Jim Spiece has a taste and a talent for reviving type styles from earlier in this century. ITC Deli Supreme is a “futuristic retro” face that would be at home as a logo on a car or a roadside diner from the 1940s or '50s; the lowercase nearly joins, in script style, thanks to the long extenders stretching out from the bottom-right corner of most letters, while the caps have beginning strokes leading in from the top left. ITC Deli Supreme, like ITC Deli Deluxe, features slightly rounded corners on all the letters, for a soft, streamlined look despite the squareness of the letterforms.

Herculanum is a part of the 1990 program “Type before Gutenberg”, which included the work of twelve contemporary font designers and represented styles from across the ages. Herculanum is a work of Swiss typeface designer Adrian Frutiger. It takes its name from the city of Herculaneum, an ancient Roman resort town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows from Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD (the same eruption that destroyed the nearby city of Pompeii). Herculaneum's ruins are located today in the commune of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Ancient Roman writings of the 1st century influenced the font's design. Herculanum is distinguished by its broad characters with narrow strokes and its willful character.

The type family consists of six well-distinguished weights, from hair-thin all the way to the one black as the deepest night. In line with the current trend, it touches all boundaries, it stretches beyond technical possibilities and in extremes, it is almost illegible – the counters are reduced to a hairline. All italics have the same proportions as their corresponding regular styles, which emphasises the block-like appearance of the set text. Monopol was designed to thrive on posters, exhibit stands, book covers, magazines, and in complex visual styles. Its twelve styles make it an ideal tool for creating a dynamic composition using solely typographic means.

Julia Script is a playful calligraphic font designed by David Harris in 1983. It takes the viewer back to the flower power of the 1970s. Generous capitals with cheerful, rounded stroke beginnings and endings contrast perfectly with the narrower, closer, but nevertheless vibrant lower case letters. Characteristic of this typeface and similar to Candice is the marked increase in stroke width in the lower third of the figures. This detail is reminiscent of the platform shoes typical of the 1970s. Julia Script suggests freedom and fun and can often be found on party fliers and retro advertisements. Used sparingly in headlines and slogans, Julia Script will be sure to attract attention.

Agakê is a typography for comics with 03 weights, variations in italics and shadow. It has 432 glyphs with support for multiple languages and was designed to adapt to a variety of styles and narrative genres, whether adventure, fiction, graphic novel or even superhero. Traditionally, the typeface in the comics are applied in capital letters, seeking the optimization of the space without losing the readability. But Agakê was designed to work also in lowercase, allowing a greater number of combinations and an incredible reading experience. Valuing the foundations of the graphic narrative, Agakê obtains total harmony next to the most diverse styles of illustration of the comic books.

HGB Galaxo is a tribute to Othmar Motter (1927–2010), the Vorarlberg graphic artist and typeface designer, who designed very individual and perfectly crafted typefaces in the 1970's and later. (Motter Ombra, Motter Tectura ...)From a Motter sketch of 5 letters for a logogram, I derived a simplified letterform and developed all the necessary characters. Working on these glyphs and delving deeper into Motter's letterforms, the respect for the accuracy with which he drew his letters (in ink) grew more and more. The spiral resembles the shape of a galaxy, hence the name Galaxo. The font is suitable for retro, poster and logo design.

Ice Creamery is a new variation of our Saloon Girl font family complete with italics and fill fonts which may be used to layer different colors into the open parts of each glyph. We don’t recommend using the fill fonts for Ice Creamery as stand alone solid fonts, Ice Creamery Chocolate was designed as a the stand alone solid font for this font family. Fill fonts go back to the 1850's where they would design matched sets of printing blocks and the layering of colors took place on the printing press, they would print a page in black then on a second printing they would print a solid letter in red or blue over the letters with open spaces to fill them in. Most of the time the second printing didn't line up exactly to the open faced font and it created a misprinted look. With the fill fonts in Ice Creamery and other FontMesa fonts you have the option to perfectly align the fill fonts with the open faced fonts or shift it a little to create a misprinted look which looks pretty cool in some projects such as t-shirt designs. I have some ice cream making history in my family, my Grandfather Fred Hagemann was the manager of the ice cream plant for thirty years at Cock Robin Ice Cream and Burgers in Naperville IL. In the images above I've included an old 1960's photo of the Cock Robin Naperville location, the ice cream plant was behind the restaurant as seen by the chimney stack which was part of the plant. If you were to travel 2000 feet directly behind the Cock Robin sign in the photo, that's where I started the FontMesa type foundry at my home in Naperville. My favorite ice cream flavor was their green pistachio ice cream with black cherries, they called it Spumoni even though it wasn't a true Spumoni recipe. Their butter pecan ice cream was also incredibly good, the pecans were super fresh, their Tin Roof Sundae ice cream was chocolate fudge, caramel and peanuts swirled into vanilla ice cream. One unique thing about Cock Robin and Prince Castle was they used a square ice cream scoop for their sundaes.

