By 1915, all the major foundries offered families of sans serifs, sometimes called Gothic in the USA. Franklin was a response suitable for countries in the vanguard of the machine age. Designed by Morris Benton in 1903-1912, Franklin has preserved its own personality ever since. The ITC Franklin Gothic font family is a redrawing by ITC that keeps the original strength intact, meeting the demand for a strong typeface. ITC Franklin Gothic is better read in display sizes and considered a standard in the newspaper and advertising fields.

New Alphabet was created as a four weight family in close collaboration with Wim Crouwel. His response in the late 1960s to the first device for electronic typesetting was a radical experiment designed to follow the underlying dot-matrix system. With his strong interest in grids, Crouwel worked within the constraints of existing electronic technology, to produce characters that worked with the mechanical means that conveyed them. His original New Alphabet experiments have now been further developed by The Foundry into a typeface family that also includes the dot version.

Adverb Mono is an atypical monospaced, squared proportional, slab-serif and low contrast typeface inspired by the American Type Founders' "OCR-A" and the latest work of Adrian Frutiger "OCR-B" designed during the second half of the 20th century. The typeface (in his 1.00 version) counts five different weight, from Thin to Bold, and a pixelated redesign of the regular weight inspired by the retrogaming consoles' graphics. It counts more than 240 different glyphs continuously updated. Designed by Gabriele Bellanca for IED Florence Typography Masterclass 2020/21. All rights reserved.

P22 Civilite is a historic font revival. The font is a non-connecting upright handwriting script based on 16th century sources with a lineage going back to Robert Granjon in France and from early Dutch type specimens from the Enschede and Sons Foundry. The P22 Civilite suite of fonts includes the 6 basic Dutch versions of Civilite in both "historical" and "modern" styles in basic OpenType format and Pro versions that combine the historical, modern & sorts into one OpenType font with alternates, expanded language coverage and pro features.

The specimen book Alphabete: ein Schriftatlas von A bis Z identified the pattern for this typeface as Stymie Black Flair. Although neither the designer nor the original foundry is identified, it bears a strong resemblance to the work of Dave West for Photolettering in the 60s and 70s. Big, beautiful and bodacious, it’s a natural choice for attention-grabbing headlines. Many alternate characters available: see the full character map. The PC PostScript, TrueType and OpenType versions contain the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

Lucian Bernhard designed this typeface for American Type Founders in 1929. Bernhard Fashion sports tall ascenders, stylish embellishments, and much taller than normal capitals that drop below the baseline. This extra light typeface radiates elegance and lightness. SoftMaker’s Bernhard Fashion Pro typeface comes with a huge character set that covers not only Western European languages, but also includes Central European, Baltic, Croatian, Slovene, Romanian, and Turkish characters. Case-sensitive punctuation signs for all-caps titles are included as well as many fractions, an extensive set of ligatures, and separate sets of tabular and proportional digits.

The design of this display face is based on the hot metal typeface Acropolis, issued by the German type foundry Ludwig Wagner in Leipzig in 1940. To further increase its usefulness a Cyrillic was added to it: URW Akropolis, redrawn and digitally remastered by Coen Hofmann for the URW Font Forum, is a true display design that should not be set below 48 point if you want to preserve it's fine details like the open triangular sections, e.g. in L, G, S, T etc. and gain the full typographic splendidness of this beautiful typeface.

Eurostile, created in 1962 by Aldo Novarese for the Nebbiolo type foundry, is one of the most popular sans serif fonts of all, and has been for about 50 years. Originally designed as a screen font it was very popular from the beginning, even though it is only a slightly modified version of the 10-year-older Microgramma, but completed with lower case characters. On public demand, URW++ has expanded its range of Eurostile with Eurostile Round with 19 additional styles. Quite like Futura Round by URW++, Eurostile Round works perfectly well as webfont.

ITC Cushing has a long history. The typeface was originally designed by J. Stearns Cushing, a Boston-based book printer, and famous American type designer Frederic Goudy expanded it to include an italic weight. Under a special license from the American Type Founders, Vincent Pacella modified the design for ITC and added some additional weights. ITC Cushing is slightly condensed with large, bracketed serifs. Pacella changed the capital letters to better complement the lower case and replaced the sloping serifs of the italics to linear type serifs to produce ITC Cushing.

