I am reading a great book by David Mitchell, called Number 9 Dream. One of the characters is called Buntaro, so I decided to call my new inky font after him. Like the book, Buntaro is quite unusual: it has no real baseline, comes with some strange characters, feels familiar, but surprises you nonetheless. It was made with a broken bamboo satay-skewer, Chinese ink and a lot of patience. Buntaro comes with a wealth of diacritics.

Tasty Joke was made with a slightly bulgy pen, and by using a loose touch.The result: two fine kinds of naive and lively letters. Combine the Regular and Line versions for cool results.

Patricia Pothin-Roesch's Saussa typeface began life as brush-lettered artwork for fruit salad packaging in France. After the key letters had been painted, Patricia Pothin-Roesch switched to digital tools to create the final font. True to its roots, Saussa is a real advertising face, perfect for point-of-purchase displays. Even its name is consistent with its intended area of application: Saussa sounds a lot like the word “sauce.” Saussa is an informal script; its outstrokes function almost like serifs, and the capitals have a lowercase structure. The feelings this typeface conveys are due to the hand of its creator, Patricia Pothin-Roesch, an experienced brush-letterer.

Pesaro is a new text typeface with a strikingly robust but charming appearance. Inspired by early prints from Venice like Jensen and Manutius, it follows its own formal concept of a contemporary design – a stable typeface with strong text qualities and graphic appeal. The Pesaro family comprised 12 styles and is well suited for ambitious typography. It comes in OpenType format with extended language support. All weights contain ligatures, proportional lining figures, tabular lining figures, proportional old style figures, lining old style figures, matching currency symbols, fraction- and scientific numerals and elegant swash captitals for all italic styles.

This bold, sharp and geometrically designed font exudes elegance and sophistication that will bring any design project to life. With its strong lines and shapes, it evokes memories of the glamorous era of art deco, making it perfect for theatre posters or hotel branding. A display font suitable for both print and digital media, adding an extra touch of class wherever it appears.

This typeface is named after Sarah Eaves, the woman who became John Baskerville’s wife. As Baskerville was setting up his printing and type business, Mrs. Eaves moved in with him as a live-in housekeeper, eventually becoming his wife after the death of her first husband, Mr. Eaves. Like the widows of Caslon, Bodoni, and the daughters of Fournier, Sarah similarly completed the printing of the unfinished volumes that John Baskerville left upon his death.

Piercing is part of a series of typographic experiments from the young Swiss designer Michael Parson. In the Piercing family, which contains three separate weights, Parson has successfully transformed the movements of points and lines into a fabulous display of alphabets. But you can use Piercing as your key to the techno scene: these letters, made up of fine lines terminated by dots, virtually groove with the beat as you set them in text. Like a musical score, they provide a fantastic look just right for your next flyer. Piercing is one of ten experiments in constructed letter design that Parson has included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH."

The characters of Skagwae have no curves, just straight line segments. The letter shapes themselves are fairly standard, but the choppy line segments used to construct them give the fonts a crude, unfinished look that is highlighted at large point sizes. At small point sizes the fonts are surprisingly legible. The family has nine styles. The regular, bold, italic, bold italic, shadow, and shadow inside styles are proportionally spaced. Shadowinside is very similar to regular but is spaced to be used in a layer with the shadow style. SkagwaeMono-Regular and SkagwaeMono-Bold are monospaced versions of the family. A third monospaced style, SkagwaeMono-Rippled, is a distorted version with squiggly lines full of curves.

Handu, designed by Alex Jacque in 2012, is an affable hand-drawn sans-serif inspired by the hand-painted type and signage on the streets of Kolkata, India. Fitting then that it come to life with brush and paint. When used for display purposes the organic, painted texture of Handu's glyphs really shines. At smaller point-sizes the hand-drawn aesthetic still translates. Handu comes in two styles, regular and shadow. Use each independently or overlay them for a little youthful emphasis.

Linotype Fresh Ewka is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the contestants of Linotype’s International Digital Type Design Contests of 1994 and 1997. This fun font was designed by Polish artist Dariusz Nowak-Nova and each letter seems to be a work in itself. The fine hair lines are decorated with tiny squares and look like wires with nodes while the thicker strokes have indefinite contours and seem to have been made with a thick brush. Linotype Fresh Ewka is suitable for headlines in large point sizes.

The biggest feature of HT Espresso is a mixture of straight line and curve.It is like a cup of espresso with a bite-sized piece of chocolate. You can connect all the letters with thin line and It would attract notice. 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!

