A decorative font with descending tails on the capital letters. The design is based on a popular typeface from the 1880s, mainly used for personal names on title-pages, advertisements and stationery. Today, you can use it e.g. on book and album covers, invitation cards, restaurant menus and concert programs to give a fin-de-siècle impression.

Eclectic FS Siena is a typeface with history, and not just in the sense of having its origins in classical Roman lettering. Fontsmith founder Jason Smith first committed it to tracing paper while still at college, instinctively redrawing letterforms based on Hermann Zapf’s Optima according to ‘what felt right’. When Krista Radoeva took up the challenge to edit and extend the typeface, she and Jason were determined to preserve its subtly nonconformist and eclectic spirit. Like a great dish, there are individual components throughout the character set that all add flavour, and need to be balanced in order to work together. The smooth connection of the ‘h’ ‘m’ ‘n’ and ‘r’ contrasts with the corners of the ‘b’ and ‘p’. The instantly recognisable double-storey ‘a’ – the starting point of the design – contrasts with the single-storey ‘g’ and the more cursive ‘y’. And only certain characters – ‘k’, ‘w’, ‘v’ and ‘x’ in the lowercase and ‘K’, ‘V’, ‘W’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ in the caps – have curved strokes. Transitional FS Siena is a contrasted sans-serif typeface, blending classical elegance and modern simplicity. Its construction and proportions are descended from classical broad-nib calligraphy and humanist typefaces, with a high contrast between the thick and thin strokes. The angle of the contrast, though, is vertical, more in the character of pointed-nib calligraphy and modernist typefaces. This vertical stress helps to give FS Siena a strong, cultured presence on the page. Idiosyncratic italics The italics for FS Siena were developed by Krista to complement the roman upper and lower-case alphabets first drawn by Jason. Many of the letterforms are built differently to their roman counterparts: there’s a single-tier ‘a’, a looped ‘k’ and connections more towards the middle of stems, such as in the ‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘u’. These distinctions, along with generally much narrower forms than the roman, give the italics extra emphasis within body copy, where the two are side-by-side. In editorial, especially, the combination can be powerful. To cap it all… In his original draft of the typeface, Jason found inspiration in Roman square capitals of the kind most famously found on Trajan’s Column in Rome. In keeping with those ancient inscriptions, he intended the capitals of FS Siena to also work in all-upper-case text, in logotypes for luxury consumer brands and property developments, for example. A little added space between the upper-case letters lets the capitals maintain their poise in a caps-only setting, while still allowing them to work alongside the lower-case letterforms. The caps-only setting also triggers a feature called case punctuation, which adapts hyphens, brackets and other punctuation to complement the all-caps text.

The Vienna Workshop was a production community of visual artists, which operated from 1903 to 1932. The emphasis lay on fine craftsmanship and its motto was: "Better to work 10 days on one product than to manufacture 10 products in one day". The typeface before you was based on some of the artwork produced by Vienna Workshop artists, in particular that of Koloman Moser. Vienna Workshop comes with some unusual glyphs, intriguing ligatures and Babylonian language support.

Argonautica is based on a relict of the future that was left on earth by time-travelling extra-terrestrials. In 1947, an UFO crashed in the New Mexico desert. There were unknown glyphs found on the spaceship which couldn�t be deciphered to date. Based on one of the unknown glyphs, Gabriele Lindemann developed a complete alphabet readable for human beings. Argonautica is particularly suited for colored typography and can be read much better with growing distance.

Burlesk Queen JNL was inspired by the hand lettered title “Gypsy” on the sheet music for "Everything's Coming Up Roses" from the movie musical based on the autobiography of famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. With just four basic letters to work with [G,Y,P and S], a full character set was drawn from scratch. The design features bold spur serif characters on individual ‘marquees’ bordered with lights. Burlesk Queen One JNL is the original version with white characters on black panels, while Burlesk Queen Two JNL has those panels stripped away to provide black letters on a white background.