When Hal Taylor saw the 1930 logo for the Stetson Shoe Company of Weymouth, Massachusetts, he didn't run out and buy a pair of loafers. Instead, he seized on this striking example of an Art Deco logotype as the basis for a new typeface design. “I was impressed with the delicate and sophisticated letter forms,” Taylor recalls, “particularly the enlarged cap S -- in any other case it would have seemed unbalanced, but in the context of this logo, it worked perfectly.” All the letters in the original all-caps Stetson Shoe logo were rendered with condensed proportions except the O, which was a perfect circle. While the prominent O added visual interest to the logo, Taylor knew that such a character would limit his typeface to display applications. For versatility's sake, he drew his O for ITC Stepp with the same proportions as the rest of the alphabet. Taylor also gave the logotype's inverted S a more traditional design, but kept the original as an alternate character in the OpenType font. Taylor's toughest challenge during the design process was creating a lowercase. “A good type design tells you what it wants to be,” he says, “and after a little while the Stepp caps began to tell me what the lowercase should look like.” Taylor's lowercase is slightly more conventional than the caps. The jaunty g" and almost upside-down "s" add subtle charm, while the capital letters provide the broader gestures of Stepp's personality. Together, they create a versatile and distinctive typeface design. One of Hal Taylor's first jobs was as a photo-lettering typographer in Philadelphia, setting headlines and creating custom lettering. This was followed by a stint doing finished lettering for John Langdon, whose ambigrams appear in Dan Brown's best-selling novel, Angels & Demons. Today, Taylor works as a graphic designer in the publishing industry, but he still finds time to create an occasional hand-lettered book jacket, and draw handsome typeface designs. ITC Stepp is available in four weights, ranging from Light to Ultra Bold. All four weights have companion italics, and the lightest three weights also offer a suite of small caps."

The shapes of the f-holes on a violin reminded German designer André Maaßen of an italic letter "f". Maaßen used these captivating contours as the theme for his type family, Varius. The name "Varius" is an homage to the manufacturer of the violin that inspired Maaßen's project, Antonio Stradivarius, the most famous manufacturer of violins in music history. Varius has three separate styles. Varius 1 and its italic are the base style of the family, and are typefaces in the baroque serif manner. Varius 2 and its italic are slab serif egyptiennes, slightly heavier than Varius 1's more classical forms. Varius 3 and its italic are semi serif faces; their characters are serifed, but some of the serifs have been cut off. The family is rounded out with two pi faces: an ornaments font (which can be used in conjunction with the text fonts, or on its own to create beautiful borders or individual decorative elements), and a font of musical symbols and notations. Each of the six text fonts has dozens of supplemental ligatures included in their character sets. When these fonts are used in an OpenType-supporting application, such as Adobe InDesign, these ligatures automatically appear in text when the "Discretionary Ligatures" feature is activated. Additionally, the character sets include added alternate glyphs, such as a swash "m" or "n" to finish off a line of text. These can be inserted manually in applications that include glyph palettes (e.g., Adobe InDesign or Illustrator CS). All of the Varius family's letterforms appear slightly narrow, and traces of the wide-nibbed pen can be seen within their forms. Additionally, the shape of a violin's f-hole is a reminiscent element within all of the family's curves. Varius is particularly suited for use many applications, such as body text, newspaper text, display text, headlines, posters, books, screen design, and corporate identity. Use in sizes ranging from body copy text to display and poster format allow the different facets of the typeface to effectively present themselves. The effects can be as versatile as the possibilities! Due to its special character, the typeface could be used in the design of a logo, or within an appropriate corporate design context, to particularly stress individuality.

