The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Thomas Nagel and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Nagel and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! F2F EI Dee Cons one of 41 Face2Face fonts included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype. Nagel designed nine of these himself."

Kanona JNL is modeled from one of the numerous alphabets created by the late Alf R. Becker for Signs of the Times magazine from the 1930s through the 1950s. Thanks to a wealth of source material provided by Tod Swormstedt of ST Media (and who is also the curator of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio), Jeff Levine has been redrawing many of these alphabets and presenting them in digital form. The original variations in letter widths from Becker’s hand-painted alphabet have been left intact.

Digital version of the font Egyptian Bold (Headset No. 8, Narrow fat Egyptian), Cyrillic version of the Egyptienne schmale font, around 1870. A squared antiquarian font with almost no contrast between the strokes. For the reconstruction font were used stamp from the catalog Typefoundry and the factory of copper lines B. Krebs Priemnik, St. Petersburg and Frankfurt am Main; Catalog of hand and machine fonts, Publishing House Book, 1966; Catalog of manual fonts of the Kharkov liner factory, Prapor, 1973; Catalog of fonts typography Volodarskogo, Lenizdat, 1985.

The inspiration for SJURecord was calligraphic lettering used for the title of a student newspaper, St. John’s Record, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The three upper-case and nine lower-case letters were considerably different from any calligraphic lettering I had developed, so I thought creating a complete typeface around these twelve letters would be an interesting challenge. The SJCRecord family has four members: regular, oblique, shadowed, and oblique shadowed. There are alternate letters for A, J, L, S, V, W, and X.

Tarocco is a typical book face with good readability and rather tall x-height. The origin for this typeface is found in Nordisk Antikva. A typeface especially constructed with attention for the Swedish language. Waldemar Zachrisson was determined to realize his ideas and in 1906 he began to cooperate with the foundry Genzsch & Heyse, based in Hamburg. Some influences of Jugendt can be found and the typeface were released in 1910. It became rather popular until around 1930. The MRF version includes 7 weights all together.

German Designer Klaus Sutter digitized Bazar, a brush script typeface from the 1950s originally drawn by Imre Reiner (1900-1987) and published in 1956 by D. Stempel AG. Bazar is a calligraphic brush type free from accurate horizontal and vertical strokes and a contrast to the objective body type. It has a more static character and could be perfectly applied in headlines or as a figurative word mark. Like tradional chinese calligraphers, Imre Reiner was also a painter; this is reflected in the glyphs of Bazar.

A 1930s WPA (Works Progress Administration) poster promoting national parks depicts Native Americans overlooking the land with the tag line "his hunting ground of yesterday". The hand lettering of that text is reminiscent of Futura Black and similar Art Deco stencil-influenced type designs, but is rendered in an oblique lower case with no capitals. Re-drawn as Sandwich Shop JNL, the typeface is now available in both regular (vertical) and oblique versions.

Crimes Times Six is a cool horror font, originally created with a chalk stick back in 2012, by Jonathan S Harris. The typeface design works very well in video games, movies and broadcasting, but also looks great on clothing and posters.

I love geometric sans serifs, their crispness and rationality. Le Havre taps into this style, but for a while, I've wanted to create a font recalling the printed Futura of the 1940s, which seems to have an elusive quality all its own. After seeing an old manual on a World War II ship, I developed a plan for "Le Havre Metal" but chose to shelve the project due to Le Havre's small x-height. That's where Steagal comes in. When Robbie de Villiers and I began the Chatype project in early 2012 (a project which led one publication to label me the Edward Johnston of Chattanooga!), we started closely studying the vernacular lettering of Chattanooga. During that time, I also visited Switzerland, where I saw how designers were using a new, handmade aesthetic with a geometric base. I was motivated to make a new face combining some of these same influences. The primary inspiration for the new design came from the hand-lettering of sign painters in the United States, circa 1930s through 1950s. My Chatype research turned up a poster from the Tennessee Valley Authority in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which exhibited a number of quirks from the unique hand and style of one of these sign artists. Completing the first draft of Steagal, however, I found that the face appeared somewhat European in character. I turned then to the work of Morris Fuller Benton for a distinctly American take and discovered a number of features that would help define Steagal as a "1930s American" vernacular typeface--features I later learned also inspired Morris Fuller Benton's Eagle. The overall development of Steagal was surprisingly difficult, knowing when to deliberately distort optical artifacts and when to keep them in place. Part of type design is correcting optical illusions, and I found myself absentmindedly adjusting the optical effects. In the end, though, I was able to draw inspiration from period signs, inscriptions, period posters, and architecture while retaining just enough of the naive sensibility. Steagal has softened edges, which simulate brush strokes and retain the feeling of the human hand. The standard version has unique quirks that are not too intrusive. Overshoots have almost been eliminated, and joins have minimal corrections. The rounded forms are mathematically perfect, geometric figures without optical corrections. As a variation to the standard, the “Rough” version stands as the "bad signpainter" version with plenty of character. Steagal Regular comes in five weights and is packed with OpenType features. Steagal includes three Art Deco Alternate sets, optically compensated rounded forms, a monospaced variant, and numerous other features. In all, there are over 200 alternate characters. To see these features in action, please see the informative .pdf brochure. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe Creative suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. Steagal also includes support for all Western European languages. Steagal is a great way to subtly draw attention to your work. Its unique quirks grab the eye with a authority that few typefaces possess. Embrace its vernacular, hand-brushed look, and see what this geometric sans serif can do for you.

