combining both into one edition. New version supports more Latin languages with an extension to glyph amounts. Also, six more alternate styles have been added to the original six styles.

The 1923 Barnhart Brothers & Spindler specimen book called this typeface "Cardstyle", and suggested its use at small sizes for business cards. It also work quite well in large sizes when a warm, casual antique feeling is called for. Named for a river that flows through Washington, DC. Both versions of the font include the 1252 Latin and 1250 CE character sets (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

I’m not particularly fond of beans. I do eat them, but they’re not my idea of a delicacy… But this font has ‘fairy tale’ feeling to it, and I liked the name Beanstalker. Beanstalker is a hand made font (I used a fineliner to draw the glyphs). It is quite neat and organized, but does come with some rough edges and a bit of texture.

Aegypti 7 is a digital revival of Font No.7 or Egyptian Narrow - a Soviet display face cast for hand composition. I settled on the 12pt version as a basis for my digital version, as larger sizes added too much contrast to an otherwise quite orderly slab serif. The Soviet Font No.7 itself was based on an older Semi-Egyptian narrow cut before the revolution.

If Sewing Patterns wasn't quite vintage enough for you, Sewing Patterns 2 is the answer to your early twentieth century wishes. Spanning the years 1910 to 1949, it's more Downton Abbey than Mad Men, more Katharine than Audrey, and definitely contains more hats. Like the original, the upper and lowercase letters feature what the well-dressed woman was wearing and the numbers are popular children's fashions.

This is not a brush font! This is an imitation of brushstrokes, done by pen. But I guess you've already noticed that - the brushstrokes are way too obvious, to have been made by brush. Although being a "fake", the letters leaves you with quite a good impression. Letters were inspired by an old horror movie poster, but is very useful for something less terrifying!

The 1929 sheet music for Cole Porter's "You Do Something to Me" (from the musical stage comedy "Fifty Million Frenchmen") has the name of the play hand lettered in a bold sans with an intersecting inline. This design was the inspiration for Suggestion Box JNL. Not quite Art Nouveau, and not yet Art Deco, the typeface is nonetheless timeless in its clean, appealing style.

Swung Note is a groovy and dynamic font, packed with more than three hundred smart interlocking pairs that do their magic powered by OpenType programming. Since the letters assume different shapes in the many different ligatures, the compositions look truly handcrafted. Swung Note is definitely a great – and quite playful – tool for creating amazing custom-lettered looking designs, while keeping the groove going. Swing-along!

I bought a pair of green gumboots (or Wellingtons) the other day. I have a little wilderness outside and it is quite muddy, so I thought a pair of boots would be a good buy. Gumboots is a handmade comic font. It comes in a regular and a fat style and you can use it for just about anything that needs a bit of comic relief.

Bangel is a contemporary display font family with a strong personality. The eye-catching letter design is quite geometric, but also pretty expressive and fun. It supports broad latin languages and comes with 4 styles + a special free Wave bonus. Bangel is a pretty good choice for logotypes, branding, headlines and posters. This typeface is also a powerful option for use on social media, web & UI design.

The other day I drank a glass of white wine, which was partly made with Colombard grapes. When I created this font, I needed a bit of a ‘posh’ name, so I settled on Colombard. Colombard is a nice, handwritten font. Quite elegant, but cheeky at the same time. It comes with extensive language support and a full set of Discretionary Ligatures for double letter combinations.

"Lekker" is an Afrikaans word, that does not quite have an English equal. I can sum it up with the following mixture of words: yummy, nice, fun, joy. That is what this typeface encapsulates. A fun, playful, informal and easy-to-read font with a few script ligatures. Lekker includes multilingual support for All Western Europe languages, as well as Afrikaan (of course). xx Susan

Constellation started with a simple geometric concept in the manner of Art Deco which gradually developed to a complete typeface, both upright and italic, total of seven weights. The concept allowed the font to be designed from Ultra Light in both very light and quite black styles. This Pro font is packed with all European and Cyrillic alphabets, small caps, variable figure sets and features .

Occulista began as a modern take on a vintage tri-line style of typeface, but quickly evolved into something quite different. This heavyweight optically-stimulating family features nine weights, with alternate uppercase letters in place of lowercase. This typeface works best in eye-catching headlines or short bursts of text, and the variant styles can applied to accent key wordings in many interesting combinations.