YinYangMessages contains two sets of letters, those on the upper-case keys that fit on the left side of a yin-yang symbol and those on the lower-case keys that fit on the left side of a yin-yang symbol. One can alternate the two sets manually but the OpenType contextual alternatives feature does this automatically in any program that supports this feature. The family contains two fonts. In one the filled half is on the left and in the other the filled half is on the right. The slash and backspace keys contain blank halves of the symbol, which are useful for completing words with an odd number of letters. The two styles can be used in layers. YinYangMessages is a fun and playful family that every once in a while may be the ideal typeface for some unusual situation.

Interboro JNL is based on the serif lettering found on an old E-Z Letter lettering guide.

Distinguishing characteristics of Frank Marciulano’s Linotype Automat™ are its strictly constructed basis and its uniquely placed stroke contrasts. The emphasized vertical strokes are reminiscent of bars and give text a static feel. The forms of the letters are distinctly modern, an interpretation of a typeface meant for machines. Automat is not recommended for text but is particularly good for headlines in large point sizes, which allow its unusual forms to really stand out.

An unnamed scroll typeface featured in the 1869 MacKellar Smiths and Jordan specimen book provided the pattern for this font. You may begin and end the scrolls with parentheses, braces or brackets, and employ the space bar as you normally would to construct headlines "in a pretty box". Both versions of this font contain the complete Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

A freeform linking script that uses OpenType programming to replace beginning and ending characters with uniquely designed variants. Also includes ligatures and an extended t-bar carefully designed to not collide with ascenders. (Note: Please view the image above for correct versions of the end and beginning letters, as they will appear in Indesign, Illustrator, etc. The Myfonts previews below are not Opentype savvy, and so these specially designed versions do not substitute themselves.)

Technically a crowbar is a straight metal rod used for digging. The tool I had in mind when I named this font is called a jemmy or pry bar, but I guess I liked the name crowbar better. Crowbar font, like its namesake, is a very useful tool: its brush-like appearance fits any design, especially if you are aiming for the ‘scary’ look. Comes with a toolbox full of diacritics too!

Eh, what's up, Doc? This cuddly little oddball of a typeface was originally released under the rather unlikely name of Hercules by the Amsterdam Typefoundry in 1926. This face includes OpenType Stylistic Alternates for b, h, h, k and l, which feature very tall ascenders with a "bunny ear" vibe. Both versions include the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets, as well as localization for Moldovan and Romanian.

Out of a lifelong inner struggle, Philip Bouwsma unleashes a masterpiece that reconciles classic calligraphy with type in a way never before attempted. Maestro takes its cue from the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century. By this time type ruled the publishing world, but official court documents were still presented in calligraphy, in a new formal style of the high Renaissance that was integrated with Roman letters and matched the refined order of type. The copybooks of Arrighi and others, printed from engraved wood blocks, spread the Italian cancellaresca across Europe, but the medium was too clumsy and the size too small to show what was really happening in the stroke. Arrighi and others also made metal fonts that pushed type in the direction of calligraphy, but again the medium did not support the superb artistry of these masters or sustain the vitality in their work. As the elegant sensitive moving stroke of the broad pen was reduced to a static outline, the human quality, the variety and the excitement of a living act were lost. Because the high level of skill could not be reproduced, the broad pen was largely replaced by the pointed tool. The modern italic handwriting revival is based on a simplified model and does not approach the level of this formal calligraphy with its relationship to the Roman forms. Maestro is the font that Arrighi and his colleagues would have made if they had had digital technology. Like the calligraphic system of the papal chancery on which it is modelled, it was not drawn as a single finished alphabet, but evolved from a confluence of script and Roman; the script is formalized by the Roman to stand proudly in a world of type. Maestro came together on screen over the course of several years, through many versions ranging widely in style, formality, width, slant, weight and other parameters. On one end of the spectrum, looking back to tradition it embodies the formal harmony of the Roman capitals and the minuscule which became the lower case. On the other it is a flowing script letter drawing on the spirit of later pointed pen and engravers scripts. As its original designers intended, it works with simple Roman capitals and serifs or swash capitals and baroque flourishes. The broad pen supplies weight and substance to the stroke which carries energy through tension in balanced s-curves. Above all it is meant to convey the life and motion of formal calligraphy as a worthy counterbalance to the stolid gravity of metal type. The Maestro family consists of forty fonts distributed over two weights. The OpenType version compresses the family considerably down to two fonts, regular and bold, each containing the entire character set of twenty fonts, for a total of more than 3350 characters per font. These include a wide variety of stylistic alternates, ligatures, beginning and ending letters, flourishes, borders, rules, and other extras. The Pro version also includes extended linguistic support for Latin-based scripts (Western, Central and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Welsh/Celtic, Maltese) as well as Greek. For more thoughts on Maestro, its background and character sets, please read the PDF accompanying the family.

