Borrowed vernacular from African hair studio signs. manually drawn with drop shadow. Used first as cover and label lettering of a cd with music from Zimbabwe, and completed later as a full character set for the typographic issue 'National Typographica' of I-Juici Magazine, in South Afrika.

Umoya is a modern and fluid African font. Its name means 'spirit' in the Zulu language and it is also the word used for 'air'. It is best used for an ethereal, magical look with tribal undertones. The font is fully professional: carefully letterspaced and kerned.

A 1930s-era poster to "See America - Welcome to Montana" was issued by the United States Travel Bureau; one of the WPA (Works Progress Administrations) projects promoting travel and tourism within the country. The hexagon-inspired angular lettering on the poster provided the inspiration for Infrastructure JNL.

The smooth curves and big wondrous eyes of the Tango dancer in all her charm. Domingo expresses the sensual mysteries of South America like no other typeface ever could. Fragile yet firm, loving yet proud, Domingo conveys an eternal sense of care and beauty, depth and poetry.

Liquidambar is actually a beautiful tree, native to America. I have one in my garden and I love its autumn colors! Liquid Amber is something else: it is a handmade all caps font that comes with oodles of diacritics, some swashes and some alternate glyphs. Enjoy!

Vast and untamed, the American West once stretched as free and wild as imagination itself. Still beautiful, the Wild West of long ago and the new West of today is now to be found in insigne’s new face, Plathorn. That’s right, folks. When the West called, Jeremy Dooley reached up like Pecos Bill, grabbed it by the reins and pulled it in, then using its wide, roaming elements to design this functional font that still has an unbroken spirit burning deep inside. This down right, no-nonsense, orthodox face leaves off any of that extra fancy stuff that doesn't belong on a ride. Plathorn comes with a family of cowhands as wide as the Rockies, bringing specifically tailored condensed and extended sub-families along with it too. By design, it’s not very obtrusive like its unorthodox reversed tension brethren. Leave those for the next font rodeo. This mount features barely a hint of a serif that hearkens back a hundred years or so to sign painters and package lettering artists of early twentieth century. They're sure to put the sharpness, gumption and grit you need into your copy. So grab a tall glass of Plathorn and drink in the deep taste of America’s big country. Put it in your next magazine. Put it in your brand. This typeface’s offbeat appeal is bound to bring a bit of wild U.S. to your free-spirited work.

The original Franklin Gothic was designed in 1903 by Morris Fuller Benton. Franklin Gothic is named after Benjamin Franklin, America’s greatest printer. Our Franklin Gothic Black Condensed is unique because it is designed to set properly in all display applications. It contains all the high-end features expected in a quality OpenType Pro font.

Based on wood type designed by William H. Page & Company in 1872, Aldine Extended is one of many variations within the Aldine family. The characters are extremely wide relative to their height, and have heavy, thick serifs. Aldine was extremely popular in broadside printing during the late 19th century and conveys America’s enthusiastic westward expansion.

Dynasty is an extensive and versatile family that exploration and modernisation of the typographic quirks associated with the 'American Gothic' type school (in much the same way as English Grotesque was an exploration of Gill/Johnston idea-space) and adds chamfered elements to dots and tails to emphasise and extend the early machine-made aesthetic. Elegantly clean and readable at headline and small text settings, where (as with all fonts in small sizes) the introduction of tracking will improve legibility.

This is the rounded version of Penta! »Penta« is a new Sans typeface, designed in the American tradition with contrast between the up- and downstrokes. The contrast is hardly visible on the »thin« cut, but the heavier the weights get, the more contrast becomes visible. That makes this font very useful, almost linear in the lighter weights and very distinct rhythm in the heavier ones. »Penta« is extremly versatile, it can be used for bodycopy in the lighter weights and for heavy headlines.

