Once upon a time, in the days BC (that's Before Computers) there lived a very talented group of men and women whose job it was to render ads by hand. So skillful were these people that some say it was possible to actually identify the typefaces that the layout artists were emulating. Their renderings were swift and slick, no time for detail as it was necessary to do a whole bunch of variations, usually within ridiculous deadlines. Their only tools: bullet-tip markers and bond paper - often mistakes resulted but no time to re-do and white paint was totally unacceptable - just let the slipups be. Here's a simulation of their craft, we don't really know what typeface this was supposed to represent… any ideas?

In the early days of printing it was soon recognized that there was a need to identify the printer and publisher behind the printed work. So these industrious people created marks to identify themselves to clients. This font contains over 160 marks dating back to the early years of printing with the likes of Fust, Ratdolt, Manutius, Caxton, and a whole host of others represented. Some of these printers were very influential and altered the course of history, some merely enabled the broader public to access the classics. Some were imprisoned and others helped foment revolutions. But all were riding the new current of this technology of moveable type that helped transform our world through the enabling of easily exchanging information.

ITC Avant Garde Gothic is a font family based on the logo font used in the Avant Garde magazine. Herb Lubalin devised the logo concept and its companion headline typeface, then he and Tom Carnase, a partner in Lubalin’s design firm, worked together to transform the idea into a full-fledged typeface. The condensed fonts were drawn by Ed Benguiat in 1974, and the obliques were designed by André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt in 1977. The original designs include one version for setting headlines and one for text copy. However, in the initial digitization, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included. The font family consists of 5 weights (4 for condensed), with complementary obliques for widest width fonts. When ITC released the OpenType version of the font, the original 33 alternate characters and ligatures, plus extra characters were included. ITC Avant Garde Gothic® font field guide including best practices, font pairings and alternatives. Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos, Best Fonts for Websites, Best Fonts for PowerPoints

With Antipol Variable, the reversed stress font was supplemented with Wide and Extended cuts in the Hairline weight. The ability to stretch single letters extremely wide is an exclusive goodie of the Variable version. Antipol is a Sans Serif design that reverses the conventions of a regular Latin Sans Serif. With a weight emphasis on the horizontals and its vertical terminals Antipol radiates a 1970s charisma known from the like of Antique Olive. Its modern and avantgardistic attributes are most pronounced in the Hairline weight, where ultra thin lines meet distinctive arrowhead-corners. This particular weight is meant for display settings, think full-page magazine titles or posters. Antipol Wide and Antipol Extended are a generous statement for graphic design with enough space to let the type breathe: art catalogs, lead texts, invitations, letterheads or brand identity. Any style comes with a wide range of OpenType features that goes beyond a standard display font: Small Caps, Proportional and Tabular Oldstyle Figures and Lining Figures, Fractions, and much more.

Introducing Rolide – Expanded Sans Serif Contemporary Charm Rolide – Expanded Sans Serif presents a unique blend of contemporary charm with its wide and boxy shape. Versatile Design Solution This font is your versatile design solution, ideal for titles and body text. Its non-bold style strikes a harmonious balance between subtlety and impact. Wide & Expanded Rolide’s wide and expanded characters add a touch of modernity to your projects. They stand out without overwhelming the content. Perfect for Titles and Body Text Whether for titles or body text, Rolide is the perfect choice. It maintains clarity and readability, making your content engaging. Elegance in Simplicity In the world of fonts, Rolide embodies elegance through simplicity. Its clean lines and non-bold form offer a contemporary feel. In Conclusion In conclusion, Rolide – Expanded Sans Serif is the font that marries wide, expanded, and non-bold characters to create a contemporary and versatile design solution. It ensures your titles and body text are engaging, clear, and subtly impactful, appealing to a broad range of readers.

