A font inspired by regime propaganda inscriptions found in Italian institutional and civic architecture of the 20’s and 30’s. Bold, severe lettering, suggestive of pre-war Italian Art Deco and American Depression Modern aesthetics.

During the turbulent era of the 1960s, the youth of America found various ways to protest against "The Establishment". Whether it was campus unrest, protest songs, sit-ins or other methods, the message was the counter-culture movement. Arising from this disenchantment with traditional social standards, a small but effective means of protest arose that made no sound, yet spoke volumes - the pin button. Statements against the war in Vietnam, free love, drug use and other messages popped up on little metal discs pinned to tee shirts, suspenders, head band and hats. Sixties Pin Buttons JNL recreates twenty-six of these messages in both white on black (upper case keys) and black on white (lower case keys). Blank buttons in both white and black are found on the parenthesis keys.

This family is a compilation created from a Garamond set in use in Paris circa 1651, but similar to those, eroded and tired, that were in use during centuries to print cheap publications, as well as in Europe than in America, and from a large choice of printed symbols—all specially redrawn—used for alchemical, pharmaceutical and astrological books, covering 1550 to late 1800s period. Each alphabet is doubled by a slightly different one, and a special OTF encoding allows to give an irregular effect with never the same twin letters in a single word. The Normal style is enriched by small caps, and the Italic style by Swashes. A lot of symbols, too, are given twice with differences. This font may be used with our calendar specialized 1689 Almanach.

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.

The source of inspiration for Haute Monde Monogram is the 1934 "Book of American Types" by American Type Founders. Found in that specimen book was a wonderfully elegant traditional smallcap-Capital-smallcap monogram alphabet known as “Elite Monogram Initials”. This elegant typeface is now digitally remastered and updated for modern use with functionality beyond its original intentions. Download and view the MFC Haute Monde Guidebook if you would like to learn a little more. MFC Haute Monde Monogram comes complete with Pro format fonts. You will require with programs that can take advantage of OpenType features contained within the Pro fonts.

Workaday from Yes Please is a bold and clean contemporary take on the classic American Sans Serif. Inspired by the wildly varied history of early to mid 20th century American signage, aircraft markings and industrial shipping vernaculars, Workaday exudes a timeless, classic flavor packed with a personality perfect for graphic headlines, packaging, copy setting and much more! Workaday features conventional ligatures, a standard set of accents and symbols, and a set of open type alternate characters to provide a versatile end-user experience. Workaday has seen action for Nike Sportswear, MSN, IFC, FX and more. Workaday is designed by Lee Schulz.

This American original was designed in 1901 by Frederic W. Goudy for the American Type Founders in Jersey City. Copperplate Gothic is an all caps font which looks like a sans serif at first glance. But closer examination reveals tiny, pointy serifs which almost seem to round off the letters. Designers rely on this font’s lofty and sublime impression and it is often seen in advertisements, but it has also made a place for itself in private and business correspondence and corporate design. The AB and BC designations in the style names refer to the relative sizes of the capitals and small capitals.

Outlined techno font designed on the 1990s. Perfect for true expressive artworks

Here is a nice sign-painterly display font inspired by the 1920s.

Hamerslag is an ultra-condensed serif type family with uncomplicated, regular appearance, large x-height, relatively high contrast and modern glyphs shapes. Available in four styles, contain fraction- and scientific numerals, standard ligatures, currency symbols, proportional and tabular lining figures. Its wide character set support 200 Latin-script languages, 50 Cyrillic-script languages and 190+ romanizations/transliterations, e.g. The United Nations romanizations, Chinese official romanization (Hanyu Pinyin), BGN/PCGN (United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use), American Library Association / Library of Congress romanizations and others. The OpenType PostScript CFF (.otf) and OpenType TrueType TTF (.ttf) support encodings: Windows 1250 Latin 2 (Eastern European), Windows 1251 Cyrillic, Windows 1252 Latin 1 (ANSI), Windows 1254 Turkish, Windows 1257 Baltic, ISO 8859-1 Latin 1 (Western), ISO 8859-2 Latin 2 (Central Europe), ISO 8859-3 Latin 3 (Turkish, Maltese, Esperanto), ISO 8859-4 Latin 4 (Baltic), ISO 8859-5 Cyrillic, ISO 8859-9 Latin 5 (Turkish), ISO 8859-10 Latin 6 (Scandinavian), ISO 8859-13 Latin 7 (Baltic 2), ISO 8859-14 Latin 8 (Celtic), ISO 8859-15 Latin 9, ISO 8859-16 Latin 10, Macintosh Character Set (US Roman). Supported OpenType features: Acces All Alternates, Capital Spacing, Case-Sensitive Forms, Denominators, Fractions, Glyph Composition/Decomposition, Historical Forms, Kerning, Localized Forms, Numerators, Ordinals, Proportional Figures, Scientific Inferiors, Slashed Zero, Standard Ligatures, Stylistic Alternates, Subscript, Superscript, Tabular Figures. Kerning is prepared as single ('flat') table for maximum possible compatibility with older software.

