Years ago, I developed an interest in the Japanese art of dwarfed potted trees, bonsai. I bought some books on the subject from Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In one -- Handbook on Bonsai: Special Techniques (seventh printing, February 1976) -- the type was bad. Old worn lead type, I suspect, spread wide in the tops of characters and disappearing on the bottoms. Two decades later, I came across my Brooklyn Botanic Garden collection and was struck again by this interesting type. Inspired, I made a typeface. Didn't take me long to decide on a name for it, either: a name with a double-meaning, based both on its look and its inspiration. Bonsai, the typeface, has two styles, a roman and a true italic.

Lately I have been thinking about rabbits. Not that I have a particular love for rabbits - they’re cute, but also kind of stupid. But as Christmas dinner is approaching, I see more rabbit carcasses lining the shelves of supermarkets. These poor animals never saw the light of day, never felt the grass between their paws and never had a ‘true life’. In honour of the hundreds of thousands of rabbits being slaughtered for Christmas this year, I have named this font: Rabbit Escape. Rabbit Escape is a slightly back-slanted typeface - handmade with a permanent marker I bought in Japan. It is quite unusual, maybe a bit weird, but it will serve you well. Comes with a generous stuffing of diacritics.

Bodoni Classic Deco Two, like the original Bodoni Classic Deco, breaks all rules. Giambattista Bodoni himself would probably hate me for doing it; he was a real purist. The whole idea of the Bodoni typeface is no embellishments and here I go and decorate those nice clear letters. Shame on me! But I find this is a very nice and useful typeface for all kinds of cards and certificates. So I just did it for all of you out there that are not born purists, and want a little embellishment to their lives. And to make things worse, I added a small caps cut. I even decorated the numbers. This Bodoni is the condensed version!!! Enjoy! Yours, still breaking all the rules, Gert Wiescher

To design a font Blezja, I was inspired by an old metal tin from 1907 from Potsdam, which was used to store earplugs. From a few letters I created whole typeface - lower and uppercase characters.

Collins Florets is a collection of embellishments. I found them in the endless archives of Erik Spiekermann. I scanned them and carefully corrected the outlines, to keep the rough look of yesterday. Yours Gert Wiescher

Geometa Deco is based on Paul Renners Futura Classic. The design is timeless, but I always missed some decorative characters. So I sat down and did some. The type-designer for surprising solutions, Gert Wiescher

This is the design that was always on the drawer. I designed it when I was bored of designing other typefaces, there was no briefing, I just wildly played with the bezier tool. It was something to relax from more serious work, so it feels like a very funny and smiling design. Genica mixes various styles creating a display type with lots of personality.

I’m not particularly fond of beans. I do eat them, but they’re not my idea of a delicacy… But this font has ‘fairy tale’ feeling to it, and I liked the name Beanstalker. Beanstalker is a hand made font (I used a fineliner to draw the glyphs). It is quite neat and organized, but does come with some rough edges and a bit of texture.

They say the Nile has many secrets and she was the most sacred of them all. Isis. I met her in a small tavern outside of Edfu, hidden like a jewel between Luxor and Aswan. I had journeyed to Egypt to study the mating habits of homosexual hippos. I had no idea it was the journey that would teach me the true nature of love.

Inspired by show card lettering and the more human side of art deco, I wanted this font to retain the casual unevenness of informal hand lettering. As decorative as the font looks, I do envision it being used for text more than display. Obviously not a workhorse, but rather a quirky niche font. I find it makes dense philosophic texts more friendly to read.

When creating the font, I was inspired by the various names of musical groups and sci-fi movies. I took the hourglass shape as a basis and added various serifs to it, hence the name of my font appeared - Klepsydra, as in the Greek hourglass. This style has an abbreviation - "Z". I will develop this font family and will add new styles, as well as characters.

I bought a pair of green gumboots (or Wellingtons) the other day. I have a little wilderness outside and it is quite muddy, so I thought a pair of boots would be a good buy. Gumboots is a handmade comic font. It comes in a regular and a fat style and you can use it for just about anything that needs a bit of comic relief.

