In 1931, Morris Fuller Benton created the Stymie typeface for the American Type Founders (ATF). Stymie is a reworking of a slab serif type that was popular in Europe at that time, Memphis. For the past one hundred fifty years, slab serif types (sometimes called Egyptian or Egyptienne-style faces) have been a popular choice for headline text in newspapers, magazines, and advertising.

This little charmer combines an uppercase designed by American lettering artist J. M. Bergling with a lowercase designed by English architect Roland W. Paul. The result has a wiggle in its walk and a giggle in its talk: oh, baby, that’s what I like! Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Farquharson is an all-caps display face, adapted from an early American woodtype, and designed especially for use in the book Charlie Farquharson’s Unyverse. The complete family consists of two fonts: a regular version and a stencil version. Alternate versions with slightly elongated feet are provided for A, H, K, M, N and R. Very eccentric, it is best used in small doses.

Howdy is a modern French Clarendon revival typeface inspired by late 19th-century woodblock type and sign painting. Its ties to the American West evoke a distinctive western and retro flair. It was designed with flexibility in mind. Intended for use as a display type, its reverse contrast forms make an impact from tall or wide headlines and anything in between.

Rodeo Rebels is a display typeface with a retro, cowboy, and western theme. It's perfect for designs that require a bold and masculine touch, such as branding, packaging, posters, and headlines. The font was inspired by vintage rodeo posters and the American Old West, where bold, slab-serif typography was a common sight. To make the most out of Rodeo Rebels, consider using it in designs that require a rugged and tough aesthetic, such as clothing and apparel, whiskey and beer packaging, and Western-themed events. Pairing it with other vintage-inspired elements, such as distressed textures and illustrations, can also help create a cohesive look and feel. With its bold and rugged aesthetic, Rodeo Rebels is a font that demands attention. It's perfect for projects that require a vintage and masculine vibe, and its features make it a versatile choice for a wide range of designs. Give your projects a touch of the American Old West with Rodeo Rebels, and let its bold and rugged style do the talking.

Here's a charming little face from the 1896 American Type Founders specimen book. Its naïvete will add warmth to any project it graces. Both versions support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

This South American grotesk font blends the functionality of an American grotesk typeface with that unique Latino rhythm and flair. Sure it can be quite serious, but more importantly, its two alternate sets allow you to bring flavor to your logos, brands and advertising designs. We would like to especially thank Alfonso García for his help with digital editing, the development of a fresh italic version, as well as the addition of Cyrillic and currency symbols.

Kennerley Old Style was designed by Goudy for publisher Mitchell Kennerley in 1911. Goudy described it as a "book letter with strong serifs, firm hairlines, and makes a solid, compact page." One of Goudy's best text faces, Kennerley is considered an original American classic as it is not based on historical type designs.

English by influence with an American disposition and modernist details, Steady Sans is a blend of styles from multiple eras. Decidedly expansive letterforms make for an overall lively presence. Fluid italics, multiple weights, and alternate forms provide a variety of tone for headline use and solid construction works well for text settings.

This is a stylized blackletter font with many OpenType features and 403 characters -- many of which are presently unknown for blackletter fonts: Caps, lower case, small caps, old style figures, numerators, denominators, accents characters and so on. The idea is a modern blackletter that is readable and usable for the American eye.

A sales catalog sheet from the American Decalcomania Company circa the late 1940s-early 1950s provided some hand lettering that served as the inspiration for Sign Painter JNL. Emulating the look of characters made with a round pen nib, this Deco-style typeface conveys nostalgia and charm seldom found in advertising of today.

