My affection for Slab Serifs began in the early 1960s in Kansas City when Rob Roy Kelly was at the Kansas City Art Institute, teaching and writing his book on American Wood Type. I got to know him just well enough to gain access to his fabulous collection of wood type and wood type catalogs. Later, in the1970s, I tried to re-create a Nebiolo Egiziano for Roger Black at New West magazine. And again for Roger, in the 1980s, I designed a Slab Serif logo for Newsweek Magazine. Finally, in 2003, designed the Sutro Family. There were things I didn't like about it, so, over time, I’ve been adding some things and dressing it up a little. Sutro Shaded has existed for a few years as a one color, outlined, drop-shadowed display font. It seemed like it was just dying for a little color. I added five more fonts: Fill, Gradient, Hatching, Rules and HiLite. These fonts can be used in different combinations to achieve various effects. There is a downloadable SUTRO SHADED USER MANUAL PDF in the Gallery section for this family.

I just returned from a short holiday in Japan. I stayed in hostels and small guesthouses and noticed a peculiar thing they all had in common: they love little notes, telling you where to go, what to do, how to use the microwave oven and when to check out. These notes were sometimes printed, but more often they were handwritten. I found that the Japanese way of writing roman characters is a little, well, unusual. The letters are correct, but they have that typical ‘Japanese look’ - most notably the a and A the b, d and g, the p and P and the t and T. I can’t really tell you what makes them look different, maybe it’s the proportions, but I do know that a Nippon Note is highly recognisable. So, here is Nippon Note, a highly recognisable, handmade font. You don’t really have to be in Japan to use it, but it will give your designs that extra cachet. And don’t forget Nippon Note Kawaii - the cute doodle font which is free if you download the Nippon Note family! Comes with extensive language support, but unfortunately not Japanese…

When designing a font, I often imagine how I think it should be used or where I'd be likely to see it out in the real world. With Barataria I envisioned it on decorative, antique-looking signs hanging outside shops in the French Quarter of New Orleans - hence the name. Barataria is based on samples of 1920s period poster lettering. It's a bold, heavy roman font with strong, rounded character forms. Barataria also has some unique alternative character forms, like the super-looped 'g' shown in the sample.

Thomas Oldfield’s typeface, Reaper, is reminiscent of inscribed Greek letterforms but he claims that its origin is much simpler than that. “I recall”, Tom says, “that I just began the design by making the uppercase ‘I’ and continued using it to make up the other characters.” The cap only typeface has alternate cap forms in the lowercase positions, including a vastly scaled downed O and Q that make for some unusual text settings. Contrary to what the name might have you believe, there’s a lot of life in this quirky typeface.

Hello, friends! Just this year I went to the United States for the first time. To my surprise, the neighborhoods, streets, and parks that I had only seen in the movies turned out to be true. There is a soul in them. I really enjoyed wandering these endless streets, soaking up this spirit. They feel childishly carefree, as if you were in a movie.Just try this font and understand my feelings. The font will work for almost anything: social media, cards, invitations, announcements. Good luck and love to you!

To tell you the truth, I don’t know what a juicy advice is - other than I guess it’s something positive and maybe even helpful. Well, what I do know is that this Juicy Advice is positive, helpful and playful. It’s a handmade comic font, with an outline version to compliment the Regular version. The outline version is also handmade, but not entirely sticking to the boundaries of the shapes of the Regular version. This leaves the outline somewhat off, but deliberately in order to keep the authentic feeling.

Romeo Fans is a natural brush script with texture and similar to hand written. I designed it by hand and I really hope you will enjoy using this font. I love using this one with layer masks in Photoshop, it really looks natural written. Romeo Fans Script includes a couple ligatures to make everything look totally hand-done, it also contains other additional features like swashes and spots. What's Included: - Ligatures - Numbers + Punctuation - Non-English support - Swashes - Spots Please contact me if anything question, I'm glad to help. Happy Designing!

