From alphabets created for book illustrations in the 1970s to lettering created for a book jacket in the 1990s, the Mentor family of typefaces has developed along its own slow and circuitous path. Always present in its evolution, though, has been the influence of three 20th century design giants: Eric Gill, Reynolds Stone, and Hermann Zapf, as filtered through the meticulous sensibility of Michael Harvey.

In the 1670s, Christopher Plantin was the largest publisher of his day. Hendrik van den Keere cut for him an astounding series of romans. As Stanley Morison once observed, such types adopted features of Flemish blackletter to strengthen elegant French romans. Large on the body, strong in color, economical in fit, widely (if anonymously) distributed, they established effective standards for all that followed; FB 1997–2000

A long-set aside Art Deco typeface design begun (but not completed) may or not have been from a vintage source, but its roots go well back into Art Deco lettering. Taking the existing letters and thickening their weights, removing the counters and ending up with a completely new, solid alphabet design resulted in Deco Redux JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

For decades, spot illustrations - whether by hot type, photoengraving, clip art or (in later years) digital means provided decorative and often lighthearted breaks in reading printed copy. This collection of twenty-six cartoon images has been meticulously re-drawn in digital format from 1920s-1930s era source material. By adding a simple caption underneath a design, your ad copy can be enhanced with these wonderful period pieces.

The inspiration source for Arteaga Borders Three is a collection of the embroidery and beading patterns from a vintage embroidery patterns catalog dating back to 1865. The original collection of patterned sides has been expounded upon to create matching corners that continue the fluidity of the ornate forms. Download and view the “MFC Arteaga Borders Three Guidebook” if you would like to learn a little more.

It is NOT the END, my friend. Beyond the Saga, beyond the Hype, Beyond the expectations of marketing executives and studio shareholders lie prequels AND sequels. It has been said that every journey has a first step as THE STORY BEGINS, and every Generation has a Legend, a Story, a Franchise and an inevitable descent into mindless exploitation where THE STORY ENDS. It's true, all of it!

Caslon Antique was designed by Berne Nadall and brought out by the American type foundry Barnhart Bros & Spindler in 1896 to 1898. It doesn’t bear any resemblance to Caslon, but has the quaint crudeness of what people imagine type looked like in the eighteenth century. Use Caslon Antique for that “old-timey” effect in graphic designs. It looks best in large sizes for titles or initials.

A modern san serif typeface with a humanistic influence. The intention was to create a clean, functional design that would also have an elegant appearance. Careful attention has been paid to proportions and purity of form to help improve readability across text layouts. Details include 8 weights with italics, 540 characters with old style and tabular numerals, stylistic alternatives, manually edited kerning and Opentype features.

David Kowalski’s typeface Maccaroni is based on a logo type and has been designed to a complete typeface in Prof. Veljovic’s Type Design course at HAW Hamburg. Maccaroni breaks the traditional brush scripts and offers a unique design. Each letter is present in triplicate in order to achieve the illusion of a hand-written typeface. The OpenType programming ensures that two identical letters won’t follow each other.

Song Publisher JNL features a design based on the 1945 Art Deco-era hand lettered sheet music title "When the Old Gang's back on the Corner (Singin' Sweet Adeline Again)". It's a good thing sheet music wasn't sold by the word count found in song titles, because this twelve word example would have been more costly than titles such as "Nola", "Tenderly" or "Ciribiribin".

Ornata D is the fourth of a series of old ornaments that I am trying to save from oblivion. I am completely redesigning the ornaments from scratch, trying in this one to keep the rough "letterpress" character. These ornaments have been first designed by Auriol around 1910. This set is perfect to design a great number of frames. Your digitizing type-designing savior, Gert Wiescher

Gopher is a reverse contrast, geometric sans serif typeface in 3 optical sizes ranging — Text, Normal, and Display. With the most subtle contrast,Text works best in smaller type settings while Display is the most dramatic as the contrast has been pushed more to the extreme for an immediate visual impact. Gopher works great in a variety of settings for branding, advertising, posters, magazines, packaging, and more.