Architype Crouwel is a collection of typefaces created in collaboration with Wim Crouwel, following his agreement with The Foundry, to recreate his experimental alphabets as digital fonts. Crouwel's most recognized work was for the Van Abbe and Stedelijk museums (1954 –72) where he established his reputation for radical, grid-based design. Architype Vierkant was developed from the few letterforms that Crouwel created for an opening spread in a 1972 Drupa catalogue, on the theme ‘typo vision international’ – this single reference showed an interesting interplay of the experimental ideas underpinning his controversial ‘new alphabet’ and Fodor.

The inspiration for this font made its first appearance in the 1897 American Type Founders specimen book, under the name "Lithotint". As the name suggests, the original was tinted gray (diagonal lines formed the body); this version is solid and spooky, too. The font contains a few ghostly graphics, including ghosts at the bracket positions, a haunted house at the backslash position, and a scary backdrop at the ASCII tilde and ASCII circumflex positions. Both versions of the font include 1252 Latin, 1250 CE (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Naïve Line is an unusual handwritten serif font designed by Fanny Coulez and Julien Saurin in Paris. Our goal was to draw a font with finely irregular lines that give a human and whimsical feeling. We designed five weights, finely balanced, to assure a good readability whatever the size. This font is part of our Naïve superfamily that contains lot of variations: Line, Inline, Serif, Sans Serif, and a special Art Deco one. Just click on our foundry name to see them all! We hope you will enjoy our work. Merci beaucoup!

Fisionada font family has been designed for Graviton Font Foundry by Pablo Balcells in 2023. It is a condensed sans serif typeface with sharp edges and a very technical aesthetics. Its condensed design makes it very effective for space economizing and its geometric features make it a very attractive choice for display usages such as futuristics logos, video games and sci-fi content. It has been conceived to be most suitable for headlines and short length text blocks. Fisionada consists of 8 styles. Each containing small caps and glyph coverage for several languages.

Robert E. Smith designed this typeface for American Type Founders in 1942. Brush Script is perfect for display work where an informal, handwritten style is desired, for example in signage and on posters. SoftMaker’s Brush Script Pro typeface comes with a huge character set that covers not only Western European languages, but also includes Central European, Baltic, Croatian, Slovene, Romanian, and Turkish characters. Case-sensitive punctuation signs for all-caps titles are included as well as many fractions, an extensive set of ligatures, and separate sets of tabular and proportional digits.

Georges Peignot designed Cochin based on copper engravings of the 18th century and Charles Malin cut the typeface in 1912 for the Paris foundry Deberny & Peignot. The font is named after the French engraver Charles Nicolas Cochin (1715–1790) although its style had little to do with that of the copper artist’s. The font displays a curious mix of style elements and could be placed as a part of the typographical Neorenaissance movement. Cochin is especially large and wide and was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century.

This ultrabold headline font is basically patterned after the font Nubian Black, designed by Willard T. Sniffin for American Type Founders in the 1920s, but includes an unusual inline treatment of the caps. Named for the local television show on KFJZ-TV (later KTVT) in Fort Worth, Texas, that introduced a whole new generation of kids to the Three Stooges, and hosted by the erstwhile Icky Twerp. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 (Latin) and Unicode 1250 (Central European) character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Say hello to a new Typoforge member! Nisse is a display font family that consists of 4 styles (including italics). The regular and rough versions differ in the amount of wear. It’s inspired by Rex typeface first published by „The Jan Idzikowski and Co. Foundry“ in 1930. Nisse has a high amount of detail making it ideal for large prints and poster design. It is specified by a huge amount of automatic alternates. Each basic latin letter has five versions, the numbers have thee versions and extended latin letters have two versions.