Evanston Alehouse is the first font in a larger collection of typefaces inspired by years leading up to the American prohibition. For the past two years I was living in Evanston, IL, a suburb of Chicago. After learning it was one of the birthplaces of the prohibition movement, I set out to learn more about it, and decided to develop a type collection that captures the dynamic era in our nation’s history. In the century that prefaced the ratification of the 18th amendment, saloons, taverns and alehouses boomed as the American working class enjoyed beer and discovered whiskey and gin. At the same time, the Temperance League was forming and gaining strength. By the turn of the century, these temperance societies were common in the culture of the country, with individual towns and states already on the move to abolish alcohol consumption. However, it was undeniable that by this time in history, America loved to drink. This font is inspired by the signage seen outside such drinking establishments. Back to the modern era, Evanston Alehouse is a 25 font family that includes 3 weights, 4 widths and 3 heights. It has special features that add depth to the font, with discretionary ligatures and stylistic alternatives. It also includes a complementary set of ornaments, including line breaks, frames, borders, and laurels. Here’s a snapshot of what you get with Evanston Alehouse: 2 Styles/Postions: Sharp (regular) and Round 3 Weights: Light, Medium and Black 4 Widths: 1826 (condensed), 1858 (narrow), 1893 (wide) and 1919 (expanded) 3 Heights: Capitals, lowercase and small caps 2 Alternatives: Discretionary Ligatures and Stylistic Alternatives 1 Ornament font with over 100 graphic extras

Stars & Type is a display font inspired by a road trip around the USA. It is bold, abstract and experimental and is meant for attention grabbing large headlines. Utilising stars to give a sense of Americana, it would be suited to editorial, advertising and display typography.

Brophy Script is a bold connecting brush alphabet. This brush script typeface was designed in 1953 by the American type designer Harold Broderson. Broderson worked for ATF (the American Type Founders), who were the original publishers of this design. Brophy Script is a version with more handwritten letters than to its other version called Body. This a brush script face that mimics the show card style of lettering, which was very popular throughout the United States during the first half of the 20th Century. The letters appear as if they were drawn quickly and spontaneously with a wide, flat lettering brush. The lowercase letters connect to each other, cursive script style. Brophy Script is the perfect display face to provoke a nostalgic feeling for the 1950s. Anything having to do with apple pie, home cooking, or last minute sales would look great in this face. You could outfit a whole supermarket signage system in a snap with Brophy Script.

The face exudes Edwardian elegance, based on a 1905 release from American Type Founders called Meriontype. It's evocative of simpler times. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

Robert Wiebking based the Engravure face on the Engravers faces developed by American Type Founders around 1903. Engravure can be used as a titling font for magazines, brochures, and book covers. It is also suitable for packaging and stationery.

Enjoy Font Kitchen’s all-natural Pastrami! This rounded geometric sans is served with a tall glass of ligatures, a heaping portion of all kinds of fractions, and your choice of stylistic alternates. Inspired by warm, whimsical typefaces of 70s American diners, Pastrami is perfect for adding a stylized charm to your next piece. Available in seven weights, Pastrami is sure to add a dash of flavor to your next project.

Like our first "1871 Dreamer Script" this script font was inspired from a lot of manuscripts, notes and drafts, written by the famous american poet Walt Whitman. However, it is a very different font, with a higher x-line, numerous different ligatures, alternates and twin letters, including fractions, and, as a real "Pro" font, usable not only for Western European, but also for Eastern and Central European, Baltic and Turkish.

Fitzronald is a body text typeface with a strong personality combined with a good legibility in small sizes. It is an excellent book typeface, but it can be used in e.g. advertising and packaging as well. Due to its good legibility at low resolution, it is a superb website and e-book typeface. Fitzronald is based on Ronaldson, an American typeface originally cut by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in 1884.

Candy Bits was originally designed at Bitstream as a custom project for a large printer manufacturer. Released in 1997, Candy Bits was designed by Jim Lyles. The typographic characters were fashioned after a well known American candy. The balance of the characters in the font are designed to enhance the 3D illusion by appearing to recede into the page. Soon after its completion, Mr. Lyles joined a local health club.

