The earliest form of Ionic was brought out by Vincent Figgins in 1821 and was intended for display work. In 1863 a more refined version appeared which had more contrast between thick and thin strokes and the serifs were bracketed. Further developments were made, however the robustness of the Egyptian style was retained making the face suitable for newspaper text setting. With a large x-height and strong hairlines and serifs, the Ionic font family became widely used by the newspaper industry as a body type and provided a model for many twentieth century newspaper typefaces.

Copenhagen has been in need of a typeface that unites the city’s many visual expressions. The three designers Morten Rostgaard Olsen, Henrik Birkvig and Ole Søndergaard have designed and developed the typeface FP København. Now available from MyFonts in 44 styles: Serif & sans serif, uprights & italics, small caps, pictos-characters, stencils, sprayed style, OT-features, ligatures, contextual alternates etc. The shapes of the letters are inspired by the city’s culture and the visual environment and design in Denmark in the 20th century. It is relatively low and wide as the city itself and with rounded corners that give it a warm visual mood.

Humber is a rational sans serif typeface designed with a large X-height to provide clarity at both text and display sizes – with subtle features that really shine at larger sizes. Inspired by 20th century typefaces and modern European designs, Humber is suitable for a wide range of projects and audiences looking for a typeface that feels professional – without being overly familiar. Featuring seven weights and matching italics, discretionary ligatures, lining, old-style, and tabular figures, and conditional kerning for accented characters, Humber is truly versatile. With over 738 glyphs, Humber supports over 339 latin-based languages.

Vermont is an outline semi slab serif created by British designer Freda Sack. The serifs of Vermont are typical of slab serif fonts, having the same stroke width as the base strokes and forming a right angle to them. The strong figures of this font still manage to seem light and airy and the marked shading makes them seem almost plastic or sculpted. This class of font appeared at the beginning of the 20th century as an advertisement typeface, rose in popularity through the 1950s and phototypesetting in the 1970s. Vermont should be used exclusively in headlines and displays in larger point sizes.

Manhattan Midnight owes its style to Art Deco fonts of the early 20th century. It has the opulence of New York City in the 20s and 30s, the glitter of city lights, the glamour of movie stars, the razzmatazz of Manhattan in the bad old days. You can use Manhattan Midnight for all advertising with an art deco flavor, for music media needing a bluesy, retro look, for movie posters reminiscent of the era, and so many more applications. The font has all the features usually included in a fully professional font. Language support includes all European character sets.

Manufacturer JNL is a reinterpretation of the classic type face Venus Extra Bold Extended, and is available in both regular and oblique versions. According to Wikipedia: “Venus or Venus-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family released by the Bauer Type Foundry of Frankfurt am Main, Germany from1907 onwards. Released in a large range of styles, including condensed and extended weights, it was very popular in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It was exported to other countries, notably the United States, where it was distributed by Bauer Alphabets Inc, the U.S. branch of the firm.”

Portello is a display family in the tradition of Tuscan advertising and display faces. It's a family of three 'all capital' faces. A perpendicular regular form is offered, along with an italic form (a true italic - with purpose designed glyphs-NOT merely an oblique) and a basic form for small text - which dispenses with the family's characteristic outlined look. It offers the spirit of the Victorian era with ready and distinctive legibility. It's ideal for poster work, especially at large sizes, and for signage with a period flair. Why not give your work the flair of colorful 19th century commercial design today?

Layering of individual styles forms the basis for the sans typeface Clown. The font family comprises 18 various styles that precisely fit together. Simply cover one style over another to create over 150 original typefaces to freshen up your work. Clown is a striking headline font that would work well for a retro-style café, bar or club and evokes the style of a Wild West saloon. A similarly decorated typeface was popular for decorating posters and advertisements in the early 19th century. The font family contains uppercase letters and diacritics for most Latin languages, figures, arrows and currency symbols.

Inspired by the lettering on Koloman Moser’s poster design for Fromme’s Calendar (circa 1912), Nouveau Calendar JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions. According to Wikipedia: “Koloman Moser (30 March 1868 – 18 October 1918) was an Austrian artist who exerted considerable influence on twentieth-century graphic art and one of the foremost artists of the Vienna Secession movement and a co-founder of Wiener Werkstätte. Moser designed a wide array of art works, including books and graphic works from postage stamps to magazine vignettes; fashion; stained glass windows, porcelains and ceramics, blown glass, tableware, silver, jewelry, and furniture.”