First, the important information…Nori is a hand-lettered typeface that contains over 1100 glyphs, 250 ligatures, 487 alternate characters, 125+ swash and titling alternates, lining and old style numerals. To make sure it is perfectly clear—Nori is the result of brush and ink on paper. The textures produced in each glyph are real and the imperfections are intentional and add to the sincerity of the letters. I say this to be as blunt as possible in order to avoid confusion and to frame what this typeface represents—calligraphic, handwritten letters captured digitally for their warmth and poetic variation for print and screen. Like my handwritten, calligraphic or brush-driven faces before it (the Baka series and the TDC2 2010 winning typeface, Fugu), Nori is a product of my analog and digital hand. To view the words and sentences formed by this typeface is to look at how my hands, yes hands, make letters. The fluidity, as well as the irregularity, is human, honest and intentional—to do so lets the brush I am holding breathe life into each letter. Once digital, any number of points and repetitive processes can’t mask its influences—and I like that. The brush, a simple instrument, my tool, my friend designed to emulate traditional Japanese sumi-e brushes... the Pilot Japan Kanji Fude brush pen. Each letter, each variation was written over and over again until I found the right combination. From there, each was scanned, digitized and optimized. Points were removed in order to ‘clean’ the glyphs up some but I did not want to compromise the integrity of the actual brush stroke. Once this base set of characters (about 350) were completed, the thoughtful manipulation of the glyphs, their gestures and forms were further expanded to solidify the embellishments used within the ligatures, alternates, swashes and additional features. This process was admittedly self-indulgent to an extent. I wanted the words created with this typeface to have the flexibility of variation and cohesiveness of movement that someone fluidly producing these letters by hand might have.  I hope you enjoy this typeface as much as I did during the six months working on it. A specimen and style guide is included with the purchased of Nori.

Footlight is a highly distinctive face which began life as an italic. The designer then went on to produce the roman weights. It is unusual to draw the italic version first but this was done to impose a calligraphic influence on the face, and the slightly hand drawn feel remains evident in FootlightÆs roman version. The Footlight font family is of considerable versatility and charm, its originality makes it the perfect choice for advertising and magazine typography.

The letters in TapedUp are constructed from straight pieces of what could be masking tape. The letters have a unsophisticated or unpolished quality to them. The typeface is caps-only but many of the shapes on the lower-case keys differ from those on the upper-case keys. It was formed with a template used for several letterbat fonts and also typefaces Rumpled and Tinkerer. The family has six styles: regular, bold, shadowed, oblique. bold oblique, and shadowed oblique.

Linotype Afrika, from German type designer Jörg Herz, is part of the TakeType Library, chosen from the entries of the Linotype-sponsored International Digital Type Design Contest 1999 for inclusion on the TakeType 3 CD. Dancing, jumping, and playing, the lively beings of this symbol font exude joy. Ornaments and a few frolicking animals complete the font. Combining the single figures, whether as decoration or border, creates a pattern which will surprise you with its lightness and dynamism.

Questal is an intriguing unicase serif. The face appears rather eccentric, yet it still retains a refined character. The typeface is wider than most, but not to the degree that Aviano is extended. The font includes some interesting OpenType alternate characters to extend the quirky quality of the letterforms even further. If unicase isn't your thing, the Questal family also includes a small caps variant for more traditional uses. Use Questal for eye-catching and distinctive logotypes or headlines.

VineStreet a place somehow familiar to everyone in the English speaking world. It might be just around the corner or the next town over. This font gives that aged feel of comfort and familiarity and the authority of tradition. The example for this font was derived from a ecclesiastical history published by the Caxton Press of the Sherman & Co. of Philadelphia and was originally developed prior to 1867. This font has over 1000 defined glyphs and small caps included.

Lualaba Snake is a bold display font, characterized by the snake-like decoration used in each letter. The design of the font was inspired by the legend of the Lualaba River in Central Africa. Snakes enjoy a special status in Africa, as they are reputed to be messengers of the ancestors, and are therefore good. Near the Lualaba river is a pool in which a big snake called Kabwe lives. Our ancestors are thought to communicate through this snake.