An unusual take on Art Deco "streamlined" alphabets is found in Farragut JNL from Jeff Levine. Over-extended serifs on some letters and elongated horizontal strokes on others make for a new approach to a traditional lettering style.

Twigglee was inspired by the hand lettering on the plates in a 19th century book on ornaments by Owen Jones. It has no lower-case letters; the upper-case letters are simply repeated on the lower-case keys.

Anna Gagarin is the loving matriarch of the Gagarin Family. Her life was full of love and passion. She had several affairs with Futurist and Contstructivist artist in the beginning of the 20th century. She was in love with the Russian poet Vladimir Majakovski (born on July 19th, 1893 and died in Moscow on the April 14th, 1930). She gave birth to his son Boris. She called him 'a cloud with trousers'. After this love story, Anna Gagarin met the designer and artist Gustav Klucis in Italy. His radical and political ideas were much too childish for her. After a period of love and passion Anna gave birth to his son. At that time they were in Italy, which explains his italic forms. After her return to Moscow in the beginning of the 1920's Anna was introduced by Alexander Rodchenko. They were heavenly in love but Ilja Stepanova was very jealous on her husband. Anna once said that 'Alexander fills mine construction with love...' That phrase can be an explanation for the term Constructuvism as an art movement. Alexander was the great love of Anna. She gave birth to their love-baby Dimitri Gagarin. That night Alexander designed his most famous poster. A decade before that Anna told it was
'a time for a change'. In a local bar in Sint Petersburg she met Gregory Rasputin. At that time Rasputin was a well known person and a respected member of the Sint Petersburg upper class.His diabolic character influenced Anna and after several months she gave birth to their son Kurt. He inherited the main characteristics of his father. The Gagarin Family wants to give love and wants be loved...

Phinney Jenson ML is a font with deep historical roots firmly planted in the fertile soil of the Italian Renaissance. Twenty years after Lorenzo Ghiberti finished his famous East Doors, the Gates of Paradise, of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and about fifteen years before Sandro Botticelli painted his “Birth of Venus,” a French printer by the name of Nicolas Jenson set up a small print shop in the powerful city-state of Venice. The fifteenth century marked the end of the plague and the rise of Venetian power, as the merchants of Venice controlled the lucrative trade of the eastern Mediterranean and sent their ships as far as London and even the Baltic. In 1470, Jenson introduced his Roman type with the printing of De Praeparatio Evangelica by Eusebuis. He continued to use his type for over 150 editions until he died in 1480. In 1890 a leader of the Arts & Crafts movement in England named William Morris founded Kelmscott Press. He was an admirer of Jenson’s Roman and drew his own somewhat darker version called GOLDEN, which he used for the hand-printing of limited editions on homemade paper, initiating the revival of fine printing in England. Morris' efforts came to the attention of Joseph Warren Phinney, manager of the Dickinson Type Foundry of Boston. Phinney requested permission to issue a commercial version, but Morris was philosophically opposed and flatly refused. So Phinney designed a commercial variation of Golden type and released it in 1893 as Jenson Oldstyle. Phinney Jenson is our version of Phinney’s version of Morris' version of Nicolas Jenson’s Roman. We selected a view of the Piazza San Marco in Venice for our gallery illustration of Phinney Jenson ML because most of the principal buildings on the Piazza were already standing when Jenson arrived in Vienna in 1470. The original Campanile was completed in 1173 (the 1912 replacement is partially visible on the left). The Basilica di San Marco was substantially complete by 1300. The Doge’s Palace (not in the photo, but next to the Basilica) was substantially complete by 1450. Even the Torre dell'Orologio (Clock Tower) may have been completed by 1470—certainly by 1500. Phinney Jenson ML has a "rough-and-ready" strength, suitable for headlines and short blocks of text. We have sought to preserve some of the crudeness of the nineteenth-century original. For comparison, see the more refined Centaur, Bruce Rogers's interpretation of Jenson Roman. Phinney Jenson ML has a strong presence that will help your documents stand out from the Times New Roman blizzard that threatens to cover us all. Phinney Jenson ML Features: 1. Glyphs for the 1252 Western Europe, 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Accented glyphs for Cornish and Old Gaelic. Total of 393 glyphs. 400 kerning pairs. 2. OpenType GSUB layout features: onum, pnum, salt, liga, dlig, hisy and ornm. 3. Tabular (std), proportional (opt) & old-style numbers (opt). 5. CcNnOoSsZz-kreska available (salt).