The Dalecarlian runes, or dalrunes, was a late version of the runic script that was in use in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century.The province has consequently been called the "last stronghold of the Germanic script. When Carl Linnaeus visited Älvdalen in Dalarna in 1734, he made the following note in his diary: The peasants in the community here, apart from using rune staves, still today write their names and ownership marks with runic letters, as is seen on walls, corner stones, bowls, etc. Which one does not know to be still continued anywhere else in Sweden. The Dalecarlian runes were derived from the medieval runes, but the runic letters were combined with Latin ones, and Latin letters would progressively replace the runes. At the end of the 16th century, the Dalecarlian runic inventory was almost exclusively runic, but during the following centuries more and more individual runes were replaced with Latin characters. In its last stage almost every rune had been replaced with a Latin letter, or with special versions that were influenced by Latin characters.

Volta is a robust typeface from the 1950s. A revisit to styles that were en vogue at the turn of the century, Bauer type foundry designers Walter Baum and Konrad Bauer designed this type family in1955. The form of Volta's letters are similar to those in New Transitional Serif typefaces, like Cheltenham and Century. Developed after the Didone (i.e., Bodoni) style types, New Transitional Serifs speak more to the zeitgeist of the late 19th Cntury, and were typographic adaptations to it's newer technologies. Already in the period of mass production, typographers and printers at the dawn of the 20th Century had to cope with larger print runs on cheaper materials. The robust letterforms of New Transitional Serifs were designed to compensate for this, but they were also ingenious little inventions in their own right. Form the beginning, the new, peculiar forms of New Transitional Serif letters were adopted for use by advertisers. Their robustness also allowed them to be used in virtually all sizes. Volta was designed especially with advertising display usage in mind. The x-height of Volta's letters is higher than average for serif faces. It is recommended that Volta be used exclusively for shorter tracks of text, above 12 point. Headlines look dashing set in Volta. Four different font styles are available for the Volta typeface: Regular, Medium, Medium Italic, and Bold."

Sweet Upright Script is the first release for Sweet Fonts Collection, published by MVB Fonts. It is an interpreted revival of a vintage, social engraving lettering style that was popular during the 20th Century. It is probably the first digital version of the design. With the advent of the engraving machine (a pantograph device) around 1900, commercial engraving moved from the use of hand-cut plates to the use of masterplates (lettering patterns). Lettering was traced from the masterplate using the engraving machine, letter by letter, onto a coated steel plate, that would then be etched in a chemical bath. The resulting plate was used to print engraved stationery with the raised print distinctive to the process. Many of these lettering styles were used for decades for commercial and social applications (letterheads, wedding invitations, etc.), but as they were merely traced alphabets, were not "fonts". Many remain unavailable in digital form. Over time, a number of the most popular styles were adapted to phototype, which sped up the process of plating for engraving, avoiding the need to trace each letter by hand with the engraving machine. Later, when type went digital, these phototype fonts were revived as digital fonts. As a result, the styles offered by engravers narrowed over time, as has the range of engraving styles revived in digital form.

Thataway JNL is an assortment of arrows in many different sizes, shapes and directions that were collected from antique letterpress blocks and other vintage sources.

Cadabra is an incredibly unique and interesting display font. A little bit quirky, this font looks incredibly adept on a wide variety of Halloween contexts!

This font is based on real prints made out of a linocut. The glyphs were handprinted, then scanned and then turned into a computer font.

Vintage French tin stencils with various phrases were the model for Paris Stencil JNL. The type design is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Shanty House is a chunky fun and whimsical handwritten font. A little bit quirky, this font looks incredibly adept in a wide variety of contexts!

Revij Anovik is a unique and modern decorative serif font. This playfully conceptual typeface font will look truly outstanding in a wide range of contexts.

Stencil Machine JNL replicates the lettering of a stencil cutting machine. The stencils produced on such machines were primarily used for carton identification and shipping.

Weeknight is a cute and quirky handwritten font. It’s simple and friendly style makes this design incredibly versatile, fitting a wide variety of creative ideas.

Milk Bath is a cute and funny handwritten font. It’s simple and friendly style makes this design incredibly versatile, fitting a wide variety of creative ideas.

Lemon Party is a cute and quirky handwritten font. It’s simple and friendly style makes this design incredibly versatile, fitting a wide variety of creative ideas.

MacKeller, Smiths and Jordan had a font called Giraffe Wide which we liked, but like many Victorian display fonts it had no lowercase. We fixed that!