I bet a lot of people would love to have a Veggie Spray - I bet they would use it to turn candy, ice cream, cakes and other fattening products into something more healthy! Well, this font has zero calories and is 100% handmade, and comes with contextual alternates - which means that every letter has 5 different versions!

Hippyfreak was created by manipulating my Beatnik font. I stretched and distorted the outlines until I got an interesting effect reminiscent of the Hippie generation. It has a cool and hip rhythm and movement. Great to use for those funky headlines, or whenever a retro look is desired. Works great at all point sizes. Groovin' baby.

Criss Cross is a scratchy, scribbly, rough-n-tough kinda font. The idea comes from the many notes I wrote in my horrible handwriting. When I want to stress things, it sort of looks like Criss Cross. So... Now you can write notes and stress things too! And guess what? It comes with a bunch of alternates, so enjoy!

Silhouette font designed to be used as a decorative element within layouts and illustrations. Featuring boys and toys in everyday life situations. Inspired by my kids and their friends playing, running, fighting and expressing different emotions. To create this set of 81 glyphs I used photographs that I hand-traced. Picture font recommended for a variety of illustrative purposes.

In 2006 the art director of Emotion, a women’s psychology magazine, asked me to design a copy typeface for them. Before I actually got the job I started to work on a serif. I wanted it to be feminine but still clear and modern. On one hand there are the floral round elements and on the other hand the angular serifs. In the composition I wanted the two extremes to work together. All the other elements had to be harmonized. The proportions needed to match the magazine’s requirements. The ascenders and descenders are short enough to work in narrow columns but long enough to work in small sizes. As you can imagine, the emotion-job never happened. In copy you should not get heavier than Heavy. Extrabold and Ultrabold work best in display.

Skeletal Wish is a line from one of my favourite Opeth songs: Heir Apparent. The lyrics are pretty veiled and bleak, describing the destruction and downfall of something that once was beautiful. I am worried about what is happening with our planet: the Amazon forest is burning down, our oceans are full of plastic and the earth is warming up. I had to think of this when I created Skeletal Wish and I thought the title was perfect. Skeletal Wish is a heavy and scary halloween font. It comes with blobs, splatter, gore and whatever else you may need for your designs. It won’t help save the Amazon rainforest, nor will it stop the flow of marine plastic, but you could use it to create a protest sign. After all, the change begins with you.

Varietta is the result of my fascination with photographing the type designs of some marquees in Spanish markets. In them you can see many letter designs with reversed contrast and in different widths, probably based on the possibilities of photocomposition. At the same time I was working on the expansion of the Hastile typeface designed by Alessandro Butti for the Nebiolo foundry in Italy in the late 1930s, of which I had not seen any digitization. As I am not a fan of perfect revivals, I thought it could be interesting to connect Spain and Italy in a single typeface. The first step was to expand Butti's design to 27 styles, ranging from thin condensed to black expanded. To look for the Spanish connection and its characteristic inverse contrast I took advantage of the current technology that allows variable typefaces with many axes. From this, three scenarios of horizontal contrast were incorporated (top, bottom and mixed) which allows infinite possibilities of use. The final result is a collection of 108 static typefaces or a single variable file.

High-contrast? High impact? Have Courage? Eye-catching and (extra, extra) bold, Courage balances ultra-high stroke weight, delicate details, and unique letterforms with a self-indulgent passion that will make you feel a little guilty using it. Honestly, use it large and don’t try to force it into a small space, because these fearless letterforms need room to move. Flavored with both upright and italic styles, each font includes an indulgent level of alternates, swashes and titling options, visual elements and more. A backstory with a different name Years ago, I was commissioned to take my Lust typeface and produce something unique to use for large format graphics for an event…cool. It needed to be hyper-contrast with a lot of over-the-top details. With a tight turnaround, I looked for primers within my development catalogue to help me, and settled on some early work on a typeface I had drawn called Hedonist. I used those sketches and its conventions to retrofit and build out Lust Hedonist (only to see the project go bust on the client’s end). I intended to go back shortly after the Lust Hedonist release to finalize a retail version of the OG Hedonist, but I never could settle on the look of the 'g' or the numerals, got distracted with other projects, and never picked it back up… until last year. After randomly doodling a fat, flat ‘g’ with an extremely tilted counter axis, I knew immediately how it could be used and that (re)set things in motion. Only problem was, in the process of refining the letterforms I began truly dissecting the pieces, rediscovering all of the recklessness within Hedonist, and decided on fundamentally rewriting the approach to the typeface… literally flaying it to the bone. I’m much, much happier with this finished typeface now, but the name no longer fit the moniker given to the first, adolescent approach—there’s far more audacity and cleverness in these letterforms, tenacious in their resolution now. As a result, the name Courage fit the mettle of this typeface so much more, so I kept it.