A mixture of bold and fine line helps this distinctive design evoke the spirit of the 1930s Jazz Age. Due to the modular nature of this design there may be a slight lack of smoothness to the curves at very large point sizes (around 100 pt and above).

Wavelength is a unique sans serif family of five weights and italics. For all of it's unusual detailing and arc-shaped strokes, this typeface is a solid workhorse, and is highly legible at all sizes. It's an excellent starting point for a unique logotype or offbeat headline, and is able to cross genres and styles because of its essential letterform simplicity. Wavelength is contemporary, but with a nod to 1930s art deco, streamline, and even 1990s tech futurism. It's great all-arounder that works well with shadows, outlines, extrusions added within vector editing programs.

An original volume decorative typeface that imitates broken stones. It was inspired by graffiti letterforms. Solid and inverted styles are available. Designed by Fedor Saveliev and Olga Ryabihina in 2003 and licensed by ParaType. For use in display typography.

ITC Florinda was designed by Luis Siquot in 1997 and consists exclusively of capital letters. The basic forms were influenced by old favorites like Franklin Gothic, but Siquot ornamented the classic forms with symmetrical knobs which look like pieces of lead left over after pouring the forms. This gives the figures a playful, constructed look. When used in a text, the horizontal lines seem to come together to draw a fine line through the middle of the lines of text, giving it an ornamented character. ITC Florinda should be used exclusively for headlines or display.

Hand drawn by Michael Browers, Ekkehard is inspired by multiple blackletter typefaces that appeared in an 1862 printing of "The Doctrine of the Simple and the Power of the Powerless" by Hans Nielsen Hauge. The result is an eclectic distressed font that is ideal for logos, product packaging, headlines, posters, merchandise, greeting cards, and other projects requiring a vintage, hand-made feel.

And now something completely different. Keks has broken elements like a blackletter typeface, but the actual forms are roman. That keeps it very legible although there is no curve at all. What was the inspiration for designing the font? Blackletter has an interesting history here in Germany. We need to find contemporary interpretations for this tradition. What are its main characteristics and features? Legible roman blackletter Usage recommendations: any usage that needs a black letter athmosphere where legibility is important.

I have always liked Scandinavian folklore, although I have to admit that I didn’t know about the Fossegrim. Fossegrim is a fiddle or harp playing water sprite - usually friendly, but he has been known to lure children and women in deep water with his music. Fossegrim font is a little bit weird as well: I made it using a broken bamboo satay skewer and Chinese ink. It comes with extensive language support and a set of alternates for the lower case letters.

For some reason I had to think of Moby Dick (the classic book by Herman Melville) when I was busy working on this font. No, I don’t live near the sea, nor do I have a pet whale. It’s just one of those things… Whalebone (named after Captain Ahab’s prosthetic leg) is a handmade, all caps brush font. It wasn’t actually made with a brush; I used a broken satay skewer and Chinese ink. Whalebone comes with discretionary ligatures for double letter combinations.

Los Lana Pro is a handmade display typeface. Unlike other font families, this type has not a modular structure, that is, each character has been individually designed. The coherence of structure elements across different characters is given by irregular strokes. This curveless typeface is perceived as being curved because of its straight lines, which form different-size angles. Los Lana Pro is a rustic typeface that captures the stereotypical “Andean hippie” handmade aesthetics. Irregular shapes and broken lines give it a distinct personality. Los Lana Pro looks better in larger sizes. Includes many ligatures, two groups of alternate characters, and titling caps characters. Languages include: Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian and Pan Africa Latin. Photos by Sergio Recabarren.

Neacademia is a Latin and Cyrillic type family inspired by the types cut by 15th century punchcutter Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. Beyond the letterforms themselves, however, the digital fonts themselves are based on the techniques and methods Griffo employed. The family comprises four distinct variants optimised for specific point sizes, as was traditional in metal type. While the display sizes maintain a visual link to calligraphic roots, text sizes exhibit more typographic qualities, following the hand of the carver. Likewise, Neacademia maintains its even colour on the page by carefully employing alternative letterforms, rather than leaning on a multitude of kerning pairs. A geeky little detail you’ll likely need to point out with a magnifying glass to your type friends, but creating a neat texture that works in readers favour nonetheless. Neacademia’s historically sensitive eye is put to work for modern typographers’ needs. It incorporates Griffo’s italic capitals and harmonizes them with the lowercase and the romans — where the original Aldine italics had no capitals of their own and simply re-used the uprights. It was designed with specific allowances for letterpress photopolymer printing. Printed digitally, it can tolerate – and even benefit from – low resolution, rough paper, and low-grade presswork. In many ways, it feels like using metal type again!