Titles from the 1938 movie "Service Deluxe" starring Vincent Price and Constance Bennett were the inspiration for the similarly named Art Deco typeface Service Deluxe JNL.

The words “Benny Goodman & His Orchestra” on an appearance poster for the band from 1936 were rendered in a beautiful semi-script style of hand lettering.

Wishkey is a cool and interestingly designed display font. It will elevate a wide range of crafting ideas from cards to branding, labels, and much more.

Rancher JNL was inspired by classic wood type. This wide, slab serif typeface is reminiscent of wanted posters, broadsides and other printed matter from the 1800s.

Sunkiss Cafe is a cute and funny handwritten font. It’s simple and friendly style makes this design incredibly versatile, fitting a wide variety of creative ideas.

An antique Bradley stencil cutting machine’s letters and numbers were the basis for Dry Goods Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

I love the feel of a short, wide font. This handwritten font is a great way to mix and match heights and widths in a design.

Bubble Drink is a cute and funny display font. It’s simple and friendly style makes this design incredibly versatile, fitting a wide variety of creative ideas.

Stay and Shine is a strong and tall display font. Its sharp yet approachable feel makes this font incredibly versatile, fitting a wide range of contexts.

Ziga is a whimsical, wavy and chic display font. It will elevate a wide range of crafting ideas, from cards, to branding, labels and much more.

With you is a sweet brushed handwritten font. Its natural and unique style makes it incredibly fitting to a wide spectrum of ideas. Thank You, Subectype

Anti Gravity is a cute and funny handwritten font. It’s simple and playful style makes this design incredibly versatile, fitting a wide variety of creative ideas.

ALS Direct is an open and dynamic typeface with clear-cut letterforms that make it instantly readable. It lends text a neutral, yet agreeable and modern feel. Direct has nine font styles convenient for the purposes of navigation signage. Regular-style letterforms are rather wide, because direction signs are likely to appear before readers at an angle, so the type needs to withstand perspective distortions. And as signs and boards may vary in size, Direct was developed to include several width variations. Condensed fonts can be used where horizontal space is limited, allowing you to keep proper height and readability of the characters. A signage typeface must be easily readable from some distance away and have simple letterfoms with clear-cut features to quickly identify characters. Designing a type for a potentially wide range of purposes calls for a universal approach. If not destined to be used for navigation in a particular building, it shouldn’t incorporate any peculiar elements to agree with certain design or architecture. All of the above determined our choice of a sans serif with large apertures and definite features allowing readers to instantly recognize letters. Descenders are made compact not to interfere with the line below. And the low contrast between thick and thin strokes renders all elements equally perceptible. The x-height is significant, close to the cap height, which inhances readability of the lowercase type. There are two reasons why directions must not be set in all caps. Firstly, lowercase letters are more diverse and include ascenders and descenders identifying some of the letters in the line. And secondly, having learned to read, people recognize word shapes rather than individual letters, which makes lowercase text more readable. With Direct being a signage typeface, first to be developed were its width variations, and different weight styles and italics were added later. Another thing to be kept in mind was that signs often use dark background colors, and black type on a white background appears smaller than white type on a black background. Direct is the first Cyrillic typeface created for navigation purposes. Before that, designers could use the Cyrillic version of Frutiger (Freeset) developed by Adrian Frutiger for the Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport, and a number of other, mostly body copy, neutral sans serif types. However, signs and boards were dominated by Arial, which Direct would be glad to replace offering elegance and lucidity of form instead of type bluntess. Direct was designed as a signage typeface, but its neutral style and clear-cut letterforms suggest various other ways of application.

Bebedot originated from doodles and scrabbles in notebooks; irregular forms very well might contain a style for an alphabet. Once used for an intro spread in Wired magazine (#6.04, April 1998): "To keep up you need the right answers. To get ahead you need the right questions". The name was inspired by a women clothing poster at the San Francisco bus stands. The dot is for the com that never came.

