A creative context 2003. Fontsmith was sharing a small, cold, whitewashed studio space in Northburgh Street, Clerkenwell. But things were on the up following prestigious custom type commissions for The Post Office and E4. “Slab serifs were on the brink of another revival, we could feel it,” says Jason Smith. “All we wanted to do was have a play with these slabs, go as far as we could within what was acceptable and readable.” “It wasn’t initially clear what was happening,” recalls Phil Garnham. “We were becoming very influenced by our surroundings, outside the studio space. We absorbed the essence and the designer grime of where we were.” Process Jason began by drawing stems on-screen. “The key aspect of the font is the upward bend of the leading shoulder serif, the way it kind of ramps up and then plummets back down the stem. “The regular and light characters are quite narrow – great for text but the bold is quite wide and chunky – better for headlines. I think ‘y’ is quite different for a slab design. We call it the Fontsmith ‘y’.” Promotion Fontsmith were determined to get FS Clerkenwell noticed. To launch the font, Ian Whalley, a designer friend of Fontsmith, captured words heard on the streets of Clerkenwell, set them in the new font and crafted a small book of typographic conversations. It was a first for Fontsmith. “I think that’s part of why this font has been so successful,” says Phil. “It really does embody the spirit of the area, as a special place for design, arts and crafts. And designers love that.” Contemporary twist FS Clerkenwell, based on influences in and around this part of London with a rich tradition of printing and design, mixes tradition with creation. Old-fashioned values meet new-school trends. Its quirky, contemporary character lends an edge to headlines, logotypes and any large-size text.

Odile is a text typeface with bracketed head and bracket-free bottom lower case serifs, a quality that counters rigidness most traditional slab serif typefaces possess. This contemporary design draws inspiration from an experimental typeface named Charter originally designed by the American book and type designer William Addision Dwiggins. It consisted of an informal lowercase alphabet, a narrow seemingly non-inclined vertical letter with script attributes, featuring non-joining letterforms. Dwiggins’ contemplated Charter as the italic companion to Arcadia, Experimental No. 221. The Charter project progressed sporadic stalled during the Second World War and came to a halt in 1955. Charter remained incomplete and was never commercially released. Assessing Charter’s whimsical design, its fragments were rethought and developed into a comprehensive text family. Odile Upright Italic reveals recognizable similarities shared by Dwiggin’s Charter and defines the design approach for the family. The steep calligraphic outstroke and low junctions off the stem as in the upright italic “n” or “r”, for example, are gradually lessened in the italic and moved up for the roman weights. The six optically balanced weights range from the delicate Light to stark Black, accompanied by display variants with feminine flair and ardent Ornaments. Two sorts of Initials, one amplified with interweaving swashes, the other more restrained, both are clearly derived from the Upright Italic. This mid-contrast serif offers a wide range of tools for text and display typographies with a palette of strict to playful. This family shines in magazine, book and display use. The graceful serifed type harmonizes perfectly with Elido, Odile’s sans companion. Sans and serif share the family array and OpenType features in perfect tune. Odile offers an extensive character set, numerous OT features including roman and italic Small Caps, five sets of numerals, alluring ligatures, and many more. OT stylistic variants (with accents) offer a one-story “a” for the roman weights, alternate “g” and “s” designs for the italics, and a variant “s” for the Upright Italic.

Conversation Hearts are inspired by the sweethearts and conversation hearts that can be found all over the US and Britain, but not in Germany. A source of endless fun and surprise. As a typographer to me they are also a surprising document of written communication. Most people complain that nowadays the inscriptions are not as sweet as they used to be. While they used to held romantic and promising inscriptions like “Be True” “Sweet Talk”, today they carry “Tweet me” “Ur Hot” and “Party Girl”. So i took this as a motivation to work with conversation sweetheart on a conceptial inspirational and typographical level. The obvious: every letter pressed on the keyboard brings out a conversation heart that starts with the letter - i.e. L = Loverboy, H = Heartless but what to write? Since i didn't want to reproduce the old “Fax me” and “Email me” I had to come up with something new. Something with a personal relation and of course something that I Love - what else could i write in the shape of the heart? So I tried to access my upper subconsciousness and looked for two words for every letter in the alphabet. One for the capital letter pressed and one word for the lowercase letter. Resulting in a Kurt Schwitters worthy assemblage of vocables "Post-office" “Internship” “Zebra” “Answers” etc. It is not easy to read a text set in Conversation Hearts but easier as a text set in Zapf-Dingbats. To sparkle the visual appearance uppercase letters are filled hearts with “carved” inscription, while lowercase letters are an outlined heart with written inscription. Conversations Hearts is a part of the Light Hearted Font Collection that is inspired by a recording of Jean Baudrillard with the title, "Die Macht der Verführung" (The Power of Seduction) from 2006. Further inspiration came from the article, "The shape of the heart: I'm all yours". The heart represents sacred and secular love: a bloodless sacrifice. by British writer Louisa Young printed in EYE magazine (#43) London, 2002.