Ripped from the pages of the Art and Crazy Paving Lettering of The Lord of THE BEEF, SHAKY KANE, Comicraft Proudly Presents a font so wacky, so snakey, so achy-breaky, we could only call it FUNKY CHICKEN TOWN. And if that isn’t wacky ENOUGH — FUNKY CHICKEN TOWN features three — count ‘em — THREE versions of each letter!!! Opentype will automatically cycle between the alternates of each letter. FUNKY CHICKEN TOWN features solid and outline weights which can be layered in any number of funky ways, and features Comicraft’s trailblazing — often imitated never equalled -- Crossbar I Technology™ which automatically places capital “I” in i words like i, I’m, I’ll and I, and removes them from words like Chicken and Comics! Artwork by Shaky Kane from THE BEEF, available on Comixology.com

My 7 year old son is reading a book called ‘Spees De Ruimtewees’ (Spees, the Galactic Orphan), so when I needed a name for this font family, I didn’t have to think a lot! Flying Saucer is a family of 2 fonts: a rough(ish) sans serif and a script font. Both fonts come with Italics. Use Flying Saucer for anything space related (or whatever you feel like using it for).

Element 120 (Unbinilium) is a hypothetical chemical element in the periodic table. You can forget about that, I just thought it was a cool name for a font. Element 120 is a hand drawn Ultra Bodoni. I drew all the glyphs by hand, then gave them a good grunge makeover and the result is what you see before you. Comes with a periodic table of diacritics as well!

Years ago, I came across a vintage playbill and was struck by its lettering. The detailed floral pattern surrounded by thick outlines stayed in my mind even though the play's name and cast have faded. I finally tried to recreate the style from memory and Forgotten Playbill is the result. While all letters are actually capitals, the uppercase rotate slightly counterclockwise and the lowercase slightly clockwise. I suggest alternating between the two to reproduce my mystery inspiration.

I was cleaning out my pencil box and found an old marker pen. I wanted to throw it away, because it was leaking all over my stuff, but decided I could use it one more time. The result is Full Blast font: a ‘brush’ font (made with that leaking old marker pen). Use if for your fireworks packaging, fiery pepper sauce bottles and whoopee cushions (and just about anything else as well). Comes with an explosive amount of diacritics.

Sticky Shoes was inspired by a sign at a local flea market. The artist behind the sign obviously didn’t care much about painting the letters “in the right way” - leaving a slobby and uneven impression. And what is wrong with that? Nothing, if you ask me. I tried my best to capture the charm and innocence behind that sign in Sticky Shoes. I even made the paint version go outside the outline in the Regular version! I added 6 different versions of each letter, and they automatically changes as you type. That goes for all 4 versions, and they even mix very nicely!

Pardesi font is named after a song from Raja Hindustani, a 1996 Bollywood movie directed by Dharmesh Darshan. The lead roles were played by Aamir Khan and Karisma Kapoor. Together they sing: 'Pardesi, pardesi, jaana nahi', meaning so much as: 'Foreigner, foreigner, don't go'. I remember this song very well, as I was backpacking through India and Nepal at the time and it was played over and over again on all long distance buses I took. Pardesi font is a fat, rounded, marker-pen font, ideal for books and posters. It comes with extensive language support.

