The late-19th-century Prussian-American printer and publisher Louis Prang, the “father of the American Christmas card”, was well-known for his efforts to improve art education in the United States. He published many instructional books and even founded a training school for art teachers. One of the books he published included a series of alphabets for sign painters, lithographers, illuminators, architects and civil engineers. There was nothing truly original there — in the book’s preface, Prang says that the alphabets were “based on foreign forms and adapted for American taste”. The one alphabet that caught my attention in that book was one simply called “Italic”. It’s a high- contrast modern, a Didone really, but with an interesting little twist: the lowercase is almost entirely connected, which makes for an interesting mix of modern typography and classic calligraphy. That stuff is right up my alley now. Whenever my eyes happen on a modern, it’s easy, even almost impulsive for me to envision swashes coming out of serifs and terminals. The caps melt and the minuscules dance with them. And so I brought my vision to life. Prangs is an italic set of three weights, each containing more than 1400 glyphs with plenty of OpenType features and Latin language support. This set celebrates the convergence of three centuries of fancy display alphabets. These fonts should work wherever moderns are used to elevate and scripts are used to appeal — namely today’s branding, packaging and glossy publications.

This is the definitive standard African font. It combines wonderful readability with tremendous panache. The fact that it has a full character set (UPPER and lower case), all punctuation and all special characters, means that it can be used in just about any African design context. If you had only one African font in your arsenal, it would have to be Aarde Black. The name "Aarde" means "earth" and refers to the gutsy, earthy character of the letterforms. It includes a full character set: characters for English, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese. The numerals are mono-spaced, and are very readable so that they will line up correctly in columns of figures. The letters of the alphabet are correctly kerned so that they appear correctly in text.

An American Scotch remixed in 27 fonts Mencken has twenty seven styles, divided into three widths, three optical sizes, romans and italics. Generally, optical size typeface families belong to a same common construction. It falls into the same category of type classification, while presenting different x-heights or contrasts. Mencken is unique because it is designed according to different axis and optical sizes. Firstly, Mencken Text is a low-contrast transitional typeface, designed on an oblique axis, asserting horizontal with featuring open counters. Its capitals follow Didots to better harmonize the rest of the family. On the other side of the spectrum, Mencken Head (and narrow variations) is designed on a vertical axis, high contrast, in a contemporary Didot style. The Mencken is therefore a typeface answering to different sorts of uses, whose design is different according to its uses: from oblique axis in small size to vertical axis in large sizes. Vertical proportions (x-height, capitals height, etc.) were calibrated to be compatible with many Typofonderie typeface families. Lucie Lacava and I followed the idea launched by Matthew Carter few years ago for some of his typefaces intended for publications. From Baltimore Sun’s project to Typofonderie’s Mencken It is a bespoke typeface for American newspaper The Baltimore Sun started at the end of 2004 which marks the beginning of this project. The story started with a simple email exchange with Lucie Lacava then in charge of redesigning the American East Coast newspaper. As usual, she was looking for new typeface options in order to distinguish the redesign that she had started. At the time of its implementation, a survey of the newspaper’s readers has revealed that its previous typeface, drawn in the mid-1990s, was unsatisfactory. The Mencken was well received, some reader responses was particularly enjoyable: “It’s easier to read with the new type even though the type is designed by a French.” Why it is called Mencken? The name Mencken is a tribute to H. L. Mencken’s journalistic contributions to The Sun. According to the London Daily Mail, Mencken ventured beyond the typewriter into the world of typography. Because he felt Americans did not recognize irony when they read it, he proposed the creation of a special typeface to be called Ironics, with the text slanting in the opposite direction from italic types, to indicate the author’s humour. Affirming his irreverence, the Mencken typeface does not offer these typographic gadgets. Henry Louis Mencken (1880 — 1956) was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. Known as the “Sage of Baltimore”, he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements. Creative Review Type Annual 2006 Tokyo TDC 2018

Introducing Levo Dope Slab Serif Font a typeface that exudes boldness and confidence. With its thick, heavy serifs and rectangular shape, this font is the perfect choice for any design that needs to make a strong impact. Transport your audience to the American West with the vintage charm of the Western slab serif font. Whether you're creating posters, advertisements, or signage, this font will capture attention and convey a sense of stability and strength. Also come with FREE illustrations and editable logo to make better design.

