Always intrigued by Bodoni's original work, I was set out—back in 2000—to examine his work and study Manuale Tipografico, one of the greatest specimen books ever printed. Issued in 1818 at Parma, Italy by Bodoni's widow, the two-volume work shows an impressive array of 142 roman alphabets and some foreign ones such as Greek and Cyrillic. After a careful examination of all characters, I decided to create a typeface based on the distinct script capitals presented in the book. Matching lowercase italics were later selected and designed to complete the series. Since my intention was not to create simply a digital version of Bodoni's work, this typeface was designed with connected characters and capitals with extra calligraphic elements. The result was released in 2002 and published in our award-winning catalog/book IDEA/Trendsetting Typography vol.1. Later in 2005 we revived a large number of ornaments and borders (credit goes to designer George Lygas). All this work was left behind till recently when it was revisited to create a complete 'Pro' family. Several new uppercase and lowercase glyphs were designed in order to create a distinct typeface, which is based on Bodoni but yet it stands out on its own. The new version also takes care of conflicts between neigbouring letters, something that was not included in the first version. Bodoni Script Pro is a 3-weight superfamily. It supports 10 special opentype features including 'contextual alternates' as well as support for both Latin and Greek. Each font comes with 725 glyphs including a large number of alternates as well as 144 ornaments. Furthermore, when you purchase the whole package you get a bonus font which contains 120 frame parts. These parts, when put together, create some truly amazing borders. -Panos Vassiliou

Bodoni Classic Bold Ornate is another puzzlestone in my ever growing Bodoni Classic family. This time the letters are ornated within the limits of the letter, this keeps the classic form of the typeface intact and still gives it ample decoration. Please use this font only sparingly to decorate text or use it as initials only. Your Bodonimaniac, Gert Wiescher

Old Bodoni Wide JNL is based on examples of this classic Bodoni design and contains the quirks and imperfections one might find within a wood type font.

Bodoni Classic Free Style is my really fat, high contrast free flowing, liberated designed, script-like non-script extension to my ever expanding Bodoni Classic family.

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

This typeface is based on Guillaume I Le Bé typeface. This font has all diacritic accents including the chanting diacritic (trop) and modern Nikud (Holam Chaser, Shevana, Kamatz Katan and Dagesh Hazak).

This typeface is based on Guillaume I Le Bé typeface. This font has all diacritic accents including the chanting diacritic (trop) and modern Nikud (Holam Chaser, Shevana, Kamatz Katan and Dagesh Hazak).

This charming, all caps display font was inspired by outdoor chalk board signage in front of outdoor cafes. These are common on the streets of places like London, Paris, Montreal, and Belgium. The letters are casual by design with just enough texture for convincing chalk marks. Use Cafe Francoise for a bakery logo, cafe menu, or poster. Basic Latin, extended Latin, diacritics, punctuation, kerning, and graphics are included. Please check the glyph map for all supported characters and images.

The bigger the better! M8T Mamma Mia is a broken Bodoni inspired serif font whose each character has been handdrawn. Hundreds of strokes build this rough, yet soft font. It is perfect for titles, especially in large scales. Using it on chalkboard backgrounds you will realize the inspiration of chalk-board-writing.

This blackletter font displays best the voluptuous coziness of South German Baroque. You almost automatically visualize Alpine villages and Swiss chalets, or buxom girls serving beer in steins or herding their bell-ringing cattle.

London is one of my favourite cities, so it was about time I named a font after it. Well, technically, I named a font after one of London’s districts. Southwark comes from the Anglo-Saxon word Suthriganaweorc, which means ‘Fort of the men of Surrey’. The font Southwork is a handmade Clarendon. I used a Japanese brush pen to create the outlines. I gave the glyphs texture by filling them in with a brush and Chinese ink. Southwark, therefore, has an uneven look and a brushy texture. It looks good on just about anything, but posters, greeting cards and product packaging come to mind.