Inspired by the hand lettering on a 1940 campaign poster for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this condensed, casual sans serif design is now available as Political Poster JNL – in both regular and oblique versions.

Ideal for magazines, posters or flyers, Inlove is a modern take of Ariel Di Lisio’s passion for geometric and very contrasted typefaces. Because the strong influence over his work, Ariel was invited during 2009 to be part of the Herb Lubalin Exhibition at New York. Designed by Ariel Di Lisio and digitized by Ale Paul.

Another variant of Bayer’s Universal Alphabet, resembling ITC Bauhaus in design, ITC Ronda in proportion and fit, prepared by FotoStar in the mid 1970s.

Ad Lib was created by Freeman Craw for ATF in 1961. Sporting irregular character shapes, this informal typeface makes a good impression when a 1960s look is desired in advertising and display work.

The Legal typeface family grew out a sans serif project that Hellmut G. Bomm began in the 1970s (his HGB Grotesk). This refined, industrial type family is well suited for short amounts of text, headlines, corporate identity and logo design. In small sizes, the typeface works like many other sans serifs, but with better differentiation between characters. The Legal family includes oldstyle figures and true italics.

Quendel has been expanded to become Quendel Happy Family. Apart from the new Bold weight for easy distinction and emphasis, there are now four other very exciting variants, rendering different writing tools and writing materials. The basic form of Quendel was written with a Japanese bamboo tip and therefore embodies a form letter of natural flow. The new versions show other features that provide the feel of written scripts. While the styles Wood and Crayon include some alternate characters, Q Marking Pen and Q Fingertip, due to their apparently more complex enacted forms, do not need additional alternates without looking stiff or boring. The wood relief of Quendel Wood was created by a freehand wood relief drawn with oiled chalk. Quendel Marking Pen seems to be written with a felt-tip pen soon depleted. At the same time it is also reminiscent of the blooming effect, which we know from photography. The name of Quendel Fingertip suggests what can be seen - someone seems to have written with the finger in a grainy material. One would like to try it himself. The effect of broken lines which can be gained by writing with chalk as reflected in Quendel Crayon. Almost like parched sandy soil, the writing material seems to crumble.

ITC Ziggy was designed by Bob Alonso, who says it started out as phone doodles in the early 1970s." Alonso rediscovered the sketches years later, thought they revived the feel of the 70s, and decided to digitize the typeface. He liked the form of the letter Z best, so named the font Ziggy. ITC Ziggy reminds its designer of "elephant bellbottoms" and its style as a display face instantly evokes a nostalgia for the 1970s.

Kirshaw is not your grandfather's sans serif from the 1950s and 1960s. All those old classics like Helvetica, Futura, Franklin Gothic, and Univers are showing their age like an old Elvis Presley song. Kirshaw is a clean, rounded design with sharp contrasting edges. Like those classics, Kirshaw is easy to read in small body copy and captions, plus it's delightfully modern and stylish for headlines and logos. I designed Kirshaw and Kirkly while undergoing cancer treatment at Stanford Medical Center. Font design was always in the back of my mind and now I had extra time. Kirshaw is a distinctive, modern, easy-to-read sans serif family consists of 14 weights (including italics). It’s an Adobe Latin 3 Character Set containing 350 glyphs per style (including special characters).

Anyone old enough to remember either the radio or television version of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” pictures Ozzie Nelson as the easygoing father figure who never seemed to have a real job – he was always hanging around the house. In truth, the handsome young Ozzie was a bandleader in the 1930s and 1940s and ended up marrying his ‘girl singer’, Harriet Hilliard. A piece of sheet music from 1933 for “You Have Taken My Heart” was one of the songs Nelson featured with his Columbia Broadcasting System Orchestra. The title was hand lettered in what can only be described as a slightly eccentric Art Deco Sans serif. Redrawn and cleaned up to reflect more uniform stroke weights, Bandshell JNL is now available in both regular and oblique versions.

