In the July 24, 1915 issue of “Dry Goods Reporter” is a demonstration of hand lettering rendered with the use of a “speed pen”. Two suggested examples cited in the accompanying article were the Payzant pen and the then-new Speedball pen. An ornate Art Nouveau serif alphabet is displayed, with some examples having delicate floral elements entwining the letters. The initial alphabet was auto-traced, then cleaned-up and modified to recreate the core design of the basic (unadorned) letters. The numerals, punctuation and all additional characters were then made from scratch. Nouveau Rose JNL is the finished result, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

This font has been on my drawing board since the late eighties. It was based on drawings provided to me by an old sign-painter family friend and we used it extensively as a caps-only font in the early 90s on a cellphone ad campaign. It loves to be tight set and stacked and provides real grunt when you need it. Small caps have been added and have been weight and proportion adjusted so as to complement the caps. At Type Associates we believe that a font is not complete until the spacing is optimal. Carmel is another example of quality through extensive experience, testing, adjusting and refining.

For some reason I had Paul Simon’s song ‘You Can Call Me All’ in my head when I was busy working on this font, so I just had to call it Bonedigger. Bonedigger does not dig bones, but it does have ‘heavy bones’, as it is quite big. Bonedigger is seriously eroded and would look great on book covers and product packaging. It comes in a lovely regular and italic style and a seriously twisted inline style (with, of course, its own italic). As the song goes: With a knick-knack paddywhack, give the dog a bone, this old font came rolling home.

Mixed designs of Futura and Bodoni (Fudonis) are quite popular. Apart from being contemporary, such fonts provide excellent readability. However, most of the existing 'mixtures' were not good enough in terms of balance for P. Kraft. He was finally inspired by a noticeable 'mixture' in a Japanese fashion magazine. His intention was not to combine two existing fonts but to design a completely new typeface: Bohemian - named after the well-known Japanese fashion style in Shibuya/Tokyo - the Bohemian Style.Bohemian and Parametra can be mixed perfectly since their proportions and dimensions are the same.Bohemian was designed for the URW++ FontForum.

Bandalero is a witty display font from British designer Richard Yeend. The letterforms in this poster/display typeface are quite square-ish and geometric. The lowercase letters have short x-heights, and the uppercase letters look dressed for a showdown, with bandoleer-like elements strapped across their tops. Because of this, Bandalero should only be used in large sizes, where it can really stare down its opponent, or reader. This might be the best font yet for a keep out sign! Bandalero was designed in 2003, and is part of the Take Type 5 collection, from Linotype GmbH."

This typeface is inspired by the powerful political and social posters by Paul Peter Piech, a tireless artist and printer. Questioned about his endless energy and focus on work, he said "I don't want to sit around and be silent". Pieches is a linocut-looking font heavily loaded with interlocks, including vertical pairs of letters. There are alternates also, and not quite a few: four glyphs for each letter so countless expressive possibilities are open. Graphical elements are also included, for added wilderness. This is a loud-speaking font for those who don't want to be silent. Come on, let’s shout!

Buckthorn is a genus of about 110 species of shrubs and small trees, native to North America and Asia. Its uses are varied: it is used for dye, oil, printing ink and oil. That concludes the botany class for today, on with Buckthorn ‘The Font’. Buckthorn is a handmade typeface with a lot of character. It is severely eroded, giving your designs an authentic look. It comes in 4 styles, including a ‘hollow’ style, plus a dingbat font with very nifty shapes. Buckthorn is quite a pleasing font and comes with a rich harvest of diacritics.

First Prize typeface has simple shapes. It is a narrow, heavy sans serif typeface with geometrical logic and quite predictable constructions of characters. The idea behind it was to combine constructed structure of the skeleton and some calligraphic ideas, swashes and cursiveness. At the moment First Prize typeface consists of three narrow styles: bold, upright italic and italic. Cursive weights have beautiful ending swashes and initials. There are few alternative shapes for A&N. As a Display typeface First Prize will work very well with any other typefaces for the good of any project in print or online.