From the 1917 sheet music for "The World Has Been So Mean to Me" comes a wonderfully hand lettered chamfered sans with varying widths and character shapes, now released digitally as Sentiment JNL in both regular and oblique versions. This informal bit of lettering retains the stylish elements of the Art Nouveau period without the extreme eccentricities found in some typographic designs of the period.

LP Hand Eins is a typeface designed by German type designer Peter Langpeter. LP has been running his own design studio since 1995, working as a typeface and logo designer, as a calligrapher, cartographer and illustrator. During this time LP created a large number of excellent new typeface designs. LP Hand Eins is well-suited for plenty of applications, e.g. personal correspondence, invitations, greeting cards etc.

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.

Architectural yet human, as if the letter forms had been delicately carved in stone; their rounded stroke edges and corners lovingly eroded by the surf of the Baltic Sea; slightly overexposed, radiating comforting warmth, giving the impression one was looking at the characters against the setting sun. FP Head Pro reviewed by Yves Peters and Typographica.org: One of the most noteworthy typefaces for 2008.

The inspiration source for Arteaga Borders One is a collection of the embroidery and beading patterns from a vintage embroidery patterns catalog dating back to 1865. The original collection of patterned sides has been expounded upon to create matching corners that continue the fluidity of the ornate forms. Download and view the “MFC Arteaga Borders One Guidebook” if you would like to learn a little more.

The inspiration source for Arteaga Borders Two is a collection of the embroidery and beading patterns from a vintage embroidery patterns catalog dating back to 1865. The original collection of patterned sides has been expounded upon to create matching corners that continue the fluidity of the ornate forms. Download and view the “MFC Arteaga Borders Two Guidebook” if you would like to learn a little more.

Many alphabet style examples from the Speedball Textbook on pen lettering have offered amateurs and professionals a source of inspiration since its first publication in 1915. A 1940s edition presented a simple sans serif design rendered with the style ‘B’ round nib pen point, and has been recreated as the digital type face Pen Sans Rounded JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Rails is an experimental, retro, outline display typeface designed by Superfried. Rails is available in four styles: display, broken, solid and solid broken. As the name suggests they are constructed from parallel tracks with the broken versions featuring distinct breaks for added impact. Combination of the two results in clean, flowing type with sudden and unexpected moments of disruption. Rails has been featured in Computer Arts magazine.

Sánchez, designed by Daniel Hernández, is a serif typeface belonging to the classification slab serif, or Egyptian, that bears a strong resemblance to the iconic Rockwell, but with rounded edges— offering contrast and balance to the square structure. Sánchez & Sánchez Condensed comprises 12 variants, ranging from extra light to black, each of the same x-height. Regular and Italic variants are available for free.

Designed with a very limited over-shoot to accentuate a horizontal appearance to increase legibility in long or short headings as well as body-texts. Note with the capital O and lower o roundness has been limited along with other lowercase b, d, g, q and p. Trebla Square is very suitable for titling, display, captions, logos and supports all if not most latin languages.

Slightly off-kilter to give this rigid geometric a little personality, Contraption started as a digitization of a film typeface called Intrigue by Lettergraphics. From there, this mechanical typeface was expanded into a giant family of useful widths, weights, and obliques: from spindly thin and light weights, to chunky bold and blacks. An additional Inline style has been developed to further enhance the family dynamic.

This digitally remastered high density lettering has been bitmapped out for you by Comicraft's Eric Eng Wong. Those of you harddriving through cyberspace on the information superhighway had better zap your prams and reboot your hard disk before you're dragged into your system folder while OVERBYTE makes a major withdrawal from your atm. Do not be fooled by the name, there's nothing goofy about this typeface.

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.

A group of unique metal plates with stencil initials cut into them was spotted while browsing through online auctions for source material. What made these items even more interesting was how some of the stencil letters had been sectionally divided - not vertically or horizontally as in most stencils, but lines cut at angles. This is the basis for Steel Stencil JNL and Steel Stencil Oblique JNL.

