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

At VetteLetters we like food but we also appreciate our drinks. Yes, of the non-alcoholic kind as well. Like milk. Contrary to what Arnold Schwartzenegger once said, Milk is not just for babies. It contains a whole lot of stuff that is genuinely good for you. Like proteins, carbohydrates, minerals (calcium a.o.) and many vitamins. One time visiting The Hague, Donald DBXL spotted a tile tableau on a brick wall, advertising a dairy factory called ‘De Sierkan’. Yellow sans serif letters on a bright blue background, dating back to the late 19th century, immediately grabbed DBXL’s attention. Especially because the tableau showed both regular and bold letters with some lovely peculiarities here and there. De Sierkan appeared to have been a milk factory solely operating in The Hague from 1879 until 1961. A number of these wall adverts are still to be seen in The Hague streets today. Photos were taken for later reference. Later is now, the lettering has been digitized, missing characters added, and VLNL Melk sees the light of day. VLNL Melk is an all-caps geometric display sans serif family of three weights, Regular, Bold and Black. The basic shape of the letters is a rectangle with rounded corners, leaving a sturdy no-nonsense look and feel. It has a distinct historic aura, but with both feet in this digital day and age. It can equally well be used for the logo of a hipster coffee place, as the cover of a historic novel. Actually, VLNL Melk kan be applied in a wide range of designs like logos, posters, flyers, book covers and magazine headlines.

Mystical Woods is a script and caps font duo. I went back to the basics for this one -- ink and a brush on paper. I cleaned up the letters enough so that there are no jagged edges, but left enough of the character to keep that inky look -- those are the Rough fonts. Then I went back through again and cleaned the heck out of them, making every line and curve smooth for our cut-crafting friends -- those are the Smooth fonts. Since these two fonts were written together with the same tools and style, you can also mix the script letters in with the caps letters! Each font comes with a full set of standard characters and punctuation, as well as over 300 extended Latin characters for language support. And the script fonts also have 45 double-letter ligatures!

Here's a big shout out to all our Loud and Proud font homies -- If you've got a good set of lungs on you -- fill 'em up and get ready to Shout, SHOUT! Yes, let it all out because this is a font you can't do without -- It will make you wanna SHOUT! Throw your hands up, SHOUT! Kick your heels back, SHOUT! Throw your head back, SHOUT! Come on now, SHOUT! And don't forget to say you will... Don't forget to SHOUT! Yeah yeah yeah yeah, SHOUT! A little bit softer now, (Shout) A little bit softer now, (Shout) A little bit softer now, (Shout) A little bit louder now, SHOUT! A little bit louder now, SHOUT! A LITTLE BIT LOUDER NOW! SHOUT! SHOUT! SHOUT! SHOUT! PHEW -- Who says Comicraft doesn't know how to Pump it Up AND Get Down?!

The long awaited and much requested revival of Robert Hunter Middleton's very popular classic is finally here. Mayfair Cursive was an instant hit for Middleton in 1932, and it went on being used widely until late into the 1970s, in spite of it never having crossed over to film type technology. Like a few of its contemporary designs, most notably the work of Lucien Bernhard, Mayfair is a formal script that is somewhat based on traditional italic forms with swash uppercase, but also employs subsidiary hairline strokes in some of its lowercase as an emphasis to the script's cursive traits. Why these gorgeous letters never made the leap into photo typesetting is a mystery to us. But here they are now in digital form, almost three quarters of a century since they first saw the light in metal. Mayfair was redrawn from original 48 pt specimen. It also underwent a major expansion of character set. Plenty of swash characters and ligatures were added. An alternate set of lowercase was also made, in order to give the user a choice between connected and disconnected variations of the same elegant script. Mayfair ships in all popular font formats. While the Postscript Type 1 and True Type versions come in two fonts (Mayfair and Mayfair Alt), the OpenType version is a single font containing all the extra characters in conveniently programmed features that are easily accessible by OpenType-supporting software applications. We are quite sure today's graphic designers will be appreciative of having access to the face that all but defined menus, romance covers, wine and liquor labels and chocolate boxes for almost two 20th century generations.

The movie trailer for the1936 film "After the Thin Man" is filled with text lettered in this classic Art Deco condensed typeface. Sleuth JNL seems the appropriate name for this digital revival, as the romantic comedy centers around detective Nick Charles' and his wife Nora's adventures.

Phoenician/Canaanite The Phoenician alphabet developed from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, during the 15th century BC. Before then the Phoenicians wrote with a cuneiform script. The earliest known inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabet come from Byblos and date back to 1000 BC. The Phoenician alphabet was perhaps the first alphabetic script to be widely-used - the Phoenicians traded around the Mediterraean and beyond, and set up cities and colonies in parts of southern Europe and North Africa - and the origins of most alphabetic writing systems can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet, including Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, as well as the scripts of India and East Asia. Notable features Type of writing system: abjad / consonant alphabet with no vowel indication Writing direction: right to left in hortizontal lines. Sometimes boustrophedon. Script family: Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician Number of letters: 22 - there was considerable variation in their forms in different regions and at different times. The names of the letters are acrophonic, and their names and shapes can be ultimately traced back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. For example, the name of the first letter, 'aleph, means ox and developed from a picture of an ox's head. Some of the letter names were changed by the Phoenicians, including gimel, which meant camel in Phoenician, but was originally a picture of a throwing stick (giml).