To design a font Blezja, I was inspired by an old metal tin from 1907 from Potsdam, which was used to store earplugs. From a few letters I created whole typeface - lower and uppercase characters.

Mo' Funky Fresh is the work of New York designer David Sagorski. It is an all capital typeface which includes a set of alternative capitals, compatible symbols and lively illustrations. Mo' Funky Fresh brings to mind sunny days, tiki bars, surfboards and cool drinks and is a great choice for headlines requiring a vital, energetic look.

The original typeface was designed by Albert Kapr between 1971 and 1973 for Typoart in Dresden. Kapr was the font designer and teacher as well as book author on type design of former East Germany. He also was an expert on this kind of type design, and thus, it is no surprise that he created Leipziger Antiqua, a design combining features of both Latin and broken scripts. The result is a stunning and unique gem from earlier times although it does not come along too distinguished or artsy. The digital version of Leipziger Antiqua was developed by Ralph M. Unger exclusively for profonts in 2005. During the work, Unger fell so deeply in love with this typeface that he couldn't help but add an expert font with small caps etc.

Jet is an assertive italic sans that anticipates the return of the simpler, optimistic times when progress was considered positive and forward seemed to be the only way to go. It may have felt right at home in the mid-1970s, the time of Sc-Fi, synthetics and disco, yet it unmistakably belongs to the present. Its dynamic sturdy forms and angular tapering of some horizontal forms convey movement and edgy impatience for change, with a few re-imagined details, like the reversed slant on top of the lowercase t and the atypical round counter of the lowercase a, showing a new hope for the bygone optimism. Available in five weights in Latin and Cyrillic, supporting many languages, with stylistic alternates and two sets of figures. Designed by Gayaneh Bagdasaryan and Vyacheslav Kirilenko, 2020

What do you use to write a price tag at a store or to design a wall menu in a cafe? What to choose – a marker or chalk? Now it makes no more sense to be torn apart by the choice – use both techniques for your design. Walls fontfamily allows to perfectly combine an eco-friendly style with contemporary motives. Walls fontfamily supports over 70 languages and consists of 10 typefaces in 5 popular weights (Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, Black). Initially we wanted to create a font that would imitate an inscription made by a square tip marker which is usually used to write price tags at supermarkets, shops and cafes. During the working process we've decided to extend the conceptual boundaries of the Walls fontfamily and added 5 rough typefaces that imitate the style of ecologic chalk writing

Fette Deutsche Schrift also known as Koch-Fraktur or Kochschrift was created by Rudolf Koch for Klingspor foundry between 1908 and 1910. The basis of this font is a publication in the magazine “Das Plakat” of September 1921. The font contains swash capitals to use as dropcaps, contextual alternates, glyphs for line endings, ligatures, discretional ligatures for use in German, ornaments and other OpenType features. It supports all the European languages using Latin alphabets (including slashed S and slashed long s used in Latvian old orthography till 1930s).

Alexandrya is a subtly modulated block serif font family with a humanist sensibility and all of my personal style for font design. A distant ancestor of the basic letterforms is Minister (a German font of the 1920s) through my first font in the mid-1990s, Diaconia. There are many OpenType features with over 600 characters: Caps, lower case, small caps, ligatures, discretionary ligatures, swashes, small cap figures, old style figures, numerators, denominators, accent characters (including CE), ordinal numbers (1st-infinity: lining and oldstyle), and so on. It is designed for text use in body copy.

Reklame Script is a brush typefamily consisting of four weights. It was designed by Hannes von Döhren in 2010. This family is influenced by the handlettering of printed advertisements of the 1940s and 1950s. You can combine the four weights to gain a better emphasis – perfect for headlines, posters, and other display uses. Reklame Script is equipped for professional typography. The OpenType fonts have an extended character set to support Central and Eastern European as well as Western European languages. The fonts also contain double-letter ligatures to prevent repetition.

Comic books are filled with pages full of the daring adventures of crime fighters with colorful costumes, amazing abilities and wondrous powers. They have enthralled kids of all ages since the 1930s. Costumed Hero JNL emulates both the hand lettered cover titles of those vintage comics as well as the title credits from a 1960s television show based on one of these characters. With its non-conforming letter shapes and varying widths, the lighthearted look of classic comic title art can be yours. The font is available in both regular and oblique versions.