Released on the occasion of the 2012 London Olympics, Olympukes 2012 was a new set of pictograms telling the ‘real’ story of the Olympics and extending the unofficial project that began in 2004. The occasion of the London games provided an opportunity to revisit the complex contradictions of the modern Olympics and to acknowledge the geopolitical shifts of the intervening eight years. The 2012 games arrived at a time of great economic and political uncertainty for the nation and Europe. Greece – the host of the 2004 games – was now located at Ground Zero of a disintegrating Eurozone and the United Kingdom was two years into a programme of austerity enacted by the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Given that the previous London Olympics had been held in 1948, in a climate of recovery and austerity after a devastating World War (1948’s Olympiad was dubbed the ‘Austerity Games’) there was a sick irony to the 2012 games' arrival. The suppression of human rights in order to deliver the perfect games for PRoC’s Beijing games shocked no-one and yet, in London, the security measures seemed grossly excessive. Then again, in a country with an estimated 1.8 million cctv cameras, perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised. Another aspect of the Olympics that returned for 2012 was the unfettered commercialism – if you think the Games are about pure sport, about noble human endeavour, think again. Please note that Barnbrook Fonts is in no way affiliated with, or has received any endorsement from, the International Olympic Committee, the organising committees of the Olympic Games, or any national Olympic committee.

Based on the original typeface from Face, London, circa 1972.

In the 1970s, Face Photosetting in London was known as the preeminent typesetting house in London. Steve worked in the studio in Newman Street and Hanway Place. El Paso Pro is a family of typefaces based on a unique single font design from the Face Collection, called El Paso.

An authentic collection of engineered fonts, constructed in East London. Docklands is a handmade font family inspired by the creation of the London docks in the early 18th century. The rough edged sign written style is evocative of the era when iron works and boatbuilding wharfs lined the River Thames.

Stefan Claudius developed this font while he was sitting in a small chalet in Denmark with a hot wood-oven and nothing but snow outside. Probably the amount of white led him to make it so thin and to have as much space between the lines as possible. If you have that in mind, it looks best in large sizes.

Redrawn from an old wood type we picked up in London. The original manufacturer is unknown. We added the lowercase to increase is usefulness.

Worthington Arcade is a classically-proportioned capitals-only type incorporating a selection of ligatures and alternates. It loosely resembles the hand-painted architectural lettering of the 30s to the 50s, exemplified by the likes of Percy Smith’s interior signage for the BBC or George Mansell’s lettering for the University of London and the signs found on London’s bridges. However, rather than a slavish copy of any historical model, it is more an examination and evocation of certain idiosyncratic quirks of civic lettering of the period, and an attempt to create a peculiarly English titling typeface. The round letters, for example the O, Q and C, are wider than the perfect circle usually found in such designs, while the straight-sided characters, usually drawn on a square, are narrower. This lends the whole a subtle elegance that is also emphasized by the raised crossbars on the H, E and F and extended lower leg of the E. Includes old-style numerals.

POWERPLAY a monospace lowercase alphabet with a 3D twist. Designed by André Toet in 1976 (during his study at Central School of Art & Design, London, UK) and he redesigned this in 2011. The name Powerplay is based on the Battersea Power Station, London. The remarkable architecture of the building is also used as a decor for films and for one of the covers by Pink Floyd (Animals, the flying pig). Concept/Art Direction/ Design: André Toet © 2017

Picadilly family was made after my short visit in London and huge impression of Edward Johnston works. I've designed family of 20 modern typefaces with strong personality.

Originally developed as a logotype proposal for the Metropolitan Hotel in Park Lane, London. Available in upper case only, Metropolitan is a pure, streamlined, contemporary display typeface.

Brick Lane is an picture font consisting of 52 detailed, hand drawn illustrations of people seen on Brick Lane, a street in the heart of the Bangladeshi community in the East End of London. It has over the last few years become the home of parts of the creative industries in London, mainly media, fashion and graphics. All illustrations are based on photographs taken on location over a period of time. The photographs are then hand traced to create high quality, detailed silhouettes.

The font design is inspired by the long autumn evenings in London. Those "fast brown foxes" ran along the streets. Camden smelled delicious. And she was as beautiful as a queen.