Niveau Grotesk—the companion of Niveau Serif —is a type family of six weights plus matching italics and small caps. It was designed by Hannes von Döhren in 2013. Influenced by classical nineteenth-century faces, the fonts are based on geometric forms. Because of its straight architecture, Niveau Grotesk has a “punch” in big sizes but is very legible in smaller sizes and longer texts—in print or on screen. Niveau Grotesk is equipped for complex, professional typography with alternate letters, arrows, fractions and an extended character set to support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European Languages.

Sheet music at the beginning of the 20th Century reflects both the musical and artistic tastes of the times in often colorful ways. It seemed to be a favorite thing amongst songwriters of that era to come up with very wordy song titles. The cover of the sheet music for 1907’s “Every Little Bit Added to What You’ve Got Makes Just A Little Bit More” checks in at fourteen words, but the hand lettered title (done in an Art Nouveau style) made it worthy of transposition into a digital type face. Nouveau Years JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The font Eckmann is named after its designer, Otto Eckmann, and appeared with the Klingspor font foundry in 1900. The influence of the Jugendstil is clear to see in the flowing floral contours of the letters. This font was made for larger point sizes, like on posters, and while relatively legible, it is not meant for smaller print. The font was often used in book titles and advertisements of the 19th century and today Eckmann is often used to suggest a feeling of nostalgia and is often found on the Jugendstil facades in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Cottonwood is a group effort of the typeface artists K.B. Chansler, B. Lind and J. Redick and displays the unmistakable look of the Wild West. It is stylistically modelled on the typefaces used in advertisements and signage toward the end of the 19th century. Typical for these capital alphabets are the split serifs which emphasize the markedly decorative character. Cottonwood is a kind of homage to the Western typefaces (woodtypes) which became popular through their use on Wanted signs in Western films. Cottonwood is best used sparingly in headlines to best emphasize its decorative, 'wild' character.

A few bold caps drawn by Albert Du Bois for the 1906 Henderson Sign Painter book started me in the direction of looking at how sign painters approached slabs after the industrial revolution. The usual happened from there. My exercise in the early lettering roots of what eventually became the definition of geometric typography ended up having a life of its own. The majuscules led to minuscules, one idiosyncratic bold weight led to six more, and uprights led to italics. What was kind-of-interesting in the early twentieth century persuaded me to make it interesting enough a century later. This of course meant alternates, swashes, the standard baggage that keeps calling my name. Henderson Slab is a family of seven weights plus italics, all full of open features and extended Latin language support. Part of this family’s appeal is its coverage of nearly the entire of the slab serif through the last 100 years — the basis is the manual, humanist origins, the swashed forms come right out of the phototypesetting era, and the alternates and mostly modern constructs of contemporary ideas. The result is a set with the ability to function in modern spaces, from corporate to editorial, in text or display, while both winking and nodding at the roots of what is now considered a geometric endeavor. (Basic version do not include alternates, swashes, etc).

Designed by Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini and Andrea Tartarelli with Maria Chiara Fantini, Lovelace is Zetafonts homage to the tradition of nineteenth century “Old Style” typography - a revival of Renaissance hand-lettered shapes driven by the desire to create a less formal and more friendly alternative to Bodonian serifs. While taking inspiration from the letter shapes created by Pheimester or Alexander Kay - with their calligraphic curves and heavy angled serifs that influenced Benguiat and Goudy’s typefaces in the 70s - we also tried to add elegance and contrast by following another 19th century revival style: the Elzevir. This digital homage to victorian typography, aptly named after the algorist daughter of lord Byron, is developed in two optical sizes, both in a six weights range from extralight to extrabold. The text variant offers maximum readability thanks to the generous x-height and screen-friendly design, while the display variant excels in the sharp contrast and thin details needed for editorial and large-size titling use. The italics, strongly influenced by calligraphy, have been complemented with a display script family, including luscious swashes and connected lowercase letters, lovingly designed by Zetafont in-house calligrapher. All the thirty weights of Lovelace cover over 200 languages that use latin, cyrillic and greek alphabets, and include advanced Open Type features as Stylistic Alternates, Standard and Discretionary Ligatures, Positional Numerals, Small Caps and Case Sensitive Forms.