Eden Light, originally designed by the American type designer Robert H. Middleton in 1934, was commissioned by Publish magazine for a redesign in 1990. When I found a specimen of Eden Bold a couple years later, I decided to digitize it also. Subsequently, I created a Medium weight. Very squared and compact with thin slab serifs, Eden includes support of all European languages that use the Latin alphabet.

Atonement is a splattery, scratchy font. I made it with a steel nibbed pen, a brush and some Chinese ink. I based it on my fonts Ravenheart, Qilin and American Grunge - mostly because I really like them. Of course, all of these fonts are influenced by the work of the great Ralph Steadman - someone I greatly admire. Atonement comes with ligatures for double letter combinations and a stash of diacritics.

Beauty Club is a modern font collection that includes four serif weights, a thin signature brush script and free marketing words. Beauty Club Brush is a hand-painted script that includes 7 ligatures and 26 alternates. The brush script works great paired with the serif fonts. Try the Beauty Club free font for beauty marketing and social media. It’s a great font for promoting your beauty brands. Fonts and posters designed by Cindy Kinash. See font details below. VERSIONS: American (US) and Extended Latin Pro (Standard) FREE WORDS FEATURES: 57 free words useful for beauty marketing and social media promoting. Keyword examples include beauty, makeup, free, love and sale. Intended use for: beauty, fashion, apparel, marketing, music, social media, websites, magazines, sales, film and packaging. BRUSH SCRIPT AMERICAN (US) Shorter version Thin hand-painted brush script 7 ligatures and 26 alternates OpenType Includes the common alphabet, numbers, American symbols and punctuation. BRUSH SCRIPT EXTENDED LATIN PRO (Standard) Extended version of the American (US) version. Thin hand-painted brush script 7 ligatures and 26 alternates OpenType Includes Latin Pro characters for Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Feroese, Finnish Scots, French, Gaelic, Galician, German, Greek Transliterated, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Nynorsk Bokmal Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh. SERIF AMERICAN (US) Shorter version OpenType Includes the common alphabet, numbers, American symbols and punctuation. SERIF EXTENDED LATIN PRO (Standard) Extended version of the American (US) version. OpenType Includes Latin Pro characters for Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Feroese, Finnish Scots, French, Gaelic, Galician, German, Greek Transliterated, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Nynorsk Bokmal Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh. TIPS: Try the OpenType brush script alternates/ligatures by turning on the feature in your preferred program that supports ligatures. DISPLAY- Pair the Beauty Club brush script with the serif fonts as large headline text for optimization. FONT USE- Use Beauty Club for beauty, fashion, apparel, marketing, music, social media, websites, magazines, sales, film and packaging."

A classic “American” sans serif with a kink Desphalia belongs to the kind of sans serif fonts that were created in the 19th century. You could also name it “American Gothic”, a sans serif in the style of fonts like Franklin Gothic, News Gothic and similar. Above all, the high x-height characterizes this typeface style, as do the identical heights of uppercase and ascenders. However, I allowed myself a few peculiarities ;-) On the one hand, there is the gently sloping horizontal middle line on letters such as H, E, F, A and e. The M also got gently slanted sides. Some of the lower-case letters have an up- or down-stroke: a d m n p u. This "kink" on the shaft also serves to better distinguish the small l from the capital I — as can be seen clearly with the term »Illinois«. In keeping with the tradition of American typefaces, Desphalia does not have a true italic. Rather, the letters of the “Italic” have the same character forms as the normal upright variant, but in oblique — and so it is not called “Italic” but “Oblique”. Style Set 01: Another American peculiarity is the capital I with dashes above and below. It is included in the Desphalia as an alternate character form. An alternative small l with the “kink” in the ascender is also included — as is a y with the “kink” in the descender. Style Set 02: The corresponding “straight” forms a d l m n p u without the break are included as alternatives in a separate style set. Small caps are uppercase letters that are optically the same size as lowercase letters. They offer a very classy way of emphasis. Desphalia is available in the widths Condensed, Normal and Expanded, the weights include Thin, Light, Book, Bold, Black. Using the variable font, all intermediate levels can be freely selected. The figures are optionally available as tabular figures, proportional lining figures or old style figures.