The versatile neo-grotesk typefamily, inspired by the swiss academia with a contemporary mood. The shape of the letters are more pliable compered to classic grotesk typefaces. The Expanded series enlarges horizons... and type! -- Taking inspirations from classic grotesk letterforms, both from the European tradition (specifically the Swiss school) and the American tradition, HypeType's Arcadia Grotesk is modernized with its shorter ascenders and descenders to give more compact blocks of text and with more contemporary and dynamic forms. -- hype-type.com // kidstudio.it

Dom was designed by Peter Dombrezian for American Type Founders in 1951–52. It is an informal unjoined script typeface that looks brushwritten. Its letters are almost monotone, freely or casually drawn. Vertical strokes of them have irregular ending at different heights, and oval axis have slightly different slopes. This typeface is to create a friendly, informal look in signs, advertising, and invitations. The Cyrillic version of the Bitstream digital font was developed by Dmitry Kirsanov for ParaType in 2008.

Sheet music for the 1910 composition "Good-By Betty Brown" has its title hand lettered in a thick and thin, condensed sans serif design reminiscent of lettering found in later comic strips and books of the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles, Funny Papers JNL gets its name from the slang reference Americans of the early 20th Century gave the Sunday comics pages in their local newspapers, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Marli is an adaption of a face designed by F. Schweimanns and issued by the Stempel Foundry from 6 to 48 point, as “Korso”, in 1913. In 1936 the American Intertype issued their version for the line composing machines in 12 and 14 point as “Camera”. It is a very suitable type face for personal stationery, announcements, greeting cards and the like. The font is updated with a full Open Type character set, while also a Cyrillic has been added.

Morris Fuller Benton's Hobo [designed in 1910] is one of a number of fonts which have been so over-used that many designers shy away from it altogether. However, Jeff Levine had often wondered what the design might look like it given a serif treatment. The result is Rail Bum JNL, named for the hobos and transients who hitched along on freight cars to ride the rails across the country during the years when trains were the mainstay of American transportation.

The first Century typeface was cut in 1894 by Linn Boyd Benton in conjunction with T L DeVinne for the Century Magazine. It was a blacker, more readable face than the type previously used. Morris Fuller Benton designed the Century Expanded version in 1900 for American Type Founders to meet the Typographical Union Standard of the day. The 'expansion' was in the vertical plane. Century Expanded is a useful font family for text setting in magazines, books, presentations and newsletters.

Popular music of the early 1900s included a genre called two step; round dances utilizing a sliding step with a tempo in either march or polka time. 1911's "Daughters of the American Revolution" was one such march/two step. The cover of the sheet music had the title hand lettered in a slightly rounded sans serif type design in the Art Nouveau style popular during that era. It is now available as Two Step Nouveau JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

A thin Roman typeface with slab serifs shown in various editions of the American Type Founders’ Specimen Book as either Lining Antique or Lining Central Antique was the model for Specimen Book JNL which is available in both regular and oblique versions. This is the 1700th design released by Jeff Levine Fonts since its inception in January, 2006 and was named Specimen Book JNL to celebrate the era when metal type and letterpress were the modern technology of their time.

The capitals of Register share a similar construction to Morris Fuller Benton’s 1930 Bank Gothic for American Type Founders, but iron out the broader curves and add ‘ink traps’ to emphasise the machine aesthetic. Register also provides the lower case missing from Bank Gothic. Available in two main widths, each in five weights plus reweighted italics with cursively-derived letterforms, plus a bold condensed, Register has been used for the Sochi Winter Olympics, Source magazine and releases from Transient Records.

Lewis F. Day, in his Alphabets Old and New, presented these letters as examples of rustic Roman lettering of the first through third centuries, AD. An uppercase-only typeface, most of the lowercase positions are occupied by letterform variants. It should be noted that the name does not refer to a savory dish made from a nocturnal American marsupial; it’s Latin for “I can dance”. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Madrone is an Adobe Originals typeface designed by Barbara Lind in 1991. Madrone was digitized from proofs of the woodtype collection in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A fat face roman, Madrone is typical of popular early nineteenth-century styles. Fat face types are characterized by their squatness and extreme letter width. One familiar version of this design is Bodoni Ultra Bold. Madrone is eye-catching for display uses in advertising and packaging.