The idea behind Geotica was to build a font out of -more or less- simple geometrical line elements. The open wire frame could then be left open or (partially) filled. Geotica comes in four different grades or line thicknesses (One, Two, Three and Four) so it's suitable for a broad use. Each grade has four styles and is loaded with swashes, final forms, lots of ligatures and ornaments.

The idea was to create a package containing prominent tag styles of graffiti strongholds like New York, Berlin and Paris. Shik (New York), Deon (Paris) and Etan (Berlin) came together to show the typical tag styles of their respective metropolitan areas. The fonts were digitized, spaced, kerned and programmed by Hannes von Döhren. The Subway Types are highly equipped. Each one consists of 4 alphabets (Uppercase, Lowercase, Small Caps & Swash). They also include ligatures and some specials like underlines and a huge range of accents for a wide language support. With the OpenType technology these features can be applied easily. For those who never used the OpenType features, we created the Std (Standard) and the SC (Small Caps) versions of the fonts. They contain the same basic characters like the OT versions but are split in two fonts. Hence you don’t need any OpenType knowledge to use the Std and SC fonts.

Afrik is a hand painted font which letterforms were inspired by Proto-Saharan Ancient African writing system and scripts for African languages such as Mande and Vai. Drawing technique I took from Ethiopian Tribe Karo body painting. I drew each letter with my finger using self-made paint from crushed charcoal. Afrik is uppercase font and instead of tall capital letters uses wide. They can be used instead of double letters or just to diversify a typing. Also, I included up to 4 alternate "decorations" for most of the letters which will help you to create unique artwork (use "Contextual Alternates" feature to randomize look automatically). Afrik perfectly fits for posters, clothes design, and any design​ with a ​wild ethnic mood. Afrik Features: Handmade pant texture Up to 4 Alternative styles for each letter Carefully tuned kerning If you have some issues or questions, please let me know: lhfonts@gmail.com Hope you'll enjoy using Afrik!

The Greatest Caps Of The Greatest Font Designer Bodoni's Most Beautiful Display Caps, Finally Available in Digital This font is the largest display caps that Bodoni ever made, painstakingly handcarved and now digitized to wow in any situation. It is one of the most beautiful fonts for whenever you need a stunning all caps display. The obvious and easy choice over tired standards like Trajan, Palazzo will be a highlight in your font collection. Bodoni Palazzo was updated in 2021 to include Small Caps and other new features. Previously only included the "old style" figures (top); Now with lining figures to better match all caps, and small caps numbers to match the small caps. CAL Bodoni Palazzo is a member of our Origin Series. Origin Fonts are designed to be true to the original designer's intentions and fonts. Our Bodoni origin fonts ARE Bodoni fonts, not imitations or interpretations. They were drawn by Bodoni, our team just expanded it for modern use.

Emilio is a modern serif family available in 14 styles. It's an elegant typeface with friendly and warm personality which seeks a balance between traditional and modern. Emilio is inspired by the visuality of the 1980s and the typefaces that were widely used in advertising at the time, such as Times and Garamond. However, Emilio offers a contemporary take on the serif font family, adding new elements such as reductive, calligraphy-inspired details or the "K" and "R" legs shape. If you want a more traditional look, you can achieve it with the stylistic alternatives available. Of course, the typeface also provides standard and discretionary ligatures and many other Open Type features. In addition, it offers support for most Latin languages. The big headlines and titles are where Emilio shines the most, but due to large x-height and decent contrast will work for smaller text as well. Emilio is the ideal typeface for editorial design, posters, covers, branding and much more.

Merc is a four-letter word that stops just one y short of Mercy. Merc is also the standard street abbreviation for mercenary, or a soldier for hire. Now that the global security business has become a two hundred billion dollar industry, we thought you would like to have your very own affordable merc. Knew you'd be pleased. Merc is based on an all-cap metal face called Agitator, designed by Wolfgang Eickhoff and published by Typoart in 1960. The rough brush letters look like they were made by someone who is capable of elegance but has no time for it. These are letters that live to catch the eyes and warn them loudly: Doom is here, and if you want it screamed out, this Merc is at your service. This font contains more than 460 glyphs, which means quite a few stylistic alternates and support for the majority of Latin languages.