I've been working on a usable sans serif for body copy since the mid-1990s (though I certainly did not know it at the time). This one works well. It started life back in the mists of time as a scan of an old German font by Carl Fahrenwaldt. It was developed fully as a synergized serif with strong traditional roots and released as Bergsland Pro. Now it finally makes it to where I was headed all along as a sans text font. This is a well modulated humanist, sans serif font family with many OpenType features and over 600 characters: Caps, lower case, small caps, ligatures, swashes, small cap figures, old style figures, numerators, denominators, accents characters, ordinal numbers, and so on. It is designed for text use in body copy. But it also works very well for elegantly stylized display.

Police JNL was modeled from one of the many fonts created by the late Alf Becker exclusively for Signs of the Times magazine during the 1930s through the 1950s. This was a bit of a difficult design to translate into a digital font file, because the individual characters did not follow a formal structure as to the width and length of the cast shadows or the letter shapes—such is the way of the hand-lettered alphabet. Special thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Publications (and curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati) for providing the archival material to work from in creating this font. Police JNL has a limited character set. The basic A-Z character is on the upper and lower case keys, along with numbers, some punctuation and the dollar and cents signs.

From the beginning “Esmeralda” was born with a strong influence of the classical “capitalis monumentalis”, carved in stone. In the same way, the origin of this majuscule writing emerged from the brush, from a way of writing made merely by hand. For this reason, these two universes were intended to lie beneath the shape of each letter, redefining them. And this combination of styles should also be reflected in a lower case set that also allows to open up the spectrum of usage possibilities. Foundational calligraphy represented a solid base for the development of lower case glyphs, ensuring proper interaction with the upper case letters. “Esmeralda” features a great number of ligatures that mix classic structures with a more contemporary impression. With more than eleven hundred glyphs, it provides a multiplicity of uses across a wide combinatory of ligatures, alternative signs, initial caps, miscellaneous and connectors; each one of them accessible through Open Type. “Esmeralda” is perfect to speak with a classical yet fresh, modern – and a little bit bold – tone of voice. Designed by Guille Vizzari, together with the tough and remarkable work of Ale Paul, in use “Esmeralda” stands out in a subtle and unexpected way that’s almost unnoticeable. Its delicate yet solid curves, serifs and endings give each composition a fine, elegant and exquisite feeling, along with a firm and sturdy look. “Esmeralda” was initially born as a typographic project developed by Guillermo Vizzari – tutored by Ale Paul and Ana Sanfelippo – under completion of the Specialization in Typography Design at University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the years 2011 and 2012.

Hangman's Delight is a scratchy, all caps font. The upper case letters come with swirls and curls, but the lower case letters are unadorned. A bit of an unusual font, I admit, but it would look nice on book covers and posters. Comes with some ligatures and stylistic alternates and a whole bunch of diacritics.

OldHaroldRee is a modification of PhederFrack, a calligraphic fraktur face. It keeps the lower case letters and inserts a completely different set of upper-case letters, which is in the “Old English” rather than the “Old German” or fraktur style. It comes in two weights, a bit unusual for an Old-English style typeface.

March may be a good time to use this typeface. PattyDay is a caps-only typeface in which the letters are decorated with shamrocks or clovers. Some but not all of the lower-case letters are different from the upper-case letters. If you want a version of this face without the shamrocks, try Ingone.

Interoffice Memo JNL was inspired by an image of a plastic lettering template used for making mimeographed fliers in the days prior to the widespread use of photocopy machines. A classic Deco-style alphabet is on the upper case, with alternate A,E,F,L,M,N and W in the lower case set.

The letters of ShirlyUJest have serifs that have gone wild, crossing over themselves, giving them the look of overgrown vegetation. It is weird and bizarre and out of control; the name says it all. It is caps-only with the lower-case keys containing the glyphs identical to those on the upper-case keys.

WurstchenDotted is made up up of sausage segments. It does not have true lower-case letters, but rather variants of the upper-case letters instead. As all extreme display fonts, it is useful in small doses. The three WurstchenOverlay fonts decompose WurstchenOutlined and can be used in layers to create letters with three colors.

Picking up a concept of Fritz Richter, Circensis is the realization of an adorned diplay font which had not been hitherto available, neither as a hot-metal font nor digitally. It is a great and legible font for circus and variety ads and posters, as well as for films, cafés, ice-cream parlors etc.