Sun is a family of compact typefaces closer to old industrial-style American newspaper headlines than to Luc(as)’s other designs. The fonts also work in text, and have been used for corporate identity and editorial projects for more than two decades now.

Here’s a workman-like collection of border elements gleaned from the specimen books of various American manufacturers of woodtype from around 1840 to 1885. Refer to the PDF guides for detailed, yet simple, instructions for constructing various border patterns, all with Victorian grace and charm.

Tag is the work of American designer David Sagorski and influenced by street art. It is an all caps typeface which includes a complete set of alternate capitals and amusing spot illustrations. The graffiti style of Tag is ideal for vivid, eye-catching headlines.

ITC Highlander font is the work of Dave Farey and loosely based on the handwriting of the late American graphic artist and lettering master Oswald Cooper. ITC Highlander is a unique font family, but not so unusual that it is limited only to display applications.

Pacifica – hand lettered elegant bold script for decorative typography inspired by American branding typography from end of XX century. Comes with different variates – filled, highlighted or pressed. Perfectly for headers, signs, logos, prints, etc. Comes with ending and some middle alternates and some standard ligatures.

These beautifully designed initials were created by talented American designer Steven Albert. Aquitaine looks best when the more straightforward characters are used to set words and the decorative alternatives are used to provide exciting initialling complements. A unique style with subtle historical and religious overtones.

Surreal PostIndian by Laura Klamburg. OpenType, 2 styles According to its creator, Surreal Post Indian was inspired by the performance of an American Indian artist, but this typeface seems more connected with pop neon signs. Anyway, here is an amusing Laura Klamburg font. Enjoy it.

American type designer Jim Parkinson created this display FontFont in 1996. The family contains 2 weights and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, film and tv, editorial and publishing as well as poster and billboards. It comes with proportional lining and proportional oldstyle figures.

Loubotin Inspired by Modern Vintage & Retro style and combination with old american traditional style.Loubotin allowing you to create hand lettering is an instant and a super handy set of bonus Swash. Ideal for logos, handwritten quotes, product packaging, header, poster, merchandise, social media & greeting cards.

Haglos Script was inspired by Modern Vintage & Retro style in combination with old American traditional style. It's bold and has amazing swashes. In my examples I show how this script can be used. It's very well suited for logotypes, product labels, food flyer, and others.

Apparently original with the Lindsay brothers type foundry in New York shortly before they were merged into the American Type Founders Company. A few characters of the original font have been modified slightly to make them more harmonious with the rest of the alphabet.

The name says it all. It is aesthetically located between American Gothics and European Grotesques and features small caps, a Central European character set and four number formats plus small caps numerals. This makes it not only a heartbreaking headline font, but also extremely versatile.

Rase Nicolous is a tall, handwritten graffiti font built to emulate a particular category of modern American, west coast graffiti styles. The varied stroke width & rough edges can produce the look of a number of different writing implements, paint brush, pencil, marker, chalk etc.

Sign and Design JNL is a casual brush alphabet modeled after an Alf R. Becker design that appeared in Signs of the Times Magazine. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media and the American Sign Museum for providing the reference material to make this font.

City Streetwear is a sophisticated signature collection that includes four script weights and plenty of ligatures. City Streetwear scripts includes 102 ligatures and 6 alternates. Ligature programming has been added to the fonts to give the scripts a more handwritten and luxurious appeal. Try the City Streetwear free font for fashion marketing and social media. It is a great starting point for finding appealing modern catchwords. Use City Streetwear for sophisticated designing. Fonts and posters designed by Cindy Kinash. See font details below. SCRIPT FEATURES: Signature style OpenType Common ff fi fl ffi ffl ligatures  Available in Extended Latin Pro (Standard) or American (US) version. 102 ligatures and 6 alternates. Programmed ligature feature for optimization. Every time you type specific pairs, ligatures are programmed to pop up to avoid letter pair collisions. Programming ligatures gives the script a more sophisticated flow. Make sure to turn on the feature in your preferred program that supports ligatures. FREE WORDS FEATURES: 68 free words useful for fashion, marketing and social media promoting. Keyword examples include fashion, exclusive, and style. Intended use for fashion, apparel, beauty, marketing, social media, websites, magazines, sales, film and packaging.  VERSIONS: American (US) and Extended Latin Pro (Standard) AMERICAN (US) Shorter version  102 ligatures and 6 alternates  Common ff fi fl ffi ffl ligatures  OpenType Includes the common alphabet, numbers, American symbols and punctuation. EXTENDED LATIN PRO (Standard) Extended version of the American (US) version.  102 ligatures and 6 alternate Common ff fi fl ffi ffl ligatures  OpenType Includes 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 ligatures by turning on the feature in your preferred program that supports ligatures. DISPLAY- The City Streetwear fonts work best as large headline text for optimization. FONT USE- Use City Streetwear for fashion, apparel, beauty, marketing, social media, websites, magazines, sales, film and packaging.