Based on chalk board handwriting at one of my favourite drinking establishments, Charley Style is funky, and clean.

Although wood types are found throughout the world, most of the decorative one originated in the United States. This one would work well on theatrical playbills, and advertising for tourist railroads, wild west shows and concerts in the park.

Retorica, by Enric Jardí. With its simple geometry, Retorica stands out as our Art Déco typeface. Retorica has two styles: one solid version and one hollowed. In addition, each one has a Small Caps set, available by OT features.

Occidental Tourist JNL is based on a set of die-cut cardboard letters used by teachers. They were primarily found on classroom bulletin boards or felt boards. The font's name is a pun on the movie The Accidental Tourist.

Shabwa is An Arabic typeface for Print And screen. this font family is from Kufi style and contains 3 weights: Regular, Medium and bold. Shabwa is simple and a little detailed font and its three weights are fully harmonized, one letter with one length on the line, and words with a uniform length on the line, gives a comfortable reading look.

Teapot is a font with letters on teapots. Upper-case letters have the handles on the right and lower-case characters have the handles on the left. The letters on the teapots are from the typeface InsideLetters. A revision in 2018 added some characters that can be used to create multicolored lettering. A pdf file here shows how to use them.

Meila Arabic is sibling of Meila with the addition of Arabic glyphs, for Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi. Still carrying a childish character with a cheerful font, visually featuring bold and cute characters. Meila has smooth lines on each side, especially on the outside, almost no sharp corners. On the inside there is only one line that functions as a counter space.

Bowling has letters on bowling pins. On the upper-case keys, the bowling pins are white with black letters and on the lower-case keys the pins are black with white letters. The lower-case letters can be colored and placed behind the upper-case letters to give two-color lettering. (The letters on the pins are from the typeface InsideLetters.)

Nexa Slab is a geometric slab serif font whose design is based on the already popular best-seller Nexa . The font family contains 3 basic forms: italics, obliques and uprights, each of which has 8 different weights. This visual richness makes it the ideal slab serif font family for the web as well as for print, for motion graphics, logos, t-shirts and so on. It is also great for headings, fitting nicely with both small and large typesetting text blocks. Nexa Slab draws from the rich traditions of the classic Neo-Grotesque slab serif fonts such as Lubalin Graph, Rockwell and Memphis, which conceal the richness of typesetting text in its crucial advertising function. Just like these fonts, it’s design is subject to rational, carefully thought-out, thick and thin bars with a low contrast between them. The letters are characterized by the strict geometry and square proportions of the original, extra-fortified by suitably balanced slab serifs. Nexa Slab is serious without being rigid and inflexible, finished and lacking in nothing, systematic without being monotonous, and though it may seem at first glance to be more suitable for short, direct messages; in the hands of a master designer... it can build and create exquisite and harmonic designs. Open Type Features: Lining figures (proportional and tabular) The “f” ligature set Alternate characters (a, g, y) Automatic fractions Automatic numerators Automatic denomerators Automatic subscript and superscript Automatic ordinals Extended language support (most Latin-based scripts supported)*

Lakeland JNL was inspired by lettering seen on a vintage container of Yankee brand motor oil. Originally all-caps on the package, the remaining characters were developed to expand on this casual semi-script design which was popular during the 1940s.

The Maricava font was designed for a lady, who received her first computer on her 60th birthday. Maricava is loosely based on her own handwriting and now used intensely by herself in her short stories, writings, recipes and so on.