If it's dog friendly, it must be something good! Actually, I was never really into dogs, not until me and my wife decided to get a dog. We got a French Bulldog and life hasn't been the same since! I found out that I love dogs, and especially French Bulldogs! This font is a kind of tribute to everything good that has to do with dogs! :)

Gawain Douglas was my co-worker and eventually my boss when I worked for the Tucson Citizen. He’s director of production and design for a children’s book publisher now, a very talented and creative guy and Gawain’s Hand is what his writing looks like. A shame, isn’t it? Just kidding, Gawain; I wouldn’t have featured it, if I hadn’t liked it. Really. No, really. :-)

With Quote Note I did my best to make a simple and unsophisticated font. I wanted the letters to come out as if they were made with a fat marker on a note. Well, I'll let you be the judge on how I succeeded. I've added 4 different versions of each lowercase letter and even did a simple complimentary dingbat. And of course there is multilingual support!

I don't have an Uncle Oscar, so the font is not named after someone I know. The name just kind of stuck. Uncle Oscar is a pencil font, made with a black ‘Lamy’ pencil I took from my son Sam’s pencil box. It is a little rough, but very legible and comes in Regular and Italic. Of course, Uncle Oscar speaks a lot of languages.

Need a catchy headline font with a clear handmade and organic look? Look no further, because Sukkergris is here to do the job! Each letter is handmade and manually cleaned up, but keeping the original quirky curves. I have added 6 different versions of each letter, which automatically cycle as you type. I also added a set of small caps, just because I think they look awesome!

This font is the byproduct of a T-shirt line for a punk/hardcore band I did a while ago. The guys like it skatestyle, so I scribbled their bandname and tagline with fat edding markers, which was so much fun that I decided to make it into a whole font. PiS Wallride features ligatures and OpenType alternates for an even grittier and more authentic feel.

There are many fonts inspired by Lucian Bernhard. I have always admired his 1906 award-winning poster: ‘Priester’— believed to be the birth of the ‘Sachplakat’ (or Object Poster). I have interpreted the hand lettered “Priester” logo into a formal typeface and only hope I have done it justice. Usage recommendations: Captions, fliers, packaging, cards, posters, ads, book jackets, manuals, bulletins, magazines, greetings, announcements.

I just launched brush script font in the new collection Sandblast is a extreme textured for brush script, I design it with real write my hand, I really hope you will enjoy it so much when using this font.I love using this one with layer masks in Photoshop, really look natural written. Please contact me if anything question,I'm glad to help :) Happy Designing, Haksen Studio

Minou is a French cat’s name. There are more: you could name your cat Léo, Fripouille, Orion, Orphée or Tigrou, but I kind of like Minou. Minou font is a very cute, handmade affair, that started from some doodles I had drawn. Use it for children’s book covers, pyjama party posters, toy packaging and inspirational quotes. I am sure it’ll do the job purrfectly!

Rian Hughes’ 15th collection of fonts, “112 Hours”, is entirely dedicated to numbers. Culled from a myriad of sources – clock faces, tickets, watches house numbers – it is an eclectic and wide-ranging set. Each font contains only numerals and related punctuation – no letters. A new book has been designed by Hughes to show the collection, and includes sample settings, complete character sets, source material and an introduction. This is available print-to-order on Blurb in paperback and hardback: http://www.blurb.com/b/5539073-112-hours-hardback http://www.blurb.com/b/5539045-112-hours-paperback From the introduction: The idea for this, the fifteenth Device Fonts collection, began when I came across an online auction site dedicated to antique clocks. I was mesmerized by the inventive and bizarre numerals on their faces. Shorn of the need to extend the internal logic of a typeface through the entire alphabet, the designers of these treasures were free to explore interesting forms and shapes that would otherwise be denied them. Given this horological starting point, I decided to produce 12 fonts, each featuring just the numbers from 1 to 12 and, where appropriate, a small set of supporting characters — in most cases, the international currency symbols, a colon, full stop, hyphen, slash and the number sign. 10, 11 and 12 I opted to place in the capital A, B and C slots. Each font is shown in its entirety here. I soon passed 12, so the next logical finish line was 24. Like a typographic Jack Bauer, I soon passed that too -— the more I researched, the more I came across interesting and unique examples that insisted on digitization, or that inspired me to explore some new design direction. The sources broadened to include tickets, numbering machines, ecclesiastical brass plates and more. Though not derived from clock faces, I opted to keep the 1-12 conceit for consistency, which allowed me to design what are effectively numerical ligatures. I finally concluded one hundred fonts over my original estimate at 112. Even though it’s not strictly divisible by 12, the number has a certain symmetry, I reasoned, and was as good a place as any to round off the project. An overview reveals a broad range that nonetheless fall into several loose categories. There are fairly faithful revivals, only diverging from their source material to even out inconsistencies and regularize weighting or shape to make them more functional in a modern context; designs taken directly from the source material, preserving all the inky grit and character of the original; designs that are loosely based on a couple of numbers from the source material but diverge dramatically for reasons of improved aesthetics or mere whim; and entirely new designs with no historical precedent. As projects like this evolve (and, to be frank, get out of hand), they can take you in directions and to places you didn’t envisage when you first set out. Along the way, I corresponded with experts in railway livery, and now know about the history of cab side and smokebox plates; I travelled to the Musée de l’imprimerie in Nantes, France, to examine their numbering machines; I photographed house numbers in Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam and here in the UK; I delved into my collection of tickets, passes and printed ephemera; I visited the Science Museum in London, the Royal Signals Museum in Dorset, and the Museum of London to source early adding machines, war-time telegraphs and post-war ration books. I photographed watches at Worthing Museum, weighing scales large enough to stand on in a Brick Lane pub, and digital station clocks at Baker Street tube station. I went to the London Under-ground archive at Acton Depot, where you can see all manner of vintage enamel signs and woodblock type; I photographed grocer’s stalls in East End street markets; I dug out old clocks I recalled from childhood at my parents’ place, examined old manual typewriters and cash tills, and crouched down with a torch to look at my electricity meter. I found out that Jane Fonda kicked a policeman, and unusually for someone with a lifelong aversion to sport, picked up some horse-racing jargon. I share some of that research here. In many cases I have not been slavish about staying close to the source material if I didn’t think it warranted it, so a close comparison will reveal differences. These changes could be made for aesthetic reasons, functional reasons (the originals didn’t need to be set in any combination, for example), or just reasons of personal taste. Where reference for the additional characters were not available — which was always the case with fonts derived from clock faces — I have endeavored to design them in a sympathetic style. I may even extend some of these to the full alphabet in the future. If I do, these number-only fonts could be considered as experimental design exercises: forays into form to probe interesting new graphic possibilities.

Just before the end of 2020 all schools in Holland closed for the second time, because of an increase in the number of COVID 19 cases. This means that my wife and I have to educate our three kids at home. The kids are great and take their tasks seriously, but it is difficult, as all three of them require different educational levels. I am sure you parents understand. Trying to get some work done is virtually impossible, so my wife and I made a schedule and we live by ‘on duty’ and ‘off duty’ days. I was thinking of this when I created this font (obviously on an ‘off duty’ day). Home Education is a handwritten scribble font. It was made with a Sharpie pen (possibly used by one of my kids, because I noticed tiny ink stains on my wooden dining table…). It comes with all the diacritics you can hope for and lovely double letter ligatures for you to play with.

Movie Script is the script that was used in German movie-brochures. Those were small four page leaflets with a lot of sepia-colored pictures about the movie one was about to see. Today those things are collectors items. The script was also used on those hand-painted posters above the cinema entrance. I cleaned up the old script and made it just a little bit more readable, but overall I left it as it was. Of course I added the necessary glyphs for today's world, like Euro and so on. When I was a kid, my grandfather gave me 1 German Mark and I could go to the movies matinee, that was around 10:30 in the morning, the entrance cost something like 60 Pfennig and the rest was for peanuts and a drink. Still today I love my grandfather for that, movies introduced the world to me (no TV then). Your grandfather-loving designer Gert Wiescher

Katsudon is a Japanese crumbed and deep fried pork cutlet, typically served on rice with egg drizzled over it. There is also a chicken variety. I have been to Japan numerous times (it is my favourite country) and each time I revelled in the great variety of foods being served in street stalls and hole-in-the-wall eateries. I especially love the grandma-and-grandpa eateries that are tucked away in alleys behind the major shopping streets. They never speak English and my Japanese is shaky (to say the least), but the food is always good and we always seem to understand each other. This year, I couldn’t travel to Japan, because of the Covid outbreak, but I can tell you that I miss Japan a lot! Katsudon is a crumbed and deep fried font. It comes with a splash of authenticity, a sprinkling of cheekiness and a generous dose of oomph. Oh, yeah, and double letter ligatures, plus a few alternates as well.

This type crept up the sense that it was made in Eastern Europe by poorly trained urbanites from a crippled nation, or that it is the remains of a contemporary gothic (like Eckmann) stencil. The choice of what this type signifies is up to the public. Lately I like the idea of 'putting on' (in McLuhan's sense) a genre of idea that is somewhat different from my tradition's beliefs, and fitting a core category of that toward a teleological/eschatological advantage. Therefore postmodernist/apocalyptic carelessness (which I may 'put on' by using this type) is how I abstain from the cravings of immortality, or more so that wanting it is pointless. It’s stands as memento morí; that I will have to die someday. I have to become less, He must become more. Of course, Interzone may signify a classic Joy Division track from Unknown Pleasures as well as the Cold Warish ongoings of conflicted eastern European life. I considered naming this Lunik 9.

I made the first sketches for Brocha when I first visited Easter Island in 2011. I took inspiration from pre-Columbian art for such sketches, but I must say that they were kind of rough and clumsy; it was an experimental and limited-use typeface. It took a long time, but thanks to my learning about type design gained over the years, I have finally been able to complete my project. I have made sure to preserve the Latin American spirit of my original designs in order to give my final typeface an expressively handmade, highly humanist look. Brocha is a display sans with friendly design ideal for high-impact headlines, logotypes or use on cookies packaging designs. Brocha consists of 2 subfamilies: one basic and one alternative. Each subfamily comes in 8 weights plus italics. The Alt version is highly recommended for those art directors who look for more varied fonts when designing.

My eldest son Sam always wanted to visit Japan and he has been saving up for a ticket for years now. We should have traveled there this year, but due to the pandemic, that was impossible. We’re now trying to go next year. Sam and I did make some kind of itinerary and I told him how we were going to get around, as I have been to Japan many times. I told him about the Shinkansen trains, the cute Tram in Nagasaki and the immense subway system in Tokyo. One of the lines in Tokyo is the so-called Yamanote Circle Line, which I have used on numerous occasions. A new font name was born and it stuck to this particular font! Subway Circle is a 100% handmade font. It is rounded, slightly slanted and comes with a sunny disposition. I am sure that, when you use it, you will find your 生きがい… ;-)

One day shortly after Christmas 2004, the art-director of Vogue Moscow called me. Would I maybe make a Cyrillic version of my Bodoni Classic Text typeface? Well, since I had been thinking about doing it since a long time, this was the perfect reason to finally do it. It was not an easy venture, since I do not have the faintest idea of Russian but, together with those nice people in Russia and a fellow helpful type designer in Kiev, I managed. I did an enormous amount of kerning, thanks to the help of the Moscow Vogue office. Here the fonts are now for all of you: five text cuts, plus one standard roman cut that has no Cyrillic letters but an extra set of medieval numbers. At Vogue they are happy with the fonts, even though I did not quite adhere to Bodoni's originals in this case. Nastarowje (or whatever you say in Russia), Gert Wiescher

Pantomime is an original and unusual casual Roman Script. Designed for using at larger sizes and headlines I have spaced the fortnight, as I believe this is the most effective way for producing interesting word patterns.

To design this font, Crackle, I was inspired by an advertisement in the polish weekly "Tygodnik Powszechny" from 1938. From a few letters I have created an entire typeface - uppercase characters - in crackled and uncrackled versions.