Over the past few years, every designer has seen the surprising outbreak of blackletter types in marketing campaigns for major sports clothing manufacturers, a few phone companies, soft drink makers, and more recently on entertainment and music products. In such campaigns, blackletter type combined with photos of usual daily activity simply adds a level of strength and mystique to things we see and do on a regular basis. But we couldn't help noticing that the typography was very odd in such campaigns, where the type overpowers all the other design elements. This is because almost all blackletter fonts ever made express too much strength and time-stamp themselves in a definite manner, thereby eliminating themselves as possible type choices for a variety of common contemporary design approaches, such as minimal, geometric, modular, etc. So extending the idea of using blackletter in modern design was a bit of a wild goose chase for us. But we finally found the face that completes the equation no other blackletter could fit into: Leather is a digitization and major expansion of Imre Reiner's forgotten but excellent 1933 Gotika design, which was very much ahead of its time. In its own time this design saw very little use because it caused problems to printers, where the thin serifs and inner bars were too fragile and broke off too easily when used in metal. But now, more than seventy years later, it seems like it was made for current technologies, and it is nothing short of being the perfect candidate for using blackletter in grid-based settings. Leather has three features usually not found in other blackletter fonts: - Grid-based geometric strokes and curves: In the early 1930s, blackletter design had already begun interacting back with the modern sans serif it birthed at the turn of the century. This design is one of the very few manifestations of such interaction. - Fragile, Boboni-like serifs, sprout from mostly expected places in the minuscules, but are sprinkled very aesthetically on some of the majuscules. The overall result is magnificently modern. - The usual complexity of blackletter uppercase's inner bars is rendered simple, geometric and very visually appealing. The contrast between the inner bars and thick outer strokes creates a surprising circuitry-like effect on some of the letters (D, O, Q), wonderfully plays with the idea of fragile balances on some others (M, N and P), and boldly introduces new concepts on others (B, F, K, L, R). Our research seems to suggest that the original numerals used with this design in the 1930s were adopted from a previous Imre Reiner typeface. They didn't really fit with the idea of this font, so we created brand new numerals for Leather. We also expanded the character set to cover all Western Latin-based languages, and scattered plenty of alternates and ligatures throughout the map. The name, Leather, was derived from a humorous attempt at naming a font. Initially we wanted to call it Black Leather (blackletter...blackleather), but the closer we came to finishing it, the more respect we developed for its attempt to introduce a plausible convergence between two entirely different type categories. Sadly for the art, this idea of convergence didn't go much further back then, due to technological limitations and the eventual war a few years later. We're hoping this revival would encourage people to look at blackletter under a new light in these modern times of multiple design influences.

Syntax was designed by Swiss typographer Hans Eduard Meier, and issued in 1968 by the D. Stempel AG type foundry as their last hot metal type family. Meier used an unusual rationale in the design of this sans serif typeface; it has the shapes of humanist letters or oldstyle types (such as Sabon), but with a modified monoline treatment. The original drawings were done in 1954; first by writing the letters with a brush, then redrawing their essential linear forms, and finally adding balanced amounts of weight to the skeletons to produce optically monoline letterforms. Meier wanted to subtly express the rhythmical dynamism of written letters and at the same time produce a legible sans serif typeface. This theme was supported by using a very slight slope in the roman, tall ascenders, terminals at right angles to stroke direction, caps with classical proportions, and the humanist style a and g. The original foundry metal type was digitized in 1989 to make this family of four romans and one italic. Meier completely reworked Syntax in 2000, completing an expanded and improved font family that is available exclusively from Linotype GmbH as Linotype Syntax. In 2009 the typeface family was renamed into a more logical naming of "Syntax Next" to fit better in the Platinum Collection naming."

The font family Univers is one of the greatest typographic achievements of the second half of the 20th century. The family has the advantage of having a variety of weights and styles, which, even when combined, give an impression of steadiness and homogeneity. The clear, objective forms of Univers make this a legible font suitable for almost any typographic need. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry’s art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts — quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Peignot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype. The Deberny & Peignot type library was acquired in 1972 by Haas, and the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) was folded into the D. Stempel AG/Linotype collection in 1985/1989.