Emulating real handwriting has always been an aim of font designers in the digital age. The standard mainstream scripts and doodles that were available for the longest time have not successfully reached that goal. A letter always looked the same wherever you placed it. Some workarounds, such as letter alternates and ligatures, were used in many fonts, but they were a bit inconvenient to use, and in some cases didn't work correctly because they had to be placed in separate fonts from the main character set. Not until now, with OpenType technology, have we been able to emulate real handwriting, by including multiple character sets in the same font and programming it for smart form changes through letter sequence counting. Secret Scrypt was the first Canada Type font to make it to the bestseller list in the summer of 2004. In early 2005 a New York restaurant chain picked Secret Scrypt to use on its menus and internal signage, but they wanted to look even more like real handwriting, where two or three instances of the same letter used in one word would automatically change and look different from each other. Using OpenType technology, Canada Type produced a Secret Scrypt Pro for that restaurant chain under the direction of Mucca Design in New York City. That initial version contained three different character sets in the same font, and some intelligent programming that determines the sequence of the letters and change their shapes accordingly. Now the retail version of Secret Scrypt Pro is available, with four character sets built into the font for even more variety on the real handwriting theme. Make sure to check out the Secret Scrypt Pro PDF in the MyFonts gallery for tips on using Secret Scrypt Pro. Secret Scrypt is perfect for menus, handwritten notes, theater programmes, charity organization posters, and any design that attempts to get close to people with the personal magic of real handwriting.

A vintage printer's cut for the masthead of the "Fed-O-Gram" (a monthly publication of the Farm Bureau Federation, Inc.) had its title set in letters that emulated a moving message board. This design formed the basis for what is Moving Message JNL.

NewJune is a very strong unique character. It is already used in many magazines all over the world. Like Harvey Nichols magazine in London and later W magazine in New York. NewJune is the corporate typeface of the Academy of the Arts in Munich.

Mayestica is a luxurious script font with a sophisticated style. Use it to turn any design project into a true standout! The Mayestica font is a great choice to increase the prominence in your project. Although the typography is traditional, the basic elements are great.

A title card listing the supporting cast of the 1950 Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame drama “In a Lonely Place” provided the hand lettered slab serif type design that served as the model for Post Production JNL – available in both regular and oblique versions.

The cross appears globally even reaching the remote corners of the earth. Primitive man used it as an emblem as did many following civilizations. Associated with reverence and spiritual power, the cross is represented in many forms. Cross Ornaments contains a total of 106 ornaments.

A 1930s-era sign lettering template set manufactured for the National Carbon Company by Wrico (The Wright-Regan Instrument Company) yielded the familiar lettering that comprises Zoning Department JNL. This rounded-end typestyle was also widely used on architectural drawings, signage, blueprints and the like.

Originally issued as Palm from the A. D. Farmer Foundry in New York, about 1887. This is a good early example of the transition from the ruffles and fluorishes of Victorian fonts to the more restrained decoration that came to be called Art Nouveau.

Dylan-Copperplate is my newest addition to the ever growing family. The small flicks of the burin add an elegant touch to the solid font-design. Very handsome and useful for all kinds of invitations and business-cards as well as for classy advertising.

The title on the 1925 sheet music for “By the Light of the Stars” was hand lettered in an eccentric Art Nouveau type style with varying character shapes and line widths. This is now available as Erratic Nouveau JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Modernismania is the headline font you need. Modern and elastic it will give your branding the freshness it deserves. A full latin language support is included, also the numbers are funky. With a flexible contrast in the middle area, this font is truely sympathic.

Marceta is based upon the uncial & half-uncial scripts of the fourth to eighth centuries. The font has been designed with different capital and lowercase characters which can be intermixed to give variation to the text and to enable pleasing word patterns to be created.

Tallahassee Chassis JNL was modeled from a toy alphabet rubber stamp set made in Japan and imported to the U.S. during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The lettering style somewhat resembled that found on the side of old railroad cars, buses or trolleys.

Furuhashi font is a unique font that is made in a Japanese style adapted to the letters of the alphabet. basically, this font is used for needs displays and headlines. but the user is given the ease of customization as it is alternative letters.

BD Kickrom Mono is a retro futuristic monospaced, uppercase font with the main characters set on the small keys and variants on the capital characters. It is great for the use as headlines in magazines, logotypes on posters, game titles, movies or music packaging.