Venetian 301 is the Bitstream version of the Centaur type family. Centaur was designed by the American book designer Bruce Rogers on the basis of Venetian typefaces of 1470 of Nicolas Jenson. Beautiful Italic based on a face by Ludovico degli Arrighi was developed by Frederic Warde who was an American calligrapher and typography researcher was added as Italic to Centaur. Adapted for mechanical composition by English Monotype in 1929. Its lettershapes owe much to pen-drawn letters of Italian humanist minuscule and cursive. This elegant humanist face is useful for the finest typography both for book text and display matter. Cyrillic version included small caps was developed for ParaType in 2003 by Dmitry Kirsanov.

Qi is a display sans-serif inspired, in part, by the art deco typefaces sometimes seen on old signs along rural American backroads. Unlike these signs, Qi is new, fresh, a little bit quirky, and not at all in need of repair or a fresh coat of paint. The family is comprised of six distinct fonts with more on the way. With an entire set of Central and Western European (and, of course, American) glyphs, plus a bunch of alternates and ligatures, Qi could be the perfect display face for your next sign, poster, newsletter, headline or, well, most anything else. Hey, the lowercase alone makes these fonts well worth the price.

These six faces are interpreted from examples shown in Rob Roy Kelly's "American Wood Types" They are not merely scanned copies, but have been redrawn from scratch with various optical adjustments. Kelly points out that the true glory of the American Wood Types are the negative spaces, which are, in their dynamic active forms, the antithesis of the anemic flimsy letters produced by type foundries in the 19th century. The Alphabets Wood Types are designed with digital manipulation in mind. Stretch, curve and distort at will! These designs were released prior to similar revivals from Adobe. Each font has two full alphabets (one full height, one smaller) and numerals. However, certain points and accents will not be found.

Pull up your Jackboots and check out this Teutonic title font designed by Richard Starkings for Rob Liefeld's controversial relaunch of Marvel's CAPTAIN AMERICA.

I made Company into a font after several inquiries from designers in America. I always liked Company and was quite happy to digitize it.

It is the 3rd inscription font I shared with Liljegren Runic, one of the inscriptions in America. I couldn't find much information about it.

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

Not to be confused with the prolific, 1980s British super-star graphic and type designer Neville Brody, 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. Body is 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. Brody 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 Brody. If you need the original version with more lettered characters then Brophy Script is a good alternate,

Park Avenue is a lighthearted contemporary script designed by Robert E. Smith in 1933 for American Type Founders. This unique design has small x-height lowercase letters with very long ribbon-like ascenders. Park Avenue is a good design for occasional pieces such as invitations and menus.

Here's another old-timer that needed a lowercase, so we drew one. Originally issued as a caps-only type by The American Type Founders Company about 1898, this font found its way into Craftsman period design. It was the inspiration for Galadriel, a dry transfer sheet alphabet.

Victor Hammer created many faces based on uncial handwriting of which American Uncial, released commercially by the Stempel foundry in 1952, is the source for this version. Uncial is an ideal choice for historical or church pieces, provided that the length of the copy is brief.

Monotype Lightline Gothic is a thin sans serif face cut by American Type Founders to work with Franklin Gothic, which had been designed as a bold face. The rather condensed nature of the Monotype Lightline Gothic font has made it popular for advertising display and newspaper work.

