Donald DBXL Beekman needed a break. And he took it too. While sitting there consuming a sandwich and a half-pint of milk, he took up his ruler and pencil. By the time there was no milk left and only some bread crumbs remained on his plate, VLNL Breakz was finished. That’s DBXL for you. Get your letters during your break. VLNL Breakz was originally designed as the headline and logo font for the breakdance competition Amsterdam Breakz, but turned out to be very versatile. It has 4 variations, Regular and Condensed widths / Bold and Light weights.

Phosphate Pro is an all-caps sans serif font family with an inline weight, and was created by Steve Jackaman (ITF) and Ashley Muir in 2010. The original Phosphate was published by International TypeFounders, and the family was based on the ‘Phosphor’ typeface created by Jakob Erbar for Ludwig and Mayer, circa 1922-30. Jackaman created a condensed variant, 'Phosphate Condensed Pro,' in 2017. Phosphate Pro has incredible presence, and its power shines in display format. Apple, who is notoriously selective about their software choices, included Phosphate Pro in the system fonts for Apple’s OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

Towards the end of the 1400s, in Lyon (France), was living Barthélémy Buyer, descendant of a rich family of merchants. In the end of 1472, he engaged a typographist from Liège (Belgium): Guillaume Le Roy. The first book stemming from their print shop was the Compendium breve ( by Pope Innocent III.) using Blackletter “textura”. Many books followed, most often illustrated with wood carving. In 1483, to print a French translated “Eneide”, they used a venetian “Rotunda” blackletter. Our font was inspired by this “Rotunda” set, with historical forms and ligatures enriched with accented letters and other characters not existing in the original.

This typeface was designed to be used as the page heading font for MyFonts. Originally only the letters needed to make up the required phrases were drawn. Then amazingly enough, people started asking where they could get the font, so I decided to complete the character set, and named it Softie. This name was chosen because the round and rather bulbous shapes that make up the letters reminded me of marshmallows. Softie, almost good enough to eat. The Bold version, called Softie Bloated, was added in late 2003. Rumor has it that the name came to Steve after Thanksgiving dinner.

Hello Buena - From Wood to Digital Type Buena is the first word I read on a letterpress paper, printed by my colleague and friend Wolfgang Wick. I was fascinated by the power of this fat wooden letters at first glance. So I started to create a digital version of it and »Buena Black« was born. Due to the fact that the original punches had only upper- case glyphs, I created the lowercase characters by myself. After that it was time to design the family... Buena is full of OpenType features. To get fully acces, go to www.mazefonts.de and Download the Type Specimen.

The hand lettered word ‘puzzles’ from the box cover of a 1940s set of metal “connected” puzzle pieces manufactured by the A.C. Gilbert Company was the initial typographic model, but some additions and changes were made. Instead of the right side of the ‘P’ being a semi-circle, it was changed to a more conservative ‘’squared’ look. After drawing out all of the necessary glyphs, the overall height of the characters was extended to make the letters and numbers appear taller and narrower. The end result is Narrow Deco JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Peter Schoeffer was a printer who was apprenticed to Gutenburg and after leaving Gutenburg in 1455 he set up shop with Facob Fust. His son, Peter the Younger, moved to Mainz and carried on the trade. This particular font is based on a typeface of Peter the Younger that was cut circa 1509-1520. This font has over 900 characters. While there are only about 80 in the historical exemplar the rest have been developed for modern usage. This font is based on Typ.7:146/148G also known as Gesellschaft für Typenkunde plate no. 258.

Ammurapi was the last king of Ugarit, which was destroyed circa 1200 B.C. Back then all writing was done by hand and all that has been preserved is on clay tablets many of which were fired in the very destruction of the cities that enabled these documents to withstand the rvages of time. Ugarit unlike the other cuneiform scripts has a very limited number of glyphs. It is somehow exotically attractive. This font has been encoded in the appropriate unicode block to permit ease of use for scholarly purposes, but would also make a fine use as a decorative element.