Burgues Script is an ode to the late 19th century American calligrapher Louis Madarasz, whose legendary pen has inspired schools of penmanship for over 100 years. His talent has caused some people to call him “the most skillful penman the world has ever known.” I use the word ‘ode’ in a colloquially ambitious manner. If I was an actual poet, my words would be about things I desire but cannot attain, objects of utter beauty that make me wallow in humility, or people of enormous talent who look down at me from the clouds of genius. But I don’t write poems. My work consists of letters drawn to fit together, that become an element of someone’s visual poetry. I am the poet’s assistant, so to speak. Once in a while, the assistant persists on what the subject of the poem will be. And occasionally, the poet gives in to the persistence. I hope you, visual poet, find my persistence justified in this case. The two main sources for Burgues were the calligraphy examples shown in Zaner Bloser’s The Secret of the Skill of Madarasz: His Philosophy and Penmanship Masterpieces, and C. W. Jones’s Lessons in Advanced Engraver’s Script Penmanship by L. Madarasz. These two references were the cornerstone for the concept I was trying to work with. I did have to change many of the letters in order to be able to produce digital calligraphy that can flow flexibly and offered the user a variety of options, while maintaining its attractive appearance. To this end, many ligatures and swashes were made, as well as full flourished sets of letters for use at the beginnings or endings of words and sentences. All of this has been tied together with OpenType and tested thoroughly within today’s standard design and desktop publishing software. After working with digital scripts for so long, at one point I thought that Burgues Script would become a bit of a chore to complete. I also thought that, like with most other scripts, the process would regularize itself after a while and be reduced to a mechanical habit. Surprisingly, and fortunately for me, this did not happen. The past holds as many surprises as the future. Madarasz’s method of penmanship was fascinating and challenging to translate into the strict, mathematically oriented language of the computer. It seems that the extremely high contrast of the forms, coupled with the required flow and connectivity of such lettering, will always be hard work for any visual artist to produce, even with the aide of a powerful machine. I can only imagine what steady nerves and discipline Madarasz must have had to be able to produce fully flourished and sublimely connected words and sentences on a whim. When I think of Madarasz producing a flourished calligraphic logotype in a few seconds, and try to reconcile that with the timelines of my or my colleagues’ work in identity and packaging design, the mind reels. Such blinding talent from over a hundred years ago. Burgues is the Spanish word for Bourgeois. In the end, I hope Burgues Script will serve you well when a flourished word or sentence is required for a design project. One of the wonders of the computer age is the ability to visually conjure up the past, serving both the present and the future. With Burgues, you have a piece of “the most skillful penman the world has ever known,” at your service. Burgues received important awards such as a Certificate of Excellence TDC2 2008 and a Certificate of Excellence at the Bienal Tipos Latinos 2008.

Online auctions continue to be a surprising wealth of font design inspiration. In this instance, a number of silk embroidered Art Deco initials inside inverted triangles inspired Deco Pennant Initials JNL. The uppercase version is white lettering on a black background – similar to the originals. On the lowercase keys is a set of initials that are black on white with a black border. Since the inverted triangles resemble pennants, there’s a solid black blank on the left parenthesis key and a outlined blank one on the right parenthesis key. In this way, the initials could be used for monograms or interspersed with the blanks to form short banner messages.

K-haus 105 is inspired by the work of graphic designer and typographer, Herbert Bayer, during his time at the Bauhaus around 100 years ago — work that kick-started graphic design as we know it, to this day. It owes something to the simple geometry of Bayer’s hand-drawn, ‘universal typeface’, updated and expanded to deliver a clean, balanced, geometric sans for today. Also available as K-haus 205 , featuring a few, more 'daring' characters here and there, chiefly in the lower case set. Both variations include an extended character set, featuring accented characters for Central European languages.

For decades, the soft glow of a neon sign beckoned weary travelers to roadside rest courts, told the hungry individual where to eat; let enthusiastic revelers know where the night life was happening. There is something special about a neon sign, yet changing times, city ordinances and even technology itself is turning this staple of urban life for over a hundred years into a museum piece. Night Sign JNL emulates the craft of hand-formed neon signage and it (along with a few added special effects) can really add some good-old-fashioned pizzazz to a print or web project.