Regency is named after the style associated with the period, which is at once elegant and luxurious. A modern classic, it is influenced by Americana and Optima and combines the style of a serif face with the simplicity of sans serif.

A 1930s travel poster from American Airlines had the airline’s name in a classic thick-and-thin Art Deco design of hand lettering. With the addition of angular spurs, some of the characters become semi-serif in nature. This type style is now available as Travel Plans JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

I spend a lot of time following two obsessions: packaging and hand lettering. Alongside a few other minor obsessions, those two have been my major ones for so many years now, I've finally reached the point where I can actually claim them as “obsessions” without getting a dramatic reaction from the little voice in the back of my head. When you spend so much time researching and studying a subject, you become very focused, directionally and objectively. But of course some of the research material you run into turns out to be tangential to whatever your focus happens to be at the time, so you absorb what you can from it, then shelf it — like the celebrity bobblehead that amused you for a while, but is now an almost invisible ornament eating dust and feathers somewhere in your environment. And just like the bobblehead may fall off the shelf one day to remind you of its existence, some of my lettering research material unveiled itself in my head one day for no particular reason. Hand lettering is now mostly perceived as an American art. Someone with my historical knowledge about lettering may be snooty enough to go as far as pointing out the British origins of almost everything American, including lettering — but for the most part, the contemporary perspective associates great lettering with America. The same perspective also associates blackletter, gothics and sans serifs with Germany. So you can imagine my simultaneous surprise and impatience when, in my research for one of my American lettering-based fonts, I ran into a German lettering book from 1953, by an artist called Bentele. It was no use for me because it didn't propel my focus at that particular time, but a few months ago I was marveling at what we take for granted — the sky is blue, blackletter is German, lettering is American — and found myself flipping through the pages of that book again. The lettering in that book is upbeat and casual sign making stuff, but it has a slightly strange and youthful experimentation at its heart. I suppose I find it strange because it deviates a lot from the American stuff I'm used to working with for so long now. To make a long story short, what’s inside that German book served as the semilla, which is Spanish for seed, for the typeface you see all over these pages. With Semilla, my normal routine went out the window. My life for a while was all Bezier all the time. No special analog or digital brushes or pens were used in drawing these forms. They're the product of a true Bezier process, all starting with a point creating a curve to another point, which draws a curve to another point, and so on. It’s a very time-consuming process, but at the end I am satisfied that it can get to pretty much the same results easier and more traditional methods accomplish. And as usual with my fonts, the OpenType is plenty and a lot of fun. Experimenting with substitution and automation is still a great pleasure for me. It is the OpenType that always saves me from the seemingly endless work hours every type designer must inevitably have to face at one point in his career. The artful photos used in this booklet are by French photographer and designer Stéphane Giner. He is very deserving of your patronage, so please keep an eye out for his marvelous work. I hope you like Semilla and enjoy using it. I have a feeling that it marks a transition to a more curious and flexible period in my career, but only time will tell.

Hobo font was designed in 1910 by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders. This unusual Art Nouveau-inspired design contains no straight lines and no descenders. It imparts a friendliness to display work such as invitations, menus, signage, and packaging.

Millerstown is full of that solid, 19th Century, transatlantic spirit of enterprise. It is an all capitals face, decorative but clear and legible, ideal for signage, posters and banners. Bring a touch of American inspired flair to your next design project!