A snappy single-stroke alphabet from The New Lone Pine ABC of Showcard and Ticketwriting, which Aussie author C. Milnes suggested should be executed with a well-loaded brush, provided the inspiration for this loose, lilting retro script. Its condensed letterforms and tight spacing allow for larger headlines than most brush scripts, and its bouncing baseline adds an extra dollop of visual fun. The PC Postscript, Truetype and Opentype versions contain the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

Paradise Lost is a 1667 poem by John Milton which mostly concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man, Eve's temptation by the devil and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. It's quite a hefty read, as the poem consists of ten books with over 10.000 lines of verse. Needless to say, I didn't read it all. But, it did give me inspiration for a font, which I called Paradise Lost. It's a good name, even though there is nothing Biblical about this font. Paradise Lost was created (pun intended) using a broken bamboo satay skewer and Chinese ink. It is all caps, but upper and lower case differ and like to mingle. I also included several ligatures for double lower case letters (aa, ee, jj, kk, etc.). Paradise Lost comes with an eternity of diacritics.

Fracture is a broken font -- broken into many pieces -- yet it still conveys a powerful and modern message. It is a funky, in-your-face font that has strong overtones of modern rap and hip-hop culture. Its fragmented look brings to mind graffiti, contemporary youth culture, kids-on-the-move. Fracture is a must for movie posters, event posters, CD & DVD covers, clothing ads & swing tags, funky magazines, in fact, any product aimed at the young, trendy market. The font is letterspaced and kerned and has a complete character set (all upper and lower case, numerals and mathematical symbols and a complete set of accented and special characters).

An elegant fine serif gives this font that unique beautiful charming feeling. This a great font for that real sophisticated high end look. Like a fine wine this font is sure to please your taste.

Definety is a clean and sharp pixel font with lowercase and uppercase glyphs including Basic Latin, Extended Latin A, Cyrillic, numbers, and special symbols. Carefully crafted for a wide range of purposes like branding, logo, posters, print, games, web, and a lot more. Pixel perfect font size starts from 8px/pt and continues by adding another 8 points to the size. Examples: 8px, 16px, 24px, 32px, 40px...

StoneWash is a funky, grunge font, with a monumental marble finish. The font combines an “old as the hills grunge” look with IN YOUR FACE, modern lines. It has a look of very old, washed out denim, about to disintegrate. StoneWash has all of the grunge characteristics: -- it’s dirty and corroded -- it’s coarse & broken -- it’s rough & pitted It also has the characteristics of an African style font: -- it’s ethnic -- it’s irregular -- it’s primitive -- it’s rustic -- it’s vibrant Use StoneWash for a great variety of applications: -- think advertisements - think flyers - think graffiti art - think posters - think magazine pages. You have to have StoneWash.

An attempt to go back towards the beauty of fine book printing, inspired in Britain's literary classics. Athelas takes full advantage of the typographic silence, that white space in the margins, between the columns, the lines, the words, the lettershapes and finally, within the characters themselves. It is also intended to take advantage of the great advances and technical developments made in offset printing. Athelas shows its best side in finely crafted book editions and good printing conditions. Athelas has a large character set that covers most of the languages that use the Latin script. Although inspired in British literature, this typeface respects the cultural values behind different languages, where diacritic marks have an utterly important role. Athelas features four weights and about 800 characters per weight, including small caps, discretionary ligatures, fractions, a complete range of numerals for every use and a set of ornaments and arrows.

Falstaff first appeared with Monotype in 1931, an alphabet in the style of a wide, bold antiqua that was especially popular in the first third of the 19th century. Such typefaces distinguished themselves through their consistent basis in the transitional antiqua style. They are characterized by their extremely fine unflexed serifs with no curve connecting them to the thick strokes. The numerals with their generous curves and ball-like stroke endings and beginnings are particularly decorative. The vertical strokes are dominant and give lines of this typeface a column-like and therefore static look. Falstaff is today often used for book titling, especially for mystery novels. It is best used sparingly in middle and larger point sizes.

Arcs for framing curved lines of text, in a style common on Victorian posters and almanac covers, and still seen on modern food packaging.

A piece of sheet music for “Broken Blossoms” circa the 1920s or early 1930s has its cover title hand lettered in a wide thick-and-thin Art Deco design. This is now available as Flower Shop JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.