Paperlight Script - Luxury Calligraphy Font. Paperlight Script is calligraphy font with a classic style and a touch of elegance, inspired by the handwriting of ancient manuscripts. This calligraphy harmony gives the impression of being luxurious, free and sophisticated. The body text of Paperlight Script font has been designed with high details, precisely, smooth and flow. Paperlight Script font carefully designed to work together harmoniously making it perfect for wedding media, book covers, greeting cards, logos, branding, business cards and certificates, even for any design work that requires classic, formal or luxurious The alternative characters were divided into several Open Type features such as Swash, Stylistic Sets, Stylistic Alternates, Contextual Alternates, and Ligature. The Open Type features can be accessed by using Open Type savvy programs such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop Corel Draw X version, And Microsoft Word. This font is also support multi language.

Gothic Round was first introduced as wood type by the George Nesbitt Co. in 1838. The font is a softened variation of a standard heavy Gothic typeface. The style evokes a much more recent history of the 1960s and 70s and can be seen in such places as donut shops and on children's toys as well as inspiration for such fonts as VAG Rounded. Gothic Round has not previously been available as a digital font until now. The font was digitized by Miguel Sousa from a wide variety of historical sources, including visits to the Cary Collection at RIT (Rochester, NY), WNY Book Arts Center (Buffalo, NY) and the Hamilton Wood Type Museum (Two Rivers, WI). The result is a very solid and contemporary font with a 175 year history. For more information about this release, check out the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry website .

Konseric is an elegant serif display font of a classic style that has been modernized with unique curves and cut-ins making it one of the most memorable top fonts on the market. It represents vintage aesthetics in a modern and minimalist way. Fonts include special uppercase letters, alternative characters and beautiful ties and multilingual support. This versatile font can be used for wordmark logos, mastheads, pull quotes & monograms that show feminine and masculine qualities, elegant packaging or invitation cards and almost all creative designs. To enable the OpenType Stylistic alternates, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7, Microsoft Word 2010 or later versions. We hope you enjoy the font, please feel free to comment if you have any thoughts or feedback. Or simply send me a PM or email me at picatypestudio@gmail.com. Thanks for purchasing and have fun!

DF Korolev is a 72 weight geometric sans serif family based on lettering by an anonymous Soviet graphic designer from the propaganda displays at the Communist Red Square parade in 1937. It has been named in honor of Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov, or Korolev, considered by many to be the father of practical astronomics. Rational and robust, it is also elegant and refined. Tracings done in Illustrator over a photograph featuring this type pinned down some of the basic character shapes. These were then imported into FontLab, where the full glyph complement was developed. The lower-case has been designed from scratch, and adheres to the structural logic of the uppercase as closely as possible. The complete Korolev super-family includes standard, italic, condensed, and compressed versions, each in five weights. The Alternate families come with a double-story “a”. Authoritative yet friendly, Korolev Rounded is a versatile addition to the Korolev range.

This is a standard, plain face with no special distinguishing features. It was created over a period of four months for use in small text in a cartographer package. While the face was extremely suitable for the purpose it was designed for, the party who was to purchase the family outright decided upon another design, allowing me to offer it up for sale. The original design for this face is nothing new, and has been greatly influenced by many others already in existence. It was not intended to be flashy, nor eye-catching, and I believe I have managed to escape any individuality that could have affected the face. It displays well in the lower text sizes, and, in my own opinion, displays some characters more clearly than some other similar faces that are currently in use (not all, some). While individuality makes a typeface stand out from all the others, this style of design would have been compromised with it.