I had a chat recently with a customer who is a big fan of lettering from the psychedelic poster era. The discussion got me thinking about poster lettering we hadn't yet made into fonts, and a particular sample from a Jimi Hendrix poster I had played around with but never finished making into a font. So I went back to the drawing board and the result is the new Hendrix font. Unlike many of our other Psychedelic fonts which are stripped down to their basic character forms, this font includes the outlines characteristic of a lot of poster lettering from that period. It also includes variant versions of a number of the characters

Thirsty Cream is my handmade and slightly curly font. I had birthday greeting cards, invitations and products for kids. But I guess that it is useful for a good handful of other things. While the lowercase has it's curly moments, the UPPERCASE is quite steady and super legible

Nuuk is the capital of Greenland. It is the Kalaallisut word for "cape". I really like the sound of it, so I just had to name this font Nuuk. Nuuk is a whimsical, handmade serif font. It comes in four weights, each weight with its own Italic style.

I met her in a saloon called Little Texas. I was drinking mescal like it was vodka. She, tossing midgets like they were lawn darts. When the betting was closed, she launched an extra from The Wizard of Oz an impressive five meters, grabbed her margaritta and sat down.

Hiroshi is a 6 weight decorative typeface and is one of the best fonts I ever created for many reasons. I really enjoyed the all the design process (yes even the kerning) and I’m very very proud with the results you can check out the whole presentation at www.behance.net.

Celestina is the lively spirit, just like drops of ink on a piece of paper or clouds in the sky. The same spirit is maintained by the rounded letters of the script and by the characters' small whorls. Celestina has come to life as a result of a peculiar game in which I tried to bring together the letters with different tempers with help of calligraphic instruments. I wanted to create a very light and playful font which would look like a quick inscription on a piece of paper, but would also be easy to read in a text array. As I was working on the font, my cat Celestina has been very interested in the brush painting process, and I had no other option but to name the font after her! Celestina works perfect for both Moomins stories and personal blogs, as well as for the design of hand-made things, and even just then when you want to put yourself into a good mood!

While it is obvious that this is an ornamental style font, it is more than that: it is a Celtic Knotwork design tool! Irish, Scottish, Welsh, even Norse and Viking cultures have used knotwork designs for millenia. These ancient traditional interwoven designs are experiencing a revival as Celtic culture gains exposure in the modern world. Intricate Celtic knots are featured everywhere from jewelry to tattoos. While many enjoy them simply for their beauty and fascinating twists, they can also be used to add an air of myth, magic and mystery to any project. The interlaced lines make them perfect for wedding invitations, borders, dividers and rules, web graphics, and logos. I began using Celtic knotwork designs in my own work as part of my knifemaking and jewelry making hobbies. I read all of the books I could find about Celtic knots and at first I drew them by hand with pencil and paper. Then as I realized how nice it would be to have "undos" I switched over to using Corel Draw. Draw proved to be a natural for this type of artwork with tools like contour and the trim function. But even with these great tools, it was still tedious to create these designs. I noticed that I was able to reuse a lot of parts in repetitive sections. I developed a small library of reusable bits and chunks of Celtic designs. I found them so useful and fun to work with that I began thinking about ways to market my Celtic design kit. I thought about CDR and EPS formats, but then I thought of creating this toolset as a True Type Font. That way anyone with ANY program that uses fonts could easily create Celtic knotwork designs. Word processors, embroidery programs, engraving programs, jewelry design programs, CAD/CAM programs...almost every program can use fonts. I was also interested in CNC work and thought that this font would work well for applications such as laser etching, vinyl signs, and machining. With that in mind, I designed each character of the font with extremes of accuracy. If one character from the font is used at one inch tall, every control point will be placed to an accuracy of better than 0.0001 inch. I wanted every piece to meet exactly with the next, with no possibility for misalignment. The different styles are all very carefully created to fit accurately with each other. So the Filled Style fits exactly into the Outline Style, and the Inverse Style fits precisely around the Outline Style so as to make up the background behind the knotwork. Combining the styles allows you to have complete creative control. By assembling the nearly 200 pieces it is quite easy to produce very complex designs. It is actually a bit like playing with a puzzle and many people really enjoy putting the pieces together to make designs. In fact, I have had many customers tell me of how they love playing with this font and making knots into the wee hours of morning. If you like puzzles then you will absolutely love this font! And creating the patterns is just the beginning of the fun! If you apply your favorite Photoshop tricks on them you can make anything from dazzling chrome knotwork to carved stone. Photoshop plug-ins like SuperBladePro are great for converting knotwork text into corroded bronze or rusted iron. Use your knotwork to add texture to a virtual landscape, or add them as surface embelishments on architecture and furniture. You can also make round knotwork by using this font with "WordArt" (WordArt is included with every copy of Microsoft Word. See http://clanbadge.com/round_knots.htm for a tutorial on how to make round knotwork). For Crafters there are limitless uses for this font. It has been used for embroidery, jewelry, leatherwork, stencils, stained glass, quilting, painting, pyrography, woodcarving and lots more. We have even sold copies to monks for use in decorating handmade books!