Kallio is a Bold Brush Script with roots in American sign painting culture. Kallio is Finnish and means rock or cliff. Kallio is equipped with Contextual Alternates for smooth connections and Swash Alternates for every standard letter.

Callista (from the Greek for "most beautiful") is a fat cursive typeface, inspired by the works of Francois Boltana in the early 1970s and those of Milka Peykova in late 1970s. With its Full Latin and Cyrillic support, Callista is a perfect choice for short headlines and logotype design.

Fine-built, straight but not official, with soft corners is suitable for short texts, placards and advertising. It was inspired by 1970s when people were mad about robots, space and so on. I decided to create a font as if it was a progressive font of the 1970s.

Here is a wood type from Tubbs & Co., about 1900. Its lack of decoration reflects the changes that were rapidly occurring in the design of printed pieces at the beginning of the 1900s. There were several similar types in metal in the first decade of the 20th century.

A 1950 reissue of the 1934 tune “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming” had the title of the sheet music hand lettered in a semi-calligraphic sans serif design. This became the model for the appropriately named Semi Calligraphic JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Cooperative is a retro style poster font in Hebrew and Latin. Is based on a printed example of a vintage handmade wood type from the 1950's. This sans serif font is available in both regular and bold versions, with a dirty and grungy styles as well in regular and bold.

HT Mason is bold and hand painting font. This font is retrospective and decent, but it is also funny and cute. 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!

Hand lettering from the title credits for the 1950 film “All about Eve” were the inspiration for Evening Event JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. The font’s name is an (unintended) double-homage to the film’s title, for the first part of both words include “Eve”.

The Bauer Typefoundry first released the Beton family of types in 1936. Created by the German type designer Heinrich Jost, the present digital version of the Beton family consists of six slab serif typefaces. First developed during the early 1800s, by the 1930s slab serif faces had become one of many stock styles of type developed by foundries all over the world. Because of their distance from pen-drawn forms and their industrial appearance, they were seen as “modern” typefaces. (Their serifs kept them from being too modern.) The first slab serif typefaces were outgrowths of didone style text faces (e.g., Walbaum). As newspapers and advertising grew in importance in the western world (especially in “Wild West” America), type founders and printers began to create bigger, bolder typefaces, which would set large headlines apart from text, and each other. Through display tactics, businesses and industry could begin to visually differentiate their products from one another. This craze eventually led to the development of monster sized wood type, among other things. By the 20th Century, the typographic establishment had begun to tame, categorize, and codify 19th Century type styles. It was in the wake of this environment that Jost developed Beton. The Beton family is a type “family” in a pre-1950s sense of the word. Although six styles of type are available, only four of them fit in logical progression with each other (Beton Light, Beton Demi Bold, Beton Bold, and Beton Extra Bold). The other two members of the family, Beton Bold Condensed and Beton Bold Compressed, are more like distant cousins. They function better as single headlines to text set in Beton Light or Beton Demi Bold, of as companions to totally separate typefaces.

Emil Rudolf Weiss’s 1920s Antiqua font family redrawn and redesigned for nowadays use.

Metropolica is a plakkat font, inspired in titglings from advertises from 1930's

Designed by R.H. Middleton for Ludlow, circa 1930. Digitally engineered by Steve Jackaman.

Yarker is the Business Hand of the late 1800's early 1900's.

A bold slab-serif typeface influenced by Spagetti Western posters of the 1960s.

Monk is a multi-language geometric harmoniously balanced font in Arabic and Latin. The font family has its origins in Benedictine and Franciscan writing. Both Arabic and Latin work seamlessly together having shared counters, stem thickness, and curved forms. Monk is a type family that seeks a balance between the openness and legibility of humanist sans serifs. Letterforms have a distinct direction of the ductus, a wide overall stance, large open counters that help in its legibility. The typeface is versatile and can be successfully used in magazines, posters, branding, websites, headlines, large-format prints, brand identities, social media, advertising, editorial design, posters. The family contains over 40 alternative glyphs and over 50 ligatures in each style and comes in 10 styles with their corespondent italics. The family Latin supports Western, Central, South Eastern, South American, Oceanian, Pan African, Vietnamese, Sámi & Arabic

King George is a chaotic, bouncy, flyer display font that harkens back to Chank's roots as a grunge alphabetician. It also has a ransom note feel that reflects the stresses and randomness of this American life. Pure rebellion!