Initially, I participated in the contest to design the logo for Bill Lloyd. In the end, the design was rejected, but letters remained. I then decided to continue with the idea and complete the entire typeface. After a couple of months, I realized that the typeface was imperfect, and now that I’m working on an updated Lloyd type, this one is free. The main characteristic of the typeface is its bold and curvy shapes. It is also tall and original in design. It was a great experience because it taught me how failure inspires people to move on, and create something better.

The earliest form of Ionic was brought out by Vincent Figgins in 1821 and was intended for display work. In 1863 a more refined version appeared which had more contrast between thick and thin strokes and the serifs were bracketed. Further developments were made, however the robustness of the Egyptian style was retained making the face suitable for newspaper text setting. With a large x-height and strong hairlines and serifs, the Ionic font family became widely used by the newspaper industry as a body type and provided a model for many twentieth century newspaper typefaces.

Sheet music for the tune "Put Your Arms Around Me Honey" (from the 1937 film "Coney Island" starring Betty Grable, George Montgomery and Cesar Romero) has the song title hand lettered in a condensed Art Deco sans serif design. This became the basis for Deco Nights JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. For trivia buffs, the song was written by Junie McCree and Albert Von Tilzer and was first featured in the Broadway show "Madame Sherry" in 1910 and was revived for a second time in the 1949 Judy Garland -Van Johnson film "In the Good Old Summertime".

Manufacturer JNL is a reinterpretation of the classic type face Venus Extra Bold Extended, and is available in both regular and oblique versions. According to Wikipedia: “Venus or Venus-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family released by the Bauer Type Foundry of Frankfurt am Main, Germany from1907 onwards. Released in a large range of styles, including condensed and extended weights, it was very popular in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It was exported to other countries, notably the United States, where it was distributed by Bauer Alphabets Inc, the U.S. branch of the firm.”

Meet the Letterpress! Jakob Erbar’s Phosphor was released by the Ludwig & Mayer Foundry before 1923. The origins of Aurora date back to 1912 (Johannes Wagner Foundry). Permanent Headline was designed by Karlgeorg Hoefer, also known simply as Headline. It was fun making a mix out of the three classics – with Letterpress Bastard you will quickly get astounding results. To complete the family we added a font containing random symbols we also found in the metal type boxes. Please note that we provided loads of ligatures for double-letters to make your design look as authentic as possible.

Tioga is a highly legible typeface designed specifically to display clearly on low-resolution displays. With superior readability even at small sizes, Tioga is an ideal typeface for developers of set-top boxes and digital televisions. Tioga is metrically compatible with Tiresias, a widely-used typeface designed for digital TV applications and adopted by the DVB and MHP standards. Tioga was fine-tuned to be more readable and aesthetically pleasing. Individual characters were adjusted for improved legibility and the letter spacing was revised to improve appearance and readability. Tioga bold was created to make the design more versatile.

Futura is THE prototype of a geometric or constructed linear sans serif and the font most commonly font of its kind used to date. Futura, very much influenced by the Bauhaus movement in Germany, was designed in 1927 by Paul Renner. Although being around for almost 90 years, Futura seems eternally young and fresh which also explains its continuous popularity with designers and typographers. Futura simply means efficiency and functionality documented by both its many usages as corporate type (e.g. Volkswagen, formerly IKEA, Vuitton, Shell, formerly HP, SMA and many more) as well as in various famous film projects (e.g. Kubrick, Anderson etc.). Futura’s iconic status was probably established when it walked on the moon with the Apollo 11 crew in 1969. It was used for the lettering of the plaque that was left up there.

We wanted to make an ultra-thin, tall font with a rough, hand-drawn look and ended up with more than we bargained for. To get the font we wanted we started by developing a source font for the basic letter shapes and we ended up with a whole bunch of variations of the basic style. Thus was born the new Ducatus family of fonts, starting with Ducatus Light which developed into the Medium and Heavy versions, and the Medium weight was ultimately used as the basis for the Ducatus Rough font, which was the goal of the project in the first place. Ducatus Rough was created by modifying Ducatus Medium in Photoshop using Gallery Effects and several other filter packages, and then redoing the outlines from scratch in Fontographer. A lot of work, but the result is just what we wanted.

