Since their first appearance as Italians on the pages of the 1821 William Caslon type specimens, reverse contrast typefaces have been typography's best loved quirky outcasts. Subverting the traditional relationship between thick verticals and thin horizontals made them perfect for eye-catching advertisements. The unexpected contrasts and the thick slabs produced by reverse-contrast serifs became ubiquitous in period posters, and synonymous with wild west and circus iconography. In designing Stinger, the Zetafonts design team composed by Maria Chiara Fantini, Andrea Tartarelli and Francesco Canovaro and orchestrated by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini decided to marry this subversive tradition with the workhorse approach of modernist sans serif typefaces like Univers, developing a super-family with four widths, each in five different weights, from thin to heavy. This gives the designer a full range of options for type setting, with the Normal and Fit widths providing two different text-sized alternatives, the wide width adding display and titling options and the Slim ready to deal with the space-saving necessities of extremely long texts. True italics have been added developed for all weights and variants, bringing the Stinger family to a total of 40 fonts, with a latin extended + Russian Cyrillic character set covering over 200 languages, and open type features including positional numbers, stylistic sets and alternate forms. In the crowded panorama of contemporary grotesque typefaces, all aiming to stark geometric perfection, Stinger stands out with its bold choices and strong personality. From the calligraphy-inspired terminals in the thin weights to the logo-ready sculptural approach in the heavy weights, each variant manages to look striking without forgetting the readability and flexibility lessons of modern reverse-contrast classics like those designed by Excoffon or Novarese. A variable version is included with the full family, allowing maximum flexibility and control for the designer over the wide range of expression capabilities of the Stinger super family.

For decades, cereal companies have included premiums [promotional gifts] inside their packages, printed on the cartons or to send for with a special coupon and redemption instructions. During the 1940s, Pep cereal [a long-discontinued Kellogg's brand] offered a series of water-applied decals within its boxes. Most likely made by the Meyercord Company (one of America's largest transfer decal manufacturers at the time), one decal in particular had an alphabet in gold letters with black outlines. (One can only presume the marketing strategy was to have kids bug their parents to buy more Pep cereal if the child needed more than one letter of the alphabet for his or her initials!) Those decal letters have inspired a digital version as the outline character font Toy Decals JNL, which is available in regular oblique, solid and solid oblique styles.

Feast your eyes on Paiute, the sultry script that'll have your design looking hotter than a Vegas summer! This font is so seductive, it'll make your audience swoon harder than when Elvis was at the Sands. The exaggerated top stroke and sharply slanted terminals give Paiute a look that's straight out of the vintage Vegas scene. It's like the Rat Pack meets Marilyn Monroe in a smoky casino bar. Whether you're designing a magazine cover, book cover, or movie poster, Paiute is the perfect choice for that extra touch of va-va-voom. It's like sprinkling glitter on your design - except it won't get stuck in your hair. So why settle for boring fonts when you can make your project stand out like a sequined jumpsuit? Let Paiute help you bring that authentic 1960s Vegas vibe to your marketing. Your audience will be shouting "Viva Las Paiute" in no time!

We know what you're thinking... This is not a new font, just an old one with a few bullet holes in its helmet, dirt on its shins and some carbon scoring on its breastplate. You're thinking this is like a variant cover by Joe Madureira or J. Scott Campbell -- handsome and rugged on the outside but weak and effete on the inside. Well, my fine, font-finagling friend, you'd be Dead Wrong! This really is an All-New, All-Different, All Star, Ultimate Collectable, from the Comicraft House of Ideas! Our Dynamic Duo -- Johnny Comicraft and Ferran 'Nuff Said have brought you another winner from the Silver Age of comic book lettering. It’s a little worse for wear, we admit it, but wouldn't you be after three rounds with the Justice League of Avengers Assembled?!? See the families related to Battle Scarred: Battle Cry & Battle Damaged .

