A few scant examples of die cut gummed letters (R, C, Y and &) provided the design inspiration for Adhesive Serif Letters JNL. Influenced by the Caslon style, this typeface offers clean, legible titling. The sample letters were once manufactured by the Tablet and Ticket Company of Chicago and sold under their brand name of Willson's [named for the founder of the company]. Gummed letter sets were available in a variety of styles and sizes for various sign, merchandising and marking needs.

Another offbeat typeface inspired by the lettering on a design by Patrick Owsley for the Chicago Bears. There's nothing more lively than animated text, and Bear Club has that flavor in two ways. With counter inspirations drawn from fonts like Ad Lib and Nightclub, an automatic alternating caps and alternate caps feature, as well as a contextual alternates set that creates a true animated bounce, just like Hip Hopper. Let the fun begin with this spunky, lighthearted and heavy-weighted comic typeface.

Fiorista is a pretty brush scrip with thin and curly line. Florists works best for greeting card, wedding ceremony invitation or shop card of fashion or apparel. It could also be used for film, magazines, advertising and websites. Holiday Type Project offers retro hand drawing scripts. Inspired by retro script on shopfront lettering, wall paint advertisements in Italy around 1950s. Check out the script fonts from Holiday Type!

Karlgeorg Hoefer designed Beneta in 1991, inspired by the Littera beneventana, the script of the Benedictine scribes from the 10th to the 12th century. During this time, scribes began to use wider pens and set them at a 45 degree angle to the paper, which caused their scripts to have radical stroke contrasts. This script was mainly used for books and certificates but disappeared by the end of the 13th century. Beneta revives the characteristics of this historic script, changing a line of text into an almost ornamental space. Beneta should be used in middle to larger point sizes for shorter texts and headlines.

The box cover of “Drawing Stencils No. 3 for Use on Slate or Paper” [a children’s drawing set produced by Montgomery, Ward & Company of Chicago circa the 1890s] had its title in an elegant spurred Roman type face. Working from the few letters available, a complete character set was created that resulted in Antique Packaging JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. To note, this is the 1500th font release from Jeff Levine Fonts since its inception in January of 2006.

NoExit is an industrial vernacular type system with multiple widths. Originally designed for the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, its inspiration was an old sign that said “STAIRWAY” found the hotel’s old building. A pointed uppercase letter A stood up against the mechanic aspect of the rest of the letters, and that discrepancy was love at first sight. From that, we developed a type system in multiple widths and weights that looks best at large sizes. It’s an ideal typeface for signage systems, magazine headlines, posters and packaging.

A few scant examples of some condensed Roman style water-applied decals inspired Sign Letters JNL. The decals were once part of the gold and black "Signmaker" letters and numbers once manufactured by the Duro Decal Company of Chicago and were sold through hardware and variety stores across the country. The condensed letters (which were eight inches in height) did not sell as well as Duro's mainstay sizes of 1/2 inch to 3-1/2 inches and were discontinued long before the rest of the line was supplanted by self-adhesive lettering.

Decalcomania JNL is based on examples of gold and black water-applied initial decals made by the Transfer Monogram Company of Chicago circa the 1940s. It is presumed the patterns for the letters were hand cut, possibly explaining the variations in line widths and character shapes. These eccentricities were left intact and followed through to the other characters in order to represent a more "authentic" digital version of these vintage decals. Decalcomania JNL is available in both the regular (outline) version, and a solid black version, as well as obliques of both styles.

A comprehensive set of initials (usually referred to as Uncials, Lombardic Initials, or Lombards) of the French variety, adapted from Bergling, J.M. (1918), Art Alphabets and Lettering (Second Edition), Chicago: Blakely-Oswald Printing Company. The font contains over one hundred glyphs, including character outlines for two-color layering. Suitable to accompany most Gothic (especially Textura and Rotunda) and many Roman typefaces, or to be displayed as drop caps or in full titles and headings. Specimen, detailed character map, OpenType features, and font samples available at Alter Littera’s The Initials “Bergling A” Font Page.

The compendium Alphabete: ein Schriftaltas von A bis Z listed the pattern for this family of faces under the name Chicago which, owing to the number of other faces using the same name, makes its origins difficult to ascertain. Nonetheless, its soft lines and round forms have a timeless appeal makes this family an excellent choice for both headlines and text use. Both versions of this font include the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets, along with localization for Lithuanian, Moldovan, Romanian and Turkish.