When this font slips on a pair of ordinary, over-the-counter spectacles, applies a little hair gel and straightens its red, white and blue tie, it disappears amongst common mortals like you and I... But when danger raises its ugly head, when Truthiness, Justice and the American Way are threatened, MildMannered abandons its secret identity, rips open its shirt and takes to the skies to fight evil... ... and, of course, to help sell colorful paper plates, halloween costumes and happy meals.

Bulletin Script was a style offered by several American wood type manufacturers in the late 19th Century. It may actually be one of the most iconic styles of the late 1960 Psychedelic era when Victorian revival was in full swing. The style known as "Bulletin Script No. 2” varies from the more commonly seen Bulletin in that its bottom strokes have a concave swash to them rather than rounded bulbous bottom terminals. This new digitization features over 300 glyphs including Central European characters.

American type designer Guy Jeffrey Nelson created this script FontFont in 1994. The family contains 2 weights: Regular and Bold and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, festive occasions, poster and billboards as well as web and screen design. FF Providence Sans provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, and stylistic alternates. It comes with proportional lining figures. This FontFont is a member of the FF Providence super family, which also includes FF Providence.

Gather Serif - The Modern Classic Let your creativity flow with Gather Serif. Beautifully crafted letterforms and ligatures to give your type a modern touch of elegance. Gather Serif is packed with extra ligatures and stylistic alternative glyphs. Ligatures: CH CO DO EH EA EO IJ KA KO LA LE LH OC OO QO QU RA RC RH RI RO RS RU TH TT Th ZO fl ffl fi ffi st Language Support for: Western European, Central European, South Eastern European, South American, Esperanto.

In a career spanning the early 1900s through 1940, George M. Cohan wrote and produced over 50 plays, 300 songs and was also an actor, singer and dancer. Many of his works honored his Irish roots, and the cover of one piece of sheet music called “The Irish American” (1905) had its title hand lettered in a condensed Art Nouveau type design with tiny spurred serifs. This is now available digitally as Dress Rehearsal JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Bernhard Modern was designed by Lucian Bernhard and was first cut by American Type Founders. Bernhard Modern is an unusual face with small lowercase but very tall ascenders and short descenders. Bernhard Modern was intended to hold its color and contrast without depending on the spread of ink of the letterpress method. It has an attractive pen drawn quality which has made it a popular choice for invitations and greetings cards. The Bernhard Modern font is useful for advertising and display work.

American designer Frank Marciuliano created the Linotype Abstract display font in 1997. Abstract's letters are made up of collaged elements: a single letter can contain several different textures. Instead of an upper and lowercase, Linotype Abstract offers two different uppercase alphabets, each with different patterns. Text set in Linotype Abstract takes on the appearance of a cubist painting, making it the perfect font for all of your funky type needs. Linotype Abstract is included in the Take Type 4 collection from Linotype GmbH."

Italian type designer Maurizio Osti and American type designer Jane Patterson created this display FontFont in 2003. The family contains 4 weights and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, music and nightlife as well as poster and billboards. FF Folk provides advanced typographical support with features such as ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive forms, and stylistic alternates.The font was based on the original alphabet created by Ben Shahn in 1940. It comes with proportional lining and tabular lining figures.

Greyton Script is the work of South African designer Gerhard Schwekendiek, who is known for his script lettering and logos. This copperplate script face looks almost ribbon-like, a feeling accentuated by the letters' fine inline. Greyton Script is perfect for eye-catching headlines or personal invitations and greetings.

Kunjani, (the Zulu word for "How are you?") is a feisty, contemporary "African Renaissance" font, vibrant and richly decorative, embodying the spirit of modern Africa. The characters are full of movement and excitement, combining a hand-carved look with contemporary elegance. Traditional and contemporary designs are used to make the upper-case alphabet essentially African, while lending variety to the already interesting structure. The font is a must for creators of the contemporary look of Africa. It is perfect for music media & promotions, film media & promotions, clothing hang tags & promotions, posters for "Support Africa" events, and indeed, any project that has its focus on Africa. The font has been carefully letterspaced and kerned. All upper and lower case characters, punctuation, numerals and accented characters are present.