The Farfa fonts were designed for institutional use, commissioned by the City of Fara in Sabina, Italy. This project started from the study of the manuscripts found in the Abbey of Farfa, penned in a variant of the lower case of “Carolingian” typical style of that area. The Capital, ligatures and Small Caps, however, are based on the uncial writing that often appears in those codes and manuscripts. Farfa Abbey is a territorial abbey in northern Lazio, central Italy. It is one of the most famous abbeys of Europe. It belongs to the Benedictine Order and is located about 60 km from Rome, in the commune of Fara Sabina The origin of the Abbey is still unknown. Archaeological discoveries seem to prove that the first monastic establishment was built on the ruins of a pagan temple. The Vandals destroyed the first monastery in the fifth century. Only a few documents from the sixth-century prove the early presence of the monastic community. It had the heritage of Charlemagne (S VIII), the Lombard chiefs, and later the Carolingians, succeeded in withdrawing Farfa from obedience to the Bishops of Rieti, and in securing many immunities and privileges for the monastery. Farfa was at this period the most important monastery in Italy both from the point of view of worldly possession and ecclesiastical dignity.

Engaging the issue of scalability, Beaufort® is configured so that serifs render with great sharpness, independent of type size, limited only by device resolution. This scale of effect empowers the typographer with a design axis stretching from awesomely huge to preciously tiny, further enhanced by weights from Light to Heavy, small caps, and alternate figure styles. In style, Beaufort has a number of affinities. In particular, the bold romans recall a kind of “grotesque with small serifs” style popular with sign painters and package lettering artists in the early 20th century, and still going strong. In proportion, the basic Beaufort is in the vein of the classic oldstyle types that descend from Granjon , via the French Oldstyles, or Elzevirs, to Plantin and Times in the early twentieth century. Designed for optimum clarity, readibility, and word count, these types have a pronounced angle of stress in the lower case, which is quite large and fairly narrow in relation to the caps. None of the caps are exceptionally narrow, and both cases have an evenness of width that makes for a no-nonsense, orthodox appearance. The strength of the capitals distinguishes these types from those of another “optimizing” era, the 1970s and ’80s, when puny caps made for monotonous text. However, strong though they may be, Beaufort’s caps are not as obtrusive in text as those of Times or Plantin.

Swiss 721™ is a sans serif family that ranges in style from thin to black while mixing in a few unexpected, but beautifully made and ironically flattering, outline weights that spice up the grotesque design. Couple these upstanding letterforms with matching italic styles and you have yourself a beautiful tool that is as legible on screen as it is off, has the technical prowess to conquer even the trickiest of design riddles and will work in a myriad of projects. Swiss 721 is a staple sans serif that you’ll never be sorry you have in your library. It’s been said that a simple sans serif is one of the most difficult typefaces to design. This is because when letters are reduced to their most basic details, irregularities and inconsistencies in design become immediately visible. The Swiss 721 typeface family is a quintessential example of letterforms distilled to their essence while still possessing warmth and verve. Based on mid-century sans serif typefaces, Swiss 721 is a versatile family of weights and proportions ideally suited to a wide variety of print and interactive design projects and is equally at home as headlines on billboards as it is navigation content on small screens. Swiss 721 takes the essence of mid 20th century sans serif typefaces and melds it with modern design consistency and a systematic weight range.

Sultan is a revival and expansion of a 1954 Matrin Kausche typeface called Mosaik. This design highlights the unmistakable Arabic/Moorish calligraphy influence on Celtic lettering, by way of the highly active Andalusian culture from the ninth century until the crusades in the early eleventh century. Although Celtic lettering evolved on its own and prompted different calligraphic styles after the crusades, elements of the Arabic influence survived with it, its appeal remaining evident to this very day. For instance, this kind of lettering is very similar to the one Louis Tiffany used to make the most recognizable athletic insignia in North America - the New York Yankees logo, which is now over 110 years old, and has inspired hundreds of spin-offs in many athletic and non-athletic fields all over the world. The original character set made by Kausche was quite minimal, consisting of only numerals and uppercase letters along with a few alternates. But in this digital version the set has been considerably expanded into uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation, a complete set of accented characters, and more than 15 alternate letters built into the font. Sultan is a great font choice particularly for design contexts of fantasy, middle ages legend, mystical and new age content, pirate literature, and Irish history. But it is also an excellent all-purpose display and poster font in general.

