Decorative, Display, Headline, Serif, 1920s, Hand Lettered, Engraved, Incised, Bold, Extra Bold, Retro, Vintage, Nostalgic An ad in the July 27, 1928 issue of The Film Daily for FBO Pictures was an encouragement to all theaters to accept the emergence of 'talking pictures' and "Don't be Panicked by Sound". The headline text was hand lettered in an extra bold serif type face with engraved [incised] lines. The lettering has been redrawn as the digital type face Movie Usher JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

I have always been frustrated when looking for a bold condensed face. The choices were the usual? Helvetica Bold Condensed, Univers Bold Condensed or Alternate Gothic #2... all rather dated. I was looking for a really unique, clean, uncluttered sans serif face, so I decided to design one. I have since adapted it to many logo designs. So, in my terms and conditions, I decided to permit the modification of the letter forms for logos and monograms, but logos and monograms only, not the typeface in normal usage.

As the first multi-font family designed for the CounterPoint font library, Plectrum offers designers and font lovers an alternative to the usual display style fonts of CounterPoint with a low key yet elegant sans serif family that can serve a variety of functions. Designed as a humanist style sans serif, the letters have variation in stroke weight. The italic faces have some variation in the letter design making them more of a true italic rather than simple oblique faces. The complete family consist of four weights: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic which can be purchased separately or as a complete package. The typeface has some unique features which add warmth to the design such as a slanted cross bar on the lowercase e and a large x-height. This is a solid, versatile family. Available in OpenType and contains support for Latin based and Eastern European languages.

MVB Solano Gothic Bold was originally designed as a display face for the City of Albany, California (located on the San Francisco Bay facing the Golden Gate Bridge and bordering Berkeley). Named for the City’s main street, the typeface needed to work on signage in proximity to early 20th Century buildings, and in contemporary settings. Rather than creating a neutered design to cover all bases, Mark van Bronkhorst chose to develop a simple, strong, condensed face that would offer flexibility of style by providing both retro and more contemporary forms. Solano Gothic has since been expanded to a family offering five weights from Light to Bold. The basic fonts provide upper- and lowercase forms, with figures designed to harmonize within upper- and lowercase settings (the standard figures are not full cap height). The same figures are provided with Small Caps, and align to small cap height. For all-cap settings requiring figures and monetary symbols of full-cap height, there are the “Cap” fonts. An alternate tabular “1” is provided in all fonts so that both fitted and tabular settings of figures are possible (access to alternate characters subject to system or application support).

Apollo is oddly one of the lesser known typefaces of Frutiger, perhaps due to the extreme fame of some of his other works, like the typefaces Frutiger® and Univers®. Stylistically, the very legible and harmonic Apollo is an old face. Frutiger designed it especially for the photosetting used at the time. The Apollo typeface family consists of the weights roman and semibold and their respective italics as well as expert sets. Frutiger optimized the relation between the two weights so that the roman is robust enough to present a legible text on soft paper but light enough to contrast with the semibold. The clear, elegant Apollo is perfect for headlines as well as long texts.

Kudryashev Display is a set of light and high-contrast faces based on Kudryashev text typeface . In addition to Kudryashev Display and Kudryashev Headline faces, the type family includes also two sans-serif faces of the same weight and contrast, with some alternates. The graceful nature of the typeface, along with carefully designed details, allows to use it in large point sizes, for example in magazine layouts, packaging design and in many other ways. The serif styles were designed by Olga Umpeleva in 2011, the sans styles were created by Isabella Chaeva in 2015 with the participation of Alexandra Korolkova. The typeface was released by ParaType in 2015.

Turn on the mirrored ball, and haul out the gold chains and white suits! This Disco dazzler is a new take on Bass Rainbow, designed by Saul Bass in the 1970s. Hip, hot and heavy, this typeface is ready to get down. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

This in-yer-face kinda face is based on a broad brush font from "The New ABC of Showcard & Ticketwriting" by C. Milne, published in Australia in the late 1930s. Brought to my attention by Ms. Kat Black, and named in honor of Ms. Kat's grannie, to whom the book originally belonged. The Postscript and Truetype versions contain a complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252); in addition, the Opentype version supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages as well.

Sherwood is a reproduction of an unusually small wood type font from England, dating from the last years of the 18th century. Somewhat reminiscent of Caslon Old Face. The original wood type is used at Sherwood Letterpress and can be seen on the Sherwood home page.

Trailerpark numbers 0-9 were rather old fashioned 1950's cut aluminum numbers, you've seen digitized nowhere else but here! Part of Market LTD, a collection of limited faces, mostly alpha-numeric and some just plain numeric, used primarily in retail and display situations and titling.

This revival of the Bruce Foundry’s No. 11 is typical of the nineteenth century types derived from the work of Didot and Bodoni; the face remains popular with lawyers and government printers. In fact, Theodore Low De Vinne opposed this kind of design as hard to print and read; he had Century designed to replace it.

At first glance, this unusual display face might appear to be a product of the 1960s, with its highly unconventional letterforms and its plastic, fantastic highlight treatment. However, this font is in fact inspired by a ca. 1930 poster for a Belgian beer of the same name. The uncredited Flemish designer was clearly a head of his time (ouch!).

Designed for Linotype Library GMBH and the International Typeface Corporation in 1997 by Phil Grimshaw. Based on bold script Banco designed by French graphic and poster designer Roger Excoffon and released in 1952 by the Fonderie Olive. Originally Banco was an all-caps bold typeface, and the lower case and the corresponding light weight were created for ITC. The tapering slightly slanted strokes of Banco made by sharp-edged flat brush. The face has the effect of being quickly sketched by a powerful hand. For use in advertising and display typography. Cyrillic version developed for ParaType in 2000 by Tagir Safayev.

Chipping is a brand new face inspired by Edwardian and 1920s letterforms. It's good for clear and legible headings which need a gentle and unobtrusive period touch, and is the latest is Greater Albion's line of faces to explore the 'small capitals' idea. You will see a broad similarity with our Chipperly family, and the two work well together in combined projects. Four faces are offered: regular and bold, as well as Black with a heavy drop shadow and white which explores the idea of 'whitespace' design.

An informal decorative sans serif was designed by Gennady Fridman and released by ParaType in 2004. Based on informal lettering. In Russian 'Zubilo' means 'Cold cutter' or 'Chisel'. Colorful letterforms seems to be cut by an amateurish but strong hand used to operate with rough metal tools, not with pen or pencil. The face is good for use in advertisements, posters and headlines, especally for comic editions and youth press. Decorative styles were added in 2011 by the same author.

Emmie is a friendly display face with fat curly terminals, which is great for billboards, branding, headlines and editorial design as well as screen based applications. It has over 450 glyphs and includes opentype features such as discretionary ligatures and stylistic alternates.

The script designed for ParaType in 2006 by Isabella Chaeva. Based on informal handwriting, its characters have rough jaggy contours. In small sizes, the face simulates an effect of handwriting by felt pen on rough paper. For use in advertising and display typography.

Based heavily on Gill especially in the mid weights, Astoria has a subtle top left serif which makes it not quite a Roman and not quite a Sans. Designed specifically as a text face it still works very well as a headline font.

Fleischer is a rough and playful display typeface good for headlines and posters. The face is based on historical letterforms combined with energetic 20th century pulp-style lettering. Fleischer comes with caps and small caps plus West, Central and East European language support.

Mediator is a balanced contemporary sans serif typeface that performs well both in display sizes and body text. The family contains 30 fonts in 3 widths: 8 romans with matching italics, of slightly extended proportions, from Thin to Black; 7 narrow and 7 condensed, from Thin to ExtraBold. The character set in normal upright faces was expanded to include small caps and all faces include old style figures. The typeface was designed by Manvel Shmavonyan with the participation of Alexander Lubovenko and released by ParaType in 2016.

Vertrina marries four virtues: elegance, simplicity, character and usefulness. It started as an idea to combine two things: the elegance of classical Roman typefaces and of classical Roman architecture. The result is that rarest of all things - a truly new face that is elegant yet characterful but not so obtrusive as to be restricted to display work. All the faces' uprights mirror the elegant taper of Roman columns, as used in the most simple and elegant form of Roman architecture. The serifs are a subtle shape that mirrors the pediments and corbels of that same order of architecture. Vertrina is a family of eight faces, four upper and lower case faces, suitable for the elegant setting out of text, and four small capitals faces ideal for headings and titles. You'll find regular and bold weights and normal and condensed width, as well as a range of Opentype ligatures. All faces are offered individually and in family groups. Bring some simple elegance to your work.

Tapa is a classical old roman typeface family which has been cut with sharp serif; Its stems, proportions, serif and elegant angles, may induce into a new view of the "Old roman faces" by our contemporary digital age. The kerning pairs were carefully controlled to ensure a good readability and nice page tone contrast. The Tapa font family is completed with true italics (without compression). And enriched with a full set of OpenType features containing ligatures, discretional ligatures, old style numerals and swashed letters.

Put together from a collection of old bits and pieces, RM Scrapheap is a distinctive display face with many uses. Due to the modular nature of this design there may be a slight lack of smoothness to the curves at very large point sizes (around 100 pt and above).

This typeface gets its inspiration from a face designed by Vincent Pacella for PLINC named Bingham, and is evocative of steam locomotives and the Old West. Both versions of this font include the Unicode Latin 1252 and 1250 Central European character sets, with localization for Moldovan and Romanian.

Here's a faithful rendering of an old face from the James Conner's Sons specimen catalog of 1888, alternately known as Aetna or Painter's Gothic. Its compact descenders allow for tightly-spaced headlines. Both versions of the font contain the complete Unicode Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

A condensed and bold obround sans inspired by 60s condensed inserat faces, with a more pronounced thick/thin stress as seen on the titles of the Avengers TV show.

A strong powerful face that really works well for any application requiring a distinguished, clean look. Headlines, subheads, and text; anything goes. Vinchenso also has a matching Bold weight.

KampIngriana was originally constructed in 1995-6. It was not constructed to meet any specific purpose but out of curiosity, to see what the result would be if two quite different faces were blended. KampIngriana is the offspring of Ingriana, a friendly, soft face, and KampFriendship, which mimics a serifed face drawn by hand. The original blending had many oddities that I did not clean up until 2020. It originally had five styles: regular, italic, bold, bolditalic, and extrabold. Medium, mediumitalic, semibold, semibolditalic, and extraboldItalic were added in 2022.

For some time, Eric de Berranger had wanted to create a distressed typeface design - one that gave the appearance of antique printing and showed signs of wear, yet was still highly readable. He was busy designing a new face called Maxime, when an idea struck: I realized that I could use these lettershapes as the basis for my antique typeface," he says. The two faces ended up being designed in tandem. While ITC Oldbook clearly captures the flavor of aged, uneven and imperfect printing, it also meets de Berranger's goal of being exceptionally readable in text sizes. Beginning with well-drawn characters was the key, and these were carefully modeled into the distressed forms. "The process was more difficult than I originally thought," says de Berranger. "The antique letters had to be tested and modified several times to work correctly." ITC Oldbook elegantly simulates antique printing in both text and display sizes. And while stroke weights are uneven and curves are irregular, the design has remarkably even color when set in blocks of text copy. Add to this the design's inherent legibility, and ITC Oldbook acquires a range far beyond replication of things old; it's suitable for any project that calls for warm and weathered typography. ITC Oldbook is available in roman and bold weights with complementary italic designs. Small caps, old style figures and a suite of alternate characters and ornaments provide additional flexibility and personality to the design."

a decorative caps font based in designs of old Speedball booklets

Based on Transitional Roman forms, this tasteful and well crafted Humanist display face exudes an air of authority along with a subtle playfulness. Narrow proportions allow for space conservation. Alternate letterforms & ligatures give this caps-only font expanded possibilities for any given text setting.

The Sans serif companion to Astoria. Based heavily on Gill especially in the mid weights and with a consistant series of condensed weights. Designed specifically as a text face it still works very well as a headline font. There are 6 weights with accompanying Italics.