Robert Hunter Middleton drew the original design of Stellar for the Ludlow Typograph Company in Chicago. Work began in the late 1920s, when Middleton was asked to create a sans serif type family to compete with European imports of Futura and Kabel. Stellar was Middleton's attempt to raise the ante. Where Futura and Kabel were geometric in design and monotone in weight, Stellar was based on roman character proportions and stroke weighs were stressed. In the late 1990s, Dave Farey took on the task of reviving the Stellar design. While Ludlow cut Stellar in a full range of point sizes, the family was limited to just a roman and bold design. Farey's revival is twice as large a family. It ranges from a very light called Stellar Nova to a very bold called Zeta In between are Lyra and Epsilon.

As most successful German private press, «Bremer Presse» has strongly influenced German book art. It was founded 1911 in Bremen to print and produce books in perfection. The role model of the press’ typeface was the english Doves Press. Willy Wiegand drew three versions of the «Bremer Presse» antiqua font, starting with the regular weight in 16 pt and adding later the regular weights in 11 and 12 pt. The revival of this beautiful font is based on the 12 pt weight. During the design process, the focus was laid on finding the elegance and strength of original prints. As it was designed to print books, the typeface is optimally used for texts. And with the revival’s new weights «medium» and «bold» and OpenType features like ligatures or old style figures, you can design sophisticatedly typographical compositions.

One of the earliest fonts published by Canada Type was Almanac, Phil Rutter's digitization of Imre Reiner's 1957 calligraphic typeface, London Script. In 2007, when the font was revisited for an update, it was shown that it too light for applications under 24 pt, and too irregular for applications over 64 pt. So the face was redigitized from scratch, using larger originals. This new digitization maintains a soft contour and, slightly darker and steadier stroke, and much better outlines for use at both extremes of scaling. Language support was also greatly expanded, and many alternates and ligatures were added to the redigitized character set. The name was also changed to Reiner Hand, to better reflect the origins of the design. Reiner Hand is soft and irregular jolts from a calligraphy master's hand. In a very Reineresque fashion, most characters include the one finishing stroke that makes professional calligraphers pause and ponder this additional touch to a letter's personality. Reiner Hand comes in all popular formats. The TrueType and PostScript versions come with 2 fonts, one of them loaded with alternates and ligatures. The OpenType version combines both fonts into one, and includes features for intelligent substitution in software that supports advanced typography. Language support includes Western, Central and Eastern European character sets, as well as Baltic, Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish, and Celtic/Welsh languages.

The typeface was created for TypeMarket in 1998 by Natalia Vasilyeva. Based on Lainie of Soft Horizons.

Rubba was created using rub-on type to create completely new letterforms from the bits of others.

Sign Designer JNL was inspired by a set of 1960s-era gold foil embossed self-adhesive letters.

Font ArTarumianIshkhan (Ishkhan from Arm. “Prince” was created as a modern stylization of Armenian medieval lapidary letters.

Very light and italicized, this font was created as a somewhat futuristic interpretation of a modern font.

Also known as The Alphabet of Daggers, this alphabet was primarily used for writings with magical purpose.

Rounded, tapered and bold, Bindle was designed as an alternative to overused or outdated informal sans serifs.

This typeface was created based on the handwriting of the famous Ukrainian bard and artist Viktor Bairak.

Gionni was designed by Cindy Kinash. This is a hand drawn, tall, light, thin retro inspired font.

Also known as "Writing of the Magi", this alphabet was primarily used for writings with magical purpose.

A set of historical Ossetic ornaments was designed by Lev Alborov in 1998 and licensed by ParaType.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) was a English poet, one of the most important figures in English literature.

Trilium JNL is a tri-line sans serif font that was modeled from some 1970s retail packaging.

This font was inspired by lettering found on old tradecards and drugstore ads from the 19th century.

The final consonant was small designed to express cuteness. The changing writing line added a casual feeling.