The retail storage box for a vintage metal numbering stamp manufactured by the American Numbering Machine Company had its brand name hand lettered in an Art Nouveau style that most likely went back to the 1920s, as the company was in existence from 1908 to around 1971. Numbering machines were used in offices, schools, libraries, and anywhere a series of numbers needed to be marked onto printed items. Similar to what was called a ‘crash numberer’ used in letterpress shops, the machines could be set to do a run of digits [for example: 4000, 4001, 4002] or repeat numbers for forms used as carbon copies. As computers took over most forms of printing, the use of numbering machines dwindled, but they are still available. The American Numbering Machine Company was one of several Brooklyn, New York companies that specialized in the manufacture of these machines. Retail Packaging JNL replicates the lettering from their packaging, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

VLNL Boulangerie was originally an incomplete set of early 20th century wood type letters, that Donald Roos found in a dust covered carton box stashed away somewhere at the Royal Academy in The Hague. Charmed by the letter forms Donald decided to print them on paper with a printing press. Next he digitised the prints as they came out, including small imperfections and damages. The missing characters were composed and added digitally to complete the alphabet. (See if you can spot those!?) We think VLNL Boulangerie is a little French in appearance (hence the name), it's joyful, warm, a little crunchy and round-ish. It defenitely has that ‘je-ne-sais-quoi’ that seperates it from most wood type grotesques. It can be perfect for lettering on a storefront window of – let's say a bread shop or a lunchroom. Or a logo for a downtown hipster café. VLNL Boulangerie hardly has any limitations actually.

Houschka Alt Pro is a carbon copy of the Houschka Pro family with one key difference: the rounded signature glyphs A & W on the default positions swap places with their straight alternates. Houschka was named after Georg Houschka, a sadly defunct confectioner’s shop in Salzburg, Austria, which had a wonderful 1930s frontage and distinctively rounded letterforms in the sign above the door. Houschka Pro is the follow up to the original Houschka type family which first appeared back in 1999. Character shapes have been improved, kerning and spacing refined, and OpenType features include CE, Baltic, Turkish & Cyrillic language support plus small caps, 3 stylistic sets, contextual alternates, ligatures and 4 sets of numerals. Houschka is a clean and legible modern sans serif typeface which shares the humanist qualities of Gill Sans and Johnston but retains a uniquely charming character of its own (particularly in signature glyphs A, G, Q, W, u & w). The monolinear structure, rounded corners and rolling curves give Houschka a soft and friendly appearance.

A classical 20-th century's (1900s to 1980s) typewriter font for both text and large display usage, titles, signage... A new thicker version of Selectric (2016), as if typed using not a thin carbon ribbon but a coarse fabric one. Both are available on a different models of Selectrics. Made after rare enough samples of the same style used during 1980s in the USSR. Based on the actual letter proportions of the original typewriter Selectric (2016) (Cyrillic ball). This time not monospaced as before, but proportional. The single known so far previous typewriter vector typeface with this 'ink blotting' effect (similarly expanded serifs) as in Dodo (2008) is ITC American Typewriter (1974; by Joel Kaden and Tony Stan) and all its hand drawn analogs from 1980s (and perhaps before). Which, in turn, is resembling ATF Bulletin Typewriter's (1925, 1933; by Morris Fuller Benton) overall proportions, geometry, and even had some natural ink expands in its paper sample (but not by design, as I see it).

Matthew Carter has been refining his design for Alisal for so long, he says, that when he was asked to complete the design for the Monotype Library, it was almost as if he were doing a historical revival of his own typeface. The illusion even extended to changes in his work process: although he now does all his preliminary and final drawing on screen, the first trial renderings of Alisal were done as pencil renderings. Alisal is best classified as an Italian old style design. Originally created between the late 15th and mid-16th centuries in northern Italy, the true Italian old styles were some of the first roman types. They tend to be the most calligraphic of serifed faces, with the axis of their curved strokes inclined to the left, as if drawn with a flat-tipped pen or brush. These designs offer sturdy, free-flowing and heavily bracketed serifs, short descenders, and a modest contrast in stroke weight. Alisal has nearly all the classic Italian old style character traits, plus a few quirks of its own. It is calligraphic in nature, with more of a pen-drawn quality than faces like Palatino or Goudy Old Style. It is more rough-hewn than either Goudy's Kennerley or Benton's Cloister, and is generally heavier in weight than most of the other Italian old style designs. One place where Alisal makes a clean break with traditional old style designs is in the serifs. While sturdy and clearly reflecting pen-drawn strokes, Alisal's serifs have no bracketing and appear to be straight strokes crossing the main vertical. Like Caslon or Trajanus, Alisal is a handsome design when viewed as a block of copy. Ascenders are tall and elegant, and serve as a counterpoint to the robust strength of the rest of the design. Alisal is available as a small family of roman and bold with a complementary italic for the basic roman weight, providing all that is needed for the majority of text typography. Alisal is not as well-known as some of Carter's other typefaces, but this lovely and long-incubated design was certainly worth the wait.