In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older typeface, Plantin, as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space (always important concerns for newspapers). As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman," Morison's revision became "Times New Roman." The Times of London debuted the new typeface in October 1932, and after one year the design was released for commercial sale. The Linotype version, called simply "Times," was optimized for line-casting technology, though the differences in the basic design are subtle. The typeface was very successful for the Times of London, which used a higher grade of newsprint than most newspapers. The better, whiter paper enhanced the new typeface's high degree of contrast and sharp serifs, and created a sparkling, modern look. In 1972, Walter Tracy designed Times Europa for The Times of London. This was a sturdier version, and it was needed to hold up to the newest demands of newspaper printing: faster presses and cheaper paper. In the United States, the Times font family has enjoyed popularity as a magazine and book type since the 1940s. Times continues to be very popular around the world because of its versatility and readability. And because it is a standard font on most computers and digital printers, it has become universally familiar as the office workhorse. Times?, Times? Europa, and Times New Roman? are sure bets for proposals, annual reports, office correspondence, magazines, and newspapers. Linotype offers many versions of this font: Times? is the universal version of Times, used formerly as the matrices for the Linotype hot metal line-casting machines. The basic four weights of roman, italic, bold and bold italic are standard fonts on most printers. There are also small caps, Old style Figures, phonetic characters, and Central European characters. Times? Ten is the version specially designed for smaller text (12 point and below); its characters are wider and the hairlines are a little stronger. Times Ten has many weights for Latin typography, as well as several weights for Central European, Cyrillic, and Greek typesetting. Times? Eighteen is the headline version, ideal for point sizes of 18 and larger. The characters are subtly condensed and the hairlines are finer."

Akira Kobayashi's ITC Seven Treasures is a symbol font for use in patterns and textures. The interlocking patterns, usually circular or oval, are taken primarily from motifs used in Japanese textiles. Most of these designs are known as komon, or tiny patterns," and they are often applied to kimono and other textiles, although their use is not limited to fabrics. They also appear carved in wood in traditional architecture, and painted in pictures as background patterns. Each of the individual designs in ITC Seven Treasures Ornaments is carefully sized and spaced so that it will fit together into a continuous pattern. Most overlap slightly but precisely, so that when you type a row of them you can't tell where one leaves off and the next begins. They may be combined or alternated to vary the texture of a background pattern."

Decayed and stamped highly textured frames and decorations. Perfect for chalkboard art.

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.

Dave West released the Behemoth Semi-Condensed font in 1960. With nineteenth-century wood-cut influence PL Behemoth Semi-Condensed is an example of the revival of slab serif styles, popular in the sixties and seventies.

Taken from the hand-lettered name on a 1930s-era tin for Cadet condoms, Bed and Bath JNL is pure Art Deco with thin line weight and varying character widths and shapes.

Accent Graphic was developed as the corporate typeface for a London design consultancy in 1997. The starting point was the word ‘accent’ in lower case. It is essentially a sans typeface with the thick/thin contrast of a serif and is the only family in the G-Type collection that was designed for a client.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Pincoya Black Pro is a font based on lettering found on a poster from the Spanish Civil War, complemented with graphics developed in “La Unidad Popular” (Chilean political coalition) during the seventies. Pincoya has many alternate characters in Opentype format that provide multiple options when composing a text. It is an ideal font for high impact sentences, logotypes, magazine layouts, poster designs, etc. Languages include: Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian and Pan Africa Latin.

Inspired from Cambodia’s alphabet, Khmer. I tried to explore the visual of the original character in Latin characters. Inspired by 2 gothic fonts, Old London (for the modern/straight feel) and Berliner (for the dynamic between thin and bold line). The letters are made with pencil in a millimeter block book, then scanned into clean vector format. And the result can be use for Display or a Headline with traditional or ethnic theme, including film, game, event, etc.

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.

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.

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.

Originally made in seven sizes, 6 to 48 point. Our font was digitized from the 24 point which we found in 1947 in a Sparks, Nevada, newspaper shop. Typical of the late nineteenth century types for job printers, where the rule was “never start a line with a font used in the line above”.

Hoxton North came out of the concept to create something distinctly British, drawing on modernist influences such as Edward Johnston's typeface for the London Underground and Gill Sans. A humanistic san serif typeface with a British modern quality. Open forms with subtle contrast promote good readability across a wide range of media in both print and screen. The compact letterforms give it a strong lateral dynamic that is space efficient across design layouts. Details include 620 characters, seven weights with true italics, small caps, manually edited kerning and Opentype features.

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.