Known to many eastern artists as the California Poster Letter because it originated in the West, this old 1930s style has reappeared in digital form. Carl Holmes, in his wonderful book on old lettering styles, pays tribute to this uniquely American design. Faintly reminiscent of the lettering of Fred G. Cooper, California Poster Bold is at times wildly exaggerated and boisterous. Letters appear to be inflated and loopy. The design might aptly be described as a kind of rollicking Cooper Black (Oswald Bruce Cooper). An extensive range of alternates and figures has been provided for your convenience. California Poster Bold is now available in the OpenType Std format. Some new characters have been added to this OpenType version as stylistic alternates and historical forms. These advanced features work in current versions of Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades.

Veranda Poster was derived from a European art supply manufacturer’s logotype done in the Vienna (Wien) Austria style. This distinctive classic style was used by artists such as Julius Klinger and Willy Willrab in the 1920s. Two new faces have been added to the original version - Veranda Poster Small Caps and Veranda Poster Alternates. Here is an extensive collection of capital and small cap alternates plus a wide selection of figures for almost any use. The contemporary alternate additions have a slightly Russian flavor. The combination of all three styles makes for striking logo and display settings. All three styles are now available in the OpenType Std format. Some additional characters have been added to this OpenType version as stylistic alternates. This advanced feature works in current versions of Adobe Creative Suite InDesign, Creative Suite Illustrator, and Quark XPress. Check for OpenType advanced feature support in other applications as it gradually becomes available with upgrades.

Very close thematically and in style to the rest of our “whimbats” (the Absurdies, Bizarries, Illustries, Genteta and Whimsies series), the Ombres contain a number of peculiar silhouettes and illustrations of people that range from cute to scary, with everything in between. Ombres offers152 pictures in 3 files. These imaginary characters were produced with different techniques: quick pencil sketches, ink, watercolour, though once digitized and simplified to bring them into the font files there is little apparent difference. The silhouettes, rather than flat shadows are more dimensional in their look, because they have been digitized retaining the original brushwork or pencil strokes of their source drawings. Some of them remind of the venerable tradition of metal stock cuts from vintage type foundries. The digitized results are quite different, but the energetic nature of the subjects has been mantained. Their vectorial file format means you can use them at any size with no loss of quality. Every Ombres dingbat offers ready-made images for a variety of creative projects. They can be used as they come or easily customized in any graphics program. At small sizes they are ideal spot illustrations with a whimsical touch; at large sizes they can bring a whole page, a spread or even a big poster to live.

Century Gothic™ is based on Monotype 20th Century, which was drawn by Sol Hess between 1936 and 1947. Century Gothic maintains the basic design of 20th Century but has an enlarged x-height and has been modified to ensure satisfactory output from modern digital systems. The design is influenced by the geometric style sans serif faces which were popular during the 1920s and 30s. The Century Gothic font family is useful for headlines and general display work and for small quantities of text, particularly in advertising. The Century Gothic family has been extended to 14 weights in a Pan-European character set from Thin to Black and their Italics. The already existing 4 weights of Regular and Bold with their Italics are additionally still available in the STD character set. The W1G versions featuring a Pan-European character set for international communications supports almost all the popular languages/writing systems in western, eastern, and central Europe based on the Latin alphabet including several based on Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. Looking for the perfect way to complete your project? Check out Aptifer™ Slab, ITC Berkeley Old Style®, FF Franziska™, Frutiger®, ITC Legacy® Square Serif or Plantin®.

I was asked by a good friend of mine to design his tattoo lettering. This fellow prefered an easy stencil with no ornament, such as swirls or loops. After some preliminary design I finally accepted the challenge and while completing the whole alphabet, the idea of creating a cool font of it occured to me. Only a few months later this new font family already contained 4 weights, every weight has a companion Italic style, punctuation, numerals and mathematical operators, as well as all accented characters. Bomber TV is a brand-new font and all glyphs have been contemplated very carefully so that all characters match in a well-balanced and streaming way. In both shaped weights, the font suits extraordinary well for headings, slogans etc. The cleanly cut and powerful Bomber TV font can easily be used for logotype, games, prints, magazines, web, apps, packaging, posters, T-shirts, signage & design projects. The font is original and custom made by Kustomtype.