Over the past couple of years I received quite a number of unusual and surprising requests to modify my type designs to suit projects of personal nature, but none top the ones that asked me to typeset and modify tattoos using Burgues Script or Adios. At first the whole idea was amusing to me, kind of like an inside joke. I had worked in corporate branding for a few years before becoming a type designer, and suddenly I was being asked to get involved in personal branding, as literally “personal” and “branding” as the expression can get. After a few such requests I began pondering the whole thing from a professional perspective. It was typography, after all, no matter how unusual the method or medium. A very personal kind of typography, too. The messages being typeset were commemorating friends, family, births, deaths, loves, principles, and things that influenced people in a deep and direct way, so much so that they chose to etch that influence on their bodies and wear it forever. And when you decide to wear something forever, style is of the essence. After digging into the tattooing scene, I have a whole new respect for tattoo artists. Wielding that machine is not easy, and driving pigment into people’s skin is an enormous responsibility. Not to mention that they're some of the very few who still use a crafty, hands-on process that is all but obsolete in other ornamentation methods. Some artists go the extra mile and take the time to develop their own lettering for tattooing purposes, and some are inventive enough to create letters based on the tattoo’s concept. But they are not the norm. Generally speaking, most tattoo artists use generic type designs to typeset words. Even the popular blackletter designs have become quite generic over the past few decades. I still cringe when I see something like Bank Script embedded into people’s skin, turning them into breathing, walking shareholder invitations or government bonds. There’s been quite a few attempts at making fonts out of whatever original tattoo designer typefaces can be found out there - wavy pseudo-comical letters, or rough thick brush scripts, but as far as I could tell a stylish skin script was never attempted in the digital age. And that’s why I decided to design Piel Script. Piel is Spanish for skin. In a way, Piel Script is a removed cousin of Burgues Script. Although the initial sketches were infused with some 1930s showcard lettering ideas (particularly those of B. Boley, whose amazing work was shown in Sign of the Times magazine), most of the important decisions about letter shapes and connectivity were reached by observing whatever strengths and weaknesses can be seen in tattoos using Burgues. Tattoos using Adios also provided some minor input. In retrospect, I suppose Affair exercised some influence as well, albeit in a minor way. I guess what I'm trying to say is there is as much of me in Piel Script as there is in any of the other major scripts I designed, even though the driving vision for it is entirely different from anything else I have ever done. I hope you like Piel Script. If you decide it to use it on your skin, I'll be very flattered. If you decide to use it on your skateboard or book cover, I'll be just as happy. Scripts can't get any more personal than this. Piel Script received the Letter2 award, where they selected the best 53 typefaces of the last decade, organised by ATypI.

Groucho is a very high-contrast script. It remined me of Groucho's moustache so I thought it was a good name.

This is a new font that I describe as a casual faux antique letterform. Great for many decorative and fun projects.