This script font was inspired by the “Ronde” French script. It was in use from 1700s to 1900s (until 1960s in special circumstances) for registers, legal documents and texts, certificates, labels and other documents that must be particularly legible. Today in France, it is still being used for menus, advertising, and labels. The present version is a late 19th Century pattern. This font supports very strong enlargements as well as small sizes. When printed, it remains perfectly legible and elegant from 9/11 pts even if using an ordinary inkjet printer.

The vast resource of hand lettered vintage sheet music titles offers many interesting and unique variations on even the simplest styles of lettering. A simple thick-and-thin serif design circa the 1920s-1930s evokes a reminiscence of the Art Nouveau period combined with a touch of what was to come during the Art Deco era. Most charming is the fact this lettering is free of the formal rules and constraints of metal type, where designers are generally forced into conformity with uniform stroke widths, serif placements and character shapes.

When 45 RPM records were the norm for a teenager’s music collection in the 1950s and 1960s, many discs had their labels printed by letterpress. Some record companies utilized a bold, condensed typeface set in all caps for the song’s title and other pertinent information. The digital version of this font is called Recording Artist JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions. A companion font loosely based on this type design [but with more original characters and a slightly lighter weight] is Promotional Copy JNL.

The calligraphy font Banner was designed by Martin Wait in 1986 and mixes the character of the 1940s with that of the 1980s in its forms. The round and somewhat reserved lower case letters make a balanced basis for the generous capitals. Black outer contours surround a white inner area and are heavier on the right side of the figures, making the characters look as though they have shadows. Banner should be used in point sizes of 18 and larger and is meant for lighthearted short texts or headlines.

Koala was originally designed in 1999 by Eric de Berranger with an individual, independent character. A distinguishing characteristic of this sans serif font is its marked stroke contrast, typical of Modern Face fonts. The open, airy forms are reminiscent of ancient Roman capitals. The lower case letters display traits similar to those often seen on posters and in advertisements of the 1930s and 1940s. The lively Koala is particularly good for shorter texts and headlines in larger point sizes and combines well with fonts with little stroke contrast.

Here’s a novelty font emulating the plastic pennant streamers that were popular in the 1950s and 1960s used to decorate a store parking lot or used car lot for a sales event. The typeface inside the individual pennants is Manufacturer JNL, which can be used for body copy associated with titles made by this font. Parking Lot Sale JNL is available in regular (black letters on white pennants) and black (with white letters). A blank pennant for word spacing or end caps is available on the backslash key.

Retro-futuristic robot terminal type. The 1930s Moderne Streamline decade meets the digital domain in this weird font. Use it in an ad for Ford Tri-Motor Airplane or a story about an out of control 1980s computer monster. Which? Help it find its place- as it is lost in time. Digideco is a minimal font set that includes upper and lowercase letterforms which can be used at various sizes but, we consider it a headline/display font, best applied larger than 36 points in size. Shall we play a game?

Bike Decals JNL captures the fun and nostalgia of the 1950s and 1960s when kids all around the country ran to their local five and dime or hobby store to purchase water applied decals. The "cool" thing would be to customize your bike, little red wagon or anything that would be fair game with various racing symbols, weird space creatures or other unusual images. In this font, Jeff Levine has put his own spin on some of the classic designs of yesteryear, drawing from scratch some of the most popular of their day.

Block-style typefaces make excellent sports-themed fonts, and Stadium JNL is no exception-- but this lettering style is also filled with nostalgia for decades past. Modeled from one of the many classic designs found in the Speedball® Lettering Textbook, this style of alphabet was quite popular in signage of the 1920s and 1930s. Stadium JNL fills the bill either way-- a font that is just as much at home on a gridiron or baseball diamond, or as lettering for a garage, warehouse or attention-getting ad copy.

An interesting hand lettered example of Art Deco lettering (minus the letter ‘L’) was spotted on Pinterest and served as the inspiration for Deco Sketch JNL. Because there was no attribution as to the age or source of the alphabet, it can only be surmised that it was a scan from a 1930s or 1940s source. The original showed many of the irregularities of pen lettering, and had rounded terminals. The digital version has been redrawn more uniformly with flat terminals. Deco Sketch JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

In the MGM musical "Broadway Melody of 1940", a new stage production has its gala opening at the fictitious Lafayette Theater on the Great White Way. The front of the theater is resplendent with classic neon signage, and the theater's name is in an interesting Art Deco design. Musical Number JNL recreates this lettering in digital form.

Satisfaction Pro is the vastly expanded and improved version of the popular font Satisfaction, inspired by cigarette ads from the 1930s. This new OpenType version has over 600 glyphs, including a full set of small caps, lining and oldstyle numbers, and numerous discretionary ligatures and contextual alternates to help create the look and feel of real handwriting.