Atlas is an affable display font (think friendly neighborhood pub) originally created by Day & Collins of London. Atlas has thick strokes and triangular, rounded serifs. Some characters feature curly, decorative elements.

Recently the Rogue family was designed as an accompaniment to Paralucent for Loaded, London's notorious lads-mag that had found its design being cloned by the competition and sought something unique to set it apart.

London's Reed and Fox 1874 specimen book featured two faces, Viennese and Corinthian, combined here in one elegant decorative face. Both versions support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

ITC Johnston is the result of the combined talents of Dave Farey and Richard Dawson, based on the work of Edward Johnston. In developing ITC Johnston, says London type designer Dave Farey, he did “lots of research on not only the face but the man.” Edward Johnston was something of an eccentric, “famous for sitting in a deck chair and carrying toast in his pockets.” (The deck chair was his preferred furniture in his own living room; the toast was so that he’d always have sustenance near at hand.) Johnston was also almost single-handedly responsible, early in this century, for the revival in Britain of the Renaissance calligraphic tradition of the chancery italic. His book Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering (with its peculiar extraneous comma in the title) is a classic on its subject, and his influence on his contemporaries was tremendous. He is perhaps best remembered, however, for the alphabet that he designed in 1916 for the London Underground Railway (now London Transport), which was based on his original “block letter” model. Johnston’s letters were constructed very carefully, based on his study of historical writing techniques at the British Museum. His capital letters took their form from the best classical Roman inscriptions. “He had serious rules for his sans serif style,” says Farey, “particularly the height-to-weight ratio of 1:7 for the construction of line weight, and therefore horizontals and verticals were to be the same thickness. Johnston’s O’s and C’s and G’s and even his S’s were constructions of perfect circles. This was a bit of a problem as far as text sizes were concerned, or in reality sizes smaller than half an inch. It also precluded any other weight but medium ‘ any weight lighter or heavier than his 1:7 relationship.” Johnston was famously slow at any project he undertook, says Farey. “He did eventually, under protest, create a bolder weight, in capitals only ‘ which took twenty years to complete.” Farey and his colleague Richard Dawson have based ITC Johnston on Edward Johnston’s original block letters, expanding them into a three-weight type family. Johnston himself never called his Underground lettering a typeface, according to Farey. It was an alphabet meant for signage and other display purposes, designed to be legible at a glance rather than readable in passages of text. Farey and Dawson’s adaptation retains the sparkling starkness of Johnston’s letters while combining comfortably into text. Johnston’s block letter bears an obvious resemblance to Gill Sans, the highly successful type family developed by Monotype in the 1920s. The young Eric Gill had studied under Johnston at the London College of Printing, worked on the Underground project with him, and followed many of the same principles in developing his own sans serif typeface. The Johnston letters gave a characteristic look to London’s transport system after the First World War, but it was Gill Sans that became the emblematic letter form of British graphic design for decades. (Johnston’s sans serif continued in use in the Underground until the early ‘80s, when a revised and modernized version, with a tighter fit and a larger x-height, was designed by the London design firm Banks and Miles.) Farey and Dawson, working from their studio in London’s Clerkenwell, wanted to create a type family that was neither a museum piece nor a bastardization, and that would “provide an alternative of the same school” to the omnipresent Gill Sans. “These alphabets,” says Farey, referring to the Johnston letters, “have never been developed as contemporary styles.” He and Dawson not only devised three weights of ITC Johnston but gave it a full set of small capitals in each weight ‘ something that neither the original Johnston face nor the Gill faces have ‘ as well as old-style figures and several alternate characters.

This is a classic early 20th century Yiddish font. This has all the new modern Nikud like: Qamats Katan, ShevaNa, Dagesh Hazak and Holam Chaser.

This is a classic early 20th century Yiddish font. This has all the new modern Nikud like: Qamats Katan, ShevaNa, Dagesh Hazak and Holam Chaser.

This is a classic early 20th century Yiddish font. This has all the new modern Nikud like: Qamats Katan, ShevaNa, Dagesh Hazak and Holam Chaser.