This font is based on the popular and timeless Caslon design and was carefully digitized from the pages of an early 19th century book. I was excited to see some unique design treatments of characters such as the lower case italic 'p', the question mark, and various swash caps that I had never seen before. During the conversion process, I made sure to preserve the worn look of faded ink on old paper by maintaining a subtle level of decay and opacity with each character. For missing characters not found in the book, I created new characters that were faithful to the style of the rest of the family. Used as a text font, The Letterpress Text Family successfully reproduces the appearance of old letterpress lithography.

Grungy Old Typewriter is based on two typed letters, each on two pages and dated 1901. The results are eroded, rough, irregular and grungy. The final results are a vintage look. As a designer, I wanted as much flexibility as possible, so there are six versions that are designed to work together. Additionally, I decided to keep the grunge and irregularities within the shape and not include surrounding typewriter or paper marks. I leave it to the design to add those elements as desired. One note, the letter spacing is much tighter than an old typewriter. I felt that readability for modern readers suffered from the added space. Of course, you can get that same look by increasing the letter spacing in your favorite design program.

I started to work at the Bernhard Studio in 1952 to 1959 in New York. I helped with some type designs and many other projects, this two tiered signature was added on all of Bernhard’s art that was produced in the past and in his later years. In the 50’s I thought Bernhard’s Gothic face was quite a bit outdated but as you may know it has become one of todays most used faces. His signature is based on his Bernhard Gothic Font. With todays computer technology I have digitized the caps and added lower case glyphs with lower ascenders and other slight changes.

From the designer, Tim Ahrens... I started designing this typeface about half a year after learning that Frutiger was not a new brand of sweets and that Garamond is not the name of a fragrance. In time it became clear that designing a sans serif must always be considered as a transformation of traditional serifed typefaces instead of deriving it from typefaces that have been derived from others which have been derived from others again. I did not want Aroma to be one of those odourless and tasteless typefaces wich sacrifice a natural feeling and the characteristic shapes of the letters to neutrality. I think that beauty often evolves unintentionally. For example, I am fascinated by the beauty of airfoils, which are actually a careful transformation of a bird's wing. I love their anorganic and abstract shape which still bears the essence and all the complexity of what they are modelled on. This is exactly the formal concept behind Aroma. Many of the outlines are actually parabolics. The small r, for example, consists exclusively of straight lines and parabolics. I decided to give Aroma more stroke contrast than it is usual for sans serif designs. Many strokes are slightly convex, which gives the font an anorganic feeling. The font was intended to have a feel similar to the antiqua. More specifically, it is based on Old Style Faces. The character of those fonts, which were cut during the Renaissance, is still inherent to Aroma.

Senko Hanabi (線香花火 - Japanese: incense-stick fireworks) is a type of Japanese sparkler. These traditional sparklers are said to evoke “mono no aware” - “an empathy toward things”; the flash of sadness when reminded of the fleeting nature of life. I am always a bit melancholic this time of the year, so when I created this font, I wanted to give it a suitable name. Senko Hanabi was made using a brush and Chinese ink. It is a beautiful font, which comes with stylistic alternates, discretionary ligatures and a sparkling amount of diacritics. Remains for me to wish you all a very happy new year. Let’s do our best to make it one worth remembering!

Geko is yet another experimental decorative display typeface. I just love experimenting with type I design it with logos, titles in mind.

Extra Crunchy is my handwriting when I am eating cookies while drawing! No, it's true! I did eat a whole box of cookies while drawing this font! :) The letters are a bit jumpy, and have no steady x-height, however, your text may look a bit off, but it is clear and legible. Fits perfect for a children's book, a postcard/poster design or something else that needs that extra crunch :)

Majordomo font is a font that was based on a vintage unnamed alphabet I found in an old font book. I traced it and added serifs and weight. Majordomo is a person who speaks, makes arrangements, or takes charge for another. Typically, the term refers to the highest (major) person of a household (domo) staff, one who acts on behalf of the (often absent) owner of a typically large residence.