Clearface Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Typefounders. The design was released between 1907 and 1910 for text and display use. Since then, many variations have been released. An interesting typeface, Clearface Gothic is useful in advertising for display and small quantities of text.

Mister Twiggs is a comtemporary modern sans created by the American type designer Alex Kaczun. There are absolutely no curves in this elegant typeface. It has sharp corners with extra tall capitals and a narrow waistline. Mister Twiggs comes in 3 flavors: regular, thin and heavy.

This is Alter Littera’s second original design. It started as an attempt at translating into roman forms the lowercase metrics of classic blackletters, in particular those of The Oldtype “Alter Gotisch” Font. Eventually, the design process led naturally to an innovative and modern re-creation of the overall forms and style of classic bold condensed letters from the early twentieth century, especially those of the “Century Bold Condensed” type from American Type Founders (ATF) Company’s American Specimen Book of Type Styles, Jersey City, 1912 (pp. 274-7) [also seen in McGrew, M. (1993), American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century, New Castle: Oak Knoll Books (pp. 76-7)]. In addition to the usual standard characters for typesetting in modern Western languages, the font includes a comprehensive set of special characters, alternates, ligatures and ornaments, plus Opentype features, that can be used for creating distinctive and attractive texts with virtually unlimited variations. The glyphs are clean, smooth and definitely readable, so the font will be suitable not only for large titles and headings, but also for full text pages. Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Oldtype “Alter Headletter” Font Page.

Versatile egg-shaped Huevo, like all Burghal Design fonts, includes upper and lower case letters, as well as numbers, symbols, punctuation, and accented foreign characters. Huevo is the head of the household known as Los Huevos. Tequila-guzzling, cerveza-swilling Huevo Loco is the boldest of Los Huevos and includes cocktail glass, olive, and eight ball dingbats. Huevo Loco can drink any other font under the table. Like most red-blooded American fonts, the favorite pastimes of Huevo Gordo are eating and couch warming, and boy, does it show!

In 1899, Robert Wiebking (who worked for a number of foundries in his time) designed an all-caps typeface named Engravers Roman (see Engravers #2). American Type Founders, Inc. (ATF) released a heavier variant in 1902, Engravers Bold, designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Engravers Bold was also released by the Barnhart Brothes & Spinder foundry. Today, Linotype's Engravers brings turn-of-the-century elegance directly to your keyboard. Use the Engravers typeface on any formal piece -- from table cards, to menus, invitations, or advertising work. Engravers is similar to Copperplate Gothic, Sackers Gothic and Nicolas Cochin.

Dog Days is an American hand lettering style brush script family. Dog Days is swift, strong and full of bursting energy. Due to its clean features it’s legible even in small sizes. Dog Days is great for any display use -from poster to packaging and logo to t-shirt. Dog Days is also great for lettering works. Dog Days Brush boasts with more than 700 glyphs and plenty of OpenType features: Keep Standard Ligatures on - it adds variety in hand lettering style and keeps the flow steady. If you need more action try turning on Swash, Stylistic or Titling Alternates in any OpenType savvy software. Dog Days Brush is also equipped with Old Style Numerals if you need your numbers to fit more into text. Dog Days Brush uppercase letters are designed to work as initials so if you need to write all caps you might want to use Dog Days Caps or Dog Days Small Caps. Dog Days Caps can also be used as uppercase letters for the script. Dog Days Extras is a set of badges, swashes and swirls designed to play with the font. Dog Days is inspired by a hand lettering sample in a vintage American swimsuit advertisement.

Mandelia was created by Alex Kaczun, an American type designer, in 2010. The typeface was named in honor of Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, for his “shining example of the incredible strength of the human spirit to persevere in the face of adversity for the pursuit of freedom”. Mandelia is a strong, bold and wide-bodied serif typeface design, reminiscent of the great African landscape with its diverse animal life. It’s easy to see the influence of the 'Rhino' sharp serifs and ‘Elephant’ size stems and proportions. The font commands attention and respect. Great for headlines that pack a punch, logos, posters, and signage. And because it was well designed, it can even be used in body copy at various point sizes. Mandelia is available in Opentype format for both Mac and PC, and comes complete with true drawn small caps, old style figures and Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets. It has everything you need to get the job done.