Tourist Spot JNL is the same lettering style as Old Tijuana JNL, but with the squiggly inside lines stripped away. The original design was modeled from the hand lettered title on the cover of the 1939 sheet music for "Class Will Tell" and is available in both regular and oblique versions. Casual and playful in nature, the font can be used by itself or combined with Old Tijuana JNL for any project that promotes festive occasions.

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.

Fonzie redefining versatility. With four charming styles seamlessly blended together, it offers the perfect balance between tradition and innovation. Fonzie's basic style embodies timeless elegance with a Space-saving Condensed form with a modern twist. The SS01 explores futuristic aesthetics with a geometric style, or embraces the sophistication and form of the Extended with the SS02 features, and for the SS03 it is added for those of you who like the extreme extended style that is now a trend.

Côte is a display monospace handwriting font. The typeface is a distinct hand drawn font using a felt marker. The Côte name is derived from the French word meaning "coast" and is also used to describe winemaking vineyards and regions throughout France. One of the most popular regions in the south of France is the French Riviera also known as the Côte d'Azur. Côte is great for display work, invitations, writing, architecture, posters, wine labels and headings.

Introducing Mionic, An Inverted Contrast Display typeface. Mionic is combinations between the Antique of slab serif typeface with the modern look of today. Available with the new Variable type system that made you more easy to choose the weight of this fonts. Mionic Bold is Best for the Headliner, Display, Or anything with bigger typography needs with a Strong Characteristic. The thinnest one are good for more longer text because of the contrast on every characters.

Chank created Zsazsa Galore as a fresh alternative to Mister Frisky, another jerky, hypercaffeinated interpretation of the traditional roman alphabet. The difference this time is that the new font has no descenders. Every letter comes to rest hard on the baseline. It sits there firmly rooted with branches wiggling around in the air. It was released as the Chank Font of the Month in October 1999 and it was named after Zsa Zsa Gabor because she is beautiful.

The cover of the 1919 sheet music for "While Others are Building Castles in the Air I'll Build A Cottage for Two" had its title hand lettered in a wonderfully eccentric Art Nouveau serif design that typified the era. Also typical of the time was the habit of various songwriters to come up with wordy titles. This particular one checks in at fourteen words. Nonetheless, the sheet music's title inspired Air Castles JNL and its oblique counterpart.

UUeirdie is weird. The Condensed-Light style was derived from the star-serifed font Asterx by replacing the star serifs with a rounded flare serif. Widening that style resulted in UUeirdie-Regular and the bold was then constructed to complement it. The warped version was a result of play with a font distortion program. Although the glyphs have sharp corners, they do not have straight lines. The UUeirdie faces are rough, irregular, and maybe a bit creepy.

Today has been a busy day. I managed to take the dog for a walk, go for a run, empty the dishwasher, clean the car, vacuum the entire apartment AND make this font! :) The Busy Day font is all about fun and games: it’s playful, whimsical and legible at the same time. I’ve added an Outline version, Inside and the Regular version. They all work well together or as individual fonts - and they all have multilingual support!

Book Country first appeared on a poster for "New York is Book Country". It was inspired by the lettering of Ben Shahn protesting the 1927 execution of Italian radicals Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The letterforms effected an urgent and powerful message. The font includes a derived lower case and an OpenType contextual feature which maintains the rhythm of the uneven baseline when characters repeat to mitigate the stiff, mechanical feeling that occurs when casual lettering is typeset.

Tacit is the first typeface to be the creative outcome of a PhD thesis in graphic design. The work's main study had the aim of documenting design processes in an effort to externalise the tacit (experiential) knowledge of graphic designers. Initially the task was only to design several glyphs but the work resulted in a full typeface. Tacit is an elegant sans serif with a distinctive character and is legible at small and large point sizes.

Linotype Mailbox is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the entries of the Linotype-sponsored International Digital Type Design Contests of 1994 and 1997. The typefaces was created by German designer Andreas Karl. An entire alphabet, only lower case letters, with the look of @ -- who doesn’t think of the Internet? If you want to give your headlines or short texts an unmistakable feel of the Internet, you could not do better than Linotype MailBox.

Level is a spurless sans serif family that takes a more calligraphic approach to the popular square sans. The subtle swelling and shrinking in the strokes of the curves and terminals contrast with the slight squared corners for a sans family that straddles the line between machine-made and human-crafted. Generous spacing and simple, narrow construction make for airy text that still conserves real estate on the page. Three weights include italics and small-caps + old-style numbers.