We cannot imagine anyone not liking beer. Especially on a warm summer night there is simply little that can top an ice cold brewski. And with the current wave of home-brewed ales and lagers, Vette Letters decided to not stay behind and brew its own brand. Just so we can design our own beer bottle label using our own font. VLNL Thueringer comes from the drawing board of Jacques Le Bailly (a.k.a. Baron von Fonthausen), the German-French specialist in the fields of both beer and type design. One day Jacques got inspired by Albrecht Dürers 15th century Fraktur (blackletter) alphabet, and decided to design a contemporary rounded version of it. Although the historic context is clearly visible, Thueringer definitely stands its own ground. It's a modern techno-style blackletter with a (beer)truckload of interesting design details. Thueringer contains a number of ligatures and an alternate set of numbers. Apart from the regular uses like logos, posters, flyers and headlines we definitely would like to see our Thueringer used on beer bottle labels and crates, but also cafés and hipster bars would do well with this modern-day blackletter. Hell, even wine or liquor labels, football team jerseys, Oktoberfest flyers, it's just too much to mention. As long as it is accompanied by a cold beer.

“Hi! I’m Hyptis – the script font based on brush handwriting. I was drawn with a soft, wet brush and digitally cleaned with care, but some of my characters keep their natural texture. If you are looking for a font for logos, postcards, product packaging, quotes, text overlays – or anything else – I am a good choice!” Hyptis has two types of embedded auto-replacement: lowercase letters without connecting strokes (for a case of the last character of the word), and ligatures (for a case of two letters that do not pair well together). These features work well in many apps (even simple ones like Notepad/TextEdit), and if you need to customize their application – you could use programs that support OpenType features (for example, Adobe apps or CorelDraw). All these additional glyphs are PUA-encoded, so if your software does not support OpenType — you could access them through Character Map (Windows) or Font Book (Mac). Hyptis also has wide multilingual support: Western-, Central- and Eastern-European, Baltic, Turkish, Latin-type Africans, and Asian (94 languages in total). And finally, Hyptis comes with a bonus font, Hyptis Swashes, that includes a set of 26 swashes – linear, round or oval. To type it you could simply use small letters from ‘a’ to ’z’.

This mixed-case handwritten font is young, fun, and uniquely styled after a teenage girl's handwriting.

Black Cow is a scary, somewhat surrealistic looking font which came from somewhere strange and unpleasant.

The classic foamy look of a birthday cake - yes indeed. Grace and sweet in once font!

"Humanista" is the name of a multilingual chancery script font by Bertram Kaiser. The idea in this long-term project was to blend the boundaries between analogue calligraphic handwriting and designing a font digitally, while using all technical possibilities of modern type design. All glyphs were originally written with a broadnib and then carefully vectorized, creating a human charme inside the font. In this design you will find influences from great calligraphy masters like Hermann Zapf or Werner Schneider. The pro version comes along with a big variety of alternate glyphs, initial and terminal forms, swash capitals and ligatures, which gives you the possibility of designing individual text layouts. Inside the font you will also find a set of italic roman capitals plus fitting numerals and interpunction, which can be treated like a font itself. You can activate them through the Open-Type menue (stylistic-set 4) or set manually via the glyphs window (ADOBE applications). When using the feature "swashletters" make sure to also activate the feature "contextual alternates" to get an appealing textdesign with alternating swashletters. This font can be used for display sizes as well as for smaller textsizes like on Invitationcards or in magazines.

Funghi Mania is a handwritten script font that comes along with over 60 decorative hand drawn funghi illustrations. Treasures from Finnish forest!

Günter Gerhard Lange designed El Greco for Berthold in 1964. This script dresses up informal documents and adds lightness to formal documents.

Diamondwood JNL is based on examples of vintage wood type with condensed, elongated diamond shapes containing the various letters of the alphabet.

PrivaPro is available in four styles with italics. It includes Greek and Cyrillic characters, along with small caps, ligatures, alternates and swashes.

Galonia is an elegant display typeface with flared serif. It has harmonic and classical look thanks to high contrast stroke. Includes ligatures, special alternative glyphs, old style figures and case sensitive glyphs. Features: Basic latin alphabet A-Z 77 Ligatures & Alternates 112 Accented characters Numbers, Punctuation, Currency, Symbols, Math symbols & Diacritics Old style figures Case sensitive glyphs Enjoy Galonia!

Goddard is based on some very unsual lettering by Art Nouveau period calligrapher Samuel Welo. It offers a full normal character set, plus mutliple alternate versions of every lower case character and selected upper case characters as well, plus very fancy over-and-under kerning to produce a really unique look, like nothing we've ever done before.

Rhapsody is clearly showing Unger's love with Blackletters and Gothics. Other than many of the existing Blackletters, Rhapsody is really easy to read. The calligraphic forms of the upper case in connexion with its lower case appear very special, very unique. Rhapsody, having its origins in the 50ies, was redesigned, completed and expanded by Unger for the URW++ FontForum.

The orthography was invented in 1952 by a Sufi Sheikh, named Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare. A phonetically robust writing system, the technical commissions that appraised the Kaddare alphabet concurred that it was the most accurate indigenous script and orthography for transcribing the Somali language. Kaddare uses both upper and lower case letters, with the lower case represented in cursive.

Spandau is one of the 12 boroughs of Berlin and, if you add Ballet, a New Romantic British band. It is also a very nice all caps art deco font. Not too soft, not too angular, just about right! Some upper case letters differ from their lower case kin. Comes with all the diacritics you'll need.

Haydon Brush is a handwritten brush typeface. It is staunch and confident, the perfect type to use for a diagonal slogan or a logotype. The font contains ligatures, smaller case contextual and stylistic alternates, as well as a full upper case alternate alphabet. Designed by Måns Grebäck, it is guaranteed to give your projects the extra character it needs.

Ameira is a modern lettering script font for use in display sizes, created with alternative glyph variations and ligatures. Perfect for your design projects like logos, branding, advertising, product design, stationery, photography, art quotes, wedding designs, fashion designs, and more. Features upper case and lower case characters, numerals and punctuation, has multilingual support, and OpenType features.

In Handmade Font the letters are made of hands or handprints, something children sometimes do when they are set free with paint. It is caps only but the letters on the lower-case keys differ from those on the upper-case keys. It comes with a large assortment of accented letters to support most European languages.

Drakkar is a Latin typeface based on runes, the medieval script of the Vikings and Northern Europe. It imitates letters carved in wood with flared strokes. Just as the actual runes, it is a single-case font; instead of lower case letters, Drakkar has a set of slightly changed caps to enable the user to express handmade lettering.

ConcavexCaps is a whimsical bold display typeface family in three styles that are designed to used in layers. It is caps-only, with the upper-case and lower-case keys differing for the BCGKRS characters. Horizontal elements of the letters are straight and vertical elements are curved, flaring either in or out. ConcaveWarp is a distorted form of ConcavexCaps.

The same monograms found on a 1930s-era business card that inspired Golden Beach JNL are reproduced as Art Deco Monograms JNL. Left-side monograms are on the upper case A-Z, while the lower case a-z are the right side monograms. A vertical bar is on the period key for a centerpiece between the two initials.

FansiPensle is a set of four decorative scripts. The capitals are fussy and ostentatious and a little weird with strange flourishes. The lower-case letters are neat and simple. Lower-case letters have the shapes of a cursive alphabet and they are connected in the cursive and cursive-bold styles but not in the plain and bold styles.

Body Art is a unique font whose upper-case and lower-case characters are formed by combining the silhouettes of two to four men and women of different figures and sizes to form the letters of the alphabet. Each of these carefully orchestrated combinations of human silhouettes is its own unique example of inspired typographic body art.

Carinthia is derived from the style of Roman calligraphy known as Rustica, but with some features of Roman uncial added to form a complete upper and lower case character set, including variant upper case characters with decorative spurs. The result is a rather vertical, but quite stylish font which has an antique calligraphic look and good readability.

Reading is fun; legible with a playful wiggle, a bit of texture, and a lively set of double-letter ligatures. Reading wants to be read aloud and sounded out - lightened by comic relief and sweetened by a bit of style. The upper case is relatively straight, the lower case - slightly jumbled, and Reading’s numbers have excellent curls.

CA Fourty Open is another take on the idea of a double-line font. It reminds us of neon-sings, but lifts the 50s aesthetics to a contemporary level. Although it’s an all-caps font, upper and lower cases differ a little bit. The upper cases are more open. CA Forty Open has a full Central European letterset.

Night Life JNL follows the classic lettering forms of the Art Deco era of the 1930s and 1940s. On the upper case letters, the A,B,E,F,H,K,P and R have extended horizontals, while the lower case a,b,e,f,h,k,p and r have those extensions removed and are more traditional in design.

Imagine that you had a bunch of pencils of various sizes and you wanted to make a set of letters with them. You would probably come up with something similar to one of these three typefaces. It is caps only, but some of the characters on the lower-case keys are different from those on the upper-case keys.

In StamperRS all the letters are on little stamps. The upper-case letters are have black letters on white stamps and the lower-case letters have white letters on black stamps. The character set is limited. The letters are from the typeface Myhota, also by Ingrimayne Type. StamperRS was first released in 1995 with the name Stamper.

College Tantrum is my take on the college font tradition – an edgy, hard working attitude and a proud statement. The font comes with both lower case and upper case letters – plus a bundle of ligatures, alternate glyph sets and college sport dingbats. It’s also versatile as a poster font, for websites and for infographics. Play ball!