This typeface is named after Markus Low, the designer of the 1965 award-winning font Basilea. The design pays close attention to the original work combining romanesque styling with clean lines and functionality. Details include a complete character set, manually edited kerning and Euro symbol.

The hand lettered title on the cover of the 1934 sheet music for "What A Night" not only acted as a design model for What A Night JNL but also as its namesake. The digital type face is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Jeff Levine first designed Sennetarium JNL back in 2004; based on the large drop caps found on intertitle cards from an old Charlie Chaplin film. The font’s name is a nod to Mack Sennett, king of the screwball comedies of the silent film era.

Teethee is a font family dedicated to oral hygiene. The characters are made from toothbrushes, toothpaste and toothpaste tubes, and teeth. Both fonts in the family are caps only, but most letters on the lower-case keys differ from those on the upper case keys.

Abwyn is a sparkly Art Deco construction. The little diamonds in the vertical strokes add a lightness that is very pleasing to the eye in display sizes: Lower case numbers, Euro, ballot box in the section slot. It was just designed for fun & celebration.

FG Typical is inspired by typewriting. But the letters got skewed in processing making it look a bit corny, but it looks great at small sizes as well as large. the characters all have the same height except for the i, å, ä etc.

The hand lettered title on the 1945 sheet music for the song "Louisiana Hayride" is an Art Deco design with a nod to the preceding Art Nouveau era. It is now available as Barn Dance JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The unusual hand lettering found on the 1945 sheet music for “Chinese Song” provided not only the design inspiration but the font’s name as well. A hybrid of Asian and Art Deco influences, Chinese Song JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

DigiAntiqua was designed by the Hell Design Studio in 1968. Its basic forms were influenced by the slab serif fonts produced at the beginning of the industrial era in England around 1820. Its clear and timeless forms are extremely legible even in small point sizes.

This font is inspired by gothic woodtype fonts from the begining of the last century. Totally hand-drawn, every glyph is unique to improve the handwritten feeling. Different approaches are used to increase the human-hand look: many alternates, double letters, English bigrams, etc.

An example from the vintage lettering book "100 Alphabets Publicitaire" ("100 Advertising Alphabets") provided the inspiration for French Lettering JNL. This stylized Victorian [or Western] type face evokes the era of fanciful lettering design from the late 1800s. Available in both regular and oblique versions.

Wall Sign JNL is a sign painter's chamfered sanserif found in an instructional manual from 1905. A popular lettering style of the day, it features an abridged vertical on the G, a flattened right side on the Q and a truncated horizontal on the 3.

This simple design keeps its elegance through slight curves like satin draped over skin. Satin is tall and sleek. The curves are not completely symmetrical. The curves are perfectly balanced with long curves on the bottom half and shorter more dramatic curves in the ascenders.

Font Sanaa is the second version of the Font family. It is an Arabic and Latin font and the splintered languages from them. It contains many characters, signs and languages. It is distinguished by its uniqueness in drawing and shape to meet the needs

The Bicicleta family recaptures the ambiance of a bicycle journey I took many years ago along the Portuguese coast and embodies a vintage flair that appeals to me. A little reminiscing is always never a bad thing. The Bicicleta family is classic, clean and stylish.

A European font from Bauer's foundry was the inspiration for the caps in the font. There was no lowercase, so we designed one. Although the original font was intended for display lines in advertising, our version reads quite well in smaller point sizes, too.

The 1954 sheet music for the song "Arrevederci Roma (Goodbye to Rome)" [from the MGM film "The Seven Hills of Rome"] was hand lettered in a medium-wide sans serif. This design is now available digitally as Arrevederci JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

This is a list of presidents of the Portuguese Republic, ordered chronologically from the establishment of the republican form of government on October 5, 1910 to the present. This work was built upon original images from this page: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_presidentes_da_Rep%C3%BAblica_Portuguesa

Tuzonie imitates misprinted or degraded and distressed type. It especially imitates type where the outline has only small imperfections, (which at smaller sizes might even appear fairly-well defined) but where the imperfections in the interior of the letter shapes are more obvious and frequent.

Theater District JNL revisits the classic lettering of the 1930s Art Deco movement with this bold headline type. While many variations of this letter form exist, each interpretation evokes the approach to modernism and streamline embraced by architects and fashion designers of the period.

The beautiful calligraphic typeface Ambiance comes from master designer Rob Leuschke. The complete array of characters includes a swash alternate for each upper and lowercase letter. Called contextual alternates in OpenType, the swash characters are automatically substituted in the appropriate context when you select them.

Playful and funky. The ideal choice for candy wrapping, teen magazines, toy packaging and the like. The reweighted condensed is useful where space is at a premium, and mixing the two weights freely leads to intriguing results. Use with bright fresh colors for added "bounce".