- Unique Modernist Look - 590+ characters per font - Standard & Discretionary Ligatures - Multiple Stylistic Sets - Old Style Figures - Case-Sensitive Punctuation - Multilingual - Cyrillic Included - Uppercase + Lowercase Porte is an elegant sans serif font inspired by stone carving and modernist typefaces of early 20th century. While at its core Porte is a display font, it can also be used for larger bodies of text and in a variety of projects. Thanks to its unique proportions and feel Porte is reminiscent of early 20th century type, wherein aesthetic qualities often overweighed matters of practicality and applicability. Porte is at once delicate and sturdy, subtle and unyielding. Porte is very OpenType friendly, boasting an awesome selection of useful OpenType features, precise and exhaustive kerning (around 1000 pairs) and lots of discretionary ligatures to make your designs look amazing. A selection of wider and narrower alternate glyphs allow the designer to modify the rhythm of the typeface, extending its application and impact. With 590+ characters on board, Porte supports all major Latin based languages as well as a number of Cyrillic languages. Porte received its first major update in fall 2022. Not only was the character set expanded considerably, but also some glyphs were re-drawn to fix visual inconsistencies, and a large number of stylistic alternates was added. The kerning, too, was re-done to accommodate new letterforms. Trials available upon request.

The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. From 1610 he worked in the printing office of the Calvinist Academy in Sedan, where he was awarded the title "Imprimeur de son Excellence et de l'Academie Sédanoise". He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman type face and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that type face at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms. Jannon's italics rank among the most successful italics of all time – they are brilliantly cut and elegant.

Garnet as a modern font kit inspired by fonts and calligraphy of XX centure. It includes Capitals (6 Styles) and Script so you can combine them as you like. Geometric Sans + Handwritten Script is a modern and fresh looking combination which can be used for many tasks. Garnet is good for headlines, posters, packaging, book covers, cards and as a starting point for logotypes.

Deco Metro is a 1920s and 30s inspired display family, ideal for posters, banners, book covers and other promotional work. Two weights, regular (with an incised centre line) and bold (without the centre line) are offered. The family has an extensive range of features including discretionary ligatures, old-style numerals, Swash Letter and numeral forms, small capitals, Roman numerals and fractions.

A 1926 travel brochure for a steamship line provided the basis for this darkly sparkly spritely font. Smooth curves and an off-center inline treatment gives this typeface a strong architectural feel.

AZ Clouds was inspired from a need to develop a sans serif typeface with center accents for a t-shirt design. This font was designed for use as a fun bold headline.

Selectric typewriter font. The part of the large, many years project on revival and further development (over 1000 glyphs) of the 20th century’s most famous typewriter Selectric golfball fonts, lost for many decades, not being created since then in digital vector form.

ITC Werkstatt is a result of the combined talents of Alphabet Soup's Paul Crome and Satwinder Sehmi, along with Ilene Strizver and Colin Brignall. It is inspired by the work of Rudolph Koch, the renowned German calligrapher, punchcutter, and type designer of the first third of this century, without being based directly on any of Koch's typefaces. Werkstatt has obvious affinities with the heavy, woodcut look of Koch's popular Neuland, but also with display faces like Wallau and even the light, delicate Koch Antiqua. Brignall began by drawing formal letters with a 55mm cap height, which Sehmi reinterpreted using a pen with a broad-edge nib. “Not an easy process,” says Brignall, “since one of the features of Koch's style is that while it was calligraphic in spirit, most of the time his counter shapes did not bear any resemblance to the external shapes, as they would in normal calligraphy. This meant that Sehmi could not complete a whole character in one go, but had to create the outside and inside shapes separately and then ink in the center of the letters.” The process was repeated, only without entirely filling in the outlines, for the Engraved version. Crome handled the scanning and digitization, maintaining the hand-made feel while creating usable digital outlines. “The collaboration of artisans with particular skills,” says Brignall, “in a modern-day, computer-aided studio environment, seems very much in step with the 'workshop' ethos that Rudolph Koch encouraged and promoted so much.”

Inspired by the idea of found paper objects, this font centers around a strict grid. Combining dot-matrix printers with subtle serifs, it combines old and new. Recommended usage is as a display font.

Al Seg 33 is a moderately dense alphanumeric display. The 33 segments are made up of eight outer segments, and twenty-four inside segments, and a center dot. It has five diagonals in each corner.

DoodleBat Journal Doodles includes several boxes perfect for writing down a secret journals entry or scribbling down a favorite quote or idea.

Fungis is a somewhat �brother� of Fungia. These two typefaces were conceived simultaneously as an experiment on designing typeface based on natural shapes. In both cases it was mushrooms. Of course the main theme of these typefaces is not mushrooms itself (it was just a start point) but the interaction between form and counterform. In spite of unquestioning individuality the font has some associations with wood typefaces from wild west, typefaces from circus posters of 19th century and even slight feeling of gothic. The font can be useful in different cases: posters, titles, book covers, billboards, street signs, magazine spreads and all situations that demand expressive typography.