The Parkway font family was inspired the Parkway Theater marquee in south Minneapolis and the abandoned hotel signage along a strip of U.S. highway running from Tallahassee to Tampa in Florida. A classic retro font trio, the Parkways speak of nostalgia and Americana. Looks like the little metal tag that dealers stick on the trunk of new cars.

Nexus (2004) consists of three matching variants – a serif, a sans and a slab – which makes it a highly versatile typeface. Nexus started as an alternative to Seria, a typeface Majoor had designed some 5 years earlier. But soon the design developed into a new typeface, with numerous changes in proportions and in details and with a redrawn italic. Besides the three connected versions (Nexus Serif, Nexus Sans, Nexus Mix) Majoor designed a monospaced version called Nexus Typewriter. The Nexus family is a workhorse typeface system like Scala, with features such as small caps in all weights, four different sorts of numbers and an extensive set of ligatures. All fonts in the Nexus family come in regular, italic, bold and bold italic. Free bonus: there are more than 100 elegant Swash italics and dozens of arrows and other icons. The Nexus family was awarded the First Prize at the Creative Review Type Design Awards 2006.

Designed in 1950s Japan by Okanao & Kushiro, the perfect partnership until artistic temperaments drove them apart. The duo spent years crafting the font with the working title “Messenjā”, Okanao bringing technical expertise to craft letterforms, while Kushiro made it his life, obsessively working late into the night to check pages for errors. For him the project was never about making money, it was an artistic endeavor to reprint the great Western works of literature. When he found out Okanao had secretly sold the rights to the font for use as a logo for a major Japanese manufacturer, Kushiro burned all evidence of the designs in a fit of passionate fury. The two reportedly never spoke again. “Messenjā” was thought lost forever until a type specimen was discovered in a vintage typewriter box bought on eBay. Now redrawn and available as 57-nao, a faithful and beautifully crafted monospace characterized by what is considered Okanao’s defining moment, the angular loop on the lowercase ‘a’.

Blacker mono was developed out of a brief by Isabella Ahmadzadeh, by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Francesco Canovaro for the editorial project "A beautiful mistake" by OFFF Tlv in 2022. It is a monospaced version of our typeface Blacker, bringing its "evil serif" aesthetics in the realm of typewriter and coding typefaces. In designing these, usually the letterforms are deformed to better fill the space, but in Blacker Mono only the serifs are modified to balance letters, while letter skeletons are kept consistent with the ones of the original Blacker family. This gives the typeface an uneven, unexpected rhythm, underlined by the unusual choice of providing three optical sizes and some extreme display weights - both uncommon choices in monospaced fonts. The resulting typefamily is thought for use in editorial situations where readability must be married by a strong personality, and is complemented by all the wide array of Open Type features that are present in all Blacker variants, from positional numerals to small case letters and alternates.

Lumios is a freehand casual marker script that was created using Pilot Sign Pen. It has both extended Latin and basic Cyrillic support that is enhanced with oodles of ligatures (latin as well as cyrillic) and alternates. As a compliment to the script I also created Lumios Design Elements font that can be useful in brand design, greeting cards design etc. Both fonts were carefully traced by hand and have clean edges, hence they are safe to use in all graphic design software (including but not limited to Adobe Suite, Silhouette and Cricut Design, Affinity Designer etc) as well as on websites. The script is fully unicode mapped. To use it in Silhouette and similar applications that do not support OpenType features (yet), you may need to use your default Mac/Windows software such as Font Book or Character Map to select alternates you need. Lumios Marker is a perfect companion to Lumios Typewriter, sharing the same soft curves and clean letter edges.

Nexus (2004) consists of three matching variants – a serif, a sans and a slab – which makes it a highly versatile typeface. Nexus started as an alternative to Seria, a typeface Majoor had designed some 5 years earlier. But soon the design developed into a new typeface, with numerous changes in proportions and in details and with a redrawn italic. Besides the three connected versions (Nexus Serif, Nexus Sans, Nexus Mix) Majoor designed a monospaced version called Nexus Typewriter. The Nexus family is a workhorse typeface system like Scala, with features such as small caps in all weights, four different sorts of numbers and an extensive set of ligatures. All fonts in the Nexus family come in regular, italic, bold and bold italic. Free bonus: there are more than 100 elegant Swash italics and dozens of arrows and other icons. The Nexus family was awarded the First Prize at the Creative Review Type Design Awards 2006.