A collection of traditional American patchwork quilt motifs in a decorative font package. Over 80 designs, to be used as free-standing illustrations, in borders, or as an overall pattern. Several designs will work together into a pattern.

Brotherland is a handdrawn serif typeface wit a rough and vintage character inspired from American Vintage typography. Brotherland comes with 4 styles: Regular, Italic, Aged, Italic Aged. Perfect for logos, badges and any project needing a vintage touch.

Designed at ParaType in 1997 by Tagir Safayev. Based on OCR-A typeface (1968) of American Type Founders. A simple sans serif typeface designed to meet the requirements of the US Bureau of Standards for optical character recognition.

Digital Sans Now combines and completes the many diverse requests and requirements by users of the past years. By now, 36 versions for over 70 Latin and Cyrillic languages have become available, including Small Caps. Digital Sans Now is also available as a webfont and reflects, with its simplified and geometric construction and its consciously maintained poster-like forms as well as with its ornamental character, the spirit of the decorative serif-less headline typefaces of the 1970s. The basic severity of other grotesque typefaces is here repressed by means of targeted rounds. Exactly these formal breaks allow the impression that it could be used in a variety of visual applications. Short texts, headlines and logos of all descriptions are its domain. It is because of this versatility that the typeface has become a desirable stylistic element, especially in such design provinces as technology, games and sports, and that, for many years now, it appears to be timeless. Additional weights designed on the basis of the original, from Thin to Ultra, the Italics, Small Caps and alternative characters allow for differentiated “looks and feels”, and, with deliberate usage, give the “Digital Sans Now” expanded possibilities for expression. The basis for the design of Digital Sans Now is a headline typeface created in 1973 by Marty Goldstein and the Digital Sans family which has been available from Elsner+Flake since the mid-1990s under a license agreement. The four weights designed by Marty Goldstein, Thin, Plain, Heavy and Fat, were originally sold by the American company Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) under the name of “Sol”. Similarly, the company Fotostar International offered film fonts for 2” phototypesetting machines, these however under the name “Sun”. The first digital adaptation had already been ordered in the mid 1970s in Germany by Walter Brendel for the phototypesetting system Unitype used by the TypeShop Group, in three widths and under the name “Digital Part of the Serial Collection.” Based on the versions by VGC, Thin, Plain, Heavy and Fat, new versions were then created with appropriate stroke and width adaptations for data sets for the fonts Light, Medium and Bold as well as for the corresponding italics

Aptifer Sans and Aptifer Slab are two 21st century typeface families created by Mårten Thavenius. Each family has seven weights, in roman and italic respectively, making 28 font styles in total. A heritage from two design traditions can be seen in Aptifer. One is the robust American gothic typefaces, like M. F. Benton’s, from around 1900. This is combined with the openness and legibility that comes from the humanist tradition. The sans serif part of the family, Aptifer Sans, is designed without excessive details disturbing the reading. Its sibling Aptifer Slab with its wedge slab serifs is more eye-catching but still suited for text settings. The italics fit well into the text flow of the roman. They are a bit narrower than the roman and have cursive characteristics. Both Aptifer Sans and Aptifer Slab are highly legible typefaces and can be used both in print and on screen. Featured in: Best Fonts for PowerPoints

Rebekah Pro is a revival of ATF’s Piranesi family, the regular being designed by Willard Sniffin, and the remaining weights designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Tom Rickner first revived Benton’s Italic for use in his wedding invitations for his marriage to Rebekah Zapf in 2006. He completed the character set in 2009. Rebekah Pro captures the elegance and distinction of the original. Tom carefully studied samples from 1930s American Type Founders catalogues and created a digital version with meticulous care. While considered an informal script because its letterforms do not connect, Rebekah Pro has graceful strokes and a truly elegant appearance. Tom created a variety of typographic enhancements not found in the original Piranesi italic font. These OpenType typographic features offer a distinguishing touch to everything from invitations and announcements to greeting cards and advertisements. Rebekah Pro contains the Latin 1 character set and the following OpenType typographic features: Swashes, Small Capitals, Ligatures, Alternates, Oldstyle Figures, Proportional Lining Figures, Tabular Lining Figures and Ornaments.

Known to many eastern artists as the California Poster Letter because it originated in the West, this old 1930s style has reappeared in digital form. Carl Holmes, in his wonderful book on old lettering styles, pays tribute to this uniquely American design. Faintly reminiscent of the lettering of Fred G. Cooper, California Poster Bold is at times wildly exaggerated and boisterous. Letters appear to be inflated and loopy. The design might aptly be described as a kind of rollicking Cooper Black (Oswald Bruce Cooper). An extensive range of alternates and figures has been provided for your convenience. California Poster Bold is now available in the OpenType Std format. Some new characters have been added to this OpenType version as stylistic alternates and historical forms. These advanced features work in current versions of Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades.