The Art Nouveau hand lettered title on the sheet music for the 1909 composition "If the Wind Had Only Blown the Other Way" was the basis for Courtship JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Gryffensee is designed to be the Futura of blackletter, combining the time-honored gravity and relentlessness of the Gothic script with the clean, contemporary freshness of the geometric sans. Built from a tightly controlled inventory of lines, arcs, sharp cuts, and OpenType features, Gryffensee was born and raised in the digital age, yet retains the powerful charisma and human warmth of its mediaeval blackletter ancestors. As a result, it excels in a wide range of display settings, logotypes, and short text. Unlike most conventional blackletters, it even handles all-caps usage with grace, and includes an extensive Cyrillic character set (in the Pro version). Apart from a generous range of automatic ligatures and contextual alternates, Gryffensee offers stylistic alternates that allow users to customize its appearance to their tastes. The capital letters |AGHIKZ| come in alternate cuts that trade traditional shapes for increased legibility, while the letter |s| appears in three cuts, each with a unique, distinct flavor. All these options are accessible through OpenType stylistic sets in the main Latin font, Gryffensee Eins. For easy use in applications without OpenType support, we provide two additional Latin fonts (Gryffensee Zwei and Drei) in which these options replace the default cuts. Finally, Gryffensee Pro offers all the functionality of Gryffensee Eins, plus Cyrillic support. My intention to devise a contemporary geometric blackletter was inspired by four hand-painted letters, |ABCD|, in Sasha Prood�s online portfolio. I later found out that he had, in turn, taken those letters from an existing font, Bastard, by Jonathan Barnbrook. Luckily, by that time my project had taken on a life of its own. Gryffensee is an original design that bears only the most superficial resemblance to Bastard. Gryffensee is a mediaeval spelling of the lake Greifensee near which I grew up. It is pronounced [?gri?f?n?se?], or "GRIEF-un-say" in English approximation. This font is dedicated to Simone.

Zapped is a grungy font with a sort of extruded look. I was working on a poster for the punk band MAXILLA (they are hot check'm out). It looks like it came out of a war zone. Abuse it!

Yalla PRO was inspired during a trip Mateusz Machalski took to Cairo (Egypt). The vast array of strong Arabic headline type, geometric forms working in interesting ways and contrasting with smooth, calligraphic details fed the design. Due to the same proportions and heights, Yalla works great together with Afronaut. Yalla was extended in 2024 by Mateusz Machalski & Małgorzata Bartosik with new weights.

There are a lot of things to say about fashion. I never really cared about what people meant was fashion, at any time of my life...well, not counting my teenage years!!! I was a teenager in the 1980ies and I was really into what was hot or not...but when I look at photos of myself from that time, I always wonder what kind of fashion trends I was following! :) Brutal Fashion is really not brutal in any way, but more attractive, nice, charming, handsome, delicate and graceful - with a stunning amount of handmade roughness!

FranklinGothicHandLight is part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

FranklinGothicHandDemi is part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

Martin Wilke’s underrated yet influential deco classic from 1932 has both feet firmly planted in the high traditions of Western European calligraphy while carefully and subtly introducing some traits from the sweeping geometric/minimalist vision of the time. In a way, it was one of the representatives of the European anti-type typefaces of that era, when print media was searching for the elusive aesthetic balance between humanism and geometry. This typeface enjoyed some popularity in Germany for a few years, and went on to influence further type designs in Holland and Italy. After the second World War, the black hole that swallowed a big chunk of Europe’s print culture, new influences and technologies overtook the scene, and selective historical emphasis ensued, highlighting some of the era’s designs and overlooking others. Further selective picking in the digital era all but buried Wilke’s body of work - unfairly so, because he was just as important in German type history as Bernhard, Post, Schneidler, Tiemann and Trump. The original metal Wilke Kursiv came in one weight. This digital version goes a long way in expanding on that original offering. Now Wilke’s masterpiece comes in three weights, and with a full Pro treatment including swash caps, small capitals, five types of figures, automatic fractions, and plenty of other OpenType niceties. Each of the Wilke Kursiv Pro fonts comes with over 700 characters, and contains support for most Latin-based languages. Also available are three non-Pro fonts in each weight.

The other day, I ate an orange - and I absolutely love oranges! This one was perfect - juicy, sweet and crispy in a very delicate way. This font is also juicy, sweet and crispy and on top of that, organic and handmade!

Tenison is a semi-formal script which echoes the way the designer was taught to write in school. It is not overly decorative and it is highly legible. All lowercase characters link with each other, just as we were taught.

SK Bade is a demi serif and condensed font. It was designed by Salih Kızılkaya in 2020. This is a completely decorative font, but legibility is at the forefront. In this way, it can be used easily in long texts.

This font was inspired by the swirling steam drawn on a chalkboard at a coffee shop. Not actually a script font though it has a similar feel. This font dances and twirls the way a wisp of smoke or steam would.

Etruscania font is base on Anchient Etruscan Alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet is an Ancient Italian alphabet used by the Etruscans, an ancient civilization of the central and northern lands, to write their language, from around 700 BC to around 100 AD. The Etruscan alphabet took inspiration from the Phoenician alphabet. The earliest known Etruscan abecedarium inscribed on an ivory wax tablet frame, measuring 8.8x5 cm, was found at Marsiliana near Grosseto, Tuscany in Italy. It dates from around 700 BC.

The A.B. Dick Company was a manufacturer of mimeograph duplicating machines which produced copies by the process of transferring ink through an etched wax stencil onto paper. Customers had the option of purchasing various size and style lettering guides in order to create eye-catching headlines or announcements on their print projects. One such guide called ‘Modern Display’ featured a lettering style resembling Futura Black with added serifs. This is now available as Template Moderne JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

I was in a bit of a gloomy mood just before I created this font. I had no inspiration whatsoever (which always affects me in a bad way). I was trying to create a font using broken satay skewers, as using those gives the letters a unique look. I broke about 25 skewers and they all broke ‘the wrong way’. Yes, it’s pathetic, I know, but that’s how it is. I decided to go to the gym and do a little workout, hoping my dark mood would pass. When I came back, I broke one more skewer and lo and behold, it broke exactly the right way! I made this font in one go, using that fantastic skewer and lots of Chinese ink. Darkness Rising comes with all the diacritics you’ll need, plus double letter ligatures and some cool underlined alternates.

I was listening to the radio and a song caught my attention. It was ‘Demagogue’ by a band called the Urban Dance Squad. That song brought back memories from when I was a student, so I decided to name this font after it. Demagogue was made using a Sharpie pen and a piece of expensive paper. The result is a very legible, very neat and very bold font. Demagogue is ideal for when you want to get your message across, but hopefully not in a demagogue-ish way! ;-)

Years ago the company that developed Fontographer marketed a program called Font-o-Matic, a program that distorted fonts in various ways. 99% of what it produced was garbage, but every once in a while it would yield something interesting. Since I had designed a lot of typefaces by that time, I had lots of material to feed it and it was fun to see what it produced. YahoschWormy is one of rare results that was interesting enough to save and clean up. The source font was Yahosch.

Ooh so soft, so curvaceous, so voluptuous and so swash-buckling. Hey, I'm talking ’bout Petals BF! Here’s a design inspired by the work of Dave West and infused with a plethora of pleasingly plump letterforms, with swashes reminiscent of 60s and 70s types. But here’s the twist: where you might typically expect to find ball terminals, you'll experience some sensuous curls; and some playful letterforms such as lowercase h, k, m, and n, may even call to mind that groovy look of ’60s bell-bottoms. Spread across its capitals and lowercase are swash variants for beginning, middle and ending letterforms —candy for your eyes. Petals BF is where Didone style happily marries the organic and curvaceous forms of Art Nouveau. Strange I know, but so is a duckbill platypus —and somehow they all seem to work surprisingly well. Among the many typographic niceties you'll discover, are such Opentype features as Contextual and Stylistic alternates, Ligatures, Case-sensitive forms and Fractions. Please note: these magical features demand the use of opentype-savvy applications such as Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXPress and etc. Petals BF is multilingual, and speaks the languages of Western, Eastern and Central Europe, in addition to Turkish and Baltic. It gets around. So let your creativity blossom with Petals in projects that involve headlines, magazine layouts, product packaging, logos, signage, branding and etc.

Spur Stencil JNL gets its inspiration from the single word "stencils" lettered on a vintage package of Glass Wax Christmas stencils.

Morning News is the sister font of Evening News which I designed some years ago for use with my local newspaper Abendzeitung. Morning News is an adaption, a little bit rounder, which gives the font a much softer touch. The general design dates back to the pre-Hitler era, the time when Germany had already lost the first World War and was taking a short deadly breath to start the second big war. Lets hope there will be a day when there will never be another war in Europe (or elsewhere!). Another new peaceful font by your pacifistic designer, Gert Wiescher.

AwanZaman has a three-phase story, beginning with Dr Mamoun Sakkal’s two Arabic styles and culminating with Juliet Shen’s Latin extension. AwanZaman started as simply Awan, a commission for a modern, clean, monoline typeface for writing headlines and story titles in a forward-thinking Kuwaiti newspaper. Awan was based on the geometric forms of Kufic script, while in phase two, a second typeface (Zaman) was designed to add enough calligraphic Naskh details to make it easy to read in demanding newspaper settings. Together these two phases give the typeface a warm, familiar, and progressive look, as well as an explanatory two-part name — AwanZaman. Since most editorials use typical Naskh headline fonts with an exaggerated baseline, Awan’s rational forms immediately distinguish it as a modern and progressive voice in the crowded field of Arabic editorial typefaces. As the companion Arabic typeface, Zaman has the same basic proportions and forms as Awan, but with many cursive, energetic, and playful details. And since modern monoline fonts are increasingly being used to set extended texts, more features were borrowed from Naskh calligraphy to expand the typeface’s use from headlines into text setting. When using the AwanZaman Arabic family, Awan (geometric Kufic forms) is the starting point. To add the sweeping, energetic personality of Zaman (calligraphic Naskh forms), simply activate an alternate character through the option of 20 stylistic sets available in any OpenType-savvy software. The two typefaces function as one file — the AwanZaman Arabic family — allowing users to combine features from both designs to transform the appearance of text from geometric and formal to playful and informal. The third phase of AwanZaman’s development introduced a companion Latin typeface designed by Juliet Shen to fulfil the persistent need in the Arabic fonts market for modern and geometric bilingual type families. Due to the Arabic’s monolinear strokes, AwanZaman Latin was destined to be a sans serif with a tall x-height, larger counters, and corresponding stem thickness to harmonise with the Arabic’s overall text colour and page presence. But it needed much more. One of AwanZaman’s chief assets is making the two languages look on a par when typeset side by side. Arabic and English readers will have a different sense of what that entails, but this type family defers to the Arabic — graceful and artistic with a good mix of straight stems and curved forms. Latin in general doesn’t aesthetically flow the way Arabic does, yet the tone of the Latin needed to mirror both the Arabic’s more squarish curves and formal personality of Awan and the undulating and more playful shapes of Zaman without looking outlandish. That need was met by creating some novel Latin characters, which are accessed through four stylistic sets the same way as AwanZaman Arabic. The alternates are not just clever in the way they look and how they echo the Arabic aesthetic, but also in harmonising the disparate languages and serving designers well when needing a balanced, bilingual text face with a warm and lively voice. AwanZaman is a clever, seven-weight powerhouse that makes extensive use of OpenType’s stylistic sets (20 in the Arabic and four in the Latin) so writers and designers can make the most of everything from a single glyph in display sizes down to dense text in paragraphs. As AwanZaman Arabic has no italic, neither does the Latin; contextual distinction normally handled by italics is achieved by exploiting the family’s seven weights. AwanZaman’s intricate OpenType programming supports Persian and Urdu, with features such as the returning tail of Barri Yeh treated properly. From its inception in geometry to its melding of two worlds with novel forms, AwanZaman is a personal labor by designers Dr Mamoun Sakkal and Juliet Shen, and embodies the TypeTogether ideals of serving the global community with innovative and stylish typeface solutions. The complete AwanZaman Arabic and Latin families, along with our entire catalogue, have been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Sur is a modern minimalist sans-serif typeface available in two weights (normal and bold), with a good shape for big editorial headlines and fashion publications. It was developed during 2009, trying to find a new way to express ideas in editorial projects.

FranklinGothicHandCond is another part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked in advertising. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past, Gert Wiescher.

FranklinGothicHandBold is another part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked in advertising. When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts. We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest "Magic Marker" this side of the Atlantic. Great days, just like today! Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher

Originally ZionTrain was built as a (probably first in Cyrillic!) navigation typeface for the Kharkiv identity project and Kharkiv subway and airport navigation systems. We wanted comprehensible, distinctive letterforms, that can help everybody on the way from Babylon to Zion. The project was used in Kharkiv promotion at homeland and abroad, but was rejected by the new government. As a corporate typeface it was used for a few cultural projects. Now it is equipped with Slavic Cyrillic and Monotonic Greek and has special Stencil faces especially for low-budget navigations (don't forget to get your own Stencil Medium for free!).

Sometimes you get an idea stuck in your head and the only way to get rid of that demon is to put something down on paper. A year later the doodles became a skeleton, and then the skeleton had a body, then the body had a name, then the name got a personality. What was left was a clean set of ten fonts that encompass a very simple skeleton with a lot of visual appeal. During the process, I saw ways to expand the typeface's display capabilities by producing inline styles as well as a down-and-dirty rough set. Each font has a full set of glyphs that include Central European and Small Cap characters.

Sometimes you get an idea stuck in your head and the only way to get rid of that demon is to put something down on paper. A year later the doodles became a skeleton, and then the skeleton had a body, then the body had a name, then the name got a personality. What was left was a clean set of ten fonts that encompass a very simple skeleton with a lot of visual appeal. During the process, I saw ways to expand the typeface’s display capabilities by producing inline styles as well as a down-and-dirty rough set. Each font has a full set of glyphs that include Central European and Small Cap characters.

Sometimes you get an idea stuck in your head and the only way to get rid of that demon is to put something down on paper. A year later the doodles became a skeleton, and then the skeleton had a body, then the body had a name, then the name got a personality. What was left was a clean set of ten fonts that encompass a very simple skeleton with a lot of visual appeal. During the process, I saw ways to expand the typeface's display capabilities by producing inline styles as well as a down-and-dirty rough set. Each font has a full set of glyphs that include Central European and Small Cap characters.

Architype Universal is a collection of avant-garde typefaces deriving mainly from the work of artists/designers of the inter-war years, whose ideals underpin the design philosophies of the modernist movement in Europe. Their ‘universal’, ‘single alphabet’ theory limits the character sets. Architype Bayer was drawn from Bauhaus Archiv sketches for a minimal sans typeface that was created in 1925 by Herbert Bayer, based on his single-alphabet student thesis. This ‘universal’ alphabet was designed for exclusive Bauhaus use, but never cut as a typeface.

After the Second World War, the Ionic style replaced Modern Face as the favored typeface for newsprint. A couple decades later, it was in turn replaced by the next generation of newspaper fonts, a mix of Old Face, Transitional and Modern Face forms. Rotation was designed by Arthur Ritzel and presented by Stempel/Linotype in 1971 and named for the rotation newsprint machine for which is was particularly suited. The font displays the influence of Old Face design and gives newsprint a feeling of lightness and elegance.

Paperly is the perfect way to add a friendly, hand-written touch to any project! It's simple and minimalist design conveys a calm and friendly feel. It was designed by Rachel Kick based on original hand-drawn letters. Each character was initially drawn on paper before being transformed into a simple typeface. It has 4 styles that can be combined or used individually to fit the needs of any project.

The front page of a late-1940s sales catalog for the [now defunct] Duro Decal Company of Chicago had its company name hand-lettered in a tall, condensed chamfered sans serif type design. Although chamfered lettering had been popular for decades, the way the "R" was shaped gave the letters a bit of an Art Deco influence, and this influence was carried through in the creation of Durable JNL.

Here's another old-timer that needed a lowercase, so we drew one. Originally issued as a caps-only type by The American Type Founders Company about 1898, this font found its way into Craftsman period design. It was the inspiration for Galadriel, a dry transfer sheet alphabet.

Thymesans was one of Chank’s earliest fonts, created way back in 1994 for CAKE Magazine. Sometimes it's got serifs, sometimes it doesn't. “What a weird and fickle futuristic font!” says Chank. Emancipate your designs with this decidedly modern font. Good for funk or country album covers.

Bitmax is the work of British designer Alan Birch, who was inspired by the look of fax transmissions. He took Helvetica medium and used controlled distortions to create this commanding, high-tech style. Bitmax is best used in large display sizes for a limited number of words.

The design of Bramber was inspired by Allied propaganda posters of the second World war, especially Russian posters. It has a distinctive solid, geometric appearance. 
Bramber also has a feel of mid 1980s design. Bramber is ideal for use as a distinctive headline or display font.