Pina is a typefaced based on Italian signage, incorporating simplified shapes for the letters and unique characters. The barebones S and the perfectly circular O are examples of the type of lettering you'd likely see on awnings. These letters have a thin footprint, and are quite condensed apart from certain letters like O and Q, which gives the font a unique bounce. It includes plenty of alternates, to letters like O, S, Q, R, K, and special ligatures for specific pairs. This font is named after my grandmother from Italy, Josephine, who was a wonderful figure in my life.

Tuesnight feels like party! Inspired by movie posters from the sixties, but with quite a contemporary accent, this is a lively face, packed with lots of alternates and interlocking pairs. There are also swashes to this side, swashes to that side, stylistic alternates... A zip-zap guide: typing upper- or lower-keys you get different lettershapes. Turn on the Contextual Alternates to get instant cycling of these. For accessing the interlock pairs, click on Standard Ligatures. Or just dive into a glyphs palette and pick your choices. Tuesnight feels like a party, and you're sure invited! Have fun!

Roscha is a fully reconsidered high contrast transitional serif, which is perfectly adapted to modern realities and requirements. When starting this project, we wanted to try to draw a modern serif with the precisely verified shapes, high contrast and detailed elaboration of each character. Roscha is perfect for use in magazines, in the fashion industry, in the branding of premium goods and services. Roscha is quite versatile and suitable for use both in headings and in text arrays. In addition, we have done manual hinting in the typeface, and now it can be used with a clear conscience in the web and applications.

Terpentijn is Dutch for Turpentine. If you say it out loud, it actually sounds quite similar! Here you thought you were just buying a font, but you get to learn some Dutch too! Terpentijn is a handmade typeface with a serious twist. It is very uneven, very unusual, and, if I may say so myself, very adorable. Terpentijn has that ‘eroded’ look, which will make your designs stand out. It comes in a regular and an inline version, plus a handy shapes pack, which will add that extra wow to your work. Besides Dutch, terpentijn speaks a lot of languages!

Complete your vintage style with Marones font! Marones is a serif font with inky effect and spurs on the letterforms. Inspired by old school garage and vintage logo, Marones visualize a quite strong look so that's perfect for any display such as packaging, bottle, headline, logo, apparel, posters, stickers, craft projects and more! Marones is an all-caps font equipped with a Stylistic set and multilingual support that you can mix and match the letters to ease your design project. Fonts featured : Uppercase Smallcaps Numbers Symbols Punctuation Stylistic alternates Stylistic set 01-04 Thank you for watching! Ramz

This humanistic sans serif distinguishes itself by its Japanese calligraphy influence. Being written with a felt tip rather than with a brush, its Japanese connotation is remote and non-dominant, thus providing excellent readability and a charm of its own. Parametra is a very elegant and modern typeface achieved by the strong form reduction of the individual characters and at the same time harmonizing them by given parameters. It is something of its own, but quite legible and well-suited for small text. Also, Parametra and Bohemian can be mixed perfectly since their proportions and dimensions are the same.

Aw, aren't they sweet? This lettering is based on a 1950s note a husband wrote to his wife shortly after they were married. His beautifully controlled and strong handwriting knows no lowercase characters; he gets his point across in uppercase only. In today's world of email and internet writings, we know that uppercase means shouting and is considered quite rude, but he didn't know that when he wrote this letter to his lovely wife! Love Ya Honey is very legible and looks beautiful when used for headlines, titling or even long expanses of body copy. Perfect for scrapbooking too!

Gramma is a compact sans with big x-height, a robust and balanced typeface that work well both for headlines and main bodies of text. The initial constructions, assembled from a few well-defined geometric modules, were later polished into more organic forms; the letters’ arches are quite squared, and the counters and other internal negative spaces push outward, creating a tension that balances the forms’ compression. Gramma’s most evident characteristic is its “bird-beak” terminals (present in many letters, including the c, e, f, s...) that replicate the unconnected junctures between stem and curve, visible in the a,b,d,g,h.