Columbia Titling is a titling-caps display family based on wide Clarendon-style wood type and industrial signage design from the late-19th and early-20th Century. Columbia Titling includes a small set of OpenType features, including both tabular and proportional figures, special superscript ordinal suffixes, underlined superscript alternate letters, and OpenType fractions. Columbia Titling can have a ‘period feel’ depending on its use, but is fresh enough to use in contemporary designs, like magazine headlines, invitations, or stationery. The typeface — released in four weights — takes its name from the historic S.S. Columbia, a steamboat launched in 1903. Lettering found on the ship’s wheelhouse provided initial inspiration for Columbia Titling.

Vienna designer Viktor Solt has a love affair with handwriting. “Usually” he says “when I start with a specific calligraphic style I take some historic specimens and try to integrate their main features into my own handwriting.” Although there are hints of various 18th-century calligraphic styles in Ballerino it was not based on any historical model. The swash ascenders and descenders on the lowercase are all slightly different; this and the rough texture of the edges gives Ballerino a distinctly hand-written feel. The swash caps are meant to be used only in conjunction with the lowercase not to be combined with each other.

Fabrikat Kompakt (formally known as Fabrikat) is a type family designed by Christoph Koeberlin with creative input of Hannes von Döhren. The Sans Serif family is published by HVD Fonts and consists of seven weights plus matching italics. Its geometric design is based on German 20th century engineers’ typefaces and has a plain and precise appearance. The shapes are optically corrected, yet retain an uncut charm. They work best in display as well as text sizes. The type family is equipped for complex, professional typography with OpenType Features like alternate letters, arrows, fractions and an extended character set to support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European Languages.

Spotlight was created by British designer Tony Geddes in the tradition of the bold serif fonts of early 19th century England. It too is a robust alphabet exhibiting extreme stroke contrasts, however, Geddes gave his font a more relaxed feel by not filling in the strokes completely. Long white rays break up the otherwise dark black strokes, following the form of the outer contours and giving the figures a three dimensional look. Spotlight is also reminiscent of the decorative advertisements of the 1930s and of the glamorous revues and shows of this time. Spotlight is perfect for headlines and display in larger point sizes.

Homenko was the only Ukrainian typeface for metal type casting developed in the last century. It has already become a 'classic'. Vasyl Homenko worked on it from 1964 to 1967. The typeface successfully combines the qualities of lineal humanist typefaces with the Ukrainian tradition of asymmetrical slab serif. The works on its digitization and further development has been in progress since 2000. The present version contains Latin Extended characters, Cyrillic with stressed alternates and several ornaments based on Vasyl Homenko's works. It works perfectly for books for children and is ideal for publications related to culture, history, literature and traditional art of Ukraine and other nations of Eastern Europe.

Max J. Gradl was a German jewelry designer. A Web search today turns up several examples of his work from the turn of the 20th century. He seemed to favor green stones in silver metalwork. Gradl also did advertising work and co-authored a book on architectural design. Most important for our purposes, though, are the incredible hand lettered alphabets and monograms the man left behind. I’ve digitized one of those delightful alphabets and tried to keep it true to the original. Beyond the base character set of letters, numerals and basic punctuation, I had to extrapolate forms that, I hope, hold true to Gradl’s design. Enjoy!

Trithemius, a 15th century Abbott, and influential counselor to Emperor Maximilian I, was also an author who wrote both histories and the first printed work on cryptography which gained him much adverse notoriety. He has been long regarded as a mystic and some of his works were therefore banned. However, it may have been his intention to cloak his cryptology essays in mystical writing to keep people from easily grasping the subject matter, which it has been recently demonstrated, at heart was really cryptological methodology. This font is based on a printed version of the Polygraphiae a text that included many methods of encryption.

Victorina Shadow is a fantasy sans letter display, inspired by the Victorian letters whose stylistic influence dominated the scene graph of the nineteenth and Twentieth century. Victorina has a perfect structure rigorous geometry. Victorina comes in several versions, in this set you will find the Shadow version in black and italic to complement the varied repertoire of styles of Victorina family, besides providing small caps and ornaments. Victorina Shadow let to work fine fantasy headlines when they overlap in layers of different styles. Victorina Shadow is a letter designed to recreate, with a contemporary vision, the spirit of those days of the industrial revolution and the early days of modernism.