Petrarka may be described as a Condensed, Sans-Serif, Semi-Fatface Roman. Huh? Bear with me on this. The Fatface is a name given to the popular nineteenth-century romans that where characterized by an extremity of contrast between the thick and thin stroke. The earliest example that is generally familiar is Thorowgood, believed to have been designed by Robert Thorne and released by Thorowgood Foundry in 1820 as "Five-line Pica No. 5." Copied by many foundries, it became one of the more popular advertising types of the day. Later, in the period from about 1890 to 1950, you find a number of typeface designs with the thin stroke beefed up a bit, not quite so extreme. What you might call Semi-Fatfaced Romans begin to replace the extreme Fatfaces. Serifed designs like Bauer’s Bernard Roman Extra Bold and ATF’s Bold Antique appear. In addition, we see the development of semi-fatface lineals or Sans-Serif Semi-Fatfaces. Examples include Britannic (Stephenson Blake), Chambord Bold (Olive), Koloss (Ludwig & Mayer), Matthews (ATF) and Radiant Heavy (Ludlow). Petrarka has much in common with this latter group, but is distinguished by two salient features: it is condensed and it shows a strong blackletter influence, as seen in the ‘H’ particularly. Petrark was released about 1900 by the German foundry of Schelter & Giesecke of Leipzig and is one of the designs of the period that attempts to reconcile roman and blackletter traditions. Making a cameo appearance in this Multi-Lingual font is the Anglo-Saxon letter yogh (#729), which, along with the thorn and the eth, is always useful for preparing flyers in Old English. There are still pockets of resistance to the Norman French influence that washed up on England’s shores in 1066. This font stands with King Canute, seeking to hold back the tide (ignoring the fact that Canute was a Dane). Support the fight to preserve Anglo-Saxon culture. Buy Petrarka ML today. Petrarka Initials brings together the Petrarka upper case letters with a very sympatico Art Nouveau rendering of a female face.

The Bauer Typefoundry first released the Beton family of types in 1936. Created by the German type designer Heinrich Jost, the present digital version of the Beton family consists of six slab serif typefaces. First developed during the early 1800s, by the 1930s slab serif faces had become one of many stock styles of type developed by foundries all over the world. Because of their distance from pen-drawn forms and their industrial appearance, they were seen as “modern” typefaces. (Their serifs kept them from being too modern.) The first slab serif typefaces were outgrowths of didone style text faces (e.g., Walbaum). As newspapers and advertising grew in importance in the western world (especially in “Wild West” America), type founders and printers began to create bigger, bolder typefaces, which would set large headlines apart from text, and each other. Through display tactics, businesses and industry could begin to visually differentiate their products from one another. This craze eventually led to the development of monster sized wood type, among other things. By the 20th Century, the typographic establishment had begun to tame, categorize, and codify 19th Century type styles. It was in the wake of this environment that Jost developed Beton. The Beton family is a type “family” in a pre-1950s sense of the word. Although six styles of type are available, only four of them fit in logical progression with each other (Beton Light, Beton Demi Bold, Beton Bold, and Beton Extra Bold). The other two members of the family, Beton Bold Condensed and Beton Bold Compressed, are more like distant cousins. They function better as single headlines to text set in Beton Light or Beton Demi Bold, of as companions to totally separate typefaces.

Anatolian typeface was designed with inspiration from the traditional Anatolian kilim motifs and symbols that characterize Turkish culture. Motifs and design elements that has been used for centuries on carpets now found place in a typeface as serifs. It was exciting to see how these old design elements would turn into a modern font that would be applicable for modern designs.

Colin Brignall designed the Tango typeface in 1974. A groovy swirl of a font, Tango looks like disco party ready to lift off. Tango is one of many fonts that have come to symbolize the party music of the 1970s, familiar forms can be found on countless album covers from that era. Tango is a child of it's times - flashy, lively, and fun!

Bold Display Sans JNL is loosely based on one of the classic alphabets found within a Speedball Lettering Textbook of the 1940s; itself called "Bold Display". The original featured a stippled texture and inline curves placed in random patterns throughout the letters. This more simplified, all-caps version is for titling requirements where a strong, yet casual design is needed.