Compendium is a sequel to my Burgues font from 2007. Actually it is more like a prequel to Burgues. Before Louis Madarasz awed the American Southeast with his disciplined corners and wild hairlines, Platt Rogers Spencer, up in Ohio, had laid down a style all his own, a style that would eventually become the groundwork for the veering calligraphic method that was later defined and developed by Madarasz. After I wrote the above paragraph, I was so surprised by it, particularly by the first two sentences, that I stopped and had to think about it for a week. Why a sequel/prequel? Am I subconsciously joining the ranks of typeface-as-brand designers? Are the tools I build finally taking control of me? Am I having to resort to “milking it” now? Not exactly. Even though the current trend of extending older popular typefaces can play tricks with a type designer’s mind, and maybe even send him into strange directions of planning, my purpose is not the extension of something popular. My purpose is presenting a more comprehensive picture as I keep coming to terms with my obsession with 19th century American penmanship. Those who already know my work probably have an idea about how obsessive I can be about presenting a complete and detailed image of the past through today’s eyes. So it is not hard to understand my need to expand on the Burgues concept in order to reach a fuller picture of how American calligraphy evolved in the 19th century. Burgues was really all about Madarasz, so much so that it bypasses the genius of those who came before him. Compendium seeks to put Madarasz’s work in a better chronological perspective, to show the rounds that led to the sharps, so to speak. And it is nearly criminal to ignore Spencer’s work, simply because it had a much wider influence on the scope of calligraphy in general. While Madarasz’s work managed to survive only through a handful of his students, Spencer’s work was disseminated throughout America by his children after he died in 1867. The Spencer sons were taught by their father and were great calligraphers themselves. They would pass the elegant Spencerian method on to thousands of American penmen and sign painters. Though Compendium has a naturally more normalized, Spencerian flow, its elegance, expressiveness, movement and precision are no less adventurous than Burgues. Nearing 700 glyphs, its character set contains plenty of variation in each letter, and many ornaments for letter beginnings, endings, and some that can even serve to envelope entire words with swashy calligraphic wonder. Those who love to explore typefaces in detail will be rewarded, thanks to OpenType. I am so in love with the technology now that it’s becoming harder for me to let go of a typeface and call it finished. You probably have noticed by now that my fascination with old calligraphy has not excluded my being influenced by modern design trends. This booklet is an example of this fusion of influences. I am living 150 years after the Spencers, so different contextualization and usage perspectives are inevitable. Here the photography of Gonzalo Aguilar join the digital branchings of Compendium to form visuals that dance and wave like the arms of humanity have been doing since time eternal. I hope you like Compendium and find it useful. I'm all Spencered out for now, but at one point, for history’s sake, I will make this a trilogy. When the hairline-and-swash bug visits me again, you will be the first to know. The PDF specimen was designed with the wonderful photography of Gonzalo Aguilar from Mexico. Please download it here http://new.myfonts.com/artwork?id=47049&subdir=original

SCALTER was designed in the early April and published in July 2020. Scalter Serif is inspired by the characteristics American vintage sign then the sans serif it’s combination retro typeface. All shape of this typeface is make strong and more contrast, giving a more dynamic and retro feel. Scalter are available in 5 Widths (Condensed – SemiCondensed – Normal – SemiExpanded – Expanded) with matches 4 style (Serif – Semi Serif – Sans Bold- Sans Black - Script) with a total 42 Styles. Also includes support for 26+ Latin (Extended) Languages.

Eldwin is a connected script type family with a friendly demeanour. With two styles of Script and Capitals, they combine playfulness with functionality, which allows it to perform best in display and headline situations. The inspiration for Eldwin was drawn from traditional Italian and American sign paintings. Details include six weights in two styles, 526 characters per Script font and 431 characters per Capitals font. Opentype features consist of stylistic alternates, ligatures, fractions, arrows and language support covering Western, South and Central Europe, and Cyrillic.