The extra bold sans serif stencil lettering on movie posters and lobby cards for “Reform School Girl” (a 1957 film by American International Pictures) was the basis of Reform School JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

During the period of the Great American Depression, “hobos” created a system of symbols to communicate and assist fellow travelers. These symbols would mark a home, farm, fence or other structure to indicate what to expect in the area. They would tip off travelers on how to find food, stay safe and what to avoid and more. In some areas of the USA, these symbols are still visible and have also become part of the American popular culture. These 96 symbols are accompanied by a pdf describing what the symbol was used to indicate. The meanings and symbols are by no means the complete list and there may be additional or alternative meanings. These are for casual use and not historical or anthropologically completely accurate.

Roadstar is a script designed in the style of the classic American advertising font from the 1940's-1950's. Roadstar is a retro brush-style script designed for logotype, packaging, posters, T-shirts, signage & design projects with a retro & vintage feel. Roadstar comes with two styles that both contain all upper and lower case characters, punctuation, numerals and mathematical operators, as well as all accented characters.

Pittsburgh is the latest (as at August 2011) in a range of inter-war American inspired commercial faces, and takes its place alongside the popular Bettendorff and the Spargo family. These shaded stab-serif capitals speak of the heyday of heavy manufacture and engineering and bring a gritty feel of the 20s and 30s to any project. Why not indulge in a little heavy engineering today?

Generous curves above and below the straight-sided Railroad Gothic parallel those of Figgins’s elephantine Grotesques, lending to both British and American series their monumental qualities. Shrinking the center strokes and counters to emphasize a massive periphery, David Berlow has used this curious similarity to suspend a complete family of sanserifs between the two forms, a manly series of great dignity and presence; FB 1997

Working at American Type Founders from a Bruce Foundry recutting, Morris Fuller Benton worked out the dramatics of the English Fat Face, and in 1928 produced Ultra Bodoni, a headline spectacular. Using Benton’s 1933 Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed, Richard Lipton digitized Bodoni FB Bold Condensed, then took compression even further and designed Bodoni FB Bold Compressed, a real technical tour de force; FB 1992

Cape Horn is a typeface inspired by seafarers who have perished by navigating the treacherous seas surrounding Cape Horn, which is at the southern-most tip of South America. A-Z Numbers Multi-language support Symbols Special Characters Uppercase

The inspiration source for Monarchy Initials is the 1934 Book of American Types by American Type Founders. In that specimen book, they had created a sophisticated two color initial design they called "Stationers Initials" which was only available in metal type at 24, 36, and 48 points. This wonderfully detailed initial style is now digitally recreated and revived for modern use. Monarchy Initials is only capable of initial or single letter monograms due to its unique design. The two color aspect of the original design has been preserved and made accessible within all programs. The Capital character slots contain the background color glyphs, and the lowercase slots hold the outline art for the letters. You can choose a color, type a capital letter, then switch to black and type a lowercase letter for the two color effect, or just tpe a lowercase letter on its own. It's that easy! Download and view the Monarchy Initials Guidebook if you would like to learn a little more.

The inspiration source for Memoriam Initials is the 1934 Book of American Types by American Type Founders. In that specimen book, they had created a sophisticated two color initial design they called “University Initials” which was only available in metal type at 24, 36, and 48 points. This wonderfully detailed initial style is now digitally recreated and revived for modern use. Memoriam Initials is only capable of initial or single letter monograms due to its unique design. The two color aspect of the original design has been preserved and made accessible within all programs. The Capital character slots contain the background color glyphs, and the lowercase slots hold the outline art for the letters. You can choose a color, type a capital letter, then switch to black and type a lowercase letter for the two color effect, or just type a lowercase letter on its own. It’s that easy! Download and view the Memoriam Initials Guidebook if you would like to learn a little more.

There's a cemetery in Castine, Maine, a lovely coastal town perhaps best known for Maine Maritime Academy and a surviving crop of stately old American elms, with headstones dating back into the 18th century -- the standard old headstone shape, often topped by winged skulls. Thanks to a local historical society volunteer, I got my hands on a couple rubbings; these show a particular style of stonecarving that proved captivating to the point of typeface design. Castine has a full character set in both roman and italic styles.