Here's a new take on an old dry-transfer standard from the 70s named Barrio. This unicase version features several handy ligatures not found in the original typeface, which will substitute in OpenType-savvy applications when the lowercase combos are typed. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.

This new OpenType pro family has four members so far with 588 characters and glyphs each. It is a redrawing of Diaconia Old Style, which has been worked hard and found to be very readable, elegant, and extremely useful for books, newsletters, or anything you need. It is elegant enough to use the regular weight as huge display type over 200 point.

This new OpenType pro family has four members so far with 473 characters and glyphs each. It is a redrawing of Albe Sans, which has been found to be very readable, elegant, and extremely useful for books, newsletters, or anything you need. It is a humanist sans that works well for body copy or headlines. A black version is in the works.

Signs of Yesterday JNL brings another twenty-six vintage signs inspired by a series of decals once made by the Duro Decal Company (now Duro Art Industries) of Chicago. This font complements the original twenty-six designs found in Too Much Information JNL. There are two blank sign panels on the parenthesis keys for use in creating custom retro signage.

I was playing around with an old brush I found in our kitchen: it had fallen under the stove and it had probably been hiding there for quite some time! I dusted it off, got my Chinese ink and set to work. The result is a scary-ish font. Mortal Coil comes with discretionary ligatures for double lower case letter combinations.

In 1962, the late Robert Libauer of the Stenso Lettering Company (of Baltimore, MD) revised two of his popular stencil lettering guides to offers users two choices: “traditional” stencil letters and numbers and "solid" letters for tracing and coloring. Solid Stencil JNL was modeled from one of those lettering guides, and contains all of the character anomalies found within that vintage stencil.

In its loose, angular forms, it is reminiscent of thorn bushes dotting the immense Kalahari desert. Spiky and freeform, Doorn calls to mind the irregular hand-drawn lettering found on wooden signs outside small shops in tiny African villages. The font contains all upper and lower case characters, punctuation, numerals and mathematical operators, as well as all accented characters used in European languages.

The inspiration for this elegant, willowy typeface was found in the 1903 type specimen catalog of Barnhard Brothers & Spindler. The original version was named "Racine"; this version takes its name from another town in Wisconsin. The Postscript and Truetype versions contain a complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252); in addition, the Opentype version supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages as well.

An extremely low midline marks this offering, based on an “elegant” alphabet found in Samuel Welo’s chapbook, Lettering: Modern and Foreign, published in 1930 by Frederick J. Drake and Company. Definitely different, and Deco at its most debonair. All versions of this font include the Unicode 1250 Central European character set in addition to the standard Unicode 1252 Latin set.

Barrowboy was inspired by the handwritten sales tickets that are still to be found on market stalls and fruit barrows, and are as familiar as the street cries that accompany them. The signage is mostly confined to numerals, so translating it into a font is pretty much a work of imagination. See also my other fun fonts Bebopalula, Calypso and Pier Arcade.

PiS Konzert is a bulky quirky all caps headline sans, inspired by letters found on a hand drawn polish poster from the 1960s. Its slightly shaky mid-century style makes it perfect for concert posters, movie intros or any other applications that need to evoke that bold, loud and still a little classy feeling of staggering inebriatedly through a murky jazz club.

Longacre JNL is bold. It's condensed. It has rounded ends. The design is both eye-catching and casual; perfect for titling that needs to make a point without being overwhelming. Based on a set of wood type, this design also offers an inference of child-like simplicity, as it is very similar to the type of lettering found on classroom bulleting boards.

Moooorrrttyyyy, stop drooling over Jessica, the ND Kronenberg is a font family based on the connection found in the letter ю and extrapolated across a whole geometric sans serif, beeerp. A mutant freak futura of some kind. Excuse me. You can find these artifacts all over 3 scripts (Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic). That and set of various additional glyphs. Enjoy.

This elegant stencil face is based on an alphabet found in one of the innumerable Dover Books volumes edited by Dan X. Solo. Intended for headline use, it can also be employed effectively for short blocks of body copy. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Central European (Unicode 1250) languages as well.