Iconic Conjuring memories of chunky typefaces from the late-60s and early-70s, and named after the world’s greatest footballer of that and probably any other era, FS Pele is one of a set of Fontsmith fonts designed specifically for headlines and other prominent applications. “We wanted to create fonts that could be integral to the design of posters, album covers and magazines,” says Jason Smith. Welcome to FS Pele, iconic, like its namesake (though, perhaps, a little less nimble). Big Pele, little Pele There was only one Pele. But there are two sizes of FS Pele. FS Pele One, with the finer counters and details, adds considerable weight and style at large sizes, especially in big block headlines on posters. FS Pele Two’s thicker “slots” make it a better choice for smaller-sized text. A load of blocks FS Pele began as an exercise by Phil Garnham in turning squares into legible letters, via the least means necessary. The idea extended his ideas about logo-making, and the search for a stamp-like brand mark that lends authority, stability and instant identification. “The thought that the type was a 2D/3D jigsaw of slotted, architectural pieces was almost an after-thought. I wanted to create a strong, stacking, block aesthetic for the most contemporary poster design. “At the time there were a lot of designers creating their own versions of the same thing but I wanted to take the blocker forms to the next step, and infer a more legible text without sacrificing the idea.”

Iconic Conjuring memories of chunky typefaces from the late-60s and early-70s, and named after the world’s greatest footballer of that and probably any other era, FS Pele is one of a set of Fontsmith fonts designed specifically for headlines and other prominent applications. “We wanted to create fonts that could be integral to the design of posters, album covers and magazines,” says Jason Smith. Welcome to FS Pele, iconic, like its namesake (though, perhaps, a little less nimble). Big Pele, little Pele There was only one Pele. But there are two sizes of FS Pele. FS Pele One, with the finer counters and details, adds considerable weight and style at large sizes, especially in big block headlines on posters. FS Pele Two’s thicker “slots” make it a better choice for smaller-sized text. A load of blocks FS Pele began as an exercise by Phil Garnham in turning squares into legible letters, via the least means necessary. The idea extended his ideas about logo-making, and the search for a stamp-like brand mark that lends authority, stability and instant identification. “The thought that the type was a 2D/3D jigsaw of slotted, architectural pieces was almost an after-thought. I wanted to create a strong, stacking, block aesthetic for the most contemporary poster design. “At the time there were a lot of designers creating their own versions of the same thing but I wanted to take the blocker forms to the next step, and infer a more legible text without sacrificing the idea.”

Quidic is an unusual display typeface. The upper-case letters are strongly vertical, condensed, and bold. Used by themselves, they make headlines and titles that stand out. The lower case letters do not have serifs similar to those on the upper-case letters, but rather have the serif shapes one expects from an italic style. The lower-case is also quite short compared to the upper-case letters. The italic styles of the family are unusual because the lower-case letters keep their shapes and the upper-case letters and numbers change. The family has three styles that differ more by width rather than by weight. Although some Bauhaus fonts have several letter shapes that are similar, there is no other typeface quite like Quidic. The family can be used for many things, but not for text. For a "normalized" version of this typeface, see Qwatick.

This family was created inspired from two French (one so common and a very rare large one) "toy print" boxes, named Le petit imprimeur, with rubber stamp characters from the 1920's. The big difference from our 1920 My Toy print is that this font is complete, with upper and lower cases, accented, complete punctuation and some symbols. The doubly of each usual character in each style (A-Z/a-z and numerals) allow to give a rich and variously uneven appearance, looking like the results of the real use of those old rubber stamps, with bad kernings and alignement. The font is containing West (including Celtic), Central, East European, Turkish and Cyrillic characters. The bold style may be used as a reinforcement, mixed with normal style without disadvantage, allowing finally four choices for each usual letter... The original size is 6mm (about 17 pts).

Inspired by New Transitional and Egyptian fonts, Tanger Serif has elements of a sturdy work-horse text face and finely detailed headline font. A wide variety of widths and weights support many text sizes. Typically Narrow is used in headlines, Medium in body and Wide in smaller print. Nothing is predefined, though. By combining the right widths with the right weights this traditional approach can easily be challenged. Let’s take an oversized (over 10 pt) body copy for instance. In conjunction with using a bigger size to enhance readability, a narrow and slightly lighter weight will save space and brighten text color. Tanger Serif Narrow is a slim normal rather than a condensed face. As an Open Type “Pro” font each weight includes an expanded character set, small caps, old style figures, tabular figures, ligatures, fractions etc. All these are easily accessible through OpenType features.

Feisty (2020) is a straight script bold using magic OpenType automatically at mimic real hand lettering. Use it for magazine, fashion, invitations, greeting cards, bussines card, logo, t-shirt, web banner, book cover, campaign and watermark photography. Feature Presents an advanced OpenType to automatically choose the appropriate letter shape as you type based on whether the letter appears at the beginning, middle or end of a word. The width of the bar in the lowercase "t" can be changed as desired. Has two different styles of caps: Normal caps, which are the same style as the lowercase; and a type of Comic font, plain caps for setting acronyms, roman numerals or any other case that calls for all caps. With extended language support for most Latin-based Western and Central European languages. Automatic all fractions. *Requires an application with support for OpenType advanced typography, such as Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress.

At first glance, Pistol Shot looks like it was originally drawn as a large, geometric slab serif font - a slab serif font that underwent an unfortunate accident, and had many of its extremities shot off! However, there is more to Pistol Shot's appearance than looking as if it had survived a showdown. Pistol Shot also looks vaguely like a pixel font viewed through a blurry filter. It also looks like it could have been cross-stitched into a craft project. Whatever its appearance, Pistol Shot Light and Pistol Shot Normal are perfect headline fonts for a wide variety of display applications. You might even want to try cross-stitching its letters into fabric yourself! Both weights of the Pistol Shot family were designed by the French design team of Roselyne and Michel Besnard in 2002, and are included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH."