A condensed serif that’s been through the ravages of reproduction but has now been digitized for modern use. Elegantly wasted.

Loopkin is a new display font from Ben Burford Fonts. It's a stylistic take on the classic modern serif font that has been a staple in high fashion publications for decades. This OpenType font comes with a full set of characters as well as ligatures and alternative characters using the stylistic sets.

Bowler Hand has been created from hand drawn letter forms using a Rotring ink pen which gives the font a great look.

When I started working on this font, I had the radio on. Ed Sheeran was singing his song ‘Castle On The Hill’ and when I looked at this new font of mine, I couldn’t help but notice it had a bit of a medieval look. So I named it Castle On The Hill. COTH is a very lively, messy handpainted serif. It was made with a Japanese brush pen. I actually had a different look in mind, but this is what came out of the pen and I quite liked its looks. It is especially useful for children’s book covers, apps and posters, but be my guest and use it as you like. All it needs is a designers’ touch, a nice tune and a sunset.

LTC Spire with alternate caps was designed by Lanston’s type director Sol Hess in 1937. Spire Roman was designed without lowercase. But it includes alternate rounded caps which transform this extra condensed “fat face” into more of an art deco titling face. Spire Roman has been used within department store logos, luxury hotel signage, perfumes, etc, etc.

Fattty is a chunky fun font with plenty of wobbly bits. It's perfect for bold brands and funky projects. It's friendly curves are a great fit in kids books or on chubby posters. But remember, say it loud I'm fat and I'm proud!

The last couple of years felt like I was living in a bad dream: I witnessed crazy leaders, climate change and now Covid. I usually name my fonts after things that affect me and this one is not different. Dreamworld is a font I made with a cheap marker pen I liberated from my kids’ pencil box (I will put it back, pinky promise…). It is a bit rough, but also very easy to read and distinctive enough to make your work stand out. Of course it comes with extensive language support (let me mention Vietnamese again…) and two sets of alternate glyphs, that cycle as you type.

I started this font on a Monday and I finished it the Monday after, so I guess the name is right! Another Monday started off as a bit of doodling (with a Sharpie pen) on a piece of paper. Before I knew it, I had a complete glyph set and it looked nice. Another Monday is a bit messy, uneven and maybe even a little weird, but it will look good on postcards, packaging and labels.

Sharpe is a stylish serif typeface family. The type has been drawn by Måns Grebäck during 2018 and 2019. It is clear, sharp and has brave, lively letter forms but with a conservative backbone. The five font weights balance beautifully in contrast to each other, and each weight has an italic equivalent, totaling in ten styles from Thin to Black. Each style contains ligatures and support for a wide range of languages.

Yuge, apparently, is how New Yorkers pronounce huge. I have never been to New York, so I can’t tell if this is a fact. But I often hear a certain New Yorker pronounce it that way, so I guess it’s sort of true. Yuge is a handwritten font - made with a Sharpie pen. Believe me, it is a good font. It is fantastic. It is the best font ever. It is YUGE! ;-)

A NEW HOPE! You begged with us..! You pleaded with us..! But we decided to release the official Richard Starkings font anyway! Huh? WHAT? You heard that line before? Where? Hmm... on this very site...? Well, yes, the Hedge Backwards font is all fine and dandy and does resemble the lettering legerdemain of comic book lettering robot, Richard Starkings... but has it been tweaked over the years to better suit the writing stylings of ELEPHANTMEN creator and writer, Richard Starkings? Has it been refurbished and digitally remastered by ELEPHANTMEN designer and Comicraft Secret Weapon, John JG Roshell? Hmm? No? Well then... here it is, retooled, reimagined and reStarkingsed...ah, what the hell, we started from scratch! This ain't no Greedo Shoots First -- you won't have to keep your pasty '70s VHS recordings of previous Richard Starkings Fonts inside a concrete bunker. Because any other font that claimed to be the official Richard Starkings font would have been called The Official Richard Starkings Font, would it not?

I'll admit right off the bat here -- I've never been to a party in a barn. I don't even know if they still do barn dances and parties, or if that's something out of the musical Oklahoma! or something. But this font gave me kind of a homey, rustic feel, so the name felt right! Like many of my fonts, this one has been refined with crafters in mind -- smoothed curves and reduced nodes, for easy cutting and printing. It's also packed with over 600 characters total! The usual alphabet, numbers, and punctuation, plus 30 double-letter ligatures, over 300 diacritics, and a full second alphabet coded in as Stylistic Alternates. Enjoy!

Trithemius, a 15th century Abbott, and influential counselor to Emperor Maximilian I, was also an author who wrote both histories and the first printed work on cryptography which gained him much adverse notoriety. He has been long regarded as a mystic and some of his works were therefore banned. However, it may have been his intention to cloak his cryptology essays in mystical writing to keep people from easily grasping the subject matter, which it has been recently demonstrated, at heart was really cryptological methodology. This font is based on a printed version of the Polygraphiae a text that included many methods of encryption.

Kanna Aoki had fairy tales in mind when she designed MVB Greymantle. She drew dots with a felt pen to build up the forms, giving them their particular rough character. The “Extras” font contains a set of whimsical illustrations, including a portrait of Greymantle—her 18-pound cat, a set of curly initial caps, and border parts.  MVB Greymantle has been spotted on numerous children's books, in magazines, in salad dressing advertisements, and on food packaging.

I have been making some clean, connected fonts lately and when I was working on another one of these, I felt the need for something chaotic. So, Scapegoat was born. I used a round nibbed steel pen and Chinese ink and the result is quite a messy font. It may look chaotic, but as Nietzsche once said: ‘from chaos comes order’. Amen to that! Comes with double letter ligatures for the lower case and a whole lot of diacritics.

The beautiful Art Deco monoline pen lettering on the cover of a 1940s piece of sheet music inspired Central Park JNL. The 1940s was an era when couples took romantic walks along the pathways of Manhattan's Central Park or rode around it in hansom cabs. Big bands played at the major clubs and ballrooms and "uptown" meant the well-to-do. Men dressed in their tuxedos and top hats and the ladies were in their jewels and evening gowns.

Ornata C is the third of a series of old ornaments that I am trying to save from oblivion. I am not just scanning these, I am completely redesigning the ornaments from scratch, thereby eliminating imperfections. These ornaments have been first designed by a designer named Ben Sussan. The designs date back to about 1910. Your digitizing type-designing savior, Gert Wiescher

A circa-1940s textbook for the Esterbrook Drawlet Pens (similar to Speedball pens) offered numerous samples of lettering that could be obtained by following the simple directions and using the book as a guide. One example was a classic Art Deco design made with a round nib pen, and it has been redrawn digitally as Lettering Book JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

I have seen my share of badly stuffed animals. Most of them via pictures, but also on vacations here and there. They all had this really bad handcraft vibe, but at the same time some really ordinary and kind of cute looks. I did my best to capture this look and feeling in my Badly Stuffed Animal font: clumsy letters made with a blobbly pen, with naive and irregular lines - and the conclusion is something super useful for a project that needs an organic handmade look!

If you take the South Shore Line from Chicago to South Bend, your train will pass though the small community of Beverly Shores, Indiana. The beautifully restored and highly colorful “Beverly Shores” train station sign not far from the Lake Michigan beach is the source of inspiration for this connecting script typeface. The sign’s existing ten letters have now been extended to include the entire alphabet. This old-fashioned depot letterstyle is much in the spirit of such faces as Fulton Sign and Inserat Cursive. Ascenders and descenders have been lengthened and capitals are now much larger. Alternate lowercase swashes, capitals, and small figures have been included for your convenience. And custom uphill words such as “The,” “for,” and “to” have been added for more novelty and spark in headline settings. Beverly Shores Script with Alternates is also available in the OpenType Std format. Some new characters including old style figures have been added to this OpenType version. Advanced features currently work in Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress 7. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades. All aboard for Beverly Shores!

Halloween is a time when perfectly reasonable people choose to reenact some lost pagan rituals. No one seems to know why exactly, but Halloween has been celebrated in its present form for a little over one hundred years. This set of ornaments dates back to the early 20th century and depicts a “classic” Halloween collection of black cats, pumpkins, witches, and other indispensable Halloween ornaments.

Frozen Memory is a heavy-boned cartoon display font. Even though it was completely made by hand (using a roller ball pen and some quality paper), it has a clean look, crisp lines and generous curves. Frozen Memory comes in three distinct styles, helping you to create versatile designs. Frozen Memory urges you to eat more ice-cream, but just beware of that brain freeze!

Gainsborough - a clean-cut display pack. Gainsborough is a display combo pack of three styles and extra swooshes. Gainsborough fonts are straightforward with characteristic clarity. All the three fonts are designed to play together. Gainsborough is very easy to use. Gainsborough Pen is a clear script inspired by handwriting with pigment pen but polished clean to be legible and inviting. It’s equipped with Contextual Alternates and Standard Ligatures for smooth flow and connections between letters. In addition there’s Stylistic and Swash Alternates for standard characters. Gainsborough Sans is a sturdy street-sans ready for action. It’s has zero contrast and angular geometric shapes. It’s great for bold headlines. Gainsborough Serif follows pretty much the same proportions but with the serifs and a little bit of contrast and round shapes. Try combining Gainsborough Swooshes with Gainsborough Pen - type one character with Swooshes in the end of a word typed with Pen and you’ll have an ending swash reaching below the word. There’s different shapes and length swooshes + a couple of center balanced ornaments.

Aksara is a sans serif font with a geometric touch. Aksara is not purely geometric, proportions have been designed so that all characters can look harmonious and have better readability. Aksara comes with five types of weights including Italic style, bringing a total of ten styles and has been supported in various languages.

Purgatorie - Quirky Halloween Font is an enigmatic display typeface tailor-made for the spooktacular season of Halloween. With its sharp, angular letterforms, it effortlessly embraces the eerie and horror-themed design aesthetic. This font offers a whopping ten alternative variations, each inspired by different Halloween motifs like skeletons, bats, tombstones, blood, pumpkins, bats, witches' hats, and ghosts. Ideal for crafters and designers who enjoy creating products with a variety of themes, Purgatorie is a fantastic choice for logos, packaging, product branding, stickers, crafting, greeting cards, and invitations. Its ability to bring a playful and whimsical Halloween spirit to your creative projects makes it a must-have for the season. With its quirky Halloween style, Purgatorie allows you to create a bewitching atmosphere in your designs and celebrate the spooky holiday.

Create fantastic headers for your invitations, business cards - or design stand out labels or gift tags. This font has been handmade and executed with a dip pen in Copperplate style calligraphy.

This rough, raw typeface is based on the lettering in Ben Shahn's iconic poster protesting the execution of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicolo Sacco in 1927. All possible uppercase and lowercase forms have been kerned, and activating Contextual Alternates in OpenType-aware applications will alternate those forms for a more random appearance. Both versions contain the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets.

Steinwald font was named after a mountain range slash nature park in southern Germany. I have to admit that I have never been there, but this font was just screaming for a good German name and I settled on Steinewald (which, in German, means Stone Forest). Steinwald was made by hand and cleaned up by computer. It looks quite neat, but its edges are a bit rough, giving it ‘ye olde handmade look’! Use it for your posters, your product packaging and your supermarket signs. Comes with extensive language support.

Hesperides is based on samples of Colonial period calligraphy. Rather than being directly derived from any one sample, some common characteristics have been emphasized to give it a more coherent and distinctive look, with the accentuated single-looped strokes on many of the characters suggesting a fully flourished style, but showing a bit of restraint. The ultimate effect is really striking, in the tradition of our Queensland and Allegheny fonts, but even more distinctive. The full version includes alternate versions of many of the key characters designed to reduce loop interference and add variety.

As one of the most distinguished lettering artists of the 20th century, Meyer “Dave” Davison’s greatest contribution to the American visual landscape is arguably Davison Spencerian. The alphabet made its first appearance in Photo-Lettering’s 1946 catalog and remains a benchmark of the ornamental script genre. Thanks to the skillful hands of Mitja Miklavčič and the tireless eyes of House Industries designers Ben Barber and Ken Kiel, we have preserved the poise and precision of Davison’s masterwork in this faithfully-rendered digital incarnation. From automotive exhaust accessories and pirate-themed wedding invites to New Orleans sissy bounce hip-hop CD covers and upmarket bivalve ambrosia packaging, Davison Spencerian offers sober sophistication and unparalleled flexibility. DAVISON SPENCERIAN CREDITS: Typeface Design: Meyer “Dave” Davison Typeface Digitization: Mitja Miklavčič Typeface Direction: Ben Kiel and Ken Barber Like all good subversives, House Industries hides in plain sight while amplifying the look, feel and style of the world’s most interesting brands, products and people. Based in Delaware, visually influencing the world.

We just had the Eurovision Song Contest here in Holland. I quite like to watch it, as it is usually a freak show of kitsch, political incorrectness and often really bad music. But it is a laugh and this year was no different. It inspired me to create this particular font with this particular name. Sing Along is a happy, wobbly, kitschy font that comes with a bit of ‘over-the-topness’, a few personality issues and an unsteady gait. Needless to say, it is politically incorrect, but that, my friends, is not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s cherry season, so I bought 2 kilos of cherries at the local cherry farm. The cherries I bought had been in a cooling cell, so they were quite cold. As I was eating them, the name for this new font popped up! Chilly Cherry is a handmade serif. It’s a little wobbly, a little off-center, but it will surely put a smile on the cherry lips of your customers.

A Qilin is a mythical hooved creature, looking a bit like a cow with a lion's head, reptilian scales and deer antlers. The Qilin features in Chinese lore, where it is often associated with good luck and prosperity. Qilin font is a rather messy typeface, created with a steel pen and Chinese ink. It might not be a classy font, but it will bring the buyer good luck! ;-)

A pleasant Art Nouveau hand lettered title is featured on the sheet music cover for "You Brought A New Kind of Love to Me". The song is from the 1930 Paramount film "The Big Pond" featuring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert. The original lettering was done with a round point pen nib, and showed a lot of small inconsistencies. For the digital version it has been "tightened up" a bit and is now available as Nouveau Fashion JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Fabrice is a font based on my handwriting, which has been reworked to be turned into a font. I write differently with each pen I use, and this font corresponds to my handwriting while using a pen I refill myself with special inks. It contains a wide range of characters, and will be readable anywhere, yet different!