The Data Error Vert AOE Pro family is another spinoff of my Data Error AOE Pro family. Quite simply, it takes on a slightly different feel than the original pin matrix grid by stroking across all vertical glyph lines. The vertical lines break up the readability somewhat of the original grid and lend a more tech vibe to the family. Check out the range of posters created to see the various Capitals, Lowercase, smallcaps and varying styles that the family has to offer and how it both differs from and compliments the original Data Error AOE Pro family.

Biographer is a mild upright script drawn by Angel Koziupa, with Alejandro Paul art directing and producing. Elegant but quite reminiscent of roman forms and proportions, Biographer keeps the calligraphy mostly toned down, but its ascenders and descenders occasionally flare out in final swashy confidence. As usual with Sudtipos fonts, alternates are plenty and the personal touch is never amiss. Biographer is great for women's lit and poetry book covers, as well as tame packaging of products where conveying comfort and peace of mind is of importance. An extensive range of languages are covered (Western and Eastern European, Baltic, Turkish, Maltese and Celtic).

I love blueberries. When my brother and I were young, we used to pick them in the forest by the bucket. Afterwards, we’d always look like victims of a serial killer, but it was all worth it, as nothing quite tastes likes homemade blueberry jam. I don’t know why I named this cute little font Blueberry Jam. Maybe I was craving some… Blueberry Jam is a highly legible, extremely cute and very handmade font. It would look good on just anything, but book covers, product packaging and homemade jam labels come to mind. Blueberry Jam comes with a bucketload of diacritics.

Fact is a workhorse open sans serif type system. It is inspired by the great Frutiger typeface. While the Regular style is slightly modernized but still quite close to Frutiger, changing the weight or width makes differences of the design more pronounced. The style range of Fact is wider than of any cognate type family, including weights from Thin to Black and widths from Compressed to Expanded. Fact type system contains 48 upright styles and 48 italics with variations in width and weight. The font was designed by Alexandra Korolkova and Manvel Shmavonyan and released by Paratype in 2018-2019.

Charming 80's retro inspired typeface with wonderful versatility given it includes 30 fonts. This is a perfect for any project Inspired by magazine adverts from the 70's and 80's - this family fit right in with bringing retro back into the 21st century. Super-versatile - have a scroll through all the preview to see the very wide range of variety the Avantime back can manifest the possibilities are really quite endless :) Avantime Font Features: 30 fonts Full Set of standard alphabet and punctuation PUA Encoded - no special software needed to access extra characters Language support: All European languages Multilingual Characters

Umberland Slab is an attractive family available in 3 different weights with italics. There’s a particular emphasis on simple geometric shapes and the way they interact with tall vertical strokes. Smooth curves and sharp angles blend together in a pleasing symmetry. Stroke widths are given variable degrees of contrast but serifs are consistent and heavy handed. Spacing is on the tight side with some lowercase pairs quite snug against each other. Umberland Slab would work well in small blocks of text, corporate logos, menus, or signage. This family is equipped with European accents/diacritics for international support, fractions, alternates, and ligatures.

Janice is a revival and expansion of a 1960s Mecanorma film type called Putty Bold. It’s thick, flowing, happy and oozes psychedelia. Unlike many art nouveau/hippy faces of the era, this font comes with a lowercase that expands its functionality to quite a few applications, like design aimed at kids and young adults. It’s also one of those fonts that feel right at home being warped, scaled and manually squeezed for packaging and poster design. Janice comes with over 400 glyphs. It contains a few stylistic alternates and support for the majority of Latin languages.

This set of initial letters was inspired from French renaissance decorated letters. It is a typical pattern, one among dozen quite similar, but this one was in use in Paris, unchanged, for centuries, and was still in use in the beginning of 1900s. This explains the difference between I and J, U and V. These characters were engraved years after the original set. Our font was inspired from a late 1800s publication. It can be used as well with Humane fonts (like our 1543 Humane Janson or 1592 GLC Garamond) as with modern fonts like our 1820 Modern or 1906 French News.

Kaikoura is a small town on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It is a very pleasant, laid-back place where the mountains meet the sea. Kaikoura is also the best place in the world to spot sperm whales. Kaikoura font is quite similar in appearance: it is laid-back and beautiful, has sharp peaks and generous curves. I am still trying to find out how to add whale watching to this description… Kaikoura is an all caps font with a lower case alternative for the o and y. It comes with an ocean of diacritics.

Naga is Hans van Maanen's original creation of art deco shapes interected with intricate mazes of what could be Celtic or Mesoamerican knotwork art. The totality of the typeface borders on the mysterious, exotic and yet clearly discernible as far as readability is concerned. Naga comes with a companion outline style that emphasizes its intricacy. Both fonts hold up quite strongly when combined with photo/illustration masks. The Naga family comes in both OTF and TTF formats, and includes an extended range of characters covering most Latin-based languages. A few unicase forms are also included.

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.

Personally I think a brush font should have the word ‘Brush’ in its name. It’s not that easy finding a name - you need some magic to come up with a good one! Magical Brush is a completely handmade font. I used a small brush (a number 3 to be precise) and Chinese Ink. I wanted just a little ‘erosion’, so I used copier paper rather than my expensive French water color paper (which is quite rough). Magical Brush comes in the normal variant and a chickenpox one. Use it for your posters, your book covers and your Christmas invitations!

BetterKamp 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 BetterTypeRight, which has characteristics of a typewriter face without the monospacing, and KampFriendship, which mimics a serifed face drawn by hand. The original blending had many oddities that I did not clean up until 2020 when I also added the semi-bold weights. BetterKamp lacks polish and elegance, but it is very readable at small point sizes.

Boxajoy drawn with an inky pen and scanned at high resolution - that's why it looks good, even at large sizes!

Road Art derives from painted lettering found on roads in the UK. Each character has been created from original photography.

Questa Slab is a slab serif font family. This typeface has ten styles and was published by The Questa Project.

A sexy font hand-penned by a real bombshell that will catch the eye of that special someone you love.

Flat pen script font designed for use on posters, titles, book covers, greeting cards, packaging, invitations, magazine articles and advertising.

Rolling Ball Cursive simulates a handwritten style executed with one of the many types of rolling ball pens now available.

TASCI SERIF typeface has been derived from TASCI typeface, it is especially designed to use for logotype and display designs.

Questa Sans is a sans serif font family. This typeface has ten styles and was published by The Questa Project.

Koufiya is designed by Nadine Chahine in 2003 as part of her MA project at the University of Reading, UK and later released by Linotype in 2007. It is the first typeface to include a matching Arabic and Latin designed by the same designer at the same time with the intention of creating a harmonious balance between the two scripts. The Arabic part is based on the Early Kufi style popular in the 7th to 10th century AD. It is characterized by a strong horizontal baseline, horizontal stacking order, clear and open counters, and a general open feeling. Though based on the earliest styles on Arabic manuscript, the design paradoxically appears quite modern and fresh. The Latin part of Koufiya recalls a Dutch influence in its shallow top arches and rather squarish proportions. Both Arabic and Latin parts have been carefully designed to maintain the same optical size, weight, and rhythm. However, no sacrifices were made to make them appear closer to each other. They are designed so that they work well together on the printed page, and to make sure that the two scripts are harmonious when they are mixed together even if within the same paragraph. The font includes support for Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages.

Some time ago I bought my smallest book ever: Kate Greenaway’s Alphabet* 57 x 72 mm. I thought it was the sweetest little book I had ever seen. Not knowing about the fame of the designer Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), I put it in some dark drawer and looked at it from time to time. Kate’s books were all outstanding successes in English publishing history; she was an icon of the Victorian era. Some of those books are still being reprinted today. This little gem I had accidentally acquired has become very rare and I have not found any reprints yet. So I thought maybe I could adapt her drawings for use on today’s computers. I ventured to redraw her delicate illustrations, blowing them up 300 percent, being forced to simplify them without losing her touch. It took quite some time! While redrawing them, I discovered that she most certainly drew them in at least three different sessions as well. Then I scanned my drawings and put them in a font. To make the font more usable, I added the ten numerals in Kate’s style; the original does not have those. I hope she would have liked my adaptations. Yours in a very preserving mood, Gert Wiescher. * Kate Greenaway’s Alphabet, edited by George Rutledge & Sons, London and New York, ca. 1885.