The beautiful Art Deco monoline pen lettering on the cover of a 1940s piece of sheet music inspired Central Park JNL. The 1940s was an era when couples took romantic walks along the pathways of Manhattan's Central Park or rode around it in hansom cabs. Big bands played at the major clubs and ballrooms and "uptown" meant the well-to-do. Men dressed in their tuxedos and top hats and the ladies were in their jewels and evening gowns.

Some words from the designer... West coast artist Teri Kahan developed a "design font" of 68 pictographs capturing the sentiments of relationship, connection and synchronicity. Many of the characters were created with phrases in mind like, "handing you the world on a platter", "howling at the moon", and "message in a bottle". Others represent life experiences. The clean, simple illustration style originates from the look of hand-carved rubber stamps, and lends itself beautifully to logos and graphics.

Manufactory JNL and its oblique counterpart were re-drawn from examples of a now-antique typeface used within many advertisements found throughout the pages of The American Stationer magazine, circa 1879. The term ‘manufactory’ was popular during this era; the word being a more archaic form of ‘factory’. There is a bit of Western flavor to this type design, as the spurred serifs and the top and bottom strokes are heavier than the vertical and mid-point stroke weights.

The slab serif Waterloo Bold was designed by Alan Meeks. He chose unique and individual forms to give this alphabet its unmistakable character. The cross strokes of the capitals are not in the optical center, the serifs have light furrows, and the figures have a slight slant tot he right, giving this font a dynamic, flowing look. Waterloo Bold is reminiscent of cigars, whiskey and the 1930s and should be used only in headlines in large point sizes.

This new Recoleta is made up of 24 styles in total. We have added to its classical width two new variants with two different degrees of condensation: one very condensed and svelte, and the other at the midpoint between the standard width and the condensed. Each of the 3 widths has 8 weights, from thin to black. It also has numerous stylistic alternatives in both uppercase and lowercase. On the other hand, Recoleta also supports the Cyrillic alphabet.

The free-form Art Nouveau hand lettering for the 1905 song "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May" was the design model for Funky Nouveau JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. Since the 1960s hippie counterculture embraced elements of the Art Nouveau period in their art and design, it seemed only fitting to use the term "Funky Nouveau" in the fontís name as an homage to both eras.

The designer's father, Philip Grecian drew a logo for his business, Grecian Creative Services and asked Alex Grecian to expand on the logo. Alex extrapolated from the existing letters, creating a font to compliment his father's logo. Naming it was the easy part. Grecian Empire has since become one of the most popular fonts offered by Elemeno. The Strikes Back and Engraved styles have limited character sets and are far less versatile than the regular version.

Gingham is a modern sans serif typeface. The unaltered version of the font is clean and classic. However, the font has multiple different options for alteration. Each letter has up to 8 different versions, which the user can choose from to make connections between letters and words, creating a completely new shape. The font also includes two stylistic sets, nr. 01 gives the overall feel of the text a more modern look and nr. 02 a more traditional one.

The pLatinum family was created in 1998. Ink, scanner, Fontographer and as a result Regular and Italic styles of pLatinum typeface. Kyrillitsa'99 International type design competition Award winning typeface. The design style is “Irregular Serif”. The glyphs of pLatinum roman are reminiscent of the Russian types of early eighteenth century—especially in the smaller point sizes. An Italic, surprisingly close to the handwriting copybooks of mid-eighteenth century, is a later addition to the design.

The motivation for Jackipur was: to achieve more openness and thus more clarity. That's why I created more clarity in the structure of the letters in order to avoid formal ambiguities that arise especially with small degrees. I found it important to open up the round letters so that they are straight and horizontal along the center and baselines so that the eye can connect the letters directly and quickly. A simple font, but neither plain nor without elegance.

Linotype Animalia is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the contestants of Linotype’s International Digital Type Design Contests of 1994 and 1997. The font was designed by German artist Johannes Plass and is full of surprises. It is like a walk through the zoo, where the j is a shark chasing a small fish and the K is a moose gazing at the sky. Linotype Animalia is intended exclusively for use in headlines with large point sizes.