Sometimes the simplest ideas yield more than one result. The basic “dot matrix” design of aligned circles that was the basis for Transactive JNL also yielded Zera JNL (connected rings) and Pillow Puff JNL (fluffy and cloud-like lettering). One more design was originally cast aside. A separate file is available for filling in the letters with a colored background, however minute adjustments may be needed due to the fact that each drawing or design software program has its own characteristics and quirks. NOTE: DO NOT purchase the fill font as a “stand alone” type face because of the difference in spacing and alignment. For the dot matrix look in your work, please purchase Transactive JNL.

Online auctions offer a myriad of unique, vintage and novel lettering devices – all which are fertile ground for typographic inspiration. In this instance, a set of stamped metal letters for outdoor signage was the basis for Stamped Metal JNL. Some of the non-traditional letter weights makes these simple block letters a wonderful change of pace for bold, attention-getting headlines.

Botanique is a hand-drawn typeface based on Schmalfette Bernhard Antiqua by Lucien Bernhard. The original face was released in 1912 by Flinsch Type Foundry, which was later acquired by Bauer. Schmalfette means ‘bold condensed’ in German and Botanique adds a charming roughness to these attributes, evoking an organic and somewhat retro mood. Its uppercase glyphs shine with adorned stylistic alternates and cool blooming swash versions for both initial and final forms, all cleverly programmed into OpenType font features. Botanique is a ​great pick for display purposes, branding, packaging, editorial design, poster work and many more. The original face counts more than one hundred years, but yet communicates quite well, you bet. Specially if loaded with some contemporary flair and smart features such as this one. Let it bloom.

In Lewis F. Day’s 1910 classic, Alphabets Old and New, the author presented the inspiration for this typeface as an example of German monumental lettering, most likely to suggest not that the typeface was really big, but that it had been found on German monuments. Bold yet charming, the face takes its name from a picturesque village in the Bavarian Alps which was the ancestral home of the Gröbl line of Curtii forebears. Both versions of this font include the complete Latin 1252 and CE 1250 character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Cut by Monotype between 1900 and 1902, the Monotype Modern font family was based on Miller & Richards News 23 and 28; slightly condensed news text types of the 1890s. Monotype Modern is a lively typeface, with long, fine hairlines and well rounded letterforms, representing the best of nineteenth century modern face design. A classic text face, and typical of the moderns that were produced in the United Kingdom at that time, being less extreme in its rendering than some of the models of purer form being produced elsewhere. Monotype Modern is an excellent text face for magazines, newspapers and books, the heavier and more condensed versions are useful in headlines and display.

Cut by Monotype between 1900 and 1902, the Monotype Modern font family was based on Miller & Richards News 23 and 28; slightly condensed news text types of the 1890s. Monotype Modern is a lively typeface, with long, fine hairlines and well rounded letterforms, representing the best of nineteenth century modern face design. A classic text face, and typical of the moderns that were produced in the United Kingdom at that time, being less extreme in its rendering than some of the models of purer form being produced elsewhere. Monotype Modern is an excellent text face for magazines, newspapers and books, the heavier and more condensed versions are useful in headlines and display.

Cut by Monotype between 1900 and 1902, the Monotype Modern font family was based on Miller & Richards News 23 and 28; slightly condensed news text types of the 1890s. Monotype Modern is a lively typeface, with long, fine hairlines and well rounded letterforms, representing the best of nineteenth century modern face design. A classic text face, and typical of the moderns that were produced in the United Kingdom at that time, being less extreme in its rendering than some of the models of purer form being produced elsewhere. Monotype Modern is an excellent text face for magazines, newspapers and books, the heavier and more condensed versions are useful in headlines and display.

Cut by Monotype between 1900 and 1902, the Monotype Modern font family was based on Miller & Richards News 23 and 28; slightly condensed news text types of the 1890s. Monotype Modern is a lively typeface, with long, fine hairlines and well rounded letterforms, representing the best of nineteenth century modern face design. A classic text face, and typical of the moderns that were produced in the United Kingdom at that time, being less extreme in its rendering than some of the models of purer form being produced elsewhere. Monotype Modern is an excellent text face for magazines, newspapers and books, the heavier and more condensed versions are useful in headlines and display.