This elegant family of fonts, suitable for both text and display, is narrow in fit and characterized by a unique feature: in the capital B, P, and R, the stroke of the bowl does not quite meet with the stem. The design is noticeably calligraphic with a dynamic and delicate character, especially in the italics. Its subtleties can best be appreciated when set in large point sizes.

Unger Script is a script design which is obviously based on H. Matheis' Slogan typeface designed for Ludwig & Mayer in 1957. This very expressive script design is defined by its widely swinging upper case and its quite narrowly designed lower case characters. Ralph M. Unger redrew and digitized this font exclusively for profonts in 2001. His work is based on artwork taken from old font catalogues.

HS Decomage was created by a desire for a more modern approach and as an homage to the Art Deco period. HS Decomage has a large set of ligatures to make optimum spacing easier to accomplish and stylistic alternatives give design choices. HS Decomage works great for headlines but also handles descriptive text quite well. Multi-lingual characters, numbers and punctuation are included in HS Decomage.

Halavah Twist JNL is a casual serif font designed by Jeffrey N. Levine and modeled after an early-1960s display font that was quite popular in its day. This new interpretation takes on an entirely different look from the original, creating a modern-yet-retro design. Light, playful and fun-loving, Halavah Twist JNL is perfect for any project that exudes a bubbly warmth and enthusiasm.

CA Mechano is quite what the name suggests – A mechanical typeface. Pretty straight forward and all-caps as long as you don’t activate the stylistic set "disorder". You will see what happens then: a lot of fun for the typographic eye. A more consumable distraction is offered by the other stylistic set. You will dis­cover peacefully rounded letters in the neighborhood of strictly mechanically constructed glyphs.

Sitting in a diner and looking upon a wall full of nostalgia, there hangs a picture of another older diner in some Northern city. The lettering from it's rooftop sign almost screams "Make a font out of this!"... so Jeff Levine did... "Hash and Beans JNL".

IL Palamede is a typeface with just one style, referring by its name to the French chess magazine Le Palamède. Connects with chess here not only the name. Each symbol is built on a 5x5 grid with 3x3 priority. At the same time, the logic here is higher than optical compensation, so you can observe here quite dense, for example "b". Thanks to this solution, the typed text is balanced in width, and it also creates the feeling of a chess cell, where black and white cells alternate. Connects with chess here not only the name. Each symbol is built on a 5x5 grid with 3x3 priority. At the same time, the logic here is higher than optical compensation, so you can observe here quite dense, for example, "s". Thanks to this solution, the typed text is balanced in width, and it also creates the feeling of a chess cell, where black and white cells alternate. Use this font for any purpose that includes winning or enjoying.

Offhand Brush is a fast and spontaneous brush font with quite a messy feel, a great option for book covers, packaging projects, album art, web titles, and even small chunks of text. It looks messy, but don't get it wrong: on the inside, it's a laborious piece of work, with four alternates for each Latin letter and two for numerals, as well as two options for Cyrillic and Greek letters. To make things even more uneven, there are still a few different letter designs programmed to pop up when specific combinations of three or four glyphs appear in the text. These are managed by the OpenType 'Standard Ligatures' feature, although they are far from standard and are not quite ligatures. And why so? Because this way it will usually be on by default, making the font way more interesting. Hey, wait! There are some ornaments too. And a couple of contextual kerning pairs, hell yes! Use it big!

Baby Megista is a calligraphic script font that comes with beautiful alternate characters. copper calligraphy mix in handlettering style. Designed to convey an elegant style. Baby Megista is attractive because it is subtle, clean, feminine, sensual, glamorous, simple and very easy to read. Its classic style is perfect to apply to all kinds of formal items such as invitations, labels, menus, logos, fashion, make up, stationery, letterpress, romantic novels, magazines, books, greeting/wedding cards, packaging, labels. Baby Megista has 304+ glyphs and 150 alternate characters. including multiple language support. It features OpenType with alternative styles, binders and character swashes, which allows you to mix and match letter pairs to suit your design, as well as a touch of ornamentation to make this font look elegant.